BarefootPhilosopher

Hmm, I don't know about popular appeal, but it could be interesting.

Imagine it starts as a subsistence farming game. Then war starts, taxes get tougher and tougher. Your side raid the village of supplies. The enemy invade and kill and plunder. You're homeless and move to a city deeper inside your kingdom. No money, you fall into begging and then crime. You make money, but there's a crackdown on crime, so you leave the city and become a highwayman.

I can see a good narrative. Whether it would be fun... who knows?

The basic framework of the above scenario is correct, but I plan to connect events such as above with a narrative hooked, linked to real world historic events.

In the game the above scenario would play out like this. Event/ Henry VIII joins the Pope's Holy League in their war against France. Economy/ The king's Treasury is rapidly drained, and since the Kingdom relies primarily upon Continental merchants for its military supplies, gold flows out of the country. A situation which contributes to a gold shortage, which just aggravates already existing economic distress. The King debases the currency in attempt to accommodate demand for money, which only serves to make the cost of imports increase. The nobility are the most affected by rising costs of imports, because they consume higher quantities of luxuries produced overseas and the rising cost of imports must be met with either higher volumes of exports or increased rents on their lands. For some it meant they would gain a better return from enclosing formerly common lands and pasturing flocks of sheep there instead. The wool would then be exported to the Continent to be processed into textiles. This created a dispensible population of former tenant farmers with no livelihood nor home who had no choice but to become wandering vagabonds and often have little choice to engage in criminal activities, especially with the King's dissolution of the monastaries, which otherwise would have offered meager charitable sanctuary.

After the introduction of the Vagabonds law of 1530 You had to apply for a begging license and it was otherwise illegal to beg unless you were a disabled or an elderly person. As for the rest of the population, they were consigned to publicly funded workhouses. Its no wonder so many in the Tudor era resorted to criminality and brigandage to eke out a living. Historical events just give context to whats happening in the game world and is little different from the lore of traditional fantasy games.

In my game the player will begin as a humble peasant in a remote village in England, where he tends strips of land within his village's open field system, while his family grazes a few sheep, pigs, cows and fowl on the Lord's waste in exchange for a days worth of labor on his estate. As part of his labors the farmer will plant his crop and reap it upon harvest time. I will model the game's open field system upon real world historical processes and institutions and will strive for utmost authenticity. A major feature of the game will be attempts to mitigate the "Tragedy of the Commons" which is a phenomenon where there is a risk that an individual with access to the commons will jeopardize its integrity while he pursues his own self interest.
He will have to engage with the local lord of the manor, negotiate and resolve disputes at the court leet, manage his household finances, whilst scripted events unfold which can be whimsical, entertaining, and even life altering for the player character.

Realistic simulation usually is not much fun. People want some progress - simply keeping the status quo is not enough unless you have some brilliant game mechanic.

The reason why people mostly play upper and middle classes is that it allows variety while preserving some realism. The life of ordinary peasant was too monotonous to be interesting for most players. In theory you could make it more interesting with interpersonal relations, but even at that case upper classes who had more personal freedom would be more relatable.

I didn't mean to imply that were would be no progress or change for the player. Of course most people would find complete stasis really boring and will give up quickly in disgust. What I meant is two things a) there won't be the degree of social mobility that there is in other games (after all it is the 16th/17th Centuries and class boundaries were a lot more rigid back then) and b) its not a primary focus of the game. The game will be able how the player responds and reacts to the social and political changes going on in the game world around them, which are modeled on real world events which happened in history. It is a game and not a simulation so the players experience won't be completely pre-scripted and events will be initiated with a tangible relationship between cause and effect.

I'm at the early stages of my design, so there are alot of refinements I will make to it.

As for your concern about the life of an ordinary peasant's life being to prescribed to be fun. To be clear, there is a clear difference between a serf and a free peasant and the life of a peasant wan't as prescribed as one would imagine. Its understandable that many people have a poor view of the life the lower classes, because popular culture does such a poor job of portraying them, relying on rehashed cliches and popular misconceptions. It stands to reason I guess since the authors of most of our popular culture are either middle class or working class who aspire to be and who turn their back on their own background.

Does it matter ? Simulations are not really games, but a simulation could be played as a game.

If you play a game, you want to archieve something. Simulations don't define a goal, but the player himself can define some goals to challenge himself.

The question therefore is, is your simulation attractive enough to be played ? Well, simulations are a niche (well, are the Sims still a simulation ?) , so don't expect to be the next big hit, but simulations are definitly attracting people.

Well, the economic simulation will be a core aspect of the game, but it won't just be an economics simulation. An economic simulation is a game genre where economics is a defining feature. Whilst it can't be considered a block buster seller, there are many highly regarded games in the genre. The the Guild 2, Anno and Patrician series of games, the Tycoon series of games, Port Royale, Commander: Conquest of the Americas, etc. I think my game will fulfill all the conditions which define a game, clear, well defined rules, meaningful choices for players to make, and compelling goals. I didn't describe the game in detail because I intended only providing context to the question I asked. I think it is important because as you yourself say its a niche genre and I won't be able to afford alienating a potential player base. It will be a labor of love, but I also want people to play it and maybe earn enough revenue from it to at least pay some of its development costs.

I definitely enjoy open world sandbox games, but its a challenge enough for huge companies like Bethesda, to provide enough content to populate a virtual world, which gives players a compelling player experience, let alone a one or two man operation like mine. I would like to give players meaningful choices, but not sure if a total sandbox format would be what I will be aiming for. At least initially it will be smaller scale and more focused, with possible room for future expansion. Players will certainly have the ability to make meaningful choices and in fact their choices will have a tangible impact on the game world.

hey cronoc,

I'm pleased you've heard of Shattered World and find it inspiring and further glad you're integrating finance and banking into your game. Its an unfortunate oversight that most games fail to incorporate finance into their in-game economies. It would add a whole new dimension of player impacting the gameworld.

On the particular game mechanic. My primary misgivings about the entropy element was the risk that it would not only annoy players but suspension of belief could be jeopardized. Time horizons for rust in particular is just too long to believably occur in a game. Blades becoming dull and notched, termites eating wood, and food spoilage would convincingly occur within the timeframe of a game session. I

I hadn't realised you would include magic into the gameworld. Magical sabotage could bring forward the rate of entropy of goods and would have a debilitating effect on an economy. It could cause temporary resource shortages but in the long run stimulate production and economic activity. It would cause temporary inflation unless item production kept pase with the demand from the need to replace damaged items. Its definitely an exotic gamemechanic. I'd be interested to see how the concept develops.

I was asking in a previous thread the way items should work to please most users in a MMO, and so it seems the best way is to fullfil the consumerist desires of gamers, that hate to wait and to share, by constantly bringing new items into this World. That's not a problem to implement in the game (it could rain hamburgers), but the economy will be punished with a horrible ever-increasing inflation.

Searching these forums and reading several topics on how to devise a healthy economy, I found out that the most basic concepts in a MMO's economy are the money faucet and the money sink. That means in order to allow the game self-regulate there must be a signal between faucet and sink. As players open the faucet, the game should activate a mechanism that opens the sink's hole wider to deflate the economy.

Then I recalled watching a documentary about the Black Death, specifically this segment is very interesting:

http://www.youtube.c...FkRnBto8#t=179s

But of course the game can't kill its most valuable asset, players. Instead plages will target items. As players harvest raw materials, trade or produce artifacts, and loot, their inventories will randomly harbor these "bugs" that devour tangible values of certain nature. For example, moths could swallow fabrics, termites will eat wooden objects, and corrosion will make metals (and maybe even gold coins, thru alchemic corrosion) to disappear from the World. Basically in my design items will have infinite lifespan, as long as they aren't destroyed by a pest.


I think this is also a good way to keep players from hoarding insane amounts of artifacts. There may be no limit to what you can store or the weight you can carry in your inventory. But if you own a huge stack of trash, it's pretty possible that bugs are happily living and reproducing in the heart of that heap. Since most plages will be always present, players could produce or buy remedies. These will be use-once items that remove one sample of a pest at a time, and the effectivity will be divided by the size of the inventory, and is reduced in time. In example, each rat eats only a portion of poison, and you will need more portions to put in all their entrances, but each will spoil eventually and must be replaced.

Finally I guess the variety in plages and the World's dynamics will also reduce the chances of over-production of "pesticides". Hope "mothballs" won't be the favorite item on top of the "mega-sword of all might".

So what do you people think of this mechanic? Thanks in advance for your comments!

I too have been working on conceptualizing a complex, dynamic internal economy for my game, partly I am dissatisfied by how most in- game economies function. In relation to your post, I think it would be both less complex and more believable to transform the very foundation of your economic model.

I've also conducted a lot of research and one model for a game economy that offers everything that I had envisioned in a game economy is the one featured in the MUD Shattered Lands. Its modelled on how our world's economy actually functions and features a player run financial system, player owned banks, ability to make loans and borrow money, and all prices are set by the players themselves. The financial system doesn't cause inflation, because all idle money eventually finds its way back into the banking system to pay back debt and provide savings for players. This system provides a reasonably stable flow of money into the game economy and according to Wikipedia prices have remained stable for over a decade.

Economic model
Shattered World has drawn attention for the success of its "Loans Standard" economic model. In this design, all businesses are player-owned, and players may set prices to any level desired, with the only central control imposed being on the amounts banks may loan, yet the system has produced reasonably stable prices since the 1990s. In the wake of Ultima Online's economic crash, this stands out as a remarkable accomplishment. The necessity that the system lack "faucets" that produce money ex nihilo means that newbies must start the game completely destitute, however, and this raises concerns as to whether this model could be made to scale successfully to larger player-bases.[5][6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_World

The economy of Shattered World relies on an economy theory known as the "Loans Standard Economy". More simply it can be described as a zero sum economy. That is the total outstanding loans always equals the total amount of money in use in the economy.

http://www.shattered.org/economic.htm