I've had this idea for a while that I thought would be interesting on two levels, first as a research tool to understand our economy better, but also as a good education game for teaching macro-economics. My idea is to find some way of actually simulating economic activity with individual agents, each with its own AI, active in some sort of economy. Each agent would have a requirement to collect some resources in order to survive, this would create demand in the economy. They would then be faced with various decisions around whether to expend the time and energy collecting the resources themselves, or just purchasing the resource at the market price from other players that have a surplus. The role of the player in this game is to manage things like the money supply, interest rates etc (i.e. what the government in our economy has access to), in the hope of growing the economy or preventing it from crashing. I think the hardest parts would be first of all establishing the basic mechanisms that drive supply and demand, that still requires a bit of thought. Once that is sorted though the market for trading should be pretty simple to implement as it would just be the mathematical aggregate of supply and demand. Second of all is calibrating the different parameters, if resources are too easy to get no one will bother trading and everyone will just amass vast stores of resources. If they are too difficult to obtain everyone will starve and die. Might need a bit of maths to handle that side of things (but I have a degree in Maths so that part should be fine) Once those basic challenges are overcome it would be interesting to run the simulation for a while and see what sort of behavior patterns emerge, then work on adding more complex economic tools like, additional resources, production or manufacturing of other goods etc. Graphics aren't really important and a simple 2D world where the agents just roam around like the original Pokemon games on Game Boy would suffice. First off, I'd appreciate any thoughts or input on the concept, if it's even possible to make a simulation like this. Second of all, [deleted by moderator]