paper

Emergent Economies for Role Playing Games

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📜 Abstract

We present a novel application of economics to the problem of determining prices for goods and services within computer role playing games, particularly those with persistent worlds. These games typically determine prices a priori, and leave them fixed for the game’s duration. Unlike the real world, games are judged by the amount of interest they generate within players, and we believe that allowing prices to be changed in response to player actions adds interesting gameplay elements. The field of economics provides a rich body of literature discussing how prices may be determined, and we have adapted these ideas into an economic model suitable for use with role playing games. Our price update algorithms provide interesting behaviour, while preserving stability under a range of conditions. Our experiments simulate daily trading over 5 year intervals in order to produce evidence of short-term and long-term behavior. Our results indicate that the novel economic model we present is sufficiently stable, resilient, and consistent with behaviors of real world economies to merit implementation in role playing games.

✨ Summary

Summary

  • The paper presents an agent-based economic model for role-playing games in which NPCs maintain individual price beliefs, submit bids and asks through a double auction, produce and consume commodities, and update their beliefs based on successful or unsuccessful trades. NPC roles are dynamically reallocated: unprofitable agents become bankrupt and are replaced by agents assigned to more profitable professions. (ianparberry.com)
  • Experiments with a fantasy-oriented production system and randomly generated production rules reported bounded price fluctuations, recovery after supply shocks, role reallocation, and low computational and memory requirements. The authors also reported testing approximately 1.5 billion randomly generated economies, of which about 2.7 million passed their behavioral screening criteria. (ianparberry.com)
  • The clearest evidence of subsequent practical influence located in the search was implementation-oriented rather than a substantial peer-reviewed research lineage. The open-source bazaarBot project describes itself as a free-market simulator based on this paper, and the project’s documentation identifies the paper as its underlying model. (github.com) A separate Unity-based EconSim project likewise states that it is based on the paper and implements related features such as agent price beliefs, commodity dependencies, auctions, bankruptcy, and profession changes. (github.com)
  • A contemporary game-development article also describes implementing the paper’s method as an open-source economics engine, indicating dissemination of the model among game developers. (gamedev.net) Beyond these implementation references, the search did not identify a clearly documented body of later research that directly extends or evaluates this specific model.