Economics Flash Game Ideas

One thing that I've been wanting to see for a while now is a flash game about economic from a laisse-faire Austrian perspective. I know there are games out there seeking to do just this, but thus far I haven't seen one that might appeal to a young person who isn't really out to learn an economics lesson. This, in my opinion, is a small tragedy of the libertarian movement, as a well-made flash game has the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of people, both young and old, who might otherwise have never encountered these ideas. I would like to propose that we libertarians get together and engage in such a project, with the mission of creating an entertaining and illuminating internet-based flash game to communicate principles of economics as put forth by Bastiat, Mises, Rothbard, Reisman, Block, et al.

To get the ball rolling, I already have one idea, based on a classic illustration put forward by Frederic Bastiat: I call it "Break the Windows". The central idea is that the game should allow the player to cause damage to physical in-game objects, which in turn affect a simulated economy, allowing the player to observe the changes wrought by destruction, and extrapolate his/her observations to policy matters such as war, government "job creation" programs, etcetera. This might take the form of the player using an "avatar" to wander around a simulated town breaking windows with rocks and witness the residents of the town scurry about and changing their behavior based on the kind and degree of the player's actions. It might also take the form of an "omniscient hand" type game that allows the player to cause disasters, wars, famines, etcetera, again affecting the behavior of a simulated economy based on the kind and degree of actions taken.

Now, I might be completely talking out of my no-sunshine region, but I think this is something that we would be foolish not to act on. I would appreciate any feedback about this general idea.

I had an idea for a flash game. Basically, you take the role of a politician, and have to court the interests of various special interest groups. The point is that you have to mercilessly whore yourself out to these interest groups or suffer the consequences. Any deviation from endless coercion into what one may consider morally acceptable behavior will immediately be punished as the political machine turns to those who will help them redistribute property rights into their hands. You can also add in mini-games where you have to make sure your speeches are as obfuscated as possible or you attempt to convince a special interest group leader of your shameless obedience to them. People should also be able to post their high scores of ill-gotten gains. It will be fun to be a ***, but it will also teach a valuable lesson.

 What about a game where you are a rogue IRS or Department of the Treasury agent out to get all the anarcho-capitalist and libertarian kooks who thought that earning money actually gave them ownership of it?  We could include raids on private business to sieze gold, we could put in intimidation and extortion.  I think that the idea about obsfucation is a must. Basically, you could be a total sociopath and the perfect government agent, all in one.

However, the original post was about a game to illustrate the principles of Austrian economics.  I don't know if it even needs to be a game.  Most people have used the mortgage amortization calculators to look at how much interest various payment choices require (at least most responsible people do, I hope).  Couldn't we make an inflation calculator?  Here is your bank account balance today - it will buy you X.  Here is the same money in 5 years, 10 years, with various inflation rates - it will buy you X-a lot.

 I think that a game that actually illustrated the negative power of inflation and depredation would be too depressing to play unless you could blow up the guys doing it to you.  As the CIV IV producers note says "dangerously unfun" levels of inefficiency make the game a drag to play.  Of course, why we put up with the same levels in real life is a really depressing question.

This is a very interesting thread. I personally would like to see a Business simulation game, that besides introducing economic concepts, would also add some political meddling into the mix; possibly enabling some tools, like financing a political campaign, in order to make it harder for smaller biz to grow, etc. With regard to the economic concepts, I don't know any simulation game that good at it; I guess Transport Tycoon does a reasonable job, but I would frame the game in a small city with a market closer to the general public.

In any case, I think the genre of such game would have to be simulation, because those are the ones that have people evaluate their choices, and make trade-offs, so it forces people to think. But maybe some genre-mix like being the boss of a Mafia, where you had to evaluate which "customers" to harass -- you could see their finance status to avoid extorting too much from them, otherwise they'll go elsewhere -- and allowing several tools to harass them or their competitors... After planning, the player would put it to action, going after them, escaping the police, and of other mafia orgs, etc.

It seems to me (and I'm a software developer) that a simulation game, at least as complex as guys you describe, are close to the most expensive genre you can do. The more costly games being the graphical adventure ones; The Last Express ranking first as the most expensive game ever, and I know for a fact that companies like Sierra used to have impressive teams in both quantity and qualification working for them. Most games nowadays are of course FPS, because a lot of the code engine can be re-used, and the needed data isn't that sophisticated.

Minigame: John M. Keynes vs. the Big Mallet. You control the Big Mallet.

Seriously, though. I like the idea of the "omniscient hand" thing. Basically what you're suggesting is a Sims-like or Civilizationesque game, but with realistic economic consequences to your actions? I'd love it. ...But I'm an econ nerd, and probably not representative of the population at large.

I'm just starting to study economics, and I actually don't know how the stock market works that well... But it sounds like it could provide a good basis for such a game, no? You'd also have projections of what the Central Bank is up to, and then its actual actions... It seems like something that could capture a lot of these concepts in a fairly simple interface.

 I have thought about this thread a few times since my first post.  While I enjoy a good FPS (Halflife 2, etc), the games I have wasted the most time playing are real time strategy (the Blizzard boys keep me rocking, Warcraft, Starcraft, etc) and then the civilization builders of all stripes (MOO, Alpha Centari, SimCity, and CIV4).  I tell you these things as the basis for my next question:

Can you separate the game result of an action from the preconceptions of the programmer?  For example, I think that overall the wealth/democracy choice in Alpha Centari is the most productive.  Sometimes when a faction has a specific ability (like the Gaian's environmentalism) I must substitute "Green" for wealth - but only because I have to.  However, the reason it is strong has nothing to do with philosophy in general, it has everything to do with the attributes the game designer assigned to the particular political/ethical/economic choice.

One thread on the site discussed a MMO game that allowed the construction of freely defined economic and political rules that affected certain game areas or actions.  But the game systems are still limited by the preconceptions of the rulemakers.

One last note - How boring would this game be: you are the "divine ruler" (Civ style) of an anarcho-capitalist society?  You have ultimate power, but you can't tell anyone what to do or what to build because they are free to choose.  The whole reason people play these games is to be the ultimate dictator and establish a world hegemony (or maybe that is just me...).  The benefits of the Civ in-game "freedoms" don't alter the fact that I am the God-king of my society! 

"Can you separate the game result of an action from the preconceptions of the programmer? For example, I think that overall the wealth/democracy choice in Alpha Centari is the most productive. Sometimes when a faction has a specific ability (like the Gaian's environmentalism) I must substitute "Green" for wealth - but only because I have to. However, the reason it is strong has nothing to do with philosophy in general, it has everything to do with the attributes the game designer assigned to the particular political/ethical/economic choice.

One thread on the site discussed a MMO game that allowed the construction of freely defined economic and political rules that affected certain game areas or actions. But the game systems are still limited by the preconceptions of the rulemakers."

A very good point. This is one of the most annoying flaws of civilization-managing games. I think that, like you said, it boils down to the attributes that the programmers assign to certain choices. Just as it's possible to write a story where communism works, it's possible to make a video game where the behavior of "cities" and "economies" contradicts what would more likely happen in reality.

On a certain fundamental level, the results can't be separated from the programmer's notions. By this I don't mean that the programmer can necessarily always predict what a game will result in, but even programming a game at all requires the use of preconceived conceptions (redundancy? I'm real tired, so I can't tell). I think that the extent to which we can separate the two is the extent to which the programmer uses hard and fast rules to determine the activity in the game. For example, let's say that some protectionist, hoping to prove the case for protectionism through a computer simulation, creates a world filled with agents, resources, and ways in which those agents distribute and use those resources, which for the purposes of this example are based on praxeology. The protectionist would probably find that, in fact, imposing artificial restrictions on the way the agents traded and used resources would not benefit them on the whole. In other words, someone writing a story about an ant colony can shape its development in any way they want, and even let the ants defy the laws of physics, but someone putting a bunch of ants in a box and observing their behavior will likely find results that completely violate their own preconceived notions about ants.

"One last note - How boring would this game be: you are the "divine ruler" (Civ style) of an anarcho-capitalist society? You have ultimate power, but you can't tell anyone what to do or what to build because they are free to choose. The whole reason people play these games is to be the ultimate dictator and establish a world hegemony (or maybe that is just me...). The benefits of the Civ in-game "freedoms" don't alter the fact that I am the God-king of my society!"

Heh, it would be incredibly boring. That's why my general approach to this idea is to have a game focus on the fallacies--by letting the player break windows or cause earthquakes. Much, much more fun and informative.

jason4liberty:

Can you separate the game result of an action from the preconceptions of the programmer?

I believe there is a lot of study into computer modeling of the economy. Maybe we can borrow from their work. Neo-classic economists (Irvin Fisher, in particular) actually started modeling the economy after physics equations, and whether that is accurate or not, I think having an idea how physics are modeled in software (games being just one particular use case) may give some insight into the problems that we face.

In a FPS game (say, Quake), the acceleration in the Y axis is computed after something ike: Ay = I - G (where I is any one-time impulse like when the user presses Jump when on floor, and G is the always omniscent force of gravity). From that -- for each frame --, you have "Vy = Vy + Ay x delta_time" and finally "Y = Y + Vy x delta_time".

Now imagine that the game takes place, not on Earth, but on some alien planet. You probably want to tune G to make jumps higher so that the user feels he is on some other planet. If it took place on Earth, you'd know that G equals 9.8m/s (and based on the resolution of the game, you would establish some conversion between meters and pixels to make it feel right). Anyway, at some point, you have to extrapolate from constants. You can try to self correct them -- like if you see the player is having trouble playing the game -- but even then, the self correction algorithm is bound to some predefined range (you will have to define how much to tweak them and how long you let the game run, before you compute again how much trouble the user is having with the game)...

In the case of economics, I think that the concepts are static, right? (of course its a science, so you can challenge them -- but I mean in the sense that it is expected that in the same set of circunstances they will tell you how things will play out...) The problem is when it comes to establish value to the various actions, and to model the creativity of the individuals to create new actions (new capital for more product output and new kinds of products for consumers). For instance, you can model the utility function, but you'll have to hard-code the utility values that your population attributes to the different actions available.

Anyway, the goal of the game is so the player discovers economic concepts in an intuitive, emprical manner. I guess we want to make it as realistic as possible -- so that the player is rewarded when learning and practicing the concepts we are trying to transmit -- but it doesn't need to be an accurate simulator. So, if the population in the game like to eat more bread than the player is used to in his community, as long as -- to produce it and distribute it -- he understands what the best ways to serve the population are, then I think we are okay.

Either way, we probably want to make it as simple as possible to avoid those kind of bugs you mentioned in Civilization. The more situations we have, the more constants we are faced with. 

With regard to actually making this happen, we'd have to settle with either some simple game or a complex one. A simple game could be possible to get donors to finance it, while a complex one we might be able to get a big company interested to produce if we come up with something interesting.

Doesn't anybody else like the idea of modeling the stocks market? It seems like it could be pretty simple... Either way, we really need to settle with something, and then everyone can draw some mockups of how they imagine it. From there, someone will work with the various proposed concepts to come up with a draft that we all can agree with.

Btw, does anyone know the volume of sells here at the Mises stores? If we got some 20k people to buy it for $20, we could make something very cool out of this. And after we got the investment back, we could make it available to the public as a free download.

I think we should do some brainstorming here, and then try to get someone from Mises interested in this.

I think the stock market idea has some promise as long as you can make it interesting. There's a business learning game called Cash Flow made by Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad). It's a great learning tool and if we could match that success it would be great. I think a simple flash game would be the best way to spread the word to the widest audience, the trouble is that people get bored of simple flash games easy. A more complicated game will get them more emotionally invested in the principles of economics, but the audience would be more narrow. How do we maximize utility?

As for ideas, maybe something where you choose a state and you vote on policies as a business owner, then run your business? If I move to Vermont and I check out the 'market' and see that I can get x, y, and z for l, m, and n dollars; the politician offers a plan of x, y and z for _% and I vote against it, the virtual citizens vote for it and I get screwed over, then I watch as the price goes up or stays the same or whatever and have to deal with gov't, have a chance to cheat on taxes, etc.

Maybe an internet game where you play with real people and they mess up the system by voting for whatever or becoming politicians and choosing the legislation that benefits them but screws everyone else over. 

RickWeber:

I think a simple flash game would be the best way to spread the word to the widest audience, the trouble is that people get bored of simple flash games easy.

I'm pretty sure flash games are either made out of templates (or based off a previous game), or they are made in these point-and-click "software studios" which are oriented for 2D game, generally for platform or board designs. Simulation games are very specific because of their computational needs (they are also very demanding in terms of the interface, especially if you want to make it 3D).

I like the idea of a stock market based game because it doesn't seem like it needs a lot of data or a sophisticated interface. Uplink has shown that a simple games, with some intelligent rules, can be pretty successful. Of course, they've used the fact that it is supposed to be about hacking, to create some mystic about it; so I'm not sure how viral you can brand a stock markets game. :/

RickWeber:

As for ideas, maybe something where you choose a state and you vote on policies as a business owner, then run your business? If I move to Vermont and I check out the 'market' and see that I can get x, y, and z for l, m, and n dollars; the politician offers a plan of x, y and z for _% and I vote against it, the virtual citizens vote for it and I get screwed over, then I watch as the price goes up or stays the same or whatever and have to deal with gov't, have a chance to cheat on taxes, etc.

Games like Transport Tycoon, Simcity or even Civilization have some economy to it, but its very rudimentary, laughable stuff, so I like the idea of a classic simulation game where you're an entrepreneurship. When I get some time, I will try to sketch some concepts I have about it. Basically, I think it should start as a rudimentary economy -- possibly, just a tribe with no established currency or government -- and we introduce stuff from there. So, the trading between cities you mention, I think should be introduced only when stuff gets more elaborated; as well as politiceans stuff.

The only thing I dislike about your suggestion is that it sounds like your game wouldn't be very interactive. I think we want some macro-economy aspects to it, but we need to focus on the micro-economy (actual day-to-day business decisions). These are the ones less obvious, and the ones that I think will be more engaging to the user. In terms of macro-economy, we want to have bills passed, where we dialog with our "Washington man" via a system where we tell him the course of action (what we support, and the means to do it) and get feedback from it. At times, we may got some of our property confiscated and stuff like that. But we can't overlook the micro-economy aspects: land, labor, and all the concepts around them.

With regard to "choosing a state", I don't think we want to get much into politic divisions of the world, much less North American ones. I would just have the player focus-ed in some city-state (like SimCity; just that we may want to let the player negociate with other city-states, but I wouldn't actually let him directly control them). Possibly, we want to use made-up names, because the idea is to be realistic to economic principles, not to the current world (we may even want to let the game evolving without government :/).

RickWeber:

Maybe an internet game where you play with real people and they mess up the system by voting for whatever or becoming politicians and choosing the legislation that benefits them but screws everyone else over. 

Ahah. I actually didn't remember the MMORPG, but that's a very successful genre, so its a good idea to have it in mind. But I'll try to make that only an option, because it'd be a lot of work to manage such a community. Besides its too demanding of the user, so, if possible, AIs and scenarios/history should exist too.

Sorry, haven't got to scratch anything yet. I just thought I'd mention I was pointed out to this Flash game on public/private private: Tragedy of the Bunnies.

 

It seems like a pretty interesting idea. I guess one of the problems, as pointed out in other posts, is that you can't really make a game that teaches free market principles if core to the game is the idea of a supreme ruler (the player) who makes all choices about what gets built etc. in a society. As such, it seems to me you'd have to approach it from the other end - rather than an RTS or Civ like "I own and control everything - you're just my minions" style game you'd need to build a game that focused on the idea of an individual entrepreneur.

Perhaps a set of games that come close to this (which I personally sunk a lot of time on) is the Patrician series (1, 2 and 3). These are basically trading simulators. You start with a ship and can buy goods in one town (where they're made) and transport them to other towns where they're in demand, to sell them at a profit. When you sell a unit of a particular good in a particular town, the price of that good in that particular town goes down. Conversely, when you buy a unit of a particular good in a particular town the price of that good goes up. The patrician games have all sorts of other cool stuff like in Winter the food production of all the towns goes down so during the summer time you typically have to "hoard" food and stash it away in your warehouses (which you have to save money to build and extend) so that you can supply for people's needs in the coming winter (and make a tidy profit to invest in more ships and warehouses).

You can set up automatic trade routes (which are essential to later in the game when you have 30 or so ships to manage) which allow you to specify that ships will go to port A and buy as much as X units of Good Y at a price less than Z and sell S units of T good for at least U, or pick up units from warehouses and drop off units to warehouses (the warehouses can then sell them into the market slowly/daily rather than trying to dump them all on the market at the same time - but selling them into the market slower realizes bigger profits).

All in all, the Patrician games do a pretty good job of showing someone how markets work. About the only annoying thing about them is that and you need a captain to setup an automatic trade route and you have to find him - there's only ever one on the map at any one time... which doesn't really add anything to the game conceptually - it's just a pain in the neck. Another thing that dissappointed me about the games is that you can't crush or buy out your adversaries. The addition of mergers and aquisitions to the games (like in Railroad Tycoon) would be cool.

Finally, with the Patrician games you're not playing against real people - it's computer players. Perhaps a MMO trading simulator like this would be cool. If I were a rich man (I'm speaking in monetary terms here) then I'd be more than happy to kill my spare time building a game like this (in between reading about Austrian Economics of course)!

My brother and I had the idea for a game that combines civilization and sim city, but applies realistic historical and economic principles to the game's engine. The player can start the game in any era, and can choose their difficulty level (the higher they go the more strictly the historical and economic models will apply).

Basically the game is completely open-ended at the beginning. You build your city state, or your company, or your city protected by private means, or your barbarian army, or your feudal castle, or whatever you want - and then you run it. Despotism drives people away, liberty attracts them. As the historical periods change, you begin to have interraction with other organizations - primarily statist. You can be a brutal dictator if you want to be, and then the goal of the game is to see how long you can keep your power - but you'll eventually lose it.

Or you can be a conqueror, and see how long you can maintain your empire - but it will eventually collapse.

Or you can be a merchant or other businessman, and gain your influence through peaceful means. As a CEO, you would have to protect your employees and customers against state agents and criminals. Naturally, they will occur more often than IRL for fun's sake.

We haven't decided whether the player should be immortal, or whether he or she should have to arrange for hereditary transfer as the generations progress. Perhaps that should be another difficulty level.

Other optional difficulties come in dealing with greater degrees of oppressive religions and widespread idologies; natural disasters; government regulation of your business (if you aren't involved in the government); and a tendency for the player to lose power if he allows time to progress too quickly, or to long without involvement.

If it is done right, it could be used to teach not only Misesian economic principles, but also historical truths such as the fallability of political power, and the inevitable tendency of governments to become tyrannies.