Replying to Avatar SuiGenerisJohn

Idea for a game: Communists vs Capitalist. Two players. You can either pick the side of the central planner, or the free market. The capital are a limited set of resources set in a limited resource environment to make the math easier. Think energy, consumables, capital assets each with perhaps one subset tier of item, e.g., expensive scarces fuel and cheap abundant fuel; cheap low utility consummables and expensive high utility fuels, all with various weights, etc. Both sides can control certain different policy settings, e.g., focus on population growth and comption, or focus on defense against external threats like war or disease, etc. These policy weights incentivize the allocation of capital and consumption perhaps controlled by taxes and/or other incentivizations. Each side gets the same set of npcs, each with various incentive profiles, risk takers and risk adverse, prestige v. anonymity, etc. The goal of the game is to, at the end of a set time limit, have the most stable population to net asset ratio, i.e., if the trend lines were drawn to infinity population vs resources and assets would not directionally be trending to zero.

As the central planner you have complete control over the allocation of capital by the agents (npcs in the game). In otherwords you can directly override their default incentives by dictatorial decree and therefore impose your will on how resources are allocated to different tasks. However, the game can't be paused and operates like an active simulation in real time and so you have to constantly watch the societies resources and modify the allocation of resources to account for issues in real time.

As the free market sovereign you cannot direct the actions of agents other than by modfying the policies that impinge on agents incentives.

Thoughts? #gamestr #asknostr #gfy

Video game or table game? I'm a capitalist, but I think the commies would win this.

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No idea yet, that was just stream of consciousness. As a gamer, I am sure strategies would develope that would give smart commies an edge, but I would like to come up with a way of balancing it so that it's exceptionally difficult to solve what is essentially the three body problem of markets.

I think ultimately war is what determines if capitalism is superior to communism - an efficient market should, in the long run and over many iterations, make war easier to conduct because it makes more resources available and allocating them according to the highest need - high demand pays more, and more money thrown at a good causes more of that good to be made.

But communists can just mass produce the armaments for war and win, if they start at the same level of tech and innovation pauses. After winning, they fall apart and end up using death camps to fix their inefficiency, but that doesn't save the capitalists...

Idk. Distilling this down to a game is difficult. Using true principles while highlighting the differences of two incompatible systems... I think the key game element has to be innovation, but beyond that, too hard.

Absolutely, really difficult problem. For me, I want to give a lot of thought to making sure the subjective actions of the individual agents are considerably important in the operation of the market. In other words, you can see how innovation as an emergent property of self-interested agents could be expressed.

Somehow tie innovation - rate of upgrades, I guess - to property, and make the degree of property rights variable via policies.

Actually, this might work.

It could. But, I was thinking let policymaking be based more around infrastructural significance rather than rate of upgrades. Or both?

Both. There's a lot that would have to go into this, and its all correlated. Maybe infrastructure is where the communist side gains an advantage and has a chance to win.

right??

right??

right??

right??

Aren’t we already playing the game?

Capitalists are having fun with their Bitcoins.

Communists assume Bitcoin will fail (as money falls within the remit of the state) so they don’t participate.

Not if you programned the NPC to act like real humans where hard workers stop working when you steal the fruits of their labor and "equitably" distribute it to those that work very little, or don't work at all.

I don't think that actually happens. It should happen... But people actually adjust to being enslaved and work even harder. But what does happen is, the people that are useless get jobs in HR and management and they don't hire the productive people because they prefer people who either look or speak like them. Then the more ethical people are out of work.

But for a game, maybe a simpler version is better...