Pokémon Go is an economy in miniature. There is exchange: players trade Pokémons and swap gifts. There is scarcity: the balls required to catch Pokémons are scarce, as is Pokémon storage capacity and other items in the game. There is production: through various activities, such as walking a Pokémon egg, or leaving a Pokémon in a gym, players can produce new Pokémon, or earn tokens. There is status seeking and signaling: high rank players parade their skill by wearing special clothing, and displaying their game level. There are even exports and imports. Pokémon Go imports dollars from the real life economy, exporting in exchange game tokens, and the enjoyment and entertainment players get from using those tokens.
Yet Pokémon Go differs from the real-world economy in two crucial respects. First, prices, the distribution of initial endowments, and all rules are determined by the game manufacturer, Niantic, which acts as an omnipotent “social planner”. Second, anyone who does not like the rules of the game is free to leave. The possibility of exit gives power to players: because more players=more revenue, the social planner has a strong incentive to set rules that keep players happy. Thus the rules that govern the Pokémon Go economy provide insight into what type of economic rules people would choose, if they actually had power to influence the social planner’s decisions in real life.
One of the most notable features of the Pokémon Go economy is the number of rules that limit the extent of inequality. Players earn tokens by leaving their Pokémon in gyms – up to a maximum of 50 tokens a day. Players gain status by achieving higher levels – but the game is structured so that the overwhelming majority of players are somewhere between level 30 and level 40. Players gain the ability to defeat other players in battle by powering up stronger Pokémon – but each Pokémon’s maximum combat power is capped too.
But so what? Pokémon Go is just a game, after all.
Yes, Pokémon Go is a game - and in gaming the excitement comes from the unpredictability of the outcome: you might win, you might lose. Take away that uncertainty, and the game becomes grinding - doing the same tasks over and over again just to earn tokens or stardust or experience points.
Yet for the outcome of, say, a battle between two players to be uncertain, the players must be at least somewhat evenly matched. If the best players are able to grab all of the resources, and become ever more powerful, the game won't be any fun for the less skilled or experienced players. Defeat would be entirely predictable and, therefore, boring. Thus a good game is a competitive game.
Economics also preaches the virtues of competition. A competitive economy is "efficient": no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off. Moreover attempts to create a more just and equal society through policies such as rent controls or minimum wages can backfire, making the people they were intended to help worse off. The best way to solve distributional problems like inequality and poverty is to create an appropriately levelled playing field and set economic agents free to pursue their own interests. These are the "fundamental theorem of welfare economics."
Yet competition only leads to these desirable outcomes under specific conditions, known as "perfect competition". There are many buyers and sellers. Everyone is fully informed about the price and quality of the goods they are purchasing. No one buyer or seller has market power, that is, the ability to influence prices.
But perfect competition is a fragile flower. Even if a game starts off being competitive, foresighted successful players will use their winnings to gain competitive advantage in future games. Indeed, the possibility of improving one's position by winning is an intrinsic part of the appeal of the game - if there were no rewards for winning, there would be no point in playing. But if successful players can "power up" indefinitely, they will eventually become unbeatable. For the unsuccessful ones the game will become, at best, boring; at worst, a desperate struggle for existence.
The Pokémon Go "social planner" restricts inequality and preserves competition in part because they can, and in part because it's profitable. Niantic generates revenue from Pokémon Go through in-game purchases, and (I assume) by selling the location data the game generates. Unless successful players are vastly more profitable on a per-player basis than the average (which seems unlikely), Pokémon Go's profitability rests on the ability of the game to attract and retain as many players as possible. Hence the game is designed to make the typical player happy. [Update: apparently a relatively small number of players who make lots of in-game purchases, known as "whales", are responsible for the bulk of gaming company's profits. However these players' are not always the most successful players, and their enjoyment of the game rests on having other players to play with. Hence Niantic still has a strong incentive to make the game enjoyable for the average player.]
Social planners in real life are also concerned with the happiness of the typical person. Governments want to get re-elected, and to get re-elected, they need to keep voters on-side. However their incentives to work in the interests of the average citizen are muted by the fact that many average citizens do not or cannot vote, some voters' votes have little influence on electoral outcomes, elections happen infrequently and, above all, voters cannot easily leave the game. Even if the choice is between an incompetent candidate and a criminal one, all a voter can do is pick the lesser of two evils, or let other voters decide the election outcome.
Ticking a ballot box is not as powerful as voting with one's feet. In a modern economy, the power of exit belongs not to people but to capital - to firms who can relocate if they are not given favourable tax treatment, or to the ultra-rich who can move their money off-shore. The kinds of radical constraints on inequality embedded in games like Pokémon Go are unacceptable to owners of capital. Through the threat of exit, they are able to pressure governments to make the tax system "more competitive" - the standard euphemism for lowering corporate tax rates (see, for example, here; to read more, see here). And so the successful are able to gain more resources, and more power. The playing field gradually becomes less level, and perfect competition, where players are at least somewhat evenly matched, withers away.
So don't criticize those who minimize their engagement with the real world, and devote their energies to virtual reality. They're opting for competition, equality, and a place where skill is rewarded and everyone has a chance of winning.
Levelling up experience points is kind of boring after a dozen hours. In FF1 you need to spend your change on the wooden sword to save an hour of this; it is fun while you are learning these niche strategies. The Matsusaki sword can be carried by a ninja who you don't need to similiarly constantly re-equip. The 1989 Hockey Simulator makes you cycle through each NHL game to simulate each NHL game. But a board game taught me the value of VTOL fighters in getting to a land front. When you stare at an office built after the Art-Deco designers went to war, you are poor. Art Deco puts you in Chivalric Times. I am learning it isn't the AI code so much as the media of a game that offers the ability to serve it up for mature adults. You want game dialogue like the Cuban Crisis, Apollo 13, Fukushima's Spitzer and the GE-guy, along with pleasing natural scenes that resemble Southern Africa a few million years ago. You've defined money as success: they will be wiped right out in any disaster more severe than COVID-19; every single flat tax rate proponent is soft outside the game. I like The Black Destroyer dialogue with a player chiming in whether to keep, release, or kill kitty.
Posted by: Phillip Huggan | September 29, 2020 at 06:47 PM
...VR is missing a lack of nausea. There will be much solved; gaze-tracking can help you draw detailed objects around where you look. But there will still be some basic nausea inducing parts for some people unless things like scroll speeds are better to the CGI Superman destruction of his homeworld R.Crowe scene, pan-rate. I'm trying to visualize the effect of a nano-sponge soaking up toxins, but the toxins being damaged in the process and the debris cleared. A flour-mill composed of two rotating nanomachines and each grinding stone the active surface that mimics our cell membranes being breached, doesn't have enough binding-site surface area. VR may make me ill whereas using a 2D game engine with free source code, I could program some basic Young's Modulus limits of whether I am to use protein or lipid or iron mill-stones to shear a bonded toxin. Cruise used a 2D flat interface to scroll through video of an open door, would the same scene using a holographic view instead of flat screen, make him sick? It matters enough that quality be used to now to attract useful future games. The ethics of Passchendaele's lead's PTSD and Heat's Pacino's broken family, have only been translated into video game juvenile characters to date. And it is fun to battle a preferred battle and ideally incrementally make it harder. I leveled up right past metal slimes my last system. Now, I would be ready for realistic monster psychologies, the goal to ally with utilitarian pragmatists and technical experts in the game (knights and infantry are okay easy heroes). The smell of mist isn't there yet, neither is the actual mist spray.
Posted by: Phillip Huggan | October 15, 2020 at 06:28 PM