Game Economist Cast
What does the new wave of open economies mean for monetization? Will negative externalities overcome cosmetics economies in the long run? What exactly does a game economist do?
Game Economist Cast is a roundtable discussion of the latest developments in mobile, HD, and crypto games through a bunch of people figuring it out using the economic tool kit.
Game Economist Cast
E18: Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business (w/Dr.Eyjolfur Gudmundsson)
It's finally here...the EVE episode. The crew speaks to one of the world's first Game Economist, Dr.Gudmundsson, who helped manage and advise on one of gaming's most durable and well-known game economies...ever. We cover the origin of E.V.E. (a simulation!?), his biggest wins at CCP, the role of game economists, and if crypto has a future.
Let's start with utility.
Speaker 2:I don't understand what it even means. It's Game Economist cast, episode 18, and this is the episode I think everyone has been waiting for. We have a very special guest today who we are delighted to have on the cast is, of course, the former head economist of CCP, the firm that makes Eve. It's the OG game economist, I think, by anyone's accounting. Welcome to the cast, dr AO. I won't even try to pronounce your full name. I think my Icelandic is a little rusty, but we couldn't be more grateful to have you here. We'll be avoiding our normal format today and we're going to be diving into your experience as, I think, the first game economist ever. Thank, you.
Speaker 3:Probably goes without saying, you were one of the first people slash names that I came across when I started to look into this. The reason I actually got into the industry is not in my PhD, but from my undergrad. I did a paper on Eve online. I was studying the supply and demand of Tritonium. So I was looking at the prices. Okay, when there's a supply shock, what happens to the price? When there was a negative supply shock, price went up. It was really simple, but it was cool for me and obviously your name came up a bunch in the research and what you probably saw there was that these were indeed direct results of changes.
Speaker 1:Sometimes the information beforehand there were many little stories like that. I always wanted to get into some kind of small book for undergrad grads to learn, to have fun learning economics, because all the theories they work directly there, because the information is is quite good. The product is some of how much. The market is big enough that mostly people cannot control Gita, but it does happen and we had to do some things to prevent that, just like in any other economy.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of little stories like that that I would love to collect one day. Let's give people a reference.
Speaker 3:If you yeah, if you ever want to collaborate, this is a group of guys who would want to collaborate on something like that. The data that we have access to now is just incredible and Phil will go on and on about this but it's severely underutilized in the academic context. Oh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:There were very few, and that's what was the reason why I was hired. There were very few of any that had the understanding of the system. The only one who really understood the system was the initial designer, kastan Piers, and he was I think it was chaotic physics using disk theory on how universes are formed from space dust.
Speaker 2:To understand the EVE economy.
Speaker 1:That's the EVE universe and he just defined the economy on the sideline while he was running automations to create the EVE universe itself. The universe EVE is the data through a simulation where they used the theories that we can say are standard in how the universe was created.
Speaker 4:So it wasn't handcrafted, it was just they ran like a universe generation simulator. Oh my god.
Speaker 3:I figured it was just a bunch of randomly does. This planet will be here, this planet will be there?
Speaker 1:No, no, no no, the initial setting was created through that random process and then, of course, there were all kinds of adjustments and connections and basically the jump or the warp drives or the jump gates between planets are handmade and sometimes crimes added in order to try to optimize routes. When did you come out to EVE and how did you get involved? So I'll just give you the full details of this time around, because I always say to make a long story short, but to tell the entire story.
Speaker 1:it's basically I did my PhD back in the United States and and at the time we were talking about last century, so don't mention that too often, but we're talking about I did that last century and Iceland. Back then we didn't have PhD programs here at universities in Iceland. We had a very simple economy, we had fish and energy and through my bachelor studies in economics I really got interested into the theory of fisheries management and kind of how you create regulations from an economic standpoint in order to optimize optimize the economic value from a resource. One of the reasons why I like it so much is that you got to work with models, simulations and you're testing parameters, seeing how, what would happen if you have the biology grow this way or that way, what would happen if the efficiency of the fleet would increase this way or that way, etc. So a lot of technical stuff. So I did go to the states 230 that exactly and selected the university in Rhode Island outside of Providence that had a department at the time which today is focusing on completely different things. But how did the department at the time that was focusing on fisheries management. So I thought I was set for life Two of my studies as a fisheries economist, coming back home writing and studying the ethnic fisheries, because that was one of the main economic systems and the source of the currents.
Speaker 1:During those study years, towards the end of my studies, we had a new faculty member, hyatt, and his name is Chris Anderson, and he had been studying experiments in economics. As many natural scientists look at social scientists as less of a science because there's so difficult to do experiments and it's impossible really to repeat experiments. Now, economists had a long dream of being able to operate experiments, and operating and having experiments with people is always controversial and having the right setup where you're truly making this year's, is completely impossible to have a real-life setup, but getting close to it is something that we economists dreamt of, and one of them, vernon Smith, who actually got a note in economics in 2002, did a very extensive work on experiments in economics using lab computer labs and students with very small incentive, but using that to do experiments on how markets should be designed and how people would react to information, etc. Very early on we were talking about in the night, very just soon after, the personal computer was becoming a, we said, mainstay of campus. You guys have to remember the first computer, personal computers. They only came out in 82 as something that could be used by university students, so it hasn't been a long time. So this is only 10 years.
Speaker 1:After that, 10, 15 years after that, I got introduced to experimental economics and that's interesting. But it's just almost like doing games and I had always been a gamer myself, in the sense that I liked chess, like the simulations, and very soon when I saw a personal computer, one of the first things I do was to operate a flight simulator. I flew the first flight simulator where you had all of the buildings in Chicago just being lines into the air and but you can still land at max field and the environment was correct even though it was not looking good. So this was all fun.
Speaker 1:Through that interaction with Chris and his experience with experimental economics, I got interested in it but finished my PhD, moved back home, moved to the northern part of Iceland to start to start working as an academic in a department of fishery science where my job was to teach about the fishery's economics of it in a program which focused mainly on operating fishing, large fishing companies and operating and managing the resource as a whole. I don't remember how it came about, but at one point we decided to have a small seminar on experiments in fishery economics because we realized that the fishermen were always best at the game. So if you put in a regulation they would design a boat that nobody had seen before. That would fit within regulation but would make no sense to any ship designer. But it would function. It would work and fall within the rules. And I think you guys start to see now the kind of comparison to gamers what are gamers really good at doing to any game that you played.
Speaker 2:Min-maxing.
Speaker 1:Optimize within your constraints and finding the flaws, harnessing a broken code, finding something that goes wrong. If you really want to do a career on your product, let the, let the players in as soon as possible and they will find it. That's why we have alphas and betas today. It's just to play the game into. We can't have alpha and betas when you have fisheries regulation systems. But what if we could have some kind of experiments gains and just bring the fishermen themselves to the table with the government officials and with the industry experts. Hey guys, we're gonna need to design a system. Now you are gonna operate as if you're within a system.
Speaker 1:So the seminar was about how would you design that? How would you design economic experiments? A small one, but we did get one on smith only two years after he got it's got his a nobel, nobel area. There was a thing for us, because this is a very small, we're talking 20, 30 economists talking about a really specific issue. Now here comes the connection. This is 2004 and that's significant because eve was published in two of the seminar slash conference seminar I was yeah, small seminar a young phd in chaotic physics showed up and to us what he thought might be an interesting economic experiment called even line. So he gave a lecture on. You only had 50 000 subscribers at the time and he gave a lecture about design and he knew in and out of it and he's a really smart guy.
Speaker 1:He could both talk about the physics of the imagined world and so on, as I was describing earlier, and talk about the code and talk about the design of the economic system itself, and he said we now have 50 000 subscribers and we are starting to see an economic growing and we are starting to see activity outside of the world. That's economic in terms of gold mining and then all of gold funding and all of that. That. That already said it's nice saturday, remember, because I can still remember the room that we were in sat on the left side of the room, second row. Oh, it's just like. This is interesting. We would have all data on every single transaction. It's big enough to fulfill the conditions of a market and we should be able to test things by just putting another make a note to ask me about that later because I turned it later.
Speaker 1:But you cannot do those tests unless you, of course, change the world and therefore you're not able to repeat tests. We'll discuss that later. However, it looked like a a golden opportunity for economists, and I just looked around and I noticed nobody was seeing this as an opportunity. They just also you talk about a computer game. Right, that doesn't work for us. We need to have a controlled experimenting. You know what it says like, hey guys you did understand them right market, with 50 000 them aiming for 100 000.
Speaker 1:We would have all the data, all data, we would know all. Yes, but nothing came out of it. Just again to the group. The group started doing little things that they knew the best, and even the noble laureate didn't see it as an opportunity.
Speaker 2:Vernon Smith didn't give a shit. What that's such a disappointment yeah but?
Speaker 1:but it was also for me, because I started to say this was really interesting. But I was not an e-player at the time and I started not playing eave. But I started to monitoring the company and two years later, in 2006 by the end of 2006 they advertised for an economist and I just said, interesting, why would I not apply, test it and just do a fun thing? Talk to my wife about it. And you, yeah, okay, yeah, it was not usual at the time that people would leave academia and gaming companies. They don't make money, not back then, nothing else.
Speaker 1:So people have just heard about it. Are you, are you crazy? What are you doing? You're gearing up your academic career for a gaming company. And I just said I just feel I have to do this and and of course, I'm a government employee, I can get a year off, so that's fine, there's no risk for me, I'll go and do it. I spoke with the ccp. We hit it off. It was really good. They told me they had all the data. I just needed to show up and do my experiments, make a lot again.
Speaker 1:It wasn't quite like that, but that's another story so I decided to try it for a year, started in 2007, and little did I know that this little lecture by kjartan in 2004 changed my life completely and I ended up working for ccp for seven years so that's how it came about that I I became the best that I know first person to be hired as an economist to oversee the economy there are important words here to oversee the economy of an online environment that happens to have many games within it.
Speaker 1:This environment is called even line and the games are multiple within that environment. You have pve games. You got pvp players. You got interest in interstate players. You got market players. You have to think about if I say you know this that has games yes, we can hear you.
Speaker 3:So when you got there sorry, I I muted myself so you couldn't hear my gasps and my ooze and oz. So when you got there, would you say that the building blocks, the basics of the economy, were already established up. Mark localized markets. I think of localized markets as being one of the main kind of driving forces of eve online in terms of the arbitrage opportunities. The freight.
Speaker 4:Explain that mechanically for the listeners real quick like the localized markets.
Speaker 3:So each starbase or each I'm also thinking I'm in like star, star, atlas, brain lingo but each of these kind of central space stations or these space stations had their own marketplace. So something that cost like one dollar here might not cost one dollar here. So there was an. There's this huge market for freighting assets back and forth and it's also one of the most confusing things is a new player. When you come in, you you put something here, you move and at least from my recollection it's been a while since I played eve it doesn't come with you and you get to the new star bit the new, it does come with you, so it's to me the genius of eve and really did like the genius that it taught the industry is.
Speaker 3:That is the lesson of how to use the, the physics in real, in the real world, to your advantage in a video game setting to make things. Having to travel is something that an economist there's a really great couple of quotes in the ted castor nova economy, design and analysis where he he talks about. If a neoclassical economist were to come into a video game and try and perfect it, then it would just be this one transaction you press one button, everything works perfectly. But that's not very interesting and the job of the game economist is to create these annoying obstacles that players have to get over and figure out.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, you're absolutely right, chris, to create the imperfections.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and that's what drives not only the economy but the gameplay.
Speaker 1:And this is always a balance between the game designer and the one who has to always see an economy, because the game within the universe and let's focus on that these needs to be universes to have games, because a game you can have a single player game that has economic factors in it. Elite, the good old game that many of the initial designers for Eve quoted as being their inspiration, was still a single player game and it had an economic system behind the game design, but it was not an economy. You have to have consumption, you have to have lack and you have to have scarcity to have an economic system that's interesting within the digital universe. To do this, you need many different games within that unit.
Speaker 1:Gameplay single player game you don't have an economic system. Multiplayer game you start to have economic transactions, but you still don't have a system. An online game with thousands of participants in a persistent world where things have impact. Once you leave stuff on the market, you log out and your stuff still has impact on that market because it's there. You start to see an economy where you need to always see and manage. And these are the very three important steps I've often had the dialogue with designers about. Can you?
Speaker 1:help me with my economy and it turns out he's just talking about helping me with the design of economic actions. There is no economy, because the designer wants to control the world.
Speaker 2:Walk me through again. Why isn't Candy Crush valid under your definition? Why isn't Candy Crush an economic game?
Speaker 1:Because there is no interaction between the players on exchanging value.
Speaker 2:So you think there needs to be floating prices or barter there needs to be an opportunity to exchange.
Speaker 1:It's like many of the Supercell games. They are multiplayer games but you are still only trading with the system. So any specialization that you figure out in your game, you cannot really utilize that to gain ahead or gain more experience. Game play.
Speaker 3:I think that the listener it might sound really confusing because you would think of a game economy designer job as somebody who has to create bundles and price those bundles, maybe even decide how powerful a special power-up will be, making sure you're trickling the value over time to this player. And a lot of people think of that as game economy design. And you're saying to have an economy, to have a virtual economy, you need exchange between actors. So it's almost this is maybe the first time I've heard this concept the virtual economy and like economy design not necessarily the same thing, because the things that you mentioned are things that Eric has been doing.
Speaker 1:It's about the interaction between the system and the players. There's a very interesting example. That happens, I think, but definitely if it was on my first day of the job, I'm not sure, but it was definitely happening. Within the first 10 days of my job, I spoke with one of the executive producers who came to me and said we have a really big dilemma. We cannot resolve it amongst ourselves.
Speaker 1:Back in the day you were able to buy space the shuttle, the smallest vehicle to travel between space stations. It traveled fast but has nothing else. It just had speed. You could buy it anywhere in these different places that Chris was talking about and because, even so much about distance and time, it's important to be able to travel fast In order for the players to move around this big map, they decided that the system would sell this shuttle at a fixed price in all stations. But what could you do with a shuttle other than travel? You could recycle it and by recycling it, you got Tritanium, chris, one of the main source of mineral, one of the main mineral in the game, one of the basic minerals. Essentially, this was supposed to be a non-impact management of the economic system by the designers, but instead they had a fixed price and of course the price didn't move a lot from this particular fixed price.
Speaker 1:Basic economic theory the price was basically they came to me and asked what should we do? And I said if you believe in having a functional market within the game, the players will produce shuttles and sell them at higher prices in places where there are more scares and sell them at lower prices closer to main hubs. There will be shortest in some places, but in other places there will be a functional market. However, the market for Tritanium will become much healthier and mining will be a much better game in high sec and low sec, particularly high sec, if you allow this to happen. So this was a question about initial game design versus the economic design and I simply said stop selling fixed price shuttles. They stopped doing that and never went back, and the Tritanium market became much more interesting. But surely enough, there were not shuttles available everywhere.
Speaker 2:But you're still making a game design decision there. Right, You're running through the it's the positive normative distinction in economics. You're running through the model, but you're still arriving at a conclusion that you think this is more fun for a player if the market operates like this. Well, that was the debate.
Speaker 1:That was the debate. Was the game going to be more fun if there was more economic game within it or is it going to be more fun if I can move more freely between places and have the interaction and fights in other places? I was the advisor quote unquote to the government being the extractives, saying if you do this on one hand typical economists if you do this on one hand, this will happen and if you do that will happen, it's your decision, direct executive director, but these are the impacts that your decision will make. So I did not make the design decision.
Speaker 4:You're like the policy advisor.
Speaker 1:Yes, I did that wise on the policy and the decision was made based on my advice.
Speaker 2:So do you think that game economists would just provide positive analysis? They should only provide analysis of running through the model. Do we really have no role in determining what is the utility maximizing design decision?
Speaker 1:I had many debates like that as the farmers within. Even I was never on a design team. I was always within the publishing arm and I was always in the advisory role. Once you start to make the decisions, isn't there a danger that you will start trying to make that decision good?
Speaker 4:I don't know if I call that a danger. What do you mean by good, like morally good or towards an economic outcome?
Speaker 1:Good towards your own liking of the game. In a complex game like E, when you have many different teams. I can give you another example. I will not go into the full details because it was a little bit sensitive, but there was a certain feature that was introduced into EVE. This feature turned out to be popular and turned out to be a good gameplay for a certain part of the customer base. We started, however, to see certain changes in money supply and is flowing into the game. We saw a danger of inflation and, if allowed to be untouched, could lead to hyperinflation in the future Not guaranteed, but could lead to it.
Speaker 1:We had a discussion with the game design team and with the game designer and the director on that particular thing. It was not necessarily a good thing for a designer to hear us say you have a good and interesting game mechanic, it's popular, at least for part of the playbase, but in the long run you're going to destroy the economy. That seems to stop now. Of course, the designer didn't agree with us pointing out this and that and so on. It's just basic theory that if you allow this to continue, in the end it was balanced and became a healthier thing. It never became a problem. So I assume that we had twice worked. Imagine that you were an economic designer. You're sitting with that tool and you are designing that thing. You become invested in it. The big danger is that, if you are on the team that the designer is designing it, the big danger is that you become too invested and you don't see your own flaws.
Speaker 2:Why can't we still, as game economists I think this is what Eric and Chris and we all do is we try to take the role of the firm and we try to maximize net present game LTV the lifetime value of whatever decision we make. What is the net present value of it? We do actively make design decisions. I don't think there's a single one of us that has not made extensive design decisions. I would describe maybe 30% of the work I do as positive economics. It's just like running through the model and saying this or that we have to make institutional design decisions frequently.
Speaker 1:That also depends on where in the process you are. Remember, I came into a world that was already designed.
Speaker 2:My role was to monitor. Let's put it this way when we think about a balanced economy, this is a word that always comes up. This is a word we always get asked what is a balanced economy? Sustainable, sustainable I think actually probably has a better definition, but a balanced economy? How would you answer that question? What does it mean to balance the EFA economy?
Speaker 1:A balanced economy is where the majority of your players 90% plus are having fun.
Speaker 4:Ultimately, the goal is gameplay. The economy serves gameplay.
Speaker 1:Guys, you're a economist. What's the ultimate goal of a human being from an economic standpoint? Utility maximization, which we cannot measure on an individual level, but we all know it's about the individuals making decisions that, in the short and the long run as well, make people happier.
Speaker 4:In the real economy we have a bunch of macro indicators like GDP, unemployment, inflation, that we look at and say, okay, these are trending positive or negative. When you look at a game economy like Eve, what are those macro indicators that the system is doing well?
Speaker 1:The same. We created our own price index. Luckily, we didn't have to have a basket, we could just use all the prices, so we were able to see how prices were evolving. The most perfect price index in the world, because you always base it on consumption, service and baskets of goods that are always years behind and lacking real consumption. You could be able to balance this. Every time we were doing the calculations it turned out. We have to be careful about the math that we are doing. In the end, we were able to have really good price index. These are still calculated. There was a master study done within, without data, that showed what was the name of it Gross the GNP. Gross net product, nominal product yeah, gross nominal product.
Speaker 1:It was like a GDP measurement for Eve, so we were able to see economic activity. Money supply was a really important part of it and of course, you all know sinks and faucets. It's basically just money supply. And it really got interesting when we introduced Plex, because Plex is where the interaction between real life value and the in-game value and I can reveal here and now I don't think I've never revealed this, at least in a podcast.
Speaker 2:Game economist exclusive. All right, we're going to get the clicks now.
Speaker 1:We actually did participate directly on the Plex market in order to make sure that nobody was cornering the market. We didn't want to create Plexes because we only wanted the Plexes to be in the game from a player who bought it with real-life money. It was a thin market in the beginning, so we had to be sure that nobody was cornering the market. And how would you do that? The only way was to collect Plexes that were not being used. I'm not going to tell you how we collected them and sell them on the market when we saw somebody was trying to corner it.
Speaker 2:Do you mind talking a little bit about Plex, because it's such an interesting mechanic and it's spread. It's spread. World of Warcraft does this now.
Speaker 1:A genius idea that the design team came up with to really exchange time for money, and we all know that real-life economic values or real-life economic actions impact all games Gold farming, exchange account sales, exchanging of items without proper eula behind it. This all happens. We as economists we would say as long as you can drop an item but somebody else can pick it up, there will be a market and you will never be able to fully control it. So why don't you just design for it? And what Plex does is that it allows you to obtain in-game currency with real-life money, but indirectly. The only way to acquire it legally within EVE is to have somebody who's in the game already selling you their currency and you buying this license and selling it on the market.
Speaker 1:So you, as a real-life guy who works 60 hours, 70 hours a week, you want to play, have fun in EVE over the weekend and get blown up a lot. In order to do that, you need very expensive ships and it's going to cost you a few hundred dollars, but you earn a lot of money and you don't care. So you show up on a Friday, you buy pilot license extensions, Plex's, go on the market, you sell them, you get ISC to buy stuff, this stuff. You create your preferred spaceship to do battle that weekend.
Speaker 1:You fly into space and you get blown up and you have a lot of fun with your friends and go back to work on Monday. However, during the next week, somebody is playing the game from an industrial perspective, perhaps with low income, but has access to the game. It's really efficient in creating ISC, creates a lot of ISC, but doesn't really have money to buy and might be on a country that doesn't really have really good access to credit cards or access to foreign currency, but is able to buy their pilot licenses, license extensions on the market for ISC and they can therefore play the game. So people with a lot of money but little time are doing exchange with people with a lot of time but little money, and this creates a healthier gameplay, healthier exchange of real value. Both parties are participating in the game and the Eve universe becomes more fulfilling.
Speaker 3:Do you need both of those people? For the economy to work, you need those net consumers, those net producers.
Speaker 1:Because in Eve everything is produced by the players. If you don't have stuff to blow up during the weekend, it's not going to be a fun thing.
Speaker 3:Did you make an effort to try to either a measure the types of players you had in your games? Obviously what type of player they are through their actions, and video games have incredible data on human behavior. And then the second thing is did you guys market to specific personas to try and get maybe you don't have enough of those, those consumers, those rich guys who just want to have fun on the weekend? How did you balance that? How did you guys, how did you I?
Speaker 1:need to step back a little bit now and remember that I just joined CCP as an economist one man team and told that all the data was there. All I had to do was to do a little bit of sequel writing, which I've never been good at, and I would be blessed with a lot of things and I could just do anything that I wanted. It turned out not to be quite that. First of all, tranquility, the database. There was only one copy and that was the operational copy, and I could only do my sequel in during the downtime hour Once every 20 to 23 hours for one hour. So no guys, this is not going to work.
Speaker 1:If your query is too big, it crashes the game. Let's not even talk about that. I got a little bit scared about that. There was always a backup copy, but it could be a few days. I will make that long story a little bit short and say it took a little bit of time to get it going and get the understanding into the company that we needed to have a specific research database, so we needed to basically have to be a live copy. We got it almost down to that, but in the end we were able to have a pretty good copy that we could run our sequel queries directly on, and that helped a lot. And then that went to Hadoop and so on and, as you all guys know, today you have a data engineering team and you have a data analytics team.
Speaker 1:But I started as a one person, but in the end we were a team of 11 researchers. We had the responsibility of monitoring the in-game economy, monitoring fraud, monitoring the channels the channels of players coming into the game from the websites. What type of players were there? Like you were asking, chris, we did the first persona study. Back in the day we had a really good marketing professional within RT and she proposed a study on personas and we did that and it was really interesting to see how, what type of players we had at the time and we even did the large scale consulting with the outside data analytics team to understand better what we could do to increase the long, the lifetime value of the customer.
Speaker 1:So we I went from being the head economist and it was that all the time to have a team of 11 people where we were managing not only the, not only the in-game economy, but the whole economic interactions in the real life and inside the game and how all of that functioned, and that was a lot of fun. We had two people that were just Eve experts, a guy who had his degree in political philosophy and he did his master's thesis while working for us and created the MSE now not the MSE, the CSM, the Council of Steller Management, the one that has been democratically elected ever since and is still functioning. We had the data engineering guys, the marketing guy who was doing optimization of all kinds of offers and so on, and another economist. Yeah, I think that covers about the fields of expertise that was within the team and this is where we did a lot of fun trying to understand all of the interactions, and this is where I started to understand that the future was going to be digital consumption, not only in games, but just in the world.
Speaker 1:And nowadays I tell people if you want to save the world, introduce more gaming. All you need for digital consumption is solar energy, really, because we can have all the electricity we want from the sun. Yes, you need to do some mining and some stuff for computers, but you can have fairly efficient production of that and then you can have people spending 80% of their income on digital consumption. That will have very minimal impact on the environment.
Speaker 3:By virtual cars, not real cars.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Or virtual spaceships.
Speaker 1:Oh, virtual spaceships. That's where I really started to see this, and I took this with me when I went back to academia and became the rector, or the president, of the Icelandic system. It's weird I'm both head of the board of the university and head of the university.
Speaker 3:Still there today, correct.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm still there, are you?
Speaker 2:teaching a class on game economics.
Speaker 1:Oh, unfortunately not. I'm just don't teach at all and very minimal research. Unfortunately, it's more administration. But I parted back with me in the sense that the university that I was with when I left was the university in the north, and I went back there and that university has focused on online education. So I came in and said, yes, we will go really into online education, because not only does it serve the rest of the country much better than having somebody having to move to a big city in order to study, it's also simply going to be bigger in the future and if we can then connect to universities all around the world, we can give our students better access to education Now this has, of course, turned into Coursera, accet, and even YouTube is now becoming a source of I don't want to say education, but what do you do if you need to learn how to do some of your stuff back at your own house?
Speaker 1:If you need to do something with your car or with your computer, what do you do if you fix something? Youtube how to we go to YouTube? Yes, you go and try to learn it that way. This is a brave new world out there and for me, this whole journey with understanding how the e-economy was interacting with the real life economy really taught me that this is a much, much bigger thing than just games, because people tend to look at games as something not being serious. But games are simply a representation, a simulation of what we do in real life and therefore we are making decisions based on the same kind of human space thinking. And once you start to understand that people are making economic decisions within EVE based on the parameters that are there, they will be making similar decisions in real life, in particular, in digital space. So all of this will merge into one big thing in the future, and I truly believe you're saying that happened these days, and COVID really pushed us away from that.
Speaker 2:If you were to take a neoclassical economist and, off the shelf, a Chicago grad or your UVA grad, whatever it may be, at day one, the joint CCP, what do you tell them? How do you teach them the game piece of the game, economist? What does that even mean?
Speaker 1:Number one. If you already hadn't been a gamer, you probably wouldn't be on the team. If he was a gamer, I wouldn't have to really teach him about the importance of the gaming world. It becomes a little bit more interesting question when you say how would you work into the department of economics in MIT or Harvard and start telling the people on the corridor you guys are looking at the 20th century, the 21st century is at the end of the hallway and you're not even looking in that direction. The good thing is what Glystod, I learned from EVE and working in that environment is that the basic theories seem to work. Doing a basic study showed us that all of the assumptions that we make about human behavior and economics they seem to work the same way within digital worlds as in real life. Because we're dealing with people anyway, that doesn't really change.
Speaker 3:Speaking of academics and coming into the 21st century. One of the things, one of the so actually Purdue especially during Vernon Smith's time when he was at Purdue it was a huge experimental school Still is pretty heavy into experimental. So one of the big, one of the biggest hurdles that you have to get over to run an experiment is coming up with the money to pay participants, because the big difference between economic experiments and psychological experiments is incentivized performance. So the better you do, the better your payoff is. And one of the things that I always thought was fascinating about that EVE paper that I wrote is a terrible paper like it wouldn't get published in any journal. But what I thought was fascinating was you were seeing all of this economic equilibria play out with no financial incentives, no direct financial incentives. Of course we were talking about Plex.
Speaker 1:Well, not only that, but now you have to remember, financial incentives are simply representation of me trying to achieve something Just order preferences.
Speaker 1:Yes, so maybe that's the flaw of the experimental economics are such is that they are so connecting it to monetary value, but the monetary value needs to be low, as you said, in order to run the experiment, so you're not really making a big decision. Believe me, when you take a ship in EVE online that cost you 50 hours to make, or you paid $100 for Plex is to take that ship into battle and you lose it. You feel it, it's a pain in the fuck.
Speaker 2:Another week in square one, not a child family.
Speaker 1:All EVE players will be able to tell you that the utility maximization.
Speaker 3:So the game economist and the game, the video, the virtual economy, its currency is opportunity cost, whereas these neoclassical or experimental economists, their value is currency. That's their most direct, most obvious way. Because, no, no play if they had levels, for example, if there was a game design in the experiments, like the kids. Once I'm done with this, once I leave that my, the fact that I'm level 10, maybe there's some non pecuniary value of being first place, but there's other than that competitiveness. There's not really a way for me to compensate this person, whereas in EVE, because of the persistent effects and all the opportunity costs of my time. So you, I guess you're saying there is actually financial incentive, there's value to these players performing at the top of their game within a virtual economy. It's just not necessarily this direct. Here's $5.
Speaker 1:No but it's. The value is measured in your status within the game, of course, in the stuff that you have, of course, just like in real life. But in the end, it's all about the human interaction. And if you start to think about it, what is life? Life is a game. It's one big game.
Speaker 1:People are chasing each other in the sense of common rat race, of trying to outsmart, trying to be bigger, trying to have something better, and the only measurement that we have to measure the success is money, and that's why economists and economics is so much connected to the dollar, to the currency. And yet all economists know that's a side product of economic behavior. They all know that the money isn't worth anything unless people believe that the money can do something for them in the future. This is why the dollar, even though you're now getting into debt like never before, it's why the dollar still makes sense, because people believe the dollar will be valuable in 10 years or 20 years. This will lead us into the discussion about crypto, when people start believing and have easy access to and can easily safeguard their electron currency. That's only then will we have a direct competition with the dollar. It's all about the perception. The money isn't real. The money is our expectations of reality in the future.
Speaker 2:So let's go back to experiments. Hold up, I don't want to let you have the hook on the single shard thing, because we've been talking a lot about experiments. So number one thing if I were an economist, if I was at CCP, I'd be like why are you doing one shard? Why are you not doing multiple shards? So I worked on forex. We have multiple shards. We can run lots of experiments. We got parallel worlds. It's every economist's dream. Why didn't you push for sharding at Eve? Why, single shard?
Speaker 1:Because, in order to have a functional economy with a persistent participation, you need to have a certain number of players participating in that version of the world, and Eve just was never big enough to be able to operate that efficient economy on multiple shards. If we had millions and millions of subscribers I'm sure we would have started in the end. Then it actually turned out to be sharded. Was the Chinese version is still a unique part and not connected to the main main shard. The more people you get together, the more interesting it will be. All games should be one universe, not sharded, because if you can have it bigger, it is going to be big. But at the same time, as you said, phil, for us it's very interesting to be able to have four large worlds together. When we do do comparison and do a change here and see how that that's for us, is a dream.
Speaker 2:Well, to me, it's the design principle.
Speaker 1:I would always say a bigger world is a better world.
Speaker 2:See that I don't understand, though. So the thing I've always worried about in having a single shard game is I've always worried about contagion effects. So if I fuck up something and I've got single shard, that's going to reverberate through the entire economy. It's going to affect every single one of my players, whereas if I shard things, I have an instant containment, like I really can isolate one country with COVID and then I can control immigration. Right now, I can be the very visible fist, I can issue immigration tickets, I can have taxes, I can have auctions, yeah but then you're controlling and you see, that's the big difference If you want to have a truly interesting game.
Speaker 1:That that is that people are making themselves. It's a true sandbox. You don't want to control it.
Speaker 2:But we're always controlling things because we have to make the institutions like. We have to decide. To your point, we have to decide supply. Everything is going to spring from the institutions, right, the initial set of conditions. Isn't this where we've been?
Speaker 1:Initial fetters, initial set. So is it possible to make a universe where you have initial settings and after that everything is just play a best?
Speaker 2:Certainly, but we're still designing the initial institutions. If you sign up for modern developmental economics, like if you design the initial institutions, we can make a pretty good bet on where they're going to end up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but not necessarily. You might not necessarily have to design all the institutions it was. It was very interesting to to do a study on the corporations in Sinead. What type of corporations turned out to be the best ones? They had communist corporations where you just worked for the good of everyone and you had 100% tax rate within the companies but you got supplied everything you needed. And they had private, tier type of corporations where you're loosely connected but pay a very minimal fee and then you're able to operate in in loose connections to other corporations, alliances and so on. And it turned out to be not completely privateers and definitely not communist institutions that work best, but some that they created themselves, alliances that work together, maybe not formally bound together within the game, but they were definitely communicating outside of the game, making decisions, etc.
Speaker 1:So the initial conditions are the kind of what type of world are you in? Just from a physical standpoint, what? How does this world make sense? And then the second one how are you going to have interaction? And in Eve they got around this complex human feeling that if you cannot understand a person, you you hit it. They got around it by saying here's a safe space, everybody can come here and meet and talk and you cannot do any damage to each other in this safe space. But around this is a vast universe where there are no rules and that's where truly the interesting games happen. There are only physical rules in that outside world and that's all the stories that you hear about Eve. That's kept the game going for the past 20 years. Those stories are happening there and that's because they are all player driven. They're all based on the behavior of human beings. So that's also a big step for game designers is how can it be the designer of good environment, but not necessarily the game as such?
Speaker 3:There seems to be. There must be two completely different schools of thought, because you have single player games like a Tomb Raider or a Warcraft or a God of War, where it's just you pick up your, that is. There's not a whole lot of player creativity, or there's certainly no player interaction. There's not necessarily a lot of we've talked about in this game, in this podcast emergent gameplay. It's pretty much you go through, you experience this heavily curated, heavily controlled experience that somebody wanted you to feel.
Speaker 1:Basically what you say in game design a theme park. It's just a theme park.
Speaker 3:Yes, versus this philosophy, and I've always it's really interesting to hear you say this, because this is always how I've interpreted the economy, as here are a handful of building blocks. No, there's not super complex in terms of the actual game design, in terms of the economy, it's the markets, the institutions that make it such a fascinating and deep environment. It's that emergent gameplay, that emergent economy that makes it interesting. And I think, for me, this huge question of how much is too much and how much do you try to force people. If I want to control prices, I control supply I say, okay, let's squeeze this pipe, let's make it smaller I'm not going to go into personally. I'm not going to go into the marketplace and try and manipulate prices by introducing a price floor or something like this. I'm even hesitant to implement taxes within the game taxes where we get the. We're the town or the governing body who's receiving the taxes, but that's still basically just a sink.
Speaker 1:You always need sinks and taxes are a perfect total sinks, yeah.
Speaker 3:The tough thing, but though, with crypto is typically a lot of companies will take this tax or this fee, which is initially a sink, but then they sell it back into the marketplace to make money, which is, I think, the same temptation as governments with the admin.
Speaker 1:There's no difference in the in the recent behind that. Once you can I don't want to say to the citizen, but once you can solve your problem with printing money or giving up value in one way or the other, it's always too tempting to do. We tend to go back into the crypto. So let's focus on that a little bit later on for the last few minutes, because I think there are a lot of things here that lead us into crypto discussion and the whole problem with crypto is that we are talking about new technology as crypto.
Speaker 2:Let's save it just a little bit, because you also have a good CCP also has a buckling.
Speaker 1:I wanted to answer you and Chris on the sense that pure sandbox or the player experience and the designed experience, if of course, it's not complete sandbox. There's a set earlier. There are a bunch of games within the EVE that are designed. There's Pee content there are published. They published new versions on a regular basis where they're introducing new content simply to make it interesting. You will not get away from that in a web 2.0 environment, so you will always constantly have to make sure that there is something new.
Speaker 1:There are new ship designs that fit the overall look of the world. We always had this dialogue Do we want to have pink unicorns flying in space? Because if we would allow pure creativity, you would have pink unicorns flying in space. But people do drive pink unicorns in the real life. If you go to Burning man or if you go to any celebration, people do crazy things and they still fit within the real life world.
Speaker 1:So why would we limit the design need, the creative needs of the customers, just because we want to have a holistic view of our game? And that's okay, because this is a game and I want it to look like this, that's fine. But then you limit it to the people that like that also and other people will go to another game. So there is no magic formula here, and this is good for us game economists, because there will always be jobs for us. There's never going to be a solution that says this is the right way to go.
Speaker 1:You always have to think about, Phil, the initial design. You have to think about what is going on. Chris, it is going to be a game economic system, but, eric, we need you there to monitor us. So this is a dialogue, debate, and people sometimes ask me wasn't there a big difference between you went to a gaming company from a university or all this academia and formality, and then you went to this crazy gaming world and then you got better and you became a director of the university and I said no, it's basically, all the same, I'm dealing with young people with a lot of passion and creativity.
Speaker 1:Everybody thinks they know the answer and we need to come to a conclusion and to me, that's the story of all game design teams. You've got very passionate people. Everybody knows where they want to take the game. You need to produce something, you need to present something. You need to communicate something. And that can only happen within a group. So if.
Speaker 1:I were ever to do it again, I would emphasize how important it is that this is not either or it's everything, and that's why I truly like my job when we had created the unit of researchers and statistics, as we called it, where we were looking at the entire chain, from reaching you as a customer through the funnel, seeing your gameplay. What kind of gameplay really kept you as a very valuable customer? What do we need to do to introduce new ones to that? And that meant you need to talk to the whole company.
Speaker 2:So why can't I sell my account, Anif? Why do I have to go to secondhand market to do that? This has always bothered me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's always bothered me too. There was a list of things that bothered me and luckily it got shorter. Even after I left, that list got shorter. But these are definitely one of the things and they actually started to do this in a different way where you can buy skill points or you can sell your character not your account, but sell your character and there are certain security issues with selling the account.
Speaker 4:Ok, that's an email password contact.
Speaker 1:Yeah with the new data personal. What do we call it? The personal? Yeah with all of that. When you have the real life data becoming your digital data and it's a question of who owns it and so on, you might end up in interesting legal battles.
Speaker 3:So tokenization of those accounts on a blockchain.
Speaker 2:Hold on before we get to see the blockchain stuff. Hold up. What do you think you was your biggest win?
Speaker 1:My biggest win.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what do you consider your biggest win in your time there?
Speaker 1:However you choose to define that.
Speaker 1:The biggest win came early on, when I was able to get it through that we needed a team and a system in order to be able to do the work that we're supposed to do, because once we had that's where all the magic started to happen. The most fun win that's a different thing. That was the plex, really, when I sat there on one night. I can just describe it to you guys. We are in the room with where the game masters are. We had the research team to decide of the game master, so there was easy communication and we saw that something had happened during the week that we didn't really. I made a deal with the executive producer and the publishing executive and we said we can do this over the weekend, try to help the market stabilize, but I need two game masters and I need a license to do this, and we will go into the market and trade over the weekend on different accounts so they don't realize who we are and our objective is to maintain the prices of plexus within the streets and make sure nobody is hoarding it. And this is what happened on several occasions.
Speaker 1:The fun thing was, if you remember the quarterly economic newsletters, we actually stated in the newsletters. If you read it, we state we might take actions to stabilize the markets. And then we said we did take action, same as central banks do when they take actions on a currency market. So that was the most fun part. So I would want to put it in some of the biggest win is just getting it to become real within the company. But the fun was when you started to realize you were doing the exactly same thing as you would be doing in a real life.
Speaker 4:Was there internal pushback to implementing plex? No.
Speaker 1:I think most people at that point in time realized how smart idea this was to get this going, and there's only somebody who wants to take the claim for it. But I'm not one of them. I did not invent the plexus, but once I heard the ideas, it is. This is something that would function and we could definitely monitor and work, and we're always trying to get the blockchain in there. It would have been very interesting to have the blockchain technology at the time.
Speaker 2:What do you think blockchain ads? What do you think blockchain ads to any of this? You already have marketplace. You already have buying and selling. What's the point?
Speaker 1:Very simple. Economists talk about the core element of our study being this being scarcity. There's scarcity in the world, and economics is all about how do you make decisions within that scarcity. Blockchain creates digital scarcity.
Speaker 2:I just think this is such baloney, because what do you mean? It creates digital scarcity, like you could put it. You could put an item number in Eve on saying this is item one, this is item two. How? Is that any different than the blockchain? How is that any different in terms of?
Speaker 4:scarcity. The user is no guarantee that Eve won't mint another one.
Speaker 1:Yes, there's a lack of that guarantee, and if we implement that blockchain properly this way in Eve, you would be able to take it out of Eve and sell it somewhere else.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you want that out of market transaction.
Speaker 1:It has to be, Otherwise it isn't interesting.
Speaker 2:So when you say take it out of Eve, though, what do you mean by that? What am I taking a ship out of Eve? Am I taking a 3D asset? What am I taking out of Eve? It's just the property, right, though?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're taking property. I'm still not sure, and this is. I've had this discussion with a lot of game companies in the past two years.
Speaker 1:It was interesting that two or three years ago my name started to pop up again. Then I had been in my current job for five years, six years, but it was all about the blockchain. And now people start to see digital currency. That's economics, money is economics and so on. So he must know everything about that. And I said I don't. However, I know that this creates a completely new world for us, but this is a world that I had predicted would happen sometime in the future.
Speaker 1:When I saw what happened within Eve, I wouldn't have known that it was blockchain that would bring it on. And just when you can have this scarcity, then you start to see real value in the consumption, just like it's a real value in a space ship. There's, all of a sudden, there's a real value in the digital consumption, and if there's still big, if people believe that this blockchain is mine and I can do with it what I want to do with it in cooperation with others, then it has become my property. So if I take something out of Eve as a space ship and I can put it into Fortnite as a gun, that's then the contract between the owner of the asset in Eve and the person letting that asset coming into Fortnite, as you said, there will be gatekeepers, there will still be immigration between the two games, but you make the decision as a game designer that you allow people to take value between games. This is most likely to happen within companies. So, eric, within companies like you work, it is most probably that you would be willing, as a publisher, to say I will move value from this game to that game in that form and that will keep customers within my brand.
Speaker 1:But in an ultimate utopian world, you, as a gamer, you just own your stuff and you just move it around games as you want to think about all the economic value that is currently doved away in games that are not played anymore. Time, chris, you mentioned that the ultimate product in the digital world is time. Time consumed to create digital stuff that nobody can do anything with because it's locked in old games or it's not interesting anymore, or something like that. If this value could be unleashed through blockchain technology or any digital asset type of technology, you will have shown consumption probably not involved and we will no longer have to buy physical things and buy this digital stuff. So what's?
Speaker 2:being locked, though. What is it that's valuable? Well, let's take a game that's dead. Let's say Pac-Man is no longer played. What is it that's stored in Pac-Man that's so valuable? Nothing.
Speaker 1:Pac-Man. Well, I'm talking about the games where you can actually, like I mentioned before, the games, that where you can, when you can pick up stuff and store stuff. So these would have to be online games.
Speaker 2:So let's think about Ultima. What about Ultima online right First, mmo, exactly. So what is being? What is locked right now in Ultima that's so valuable that we can't seem to get at?
Speaker 1:It's all this stuff that people call the time and as fewer and fewer people were interested in Ultima online then you were not able to sell your stuff.
Speaker 1:It was not interesting to more people, so people don't know the value of it or they don't value it. This is a better phrase. So what you spend a lot of time creating and collecting is now worth nothing, because people are not really playing Ultima online in any numbers. But if, at any point in time, you would have been able to trade that what we wanted to leave to another game, then you would try to sell it to other people. You would then introduce Ultima online to other people, so you would become the marketing person. But you are letting the world know. There's a game here that used to and here's stuff that I spent five years collecting. You can buy it for a thousand dollars and you will save your five years, but you can play the game at a very high level.
Speaker 3:It's just like any physical good. Digitizing physical good. Card games are like to me, the perfect example. If I play a physical card game for five to ten years, I might have built up a huge amount of value. I might be able to trade that to somebody and give it to them when I want to exit.
Speaker 3:I hate this idea of speculation and the value of these things growing over time. I don't think that's a necessary condition for this type of technology to be relevant and important. You might sell it for 50% of what you paid for it, but that's okay because you're transferring that value. I also think this idea of value ownership or digital ownership is important in the short run. Vintage cars there's only a select few cars that become more valuable. Over time, the vast majority of stuff just completely goes to nothing, especially with the Pac-Man example. I don't even think that we need the condition that it's an online game. Now, obviously, for this transfer to have it, it has to be an online game, but you could have a single player game where, for one reason or another, the assets in there could be valuable. Now, most single player games, especially in the short run, the value of those assets is going to be very low, because everybody who runs through Elden Ring, for example, is going to get the same sets of weapons.
Speaker 3:I hate the fact that I personally don't like the term play to earn. If you just sit in here, you're going to earn a bunch of money and you're going to be able to cash out. Not necessarily. It depends on how people value things. The things that are going to be valuable are always never. Is this not going to be true? They're always the things that are going to be the hardest to achieve, the scarcest, which is what you were talking about, and since I've got the mic, I think to me, one of the most valuable things is more technical, and you had mentioned it, dr Io the interoperability of assets, the transferring things from one place to another.
Speaker 3:Especially if you're all built on the same blockchain, where all the technology is uniform between firms, you have this huge opportunity of interpositionality, interoperability and there's another interword that I'm blanking on, but basically everybody plays by the same rules. Everybody knows how your program works. So not only can I study your environment, I can go on the blockchain a Solana blockchain, for example and I can study any game I want to. As long as they're on the blockchain. I can go and look at their data, I can guarantee and verify scarcity values. I can do all sorts of incredible things.
Speaker 3:But I can also build, and even at my company we're able to build and integrate with other companies other games, but also other. These could be third party companies that are trying to integrate with our. Maybe we want someone to run a specific, a special ad program for us. We're able to seamlessly integrate because we all play by the same rules and everybody knows what everything looks like. It's. If you go to Europe web two, you try to plug your United States adapter into the wall, you need a converter. In this environment, everybody has the same adapter, everybody has the same slot and everything fits together. So to me, that's another huge benefit. So it's this value in the short run, but it's also just the idea of interoperability and interfunctionality between different projects and different people.
Speaker 1:And this is very interesting, Chris, because this is where I see the practical problems stacking up this utopian world of having everybody on the same technology and you're able to actually see and analyze different blockchains within this environment is, to me, a perfect three.
Speaker 1:We haven't solved yet how companies will monetize on this and how they will actually be able to still earn revenue through this process. We haven't resolved how play to earn can actually be fun, because play to earn is a way to get people to just aggregate and get it hyped and drive up the prices and drive up activity. But for sustainability is the needs to be fun. Life is boring. Think about it. It's about surviving. You need to eat, you need to breathe, but what is life? It's about the fun, it's about the entertainment, it's about emotions, communications, etc. There is no difference in a game. All of that needs to be there.
Speaker 1:I find it really exciting to monitor in Axie Infinity versus SoRiff, because you mentioned card games. Soriff are the ones that are crypto based football cards, soccer cards. I spoke with them a few years back and it was really interesting and they've been doing really well on the front of making it interesting, because soccer is interesting to hundreds of millions and for billions of people. So this is huge. So there you have the same technology, but Axie is still finding what will make it an interesting game and an environment in the future.
Speaker 1:So again, not only do we economists game economists have endless opportunities in the web 2.0 environment in the near future. If you screw up the initial design of a web 3.0 game that's based on crypto or based on blockchain, there is no going back, there's no shards.
Speaker 1:There's no shards, there is no backup, there is no revinding. That's why economic design and, to your point of view, will be more important in the future. The economists are in the team from the very beginning, because you need to have the right data hooks in place. You need to have the right actions in place on how you will interact, and you will need to publish beforehand. Before you publish your blockchain game, you need to say we will manage our economy this way. These are the tools for us, as janitors of the universe, to be able to interact. We will do that or we will do this. We don't tell you when, don't tell you why, we don't tell you how much until after the fact.
Speaker 3:This is such a critical challenge in my life for the game that I manage. There's a huge tension between me and the community where I want to do what's best for the economy without fucking everything up by preempting the change by. I've had people recommend we should announce the change a month before or a week before, and I say so that they have the opportunity to use, like, that week to destroy everything. And it's really tough because those there's a valid concern in the community. I've, I've got this, I've got a piggy bank here, I've got a bank account. Essentially, this got a whole bunch of stuff in it and you're gonna screw up everything and I'm gonna. You know what I was was making 400 units of hydrogen yesterday and tomorrow I'm gonna make 200.
Speaker 3:And I think what they don't realize is that at the end of the day at least this is how I see it the whole economy is one big bubble of bubble is a terrible word a whole pie, a big pie of value. And that value, just because small, small parameter somewhere changes, doesn't mean that the pie shrinks or gets bigger, because the pie is a function of how many people are in that game and how much they enjoy it, not some silly function that the economist came up with. So if I change this, if I decrease the emission of hydrogen, yeah, you're producing less, but the hydrogen price goes up because there's less hydrogen in the world. So it's a really tough, I think, especially with the advent of crypto, web three. Whatever it is a conflict, there's this difficult exchange you have to do with those people who see themselves as incredibly deeply invested financially in your game and doing the right thing, trying to do the right thing, and almost just having to say trust me, it'll work.
Speaker 1:But that's why they say it was all important that you publish this before. Yeah, this is where he did another very interesting thing that still survives, and we mentioned a little bit earlier the council of tele management, where you have direct communication Between the developers and the customer, and these are really fun meetings to be on a discovery into a room and talking about the future of the game. Should we go this way or that way? We know this is happening. How can we solve that? This is just a half a step towards what you're describing, chris. When we were talking about that, you need to be able to have a truly functioning universe that goes across products.
Speaker 1:Then you need to have that communication with the customer and, believe me, we are one step closer than to being a government, and governments are not the most popular things today. Yeah, how can you create a trustworthy dialogue, dialogue based on.
Speaker 3:I got the opportunity to meet some of our most committed community members this last week in Amsterdam at a conference, and these are the. These are basically the people you just described, the heads of their organizations within the game, and they have control over hundreds of players, in some cases thousands of players, within their we call them guilds. Was really interesting to get the different perspectives. First of all, these guys are super smart. Second of all, they want what's best, but it was just absolutely surreal to get the different perspectives and talk to them. That's really interesting. You say that now I'm thinking I need to go back and we need to start a new, like a council, and every week or every month, every twenty to thirty people meet in a room and they yell at me and we talk about what needs to happen next.
Speaker 1:I was the very reason why we decided to have that experimental seminar on fishers economics, because we wanted to bring the fishermen in and the users of the system in to discuss how can we create a system that you guys will not game beforehand and not destroy with the designing boats around the regulations, rather than going by the regulations and such and such Just trying to figure out how we could manage that resource. That's not that could be destroyed the fish. It was the same dialogue, same discussion as you are describing how can we do something that's necessary and fun and, luckily for us, we live in times where you can focus on the fun part and yet not destroyed beforehand that is a perfect way to end the cast.
Speaker 2:Thank you for doing my job for me. Game economists cast episode eighteen in the can. Thank you so much for coming.
Speaker 4:It's been great. You're a legend, I was incredible.
Speaker 2:I think I don't know. I speak for all of us when I say we're starting to get into this. We're googling people. It was like, oh my god, someone's doing something and they're like publishing economic reports and they're actually employed by a firm. And this is real and we can do this too. We hope to have Ed cash Nova on pretty soon too, which would be a lot of fun too.
Speaker 1:Yes, we gave my best to him. We were here in Iceland, the month and a half ago on a very interesting conference that you guys will be hearing about on the internet. Release the first slides from that conference. So no, she, what she. What's. What's the BS been doing on social media for the past week?
Speaker 2:Is there any advertising we could do for you? Do you got a consulting business on the side?
Speaker 1:I always have opportunities to talk to to individual companies and did individuals about this but, I'm always happy to have a conversation with entrepreneurs people thinking about ideas within the economic design of games Because I learn usually more than they learn from me throughout conversation. So feel free to reach out to Dr AG at gmailcom and we could.
Speaker 4:We should teach this to our children. Economics is major, major major. Everyone has to major in economics. Number one for personal survival economics.
