A world without scarcity?
The thing about Second Life regulating in-game banking got me thinking a bit about why they have an in-game economy at all. I mean it’s a virtual world inside a computer. Electrons cost virtually nothing, so why not give game players whatever they want? Why make game resources scarce at all? Just give everyone unlimited amounts of everything.
Clearly, this would be a bad idea, because the game would quickly become very boring. When I was a teenager, I liked to play SimCity. There was a cheat code that you could use to get unlimited funds for your city. It was fun to play like that one or twice, but not very often. The whole fun of the game comes from optimising under constraint. Without the constraints, the fun is gone too.
Maybe I’m being too philosophical but I think there’s a lesson in here for life. Many people curse their constraints and of course it’s no fun living in poverty. But having everything you want, whenever you want it, might be quite boring too.
2 Comments
If you haven’t read Snowcrash, you’re in for a treat. My understanding is that Second Life is explicitly based on Snowcrash in many ways. I don’t know if Stephenson was explicit on why he made the choice for money in the metaverse presumably, server space, processor time, and high bandwidth for high resolution avatars do cost real world dollars. Moreover, how can you hire someone in the metaverse to do metaverse work for you if you have no way to pay them? You either need to barter metaverse objects, or pay them outside the world in real world money.
There is an interesting (?) bug in your website. I came to it with javascript disabled (because I use Firefox and noscript.) The website decided that I really DID have javascript and was looking at the javascript free version and then insisted I turn it off. So actually what I had to do to post this comment was enable javascript and use the javascriptable version of the site.
Javascript. Bleh.
jerry: Can you give me more details about the bug you encountered? I’ve turned Javascript off in Firefox and was able to post this comment no problem without having to turn JS back on.