[wmil]

I've seen plenty of articles along this line, but the author always seems to blame the players for the system failing.

To me it looks like their ecological model failed because it was deeply flawed.

Real ecologies aren't really closed systems. There's generally constant energy coming in from the sun, and that energy is the limiting factor. Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this energy.

But in original UO, a player having 10000 shirts would cause the amount of wool produced in the world to decline. That doesn't make any sense so it's not surprising that it didn't work.

[Raph_Koster]

This is correct. The closed system was a massive design flaw. But it was there in order to prevent mudflation, which is a classic issue with virtual worlds of all stripes, and has severely harmed the economy and game balance of pretty much every single faucet-drain virtual world ever made. So it was a try a fixing a Hard Problem, one that failed.

[DennisP]

It doesn't seem that unrealistic to me, given how much of the real ecosystem humans have destroyed so far, and continue to destroy. In fact, I'd say the developers could have predicted this outcome with a quick glance at the real world.

You have a good point that the natural world renews itself from incoming energy, but that doesn't save it when it's destroyed at a faster rate than it can renew.

[schiffern]

>Real ecologies aren't really closed systems.

Neither was theirs — things spawned! It was just overexploited, much like our own ecosystem.

>Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this energy.

A rose-colored summary.

We also frequently engage in futile activities that seem profitable, but in fact destroy wealth by failing to appropriately manage the biogeophysical life-support system of Spaceship Earth. See our current ecological collapse - climate change, soil erosion, wilderness destruction, higher rates of species extinction, aquifer pollution/depletion, overfishing, ocean acidification, ocean plastics, etc.

What is ecologically optimal should also be what's economically optimal, because ultimately they're part of the same overall system. The imaginary economy/ecology divide (like the imaginary human/environment divide) is itself a source of inefficiency, because it incentivizes ignoring problems by pretending to push them "outside the system."

If we can't make economy and ecology align our species is SOL & JWF — shit out of luck and jolly well fucked.

In my opinion, this is the biggest and most intractable of the possible Fermi Great Filters. Not destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons or nano-goo, but restraining our own species from self-annihilating global ecocide via perverse economic incentives (aka "Capitalism, the Bad Parts™").

The free market is an incredibly powerful decentralized decision-making tool, but it should be used to enhance humanity's long-term survival rather than undermine it.

[esarbe]

I think you're on to something wrt to the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter.

I sometimes wonder if it's possible at all for any species that evolved to compete for resources to survive the stage where humans are now.

[schiffern]

Just to add: best analogy I've heard is that humanity is collectively acting like a crazed astronaut who's taken a hammer to the oxygen recycler.