[msg]

Good on you.

Certainly the player can just be one more player in the economy against/among the AI. This is basically the premise of Rise of Industry. And more actively, less realistically, Offworld Trading Company.

Running one business is sort of the premise of the tycoon genre.

Generally, trouble is fun (Losing is Fun), so you may want to put pressure on the player to make the thing work. Maybe it naturally runs to ruin or is fragile to balance properly. (In Dwarf Fortress, danger follows growth and success.) There could be adversaries. Or the world could be dangerous.

They could be in charge of the macro economy or a town or a business. There could be pickles that the player has to work their way out of. Recessions and Depressions. Think about how towns collapse, businesses fail, people lose jobs. Businesses also cheat, wreck the commons, avoid taxes, break the law, exert monopoly power, form cartels, fight for dominance. There is a lot of trouble here for the player to cause, or to struggle against.

[dave_sullivan]

"Trouble is fun" is not something I'd heard before but makes a lot of sense. Need to think about that, what sort of trouble the economy can get into and how to alert the player and let them fix it...

[paulryanrogers]

Good stories need drama or tension. Though I'd argue games have grown to a broad spectrum, as have movies and books. And one end of the spectrum has so little interactivity it's just movement and observation, like a virtual fish bowl or "walking sim". Elaborate screen savers served this market long ago. Then games offered cheats as a form of customization outside the usual difficulty knobs, even if their original purpose was just to aid testing.

Sometimes I like to watch sim games run to see what will happen 'naturally', or setup AI battles in strategy games. The best toys allow players to enjoy them however they want.

[dqpb]

Maybe the players job can be to disrupt the economy. A game of sabotage.