[slovette]

I mean, the only downfall to this is that the fundamental resources you speak of “shelter, water, food...” in a game are infinite duplications of the same model with no “cost”.

In the real world, that stuff isn’t an unlimited, instantaneous resource. Someone has to build that shelter, farm that food, etc.

In order for this to work, we would need to find free labor... that hasn’t worked so well historically. And sure, you could say technology could fill these labor needs to fundamentally reduce the cost of basic resources to zero, but I don’t think that’s really possible either in practice (the robot maker needs some incentive to make the robots that are providing these free services).

Further, you start replacing fundamental tasks with technology and you begin to remove the opportunity for tasks to better your life (like in the game) because technology isn’t just niche applicable generally.

IMO: It works if you ignore the premise that the game represents a complicated issue in the most simplistic way. But as soon as you put some economics to it, it breaks down super fast.

[nokya]

I can only agree with in the way that the games do not exactly model "real life". I guess whoever had such a model would likely exploit it for personal gain rather than making a good video game.

Still, the better sophisticated MMORPGS (e.g. AO, or EVE) tend to mimick it as much as possible. Resources may seem unlimited at first sight but these games actually try to implement a universe that offers limited resources and a monetary system that responds to offer and demand, and may be subject to inflation/deflation. Failing to achieve this exposes game owners to attrition by loyal gamers (e.g. sudden price drops/increases in rare objects).

Also, AO was exposed to a hack that involved duplicating objects (I think it was in 2013), the exploitation of this vulnerability triggered a cascade of events that resulted in the deflation of the currency in the game and took months to be fixed. Again, this also raised attrition amongst gamers.

In some online universes, resources are scarce enough so that players engage in the trading of virtual goods through external transactions (i.e. virtual items paid through real money). This also tends to affect the internal currency in the game.

You mentioned the "shelter" example. I think this is where we get an analogy with State intervention (i.e. taxes) when the players do not allocate resources to actually set up theses infrastructures in the virtual universe.

I agree with you, it is an imperfect imitation of our world. But acknowledging this as formally insufficient/imperfect would require acknowledging that we actually understand what characterizes and constitutes our reality, and that we can somehow infer that a theoretical model is unsustainable without even testing it. I think that if I were to accept this, that would mean I surrender and stop believing there are better models :)