[WorldMaker]

An argument of the last couple of decades is that videogames have built incredible labs for macroeconomic experimentation. So far mostly what we learn are failure cases (mudflation, being such a big learning from videogames that the term itself is named after a type of them), but we are learning things (some of them exploitative, but that's a different ethical question).

[dinfinity]

You are overstating this. Mudflation does not transfer to the real world well, if at all. Very few skill-capped bits of DLC for real world activities.

These games do not include many of the complexities of the real world and can thus provide few insights that generalize to the real world on a macroeconomic level. They are toy universes. I'm not saying they are useless, far from it, but they are not "incredible labs for macroeconomic experimentation".

Try determining the effect of raising the central bank interest rate within a game of your choice. Or changing the minimum wage. Or the effects of investing in education. Etc.

[WorldMaker]

They are incredible compared to "no labs at all" and "no way to run experiments" as the above poster lamented.

Mudflation aka hyperinflation aka situations where "the money printer goes brr too fast" have happened in the real world. Sometimes at "extremely" small scale (for macroeconomics) such as company town scrip, but they've happened and affected real people's lives.

But also, if Bitcoin is real then videogame economies are very real. You can trade USD for most in-game currencies. Sometimes directly in game as micro-transactions today ("diamond" or "platinum" middle funging currencies that convert to other game currencies), sometimes on trading platforms that are certainly against game terms of service and possibly illegal in some states, but that doesn't really stop them existing or people living in low wage countries making ends meet by grinding game currencies to sell for "realer" ones.

(Mudflation is also the answer to the why the book I read of "Ready Player One" was better than the one the author wrote because it seemed obvious the economy in the book was a textbook mudflationary one and much of the dystopia outside of its central game could easily be explained by how much of its economy was tied into its in game mudflationary currency. I appreciated that Hank Green's book "A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor" did a better job of doing that on purpose.)

> They are toy universes.

So are most experiments, fundamentally. You model the real world as best you can. You do what you can to eliminate variables. You learn from your experiment and you improve your model. You can't test the entire universe all at once, that's too many variables, you find the interesting toys that seem to look enough like our current understanding of our universe and then you play them until you break them (assert either the null hypothesis or the alternative hypothesis). Repeat until done.

Your examples seem easy to build toy universes for. The Animal Crossing series has decades of "research" in the effects of raising a central bank interest rate. (Look for Tom Nook memes, they alone are a modern study of macroeconomics and teenagers' direct relationships with them.) Many MMOs have "trades" and "crafts" that need to balance a minimum wage to get players interested and/or invested in them versus opportunity costs in other systems in the game. Funding Education is a similar problem explored in various RPG mechanics by sometimes direct analogies such as investments into player attributes and skill levels and skill trees.

And so on and so forth. The boundary between "real" and "virtual" economics seems nearly nonexistent, they are the same thing (and currency always wants to flow between them). In this case the map seems to be the territory. In this case the analogy seems to be the real thing. Because people are involved and people are ultimately irrational, but start to do really interesting economic things the more people you put in the same "place", whether virtual or real. Which is what macroeconomics has always been about.

[dinfinity]

> They are incredible compared to "no labs at all"

That is a nonsensically low bar. You basically destroy the entire scale by labeling the bare minimum as such.

> Mudflation aka hyperinflation aka situations where "the money printer goes brr too fast"

That is not what mudflation is at all.

>> They are toy universes.

> So are most experiments, fundamentally.

Nonsense. Most experiments are performed on actual real world stuff rather than an analogue of it: something like looking at how actual food affects actual humans rather than what happens when feeding virtual characters virtual apples. Limited or narrowly scoped real world experiments != toy universe experiments.

An inbetween category would be (human) drug experiments on mice, which are real world and where the results still don't generalize to humans often.

> Your examples seem easy to build toy universes for.

Yeah, no shit. My point was that those are horribly incomplete and don't generalize: "These games do not include many of the complexities of the real world and can thus provide few insights that generalize to the real world on a macroeconomic level."

Your examples are incredibly inadequate compared to the real world and have exactly 0 predictive power in said real world. In recent decades, the entire field of economy has been dumbfounded by the (lack of) effects of quantitative easing and the central interest rate on inflation in the USA and the EU. Maybe try telling them that they should look into the economy of Animal Crossing /s.

[WorldMaker]

> > They are incredible compared to "no labs at all"

> That is a nonsensically low bar. You basically destroy the entire scale by labeling the bare minimum as such.

Ah, yeah, I wasn't using it for "scale". "incredible" also often connotes "in ways that you wouldn't believe". Your long posts disputing me are somewhat validation that I used the right turn of phrase there.

[dinfinity]

> "incredible" also often connotes "in ways that you wouldn't believe". It does not. The English word you're looking for there is "surprisingly".

"This kid is good at hockey in ways you wouldn't believe."

Which of these sentences means the same as the above?

A. This kid is incredibly good at hockey.

B. This kid is surprisingly good at hockey.

> Your long posts disputing me are somewhat validation that I used the right turn of phrase there.

I think you've just invented a new fallacy.

[WorldMaker]

>> Mudflation aka hyperinflation aka situations where "the money printer goes brr too fast"

> That is not what mudflation is at all.

No, I think it is more that you are used to the more straight-jacketed post-EverQuest form of the term rather than the original circumstances that gave rise to the term in the first place. MUDs didn't have "expansion packs" or DLC. The original form of the term had more to do with infinitely printable currency ("grindable" drops from game spawned enemies) and its effects in trying to balance a larger economy. EverQuest did help to popularize the term in the way its expansions packs particularly badly handled that inflation, but those expansion pack balancing woes were never the cause of that inflation, only a symptom. The cause was (and has always been) "grinding" and "grinding mindset".

> Maybe try telling them that they should look into the economy of Animal Crossing

That is exactly what I'm trying to do. We have some good science from videogames but not enough of it. Dismissing videogame economies as "toy universes" that don't matter doesn't help science. Animal Crossing has inadvertently demonstrated some of the symptoms of that economic question. Imagine if a game was designed to intentionally simulate that as a lab experiment.

I don't think we're going to agree on that, but I think on the spectrum of "macroeconomics isn't a science because it has no laboratories and isn't reproducible in experiments" to "macroeconomics is a science but its laboratories are videogames and we have under studied them and especially aren't building enough reproducible studies", I am happy to be on the side of it that sees hope in better macroeconomic science even if it isn't currently taken seriously enough.

[dinfinity]

1. The definitions simply disagree with you:

"Hyperinflation is a very high and typically accelerating inflation."

"Mudflation is a term for the type of inflation found in MUDs (Multi User Dungeon) games. MMORPGs, these days. It's caused by fluctuations in the game economy, caused by player exploits or poorly designed patches. Mudflation almost always kicks in after a major patch or an expansion, when new, better quality items are added to the game economy. These generally have the effect of greatly lowering the value of all pre-existing items."

2.

> Dismissing videogame economies as "toy universes" that don't matter doesn't help science.

Straw man. I never said they did not matter, nor did I say that research of them isn't useful. I said that research is severely limited due to the lack of complexity and you have provided nothing to disprove that.

I would argue that your way of communicating about this is actually a bit of evidence that this kind of research is probably going to be detrimental to policy making: Overestimating the value and use of such research is exactly the same thing that happens with traditional macroeconomic research, with policy makers and the general public treating the theories and hypotheses like laws of nature.