seeing the way people react towards situations in video games vs how people react to situations in real life is so fascinating to me. Like imagine you open an MMO and everyone starts out with 100 gold of currency. Except for they don’t. A few people randomly get 50,000 gold to start out with. A much smaller portion of others would get 1,000,000 gold to start out with. People would fucking riot, talking about how much easier it is for some players to get ahead of the rest of the game’s players because they just happened to get lucky with the money they had to start up.

And then you just tell them if they want more gold they should grind for it and they get even matter. Like guys thats how the real world works but you’re not mad about that? You’re only mad when it’s being mimicked in video games?

And the funniest part of this is that I’m not exaggerating or being hypothetical. A while ago I was talking about that guild wars 2 video where the richest players in the game talked about their moneymaking system, which was to use their own labor to generate enough startup capital to pay other people to do the time-sinking, labor intensive grinding for them, which then then profited off of by selling the final product of this labor at a significant markup.

People were LIVID. there was a massive forum in the reddit where people were talking about how the video was a scam, and how, in order for their system to be profitable, they had to be earning more money off of your materials and gameplay time than they were paying you. I was genuinely surprised to see just how fucking mad these people were because if you told them that, in real life, people who have startup capital use it to profit off of people they underpay for their labor, they probably wouldn’t listen.

It’s really fascinating stuff. I bet theres a ton of papers out there about video game economics, I’d love to read them.