Concept Motivation Imagine an open world RPG where your actions affect the price of goods, the markets reacting to anything the player may do (burn down wheat fields, cost of food increases; kill the merchants, prices differentiate between cities; sell the many swords you’ve collected on your adventures, tank the sword market). What would it take to have such an adaptive simulated economy? You could take a very simple approach and define a rule like The cost of a good is inversely proportional to the amount of that good in the game. But this will inevitable fail to capture the complex behavior we know economies to have. In order to create the desired emergent behavior, we must think at the level of the individual. By the end of this project we’ll have markets that converge to optimal prices, multiple coupled markets, inflation, geographically distinct economies, and merchants connecting cities, all of which adapts to any possible change in the environment. This work is in part inspired by Simulating Supply and Demand and Emergent Economies for Role Playing Games, both great resources if you want to explore more.

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The post explores the concept of creating an adaptive simulated economy in an open-world RPG, where player actions influence the price of goods. It discusses how simple rules like the inverse relationship between supply and cost fail to capture real-world complexity. By modeling individual decision-making processes, the simulation aims to achieve optimal pricing, inflation, and geographically distinct markets. An initial implementation involves 200 actors with varied personal and market values, leading to a functioning economy that adapts to changes.

Simulated Economy (1)

<p>social media is a simulated economy</p>
