Tag: economics

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The Invisible Hand wants to make trading exciting, but also boring

Working as a trader used to be a glamorous—if also morally dubious—job. Note the use of the past tense in that sentence: Wall Street (1987), with its yelling into phones and power-suits, power-lunches, and power-everything-else is a thing of the past. It’s not for nothing that the most exciting cultural portrayal of traders in recent years, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), is set in the recent past. What happened? In short: math and computers. The balance of power shifted from those executing trades to those who created the models on which those trades were based. In The Hidden Role…
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Today in GIFs: Get a look at Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor’s strange world

It’s been too long since we last checked in on Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, the game about exploring a grand sci-fi universe through the viewpoint of a lowly municipal worker rather than a more standard space marine hero figure. Since my original post covering the game, the team has been hard at work bringing the backwater trash-planet it takes place on to life, and recently, that work has paid off as a series of new GIFs and screenshots posted to the game’s official Tumblr. Since they give me an excuse to write about this adorable blue collar spin on…
Tesla Model S
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In-app purchases are coming for your car

Who among us hasn’t looked at a car and thought, “What if this complicated mechanical device operated a little bit more like the bestselling game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (2014)?” A version of this thought may have passed through the minds of Elon Musk and the people of Tesla, who announced on Thursday that their Model S would be able to unlock five additional kilowatt-hours from its standard battery pack for $3,000. It’s like in-game purchases, but the game is your car. This is not really a story about videogames getting there first. As with Ray J songs, that sort of parochialism is…
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Mobile game puts you at the frontline of the Spanish eviction crisis

Housing is both a practical necessity—humans have to live somewhere—and a statement of values. Relationships to housing vary by country; whereas some place an emphasis on ownership, others accept long-term renting. In this respect, housing policy mixes practical, political, and (yes) moral considerations. Consider Spain. In 1957, Franco’s Minister for Housing, José Luis Arrese declared, “we want a country of proprietors, not proletarians.” Housing, as ever, is a statement of values as much as it is a practical necessity. The former, however, comes to influence the latter; Spain, as Isidro López and Emmanuel Rodríguez note, had notably higher home ownership than…
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New edition of Monopoly will swap paper money for bank cards

Hasbro has heard your cries for help and taken action. The scourge of adding up payments in Monopoly has been eradicated. Cash is no more. Monopoly Ultimate Banking Game, which will come out this fall, is set to introduce four bank cards that can be used to make payments and transfer properties. Other editions of Monopoly—of which there are many—will continue to use cash for now, because the future of banking is not for everyone; you have to buy it. (Correction: A 2006 version of the game, aptly named Monopoly Electric Banking Edition, introduced a similar vision of electric payments. Most versions, however,…
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China is counting videogame purchases against your credit score

The Chinese government, with the assistance of national internet oligopolists Alibaba and Tencent, is in the process of introducing a new form of credit score that will factor in political compliance, the actions of one’s acquaintances, and the products one chooses to buy. Under this scheme, buying videogames is a surefire way of lowering your credit score.  That’s right: A Chinese national who purchased The Witcher 3 will have a harder time getting a loan. The credit score ostensibly exists to simplify the task of deciding who should receive money from financial institutions and at what rate. Based on a series of…
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The Sharing Economy isn’t about sharing

Sharing is largely incidental to what has come to be known as the “sharing economy.” It is simply a solution to the larger problem of allocating resources. Let’s say you have a possession—it doesn’t have to be a car or a domicile. Let’s call it a widget. You use it some, but definitely not all of the time. This is silly. You have paid for full-time ownership of the widget yet it sits dormant most of the time. Other people who want to use a widget will buy their own widgets and also use it some of the time. Assuming…
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At last, a city-building game that allows for meaningful economic experimentation

We are all low-poly before God and the free market. Polynomics is about the latter case, though the distinction is far from precise. Slated for an initial release in early 2016, Polynomics is an economic simulator. You play as the federal government of an unnamed area, issuing a currency, collecting taxes, and enforcing laws. The non-player characters in this world, which might also be called citizens, are perfectly rational actors who seek to maximize their utility through each of their actions. The intersection of all these wants and needs with (your) government objectives can be a messy one, and Polynomics…