Philosophy Now Forum

Now let's say you have a world where the prices are dictated by what things are worth, but let's say people see money like they see monopoly money, as something you spread around that means something in a game but nothing ultimately. Bear with me I am well aware this system is completely fictional and hence does not exist.

Let's say in this system some people keep raising prices because such people think monopoly money is worth much more than it is and hence their goods are overinflated (now don't get me wrong and anyone who has played monopoly probably knows, that sometimes the board is thrown in the air with such force that you spend days picking the pieces out of the cieling and various bits of furniture, and everyone calls cheat and the game ends but let's say it means little more than a score in monopoly). So they use their odd value system to dictate that things are worth far more than they are; since most people see money as monopoly money they play along, after all who cares, ultimately? What do you think would be the inevitable outcome of such a situation. Let's place an item in view to start with, that is purely cosmetic too, where it starts at first at least, for the sake of an example is in a clothing system and a patent on it so only those with the right to patent such clothes can make them, let's say the patent is forced to 10x it's so called original worth, and since it is worth so much the world council on clothes decides to make patents much rarer to try and stop this runaway inflation, what then do you think would happen..?

Now bear with me on this, this might seem like a ludicrous question, but I will get to the point by and by. But for now I think it's better we leave this in the more abstruse condition...

I'm tempted, but even I think it sounds pompous.
Oh, go on then.
How are prices dictated by what they are worth?

what then do you think would happen..?

Somebody would make an imitation and sell the clothing for less. Soon, the imitation line would become more popular and the owners of the original would have to try harder to look special, by, say, wearing accessories and jewelry that were also inflated to way above their actual worth. Whereupon, that, too, would be copied in a cheaper version. (There could well be a sinister, even criminal element to these knock-off industries.) And so on, until the whole fashion world spiralled out of control and then collapsed.

Yeah ok well this is a MMORPG, where this hyperinflation is going on, so think about that, clearly the money's not real, but clearly you can make money worthless much more easilly than you can in the real world. Clearly some people need to stop doing that, because it's only a game a) and it's only a game b).

What bothers me is when 5 years down the line everyone is whining that they are millionaires and have nothing to spend their money on. Then it becomes dumb, well you did it to yourselves.

That said yes what something is worth in the real world, how trite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK8mJJJvaes

And to sum it up I will say it by quoting a song. Macklemore: Thrift Shop, which applies to the real world at least.

"$50 for a T-shirt!"



Suffice to say supply and demand applies well to the real world, it applies to a much lesser extent when if you lose all your money, you are not bankrupt and in the hole. You just have to make some gear and sell it. Of course gold spammers don't help, people who sell millions of in game gold and rare items for real world money, another player induced problem, if you didn't feel the need to use cheats they wouldn't exist, so cry some more already when the economy get's broken...

Real world or not it isn't the clothes that maketh the man, but the man that maketh the clothes. If you are a cnut and you wear a $10,000 suit you are still a cnut in that suit. Some people can rock their grandmas coat.

Here is an example that might illuminate part of the situation. And I understand that this detail is not part of your original scenario.

In reading some history many years ago I came across and account of the southern states during the American civil war. The Confederacy was printing their own money, and had the presses set up in one city. The presses were going as fast as they could and prices were going up, inflation. at one point the Union forces approached the city where the printing operation was located, so the confederate forces stopped printing and moved the whole operation to another location, which took some time. Once there the presses were set up again and printing resumed. One thing that was noted, while the presses were in transit and not printing money, prices stabilized and were steady. Once the presses started again prices started to rise again. It was as if the supply of money determined what the prices were.

Hmm that's quite interesting. But if you could explain it further, if somehow we would stop gratuitously making money somehow the world economy might stabilise. Or are you saying that it only worked in a narrow country at the time because the value of money then became fixed if the the faction in question was not printing money whose value could not be established with actual material wealth.

I think I can agree that all countries back then had assetts that were represented by currency, you print more money you devalue a currency becuase the basis of the currency which are actual real world assets are devalued. That of course seems self evident in the real world at the time. In modern times well money has become so abstract that such simple means are no longer apt, after all the gold standard was abandoned nearly a century ago by most countries. What things are wroth now as was mentioned earlier has now become so abstract that people can't even keep up with it any more.

In a game of course you have no such gold standard, nothing is valued per se on anything of material worth, so as I said it can become corrupted more easilly.

It's a good point I think, but I do wish I could play a game where I was a crafter and have the shit I worked hard on be worth something, without some cant bot farming for what they call motifs in this game which they then cheated to obtain and sold for far more than the cosmetic crap was worth.

Long story short, there's a license to print money, but not a printing license. Game real world, think about it do you really want to create the sort of boom and bust nightmare the real world created in a game?

Games like that money is not a big issue, but I do get tired of putting all that effort in to rank myself as a craftsman, only to have some idiot make it all worthless. If I want some cant to fuck up the economy in the plain view of my eyes, I can always watch the real world. I think though it's not too much to ask that we are a little more socialist in a game and after all it is only a game, not some wankfest scoreboard where you can spunk your monetary score on the system like some idiot aka as the real world...

In monopoly you win, the board goes away and there's nothing in that but a fun game was had by all. Of course as previously said when I was a kid a lot of the time, the boards pieces were lodged in the cieling 'cause my filthy friends and familly couldn't keep their hands out of the bank, and the cheating was rife, but then I grew up, and if I play monopoly now, I roll the dice and they are not loaded. I don't play monopoly now by the way, I think figuratively at least, at one point the board was thrown so hard that a hotel piece lodged in my cerebral cortex and made me unable to want to play that game again. I'll stick to something where war is involved, like Risk, because economics in any game, is just going to end in tears.

Blaggard wrote:Hmm that's quite interesting. But if you could explain it further, if somehow we would stop gratuitously making money somehow the world economy might stabilise. Or are you saying that it only worked in a narrow country at the time because the value of money then became fixed if the the faction in question was not printing money whose value could not be established with actual material wealth.

Well it was a long time ago, both the reading and the events. Today money has a different character, credit making a big contribution to the economy, sometimes there is not any real currency being exchanged, just numbers on a computer, and this makes the potential supply of money much larger. If you can type numbers into your bank account, and get away with it, you have more money. I think the lesson would still hold, if you can limit the amount of Money (In whatever form) you can limit prices, - theoretically.