Ask HN: Economics Books for Game Development

10 points·bliblablub4··4 comments

Sup bros! A friend of mine is working on an Trade-Sim-Game. Any recommendations for book on trade, economics, how money works, etc.? Thaaaanks a lot!

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Your economy will die like any other because money will fail to circulate. So you will come up with nonsensical concepts like money sinks and faucets. Imagine an MMORPG where the money supply was fixed and 90% of the playerbase quit and took 90% of the money supply with them. That money will not circulate. It is dead money. Dead money means a dead economy.

As stupid as it sounds, every game economy has adopted a Keynesian/pseudo MMT (faucet and sink) model because that is way more fun. The Austrian economists on the other hand know how to make unfun games. Translate that to reality however you wish.

A bit on the pricey side but Will Wright's MasterClass is a great source. No fine math in it, but it's surprising how much complexity you can get from abstractions.

There's talk among game devs about cellular automata in SimCity, which I never understood for years until I saw the masterclass. But what that really meant was that a tile would affect only the neighboring tiles, for example traffic and jobs.

Paul Krugman also has an economics MasterClass, which covers trade and geographical economics. Also in simplified terms that someone who did high school math should be able to grasp intuitively.

Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty

Central Banking by Thammarak Moenjak (textbook)

Debt: A 5000 Year History by David Graeber

Please consider using a more inclusive greeting :)

With that said, hope you’ll get some good recommendations!

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