Worst economics in science fiction?

[Dinwar]

The Rimworld books got around the refinement problem quite nicely: the Puppetmaster stepdisks (sorta like the transporters of Star Trek) could be dialed to only allow certain molecules to pass through. So if you need, say, deuterium you simply program the stepdisks to only allow deuterium through--instant refinement. Star Trek could easily do something similar. Scotty could program the transporter to only transport whatever material they wanted.

 

[Toke]

I am quite busy with Skyrim right now, but have noticed how the bandit population outnumber the regular citizents immensely.

 

[Mark6]

The difference is that while in a book you can imagine there are a lot of bits that the author just had no reason to mention, in a game what you see is what you get. In most of those games you can actually enter every building and see that really there's nothing else. I mean, for example in SWG there weren't even zones that you couldn't go to. You could literally explore every single square foot of the planet and see that, yes, there is nothing else.

Heh.

I never thought of it as particularly positive gaming aspect -- or particularly negative for that matter, -- but Dungeons & Dragons Online is very different in this respect. Vast majority of the world you never see. Even in your base of operations (city of Stormreach) most buildings are un-enterable. And when you travel to quests outside Stormreach, you get a glimpse of a map which shows that quest areas are just tiny dots in one corner of Xendrik. Which in turn is just one of the continents on Eberron.

 

[Dinwar]

A lot of games are like that, which is why I don't consider it an entirely valid criticism to say that there aren't more facilities. The artform has a set of founational assumptions, akin to stock characters in books--call them stock worlds. Given gaming's history, those stock worlds tend to focus on some things and not others, as stylistic choices. Open-world games that do this include a certain amount of refrigerator logic, but the point was never to develop a world fully and completely (I doubt many game studios would know how to do that). From the beginning, gaming has developed PARTS OF the world, to a certain extent. Unless you were playing a farming game it simply didn't matter how many farms there were, since that was irrelevant to the game's central concept.

Also, in my last book it should be RINGworld, not RIMworld. Sorry about that.

 

[Beerina]

They also could offer a lot more shots than the number of bullets a similar-sized weapon could carry, or less maintenance/cleaning/damage/jamming, or less identifying evidence to trace back to the owner, or less damage to other things that might get hit by accident...

Most of a Federation starship is powered by nuclear fusion. The antimatter power core is only necessary for the warp coils, which are unable to use energy delivered in the form that the fusion system generates; they need the kind of plasma stream you get from an antimatter reaction. So making antimatter from other energy sources is worthwhile if what you intend to use it for is warp engines. Power from the warp core can also be adapted to supply other systems temporarily in emergencies where some other system needs more power than the fusion power supply alone delivers, but that's not done most of the time because of exactly the inefficiency you point out. The ships also carry machines for creating antimatter using fusion power, but, for the same reason again, it's never to be used except in a particular kind of emergency: when you really need to warp really soon but don't have antimatter.
.

Gotta love technobabble -- "fusion doesn't generate the right kind of energy but antimatter does."

All fusion does is generate heat. All antimatter annihilation does is generate heat.

 

[Dinwar]

That's obviously not true--fusion generates light as well.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

A game is a representation of a thing, not the thing itself. The fact that the entire planet is present doesn't preclude the artist not including superfluous bits, it just makes them stand out more. This can either be really bad (such as in Oblivion, where an entire economy is apparently run on an extremely small handful of farms) or really, really good (such as Skyrim, where one can assume that the war has done serious damage to the concept of people doing much farm work far from cities). I can't think of any games that do it, but it's entirely plausible to lampshade this concept, making it a central theme of an entire game.

Complaining about the lack of infrastructure in a game that's not about infrastructure is akin to complaining that pointalism doesn't allow for photo-realism--it misses the point. And the comparison is pretty accurate, since in a painting what you see is what you get.

A representation can nevertheless be distorted. If I were to paint the Roman Senate as consisting only of naked guys, it would still be a wrong depiction. I can easily accept that some things are there off screen, or in a painting, somewhere else, behind a wall. But if I do a painting where everyone is meeting naked in the Senate, it's the things that are on screen that are just wrong, even by virtue of the absence of some stuff. Going, basically, "no, see, the clothes are just implied, I just didn't paint them because they're not important" would be stupid, really.

If it's shown, then it damn better have all relevant details, or at the very least their absence better be meant to be symbolic of something or another.

But it's a supremely silly proposition that see, they're there, just not shown.

Ditto if I were making a movie. If I somehow made a fan-made episode of Star Trek where the bridge doesn't have a view-screen and everyone is clearly just staring at a wall, it would simply be a wrong depiction of the bridge. Unless I'm trying to make some metaphorical point by that lack of any way to see what's outside, then it's simply bad depiction of the bridge.

I could have the excuse that something is there, just not shown, if it's off-screen. E.g., I could get away with not showing the reactor controls, by just keeping it off the screen. Or I could get away with not showing a view screen if I'm never showing that wall. But if I show a solid wall without a screen in front of the captain, then it's silly to insist that, see, it's there, it's just not represented. Then it's a bad representation of that bridge, and that's that.

I don't see why games would get a free pass there.

Sure, I can think of gameplay related reasons for not making the player walk 20 miles across a capital city, or for not having a thousand acres of nothing but farms around the city. Fine.

But then the net effect is that in the name of gameplay, I AM having a dysfunctional world that's lacking some key elements. And then if those elements relate to the economy, then clearly the game has bad economics.

Again, I can see why in a choice between bad gameplay and bad economics, one would choose the latter. But nevertheless the net result is that the game, by choice, has unrealistic economics.

 

[Dinwar]

A representation can nevertheless be distorted.

Oh, no doubt. You're right, to paint a picture of the Roman senate without cloths is wrong. What I'm saying is that the problem isn't that there's no cloths, but often that there are senators there to begin with--in other words, if the focus is on the archetecture whether or not the senators are clothed misses the point entirely.

Though I will say that you're correct in saying that your objections are very applicable to sandbox games--since games like Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout, GTA, etc try to show a society in operation, they obviously must include sufficient detale to show how the society works. A contrast to this would be Fable, where we know we're not seeing the whole world (there are miles and miles that aren't shown, and that is acknowledged when you go from one area to the next), so there's room in the world for the stuff you're not seeing. It's a much more stylized aesthetic, which allows them to avoid the realism you're talking about. The problem with Skyrim, Obliviono, Fallout, etc. isn't that the senators are naked, it's that there's senators in the painting at all; in contrast Fable (for all its OTHER flaws, including economic) simply doesn't paint the senators at all.

 

[Mark6]

No, those books were not written for you.

Ya think??

Generally I think it is a sign of truly great writer if he makes you sympathize with -- and to want to do, -- something you would normally find abhorrent. One famous example is the scene in S.M. Stirling's "Under the Yoke" where a Danish serf girl basically throws herself at "kindly Draka" who in reality is an undercover American agent. A LOT of men when reading that scene cannot help but fantasize, at least briefly, of being Draka aristocrat and accepting this girl's offer. That scene really pushes hetero male's buttons -- several of them at once.

The difference is, Stirling knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote it. I am fairly sure when Harry Harrison wrote "A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born", he did not intend for the reader to want to rape a woman character, however a much of a scumbag she is. I am fairly sure this is the only story I ever read which had that effect on me.

Harry Harrison, the unintentionally great.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Oh, no doubt. You're right, to paint a picture of the Roman senate without cloths is wrong. What I'm saying is that the problem isn't that there's no cloths, but often that there are senators there to begin with--in other words, if the focus is on the archetecture whether or not the senators are clothed misses the point entirely.

Though I will say that you're correct in saying that your objections are very applicable to sandbox games--since games like Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout, GTA, etc try to show a society in operation, they obviously must include sufficient detale to show how the society works. A contrast to this would be Fable, where we know we're not seeing the whole world (there are miles and miles that aren't shown, and that is acknowledged when you go from one area to the next), so there's room in the world for the stuff you're not seeing. It's a much more stylized aesthetic, which allows them to avoid the realism you're talking about. The problem with Skyrim, Obliviono, Fallout, etc. isn't that the senators are naked, it's that there's senators in the painting at all; in contrast Fable (for all its OTHER flaws, including economic) simply doesn't paint the senators at all.

Actually, I'm not even saying "must". As I was saying, I'm all for dropping realism, if it gets in the way of gameplay. I'm just acknowledging that in doing so and lacking any "off screen" space where that missing stuff would be, it's painting a world where the economics don't add up.

Even in the painting analogy, there may be good reasons to not include clothes. For example, if I'm making some upper-class Roman themed porn. (It's not like it hasn't been done before) I can acknowledge that, ok, including too much clothes, or historically-accurate hours-long filibusters about some minor trade issue in some province, would kinda ruin it. But all I'm saying is that in doing so, it would depict a Rome that couldn't really function like that.

 

[gnome]

These tended to be fairly regional affairs, the range of goods was fairly limited, and even most of those eventually figured out SOME kind of currency equivalent.

E.g., even in the heyday of barter in Egypt -- which is a prime example because it technically stuck to barter long after the rest of the world used coins, it knew it, and it was even minting gold coins by the cartload to pay for foreign mercenaries and imports but never for internal use -- you'd find a lot of prices expressed in deben (a weight unit) of some metal, or such. Later, by the middle kingdom, we see something even more curious: the deben ceased to be a unit of weight and is effectively a unit of value. Well, technically it was still a unit of weight, but how much weight is a deben varied between differnet goods. A deben of copper was 23.7 grams, while a deben of gold was 13.6 grams, for example.

Later still, by the New Kingdom, the deben is increased, and they have fractional units of it used in prices. They had effectively invented pounds and pence, really.

They didn't (always) actually pay in deben of copper or gold or whatever, and there is a distinct lack of any standardized deben pieces to serve as actual coins. But it worked wonders for figuring out how much of good A to exchange for a unit of good B. We have documents (those guys really wrote down a lot) of sales where something had a price in, say, deben of silver, was paid in other goods worth the same amount in deben of silver. Although no actual silver was exchanged, they used the price in deben to figure out who many blankets, pots, bars of copper, etc, you need to pay for, say, a slave.

So, yeah, they still used barter, but they had figured a way to effectively express values in something that was just as much of a currency as the "credits" in SW.

In fact, I'd say in a (largely non-literal) sense it was the ultimate form of fiat currency, because the actual currency didn't even exist.

As long as it's understood that I continue to speculate beyond anything established in Star Trek works, the "moneyless system" could be something of a hyperbole... where it could be true of core worlds, the further away you get from major Federation influence, the more some form of substitute currency is used, to deal with outsiders and the absence of the infrastructure supporting the fancy "barter" system I propose.

In fact, it's been even made clear in lots of Star Trek works that a guy like Offenhouse could find his niche as long as he was willing to stray from the nicer parts of the galaxy.

I'm going to stick with the idea that barter regains utility even on an interstellar scale if you have computers capable of simulating your personality, and thus can engage in optimal exchanges that maximize utility without currency. It would also, however, have to go along with a social change along the lines of what Picard describes. Just because people aren't obsessed with material wealth doesn't mean everyone earns the same or lets other people tell them what to own.

But, I could also see its utility fading in the absence of that infrastructure and culture.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

I can't think of any games that do it, but it's entirely plausible to lampshade this concept, making it a central theme of an entire game.

I once ran an RPG campaign focused on exactly this. The overarching plot was that at some point in the past one of the gods killed or ate all the others, and was now getting his jollies trying to railroad people into fantasy cliche adventures. The "villains" were people trying to fight the system, or guys who realized the more they hammed it up as a bad guy, the more powerful they actually became. Nearby towns would always encourage this behavior, because the closer you got to the final boss, the richer everyone became.

 

[Ladewig]

The worst I've seen was the worst not for saying or showing stuff that was wrong, but for not saying or showing anything, even after setting up as if it would.

In "Battlestar Galactica", we're following a journey through space by the survivors of the destruction of a civilization that had included at least twelve planets, in whatever spacecraft just happen to have slipped through the cracks when their civilization was attacked. There's a scene in one of the first few episodes, in which a scientist shocks the leaders with his calculations of how many tons of food they'll need per week. But then that issue is dropped, along with the other similar ones it brings up. A long long time later, they did have a few episodes about a planet they were stopping at for a while just to collect its scarce food, but it seems to take too long and not have been on people's minds until then. And then there are the other things that they'd be used to replacing but couldn't now. They're shown having information printed on paper and using ink markers on backlit clear/white displays; where does their ink and paper (and presumably toner or something else like it) come from, or the plastic to make the new markers from, or the spare parts for the electronics? A scientist is shown in a laboratory with containers of various chemicals in them; how many hundreds of light years and millions of armed enemies are between him and the ruins of the factories that produced each of those chemicals? We're told that the Galactica, a huge long-deployment warship, can recycle water; it's good that the writers noticed the need for something like that, but what chemicals or filters does that process use, and how far are they from the ruins of the factories that made new ones? We're shown the fleet trying to get fuel, for which the raw material is found in the ground on rocky planets or asteroids; doesn't extracting & refining it require some fancy chemical processes, not to mention rock-cutting/drilling/grinding tools that can be worn down? We're never shown a single case of someone using up or breaking the last of anything or coming up with a way to make an alternative or do without it... unless you count the retaining strap on a storage pallet that breaks just so a missile can fall off and spontaneously launch itself (yes, bump a missile and its engine ignites) in order to kill most of the Viper pilots at once.

Yes, I winced ever so slightly when they printed up paper ballots for the presidential election. And I was surprised at myself for being piqued by Rosalyn using the dry erase markers every day - especially for something as standardized as a population count. Write the digits zero through nine on little pieces of paper and just change the order as the population grows or shrinks.

We're never shown a single case of someone using up or breaking the last of anything

The last tube of toothpaste in the known galaxy is displayed in a season 4.

unless you count the retaining strap on a storage pallet that breaks just so a missile can fall off and spontaneously launch itself (yes, bump a missile and its engine ignites) in order to kill most of the Viper pilots at once.

Technically, it was a communications drone and not a missile, but your point still stands.

 

[RobRoy]

Yes, I winced ever so slightly when they printed up paper ballots for the presidential election. And I was surprised at myself for being piqued by Rosalyn using the dry erase markers every day - especially for something as standardized as a population count. Write the digits zero through nine on little pieces of paper and just change the order as the population grows or shrinks.

I think they also talked about how, if they didn't start having babies pretty quickly, they were going to go extinct anyhow . . . but that was only mentioned once and (IIRC) never again. I thought that was an interesting line of discussion, but many of those were never pursued in favor of more dogfights and explosions.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy dogfights and explosions, but it still would have been interesting to see them try to tackle those other issues that never seem to come up in stories unless it is for conflict-resolution solved in a couple of episodes.

 

[Dinwar]

Actually, I'm not even saying "must". As I was saying, I'm all for dropping realism, if it gets in the way of gameplay. I'm just acknowledging that in doing so and lacking any "off screen" space where that missing stuff would be, it's painting a world where the economics don't add up.

Ah. That makes sense. It's fine to mess with the economics for the sake of making the focus of the game better, just don't pretend that you're not messing with the economics, right?

You know, I wonder what it'd be like to weaponize economics in a video game. Instead of killing the Big Bad with some large, sharp piece of metal, you simply make it so that further attacks are no longer economically viable. Do the whole Veternari thing--"Hey, you can't attack me! You owe me more than your GNP for ten years! You try to attack and I'll have the rest of the nations help reposses your sorry butts."

 

[Dinwar]

Quick question: Does Moore's "Utopia" count as science fiction? I mean, it was the equivalent during his time, and the economics is, once you actually get into the details, beyond rediculous.

 

[geni]

All fusion does is generate heat. All antimatter annihilation does is generate heat.

Not so. Which is why anti-matter weapons are not as effective as you might expect.

 

[geni]

Ah. That makes sense. It's fine to mess with the economics for the sake of making the focus of the game better, just don't pretend that you're not messing with the economics, right?

You know, I wonder what it'd be like to weaponize economics in a video game. Instead of killing the Big Bad with some large, sharp piece of metal, you simply make it so that further attacks are no longer economically viable. Do the whole Veternari thing--"Hey, you can't attack me! You owe me more than your GNP for ten years! You try to attack and I'll have the rest of the nations help reposses your sorry butts."

The problem is that its very hard to design computer players than can defend against attempts to destory their cash base. It also results in a rather boring game. Consider the case of taking out harvesters in command and conquer.

In principle its meant to be how the morganites win in alpha centuri but there are other options.

 

[Dinwar]

It also results in a rather boring game. Consider the case of taking out harvesters in command and conquer.

You've never tried to take my uncle's harvester. After the first time, I realized it was easier to simply let him have the ore and focus on superweapons (fun fact: when you're focused on defending your harvester, you're NOT focused on attacking the guy building the nukes).

The other problem is that a lot of fantasy, in particular, is swords-and-sorcery stuff. When most of the population is living at the subsistance level anyway, or near enough to it that most of the stuff they use is still hand-made, cash becomes a non-issue. In sci-fi it's much more interesting. The plot resolution to Dune amounts to this, after all. Come to that, this is fundamentally how blockaids work--they're boring work for the soldiers/sailors by all accounts, because it's not fighting so much as strangling the economy of the region.

 

[Mark6]

Quick question: Does Moore's "Utopia" count as science fiction? I mean, it was the equivalent during his time, and the economics is, once you actually get into the details, beyond rediculous.

I would say the answer is yes, but why is it "beyond ridiculous"? As opposed to merely bad?