Comment by bwang29 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bwang29 | Hacker News Reader

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I definitely feel games like Sims and Simcity changed my perception of resource safety as a child. I played Sims/Simcity2000~3000/Civs for hundreds of hours as a kid, and I loved the "realistic" feels and setups of these games. When I started to play I always had later stage trouble when I'm overspending on building fancy roads and bridges in SimCity or buying expensive items up front. I slowly learned the way of setting up a less impressive base first, and swapping out parts and do re-designs and expansions as more resources became available.

I later found out all games have a specific pattern you follow to win, many of these patterns are available in online communities/guides/cheat sections where I'd spend tons of time to read, try and experiment. Those were probably the peak happiness and best time I've enjoyed as a little nerdy kid. I never thought too much a big deal of these experiences but nonetheless I believe definitely contributed to a base reality of how resource management work, and how I manage my personal projects, finance, and career choices as I grew up.

I'd be super curious to see research / longitudinal study coming up from the past 2-3 decades of gaming on kids, and see if conservative gaming styles leads to conservative financial decisions etc etc.

I'm not a father yet but I thought it would be a really cool idea to understand my kid through game play like this, but I also don't want the kids to be limited by my personal value though these interactions - sort of like the "observer and supporter" role the author played.

Sidenote: I'm still playing the latest Civ6 and still enjoy a lot from the dynamics in the economy managements with A.I..

I'd be very careful about applying lessons from a game to the real world. Lots of games designed by economists, for example, tend to validate the pet theories of the economists, despite not working in the real world.

Real world economics is infinitely more complex than the handful of rules in a game.

I think the biggest difference is most games tend to have anything not dead + positive resource stream = a win. People tend to build city's / county's / etc that go through a major such phase to maximize resource collection.

In reality you generally don't want to have 40 years of suck to get to some long term gain, because you need to live those 40 years.

You mean some sort of great leap forward produces negative results for your citizens until it's completed? I swear I heard a story similar to that in reality.

The thing is relative to most developing nations China has had very slow economic growth. Yes, with a massive population, but China ranks 110 by purchasing power per person. It's economy is terrible, the only thing it has going for it is scale. And it's not like it has a massive population density either ranking at #80 world wide.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

developing nations

USA in 1980 was already a developed nation with a high relative standard of living. It could only grow GDP by inventing new technology and process not simply import proven tech.

China's continued failures are massive and ongoing. Some numbers look ok relative to their past failures but that's about it.

I don’t have a source — lazy Saturday here — but I recall something about city planners using Sim City back in the day as part of their education, which horrified Will Wright since in his words (paraphrasing) “sim city is just cellular automata with some differential equations sprinkled on top.”

Yeah, but who's to say that real cities aren't just cellular automata? They kind of look that way from space.

Even if they are, they don't have the same rules as SimCity's

Indeed, though in some cases it reveals that the problem is likely how we design actual cities.

http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par...

Dear god ... that game makes so much more sense now when seen in that light. I can't believe I haven't made the connection before considering much I enjoy cellular automata.

> tend to validate the pet theories of the economists

I don't think that's really true. I don't think any game company or designer cares about forcing a pet economic theory to work.

More that game economies have a purpose and can be explicitly modelled to achieve that purpose, even if that means doing unrealistic things (such as conjure up resources out of nowhere). That's not too say that they can't be an effective test model for real world scenarios, if you bear those conceits in mind.

If an economy makes players have a bad time, they can jump ship in a way that they can't do in the real world. There is a financial incentive for game designers to build an economy that makes players satisfied. Strictly modelling a game on real life economic policies is usually not a good way to achieve this. Vast resource inequality between players is a good way to kill a multiplayer game, for example - unless you even the divide in some way, only those at the very top want to keep playing.

I agree that game designers are also trying to make a system that's a good game. But I do understand GP's point here, insofar as the designers have to build the system within a certain frame of reference.

As an adjacent example, City Skylines is a pretty fun city builder. A huge simulation, down to very complex traffic models. You can build sprawling cities with a bunch of highways.

But it's extremely hard to build anything that replicates old European cities, or denser cities like in Asia, because your smallest useful road is very big in relation to the buildings. The tools given to you basically point you directly to American-style zoning that leads to suburban sprawl and huge highway systems.

In a sense, that's the point of the game (to make you fight traffic), but it's difficult if you are trying to build a certain kind of city that we know exist and are, in fact, "better cities".

The simulation presents a certain worldview of how cities are built.

If you're designing Sim City or Cities Skylines, your balancing decisions will still reflect theories though.

For example, mixing commercial and residential buildings - will it work or not?

For example, the classic board game "Monopoly" was invented to push an economic agenda:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-scandalous-history-of-monop...

But taught me very different things...

Counterpoint: Eve Online

Hey credit where credit is due, CCP is working very hard yo make the game enjoyable by the solo/little guys again, more options than straight up grinding. Still, hope you like multiaccount moon mining.

Resource management in video games is a skill that I'm sure transfers to real world resource management. Apart from the simulators you mention strategy games like age of empires and red alert also teach about it.

Some weeks ago a co-worker told me something similar to what you share, how he learned about resources while playing SimCity. He also said his younger sister asked him "If people doesn't have money, why doesn't the government print money and gives it to people?". He said that playing SimCity would have prevented his sister from asking such a naive question.

I also would love so see the results of research about these games on kids. Maybe someday kids will play Sim City and AoE at elementary school or similar games designed for schools.

It's not a naive question. She was on the verge of re-inventing Keynesian Economics, which ended the Great Depression.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/keynesianeconomics.asp

>> Keynesian Economics, which ended the Great Depression

This is a pretty bold claim and not one that should be stated as fact.

Keynesian Economics kept Australia out of recession in 08. They literally gave everyone 800 bucks. It was awesome, went out a bit more, bought lots of takeout and a few bits for around the house. And the economy kept moving.

Now if only i could figure out a way to get more people to live in my SIM tower!

Yeah, I'm sure that mining boom had nothing to do with it...

Why stop at 800?

Give everyone a million bucks and you'd have a booming economy.

That's a bit of a lame argument, along the same lines as the 'trickle down' effect.

It probably depends on whether your economy is limited by consumer demand or by insufficient investments. For most developed nations it is clearly limited by consumer demand. Giving rich people more money aka 'trickle down' won't get the rich people to invest, because there is no demand (normal people already spend more than 100% of their income)

In this situation giving away money helicopter style makes sense.

What are the competing theories? The most common one is "WWII", which is another way of saying "Keynesian Economics"

There's a ton of competing theories that like to point out that previous depressions lasted a year or two while the Great Depression went on and on because of all the government interventions that prevented the economy from being able to recover.

Luck and variance are pretty good explanations, though people tend to hate them. The idea that every thing in the universe has to have a specific cause and effect plagues a lot of "analysis" in today's world. We simply aren't built for accepting luck.

Bernanke on the lessons learned: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke201...

Sounds more monetarist: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/012615/what-differe...

"If people doesn't have money, why doesn't the government print money and gives it to people?"

Because people are not systemically important financial institutions :)

They sort of are though. It's just that a person's importance isn't individually obvious, and only becomes obvious in aggregate.

It definitely is not a naive question. Printing money is precisely what the government should do. Income tax should be eliminated, it is a relic of the past. The government should fund itself not by selling bonds, which essentially is printing money that pays interest, but by simply printing money which is more direct.

To put a finer point on it, most people still believe that (monetarily sovereign) governments are constrained by their income and by the willingness of lenders to accommodate government debt. But that view is incorrect: the real constraint to government spending is only the economy's real capacity for production. Another way to think of it is that the real constraint to government spending is inflation (because excessive government spending beyond the economy's supply capacity would lead to increased demand-pull inflation).

Whatever the reason, the empirical observation in these days of low inflation seems to be that most governments aren't even close to the true limit of spending.

Uh, this is a very interesting (and intriguing) perspective.

Couple of questions:

- Does this mean that there’s a case for QE to be made permanent under a low-inflation environment?

- Under this model, govermnents would be directly responsible for the allocation of the newly created money. How can this not lead to a depressed economic output over time?

- Where can I read more about this?

QE: Not really. The problem with QE is that it's a purely monetary operation, so the only way it could lead to real economic growth is if it somehow lead to more lending. But arguably debt leads to instability, and besides it's like pushing on a string: it doesn't work when people don't want to borrow. It'd be better for the government to outright buy stuff or give people money.

Depressing economic output: Absent inflation, economic output is proportional to overall spending, so a policy like this can't depress economic output almost by definition.

However, I'd say there is a risk of directing that output towards useless things, plus there's the risk of favouritism that leads to hidden inflation via inefficiency (see also: military industrial complex). So it matters where the money is spent.

Personally, I'd like to try something like a "citizen's dividend": just hand out money to all citizens equally each month (or permanent residents, you can argue the details), no questions asked and no strings attached, but vary the amount based on current inflation. That is, increase the dividend when inflation is low, scale it back when inflation rises above some target.

So kind of like a UBI, but with a macroeconomic motivation rather than trying to replace the welfare system. It also appeals to me because it's a sort of direct democratic approach to macroeconomic management: people can literally vote with their wallet about how the money is spent.

Where to read more: modern monetary theory is a good keyword to start with. I found Randall Wray's book very interesting. Warren Mosler's "7 deadly innocent frauds" is less academic, but it's available online and interesting since it comes from a practitioner instead of a theoretician. Though I admit it's been many years since I read either.

My naive question is why so few governments or central banks tried implementing QE as helicopter money, rather than for bond purchases. It seems to my (undergrad-only econ) perspective that the person in the street is far more likely to put the money to use in the economy.

Bond purchases or helicopter money is essentially the same thing.

1) The government sprays more money around in welfare and salaries than they raise through taxes

2) The government issues bonds

3) The central bank prints money to buy those bonds

It's equivalent to the central bank printing money to pay for welfare programs and salaries (which go to common people in the streets)

QE books purchases aren't about allowing the government to borrow more. In any rich country the government can borrow as much as it wants. It's about crowding out private purchases of those bonds so that those lenders will lend to businesses and people instead. I'd be willing to bet that a $1000 tax refund is more likely to be spent than an extra $1000 that banks may or may not lend to someone.

I disagree, buying bonds benefits above all bond holders, read funds and investment banks. The people only get the money way down in the food chain.

I've been wondering the same thing. A few points come to mind:

It's easy trot out the "but the bureaucracy!" argument.

Helicopter money is in-your-face money creation which brings out the gold bugs and inflation hyperventilators. QE as practiced is in comparison too mysterious for people to latch on to effectively.

Helicopter money was never really championed by anybody in the first place, so nobody really had to argue against it.

It's really unfortunate that a perfectly reasonable policy never got a fair chance. I do think it has a lot to do with ideological bias especially among central bankers, and with the fact that a lot of people on the left, who should naturally be in favour of such a policy, are too averse to studying economics and finance thoroughly enough to participate effectively in such discussions.

Playing games would have made it impossible to imagine Qualitative Easing? I played a lot of SimCity and it taught me that tradeoffs are very real and that mayors have a tough job; but it didn't stop me from independently coming up with the idea of qualitative easing as it happens. Still, I take the point, one can't use QE every time or in just any year to avoid a tradeoff - only when deflation is a real possibility.

What? When is monetary policy ever an issue in SimCity? How does managing a city's resources, revenue, or budget teach you anything about that?

SimCity, Red Alert, AoE so much time playing on them. I’m not sure what they teach me but I’m confident it exposed me to problem solving and persistance which are always useful skills.

Even something like Civilization can be expressive and educational. I mean, I also loved Mortal Kombat as a kid, before my parents figured out it was a game where you could punch a man so hard you could pull his beating heart out of his chest. But I also remember learning about ecology from SimEarth, and learning how to balance a budge from Theme Park.

I think combat games teach a lot about improvisation, especially if you're playing against another human, you'd have to adapt in realtime the pattern the other person is using and trying to develop a strategy to counter the other person's attack/defense. In recent combat games, the startup/cooldown time are so precise that pro players literally need to remember, compute and combine maths in their game plays in real time into combos.

I play a lot of poker, and will risk hundreds of dollars on a single hand.

All of my 401k is in money market mutual funds.

I'm not sure that a straight up games-to-financial-decision type study would be useful, there are many different motivations between playing games or even gambling, and financial decisions.

I hope by "money market mutual funds" you mean some general sort of passive-markets based investment approach (not actually holding 100% of your 401k in cash-like instruments)?

Money market mutual funds is a very well defined term.

I’d argue that, if you have a healthy relationship with skill-based gambling (i.e. poker, not roulette), you’re likelier to come out the other side with a clearer appreciation for risk and reward.

Or, more bluntly: There’s nothing like being acutely aware how easily you can lose your stack on a bad gamble to make you invest your savings wisely. :)

That’s why I never succeeded for long in Simcity 2000! I would buy the biggest items, because you know, you gotta invest, you gotta see big, so I’d buy the nuclear plant as soon as available because you know, availability makes businesses develop quicker. And I’d always fail because the slightest glitch (monster, earthquake, riot) would ruin the objectives!

Aside from being influenced by government advertising (“This airport in a no-man’s land is going to develop the no-man’s land into a city!”), it also influenced my entrepreneur life: Why see small when you can invest all you have and get increasingly more return? Why spend time debugging when I could have this other big feature on the marketing material? And that’s why I never went past a few hours in Simcity, and why my cousin, a less entreprising person, would succeed more! Ha!

What a cautionary tale.

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