Live economic statistics!!
Can this be done? You could have a simple page (it just needs to display a few numbers) on the website that reports statistics about the whole Eleven economy.
You could measure Gross Domestic Product (GDP), although of course it should be called something silly: add up all the income, in currants, that accrued to players every IRL day. That's the Eleven equivalent of GDP. It's fantastic!
You could also track consumption — how many currants were spent in the last 24 hours? — and savings —how many currants did players have in their pockets at the end of the day?
These tend to be the three macroeconomic factors that IRL economists want to look at: income, consumption (i.e. spending), and savings. Oh, and there's a very important fourth factor: GDP growth. It would be so cool if Eleven tracked GDP growth. If you already had the GDP info, it would just be a simple calculation. If you knew the number of players, you could calculate total GDP growth — which can result purely from more players joining the game — or per capita GDP growth, which is an increase in the average income (simply put, people are earnings more currants).
MMO economies are so fascinating to me. The MMORPG Eve Online once hired an IRL economist to be an analyst of the game's virtual economy. One of the most fun things for me in Glitch was the boom-bust cycle of certain commodities. You had people speculating on the price of things (I once bought 1 million currants worth of fish because it was about to go scarce) and losing big or winning big. It was a crazy fun world. I don't know if macroeconomic statistics would inform gameplay at all. I vaguely remember some third-party websites using Glitch's open API that would tell you the going price of any item over the last few days.
You could measure Gross Domestic Product (GDP), although of course it should be called something silly: add up all the income, in currants, that accrued to players every IRL day. That's the Eleven equivalent of GDP. It's fantastic!
You could also track consumption — how many currants were spent in the last 24 hours? — and savings —how many currants did players have in their pockets at the end of the day?
These tend to be the three macroeconomic factors that IRL economists want to look at: income, consumption (i.e. spending), and savings. Oh, and there's a very important fourth factor: GDP growth. It would be so cool if Eleven tracked GDP growth. If you already had the GDP info, it would just be a simple calculation. If you knew the number of players, you could calculate total GDP growth — which can result purely from more players joining the game — or per capita GDP growth, which is an increase in the average income (simply put, people are earnings more currants).
MMO economies are so fascinating to me. The MMORPG Eve Online once hired an IRL economist to be an analyst of the game's virtual economy. One of the most fun things for me in Glitch was the boom-bust cycle of certain commodities. You had people speculating on the price of things (I once bought 1 million currants worth of fish because it was about to go scarce) and losing big or winning big. It was a crazy fun world. I don't know if macroeconomic statistics would inform gameplay at all. I vaguely remember some third-party websites using Glitch's open API that would tell you the going price of any item over the last few days.
Comments
Though I do agree with commenters above, I'm not sure I'd like to see who's richest- or have any of that sort of comparison between players as it seems like it would add something that Glitch (or Eleven) should neither have or need- a leaderboard as such. One of the (many) biggest appeals in the game for me, is the fact that there is no pressure. No pressure to be better than others or rank higher on leaderboards- and no sense of higher or lower standings among different players, because we all play our own seperate ways- without needing to compare levels or wealth.
However, a greater focus on the in-game economy, without bringing forth a leaderboard- seems like a really fun and interesting idea, that I would love to see brought forth. Perhaps even with some aspects of stocks involved could be fun, or a banking mechanic- an aspect of money and business seems like it could fit really well in with the quirky themes that this amazing game has to offer.
So basically what I'm saying is that I love that Glitch encourages us be non-competitive, but honestly I also loved that it ALLOWED us to be competitive if we so chose
So I'd say ditch the richest glitch stat, but definitely keep the leaderboards!
Edit: Oops, almost forgot you @EiraFae! I sure hope he is! I should track him down and inform him this project exists and see if he's interested!
OTOH, I kinda like the idea of a leaderboard of who's spent the most currants. Not sure if there's a way to do that without doing the other. We had leaderboards of who had the most favor with giants and such; if this was similarly unobtrusive (it took me a long time to notice those leaderboards existed) it should be okay.
@"Lyrical Dejavu" I agree with your premise but I think it's sort of a cloudy, murky grey area : ) I don't think it's necessary to have wealth as a leaderboard since I think it's a bit too straightforward. To get on a leaderboard you should have to expend your wealth into a specific category AKA donating items for favor or spending money to buy materials to earn badges. However I'd say that it's sort of hard to differentiate the categories, since what is favor but wealth that was donated instead of sold? If I donate 1000 meat then I have 1000 favor, but if I sell 1000 meat in cebarkul I have 8000 currants.
Honestly I just love discussions like these : ) I think they're really thought provoking and help us to think through exactly what every aspect of Glitch meant and entailed and how we want to recapture all the Glitchy spirit in Eleven : )
And I'm not fixed on the idea of a leaderboard; I just like the idea of some way of drawing people's attention to the fact that there's an economy, rather than just the money they own. It's also a way to encourage spending, but maybe a handful of achievements would do that as well. ("you've spent 1,000,001 currants! Maybe you should get a platinum card... just as soon as one of the giants imagines platinum ingots!")
So, in my mind, there is a page that says something like:
Statistics for Today
9,113,484,950 currants earned
7,653,269,810 currants spent
39,715,816,332 in savings
Trends
Currant income is up 2.1% from yesterday
Currant spending is up 1.7% from yesterday
Currant savings have grown 0.4% since yesterday