Capitalism, Socialism, and Video Games.

[TheRealMafoo]

highwaystar101 said:

Good analogy Mafoo ,

As it works with what I would envision as the perfect society too with some minor adaptions to your analogy. You see I agree that the best way to run a market is free. every man for himself and try to make the best profit you have, none of this socialism malarkey. However, if we expand it past the game for my envision to the real world a bit.

In WoW you pay a monthly fee (taxes) to Blizzard (government). In return Blizzard gives you the essentials you need to be able to start in the world of Warcraft, all the aid and help you require to learn the game (education). If the game has a bug it will be fixed by Blizzard (healthcare) and if it receives a virus it will be eradicated by them (National defense).

That way wealth is spread in a capitalis t manner, but everyone also has the same basic essentials to begin with from the tax that was paid.

I don't believe either extreme socialism or extreme capitalism work. You need a balance between the two, drawing form the positive aspects of both.


... As for how a socialist version of WoW would work, yeah the logistics could be sorted out easily, but it wouldn't be very fun lol.

It's kind of hard to map outside game and inside game in the same analogy , but let's go with it.

You state you pay Blizzard a monthly fee (taxes). The difference here and the way the world really works, is in WoW, everyone pays the same fee (15 bucks a month or whatever it is), and gets the same resources for that money.

If you were to map this into how taxes work in all 1st world countries, Blizzard would calculate that they need 15 bucks from everyone. You would then have to submit to Blizzard what your income is, and if you were in the bottom 40% of the people who play wow, you get to play for free. If you are in the top 10%, you pay $100 a month.

If they ran it that way, now many people do you think would play WoW?

A better social analogy, would be that in WoW, you don't have to eat, worry about shelter, or worry about getting sick. The game in a passive way "socialized" these things for you. Where that breaks down however, is in the game, there is no cost associated with them. The design team just said "let's not worry about people needing to eat" and it was done.

In real life, it's different. Let's say in WoW it cost you 1 gold a day to stay healthy (healthcare and eating). Every character has a cost of 1 gold a day. The developers (government) however decide that if you don't login and play (contributing to society), you still get the service. So, 10% of the players login each day. This means that those 10% collectively have to pay 10 gold each. Some are lower level, so they can't even cover themselves, let alone everyone else. So, you make the tax progressive based on the % of gold you earned that day. If you logged in and earned 200 gold, the game takes 100 of it. If you earned 10 gold, they take 2, and so on.

How many people in WoW do you think would go for that? The crazy thing is, in real life, that's exactly how it works.

 

EDIT: to map this to the real world in a better way. Two people level 80 play for 3 hours. One earned 200 gold in those three house, and one earned 10 gold. At the strike of Midnight, the 200 gold player get's dinged 100 gold, and the 10 gold player gets dinged 2 gold.

If WoW (or any MMO) worked that way, how many people do you think would play it?