This is one of those things where it’s basically impossible to make a game with more accurate economics that is actually fun. The fact of the matter is that medieval wealth inequality was just too big for most people to wrap their heads around and would make gameplay really weird. Adventurers would in fact need to be buying equipment with the equivalent value of gold coins, but such wealth would dwarf the costs of pretty much any “normal” stuff you could buy and would cause weird balance issue. For example, a pound of cheese in medieval England cost half a penny, but a good sword could cost 480 pennies. Think about how many swords you encounter in a video game. Even if you sold them for a 100th of the high end price, you could still buy 9 lbs of cheese for a single sword and if cheese is meant to be a healing item then it probably has to be total trash to balance how cheap it is compared to adventuring gear. Or you could say a low quality sword can be sold for 5 gold and a cheese is 1 gold and make it a normal healing item. It’s just hard to balance if the economy is realistic. As for credits, it’s just hard to imagine what the hell trade will look like in the future and everyone kind of understands credits as a concept.
I don’t see the problem with that balance. You shouldn’t be hoarding cheese as an adventurer for healing or for selling. Something like a potion should be used for healing and should be appropriately expensive.
That said, I agree gameplay is more important and economic simulation, I just don’t think the example was the best. It’s already off that in games like Skyrim we collect random trinkets until we can’t carry anything else and sell it all to any random shop keeper. It’s weird and, to be honest, not actually fun. (Mildly hot take.) Finding and selling things that are actually rare is fine. Like weapons, gems, etc.
Because as an adventurer you’re not a peasant. You’re an adventurer. It’s a high risk high reward profession that’s difficult to get into.
Or just don’t give common items like cheese healing properties. Healing potions are perfectly normal features of fantasy games, and even in a more realistic setting you can use herbs, bandages and disinfectant to heal instead of standard food items. I don’t think many players are going to complain that common things like food or staying at an inn are practically free if you’re strong enough to kill one well-equipped bandit.
Also, depending on where and when in the middle ages, currency would vary hugely and work with several dozens of different coins. Travel to another region would involve money changers, scales, entirely different systems of coinage with (by modern standards) absurd breakdowns of coins and wholly new names and words.
And having pure coins would be easy, so obviously you’d have fun stuff like “new dollars” being worth 7/16th of an “old dollar” because they have less silver in them.
Also consider that on top of money being different, most people weighed goods against the local currency because coins were the most standardized objects they had access to. So not only does the local currency change, but as a result, the system of weights and measures does too.
As a gameplay abstraction, it’s fine IMO to make everyone accept standard silver coins. It’s not that far from reality, certainly closer than using gold as the base currency.
that would be an interesting concept for a game with different regions. even if you limit it to two different currencies it could be interesting to see how it would affect gameplay.
I’m sure there’s a fun game for someone in there where you play as a money trader
Whilst an average film overall, the movie ‘In Time’ has an interesting concept for currency set in a near future sci fi dystopia.
Humanity has cured aging, and everyone stops aging at 25. Then their clock starts; indicated by a tattoo like digital clock on their forearm. Everything is paid for with time taken off their clock, once it reaches 0, they immediately die. Jobs pay employees a time salary etc, and the rich horde and manipulate the time markets to concentrate their wealth, and keep the poor from achieving the immortality they horde.
I enjoyed it, and I’m sure plenty others did, but there’s no denying that a rather large suspension of belief is required.
Yeah it also has a rather large plot hole, right at the climax, and kind of terrible CGI, the car crash scene is hilariously bad. But yeah it’s quite a good film from a story point of view.
I think it’s a clever metaphor for the disparity in living standards and the real value of human life in a corrupt marketplace.
But the actual implementation of the story was a bit clumsy and heavy handed.
I remember after I left the movie as a teenager with my parents two older dudes were bickering about whether poor people in our actual world are able to escape poverty or not if they work hard.
You can escape poverty if you work hard in the same way that you can escape Earth’s orbit if you work hard
I read that comics (Mandrake) when I was a kid, like in the seventies. Alien came and stole for 40.000 years of gold. Recycle ftw eh.
Wouldn’t surprise me that it’s a rehashed comic book idea. It has all the markings of one. I found this which was apparently published in a playboy magazine of all places, not sure if it’s a retelling of the comic book or another rehash of the same idea, but it definitely seems like something that inspired the film.
Good one!
Lol found it but I don’t know the language:
We’re literally living that life and we’ve always lived it since the dawn of currency, fiat.
How long you’re going to survive after you reach zero wealth left to your own devices, homeless on the streets? Until the first rough winter?
Depends on how resourceful you are. You don’t automatically die once you run out of money. Also, no amount of money grants immortality.
In Time is definitely one of my favorite movies. It has some great world building around this concept.
Be a medieval peasant.
Harvest comes in
Load 1,000 pounds of produce onto a mule
Mule dies
Throw mule and produce on shoulders
Walk to market
Set up stall
Sign: “Apples - 1 gold piece”
Sell a single apple
Am now the wealthiest man in town
Go across the street to buy a wool tunic
Attempt to make change
Merchant cannot make change for a single gold piece
So he kills me and becomes wealthiest man in town
Repeat this for every shop in town
Literally one guy left in village
Mongols show up
Take gold piece
Return to China
China countries to be the wealthiest country on Earth for another century
the why did the wealthiest man in town give all his fortune for a single apple?
“My kingdom for a good snack!”
He was hungry
I read it was illegal for peasants to own gold or silver, maybe just in some place somewhere…
But yeah, gold is ridiculously expensive.
Even today, 1 oz of gold is worth 82 oz of silver (i.e. a metal that was commonly used to mint coins used in daily life)!
One bread costs 5 whole gold coins. Because obviously.
Well, it’s one bread Michael! How much could it cost? Ten gold coins?
I’m making a mars-themed luanti modpack (it’s FOSS and available here btw), and i intend to use water as the currency, if i ever get to trading.
Water is a scarce and useful resource on Mars. That’s all it takes to make a meaningful currency out of it.
Expect a mod fork to change it to piss lol
I’d be glad if anybody actually paid attention to my mod pack xD
so i’m fine with this :Dnote: also development is slow because i’m still in the “figure out what i want to do” phase.
The problem with using water as currency is that it is heavy. It is not reasonable to carry around large amounts. You’ll need some kind of representational currency.
Just store it in the bank and use paper notes worth 1 water! (Some Swede a long time ago).
You’ll need some kind of representational currency
yep that’s exactly what i think would make sense in the real world. basically a paper currency backed by real water. one dollar represents 1 kg of water.
it’s like the gold standard, just not backed by gold but by water.
in the game that doesn’t matter though since you can just carry around a lot of water bottles before your inventory space runs out.
Kinda fucked up that when coming up with a SciFi dystopia the worst we can think of is the Nestlé-buck.
It is telling, isn’t it?
To pivot I can also imagine information and energy scarcity, be it real or artificial.
And to follow up on my own comment, imagine this:
- Extracting water from the martian landscape would literally be seen as a source of wealth, and it gives people a strong incentive to extract as much water from the landscape as is reasonably doable, thus giving society a steady source of water, which drives society forward.
- Maybe, 1 martian dollar ($1) would represent 1 ton of water, and 1 cent (or “bit”) would represent 1 kg of water, which means 1000 cents/bits = 1 dollar.
- So you might have paper money representing 5c (almost a gallon) or 50c (let’s call it a barrel) for everyday use, so when you go to a market to buy some food, you might pay for it either by paper money or by literally handing over water bottles.
- The paper money would have to be handed out by banks that store the water or at least are able to hand it out if somebody wants to redeem their paper money.
For the love of god, don’t call something a cent (1/100) if it is worth 1/1000
xD it’s to confuse the romans, in case they invade again
That works until someone starts manipulating the market by redeeming their dollars for water, selling the water on the market, getting dollars again, redeeming for more water and continuously profiting from the endless cycle.
This is actually why the gold standard ended. Money and real world materials will fluctuate in value and are sold on different markets. Having money pegged to a real world material means someone can take advantage of a treasury by manipulating those markets. This was happening with the US dollar, then the Nixon shock happened and no more gold standard.
Why would people in the future use a currency system that’s similar to one that we used in the past and stopped using because it was fundamentally flawed and vulnerable to manipulation? I suppose if it’s set in a small community where there isn’t anyone that would work out how to manipulate the currency it might work. But if there were bad actors, you’d expect a water based currency system to be manipulated same as the gold based system was before the Nixon shock.
the gold market wasn’t “manipulated”, that was just a lie that Nixon came up with to justify ending the dollar-gold exchange system.
actually the US government just wanted to have complete control over the dollar, including the ability to print more dollars if needed. if the dollar is bound to gold, that’s impossible because you can’t just print gold. by declaring an emergency (“to protect the dollars against the speculators”) they had enough reason in the eyes of the population to make the dollar a pure fiat currency.
If you put all of the US dollars in the world in a pile on the left and all of the gold in the world in a pile on the right, the pile on the left (the dollars) would be worth 10x more than the pile on the right.
There simply isn’t enough gold in the world for a gold standard to work without there being some kind of manipulation of either the value of the dollars or the value of the gold, or both. And if you’re manipulating the value of gold and/or the value of the dollar, what’s the point?
The gold standard stuff is just conspiracy bullshit meant to create discontent and distrust in institutions based on ignorance of what money is. You’re told money should have intrinsic value so you feel like your employer is rewarding you with something of value when you’re paid. The reality is money represents debt, you did work and the money represents what you’re owed by your employer, not a reward. A system based on borrowed money matches the reality of your employer is borrowing your time and skills with that debt being paid once you’ve spent the money. A more realistic system based on money being debt isn’t as prone to manipulation as one based on a belief that shiny bits of metal have magical properties that you’re rewarded with because you’ve a good loyal servant.
“Bury your water, kids.”
Caves of Qud uses water as currency. I think it explains this by making all of its characters weirdo radiation freakazoids that can teleport and fly around and stuff.
What if money was just called hours?
Difficult jobs are worth more hours than easy jobs and require more specialized skills. If the specific skill is not part of the repertoire then the job will be exceptionally difficult and/or impossible.
There were some experiments where currency was actually denominated in hours, usually as part of a co-op system where you were literally trading for hours of labour.
I think the most famous one was in Ithaca, NY.
would love to read more about this
That one was called the Ithaca HOUR. I learned about the Cincinnati Time Store, which was maybe the first one, on a podcast that I cannot find now. So I’m somewhat useless but there are some names to search at least!
Ah nice, this led me to
But an hour waiting on an email shouldn’t be the same as an hour of heavy lifting
In the not-too-distant future
You can’t start a sentence with that and not expect me to get distracted thinking of a certain theme song.
was is somewhere in time and space? Or way down in deep-13?
All Star by Smash Mouth?
Honestly a face of mine. Acting is solid and storyline is like a dystopian Robin Hood almost.
This is a good one to show people to get them thinking about class consciousness.
Can’t do that because hours are gods.
Mfw the currency is money
If I made a sci-fi game I would just make the currency MWh. They handwave away so much science, why not have a watch sized device that can store insane amounts of power?
Which makes me wonder, is there a physics limit to the density of energy? There has to be, anyone know what it’s called?
is there a physics limit to the density of energy
the physics limit to the density of energy is literally a black hole. it compresses the maximum amount of mass (energy) into a space. but that’s technologically useless since you can’t extract the energy out of it on-demand.
The densest ways of storing energy that are technologically useful are:
- batteries (Na-Ion batteries: 0.2 kWh/kg)
- oil/carbon-based fuels (bread: 5 kWh/kg)
- uranium (pure uranium: 24 * 10^6 kWh/kg)
There’s also speculative technologies like antimatter (24 * 10^9 kWh/kg) which aren’t available today.
The beauty of using uranium as currency is that if anyone hoards too much of it, the problem takes care of itself.
So one gram of antimatter could power a modern city for like three months? That’s wild.
There actually is a method that could be used to extract energy out of a black hole. Probably not something you’d build in a watch-sized device though.
it only seems to work for rotating black holes though?
Yeah, that’s why you have to wind up your watch every now and then. To spin up its internal black hole again.
just drink more it’ll start spinning soon enough
Don’t they all spin though? As in any matter falls in one way or another angular momentum is gained.
It is possible, but very unlikely. Maybe two bh merge that has exactly opposite angular momentum.
If the well, event horrizon expands when a blackhole takes more mass, why can’t we just figure out how much volume it is compressed into by measuring the event horrizon increase?
We know the matter that goes in is a certain size. Maybe we can deduce the total size it is compressed to? And the size the blackhole gains.
It’s impossible to know based on the current understanding of particle physics. A black hole is formed when the inward gravitational force exceeds the outward neutron degeneracy pressure of a sufficiently massive object, which is what keeps neutrons from occupying the same space (not really, it’s complicated). Beyond that, only conjecture exists with no evidence, and the information paradox makes it impossible to observe the space inside the event horizon.
[…] why not have a watch sized device that can store insane amounts of power?
Because Hiroshima was leveled by “only” 20 MWh (cost ranges from 120€ in northern Scandinavia to 1010€ in Greece) so having people carry energy wallets with enough to make more around day to day is like paying your groceries bill with C4 (which is perfectly save as long as there is no primary explosive).
Yeah, but they will have a perfect safe containment device, and a way to transfer safely, just like they have FTL.
Stellaris is a space 4x game that uses energy as a universal currency. The Endless Space games are also 4x games that use ancient nanomachines called Dust as currency.
And yes, concentrating energy increases mass. E=MC^2, which means more Energy must necessarily mean more Mass. So basically gravity will be your hard limit, theoretically stuffing enough energy into small enough a place will create a black hole, though I assume if you’re talking electricity then there’s probably some physical limit you would hit first.
We have technological limits to the storage efficiencies of different types of batteries. Batteries defined as something that can store useable energy. If we are talking just energy, matter “stores” lots of energy, and you can look at the famous Einstein equation to play with numbers. I do know we have something like a matter density limit in black holes.
Matter, expressed in mass, so kilograms or tons.
This is what I love about the Legend of Zelda games, it’s “rupee”, which comes from “ruby”:
Rupee is likely derived from or a corruption of ruby, a valuable gemstone. As a result, Rupees were frequently misnamed early in the series, such as the name “Rupy” in the original The Legend of Zelda. In the German versions of The Legend of Zelda games, a Rupee is called a Rubin, which is German for ruby. Ironically, Red Rupees resemble rubies.
They’re valuable gems of indeterminate size, not necessarily related to rubies or actual gems (could be glass or something), and have no direct comparison to any actual currency (unlike gold) but we can understand some amount of inherent value (better than credits). It’s unique to the game, and denominated as a single number.
Some other ideas for units:
- sovereigns - as long as the person in charge is a king
- in-game term related to the region (like Euro is to Europe)
- chips - could be metal, glass, gemstones, etc
Keep it vague so people don’t lose immersion by comparing to realm world units, or not have any inherent wealth. That said, “credits” is better than “gold,” just a bit cliché.
Wait, they call it “rupee” but it somehow doesn’t relate to the currency of the most populous state in the world, whose currency is literally called “rupee”, which is etymologically related to silver, not ruby? And if Miyamoto is to be believed, this was intentional instead of just being a typo? That is so asinine.
And it makes sense since Japanese doesn’t have a “B” sound andthey look like gems, so ruby -> rupee makes a ton of sense.Edit: I guess Japanese does have a “b”, for some reason I thought it didn’t.
Or they could have gone with the actual japanese word for ruby instead of picking a word that sounds identical to a real-world currency.
There isn’t a native word AFAICT, it’s a loan word. But taking real things and making a slight change to be something new is pretty common for games. For example, final fantasy uses “Gil,” which is abbreviated “G” and probably comes from “gold” (gil - > gold is a pretty easy jump), though the in-game explanation is different (name of in-game ruling family).
I think it’s highly likely Miyamoto didn’t know about the Indian rupee.
Metro series games use bullets as a currency. Theyre small, not easily produceable in the setting, and have inherent value (you can shoot your money at enemies). Great design.
Could swear I’ve seen a setting where the currency was sovereigns, but there was no king. Literally “cash is king”.
I guess you don’t need a king, since sovereign refers to the government, but when it comes to currency, I’d assume “sovereign” is referring to the picture of the ruler on the currency. I don’t know many who call their chief executive/head of state a “sovereign”, but most would use that to describe a monarch.
Maybe it’s just a linguistic holdover from when they did have a monarch!
You can also get weird with it. Brandon Sanderson likes to tie money to a world’s magic system so in the world where people have metal based magic it’s coins called clips and boxings, but in the world where hurricanes make gemstones glow with magic it’s spheres of glass with gems called chips, marks, and broams
Yup, and that’s partly where my suggestion of “chips” came from. The money term isn’t a huge deal, but just changing the name to something relevant in world is cool.
In reverend insanity “money” was basically just “mana potions.”
No spacebucks?
Spacebukz
Spacebux
You gained Brouzouf.
But are your legs OK?
Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow:
This future history book takes place in the 22nd century, mostly in Walt Disney World. Walt Disney World Disney World is run by rival adhocracies, each dedicated to providing the best experience to the park’s visitors and competing for the Whuffie the guests offer. In the post-scarcity world of the novel, Whuffie is a currency-like system that primarily measures the esteem of others, or in the case of extremely low Whuffie, their disdain.
Game set in Pokemon. Currency is pokedollars.
Tell me you’ve never played a jrpg without telling me you’ve never played a jrpg
stupid comment
“tell me X without telling me X”
Insufferably obnoxious too
“Tell me”
Imperative case absolutionist too
Imagine being mad at a meme comment. Would you have preferred “Jrpgs: Hold my beer”?
Fr though there’s gil, rupees, bells, munny, zenny
I’m not mad, you’re mad
