First off, a very big thank you to everyone who’s signed up to the mailing list so far. We’re currently readying our first mail-out to you, where you’ll be the first to know a breaking piece of Fate of the World news. Expect to see something reach your inbox in the next couple of days.
If you haven’t joined the mailing list yet, then it is a matter of great ease to do so; the red widget at the top right of this webpage will be only too happy to take your details.
Dev-wise, design and team continue to assemble themselves slowly but inexorably. We’re also having some great dialogues with community members, and being reminded about some of the cool things the original game did. Fracking, austerity protests, heatwaves, extinctions, reforestation initiatives… playing the original FOTW is very much like watching the news today.
One of the mechanics that was hotly argued about at the time was the mechanism we had for predicting financial crashes. There was a core algorithm in the game which constantly monitored whether a region’s economy reached a state where Commercial GDP was more than double the aggregated value of Agricultural and Industrial GDP. If so, there would be an economic crash of some kind, and that region’s GDP and infrastructure would diminish.
This was a pretty ad hoc, hand-wavy kind of rule, but one which addressed our concerns about what constitutes “value” in a Capitalist system: to us, it seemed that there was only so much economic activity which could be sustained by the resources used – not just the fuel that powers vehicles and power stations, but also the food, clothing, equipment, and materials used in the conduct of a free market economy.
The reason this rule made players so cross was because they tried to optimise the economies of their world regions to be primarily Commercial in activity, as this had the lowest carbon footprint. Players would never abandon the Agricultural sector completely, as this dropping too low would cause Famine events, but they would happily diminish their Industrial sectors to 0. There needed to be a mechanic which prevented this from happening.
Many players cried foul at the time, but when we looked to the history books, we saw that our hunch was largely correct – most financial crashes in history happened when Commercial activity was around 1.5 times the aggregated value of Agricultural and Industrial.
Interestingly, this viewpoint has been backed up by recent research, and it seems certain that it’s a subject we’ll return to. Improvements to the model that are in discussion include separating Finance out from Commercial as an economic sector, as well as analysing what GDP really means – especially once illths such as resource usage and emissions are factored into activity.
It’s a fascinating subject, but one I can’t be allowed to dwell on too much at present; far too many other things to do. There’s a mailshot to get out, video scripts to write, UI designs to be sketched, and no doubt another dev blog to write in a day or two. Still, at least it’s not too hot.