- TNP Nation
- McMasterdonia
I thought this would also be useful for TNP rpers.
Questions here: http://s15.zetaboards.com/NSWF4/topic/8262812/1/ or Nierr/RP mod may be able to help you.
[This is a three-part lecture between Lamoni, United Gordonopia, and I.]
My lecture last year was on economics and I wanted to do something a little different this year. I wanted to focus more on world building and storytelling. As it happens, the point I want to make is best introduced by an economics analogy.
In an introduction to economics class you’re taught supply and demand through the model of perfect competition. It looks like this:
And you learn that you can explain a lot of stuff using this simple model, like why a minimum wage creates unemployment (something, by the way, which isn’t true if you use a different model) or how a price ceiling can cause a shortage. This model represents a perfect economy. As it turns out, the world of a perfect economy is quite boring.
Explaining why a perfect economy is boring is best done by way of example: in a perfect economy, there wouldn’t be any warrantees. In 1970, an economist by the name of George Akerlof wrote a paper titled “The Market for Lemons.” He explains why in an economy with asymmetric information — where one person knows something the other doesn’t — markets can break down. He uses the used car market as an example.
Suppose the buyer doesn’t have any way of corroborating the quality of the car (which in 1970 was more true than today), meaning the seller of a lemon can pass it off as a non-lemon (or the highest quality for a vehicle of that year, with that mileage, etc.). That is, the buyer can sell his lemon for the same price as the non-lemon, because the buyer doesn’t know any better. Because of this, sellers have an incentive to sell lemons over non-lemons, degrading the average quality of the product.
The buyer will eventually figure out that the average quality of a used car has fallen and price will fall, but the same problem still exists — lemons can’t be distinguished from non-lemons (remember, we just know that on average the quality of used cars has fallen). The average quality continues to fall, because the incentives are the same, and eventually the market will break down — a market imperfection.
But, we know that, despite this problem, used car markets in the real world haven’t broken down. Why? Because we’ve developed institutions to solve this market imperfection, such as the warrantee. A seller can offer a warrantee as an incentive to pay for a higher price, promising the buyer to return his or her money if the quality of the product was not up to a certain standard. Another institution is the idea of brand name or recognition. Sellers who have a reputation for honesty and high quality products will be able to command a higher price. If there were no informational asymmetries, these institutions wouldn’t exist and our economy would be blander and a lot less interesting.
The truth is that most of what makes our world so rich — the firm, property rights, money, etc — all exist because markets are imperfect. The firm arises partly out of informational asymmetries, property rights are needed to solve externalities, and money arises because of incomplete information (formally, the problem of value imputation). In perfect competition, all these beautiful facets of human society wouldn’t exist and the world would become much more boring.
Let’s apply this economics lesson to roleplaying.
Imperfections Require Creativity and Solutions
There’s a player in Greater Dienstad I have a lot of respect for: United World Order. He plays a fascist country, basing himself on an alternative history where Nazi Germany survives World War II. It would be very easy to make his country into a bland fascist superpower, where an authoritarian government is coupled with a strong economy and a strong military, but that’s not what he did.
Instead, he embraces the facets of fascism that makes it so interesting and so different — price controls and the economic disadvantages they bring, restrictions on freedoms and the social tensions they cause, and he accepts the repercussions of his policies in the context of his international relations. And he finds his own solutions and his own consequences to these imperfections. The result is a very interesting country, and one that’s very unique vis-à-vis Greater Dienstad (and the rest of the game really). I don’t think there is another player who has so successfully built the world of a fascist country on NationStates. And the reward to him is that he’s able to create great stories based on these flaws.
Why do flaws make worlds that much more interesting? It’s the same principle behind giving your characters flaws. The best characters are the kind that the reader can identify with, because the fact is that everybody is flawed in some way and it’s hard for us to identify with someone who isn’t.
Flaws also make room for tension. They allow for the existence of problems which need solving, and part of what makes a story interesting is seeing how the character solves that problem, despite her flaws. The same is true of world building, especially on NationStates, because on this game it’s often the world that we focus on the most — it’s a game of international relations, where macro-events heavily shape micro-events.
That flaws create problems that need solving also makes for better world building because each player can bring out his or her own creativity and personality out. When you are solving issues you bring your own solutions, and these details are what makes your world and your characters unique and different. I, for example, have a fundamentally stable government, where an emperor competes for power with democratic local governments, and this allows me to create stories around the solutions to and results of these tensions. And by roleplaying these tensions I can differentiate my world from other worlds that are built on similar root assumptions.
There’s an incentive on NationStates to make your country the best. But, remember, that in the literary world the best country is not the one with the biggest military, or the most powerful government, or the largest economy. It’s the one that’s the most interesting, and big militaries, powerful governments, and large economies just aren’t that interesting on their own, because on NationStates those details are average.
Questions here: http://s15.zetaboards.com/NSWF4/topic/8262812/1/ or Nierr/RP mod may be able to help you.
[This is a three-part lecture between Lamoni, United Gordonopia, and I.]
Why You Should Embrace Flaws and Imperfections
My lecture last year was on economics and I wanted to do something a little different this year. I wanted to focus more on world building and storytelling. As it happens, the point I want to make is best introduced by an economics analogy.
In an introduction to economics class you’re taught supply and demand through the model of perfect competition. It looks like this:
And you learn that you can explain a lot of stuff using this simple model, like why a minimum wage creates unemployment (something, by the way, which isn’t true if you use a different model) or how a price ceiling can cause a shortage. This model represents a perfect economy. As it turns out, the world of a perfect economy is quite boring.
Explaining why a perfect economy is boring is best done by way of example: in a perfect economy, there wouldn’t be any warrantees. In 1970, an economist by the name of George Akerlof wrote a paper titled “The Market for Lemons.” He explains why in an economy with asymmetric information — where one person knows something the other doesn’t — markets can break down. He uses the used car market as an example.
Suppose the buyer doesn’t have any way of corroborating the quality of the car (which in 1970 was more true than today), meaning the seller of a lemon can pass it off as a non-lemon (or the highest quality for a vehicle of that year, with that mileage, etc.). That is, the buyer can sell his lemon for the same price as the non-lemon, because the buyer doesn’t know any better. Because of this, sellers have an incentive to sell lemons over non-lemons, degrading the average quality of the product.
The buyer will eventually figure out that the average quality of a used car has fallen and price will fall, but the same problem still exists — lemons can’t be distinguished from non-lemons (remember, we just know that on average the quality of used cars has fallen). The average quality continues to fall, because the incentives are the same, and eventually the market will break down — a market imperfection.
But, we know that, despite this problem, used car markets in the real world haven’t broken down. Why? Because we’ve developed institutions to solve this market imperfection, such as the warrantee. A seller can offer a warrantee as an incentive to pay for a higher price, promising the buyer to return his or her money if the quality of the product was not up to a certain standard. Another institution is the idea of brand name or recognition. Sellers who have a reputation for honesty and high quality products will be able to command a higher price. If there were no informational asymmetries, these institutions wouldn’t exist and our economy would be blander and a lot less interesting.
The truth is that most of what makes our world so rich — the firm, property rights, money, etc — all exist because markets are imperfect. The firm arises partly out of informational asymmetries, property rights are needed to solve externalities, and money arises because of incomplete information (formally, the problem of value imputation). In perfect competition, all these beautiful facets of human society wouldn’t exist and the world would become much more boring.
Let’s apply this economics lesson to roleplaying.
Imperfections Require Creativity and Solutions
There’s a player in Greater Dienstad I have a lot of respect for: United World Order. He plays a fascist country, basing himself on an alternative history where Nazi Germany survives World War II. It would be very easy to make his country into a bland fascist superpower, where an authoritarian government is coupled with a strong economy and a strong military, but that’s not what he did.
Instead, he embraces the facets of fascism that makes it so interesting and so different — price controls and the economic disadvantages they bring, restrictions on freedoms and the social tensions they cause, and he accepts the repercussions of his policies in the context of his international relations. And he finds his own solutions and his own consequences to these imperfections. The result is a very interesting country, and one that’s very unique vis-à-vis Greater Dienstad (and the rest of the game really). I don’t think there is another player who has so successfully built the world of a fascist country on NationStates. And the reward to him is that he’s able to create great stories based on these flaws.
Why do flaws make worlds that much more interesting? It’s the same principle behind giving your characters flaws. The best characters are the kind that the reader can identify with, because the fact is that everybody is flawed in some way and it’s hard for us to identify with someone who isn’t.
Flaws also make room for tension. They allow for the existence of problems which need solving, and part of what makes a story interesting is seeing how the character solves that problem, despite her flaws. The same is true of world building, especially on NationStates, because on this game it’s often the world that we focus on the most — it’s a game of international relations, where macro-events heavily shape micro-events.
That flaws create problems that need solving also makes for better world building because each player can bring out his or her own creativity and personality out. When you are solving issues you bring your own solutions, and these details are what makes your world and your characters unique and different. I, for example, have a fundamentally stable government, where an emperor competes for power with democratic local governments, and this allows me to create stories around the solutions to and results of these tensions. And by roleplaying these tensions I can differentiate my world from other worlds that are built on similar root assumptions.
There’s an incentive on NationStates to make your country the best. But, remember, that in the literary world the best country is not the one with the biggest military, or the most powerful government, or the largest economy. It’s the one that’s the most interesting, and big militaries, powerful governments, and large economies just aren’t that interesting on their own, because on NationStates those details are average.
