FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Economic Challenges
An economy is a system in which resources move either physically from place to place or conceptually from owner to owner. This doesn't necessarily mean money; any quantifiable substance that can be created, moved, stored, earned, exchanged, or destroyed can form the basis of an economy. Most games contain an economy of some sort. Even a first-person shooter boasts a simple economy in which the player obtains ammunition by finding it or taking it from dead opponents and consumes it by firing his weapons. Health points are also part of the economy, being consumed by hits and restored by medical kits. You can make the game easier or harder by adjusting the amount of ammunition and number of medical kits so that a player running short of firepower or health must carefully manage his resources.
The behavior of resources, as defined by the core mechanics of the game, creates economic challenges. Some games, such as SimCity, consist almost entirely of economic challenges. Such games tend to have flattened challenge hierarchies in which the atomic challenges appear similar to the overall goal of the game. Other games, such as first-person shooters, combine economic challenges with others such as conflict and exploration. Chapter 10, "Core Mechanics," addresses the internal economies of games at length.
Many games challenge the player to accumulate something: wealth, points, or anything else deemed valuable. Acquisition of this kind underlies Monopoly and many
other games in which the top-level challenge is to accumulate more money, plutonium, or widgets than other players. The game challenges the player to understand the mechanisms of wealth creation and to use them to his own advantage. In the case of Monopoly, the player learns to mortgage low-rent properties and use the cash to purchase high-rent ones because high-rent properties produce more in the long run.
Requiring your players to achieve balance in an economy gives them a more interesting challenge than simply accumulating points, especially if you give them many different kinds of resources to manage. Players in The Settlers games juggle quantities of raw materials and goods that obey complex rules of interaction: Wheat goes to the mill to become flour, which goes to the bakery to become bread; bread feeds miners who dig coal and iron ore, which goes to the smelter to become iron bars, which then go to the blacksmith to become weapons; and so on. Produce too little of a vital item and the whole economy grinds to a halt; produce too much and it piles up, taking up space and wasting time and resources that could be better used elsewhere.
A peculiar sort of economic challenge involves looking after a person or creature, or a small number of them, as in The Sims and Spore. (Spore expands to whole populations in its later stages.) The game challenges the player to meet the needs of each individual and possibly improve its development. Because the game measures and tracks these needs via numeric terms, and the player must meet them from limited resources, these qualify as economic challenges.
