Games As Cultural Systems

As we learned with Money As A Cultural System, human beings create cultural systems by infusing shared symbols with meaning that is specific and powerful within the culture. Nothing could be more true than with games, and to tie back in to money, and currencies, and all of that, I'd like to run through my introduction to digital economies in games.

I think for many there's a notion that crypto was the first to come along and enable the buying and selling of digital things, but anyone who has played a multi-player game knows that people were trading the bits representing swords and guns long before Satoshi's paper. My first introduction to that was people trading equipment in the text-based MUD Gemstone on AOL. But the perfect example came later when Wizards of the Coast brought Magic: the Gathering Online.

The digital cards of MODO (the DO stands for Digital Objects so you know for sure computers are involved). MODO lets users trade their cards for other cards, or for event tickets. Tickets as a currency might sound familiar .

Now let me tell you, to people who do not play and/or collect magic cards, there is little in this world that holds value less than those cards. But to those of us who do, cracking a Garruk or Jace is the goods. And that is a cultural system of symbols infused with power by the participants in the system.

Now remember in Creating A Cultural System we talked about infusing these symbols a priori and a posteriori. Magic provides a very interesting example of this because its cards are given meaning _both_ a priori and a posteriori. And that's super cool for the economics of games since it means that things you own today may be worth more in the future. And that's probably worth looking into so let's talk for a sec about Meta-Gaming As A Cultural System.