If I understand correctly, the cognitive process/bias/heuristic/whatever of “sacredness” is relevant here.
Neither nails nor dollars are sacred so you’re free to trade dollars for nails.
A kidney is sacred, so you can’t trade that for dollars, but you can trade it for another kidney (although such trades still feel a bit weird).
Sacred things are often poorly managed in practice, and sacredness is easy to make fun of, but a decent defense of sacredness might be that it is one of the few widely installed psychological mechanisms in real life for managing the downsides of having markets in things. Thus, properly deployed sacredness might let you have “trade” in one area without ending up with “totalalizing trade”?
In the smaller and hopefully lower stakes world of video games, I think the suggestion would be to have card classes with different trading characteristics.
The lowest class of very non-sacred things could be swapped with extremely low transaction costs within the class and also be tradeable directly for money.
Higher sacredness things would have a separate market, perhaps with transaction costs like needing a purchaseable delivery mechanism or imposing delays so that objects go into limbo after the trade is finalized while “being delivered”. The most sacred things would be “inalienable” so they can’t be traded or given away or perhaps not even be destroyed.
Exactly where sacredness should be deployed in order to maximize fun seems like a deep and relatively unstudied problem.
One place in real life where the inalienability of something has large and substantive differences from jurisdiction to jurisdiction is the question of the rights of artistic creators to their artwork. In some jurisdictions, an artist cannot legally sell their right to veto the use of their artwork if deployed in artistically compromising ways (like use in advertising or political campaigns) after mere copyrights have been sold.
In the US artistic moral rights are not treated as very sacred, and the lack of sacredness in art production is probably part of the US’s cultural dominance a la Hollywood, but it has arguably also had large effects in the lives of artists, visibly so with people like Bill Waterson and Prince.
I think this is a great way of putting the issue. We need more sacredness.
I want my gaming experience to be sacred, and I believe other gamers do as well. Even when I”m competing professionally and keeping the prize money and writing pay in mind, I still want the competition to be sacred. Otherwise it’s just a job and doesn’t pay very well so what’s the point? I’m very much with Price and Bill Waterson. I play my Path of Exile on Solo Self-Find.
At the same time, the challenge and game of assembing one’s collection is also fun, in its own way, for many, and also the way that game companies get paid, which is important; keeping the designers and artists in rent money is already hard enough as it is.
Right now, there are games where everything is alienable (e.g. Magic: The Gathering) and games where everything is inalienable (e.g. Hearthstone/Eternal). Magic does have things you can’t trade, like Pro Points and ratings, at the competitive level, but not before. Having a hybrid system where some things are tradable and some are not makes sense as a starting point. I’m less certain about the idea of semi-alienable objects whose trading you tax/delay but it’s definitely an under-explored space.
If I understand correctly, the cognitive process/bias/heuristic/whatever of “sacredness” is relevant here.
Neither nails nor dollars are sacred so you’re free to trade dollars for nails.
A kidney is sacred, so you can’t trade that for dollars, but you can trade it for another kidney (although such trades still feel a bit weird).
Sacred things are often poorly managed in practice, and sacredness is easy to make fun of, but a decent defense of sacredness might be that it is one of the few widely installed psychological mechanisms in real life for managing the downsides of having markets in things. Thus, properly deployed sacredness might let you have “trade” in one area without ending up with “totalalizing trade”?
In the smaller and hopefully lower stakes world of video games, I think the suggestion would be to have card classes with different trading characteristics.
The lowest class of very non-sacred things could be swapped with extremely low transaction costs within the class and also be tradeable directly for money.
Higher sacredness things would have a separate market, perhaps with transaction costs like needing a purchaseable delivery mechanism or imposing delays so that objects go into limbo after the trade is finalized while “being delivered”. The most sacred things would be “inalienable” so they can’t be traded or given away or perhaps not even be destroyed.
Exactly where sacredness should be deployed in order to maximize fun seems like a deep and relatively unstudied problem.
One place in real life where the inalienability of something has large and substantive differences from jurisdiction to jurisdiction is the question of the rights of artistic creators to their artwork. In some jurisdictions, an artist cannot legally sell their right to veto the use of their artwork if deployed in artistically compromising ways (like use in advertising or political campaigns) after mere copyrights have been sold.
In the US artistic moral rights are not treated as very sacred, and the lack of sacredness in art production is probably part of the US’s cultural dominance a la Hollywood, but it has arguably also had large effects in the lives of artists, visibly so with people like Bill Waterson and Prince.
I think this is a great way of putting the issue. We need more sacredness.
I want my gaming experience to be sacred, and I believe other gamers do as well. Even when I”m competing professionally and keeping the prize money and writing pay in mind, I still want the competition to be sacred. Otherwise it’s just a job and doesn’t pay very well so what’s the point? I’m very much with Price and Bill Waterson. I play my Path of Exile on Solo Self-Find.
At the same time, the challenge and game of assembing one’s collection is also fun, in its own way, for many, and also the way that game companies get paid, which is important; keeping the designers and artists in rent money is already hard enough as it is.
Right now, there are games where everything is alienable (e.g. Magic: The Gathering) and games where everything is inalienable (e.g. Hearthstone/Eternal). Magic does have things you can’t trade, like Pro Points and ratings, at the competitive level, but not before. Having a hybrid system where some things are tradable and some are not makes sense as a starting point. I’m less certain about the idea of semi-alienable objects whose trading you tax/delay but it’s definitely an under-explored space.