Entry posted by Troacctid
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Let me start by saying I happen to have a high-school economics textbook handy, and I've been reading through it a lot lately. (Why? Because I'm in high school and I'm taking an economics class. Don't look at me like that. Geez.) The more I go through these basic economic concepts in the first few chapters, the more I find myself thinking, "Yup, that's just like in Runescape." Does that make me weird, a good critical thinker, or both? An economics professor might say it's because you can apply economics everywhere, and my initial thought is, "Yeah, you keep telling yourself that." But it's true. You can't go two paragraphs in this thing without a Gielinorian analogue.
Look, here's an excerpt right out of the first page of the first section of the first chapter:
"To look at the world economically, we can focus on the decisions that people make. You, for example, have to decide what to do with your time--go to a movie or study for a test. Businesses have to decide how many people to employ and how much to produce. A city government may have to decide whether to spend its budget to build a school or a park."
And in my head I'm thinking, "Runescape players have to decide whether they want to go PVPing, level their skills, or quest."
Look, right in the second section. Opportunity cost. Seems like nobody understands opportunity costs in Runescape. Turns out it really is one of the first things they teach you in Economics 101. "Every decision we make involves trade-offs." the textbook offers. "For example, if you choose to spend more time at work, you give up watching a movie or going to a baseball game." Or if you choose to mine pure essence, you can't use that time to train your runecrafting.
I have this urge to just re-write an entire chapter of the textbook using only example from Runescape. So many players have no idea how to apply basic economic principles. It would be so informative and relevant, and yet...so uninformative and irrelevant.
Maybe I should. Maybe I should just write a whole essay on this crap. Maybe I should show it to my teacher. Extra credit?
Students always complain how this stuff isn't useful in real life. Maybe not, but at least it's useful in video games.
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