On the utility of commodities and societal influence

[Bob the terrorist]

I published this in two parts, so it may be slightly disjointed.

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Part one: "On commidity utility"

Time for an in-depth look at just what utility is in erepublik, in a purely ingame sense. As the hospital rules have changed, this is now possible - before, the unique and 'free' role of the hospital would mess up any real analysis. Before we start, let's see the definition so we know what we're talking about here:
Utility

Utility is a measure of the relative satisfaction from, or desirability of, consumption of various goods and services.

In an ingame sense, I would define utility as anything that provides an increase in the power of the player. Note that this is somewhat of an assumption, as you simply cannot identify wants that apply to every individual. Nevertheless, I would term it as the most common desired outcome for erepublik players. In case you don't know what I mean, by power, look here:
Power

Power is a measure of an entity's ability to control the environment around itself, including the behavior of other entities.

Basically, the erepublik player seeks in some way to have control over the game - either individual control over their own citizen, or societal control (most commonly influence) over a party, a country, or even a group of nations - any body that contains more than one erepublik player. Obviously, the only way to have any kind of power in erepublik, is for the player to stay alive ingame. Thus there is a requirement for the means of subsistence. Most commonly food, the means of subsistence are the products ingame that keep wellness from falling to 0. Staying alive is the primary requirement of all erepublik citizens.

The means of subsistence must provide an average daily increase in wellness at n wellness at least equal to the average daily fall in wellness.

n = maximum daily fall in wellness

Wellness will constantly fall by 5 points per day, unless ingame products are consumed by the citzen - while usually this is food, it is technically feasible for wellness to be kept up using gifts. However, purely in terms of productivity points, Q1 food is always more efficient than gifts, and higher quality foods at wellnesses below 100 are almost always more effective than gifts as well.

Anyway.

To stave off eDeath, then, it is necessary to consume goods. There are two ways of having the capability to consume - either buying off the marketplace, which requires currency, or having goods donated to you, which requires some degree of societal influence. The first method is by far the most common, although there are some kept alive by the second method, notably Dio Brando, for example. All of the time, though, to have currenct you initially must work, or be donated to by someone else who has worked (and acquired their goods off the marketplace to begin with). The act of working is where we get our daily wellness loss from, and it is always equal to the quality of the company worked in, once we accept that working provides more value to the player than the wellness lost in working is worth. If this isn't the case, then you need to move company

So, our citizen is working in order to survive - that's that most fundamental need taken care of. Now comes the citizen's self interest to expand their power in some way. There are two types of power a player can exert:
Direct power - the actions directly under control of the player, ingame
Indirect power - the measure of their influence on other players

Damage
The most obvious step to increase direct power is to train every day - this adds on another 1 to the daily wellness loss, and requires the worker to make 1 wellness worth of wages every day to utilise this. Training adds a degree of potential direct power, in the form of damage, to the citizen, although it is always relative to the combined damage of anyone else fighting in a particular battle. Damage, then, is the form of direct power that is available to all citizens, in greater or lesser amounts. However, since it is available to all with a 'cap' on effort expended (you can only train or work once per day), individuals do not generally use this form of direct to power to great effect, unless their ability to do damage is much greater than the average (this applies to most older players), or they are tanked by some form of collective body - usually a government. Having a higher capability is usually a prerequisite for this, so the two go hand in hand. However, the act of tanking generally shifts the balance of power from the individual and to the collective sponsoring the individual.

But what increases the capability to do damage of an errepublik citizen? Two things - strength, which can be increased every day at the cost of wellness loss or gold (more on gold later), and weapons, which is the most common form of the use of surplus value (in this case defined as the amount of labour expended, minus the labour cost for maintaining wellness). As should be plain to most people, Q1 weapons are the most effective use of surplus value to increase damage, unless a player has access to an amount of goods equal to more than f Q1 weapons, where f is the number of fights planned in that day.

There is another form of direct power - ingame political power. However, it will not be discussed here, because it relies on an accumulation of indirect power to be achieved.

Gold

Gold is somewhat of a special case, as a commodity. Despite it being - much like in real life - used as a foundation for value, I would disagree on this. Gold is a commodity, similar to others. However, it is a special case because the rate of production of gold is largely fixed, and labour cannot be redirected to produce it. I would say that the decreased gold prices of commodities across the board (house prices in gold are in the process of falling; I had expected the effect to just be more delayed) reflect, in my opinion, an increase in the exchange value of gold. This is because 'dirty lana' increased gold consumption, but the supply of gold cannot react to market forces and increase to compensate for it. Since gold is more valuable now, there is less 'lana-ing' going on, making gold more stable than before. The unique stability of gold is due to it's constant supply relative to the number of players, which places it very close to the exchange value of commodities, which is relative to the amount of labour time required to produce them.

But I'm getting sidetracked. Gold can be used for purposes of direct power through a few ways:

1. 'Lana-ing' to improve the strength, and thus the direct power of the player
2. Investing - as a commodity with a limited supply, and a demand for companies borne out of constant population growth, there is a greater or lesser amount of labour power to be extracted from workers through control of the market, which makes more 'damage increasing' commodities available for the capitalist (note: I consider there to be little to no difference between 'investing in' and 'owning' a company, although the latter also includes the payment of doing the actual job of running the company)
3. Tanking

All of these measures can in some way increase the direct power of the player. Gold has, in my opinion, better applications for increasing indirect power, but that's a different story.

I'll follow up with an analysis of indirect power in erepublik later.



Part 2: "Influence"

Or: how game mechanics trend towards nationalism, war and statist conformity, and what is the alternative?


This is a continuation of the previous article. I had just finished on most of:

Direct power - the actions directly under control of the player, ingame

Now it's time to move on to -

Indirect power - the measure of their influence on other players

Indirect power comes from some form of co-operation with other players - since a player will always act in his own interests, it requires some sort of common goal - or to clear that up, the perception of some kind of common goal. Players with similar goals often join together; federate in a free association. We call one of the key forms of these associations parties. I much admire them, y'know.

With the growth of population on erepublik, it becomes no longer feasible to achieve ingame goals by the strength of your citizen alone. Once many citizens are working by the same ingame means toward the same goal, the expenditure of labour becomes socialised in character - it is not so much for the benefit of the individual citizen as for the benefit of the society as a whole. The degree to which this is true increases as tha player's combined power compared to the rest of the association he is involved in declines. As population is constantly growing, the goals of the individual rely more and more on the association and less on his own direct power.

Expanding the size of the association then becomes a more efficient use of time for the player to achieve his goals ingame. This can mean extolling greater efforts from his fellows, or recruiting more players to the his cause. As the game becomes larger, the level of influence the player has becomes much more important than the amount of strength, or working skill. As the association mostly shares the same goals, the way a player rises in influence there is to be seen to be helping to fulfil those goals. Not only does the player have a personal interest in trying to increase the association's chance of success, he also has an interest in doing that to later guide (influence - coercion hardly ever happens in a free association) the course of like-minded people and fulfil his own agenda.

But enough of that. Where does production come into this? Well, as I mentioned in the previous article, the chief - indeed the only - output of ingame labour is damage. Material goods thus become less and less useful for the player, as his own 'output' in damage becomes less and less important relative to the whole. So material goods, on the whole, don't do much for a player in a high population system.

Gold, on the other hand. What an interesting commodity it is. For a start, it has multiple uses - some admittedly a waste of money in most cases (tanking). However, gold has a variable value (dependent on the time spent playing, the degree to which other players increase in strength, and the rate of population growth) to a player for 'Lana-ing', although I would argue that it is actually quite small. Companies can also be bought, although the rate of return will generally depend on the competition by other players. Basically, the only way you can do better than other players in your use of gold is if you know how best to use it.

Which brings us to what is in my opinion the most productive use of gold, although again depending on competition - adverts. They are a tool for players to persuade others, inform others, and in turn, expand the influence of the player. Pretty useful things, really.

But.

Don't give up reading yet; there's still quite a way to go. I mentioned before that players must be persuaded to support a goal - while this is true, there is a bit of a 'cheat' in persuasion - the State. For some reason, players equate the interests of the State with their own. These interests are always in conflict with the interests of other States, which are also populated by players who believe the State's interests are their own. The State has a bit of a 'cheat' to garner support - real life nationalism, and a set of game mechanics that reward fighting against the targets of the State. In short, eRepublik creates an incentive to fight for the State (experience), and real life issues (nationalism) provide an incentive for players to spend ingame resources on increasing their damage.

And that's still not all. As I said, the eRepublik economy's only product, apart from basic subsistence, is damage. Since working takes so little effort and increases your work skill, excess production - which is inevitable - tends to go towards weapons. Since it's a capitalist economy, these weapons must be sold. It's not only real life nationalism - the economy itself needs war to function. It's almost as if the game was intentionally designed with war in mind, to draw in new players and retain them, taking advantage of real life nationalism . . .

So. The State has a monopoly on the beneficial effects of war, giving the person in control of what the State does with regards to the war module - the CP - great influence on the population. It's a power great enough to even approach authority; those who do not conform are labelled "traitors" - I've seen this on both sides of the Ocean, in the eUS and the eUK. This authority is obtained with indirect influence in mind - a battle of associations to direct the State - the battle of parties to win the CP election. By gaining control of the State, a party (as it tends to share common goals with its successful CP candidate) gains the resource of nationalism to use to whatever end it sees fit, expanding its indirect power. The struggle of parties in eRepublik is essentially a competition of nationalist control of the population. The 'direct power' that seemed so strong to begin with is turned into a socialised characteristic at the command of the State. The only thing that gives someone any real power is influence over a large number of people, influence over the CP, or that position itself.

I feel this situation has negative consequences, really. Promoting nationalism and conformity is bad for society, although the eRepublik admins wouldn't worry about that - it's what we call an externality. So is this situation inevitable, or is there an alternative?

As seems to be inevitable, individual gains and power must be undermined by the growth of population in the game. Some kind of socialised effort is completely unavoidable, but while the nationalistic impulses of real life would slave citizens to the State, there is another way forward. Excess production can be deliberately targetted at bringing down the system. Market forces can be manipulated, markets can be crashed, sectors can be taken over. All this can be done if labour is removed from the service of the State and put instead into the service of the erevolutionary movement. Personal gains are already gone; the only question is, do you want a future of nationalism and war, or of internationalism and solidarity? Capitalism makes war inevitable, and war is the only 'advantage' from it; therefore, it must be removed. Surplus value must be transferred from the production of weapons to the overproduction of other goods. This is the goal of the eCommunist: to smash the system, to unite the workers of the world; to remove the authoritative powers of the State from the game.



And what is the gain, you say? Anything ingame is subjective, really. Also, since the success of the movement is in no way guaranteed as in real life, I could even make the case that it doesn't matter. What I will say, though, is that it will show that humans can transcend the petty bickerings between nations; that we can unite in friendship and solidarity; that a better world is possible.

"We have a new world in our hearts."

- Buenaventura Durruti

[Vincent Nolan]

great articles Mr. Terrorist sir
The challenge with that is, like you said, an externality. How do you convinve the "majority" of players that eRepublik can still be fun without war. What would happen if we succeeded and communism was victorious? What would happen if the machine was broken? Would players quit? Would the admins reset? Would there be a "communist cleansing" in eRepublik where the admins ban us all? Who knows. It seems what we fight for isn't in the interest of the creators of this game and I would be very interested to see how they respond to such a scenario. Good article nonetheless

[TheMerican]

This article is very informative, especially for those new to the study of so-called "eEconomics" and the classes of the game. I think that war can exist without being the main focus of a nation's economy. Thanks to the impending V2, war won't be as profitable anymore, and nations and players will be forced to cooperate more with each other. I think our goal should be to shift the focus of war as a tool for economic growth to one that defends the interests of a nation and its people. Putting war in the hands of people by distributing weapons, building communes that produce these supplies, and practicing gifting is a good way to curtail the influence of major producers in our conflicts.

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