168. Applying Game Economics to Relationships
Many of the complex systems that developers face in game economies mirror some of the most difficult problems people experience in their personal relationships. Solving one can solve both.
Back in 2005 I formally began developing the technology for game economics, with the first goal of solving the MMO “gold farmer” problem. I had seen this as a mathematical problem with a mathematical solution that I could solve in one year. I was told by many industry leaders (who I had access to because I was a top gaming journalist) that this problem was unsolvable. It turned out that the problem was actually multidisciplinary and much more complex than I had anticipated. The actual solution took me 4.5 years to complete and write, working double full time. So that took me 9 Ramin-years of labor, which might be 15+ years of labor for someone with less specialized knowledge.
I quantify the time here because that concept of effort is key to understanding what game economics is, and how it works. It’s also key to understanding how relationships work. All of us are born with some indeterminate amount of time on Earth, and time passes whether you want it to or not. Thus time is never “wasted” unless you don’t use it in pursuit of your goals, or poorly plan how to meet those goals. Having a goal in life is probably the most important element of success as without it you are a lost soul. Living only for pleasure, a hedonist, is a problematic (but very popular) goal that is self-destructive as I will explain later in this article.
The product of that 9 Ramin-years of labor was Sustainable Virtual Economies and Business Models (2009, unpublished). It was read and authenticated by Professors Mike Zyda and Henry Jenkins, both at USC. Zyda informed me that the paper was worth at least $250,000 USD to Blizzard in that year. Based on that information, I did not publish it and to this day I still have not because the technology it contains has still not been reproduced from any other source. Blizzard still has not seen it as they don’t understand the value of game economies. The last time I was on their campus I tried to explain what game economics was and they were quite rude in telling me they didn’t care about any of that, they just wanted to improve their loot boxes. So they ended up hiring a loot box tech from Plarium and calling them a “Senior Economist”. I say they were rude because they flew me out to California on the pretence of hiring a game economist and while I tried to explain what that was, one of their younger employees made grotesque mouth/lung noises to interrupt me as apparently he had no interest in economics.
I think this event happened in 2017, the same year that Blizzard employee Kerri Moynihan killed herself at work because her male co-workers were sharing pictures of her vagina. Thus while my desire to solve Blizzard’s problems helped shape my identity and the field of game economics, the biggest problems at Blizzard were beyond my ability to solve. This is also relevant to what I am attempting to explain in this article as relationships are what you make them, and with enough understanding you can have superior relationships.
The Fundamentals of Game Economics circa 2009
While game economics has progressed far past what it was in 2009, in 2009 the primary goal was to harden game economies from attack from malicious 3rd parties, often called “gold farmers”. This was big business. Such big business that Goldman Sachs got involved and sent some guy named Steve Bannon to organise their farming operation in 2007. Thus the problem was expanding exponentially even as I was trying to solve it.
The reason all global developers then (and now) failed to solve this problem was because they were using active countermeasures as their remedy. This means that when something goes wrong, you activate some system to neutralize or punish the offender. This is how our whole legal framework is designed world-wide, so it’s natural that humans are wired to think this way. The reason it fails, just like our laws often do, is because it’s not only very expensive to do, but it also generates false positives. Also, cyber criminals can just make more accounts, forcing a perpetual game of whack-a-mole. Real-space criminals do something similar by hiring lawyers and delaying/crippling the legal system so that they are rarely prosecuted successfully. In both cases these are ways of increasing the cost of active countermeasures until it becomes impractical to use them.
This is actually a very smart and effective tactic. It takes advantage of the inherent weaknesses of active countermeasures. But what if we flipped this upside down? What if we designed an economy or even an entire world where it was too expensive to be malicious? Regular people, who don’t have any exceptional mental illness, will still engage in crime because there is an economic incentive. If you remove that incentive, they go do something else. If it’s more efficient to contribute meaningfully to society, than to undermine society with crime, people will do that.
This was the fundamental principle of game economics in 2009, as I designed it, and I call this method passive countermeasures. By removing any incentive for Goldman Sachs or Steve Bannon to attack your economy, they will go do something else. Like attack your Democracy. I haven’t tried to solve Democracy yet, just trying to get game developers to give up their obsolete and harmful technologies is exhausting enough.
With passive countermeasures you don’t have to deal with the fallout from accidentally banning your top players. Since those players play so much, they appear to automation a lot like farming bots. When you ban them, not only do they stop spending, but they can recruit a lot of other people to stop spending. In the process the farmers are making a lot of money and you are spending a lot of money. It fails and that’s why I was told in 2005 that this problem was impossible to solve. I come from the Olympic family. Nothing is impossible. You just have to be willing to work harder than normal people consider possible.
Game Economics Circa 2025
In 2025 games have become Digital Drugs sold by developers who usually just care about making money. Again, while most of these people don’t have an exceptional mental illness, they do have financial motivation. If the system encourages malicious behavior, that’s what you get. I don’t think Digital Drugs are inherently bad, in fact the focus of my research since 2014 has been on developing safe and effective digital drugs.
Scientists can develop drugs that can save a lot of lives, or improve quality of life. Pharmacists and doctors can deliver those drugs to people who need them, safely. But since game developers know they are doing harm, they try to hide it. By forcing this activity “underground” you get street level drug pushers trying to sell anything they can without understanding or even caring about the consequences. This happens because our society is currently designed to promote this malicious behavior.
Explaining how I solved these systems in 2009, or in 2025, is beyond the scope of this article. Since the tech could have dual use applications and could be weaponized, I’m probably not going to disclose how to do it while I’m alive. Maybe I will leave the instructions for later. But again the reason this would be weaponized is because our society is designed to promote this antisocial behavior. Society has to be redesigned before we start injecting powerful dual use technologies (like Digital Drugs or AI) into it otherwise they will be used to harm us.
What I do want you to understand is that Games as a Service in 2025 are digital drugs. So is social media. Casual sex is an analogue drug that is racing towards digitization with the introduction of AI sexual companions and porn. Dating apps, the way that Match.com manipulates them, are also digital drugs.
Our society rewards deploying these digital drugs to harm other people. So that’s how they are being used. Until the rules of society get fixed (and I doubt I’d ever get the authority to help with that), this hazardous environment will become normalized. It has been already, everyone reading this has been harmed already. Probably daily.
Applying Passive Countermeasures to Dating
Today dating is a train wreck. Women engage in casual sex soon after meeting someone then complain that they got “ghosted” afterwards. This implies that they were “investing” (with their bodies) with the goal of getting some sort of reward for it later on. If it was just a consensual no strings attached interaction, there would be no harm no foul if it was not repeated.
Thus women are now very suspicious of men. Likewise men are very suspicious of women. They suspect that they will have to pay for dates (usually true), possibly without “getting anything in return”. Thus men are being just as transactional as women. It is for that reason that I’ve previously described almost all relationships in modern times as transactional. The upside is, you can then apply game theory and economics to these interactions. Also, since the developers of most dating apps are acting maliciously, you can essentially “gold farm” dating apps once you realize how to exploit their economic weaknesses.
But those are all active countermeasures. The real value comes when you use passive countermeasures to remove malicious actors. And trust me, this is not a gender issue. Both men and women are incentivized to harm each other in the current system, so they do. Having a moral code that transcends materialism is not promoted in the system, and thus 99+% of people are incapable of this. Hence, I’m not teaching ethics here.
My goal here is to teach you how to “game” the system to passively eliminate bad actors and get to whatever goal it is that you have in interacting with other people. My focus here is on dating, but it can be extended to any relationship.
Because of games using dopamine driven design, social media also using DDD, dating apps using DDD, and coffee everywhere, people are desensitized to dopamine but are also exhausted and feel like they need ever more dopamine in order to feel anything. In such an environment, it’s healthy to be as bored as possible. Even if you are already addicted, this can give the body time to reset. When you go on a date, 90+% of people will be trying to get food or dopamine or both out of you. You are their next dose.
Slow things down. People who are trying to get something from you likely need whatever that is, immediately. Because they are junkies (addicts, for my non English speaking followers). Take them for a walk. Don’t sleep with them. Be very friendly and listen carefully to their plight and story. These are your Brothers and Sisters, even if they are wayward. If you like them, say so. But don’t turn that first date into a drug dose.
This gives the other person time to actually see you as something other than a dopamine dose or a microtransaction. If that’s not satisfactory to them, they will move on immediately to easier prey. I hate to sound old fashioned, because I’m not. But in this case traditional styles of dating actually work. There might have been a reason that for centuries (once we got past arranged marriages) we had a courting process.
This is an example of a passive countermeasure. You just make it too expensive for people to exploit you and they will go exploit an easier target. Having survived five years of homelessness on the streets of Los Angeles, the same thing applies there. You don’t have to do anything to them. You don’t have to get the Tea app and listen to bitter people who want you to hate everyone before you’ve even met them. The biggest downside here is that Nature can tend to push us to do silly things. And that’s not always a bad thing. So if you feel intense chemistry with someone, it’s okay to show that. But that doesn’t have to be full blown intercourse. Then you’ve just turned something that could be magical into another dose of dopamine. And to the other person, you’ve just turned yourself into a thing, not a person.
This is not to be confused with someone that is just stringing you along while asking you to do something for them. That’s often called “Simping” today. Anyone that’s trying to get you to Simp is just there to exploit you. The most beautiful woman I ever got with was a woman I used to work with at a steak house in Marina Del Rey, when I was 21 years old. Her name was Kelly. A straight up 10. But the next day she started asking me to buy her stuff. I didn’t, and I never got with her again. A few months later she would ask me to move in with her. I said no. I never regretted that decision.
The key thing here is inviting people to be your friend, and making sure they willingly fill that role before you turn each other into objects. Give it a bit of time and all the lies and subterfuge will reveal themselves. If you are unwilling to put this level of effort in (which is just basic human work, nothing Olympic) then why complain that you got the mediocre at best result that matched your sloth. And trust me, there’s a lot of sloth out there that you will have to work through.
The sad truth is that dating apps, marketed as speeding up the dating process, actually slow it WAY down because people have been rewarded for being inauthentic. What has been sped up is your access to your next dopamine hit, which is what turned you into a junkie in the first place. Your Brothers and Sisters are all part of your Tribe. They win when you do. But right now they are just too strung out to think past their next fix. They didn’t create this system, so it doesn’t help the situation by shaming them. Do you, and create a safe place for them to show you who they really are.