Scott and I have been chatting a bit about economic simulation trading games. DrugWar style trading games are popular in space- buy low, fly somewhere else, and sell high. Sometimes, as you buy and sell goods, the prices fluctuate. But I got to thinking about what is intrinsically fun about these systems and figured we could improve on them.

Trading is often looked at a means to an end. Players will engage in it as a way to make money even if they don’t enjoy it. The players that do enjoy it consider finding the good trade routes to be the fun part; it’s a bit of a discovery. Theoretically, the execution of the trade could be fun, evading pirates to get to the place to sell the goods, but I’ve never seen that work out. (I’d love some examples if anyone has some). Instead either the risks were way too high and the rewards were small, like in Eve Online, or most routes were basically riskless, like in Escape Velocity. I guess this is compounded by the fact that the ships with sufficient cargo space to trade profitably also were nearly weaponless and too slow to really evade any enemies in a fun way. Anyway, once you found the profitable path, you’d mindlessly repeat the route, not really generating any fun.

So our ideas centered around making trading into a mechanism that was fun by itself. How could we make something like trading an active action that feels like a minigame?

A few possibilities include:

Players killing pirates and other ships can occasionally collect special items that can be sold somewhere in particular for pretty good profit. So you can farm these faction ships and get a decent profit per hour. These might include killing pirates for the “Bavarian Flu Antidote”. If you mouseover this item (or something) it will direct you to the planet of Bavaria, where the antidote sells very nicely! In this case, you can probably figure it out planet it’s from given the name. You’re basically unprompted here, but there’s still a clear thing to do.

We can also do lightweight quests involving item exchanges. You might stop at a station where a man says he’s looking for some Belgian Crystals. You don’t have any, but the spot is marked on your map. Later when you find the Belgian crystals, you’ll know where to deliver them later. This is much more lightweight than traditional quests: “Start text at a location, specified action, return to location, quest completion paragraph.”

I am also still thinking about other mini-game like activities (although I think thats a poor way of explaining what I have in mind). I wouldn’t want to actually incorporate a separate puzzle game into the game, but something we can integrate with the game itself. I’d love to hear more ideas of tightly integrating trading and quests into the action of the game.