We Can Fix That with Data

Earnest Adams has written a piece for Next Generation on “50 Books for Everyone in the Games Industry.” I have a few additions.

See, when I was in high school, I wanted to go into politics. I wanted to be a public policy advisor type, one who pontificated about how things should be. It turned out that college-level political science and economics, at least at my school, were all about math and charts, and at the time, I wasn’t big on math and charts. I switched to an English major and merrily read some Derrida.

Several years later, I ended up pontificating about how things should be, only it was even cooler — I was dictating game rules, where I really define how things are. And it turns out that all that math and all those charts are really interesting and useful. I think I learned a lot about problem analysis with all that literary theory, but I now wish I’d moved forward with the econ department.

Now that I’m trying to catch up, I’m reading economics books and finding them tremendously instructive when it comes to online game design. My job, as an MMO designer, is to get groups of people to do what I want them to do. Economics is the study of human behavior in response to incentives. Bingo!

The new breed of pop economics books have been the best game design books I’ve read. A few you should consider:

• Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt. This is the one that everybody talks about, and it’s for a reason — it’s accessible, easy to read, and looks at interesting problems. I’d like it better if every chapter weren’t prefaced with a quote about how awesome the author is, but hey.
• The Armchair Economist, by Steven Landsburg. This one’s a little older, and has a little more hard econ work. If Freakonomics is a discussion of issues through an economic lens, Armchair Economist is a discussion of economics with issue examples.
• Hidden Order, by David D. Friedman. This one has charts and formula, so it’s quite a bit more hardcore than the others. I must admit that I haven’t finished it, but it appears to be in much the same vein as the prior two books, and is thus probably pretty useful for design.
• Naked Economics, by Charles Wheelan. Naked Economics is a straight-up econ book, unlike the others I’ve recommended. Nonetheless, it’s still very accessible and fun to read. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Later edit: for an example of applying economic analysis to something that doesn’t have to do with, like, the GDP, check out Marginal Revolution’s take on housecleaning. As usual for that blog, don’t miss the comments.