Playing to win, gaming minecraft server economies

Rating :: 4
Completed :: 2025-05-05

Perhaps the most autistic thing I've ever read (this is a compliment), and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It describes someone's journey as they learned to read and manipulate the market economy of a Minecraft server.

Notably, it describes an economic failure where the price of diamonds, the in-game currency's effective value store) plummets thanks to a duping glitch, meaning that all goods subsequently drop in value. The market becomes illiquid, and suddenly everyone is forced back into self-sustenance; you can't sell something you can make for much money at all, so why would you bother? I believe this is an example of deflation and its real-world consequences.

It makes me wonder if all the in-game economies (which are prolific with microtransactions) could help us understand other economic failures.