No Man’s Sky, the most anticipated game of 2016, is coming out next week.
If you haven’t heard about the game, let me give you a quick overview. You start on a random planet, your goal is to reach the center of the universe, while exploring, trading, and surviving on foreign terrain.
The excitement about this game is that you explore the unknown. The game is an open world which means you can do whatever you want, you don’t even have to follow the main objective of the game (reaching the center).
The game world is procedurally generated – the computer creates the objects on its own, by following parameters set in advance and following a general logic. The world is huge, that the posibillity of you meeting another human player is so slim, that this multiplayer game is more like a single player game. The game’s universe has over 18 quintillion planets – over 18,000,000,000,000,000,000, that’s a lot of zeros.
The game incorporates different species, life forms, its’ own periodic table, and most importantly – its’ own economy. This is the interesting part – the game currency is “Units” and this is what you use to buy & trade ships, items, tech, etc.
How is that even possible?
Looking at our tiny, tiny planet (relatively speaking), we have about 180 currencies just in this planet… Now thinking in a 18 quintillion universe, I’d assume there will be many more currencies rather than just one global currency.
The reason we have different currencies is that the governments want to control the influx of the currency, along with disputes that will rise upon merge of all the currencies. Back to the game – there should be quite a few factions\races spread across the universe, and one would expect that each of them would want their own currency in order to have more control over the market trades in their territory.
But, taking the game theory here – Won’t each race just flux their own currency towards foreign races when they come to trade? The universe is so vast, that the distance that one must pass to find a different territory would require him to buy fuel\supplies\ammo. If each race will treat every other race currency with extreme high inflation, there will be no trade. Also, it would be a pain to maintain stable exchange rates across those distances.
This is the reason I think that the single currency may exist, and it may also apply to our planet, if for example, a currency like the BitCoin becomes the sole currency.
What do you think?
Should more currencies exist at such large scales or is the single currency the most logical idea?
Please write in the comment section below your thoughts on this, I’d love to get your input.
See you in the next post,
Dekel
