Links For Me: Rivalry (Economics)

Rivalry (Economics)

A brief Wikipedia article describing a type of economic concept. Rivalrous goods are goods that cannot be consumed by more than one user at a time, but can be reused. I suppose this is supposed to fit with our concept of someone "owning" a planet in the game, by laying claim to it and controlling all it's resources, but also having the capability to be taken over by someone else.

It also goes into the opposite of rival goods, which is non-rival... something that can be enjoyed by many people at the same time. The idea that was brought up in presentations of planets forming get-together chat rooms probably fits with this concept, but I think kind of goes against the idea of exploration and finding those out-of-the-way places that Jasper and I are trying to bring across. Sites like Facebook and MySpace encourage you to go where all your friends are - when have you ever seen these sites encourage you to find people that hardly relate to you at all and figure them out?

I think social networking is great and all, but it doesn't really require you to step very far from your comfort zone, and it sorts of builds the expectation that every site should follow the same rules. Hopefully we can break out of this mentality of clustering together and encourage people to spread out a lot more.