Bay 12 Games Forum

So we have a few options, I think.

It could be a world with some form of easily harvested, highly concentrated energy in abundance that made for really easy technology advance without much specialization.  Wouldn't need much sophistication to make modern things happen.  Just brute force energy.

It could be a culture that has maintained from its beginnings a high degree of mutualism.  People don't trade so much as give freely to anyone who needs something, with the expectation that they'll do the same in return later.  Things aren't assigned value in the sense that they are now.  If somebody needs something and you are able to share, you do.

It could be a people that never spread out after they came into being.  A race who formed one tribe that never splintered and advanced together as one unit with a centrally planned economy, so that there was never trade.  Could be some form of hive creature.  Could be a very intelligent race that was created artificially and kept confined in a limited space, but otherwise left to do its own thing... like an entire species stuck in a sort of ant farm/Truman Show scenario.

Why not all three, to improve the chances of it happening?
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Okay, now can we get back to the video games, or have we exhausted our ideas on that front?

Currency has three characteristics that it needs, to be a currency:
1--It must be a unit of account (e.g, a measure you use to compare prices)
2--It must be a store of value (e.g, a way to store money for a while)
3--It must be a standard of exchange (e.g, something anyone will accept)

That's a bit simplified, but you get the idea.

Crops can usually be given good units of account, but not always (not all apples are equal, for instance). They are (almost) never a good store of value. They are consistently a good standard of exchange, but only because people need to keep eating them, which violates the idea of a standard of exchange (e.g, Alice accepts Bob's $5 bill because Alice knows Charlie will accept it).

((I'm so killing anyone who keeps making jokes about piecewise's interpretation of my failure.))

I vote, convince the kid that the master won't believe his story (because wizards are so arrogant, and he'll assume the kid summoned a demon, and won't change his mind) and so he needs to hide us. Us meaning our demon, not the demon and the kid.

It's the New Year--Granite 1--so I'm organizing a party at the well. Me and these ghosts--Melbil needs sleep and Zulban's processing adamantine. Still, this isn't so bad, I'm the life of the party!
Did I really just say that?
Zulban joined the party, though. She left a couple of times for food and alcohol, but I didn't! Then she went to plant seeds; it had been a couple weeks, so I decided the party's over. Time to work on stockpile records; I figure out EXACTLY how much we have of everything except rocks. We don't have much more than a couple dozen of anything except body parts, bodywear, footwear, and rocks (and a lot of that--aside from the rocks--is topside).

Why do the ghosts follow me? They're obsessed with me. They never haunt the others as much, and not at the same time like they do to me. And then computer malfunctions eat my save. Yay.

Sorry about not playing for a while.

i don't disagree that trade is a human construct, i postulate that money is a natural consequence of trade. this is "barter world", not "centrally planned economy world", trade is implied to be a thing in this hypothetical universe.
also, before they were an empire with centrally planned economy... they weren't. so trade and commodity currencies might have been abolished or made obsolete some before, making the lack of trade the unnatural thing, not money.

Or maybe currency didn't exist there in the first place?

The thing is, people have been looking for a society for decades that has a real barter economy, and it just doesn't exist. If they trade, they generally have currency.

Note that the currency doesn't have to be physical; it's just a unit of account. The famed islanders of Yap, for example, use those giant stone rings; but they don't actually move them around. Rather, everyone knows everyone else, or just about, so it's not the stone that moves around but who owns the stone.

Or, take medieval Wales. Medieval Wales, like most medieval states, had almost no actual currency floating around. Still, there are medieval Welsh lawbooks detailing exact values for everything in a home, from pans to floorboards- not so that they could be bought with money, which almost nobody had, but rather so that you could get exact restitution for them if they were stolen or destroyed. Even in a world without physical currency, there will still be currency!

Trade came before currency. Trade does not imply currency. If I give a friend a book or something in exchange for, um...something else, I don't need to be considering the monetary values of each. I just trade. You don't need currency for trade any more than you need language for a brain.

as for gm foods,
NO TESTING IS REQUIRED.
really. according to the FDA a gm food is identical to a non gm food.

Then explain this. It's possible I misremembered--I read it a while ago.

You are on an infinite, featureless plain.

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