Hi everyone, the MC Cockshott experiment (we will incorporate Hanel’s ideas in the future) has gone through four rounds, and several lessons and experiences have been summarized. I will now outline them one by one.
Lesson 1: Insufficient Active Participants
The number of active participants in the experiment has generally ranged between 8-15, with peaks close to 20. However, this number is still insufficient for the experiment’s needs. The specific reasons are:
- Many players are unsure of what to do on the server.
- To simulate reality, the server has added many challenging mods, such as environmental pollution.
- Due to the difficulty, players need more guidance, but the server lacks a proper tutorial system.
- Insufficient promotion of the server.
These factors combined have resulted in low active participation and a continuous loss of players, forcing each experiment round to end after about half a month.
Solutions:
- Change the experimental design approach. Going forward, the server itself will be treated as a laboratory rather than an experiment. We will continue designing a series of short-term experiments to test various components of Cockshott’s theory. Between these short-term experiments, players can choose whether to continue playing on the server. However, we will more actively “direct” players during each experiment to test if the experiment’s goals can be achieved.
- Before each experiment begins, clearly define the objectives, process, methods, and expected duration. Specifically, the necessary technical tools (such as the shop system) should be prepared in advance. We also need to tell these clearly to the players so they understand what to do on the server during the experiment.
- Improve the gaming experience by removing some secondary but challenging mods, such as environmental pollution, from the current server setup.
- Increase the server’s promotional efforts.
Lesson 2: Difficulty in Establishing a Consumer Goods Market
One of the goals of the server is to implement a Cockshott-style consumer goods market. However, during the experiments, players tended to build physical warehouses and store or retrieve products from them—essentially bypassing the market in favour of a form of “primitive communism.” The reasons for this are:
- The existing sign shop system in the server requires each player to understand how to set up a sign shop.
- However, building a warehouse only requires a few players.
- Other players can then free-ride, abandoning the shop system.
- As a result, all players tend to favour a direct, warehouse-based distribution according to need rather than using the consumer goods market to distribute items (which is unlikely in reality and prevents the server from testing the sustainability of Cockshott’s mechanism).
Improvements:
- Develop a one-click shop system: Pressing a hotkey will bring up a virtual shop transaction window, making the cost of building a warehouse higher than using the one-click shop. This will encourage all players to favor shop transactions over warehouse storage.
After discussing the lessons, let’s move on to the experiences.
Experience 1: How to Achieve Social Division of Labor
The experiments have shown that there are several paths to achieving division of labor on the server:
- Geographically separating industrial and agricultural zones, thereby creating a division of labor.
- Allowing a division of labor to form spontaneously.
- Consciously organizing multiple workgroups, each responsible for different tasks (similar to different projects within a company), and establishing a central institution for coordination.
The experiment shows that the third path is the most suitable, and players tend to be more satisfied under this system.
Experience 2: Balancing Realism and Playability
The experiments indicate that realism and playability are often in conflict: as one increases, the other decreases. Therefore, in the upcoming experiments, the server will focus more on balancing the two. Specifically:
- Remove some secondary mods that negatively impact the player experience, such as environmental pollution.
- Add more entertainment mods to the server, such as chess or movie-watching.
- Establish a tutorial system for new players.
What’s Next: The Fifth Experiment
The next step for the server is to conduct the fifth experiment.
Experiment Objective: To test whether the Cockshott system’s labor voucher accounting system, income distribution system, and consumer goods market can operate sustainably after being established.
Experimental Methods:
- Input-output accounting plugin.
- One-click shop.
- Workgroup system.
Experiment Process: Test the stability of the Cockshott system through production, distribution, and consumption on the server with the three methods working in tandem.
Expected Duration: 15 days.