Kickstarter

What is Eunomi? 

Eunomi is a massively-multi-player on-line game that simulates the workings of the real-world global economy. When the game begins, players take charge of one of the hundreds of the country-like "domains". Each player manages the construction, production, transportation, and consumption of material resources and human services in his or her domain. Players can negotiate, trade, and form alliances with each other; and compete and cooperate for periodic real-world rewards based on the well-being of their people.

The power of modern servers allows Eunomi to be extremely disaggregated. There are over 200 different types of resources in the game, including many different types of structures, agricultural products, minerals, intermediate materials, and products and services to produce and consume. There are over nine million places on the Eunomi game board, which is a representation of the surface of the earth. There's no upper limit to the number of players, or to the richness and complexity of contracts, alliances, and the division of labor. 

To get a sense of the detail in Eunomi, here's a population density image for the San Francisco Bay Area:

Players acquire their domain in Eunomi through an auction, where they bid real-world money that will later be used to supply the periodic rewards. Once the game stabilizes, players will be able to cash-out some or all of their in-game assets through auctions.

In Eunomi, most in-game transactions are "escrowed" by the server. Once both parties to a transaction have agreed on the terms of trade, the server executes the transaction. 

An Instance Model.

Eunomi is designed so that any number of "instances" of the world can exist at the same time. Each instance, including all the players and the databases, are completely separated from, and independent of, each other instance. Instance 0 will be the first, and it is, formally speaking, the beta version. With your help, it will be launched this summer. It will run continuously and indefinitely, unless its players decide to shut it down and liquidate their assets in the game. It will be populated entirely by Kickstarter backers, or those to whom a backer transfers their "seat at the table". Instance 1 will open as soon as any issues discovered in the running of Instance 0 are resolved, hopefully by this fall.

The Instance model allows ongoing improvement in the way the world is represented and played. For example, Instance 0 includes the possibility for all forms of "trade war", but not "hot" war, which will be implemented in subsequent instances. Also, there's just one global in-game currency in Instance 0. But in subsequent instances players will be able to create and manage their own currencies. Instance 0 launches with 292 initial "domains", each operated by a single player. But the Eunomi “instance-generating machine” can generate instances that start out with more or fewer domains, and with a rich division of labor within each domain. Custom instances, designed to test specific hypotheses, can also be created. Instances with alternate initial data and/or narrative context (eg. medieval or interplanetary) are also possible.

The History of Eunomi.

The idea for Eunomi arose a few years ago. I had a large and diverse body of economic data which I had collected while traveling around the world a few years earlier, and I was trying to decide how to use it. Finding lots of other data posted online and in the public domain, mostly by government and meta-government agencies (such as the UN, the OECD, etc.), I felt that an integrated, organized, curated database containing this data, open to the public for free use, might be a worthwhile pursuit. But then I remembered Ender's Game, the novel by Orson Scott Card, and it hit me: Why not embed all the data I can get my hands on in a world-economy game, where people could play the role of a leader whose actions affect the well-being of millions of others? A giant open sandbox for multilateral economic management. I’ve been working on it ever since. 

It took a lot longer than I expected to marshal all the necessary data and integrate it into a coherent dynamic model of the world economy, and especially one which would satisfy my colleagues in the economics profession, but I think I've succeeded. And it's almost ready to open for business.

The future of Eunomi.

Web design and development standards have advanced a lot since I started work on Eunomi. By today's standards, the interface I built is a bit old-school. It's also not particularly mobile-friendly. And the back-end needs the hand of someone with experience tuning industrial-strength databases. These are skills I just don't have. 

So I need some help. I need a small team of developers to finish coding, testing, tuning, and decorating the game. So far, I've recruited two. Laci Videmsky is a seasoned designer who had a hand in Diaspora. You can see some of his work at: http://doworkshop.com/work. Here's one of his comps for Eunomi:

Brian Jones is a veteran back-end guy with real world experience in banking, nuclear power plants, and MUCKs too! You can't beat a combination like that. We could use the help of others. All the funds raised through Kickstarter will be used to pay Laci, Brian, and other freelance developers. The more you back us, the better the Eunomi experience will be for you and other players.

Instance 0 will be hosted to the web for at least one year, beginning this summer, exclusively for Kickstarter backers and their friends. Once the game has stabilized and we've identified and fixed any problems, possibly as soon as this fall, we'll begin to release additional, fresh instances of the world, each with new features. The revenue model for these will be subscription rather than advertising.

 The Rewards.

The Eunomi backer rewards are designed to kickstart a community of Eunomi players. I believe there's nothing I can offer that's more valuable than a ground-floor membership in this community. If you want t-shirts or other Eunomi gear, let me know. If there's enough demand, I'll happily add them to the rewards.

In addition to the rewards listed for each backer level, all backers at the $25 level or higher will get the opportunity to post an image, a string, and a link in the Eunomi Backer's room. The size of your Backer Room "plaque" will be proportional to the size of your contribution. The room will be accessible to all Instance 0 and Instance 1 (and maybe beyond) players and spectators.  

Please note that if you back Eunomi at $50 or more, you get two player seats in Instance 0, one before the starting auction, and one after. Higher-level backers also get one or two seats in Instance 1. All player seats are transferable, so you can give them to friends and family.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you for supporting Eunomi.