Investment Game

Software	An object oriented language, preferably with good GUI tools
Covers	Simulation of complex systems, economics, object oriented design
Skills Required	Programming, interest in games, interest in economics and current affairs.
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ?? Programming ???

Brief Description

The aim of the project is to develop a computer game in which the player makes various kinds of financial investments, where the prices of assets can rise and fall, and the investments can produce returns that depend on circumstances and on what sorts of investments they are. The aim is to produce as realistic a simulation as possible of the kinds of investment decisions people actually get to make.

This will involve creating a game architecture and an interface through which the players can buy and sell stocks, bonds or other assets, receive dividends and other payouts, and review their holdings and their current values.

The game should also generate events that cause particular assets to gain or lose value. These might have temporary or permanent effects, and affect the success or failure of individual assets or entire industry sectors.

The game will need rules and randomization mechanisms for how the political and economic events are generated, and rules for how the values of particular assets are affected both by the events and by each other. The challenge in the project is both in having a sophisticated set of rules that mimic real economic life as well as possible, and in having an architecture that enables the addition and modification of rules in an easy and efficient manner to enable the development of a sophisticated game. Ideally the generation and modification of rules for economic behaviour should be supported by a rule editing interface that is both easier to use and requires less technical skill than editing code.

Ideally the project should consider what assumptions about how the economy works are built into a particular set of rules, and/or into the game architecture, and whether these are realistic, or politically slanted in some direction, or whether the assumptions or biases can be varied.

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