Universal Basic Income

The emancipatory Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) is defined by the following four criteria: universal, individual, unconditional, high enough to ensure a dignified existence and participation in society. An Unconditional Basic Income or a “Citizen’s Income” is a guaranteed income, given to all in addition to any other income they might receive. By advancing equality and economic participation while enabling simpler welfare systems, UBI leads to a fairer and more efficient society.

European Citizens’ Initiative for an Unconditional Basic Income

The idea behind basic income is that people do create wealth. Not just certain categories of people: all of them. This is true because wealth is not a measure of assets, but ultimately a measure of human activity. Human activity produces wealth in many forms: goods, food, service, constructions, ideas, knowledge, art, entertainment, care, love, you name it. Their value can only benefit other humans, and be transferred to them. Money is just a medium that translates their value into a convenient abstraction that fluidifies exchanges when required. But, really, money has no existence of its own, it is not a thing people make.

For me, money is like blood irrigating the body, it’s a flux. Flowing blood allows vital exchanges between billions of cells in a sustainable cycle of co-dependancy. Blood must be evenly distributed and in constant flux in order to maintain a healthy organism. Blocked or accumulated, blood will impeach cells to deliver their full potential, to great danger for the whole organism. In that sense, the whole economy of the body aims to ensure a constant and sufficient supply of blood to each cell in order to thrive.

The industrial era invented salaried jobs to allocate money in exchange for much needed human labor: productivity was low and needs, immense. Today, productivity is immense and needs must be “synthesized” to justify an ever increasing production. From being a mean to being an end, it took 150 years for jobs to acquire the status of a dogma that is now even morally reprehensible to contest. According to the dogma, having jobs is the only legitimate way to get— “Make”, mind you!—money, thus, the logic goes, production must be increased to create jobs, and to fight poverty.

But the fact is that XIXth-century-style jobs are disappearing quickly due mainly to technology: productivity increases at such a pace that less human labor is required to produce far more! With jobs scarcity comes unemployment, with unemployment comes poverty and other calamities. But it is only because jobs are considered the sole morally legitimate source of money that unemployment creates poverty. While jobs continue to evaporate, however, wealth is still being created in increasing quantity thanks to dramatic productivity gains allowed by technology, and to our seemingly relentless urge, as humans, to produce wealth in all its forms.

Poverty is a societal outcome

we tend to analyze as a moral issue,

instead of a design flaw.

In games, players don’t need to show tokens of morality and skill in order to participate in the economy. Having a healthy and happy population in the game economy automatically multiplies opportunities to generate and transfer value to the publisher. The publisher’s job is to devise mechanics and opportunities to turn people into happy wealth creators, and to convert a substantial part of this voluntary human activity into real-world value (money).

Business savvy and good game design taught game publishers this simple equation: More People + More Happiness = More Wealth.

To increase the rate of conversion, you need a numerous, active and happy population of players. In all logic, it seems insane to impoverish and harass players to the point of not being able to participate in the economy. Poor and unhappy players would do the only thing in their power: make trouble or migrate. Two avenues that impoverished people tend to follow in real life too — at considerable risks for themselves and for their home countries — and a societal outcome we tend to analyse as a moral issue instead of a design flaw.

That’s the reason why all free-to-play games provide players with a steady and unconditional Basic Income. They don’t have to earn it nor claim it. Most of the time this UBI is allotted in Energy, which is the currency that buys participation in the economy.

Furthermore, someone who doesn’t participate will accumulate Energy over time as an incentive to return and continue participating. This is somewhat the opposite of our real world approach, where people who do not have jobs, voluntarily or not, are punished by being deprived of the basic means to participate again.

The amount of Energy players can own, whether by waiting long enough or through continuous winning streaks, is generally capped in most games. Again, Energy cannot be used to buy anything else in the game. It means that patience and hard “work” reap similar rewards in terms of right to participate, but not when it comes to consumption potential: decent living conditions are guaranteed, but superfluous things and status symbols can be acquired if these are priorities for the player. It also means that laziness, inadequacy or lack of skill are not punished: everybody gets an equal and unconditional right to participate in the game economy, increasing, as a beneficial side effect, opportunities for the game publisher to collect real money out of a very fluid cycle of in-game money.

During my tenure as UX Design manager at Electronic Arts, I was amazed at how deeply insightful game designers are, how they translate observations of the real world into virtual ones. But are these worlds really more virtual than the real one? When it comes to the economy, money and human participation, they should probably not be considered as fundamentally different.

G.T.

Many thanks to Andrea and Bruno for their edits.

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