The Stock Market

What it is

The stock market is where the Cartographer's villages trade with one another. Goods produced in one region — shaped by its own ecology, its own actors, its own history — enter a shared high-dimensional space alongside goods from every other region. Buyers and sellers from different villages meet in that space and exchange.

In the current beta, there are no other real villages. In their place, three dummy villages with barter bots behind them provide the market with counterparties. This is clearly represented in the interface — the dummy villages are not pretending to be real, and they behave accordingly. When the regional network scales up, the dummy villages will be replaced by the real thing. The architecture will not change.

The ticker

The market has a live ticker. Anyone who knows anything about financial markets will look at it and know exactly what they are looking at.

This is intentional. The ticker is laid out like a Bloomberg feed — stock symbols, prices, movement. Every product the villages produce sits in the high-dimensional space, and the ticker is the human-readable surface of that space: the prices at which things are currently trading, and the direction they are moving. It is running live and visible in the Cartographer interface.

What it is showing, underneath the familiar format, is the ongoing resolution of the ecology differential described in the pricing section. Where goods are abundant, prices will reflect that. Where goods are rare, prices will reflect that too. The ticker is the shape of the inter-regional economy at this moment.

Developer control: the high-dimensional field

The stock market gives developers and licensees a tool for managing the economy without visibly touching it.

If prices begin to run away — if the emergent economy drifts into territory that would break the experience — a developer can adjust the high-dimensional field that underlies the market. This changes what the space looks like to actors navigating it, and therefore changes how exchanges resolve, without any visible intervention from outside.

From the actors' perspective, something happened to the market. They cannot say what. The field shifted in a way that is felt but not traceable, because it has no traceable cause inside the world. It came from the astrology engine's cousin — an adjustment to the substrate that the village was never going to be able to read, no matter how intelligent its actors become.

This is the same principle as the ecology engine's astrological interventions: the world has a topology, and the topology can be adjusted. Actors navigate the topology; they do not see the topology itself. The stock market is ungameable for the same reason the ecology engine is ungameable. The field is not accessible from inside.

The trader

How individual actors actually access the market, what a trader's role looks like inside the village economy, and how trade executes between regions is covered on the trader page.

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