M.U.L.E.

Everything I know about economics, I learned when I was 10 from a video game called M.U.L.E.

M.U.L.E. is about mining on an alien planet, and there’s a phase where your plots of land generate goods, after which there’s an auction phase:

Sellers are at the top, buyers at the bottom. Here, brown is selling and blue is bidding by walking up the screen toward them (green and red aren’t interested). Their current bid of 75 is represented by a dotted line that moves with them.

When brown likes the price that blue is offering, they walk down the screen. This will create a dotted line for their offer price, and if his sell line meets blue’s buy line, there’s a transation. Simple! But as soon as you introduce two buyers or sellers, well, let’s just say no one in the computer lab at Bloomfield Middle School had any idea what they were unleashing.

Green and purple are both selling, but purple hesitates, because they want a higher price — and as a result, green makes the sale. Blue, buying, also hesitates — and if green runs out of stock, they’re in trouble because they’re going to have to pay purple’s higher price.

Two keyboard keys, four humans, one Apple IIe — all resulting in a shared, visceral experience with supply and demand, and how complex interactions around value and transactions happen.

M.U.L.E. is my north star of trying to help people understand math: if I can make a topic this concrete, you will learn it, you will never forget it, and you will feel a new organizing idea all around you. Your entire world will simply make more sense.

Real learning is moving from “When am I going to use this?”, to, “How did I not see this before?”