Some of my favorite video games tend to fall into the resource or time management genre (such as Stardew Valley and Satisfactory), and in playing through them, despite their differing styles and genres (Stardew Valley is a slow-paced, pixel-art farming game, while Satisfactory is a futuristic, analytical factory-building game), I’ve come to notice a few shared economic principles within them, from simple concepts like the ones of incentive and trade-off to more complex ideas like the elasticity or inelasticity of demand.
In the case of trade-offs and incentives, those two concepts tend to be the foundation of just about every and any time or resource management game. Trade-offs usually include in-game currency versus better materials or production upgrades, or the cost of filling up production queues for specific buildings as opposed to leaving them free and losing an opportunity for more production while also providing space for unexpected but potentially necessary output. When looking at incentives, there are such concerns as which quest, reward, and/or unlockable is worth more to the player. Concerns like this can lead to completely different play styles depending on what any individual player deems more or most important.
On the other hand, time and resource management games provide an interesting example of what could happen with complete inelasticity of demand and high elasticity of supply. In most resource and time management games, demand for products and materials is completely inelastic; certain things can only be made, and certain quests can only be completed with a certain number of specific materials, nothing more, nothing less, and there is no space for any kind of substitutions. However, there are plenty of ways to get said supplies and materials to fulfill the necessary requests. Therefore, the supply is somewhat elastic.
Situations like these do not often occur in real life, but games like these do provide an interesting example of what can happen with such an interesting hypothetical, which could, in turn, provide interesting ideas on how to deal with more common economic scenarios in real.
So, I suppose Economics is not just everywhere, but in the words of our textbook authors Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Economics is also fun (Cowen, et al., 2020).
References
Cowen, T., & Tabarrok, A. (2020). Modern Principles of Economics (5th Edition). Macmillan Higher Education. https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781319329464
As someone who as played Satisfactory, I can certainly agree that the game uses an incentive-tradeoff system as its core design, in a way that loosely mirrors reality. While playing, you find yourself consistently wanting to automate processes or boost their efficiency, but this comes at the tradeoff of higher material costs for these better machines. As such, the player has to decide whether it is economical to attempt to upgrade just yet. Of course, tthe decision of whether or not someone wants to suffer through games like these is an elasticity statistic of its own.