Well, played through it and I must say, if everyone in their military is as ludicrously undisciplined as the bunch in that story, it's amazing their little empire-thing hasn't fallen apart long ago. I myself am far from the most disciplined guy, but sheesh, those people make my library department look like a model of heel-clicking obsessive saluters. They squabble more than the kids in a badly run pre-school--while sudden-death deadlines loom. I kept wanting to scream at the screen "Would you idiots focus for five seconds?!"

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The phenomenon you're describing is not the tragedy of the commons. To the contrary, it's a purely market-driven problem. People imagine that "free markets" produce efficient outcomes and "clear" because of the relentless propaganda to that effect, but it isn't the case. All copyright-oriented industries at this point are suffering from serious market failure problems of one sort or another. In most of them the problems are aggravated by the ease and near-free nature of digital copying. At this point, it would probably be better for both artists and consumers if we scrapped the whole model of selling this kind of stuff, in favour of a public system of subsidies to creators combined with free access to all content via portals which tracked popularity. Subsidies ideally would be a declining function of popularity, so that an artist with at least modest popularity could make a modest living, and an extremely popular one would be pretty well off but not buying islands.

On the other hand, while the troubles of hypercompetition are noted, it's silly to talk about the "actual" worth of something that you put in a set amount of work to create in the first place, but derive a potentially endless stream of free revenue from. Since copyrighted material can be copied and sold effectively for free, the relationship between effort and reward is completely dependent on total sales. At a given price, sell too few and you're in penury; sell three times as many and you're upper middle class; sell twenty times as many and you're rolling in dough with a reward far beyond the effort you put in. And it all could depend on the right person making a tweet at the right time as much as on all the effort you put in making the game. What then was the "actual" worth, the proper price? Of course personally, I derive much of my entertainment from paper-and-pencil roleplaying games. Totting up money spent on rulebooks (much more than I needed to spend) divided by time gaming on those, I come up with about 12 cents an hour. Most of the people I play with, however, bought far fewer rulebooks than I; I doubt they've spent more than 5 cents an hour. Should I consider the "fair" price of computer games to be that much? Of course not, but it's as defensible as your "actual worth" notions.

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