In
this post, I'm going to lead you through a thought experiment
based on a theoretical game called Tomo. Tomo is pretty
simple: you buy any number of tickets at a fixed price, and each
ticket has a certain chance of winning and paying out a fixed price
reward. In Tomo, the chance of winning is not affected by how
many tickets have been sold, and neither is the payout per ticket. So
it's not like a 50/50 raffle, in which the total number of tickets
bought by anyone in the game decreases the chances of any particular
ticket winning, and the payout increases as more tickets are bought.
It's more like a slot machine, in which each pull of the lever costs
a certain amount and has a certain chance of paying out. As a further
simplification, Tomo does not have degrees of success on a
single ticket. Each individual ticket either wins and pays out or it
doesn't, there is no variability in how much a winning ticket can pay
out.
Tomo
is a game that, aside from these
basic rules, can be played many different ways. The person running a
game can decide how much a ticket will cost, what it's chance of
winning will be, and what it's payout will be if it wins. The people
running Tomo games
always have enough resources to cover the winnings other people make,
regardless of how much that might be, so they can set these figures
however they want.
