static component. Static balance is mostly concerned with a game's rules and elements, everything, that is set before a game or match starts. Dynamic balance conversely describes the balance between players, environment and computer opponents and how it changes throughout the game. Economies Within a game, everything that has an owner or is provided to a player can be called a resource. This includes commodities, units, tokens, but also information or time, for example. Those resource systems are similar to real economies, especially in regards to trading resources. There are some distinctions for video games though: There are open economies, that receive additional resources, but also closed ones that do not. Additionally, economies might provide indefinite resources, or all players have to share a set amount instead. Especially for online games, it therefore is important to design economies to make them “fun” and sustainable. Fairness A game is fair if all players have roughly the same chance of winning at the start independent of which offered options they choose. This makes fairness especially important for PvP games. Fairness also means, even for PvE games, that the player should never feel like the opponents were unbeatable. Early appearances of the term “fairness” Chris Crawford wrote in 1982 of the importance of a game's "illusion of winnability"; Pac-Man is popular because it "appears winnable to most players, yet is never quite winnable". The illusion, he said, "is very difficult to maintain. Some games maintain it for the expert but never achieve it for the beginner; these games intimidate all but the most determined players", citing Tempest as an example. A fair game is winnable but, InfoWorld stated in 1981, can be "complicated or random or appear unfair". Fairness does not necessarily mean that a game is balanced. This is particularly true of action games: Jaime Griesemer, design lead at Bungie, said that "every fight in Halo is unfair". This potential for unfairness creates uncertainty, leading to the tension and excitement that action games seek to deliver. In these cases balancing is instead the management of unfair scenarios, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that all of the strategies which the game intends to support are viable. The extent to which those strategies are equal to one another defines the character of the game in question. Simulation games can be balanced unfairly in order to be true to life. A wargame may cast