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Pype.Clicker wrote: giving more credits to the games sounds much like "renicing" it to me

Except renicing only deals with CPU time, not with other resources. For example, renicing a downloader on a Unix system will most likely not increase its download speeds relative to other downloads going on in the system, but giving a downloader more resources on an economy-based operating system will.

Pype.Clicker wrote:My concern would be that most applications have a "minimum working set" under which they cannot run. Below a critical amount of pages, e.g., your webbrowsing cannot browse the web anymore: all it can do is swap pages in and out ... similarily, a process that has too few credits to buy CPU time to the game has actually no use for its own pages of memory so it could try to trade off memory for CPU time, but the price of the game's CPU time might be so high that the program no longer has the pages it requires to do what it has to do once he has the CPU ...

This behavior would be prevented by the fact that vital resources become extremely valuable when there aren't that many around; like I said before, principle of marginal utility. And anyway, processes would, of course, have some threshold such that they either have the minimum resources needed to do the job (albeit slowly) or they can't have any and are suspended.

The truth of the matter, though, it that this situation would not happen unless the user makes it happen or the user tries running waaaay too many tasks at once, and both of these situations can be prevented.

Pype.Clicker wrote:And finally, "trading memory for CPU" means swapping pages out, right ... that means buying disk-access time and disk space for that operation :-/

Yes it does, which is fine as long as it is actually factored into the cost instead of ignored. It basically would be a damper on how often trades are carried out in the system, which is desired and expected.