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The inventor of my Treo wrote a persuasive book about how brains think, with one scary chapter about how to make machines think the same way. What's scary about it is this: Hawkins doesn't seem to grasp the way AI and people interact outside the context of handhelds. It gets intimate, you know. And that makes a big difference.
Continue reading "What About Game Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins?" »
Nate's most excellent post on Zerging suggests the alien Zerg collective's attack strategy may be bad because it is boring. By contrast, the Borg, another four-letter alien bunch whose name ends with "rg", are not particularly boring, but are thought to be bad because their all-assimilating Hivemind wipes out Mill's concept of individual liberty (and plus all that flesh-machine grafting is kind of icky). The Firm, according to Grisham and certain others, is dangerous when it gets too big, too powerful, too sharp. Collectivity threatens the individual, and in some cases, it threatens society as well. Which, of course, leads me to Robert Marks' interesting book: Everquest Companion.
My friend Eric Goldman (who I've mentioned before as skeptical of much of "virtual law" scholarship) posted recently about a presentation on Vacheland, a
French simulation of virtual farm management. Eric says Vacheland was "initiated by a public agency to increase awareness of farm issues and
to help address negative perceptions due to mad cow disease." Eric says that:
I'm hardly an Everquest expert, but I'm in the process of writing an essay about law and governance in Norrath, and I was drawn into a side issue on which I wanted to elicit comments. (So beware, I'll steal your thoughts if I like them).
My primary focus in the essay will be on two issues that I feel more qualified to discuss: first, the general relation of game rules and game governance systems to "real" law, and second, the relation of coded (so-called "architectural") software constraints to legal regulation. Still, in parsing out these issues in relation to Everquest, I feel obligated to discuss Everquest as a text that actually represents a fiction of governance, and investigate, to some extent, how this fiction relates to the other "governance" issues I want to talk about. So here's a (slightly edited) bit of my thinking:
I remember the warmth of the sun, the feel of breeze and the exotic scents that it brought. I remember friends and the spaces we made sacred by being there together.
'[J]ust as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral...," wrote Jean Baudrillard, "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real...." I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what insidious purpose Baudrillard will ascribe to the nth-order simulation that is Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom, now live in "sneak preview beta" mode (via). Meanwhile, last one into their own private virtual Jungle Cruise safari boat is a rotten avatar!
Terra Nova readers are cordially invited to this Thursday’s Future Salon speaker series, an event which takes place in Second Life each month, brought to you by the Acceleration Studies Foundation. The May salon is happening this Thursday, May 26th, 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM PST at the Second Life Public Library.
Arseni Stardoumov, Stockholm School of Economics, has written with an interesting set of propositions regarding RMT. Assume the players have a diversity of tastes for both the rewards of the game system (R) as well as its challenges (C). Assume further that there are alienable items that affect an individual's perception of C. It follows that there will always be, in that population, a market for these items. Each person has an ideal {R, C} bundle. The game system offers some default {R, C} bundle. In order to move from the default to their ideal level of challenge, players will buy items that get their C values closer to their personal ideal, and sell ones that do not.
One implication that I thought was interesting: Currently, all RMT involves people buying items that reduce the challenge level. But what if a game was too easy? Then people would actually buy things that make the game harder. Or, at least, that's how the potential market would work. That market never appears, though. People quit easy games. Only in hard games do they stay and use markets to adjust game conditions. Not sure why.
Note that all this is independent of any diversity of income and time. You can have completely equal incomes and time resources in your player base and this model says you'd still get RMT.
Well, there's more, but who has time these days? Inside you'll find a full text of Arseni's thoughts, and his request for feedback.
I’ve cracked this whole MMO marketing thang,,,
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