Terra Nova

Is Game Development Better Than Mohair Goat Farming?

When I was working in Benefit-Cost Analysis and Public Policy Economics, a colleague told me a tale about his friend the mohair goat farmer. "Mohair goat farmer - what's that?" you ask. A mohair goat is a goat whose hair - mohair - produces a fiber of particular value in the making of a certain type of military cloth. Now, the military had a hard time getting its hands on mohair. It seems there were never enough people who chose mohair goat farmer as their occupation. Moreover, the peasants who did mohair had a habit of being born and then continuing to live, for decades at a time, in lands of unreliable relation to the USA. Therefore in the interest of securing domestic production of this important strategic good, our government began to subsidize mohair goat farming. Heavily. So heavily, in fact, that a man searching through government records for the most-subsidized line of work of all would come upon - you guessed it - mohair goat farming. And that is how my colleague's friend became a mohair goat farmer.

I do not know whether husbandry of this noble caprid remains the most heavily-subsidized business in America, but I do know that video game development is getting close. Brian Keegan (thanks Brian!) sent around this piece about the government's favors for game development, most of them apparently accidental. Video games are not a strategic resource (yet), but Uncle Sam still smiles on them almost as much as he smiles on those preciously hairy goats.

Postscript: Google tells me that former Rep. Anthony Wiener took on the goat subsidy. The goats attacked and drove him off. If only we had understood their message!

Wall Street Journal: Woah Dude! Line Between Real and Virtual is Kinda Shady!

On September 10, 2011 (TN is experiencing a little backlog), the WSJ devoted several column inches in the country's highest-selling newspaper to the possibility that virtual goods have real value. The author, Holly Finn, does a nice job of making the basic point. In a poignant closer, she says that her augmented-reality New York, with its twin towers still there, feels more real than the physical New York, where they sadly remain missing. At the same time, she brings something new to the discussion, "holomelancholia," a term coined by novelist Alex Shakar to describe the inevitable disappointment of virtual worlds. It seems so cool, and then, something sets in  - I almost said 'reality' - the possibilities fade, the experiences seem not so cool, the other people are just other people, as usual. So is disapointment everywhere? Or, is it in our heads, not in the realities we construct out of those heads? Or maybe the hedonic treadmill is at work: You find something cool, but your brain adapts to it, and then you need something more cool to get the same rush.

What's most noteworthy, though, is the simple fact that more and more people in all walks of life are realizing that VR is here.

Game Education: What Should You Study?

Adam Rademacher at Gamasutra has an interesting piece today reviewing his college education and finding that, in retrospect, he wishes he had learned things a bit differently. I commented, "When I talk to young people looking for game design programs, many of them want to go to a place that lets them sit in cubicles and code video games all day and all night. I tell them they should consider a program that integrates game design with training in the classic fields. "As you approach leadership positions in the industry, you'll wish you had psychology, writing, marketing, management, and the humanities [religion, philosophy, history]." I say it, and they resist it. A lot of people starting out (perhaps this applied to you Adam, I don't know), just can't see the connection between sociology and videogames, history and videogames, scientific logic and videogames, psychology and videogames, business and videogames, and on and on. Then they get into the industry and realize that the people who move companies forward are taking videogames into all these areas. The ones whose training was just about the FOTM games when they were in school - they have difficulty moving beyond code monkeydom and QA testery."

What do YOU think?

Play the Deepak Chopra Game!

I promise this will be the last religious post for while. But in the spirit of ecumenism, let's wrap up the theme with a New Age game, sent to us by Natalie Hunter. Thanks Natalie!

Leela: The Prospects of Gaming as Religious Experience

Over the past several years, and after decades of being perceived as little more than children's toys, video games have come to be more and more accepted as serious works of art, and even begun to earn a place in the traditional and online school as a respectable teaching tool. However, New Age spirituality advocate and self-help author Deepak Chopra sees potential in the medium for more than that, believing that video games could serve as a vehicle for genuine religious experiences. In an effort to make this a reality, Chopra is developing a piece of gaming software intended to serve as an interactive aid for meditation.

The first product to come out of Chopra's nearly year-old licensing agreement with video game publisher THQ, Leela  (Sanskrit for 'play') is set for a November 8th release on the Xbox 360 and Wii consoles. It will feature a series of guided interactive exercises for what Chopra refers to as "chakra-based meditation." This type of meditation focuses on specific areas of the body referred to as chakras, believed by practitioners to serve as spiritual energy centers.

CS Lewis: Zynga is doing a Bad Thing

Using the arguments of CS Lewis, Josh Foreman of Gamasutra draws some interesting parallels between scientism and metrics-based game design.

EVE Online Releases Data

EVE continues its tradition of innovation, becoming the first major online game to release economic data to the general public. They're providing a test run of a year's worth of price info from major trade regions. More info here.

Virtual Life Satisfaction

With life satisfaction expert Gert G. Wagner of Berlin I've co-authored a study that's just come out in the economics journal Kyklos (Edit: Free version). We find that people have higher life satisfaction in Second Life than in real life. That's not such a big deal by itself, but the effect size is large and leads to some startling comparisons. Such as: For an unemployed person, the happiness boost for going to Second Life is bigger than that for getting a job. An East German gets more of a life satisfaction increase by being in Second Life than by moving to West Germany. Generally, Second Life provides as large a happiness boost as a number of major life changes. Choosing Second Life is a lot easier to do as well. The data thus suggest that choosing Second Life over major life change would be "rational" because VR provides more of a happiness boost at less cost.

These are all regression results with other relevant factors such as age, sex, and income accounted for. We are not finding any causal effects here, just correlations. What's noteworthy is the magnitude of the correlations. Second Life is providing a big chunk of life satisfaction, just as big as the factors that previous researchers on life satisfaction have found were the "biggies," like health, employment, and family relationships. (By the way, in case you didn't know, money does not make you happy.)

This evidence is consistent with the concept of a "toxic immersion dilemma" that I brought up in my first book. When someone freely chooses VR but then is leading a "bad" life (according to our standards), what do we do?