Terra Nova

Player-Authors Project - Survey One Data (Draft)

Hi everyone,

I posted here soliciting participation in the Rutgers Player-Authors survey of player UGC practices in games.  We are beginning to study the results.  A draft summary report of basic descriptive statistics is posted here.  Please do not cite or repost this draft version, as the numbers will likely change slightly.  We will have a firmer version posted on the Player-Authors website soon.

However, based on initial analysis, the following appear to be true:

• We had over 400 valid responses
• The survey participation skewed substantially male (over 80%)
• The median age of respondents was roughly 30 years old
• The PC was respondents' most popular and preferred gaming platform
• The Sims was respondents' most played game among the available options
• Respondents shared UGC on YouTube more often than on other listed platforms
• The most common motivation of respondents for creating content was intrinsic pleasure (enjoyment of creativity) and the least common motivation was financial (to make money)
• The most common UGC practice of respondents was making new objects within games
• The least common UGC practice was costumes and crafts
• Respondents generally favored the genre of action/arcade/adventure games the most -- racing and sports games were the least popular
• Roughly half of respondents stated that they had created "remix" UGC
• The most common reference material for in-game "remix" UGC was "other video games"
• The most common form of UGC creation among respondents was "maps/scenarios"; the least commons was "music/sound effects"
• Minecraft was the most popular platform for UGC sharing among respondents; Second Life was the least popular.
• The same was true for downloading: Minecraft was most the popular platform (among those listed) and Second Life was least popular.
• Respondents had a range of opinions on the value of UGC.  Most respondents thought that creative tools and the ability to access player-created content were important to their enjoyment of games.  However, many players felt that UGC was not so important to their decision to purchase a particular game.

More information about the player survey, including a finalized version of the Survey One summary, will be posted on the site shortly as we continue to refine and analyze the data.  We will also be posting initial results of other components of the Player-Authors project.

Please note: If you are a game developer and want to participate in Survey Two of the project (targeted at the UGC perceptions within the developer community), that survey is still live and posted here: http://bit.ly/playerauthors2

Thanks!

Greg

Industry Survey on UGC in Games

Hi everyone,

As part of the Rutgers Player-Authors project, we're conducting a survey of industry perceptions regarding player-created content in games.  If you're in the game development industry, please consider taking a few moments to share your views on player-created content.

The survey is here:

http://bit.ly/playerauthors2

And please pass the link along!

When results are collected, they will be posted on the website of the Rutgers Player-Authors Project.

Play, Evolution, and the Unspeakable

Steen and Owens ground play in human evolution. Now sociologist Robert Bellah makes play not just any element of human evolution but a core element of it. From play, he believes, springs almost all culture, including the topic I steadfastly refuse to bring up on this blog because of the anger it generates among TN readers; therefore I will not raise it here. It is the topic that Tolkien also believed was intimately bound up with fantasy and subcreation.

Recently in First Things, a scholarly magazine about the unspeakable topic I am not discussing, scholarly experts on that topic discuss Bellah's work and spend quite a bit of time on play. Huizenga is mentioned approvingly on several occasions. Interesting to see play given such weight by this brand of intellectual.

Also, I owe to this edition of the magazine a quote I will savor for many years: "The only time I ever saw Richard Dawkins reduced to stuttering silence was when an Irish philosopher repeatedly asked him about human freedom." Professor Dawkins, as you may know, though a biologist by trade, has positioned himself as a rather indomitable expert on the fantasies of certain ancient goat-herders. I have long wanted to ask him whether he is free and if so, how that could be. According to Professor Bellah, being free, and free to play, implicates a host of other assumptions all of which are closer to the goat herders' way of thinking than Professor Dawkins would likely accept.

Microsoft Points Go Away

Microsoft announced that it is retiring its virtual currency, Microsoft Points. This follows Facebook abandoning Facebook credits. Companies are trying to figure when and where it makes sense to have your own currency. The thing about a rewards-type currency, such as Microsoft Points, is that it adds a click to the buying process. Put in your credit card, buy Points, buy games (or movies or whatever). MS is saying, why not have it be just: Put in your credit card, buy games. What after all is the point of having the virtual currency in there?

Perhaps we are laready moving beyond virtual currencies to the next innovation, for which I conjured the name "digital value transfer." The technology FB has developed allows it to instantly and costlessly translate value from one app to another. Currently FB funnels any such transaction through dollars (so it can take its 30% cut). But it doesn't have to.

Games like Path of Exile have many things called currencies and a back-end system for translating the player's holdings of X, Y, and Z into different things of value.

The thing that makes Bitcoin valuable isn't Bitcoin, its the DVT that allows you to exchange Bitcoins for other things.

An economy backed by DVTs doesn't make any distinctions between the virtual entities it is tossing around. They may be currencies, or assets, or resources, or even virtual goods such as movies. Files. The DVT just knows how much of one thing is needed to exchange with another. Imagine a vast traingular matrix listing every good in the world. Each cell says how much one good is worth in terms of the other.

Save the Whales! And exploit them I guess.

A report just out from the fine folks at Playnomics confirms that much of the money spent in digital economies is spent by a fairly small share of the players. Vegas calls them "whales." Playnomics says that fewer than 1 percent of players spend any money at all in games, on average. Most of us free ride on the top 1% of spenders who contribute a third of the money.

I still like the game Lord of the Rings Online. It's free to play. When I look around in there, I see a very cool version of Middle Earth. It is interesting to know that one-third of everything I see there has been built because of the support of just one person out of 100 that I meet. And, if the power law holds throughout, I can fairly say that just about everything in that place exists because of the ten percent or so who love it enough to pay for it.

Here's the rub, the political economy problem. Given the above, what rights do I have as a player to express opinions about the environment? Suppose the entire thing is run for the benefit of those 10 percent. Does my voice count? Should it?

Brought to you by the 10 percent

Diablo III Hyperinflation

Diablo III's real-money auction house had some potential to be a major innovation in virtual economies. Instead, it looks like the designers failed to grasp lessons of virtual money management that are now more than a decade old. Namely, make sure you have enough sinks.

There's a wonderful, well-informed, economically expert write-up over at Mises.Org, by Peter C. Earle. Mr. Earle knows his econ and he knows the game as well. It's some of the best virtual economy analysis I ahve seen in a long while.

Thanks to Waiyen Tang for the heads-up!

The Clausewitz Engine: A Major Scientific Advance

Wittingly or no, the folks over at Paradox Development are making an amazing scientific instrument. It's called the Clausewitz Engine. I know almost nothing about it, other than having been its victim over and over again.

The Clausewitz Engine is apparently a gigantic autonomous agent model. Tens of thousands of agents act according to a sophisticated set of instructions. These instructions are apparently very flexible. In Hearts of Iron, they drive divisions, armies, and countries to war against one another, whereas in Crusader Kings, the instructions drive men and women to seek marriage partners. The information on which the agents act is incredible. The agents respond to grand strategic considerations, political concerns, territory control, economic resources, personality traits, and past actions of other agents. Yes, they have memory. They also have variable goals and strategies. Not everyone is offended that you executed your brother's children. Some generals want to capture ground, others want to avoid looking bad.

In playing against these teeming worlds of code-people, I find myself feeling immersed in a genuine society. The whole thing responds in a way that feels right; my reputation and prospects rise and fall in a very natural way.

One interesting aspect of the Engine is that it allows you to take the place of almost any of these actors. You can be Stalin, or a commander of a single division outside Stalingrad. You can be the Holy Roman Emperor, or the Earl of Argyll. It doesn't matter who you choose, because every other agent in the game is handled by an AI. If you want to play as America but don't want to bother with politics, the AI that would handle American political actors if you had chosen Germany just takes over. Of course, if you do that, you might end up working for President Lindburgh, fighting for the Master Race. But you can do it if you want.

Why is this scientifically relevant? The brilliant mathemetician Stephen Wolfram has written about the need for a revolution in scientific practice, away from experiment and toward computational modeling. Do I know if he's right? Not a chance. I have no idea whether the natural sciences are moving in this direction or not. I do know that the social sciences are not doing much with this idea.

Yet over in games, we find a computational model of human society that is orders of magnitude more advanced than anything I have seen done on campus. The Clausewitz Engine could be modded to study how norms propagate through society, how political factions rise and fall, how crowds try to get out of disasters, how diseases spread, how religions influence shopping. I say that, not knowing anything about the guts of it. I have only been smacked around again and again by the darn thing. But my sense of it, as a machine of the human world, is that it is vast, flexible, accurate, comprehensive, and infinitely malleable.

What does the Clausewitz Engine reveal about us? I do not know. Much, I imagine. I suspect that the devs could have made all agents independent of one another, little islands, self-reliant. I wonder what would happen to total economic product then? What happens if all agents slavishly follow the commands of superior agents? What if resources are redistributed equally across the agent population, what happens to economic growth? Wow.

To Paradox Development: Bravo!

Hector Postigo's: The Digital Rights Movement

The latest Social Change Technology podcast is out. Burcu Bakioglu interviews long time friend of the show Hector Postigo about his latest book: The Digital Rights Movement. Those that have been around a while with know Hector's foundational work on modding.

You can listen to the show here: http://www.virtualpolicy.net/sct013.html

New Survey - Please Participate

I'm conducting a survey on creative play within video games. If you have 15 minutes to spare, please consider letting us know about how your creativity intersects with your gaming:

https://camdenrutgers.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_0VzeOA1fJHthpkN

And please spread the link around.  Once the survey is completed, results will be published on the Player-Authors website.

Did you know? GDP ignores digital value

Real world experts are starting to think about all the economic value stored up in digital currencies. Here's a blog post about it by Joel McKendrick, pointed out to me by Robert Gehorsam. Thanks Robert!

GDC Expo Floor

A few things I noticed wandering the expo floor.

I was surprised to hear some people say that this is a fairly decent year for hiring. I thought it was a down time for the industry, but perhaps in interactive entertainment, down just means, not growing as fast. Or, we get this impression from the problems hitting consoles and AAA companies, but perhaps they are as big a source of new employment as they had been.

The level of physical fidelity continues to surprise. Trees with leaves blowing gently in the wind, canvas straps that look so real you can almost feel the rough cloth, surround environments with wind and lighting and sound, faces ..... Human faces. No. Superhuman faces. Beyond the human. Angels and devils maybe. Spirits. I don't know.

The use of the body as a controller is still clunky. Many companies are trying and there were a few apparent successes. A smallish head mounted display that really works. But there were more things that still seemed too clunky for home use. It's getting there, however.

The Indie games were more impressive than ever. We are seeing a clear impact of the democratization of tools. Indie projects just look, sound, and feel so good. They are creative as before, but they are developing such a compelling attractiveness too.

Are you ready for movies that think

Slant Six Games will deploy a procedural cinematic engine in Microsofts Galactic Reign. The segments of film are available to the engine and it creates a linear visual narrative that depends on player actions and the game state.

Time Scales

When I was a wee lad, the turnaround time for a piece of research was 5-6 years. From the first idea to the day it appeared in a journal. We now see functional models in game analytics that address practical social science problems in a couple months. Seems fast! But isn't fast enough. Game builders are making decisions hourly as their player bases shift and roil.

I wonder if we are on the wrong track in game analytics. We are using big data sociology, economics, and public policy as our models. Maybe the right model is meteorology. The weather is a vast complex system whose properties we need to interrogate on an hourly basis. Game companies are just the first to confront the problems of providing governance on an hourly basis. Also on an individualized basis. For a whole society, whose membership constantly shifts. It is a mind boggling problem and It seems that every time analytics catches up , the time scale has shifted down an order of magnitude.

Action and Virtue

Robert George in the April edition of the magazine First Things makes a case for limited government that relies on an Aristotelian view of human flourishing. For Aristotle, he says, "flourishing consists in doing things, not just in getting things, or having desirable or pleasant experiences, or having things done for you." You have to act to be well. Active entertainment is better for people than passive entertainment.

To do things in games would probably not be accorded the same respect by Aristotle as to do them in real life, I suppose. Not at first glance anyway. On the other hand, with real life as systematized as it is, and so loaded with powerful incentives, can we truly say that the average person has significant scope of action there? Whereas game designers as I heard today are planning entire worlds that respond organically to what we do. Moreover, the most significant actions we take are and always have been social and local: spouses and children and friends.

We flourish better playing games than watching TV. But real life is better than both, because it has touch. Of course, some day the games on computers will become the game of daily life; we will one day be playing games with touch. I hope this development helps people flourish better than they do now.

Next steps for AI

Games will become more reactive to us. The industry is beginning to build systems to produce environments that react in novel ways to the user. A World
Manager that directs your experience. Entities that analyze statistics before making choices. Game objects that dynamically acquire new properties. Props that think. Even small scale developers can build these things. The tools are making it possible.

Game education is scaling rapidly

Just saw a report from RIT, UCSC, and Northeastern about their efforts to build game programs. The meta data here is astounding. Ten years ago, nobody had anything. They launched little programs over significant opposition. The demand for places however vastly exceeded supply. The programs grew and now, top level support is creating huge cross campus centers to serve playable, interactive, game media.

Scale

If you've never been to this conference or E3, the first thing that impresses you is the scale. Gigantic and global. I still have trouble grasping how big the business of designing play has become.

This talk is by the CEO of Kongregate. It's about retaining players for the long run. She reminds us that games like EverQuest are still making money after a decade. Time scales are bigger than you realize too.

From GDC

Let's all go back to 2007 when blogs were proto-tweets. This week I'll be sending stuff from the Game Developers Conference. My iPad doesn't support Typepad's nice text editing features so its just going to be plain text, no cutesy images and all that. Links? No, I can't do that either without writing <a href etc. etc. and the iPad of course buries HTML braces in its third keyboard. If youre interested in following up n something, Just Google it and you'll find it I guess. And this mode doesn't autocorrect either. Typos and bad grammar on the way.

Stop being so negative, you ninny! It's GDC, the funniest conference ever! So many arrogant old guys who never got a degree and make more money than anyone. They know what works and what won't work with players. They can tell stories, they know where the industry's bodies are buried. Then there are the hordes of indie boys and enterprenoors, with their carefully-chosen scruff, hoping against hope that their artistic talent and genius will finally be discovered. The women - both of them - are either wearing way too little and getting good money for that, or wearing a semi permanent look of disgust at being once again, fifty percent object / fifty percent person to those around them. Then there are people like me, outsider wannabes, lined up to get tshirts, lined up to get 30 seconds with that one guy from Blizzard, lined up to get a seat at the restaurant everyone goes to. O, the tag scanning that goes on! The name dropping! The project puffing!

But this happens at ever major conference. You should see the American Economic Association. Actually, no, you shouldn't. You're not ready. But the same stuff goes on, I am smarter than you, that guy looks important what does his tag say, rare girls, who is going to what restaurant with whom. It's what people do at conventions.

But the subject of an economics conference is economics fer cryin out loud, an area of thought that wandered into a cave and remains there, doing nothing. The talks - how boring! The dinners - how dry! The atmosphere - how chalky!

Not so at the GDC. It's actually pretty exciting. The social conventions of conventions, for all their soul-crushing effects, recede into the background as you experience yet another year of amazing innovation in games. Ok, so the industry is having a down year. Big deal! Is having a down year because the same changes that are killing profits in music and movies are having their inevitable effect on games. So what! Technology continues to distribute the capability to make stuff. Entertainment keeps getting better.

I'm just finishing up a book and I finally sensed a theme for it, maybe it applies here too. We are living in a time when technology is making our imagination ever more concrete. I'll try to carry that around and see how it fits at the conference.

Ta Ta!

Sent from my iPad

Conferences are boring, I want to play games

I know everyone has been eagerly awaiting an opportunity to spend money to get one of my papers. The wait is over!!!

It's this paper where I say "Instead of having talks at conferences, can we have games?" I don't know, I find talks so boring. I just get antsy. And it seems to me that the real work at conferences gets done outside the context of the talks anyway. So I had this idea that you could get rid of the talks and replace them with board games. During a board game, Player A is thinking while Players B, C, and D chat. That's where the work gets done. To publicize the work, and make it common knowledge, this conference would have a cheesy idea market and a pecha kucha at the end.

Now if someone organized a conference like this I would probably want to come. No matter the topic, you know? Hey it's a conference on abdominal secretions in mollusks, but you get to play biology-themed Eurogames for a day. Dominant Species, Evo, Pandemic. Cool! I would totally go to that.

Valve Economist on EconTalk

Economist Russ Roberts runs EconTalk, a rather cool series of podcasts on edgy topics in economics. These are the guys who brought you the Keynesian-Monetarist rap debate. What's not to love? Well, they've got a great interview with Valve's economist Yanis Varoufakis.

It's important for non-specialists to be aware that Econ is having problems right now. Different people point to different issues, and they point in different ways forward. From my brief interactions with Dr. Varoufakis, I'm convinced that he's pointing in a good direction and is very much worth listening to. Perhaps the most exciting thing about him is his career choice. At Valve, he can do economic science however he wishes. I can almost guarantee that good stuff will result.

Now, how to get Valve to tell the rest of us about it....?

Fun with mapping

Holy smokes, but someone did a real Mapping test using SimCity and his hometown's traffic. It's not exactly rigid science, but this is the sort of application I've been hoping to see since writing this thing.

Virtual sports offer better betting

As you may know, football (soccer, not handegg) is broken. The game as designed is strategically light (not enough scoring, too much luck - from a Euro game? How odd) and it has fallen victim to two unrelated forms of corruption, the unelected-international-body corruption that plagues the Olympics and the UN, and the big-money corruption that plagues US college sport and politics. Football would have doping scandals too, but FIFA is only just now getting around to it.

Who in their right mind would wager money on professional football? It's like betting on the outcome of a novel. 

No matter. If real sports are broken, virtual sports can be pure. Head on over to Ladbroke's to bet on Virtual World Cup 2010. It runs anew every 20 minutes. Don't wait years, only to experience such execrable moments as this and this. You can encounter the beautiful game right now, in a way that somewhat lives up to its name - if only in virtual form.

Question: Why is 3rd Party RMT Evil?

Tom Mason blogs at the Nosy Gamer and is intrigued by CCP's ongoing efforts to combat botting and 3rd party RMT. It does seem strange, given CCP's libertarian philosophy, they they would actively resist trade in these limited cases.

Years ago I wrote a model that treated botting and farming as a pollution effect. Using hypothetical numbers, I showed that these things can be very costly to ordinary gamers; their fun is degraded. Tom asked me to reconsider and possibly update the analysis. His questions and my responses are below the fold. 

Amazon launches virtual currency

Larry Dignan at ZDnet reports on Amazon's new money. The company sells everything, but the Amazon Coin will initially be used only for apps in the company's Kindle Fire platform. Still, if they build the currency, they can use it for anything else that they do. That means, the only reason you cannot use the Amazon Coin to buy this Batman Apron, this pumice stone, or this wood chipper is because Amazon has decided against it. For now.

World's biggest bank in 2023: Starbucks?

Square. Square has invented a smooth, cheap, flexible virtual transaction system. Paypal works only online. Dollars work only offline or online through expensive credit card companies. Square instantly makes offline transactions into online ones, utilizing small-computer technology.Your smartphone talks to Square.

Starbucks. A coffee seller with 17,000 locations.They also have a customer loyalty program. Buy stuff, get Stars. You can spend your Stars in Starbucks or at their online store.

Square and Starbucks have struck a payments deal. As an astute analyst has pointed out, Starbucks can now use the Square system to extend the purchasing power of Stars. Square's technology doesn't see a difference between dollars and Stars, at least not natively. I suppose there will eventually be a regulation. But for now, there's no reason why Starbucks cannot issue Stars at will, and allow people to spend their Stars through Square on anything you can buy in Square. Which is, anything.

Square opens the doors for all loyalty credits to acquire general economic liquidity. There may be a first-mover advantage, in which case, Starbucks wins. Move over, Fed: Here comes coffee cash.

 

How fractured the world - Wolf's Building Imaginary Worlds

Early in Mark Wolf's awesome new book about subcreation, he makes note of Eco's discussion of cult products. Wolf highlights the fact that a good cult film is not necessarily completely coherent. Rather, it has chunks and pieces that allow the audience to participate in creation. A good world is not a clean story from end to end, its a lattice with hooks for people to hang other things. As we all know from building toys, anything you hang on a hook should itself be a hook.

A few weeks ago, we discussed what makes good computer game worlds different from the current over-designed worlds we are getting. It's not necessarily free-form play or anything, but rather the presence or absence of features that provide hooks for our own immersion. A huge sandy desert is a great sandbox but, pace ATITD, is not a great world. A game filled with narratives and achievement ladders is also not a great world. A game with a million loose ends is not a great world. A game that has ends that are not loose but rather awaiting further development or discovery  is the ticket. If there are mountains at the edge of the place space, we should not be told that over the mountains is "a place nobody goes." We should be told that "Across the mountains lie the sands of Khalibar; people who go there never come back. We do not know what happens to them." That's why it is so disheartening to open a new game and pop up the map, and see the entire world including a clearly defined boundary, beyond which is nothing. Once I see my progress on that map, I can't help extrapolate and sense how long it takes to explore the whole thing. It's kind of like, for an achievement player to kill the first mob and, from that experience, get a good guess as to how the final boss fight will go. Deflates the mystery. So: Get rid of the boundaries!

Anyways, you shoujld pick up and read Building Imaginary Worlds. You'd be surprised how many cool worlds there have been prior to Ultima.

 

The Decline of Worlds

Simon Ludgate documents the experience of another big-ticket MMOG, Star Wars, the Old Republic. Like many others, this one is going from subscription to free-to-play. Ludgate characterizes this as failure. While it certainly is the failure of the revenue model, it may not mean failure of the IP. F2P products make plenty of money.

But before we conclude that to use subscriptions is to fail, consider venerable EVE. She has reached new population milestones in her old age, having never abandoned the old subscription model.

I think something cognitively different happens when we enter a world as opposed to a game. People will pay subscriptions for a world. They will not play subscriptions for a game. MMOGs interpreted WoW's success as a call to improve the game elements of virtual worlds. But they have overdone it. Today's MMOGs are all game, no world. Thus no one is willing to pay a subscription for them.

What makes a world different from a game? Well, in a world, there's downtime and exploration and life. Downtime is, moments when there's nothing to do. You just be. And it is nonetheless interesting. Exploration is, you go places simply to see things, to discover them. You don't get a reward, you just go look. It's a cave with artwork in the bottom, and nothing else. It's a desert to cross, in which there's an oasis with a palm and an interesting little bear who sings rhymes. And nothing else. Life is, when you go to a place and there are people just being there. They're not on a quest, they're not grinding a craft, they're not shopping. They are simply being.

Current MMOGs have lost elements like this, believing them to be boring. EVE has them in spades. So EVE can charge subscriptions - people like to quasi-live in EVE. Nobody wants to quasi-live in SWTOR, or, it is not possible to just live there. You can't live on a race track. Race tracks are for racing. You go around a few times and quit. Why subscribe to that?

Evans v. Linden class certified

The Evans v. Linden Second Life virtual property class action lawsuit has overcome the class certification hurdle. No time for a full post, but Rebecca Tushnet covers the case here.

 

Micro rewards have weird effects on decisions

Most games use a sequence of little rewards to nudge players around. This is very different from most salary and hiring and review structures, which are big rewards in big intervals. Much has been made about the power of the games approach and how it should be used everywhere. To date (I haven't been looking very hard), I'd not seen a hard analysis of how a sequence of little payments might affect the quality of decisions. Do they help people solve new problems? Do they help people remember what they are doing, and transfer the learning to other situations?

Here's a little experiment by economists Neilson, Price, and Shor that comes to these conclusions:

• If you give micro rewards when people are doing the right thing, they remember the right solution for the current problem and transfer it to similar problems. But they don't learn how to solve new problems.
• If you give micro rewards when people are doing the wrong thing, they get better at figuring out new problems, because they learn more about the dimensions of the problem (including bad strategies). But they don't remember much about the current problem and how to solve ones like it.

Resources for Designing Virtual Economies

Recently I've been hit up a few times for resources on virtual economy design. I haven't written that paper yet, nor has the other most prominent academic virtual economy guru, Vili Lehdonvirta. No, instead we decided to write a book on the subject, which should be coming out next year. Meanwhile, though, here are some links that will help.

Vili's talk on currency design

Simon Ludgate (what a great name!) at Gamasutra

Matthew Warneford on pricing virtual items

Richard Bartle's chapter on virtual economy design in his book

Julian Huehnermann's hands-on balancing

And finally, I would keep a close eye on Valve Economics and Yanis Varoufakis

 

Virtual Currencies Appear on Central Bank Radar

The European Central Bank has issued a report on virtual currencies. There's nothing to worry about, they say. Virtual currencies are no threat to the real world, since they are small and not enmeshed with the real economy in a significant way. This reminds me of a story. An optimist falls off a 30-story building. Passing the 15th floor, he says "So far, so good." When he hits the ground he says "Wow, I didn't see THAT coming."

Hurricanes and Virtuality

Long ago (in internet time) Facebook began letting people give each other virtual gifts. Last month, Facebook enabled this virtual system to purchase and send tangible gifts. The world yawned. Therefore, Facebook announced it would have an event at FAO Schwarz in Noo York City! At this event, the world would learn how many exciting opportunities the Facebook Gift program would provide. Strikes me as a big coupon book, but hey. Anyways, Hurricane Sandy has come along and canceled the event.

I keep thinking of computing as a slow hurricane, massively forceful, irresistable, steadily raising the waters and drowning the old ways day by day. Each year the coast looks very different. But since most people live somewhat inland, all they notice are the streaking clouds and the thundering surf. "My house is safe," they say.

REAMDE and a thesis

Hello!  Two sort of related things:

1) I'll be speaking with Neal Stephenson this evening at the University of Washington about his new book, REAMDE, focusing on the legal dimensions of gold farming and virtual property.  The available seats seem to be booked at this point, but there's standing room -- more about that here. 

On page 35 of REAMDE, Stephenson describes the way that Richard Forthrast, the book's protaganist (well, the main protaganist) hit upon the idea that made him rich -- a MMORPG that encourages gold farming and is premised on a stable virtual currency:

It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold (or silver, or diamonds, or various other mythical and magical elements and gems that the Creatives would later add to the game world).

Which sounds suspiciously like Bitcoin, no? 

2) And speaking of Bitcoin and its intersection with virtual economies, earlier this month, Mark Jansen pinged Ted and I about his M.A. Thesis, recently submitted at Utrecht University.  It is embedded below and it offers a whirlwind tour of Bitcoin, goldfarming, currency systems, cyberlibertarianism, etc.  Very much of a piece with the themes of Stephenson's REAMDE and a nice intro to the issues.

Update: Worth reading from Technollama -- it seems like there's a very large amount of concentrated wealth in the Bitcoin economy.

Bitcoin the Political Virtual of an Intangible Material Currency

Can I get a tax deduction for cheating?

Yes

About £34 million worth.

We can know whether we are in a simulation

Remember the Bostrom argument from 2003? He argued that since technologies of simulation increase without limit, the only reason we would not be living in a higher power's simulation right now would be if that higher power simply did not enjoy making simulations. It's one of those asymptotic arguments - carry a thought out to infinity and the probability of something weird goes to 1. Do I understand it? Nah. But physicists in Germany argue that with current technology we should be able to detect whether this existence is a simulation - because of the physics of simulation. Do I understand that? Nah. But it is fun to think about.

More on the Exodus Recession: Technology, Entertainment, and Our Economic Doldrums

Interesting essay today by Robert Samuelson, a respected nonpartisan economist. He argues that our expectations are out of whack. During the 20th century, it was normal for an economy to grow, on average, several percent per year in real terms. This meant that when a crash came, it was followed by an energetic recovery. In the future, says Samuelson, we may have to get used to a zero-growth environment, and when recessions come, we may have to tone down our expectations of the recovery. It will just OK, just enough to get us back to zero.

As evidence, Samuelson cites a recent paper by Robert Gordon, a pretty eminent fellow. Gordon talks about technology and growth. Since 1800, technological advance has been associated with economic growth. The new stuff being built saved labor input, which was then put into the construction of other things. However, the most recent technological advances may not be growth-inducing. As Samuelson puts it, "Gordon sees the Internet, smartphones and tablets as tilted toward entertainment, not labor-saving."

This research puts some nuts and bolts and evidence on the table, making an exodus recession, a recession caused by people devoting more attention to digital things ("entertainment"), a little bit more than mere conjecture. Back to Samuelson though. He points out that an era of zero growth and massive inequality confronts our societies (he's talking about Europe, the US, Japan, everybody) with a completely different set of policy problems. For example, when an entitlement program is heading into bankruptcy, there are only two *painless* ways to save it. Either you have to have more babies (and hence more young contributors), or you have to make the workers you have more productive. But the developed world's culture is just not into babies any more. And that means, either we have to get productivity growth, or we'll be forced to dramatically cut benefits or dramatically raise taxes - just to stay solvent. Without productivity, the politics of the next 30 years look really, really ugly.

Which, by the way, will only encourage people to take refuge with even greater frequency in digital worlds, where every problem has a satisfying solution.

WaPo on Virtual Economies

Nice article on virtual economies, this weekend in the Washington Post. I still wonder about the economy. Here we have the Fed moving into unprecedented degrees of stimulus, after almost four years of huge deficit spending. The textbooks say that our economy should be screaming along by now. In fact, the textbooks I studied in the 1990s all would have judged the current policies to be dangerous. If you push a machine hard for a long time, they said, you're going to break the machine. But this machine won't run. The government is doing everything in its power to make the economy go, and it just sputters along. The rules must have changed. I keep wondering if we're seeing the first effects of a broad virtualizing of the economy. It doesn't take much to make an economy sputter. If the people simply decide to spend less money, even a couple of percent, it's enough to get the whole thing to sputter.

What have we come to expect of a "healthily growing economy," after all? We expect something like 1-3 percent real growth per year. That means, 4-6 percent measured growth, with 3-5 percent inflation. This is what we've enjoyed ("we" being the developed countries) since about 1800. Think about how different, how much richer, the world has become since 1800. From the standpoint of human history as a whole, a persistent 1-3 percent growth in wealth is extreme. It ain't normal in any way, shape, or form. Until 1800, and for most people in the world even now, "normal" meant subsistence. But we expect now to go beyond subsistence, persistently. We insist that this must be so, now and forever, indeed for everyone.

Folks in the Green movement might say that this is precisely the problem, that we have been growing too fast for too long and are now suffocating the planet with our flesh.

The vision of perpetual enrichment is internally consistent. If everyone is devoted to getting more stuff, their passions spur the economy to grow rapidly. Their demand for things create profit opportunities. The profit opportunities attract productive resources. Stuff gets made and sold. The profits enable people to pursue still more passions. The machine runs.

But virtuality throws a small wrench in the works: Satisfaction at extremely low cost. Suppose we discovered that we could satisfy all of our mental needs by sitting down in a quiet room and meditating. The economic consequences would be catastrophic, wouldn't they? A society of hermits needs food and a bunch of quiet rooms - that's it. Therefore a society moving toward hermitage will have an economy in free fall.

Now compare two groups of people: "Car People" and "Internet People." Car People are folks from the 1950s. They want big houses, fast cars, fine food, prestigious degrees, big families, high-powered jobs, and sexy sex. They want stuff to play with and they want stuff to happen, all the time. They are out and about. Internet People are folks from the 2000s. They want sugar and fat. They want freedom - from work, obligations, expectations. They want sexy sex (some things never change). They connect online, hang out at home, and commit to nobody and nothing. They hate ads and avoid them wherever possible. They want to pass the time as cheaply as possible.

Internet People are not hermits by any means, but they are a lot closer to hermitage than Car People. Their interest in the acquisition of material stuff may just be 10-20 percent lower than that of the generations before. They still want stuff, but they're happy to get it virtually. If that's true, then the turn to the virtual may explain why the economic machine just doesn't seem to run like it used to.

Spry Fox Attacks the Clones: Is Palpatine Behind This?

A few days ago, there was an interesting ruling in the Triple Town / Yeti Town game cloning case, a.k.a. Spry Fox, LLC v. Lolapps, Inc.  Triple Town and Yeti Town are both casual puzzle apps where tile elements are assembled and evolve.  Spry Fox had sought to license the game to the defendants, but the defendants pursued a cloning strategy instead.  The litigation presents roughly the same sorts of legal issues as the current EA/Zynga dispute and the recent Tetris clone decision. 

This particular case has been talked up pretty extensively in the blogosphere over the last year.  For instance, James Grimmelmann had some thoughts about the early stages of the litigation and game cloning generally:

"if Triple Town flops on the iPhone because Yeti Town eats its lunch, at some point Dave and his colleagues won't be able to afford to spend their time writing games any more."

Eric Goldman weighed in yesterday on this new ruling, connecting it to the EA litigation:

"The Triple Town ruling suggests that Zynga probably can’t score a quick win."

Happy Birthday UO

Ultima Online was launched 15 years ago! Happy Birthday. How old is that exactly in MMO years?

Anyhoo, what are you all still doing here, go to Raph Koster's site and read some of the untold history: http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/09/25/ultima-online-is-fifteen/

In other news - Pandas.

Coincidence???

 

Tolkien, Natural Law and Video Games

I wrote this paper as a talk for a symposium on Ethics and Games at DePauw University, organized by Harry Brown. I submitted to an academic journal (Ethics and Information Technology), but they rejected it. The reviewers said that an academic journal is not the place for a paper that cites Wikipedia and the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 rulebook. Well, you know, they're right. So I've just posted it on SSRN. And it's got 2 downloads! Yay!

As far as substance goes, here's the abstract, after the fold.

A reasonable remedy

One of the issues that has come up in the discussions around the UK Government's consultation on consumer rights in digital stuff is the notion of a reasonable remedy. In the case of online games - what's reasonable?

About a spaceship

He was killed. 

Game Accessibility Guidelines

I'll just leave this here:  www.gameaccessibilityguidelines.com

Country: CN

A login attempt from the following location is currently awaiting your authorization.

Address: 112.85.45.199

City: Xinpu Region: 04

Country: CN

Hmm, I don't remember going to China earlier today for the express purpose of playing Guild Wars 2 - I think something odd is going on.

Using Games to Change Behavior

Jim Cummings at Motivate.Play interviews Michael Kim, CEO of Kairos Labs. There's a science to this business, and Kim is on to it.

Game Cooperation Reduces Aggression

Gamasutra reviews recent research showing that even the most violent video games, when played cooperatively, reduce measured aggression.

Cool Job Opening at Bioware

The state of the virtual economy is such that we now see the following kinds of job openings. Oh to be 20-something again! Check out this one:

Monetization Analyst 

The BioWare Label is a division of EA which crafts high quality multiplatform role-playing, MMO, social, play-for-free, and strategy games, focused on emotionally engaging, rich stories with unforgettable characters and vast worlds to discover. Since 1995, BioWare has created some of the world's most critically acclaimed titles and franchises, including Baldur's Gate™, Neverwinter Nights™, Star Wars®: Knights of the Old Republic™, Jade Empire™, Mass Effect™, and Dragon Age™. BioWare currently operates in eight locations across the world, including Edmonton (Alberta, Canada), Montreal (Quebec, Canada), Austin (Texas), Fairfax (Virginia), San Francisco (California), Los Angeles (California), Sacramento (California), and Galway (Ireland).  BioWare Austin is located in the vibrant city of Austin, Texas. This city is known as the 'Best Place for Business and Careers', the 'Live Music Capital of the World', the 'Best City for Relocating Families', and 'Best Cities for Singles'.

BioWare’s Analytics and Reporting team aggregates, analyzes, and reports data in order to inform decisions and track KPIs. The Austin studio is looking for an experienced, energetic, full-time Monetization Analyst (Digital Merchandising Specialist) to work with our development team.  This person will focus on analyzing, managing, growing, and optimizing the in-game item catalog to maximize monetization potential for Star Wars®: The Old Republic™.   This job requires previous experience working with item catalog management systems, high-data volumes, and monetization optimization.

More details inside.

Game Politics

Does depriving gamers in Iran from World of Warcraft and the up coming Panda Expansion help anyone?

Hoping people are going to rage-quit their regime?

"Not OK: 'GET THE FUCKING CAVERN SCUTTER ENERGIES YOU FUCKASSES.'"

Following up on my recent cri d'coeur about the misanthropy of multiplayer gamer culture, I have to say I'm heartened by the diligence of the Guild Wars 2 developers in trying to create a more friendly, less offensive chat culture from the first day onward.

There's a thread at Reddit where the developers have offered to tell anyone who has been suspended why they were suspended or banned. Basically it breaks down into two major causes: first, that the account has been hacked by gold sellers and second, because the player was saying racist, homophobic, or grossly offensive things in public chat. It's an interesting thread just in purely documentary terms, since developers normally maintain a steely silence about bannings and allow players to represent themselves as the innocent victims of a mistake or a vendetta. But there's also a real pleasure to be had in seeing a player put up their character name, ask in all apparent innocence why they were banned, and to read the community representative quoting back to the player what they said in chat.

I get that this is too labor-intensive to keep up indefinitely. But it's a sign of some smart social thinking to at least do it now and hope to "seed" the emergent culture of the game with a lighter, more inclusive feeling.

Run and catch the game

If you run you can catch the start of (friend-of-the-show and guidie) Kevin Werbach's course on gamification. 63,000 have signed up so far, but it's ok the class room is big. Internetnet big.

Course stats today so run and hop on the bus:  https://www.coursera.org/course/gamification

Hashtag: #gamification12 if you want to follow the discusion on the twitter. 

Oh, it's free.