Truck and Barter

$7100, $6100, and $4550 for a PS3

Will these incredible prices actually be paid?

Why do people go on the Internet?

It seems many Danes click online for government information, while the Swiss use the net more for job hunting, in UK more for games and music;

“Intensive computer game players are relatively few in number: usually male, aged 15-28, playing more than 20 hours per week. Mass-market consumers, on the other end of the scale, prefer playing games that are easy to learn and last a short time. Meanwhile, the market continues to evolve as players get older and tend to have higher incomes. Also, more and more women are starting to play multiplayer games online. In fact, although in most OECD countries men are more likely than women to use the Internet, significantly more women than men use it in the US.”

Why do you think it’s the case?

Related;
OECD STI Scoreboard
Internet World Statistics
Poll Shows More U.S. Adults Are Going Online at Home
A Web Journal Studying How Technology Affects Society
Digitial divide still separates white and minority students
Top 15 Online Populations by Country
Internet Activities

Podcast of the Day- Loot: real money in virtual worlds

Virtual worlds are flourishing as millions of online players move in to set up their virtual lives. There are fortunes to be made, and there are real world consequences. Lissten to the podcast- the latest Background Briefing from ABC.

Related;
Terra Nova blog
Play Money: the wiki
State of Play
Ludium Conferences
Chinese Gold Farmers- video
Worlds without end; "Mr Castronova's thesis is that these synthetic worlds are increasingly inter-twined with the real world. In particular, real-world trade of in-game items—swords, gold, potions, or even whole characters—is flourishing in online marketplaces such as eBay. This means in-game items and currency have real value. In 2002, Mr Castronova famously calculated the GNP per capita of the fictional game-world of “EverQuest” as $2,000, comparable to that of Bulgaria, and far higher than that of India or China. Furthermore, by “working” in the game to generate virtual wealth and then selling the results for real money, it is possible to generate about $3.50 per hour. Companies in China pay thousands of people, known as “farmers”, to play MMORPGs all day, and then profit from selling the in-game goods they generate to other players for real money."

Working at Playing

Nick Yee is a PhD student at Stanford's Communication Department. One of his articles has just appeared in the new issue of Games and Culture magazine, titled "The Labor Of Fun" (PDF - from Yee's own site). In it he addresses the apparent "blurring" of the lines between what we traditionally consider labor and entertainment.

Does this sound like your idea of fun?

Pharmaceutical manufacturing is one of many possible career choices in the game Star Wars Galaxies. Some other career choices include: bio-engineering, architecture, fashion design and cooking. Third-party career planning tools are available for the undecided1. Pharmaceutical manufacturers create their products by combining raw resources. These raw resources, such as chemicals or minerals, must be located using geological surveying tools and harvested using installations bought from other players skilled in industrial architecture. Resource gathering is a time-consuming process that involves traveling and constant maintenance. Typically, pharmaceutical manufacturers rely on dedicated resource brokers instead. The attributes of the final product (i.e., duration vs. potency) depend on the attributes of the resources used, however, resources vary in quality, accessibility and availability. Thus, manufacturers must decide which products take the most advantage of the resources available to them and must also take into account the demands of the market.

Raw resources are converted into subcomponents and final products using factories2 (also provided by player architects). Mass production introduces a constant supply-chain management problem and manufacturers must ensure a steady supply of needed resources in the correct proportions. With final products in hand, manufacturers now face the most difficult problem - each other. In Star Wars Galaxies, everything that is bought or sold has to be bought or sold by another player. The game economy is entirely player-driven. Manufacturers must decide how broad or narrow their product line should be, how to price and brand their products, where and how much to spend on advertising, whether to start a price war with competitors or form a cartel with them. Thus, manufacturing pharmaceuticals is not an easy task. It takes about 3-6 weeks of normal game-play to acquire the abilities and schematics to be competitive in the market, and the business operation thereafter requires daily time commitment.

Ok, so it does to me. But then, I have problems.

The ability to capitalize on these efforts by selling virtual items for real money seems like a new expression of an old desire to find new and more enjoyable ways of simply making more money. That the effort is now an online game instead of, say, bartending a couple nights a week for spending cash, is really only a detail in that case.

Yee also addresses the central problem facing game providers: how to keep people hooked without having them burn out. The reward schedule probably has a diminishing marginal return (it takes forever to advance at higher levels and thus requires a large amount of repetitive activity), so how do you get people to not just walk away? There are, of course, the social aspects of game playing. Eventually, however, I think companies will have to deal with the intellectual property rights issues that arise with virtual work product. I'd expect to see some sort of licensed sales arrangement, or even a sponsored marketplace; a PayPal ATM at the back of the virtual Creature Cantina?

What Does Gold Farming Look Like?

It's a subject I've mentioned a few times before: gold farming and real money trading. Chinese people play online video games to win items, build characters, or simply amass gold in order to sell it via eBay to customers hoping to buy modifcations or advancement on games like World of Warcraft, Lineage II, Second Life, and others. Now, a student at UCSD is putting together a documentary on the phenomenon.

See a preview here. The interviews are captivating, and it gives a great overall sense as to the real-life mechanics behind the market for online goods. (Via TerraNova.)

The Start of VMT

In video game circles, the acronym "RMT" stands for "real money trade". This is the long standing practice of people paying real money for virtual goods. Well -- and it was inevitable -- it looks like the direction has been reversed. Via Mashable I saw an article noting that people are starting to sell real-world goods for virtual-world currency.

This may not be the very first instance of the activity, but it has now moved to being a whole business model. There really is nothing surprising about this -- at least if you already don't see anything odd about being able to buy computer hardware for "money" you earned playing a video game.

My question: what's the average amount of time it takes to make, say, 100 Linden dollars? With that information in hand, it should be a quick path to figuring out a few things about the time value of leisure for Second Life players. I think it would be fascinating to compare how long it takes to make the equal amount of buying power in Second Life as in the real world. How many hours would an average player need to work to buy, say, this monitor in Second Life versus her first (real) life? (Running at about $399 at TigerDirect, and 140,000 Linden dollars.)

What I'd expect to find: it takes quite a bit longer in Second Life. But the money would be spent on upgrades and various small computer items that are mprovements on the gaming experience, since I think this would be treated simply as a fun by-product of playing Second Life. That said, I'd also expect to see people under-estimate how long it takes as compared to real world work, possibly implying over-valution of their leisure time. (That is, they think it's pretty fast, and so spend more time playing in the belief that the value of playing the game is higher than it really might be -- though that requires some squishy comparisons in leisure activities, I suppose.)

And just FYI, as of yet, T&B cannot accept Linden Dollars as currency for tips. The regular large donations to Swedish Swiss bank accounts is still the preferred method. (NOTE: Donations will also be accepted in allotments of soda to stave off problems relating to low caffeine supplies for Ian.)

The Reason They Make The Environment Interactive

The next time you round a corner to take shots a demon, an alien race, or one of the people you swore to serve and protect, you might come face-to-face with a billboard for soda, snacks, ammo, or something else.

"It is simply impossible to offset a 50% rise in development costs via retail sales. It just can't be done," Longano said. "Publishers are going to HAVE to have a secondary revenue source. It varies game-to-game depending on the specific ad implementation, but in-game ads can increase publisher revenue an additional 20-30% above the amount generated by the title's retail sales."

I'm actually surprised it's taken this long to become a "big idea". With the success of pro-football and racing games, -- two real sports almost deluged with corporate sponsorship -- the inclusion of branded cars, billboards, or even full digital commercials for actual brands would seem natural to me.

Of course, with the increasing interactivity of video-game environments, such ads may turn into favorite targets of abuse.

Farmers Without Subsidies

In the world of massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games, "farmers" are those people who play the game specifically to make money off the business of trading virtual-world goods for real-world money.

Via Terra Nova comes this article on numerous aspects of the Farming Community. Incentives, property rights, work conditions, effects of economic activity; it's a fairly detailed piece with some fascinating tidbits. You'll have to slog through a bunch of game jargon, but its worth it for an inside-baseball perspective on the effects (both in the virtual world and the real one), of people working obsessively to turn gaming into real cash.

Hey, I had that idea second!

Well, I don't know if I should be glad that I'm not the only one to think video gaming environments could be interesting test beds, or sad that I wasn't a visionary pione...heh. Yeah. I could barely type it with a straight face, let alone read it.

Anyway, from a fascinating Marketplace story, I heard about attempts to train emergency responders with video game technology. A brief mention is also made to "massive multiplayer" environments. The Christian Science Monitor had a similar story a few months ago. The Serious Games Initiative is sponsoring the Games for Change conference, and has some interesting references on its site. (I find the subject fascinating, even though I tend to cringe at things that say they are explicitly working for "social change". Society tends to change pretty well on its own; earnest proponents of further change usually imply that the change happen in ways they prefer, whereas I would prefer the change come up more spontaneously. This page urges us to join to help foster "positive social change". Positive, eh? Perhaps I'm too skeptical, but...)

Of course, the Army has been using simulation technology for years, and have even released games that are little more/less than the tools they use for training. The important differnce, and the one I think is key to this whole issue of MMO environments is that both sides of an interaction are being controlled by a human. That is to say, both the affected and the emergency response team could see online representation of reactions that bear striking resemblance to those we might see in the real world. Or, at least, closer to true than the programmed versions might ever get.

Why not get those training in emergency response help deal with those people who currently experienced a rapidly spreading plague?

UPDATE: Now it's even on NPR! If you didn't get a chance, this is a decent story on the World of Warcraft plague, including a chat with someone who works on modeling infection disease outbreaks.

Are RPGs Getting More Complex?

There's some evidence that television is complex than it used to be. But to me, TV is still so passive; a more important question is whether any strand of gaming is becoming more complex, i.e. more intellectually challenging and absorbing. (Although I'm personally interested in the evolution of RPGs, if fighting games have become brain fodder, then that would be interesting too.)

I wanted to write a detailed post about this, but I stopped playing RPGs when my Commodore 64 broke, and I have little to no experience or information about the complexity of RPGs after the mid 1990s. Hence, I figure I'd ask you all if you've read or heard talk about this.

Old-time T&B readers know that, until late in high school, I was a happy underachiever in academics. Both the sophisticated culture of high society and the cutthroat barbarism of politics simply did not exist. Education was what you tried to minimize at school, and if necessary, you brought it home. My parents didn't pressure me at all, never presented me with a book, and basically left me alone to do as I please. And what I did was play video games, specifically Role Playing Games. All I needed to know, I learned from "Legacy of the Ancients". (Not quite).

Question: Has the time, individual mental effort, and/or social organization required to successfully play a computer-based RPG changed considerably since the early 1980s? Has it changed more or less than the complexity of TV?

Please help out the ignorant!

Sony Backs More Efficient Allocation of Things That Don't Exist

After having been hammer-and-tong against people selling virtual goods, Sony has decided to do a 180.

Virtual goods exchange occurs when a player of an online game decides to sell off access to some sort of item that is valuable within the game in question. Everything from particular items to property to entire characters are being traded back and forth -- using real cash. Sony Online used to argue against this activity, and worked to block people who were suspected of having done this. No longer.

Starting in late June, SOE will begin offering a new service called Station Exchange. This secure service will allow EverQuest II players on specific servers to buy and sell the right to use items, coin and characters. To be clear, all we are doing is facilitating these transactions. We are NOT in the business of selling virtual goods ourselves.

According to the article such exchange has blossomed into a US$200 million a year market. For things that don't exist. I still say that people who are eager to spend close to $200 on a single character are going to respond in ways that reasonably approximate real life when faced with experimental conditions. The biggest hurdle to using these things as econ labs? Selection bias on the the test group; it's a specific crowd that takes that kind of time and effort. Hey, I could well be one of them, so no offense. I'm just saying, is all...

Outdated Video Games are Popular

I had briefly seen the this product--a joystick that has the computer console inside--on QVC. The games looked really simplistic, and I cringed at the thought of all the people who purchased this toy and thought they might be getting the latest and greatest.

Now, The New York Times has a writeup of the product and the female entrepreneur, Jeri Ellsworth.

I did not know that Ms. Ellsworth had miniaturized an entire commodore 64 onto a single chip::

Sold by Mammoth Toys, based in New York, for $30, the Commodore 64 joystick has been a hot item on QVC this Christmas season, selling 70,000 units in one day when it was introduced on the shopping channel last month; since then it has been sold through QVC's Web site. Frank Landi, president of Mammoth, said he expected the joystick would be distributed next year by bigger toy and electronics retailers like Radio Shack, Best Buy, Sears and Toys "R" Us. "To me, any toy that sells 70,000 in a day on QVC is a good indication of the kind of reception we can expect," he said.

Ms. Ellworth's first venture into toy making has not yet brought her great wealth - she said she is paid on a consulting basis at a rate that is competitive for her industry - "but I'm having fun," she said, and she continues with other projects in circuit design as a consultant.

Did I mention she dropped out of high school? And get this about her relationship to her partner in a computer assembly business:

They went into business together in 1995, but soon had a falling out and split up. For a short time Ms. Ellsworth considered leaving the computer business. Instead, she opened a store near that of her former partner, then drove him out of business. Ultimately her store became a chain of five Computers Made Easy shops in small towns.

The game console costs $30 and includes these games.

HL2

From the Inquirer comes an article on how video game companies could combat piracy:

If the games industry really wants to combat piracy, it should take a leaf out of Valve's book. Establish one worldwide release date, don't stagger for different territories. Keep a tight check on where you're sending code, and drop outdated CD copy protection technology as the only check on piracy - use an online 'switch' to activate copies of the game. Keep gamers happy by keeping them equal - isn't that just common sense?

The company the article is refering to, Valve, is set to release its much anticipated game Half-Life 2. There are two important developments when it is released, the method and the date. The latter is interesting since the movie business has moved in the same direction for the same reason. The Inquirer describes why staggering release dates encourage piracy:

The gap between those who have the game and those who don't have it yet is part of what drives people to pirate games. This week, Halo 2 was released two days earlier in the US than in the UK. With the worldwide community created by the net - indeed, by Microsoft's own Xbox Live - having a bunch of your friends play a game 2 days before you can is unacceptable to many. Companies don't appear to understand that staggered worldwide releases aren't conducive to their anti-piracy cause - either give gamers the game at the same time, or put up with the fact that people will get it elsewhere. Companies can't create the amount of hype that they do then expect gamers to sit back while other people play games they can't get their hands on yet.

Not only will they release the game the same day, but use a piece of software called Steam to authenticate it online. It also enables you to download games directly to your harddrive. For instance, I have a copy of Half-Life 2 currently, but I can't play it until they release it(and I pay for it). Content of similar size has been downloadable as movies and games, but that is largely warez. So, the dream of current releases being legally downloadable is upon us and, hopefully, a better system to stop piracy. Undoubtedly, somebody will find a work around for steam too, but at least it'll take a day or two.