virtualeconomics

Contra Farmville for Dummies

The appearance on Amazon of the book Farmville for Dummies - a self-consciously dummed-down how-to for Zynga's Facebook "game" that is absolutely nothing more than a time-sink without an iota of mental challenge - so depressed Umair Haque today that he declared it the end of culture.

"You know what's really cool about our culture?" he tweeted. "Oh wait. I can't think of anything."

Hyperbole is hyperbole. But since this is a cultural golden age, I do not like to see the odd bump in the road cause one of our greatest minds to write off the whole thing. Contra Farmville for Dummies, therefore, a handful of points in favour of the culture at the start of the second decade of the third millenium.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night saves HMV

There seems to be two rather different reactions to the announcement that HMV is to close 60 shops:

(1) "how can they be making any money when everything's twice as expensive as it is online?"

(2) "how can they not be making any money when the shops are always packed?"

One possibility - no-one is visiting HMV to buy any more, just to browse or socialise and see what they'll order online later. So the shops are always packed but no money is changing hands...sure, it's possible. Anecdotally, plenty of people increasingly treat the high street as an opportunity to look for things they'll buy later, more cheaply, online. 

Entire population of the world killed inside a fortnight

Call of Duty: Black Ops launched three weeks ago on November 9th and immediately became the highest grossing media launch of all time, taking $650m in its first week. According to the stats that flash up in between games the current kill count is equal to 150% of the total global population, so it seems that it took the game's approximately three and a half million players just a fortnight to kill their way through the equivalent of the entire population of the world. They've also fired about 200 billion bullets. Jeffery MacCormack wonders what it says about us as a species, that the most successful media launch of all time has thus far wiped out the human race in its entirity.

(Photo: popculturegeek on Flickr)

Global warming subtext of the Warcraft Cataclysm

World of Warcraft's latest expansion Cataclysm is officially released on 7th December, but today saw the rollout of a significant proportion of the expansion's new content, The Shattering. While previous expansions have focused on adding new content, new characters and new regions to the game, this one takes a new and more controversial approach by redrawing the map of the Warcraft gameworld Azeroth, destroying many areas while creating others.

The growing value of URLs you can easily spell out in dead bodies

Probably the funniest bit of commercial ingenuity I've seen these past few months is the growth of corpse-spam in World of Warcraft.You see, it's quite hard, in-game, to spam people with commercial messages. If you send messages to people you get blocked and reported and your account shut down. If you just yell stuff in the city square people ignore you. But there's a huge market in selling gold to players (cos it's easier to buy 1000 gold from a Chinese sweat-shop than bother to earn it by playing the game) and so the gold-spammers have hit on an ingenious solution.

Go to any major city (Stormwind, Orgrimmar) and you'll see the name of some gold-selling website or other spelled out in dead bodies on the ground. Now, it's quite hard to spell out URLs in dead bodies (it takes several corpses, hence player accounts that you have to hack from somewhere - to spell out each one) so the big trick is to get a URL that is short, ideally memorable and above all easy to spell out in the dead bodies of WoW avatars. 

 

There's another one for the list of jobs that it would have been hard to predict existing in the C21st - virtual corpse spammer. But there seems to be quite a lot of skill to it.

You can get anything for free by calling it a game

An article in today's Sunday Times on Japan's "professional seducers" set me thinking. (Apparently various companies offer services to people who want to entrap their husbands or wives in infidlity to faciliate a divorce, as well more esoteric services such as contriving "chance" encounters for clients.) At the moment, the companies take on as staff these seducers and pay them in the region of five grand a month each. I think they're missing a trick - they could get the seducers to pay them too, if they pitched the whole thing as some sort of spy game.    

Update: also, why are there no counter-espionage services available? You'd think that for a modest fee a cheating husband could have his latest affair checked out by yet another set of experts to see whether she was a known agent hired by his wife to trap him. I guess the industry just hasn't been around long enough yet to generate the requisite quota of disgruntled ex-employees.  

I'd rather be fishing in Loch Modan

First impressions of World of Warcraft (which I started playing a couple of weeks ago*) - neither the graphics nor the interface have to get all that much better before you could really just live there. Not corporeally, no - you'd still need food and water and sanitary facilities somewhere out in the world. But otherwise some of the scenery and the buildings are comparable to many of the places you'd trek halfway around the world to see and the society is probably as interesting as any on earth.

This, of course, is not news - back in the old Everquest days Ted Castronova got a 20% positive response to the assertion "I live in Norrath but I travel outside of it regularly", and a 22% positive response to "if I could, I would spend all of my time in Norrath."

But what this boils down to for me is, like the Kindle, more bad news for property values. Let's agree for a moment that once everyone can afford a working Holodeck they're not going to need anything else in their house. Somewhere on the line between Working Holodeck and WoW is a point at which people - lots of people - are going to start saying "screw this house thing, I don't even live here anymore. I live in Stormwind. My friends live in Stormwind. Sometimes we pop into London for baths, meals and a phone call to reassure our parents we're still alive." And once people twig that to do that they need one room with a bed, a shower and a wifi connection...well, what are all those big houses going to be for anyway?

*Nordrassil server, if you happen to be on the same and want to come and say "hi"

Ms Bimbo

My friend Alex at ShinyShiny was on Sky News last night (I'll post up a clip as soon as I get hold of one) talking about this week's big Internet controversy, Ms Bimbo.

Creator of the game Nicholas Jacquart has, inevitably, taken something of a hammering in the press for allegedly promoting a negative and harmful self-image to young girls. Personally I can't raise much enthusiasm for criticising a man who's making a few quid pissing in a well that's already been thoroughly poisoned by the millions who have come before him - when, apparently, 63% of girls would already rather be glamour models than get a job it's difficult to see how much extra harm this bit of silliness is really going to do. Still, I'm not the anxious parent of an image-obsessed teenage girl, and if I was I'd probably find it easier to take on one 23-year-old web designer than face up to the real problem that is the vast apparatus of the global advertising industry too.

More from humanity's newest emerging nation

Very interestingly, MMOG Eve Online has appointed a full time economist to investigate and report on the economics of the virtual world. This is the same game that was described by creators as an emerging nation only a few weeks ago.

(HT: the virtual economy reasearch network)

"Eve Online is not a computer game. It is an emerging nation"

From NYT, via Craig:

"The kingdom is in crisis. After pledging to treat its citizens equally, the government stands accused of unfairly favoring one powerful, well-connected political faction. Many citizens have taken to open dissent, even revolt, and some are threatening to emigrate permanently...This specter of corruption has emerged most recently not in some post-colonial trouble spot but in the virtual nation of an Internet game called Eve Online."

CCP, creators and owners of Eve Online, now plans to hold election of an oversight committee to which it will "call in election monitors from universities in Europe and the United States".

When an online game starts not just calling itself, but behaving like, an emerging nation, something a lot bigger than computer gaming is going on.