Moving to a new home ....

Well, I've decided to take the plunge and move my personal blog over to MSN spaces. It just seemed like the thing to do, what with it's recent release to the public and rather nice interface -- I can even submit a post by email if I'm so inclined. Therefore, I will now be hanging up my shingle at "strawberryJAMM's Space". See you there!

KidTrade: A Design for an eBay-resistant Virtual Economy

In my wanderings I came across a very interesting position-paper under development for the State of Play II: Reloaded conference later this month:

< who="Randy Farmer" where="KidTrade: A Design for an eBay-resistant Virtual Economy">

Among MMOG customers and developers, online debate rages about the unfairness of the time-investment vs. money-investment trade-off. Those who have an excess of one resource and a shortage of the other face off against those with the opposite resource imbalance. I will not retread that ground here, but instead offer an alternative approach to the entire idea of the virtual market.

An eBay compatible virtual economy is (now) a design choice. We may not have known that this would happen a decade ago (though, arguably, we should have), but now there’s no excuse for ignoring this effect when developing a new game. We can design our products, service rollout, Terms of Service and End User License Agreements with our eyes wide open.

We don’t have to do it the same –old way, especially if it doesn’t make sense for our game. There are other virtual market designs that do not have these same properties, and may be suited better to your property, especially if externalizing virtual object markets will be harmful to the health and/or profitability of your product.

I will present one such model in detail: KidTrade.

[more...]

< /quote >

State of Play is an annual conference sponsored by New York Law School and Yale Law School that explores virtual worlds as "the next frontier in the evolution of cyberspace", with this year's Reloaded conference highlighting two themes: the role of intellectual property and governance in virtual worlds, including (but obviously not limited to) the question "What should be the relationship between real and virtual world economies? "

This particular paper, written by Randy Farmer, a pioneer in the development of multi-user online systems, is an argument stating that it is actually possible for a developer to design a virtual economy that is resistant to external real-world economy "contaminants" rather than all such economies "inevitably" reaching a point where someone with lots of money and not enough time to "play the game" can simply purchase goods and/or prestige on e-bay, using real currency, from someone else who has lots of time to play and a desire for more real-world money.

What a great article and thoughtful debate surrounding it. I found it very interesting to start thinking about how one might develop a virtual economy that deliberately disrupts this presumed-to-be-inevitable co-mingling of real and virtual economies.

In reading through the text, appendix and follow up comments I had some ideas that might possibly strengthen the "non-e-bay-ness" of Randy's proposed economy:

1. One of the things that immediately occured to me was that the problem associated with an unestablished market could be mitigated by, upon starting the MMPORG, instantly and automatically creating some small number of pre-existing trade entries for the n * (n - 1) "A for B" pair-wise combinations of all original Things available in the game. This then pre-creates an "established market" that can then just evolve from that point forward.

2. In the article, Randy includes the following footnote:

< who="Randy Farmer">

[7] Decay complicates the trader’s market by adding wear status as a dimension, but seems like an important feature for a kid’s educational game. Stuff that lasts forever, even when you use it heavily, doesn’t match their real-world experience.

< /quote >

Dealing with decay is defintely not an easy problem - you want things to "wear out with use" but you probably also a Thing that is used very heavily to "wear out" faster than a Thing that is used only a little bit. On the other hand, you want to discourage hoarding in lieu of sharing and trading, so you also have to make sure all Things wear out over time even if they aren't used.

Also, the longer and/or more heavilty a Thing has been used, the less "value" it has because it will have a relatively shorter life-span than a "Brand-New-Thing". Players will want to trade their older Things for newer Things, but will generally be more inclined to offer an Older Thing for an Older Thing and only accept a Newer Thing for a Newer thing. Eventually, everyone will have a lot of "Broken Things" that can't be traded for "New Things", and there will likely be a lot of unfulfilled trade request involving Things that have decayed past half their original life-span.

One idea I had here would be to introduce Recycling to the economy. That is, allow users with "Heavily Used Things", "Broken Things" and even un-droppable "Unique Things" a player no longer wants, to bring them to a Recycling Station where they are accepted and then "converted" into a random "New Thing".

A player couldn't accumulate any more Things than he already had, since there is still only a one for one trade, but now an intrinsic value has been given to "Heavily Used Things", "Broken Things", and "Unique Things" regardless of the actual nature of the Things, which allows a user to get rid of Things no one wants in exchange for "New Things" he might want or that he can trade for something he does want. Therefore, this deals with the side effect of junk accumulation and also has the benefit of teaching good citizenship to boot.

3. Do trades absolutely have to be restricted to a Central Market place? Could we still mittigate the E-Bay-ness of a virtual economy and allow non-anonymous trades?

Randy lists four requirements for an external market transaction on a service like eBay to be viable, and claims that only one of the first two need to be blocked to make the market in virtual goods non-viable:

Requirement 1: The Seller must be able to guarantee delivery of the virtual goods to the correct buyer in a reasonable timeframe. Delivery to the wrong party is not acceptable.

Requirement 2: The Seller must also be able to confirm delivery of the virtual goods to the correct buyer, or be subject to potentially fraudulent buyer non-delivery claims.

Requirement 3: The universe of Buyers and Sellers must believe that Requirements 1 and 2 can be reliably met, or the market will not develop. This belief is only established through a history of successful transactions.

Requirement 4: The value of the Thing being sold is greater than transaction costs including: Transaction fees, market liquidity, delivery fees and delivery coordination. If the sale value drops to zero, this requirement can not be met.

Obviously allowing the non-anonymous trade opens Requirements 1 and 2 to the wind, and there's nothing much we can do about Requirement 3 if it has been met. But we can try to manipulate the value of a Thing to both the seller and the buyer inside the game.

For example, what if all non-anonymous trades had to be both one-for-one and could only be to exchange two things with comparable remaining lifetimes (that is Consumables must both have the same number of uses left, Collectables would have to have the same amount of "usage" left in them.)?

Using Randy's own method of analysis:

• The seller can meet eBay Requirement 1.
• The seller can meet eBay Requirement 2.
• The seller can meet eBay Requirement 3.
• What about eBay Requirement 4?

Well, first, the seller must be willing to take something virtual from the buyer in exchange for the Thing being sold. We've restricted him from accepting a Thing that is otherwise worthless in the virtual world for a "Hot-New-Thing". Instead, the system forces him to set the virtual "cost" to something with the same "usefulness" remaining. Why, then, would a buyer bother to go looking for stuff on eBay? If she already has something at a high level of utility why isn't she trying to sell it herself in order to trade with someone who has what she wants but isn't asking for real-world money. Or she can use the Market place to trade it for what she wants or for a more heavily used item which she can then Recycle, hopefully for a "New Thing" of the type she wants but, if not, then for whatever random "New Thing" she gest which can most likely be easily traded for a "Used Thing" of the kind she wants".

(Hm. For some reason I'm suddenly reminded of the Fast Pass service at Disneyland, where you can get a (free) ticket that "holds your place in line" at a specific time, resulting in minimal waiting time to board the ride without removing the "old fashioned" queuing system so that park visitors can still opt to "take their chances" when they haven't got a Fast Pass at a time they'd like to ride. I wonder if that model has anything useful to apply to this model)

Well, those are some of the thoughts I had after reading Randy's article. I might have more to add later, but it's very late and I'm going to stop typing now.

Is that a knife in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

I stumbled across the following link at "follow me":

The FBI Guide to Concealable Weapons: http://www.asiscleveland.com/asis/docs/CW.pdf

I have to agree with "The Cerebrate" - isn't it Fascinating, how many ways we humans have come up with to surreptitiously "slice'n'dice each other"? :-P

New "Technical" Blog at MSDN

I've decided to join the ranks of the "officially blogging" Microsoft Employees at MSDN and have started a second blog specifically for discussing stuff about my current projects (what I'm allowed to discuss anyway) and my various thoughts and opinions on user experience and secure software systems.

So hop on over to http://blogs.msdn.com/strawberryjamm/ to read my future thoughts along these lines.

(This blog will continue to exist, however it will now be focused primarily on the "Personal Stuff", such as RPGs, Movies, Books, Art, &c.)

Harry Potter and the Tidbits of Technology

So, Okay, I haven't blogged anything for a while. But, you know, I'm really not the sort to stress myself out about that kind of thing. I guess I just post when I post. :-)

Why the lengthy gap this particular time? Well, mostly because I've been a bit obsessed with ... well, ... looks cautiously over shoulder ... um .. well ... *cough*harrypotter*cough*.

It all started as the release date for the third Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Prisioner of Azkaban, approached. In preparation, I started re-reading the third book, and checking out the news on some of the popular Harry Potter web sites, like "The Leaky Cauldron", "Mugglenet" and even "JK Rowling Official Site".

Then I, my husband and my five-and-a-half year old son went and saw it on opening night - what a blast, and a totally awesome movie. So what if it wasn't exactly "faithful" to every single nuance and action in the book? It was faithful to the theme of the book over all, and so, so, so different from how the first two were done. The best explanation I've seen touching on the difference is thus:

<quote who="Cleolinda Jones" where="Daily Digest Movie News">

"The best way I can describe the difference between Chris Columbus and Alfonso Cuarón as directors is that it's like dancing. You're dancing with this one guy, and he knows all the steps, but you can tell it was a lot of work for him to memorize them, and you keep hearing him mutter, "One-two-three, one-two-three..." the whole time. Then you're dancing with this other guy, and he's so good at what he does that you're not conscious of anything else but music and motion.

"Alfonso Cuarón is that second guy."

</quote>

(If you are also a Harry Potter fan (closet or otherwise) and are willing to go through the motions of signing up for a free LiveJournal account and joining Cleolinda's Movies in 15 Minutes community, you have to check out her parody "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in 15 minutes". Warning - although based on a kids' movie, this parody does contain "mature content")

After the movie, I started re-reading the other books in more or less random order - started the fourth book as a follow on to the third, then picked up the first book to read aloud to my son at bedtime, and am now about half way through book five, with plans to pick up book two when that's done. As the obsession was still running high I poked around the net some more and eventually stubmled onto a awesome though seriously high-bandwidth Yahoo! group called Harry Potter for Grownups, and I've almost never looked back!

Now then, moving along... despite my current obsession with the Wizarding World I did still managed to stumble across the following Tidbits of Technology:

DRM and MSFT: a product no customer wants (Transcript of a talk given on the Microsoft Redmond Campus) - Cory Doctorow, June 17, 2004

"Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!

"I'm here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff (mostly), and I live in London. I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM."

Joel on Software - How Microsoft Lost the API War - Joel Spolsky; Sunday, June 13, 2004

"Microsoft's crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet."

Someday, You'll Own a Tablet PC - by David Coursey, June 18, 2004

"Opinion: With tablet support likely becoming a standard part of the Longhorn OS, every Windows-based business notebook will double as a Tablet PC.

"There's been a lot of talk around eWEEK.com about the future of the Tablet PC, so I've decided to add my two cents' worth. My prediction? Someday every business notebook that uses a Microsoft operating system will be a Tablet PC. And most of them will even have tablet features!"