Markets Are MMOs

The reason we have markets is because the systemic optimization effect of free agents making decisions is generally more accurate than any particular algorithm, not least of all due to computational capacities relative to those possesed by human brains. Markets are the bi-product of the crowd sourcing of logistical optimization problems. In other words, you've got a curve of demand that changes in unpredictable ways, and you can fill spaces under that curve by drawing rectangles. Predicting the curve and directly matching it is very hard to do, but if you let people trade individually, they can adapt on a more granular basis, approaching an ideal of "liquidity". It's great.

If you look back on the history of financial markets versus how they work today, you'll realize that the means of communication completely changes the nature of participation. They used to trade paper, and in order to invest you had to be a real royal jerk wearing a top hat or something, living in London or having an agent for you operating there. Watch Wall Street, that guy spends his day cold calling people and trying to get them to invest in an account he operates. The Internet blew the collective mind of the market, allowing trading to happen both computationally and remotely. It's become possible for due diligence to be done in a more rapid and accessible way. This has changed the nature of the game.



The biggest problem facing the global markets, in my personally opinion as an interaction designer, is not too much constraining regulation or overly-loose, unbalance lack of regulation. The big problem is in the interface. The more accessible a market is, the more likely it is that it will do what it's supposed to do: optimize logistics. People are the fulcrum, so interface accessibility is like the meta-fulcrum, maybe torque, I didn't do well in physics...

The nature of a market in it's rules is the second key consideration. Government constraints are usually the least important factor of the three, for the following reason. If the terms of a market are not conducive to optimization, then it doesn't matter if the market is too regulated or deregulated, problems are going to result. For instance, under one set of terms one could make that argument that commodity futures markets are not conducive to optimizing the efficiency of deliveries; the friction of hedged trading between numerous middle-men can exceed the benefit gained from more efficient pricing. However, it's quite possible that a futures market could be oriented in a way that the end-consumer is paying less of a mark-up than they would were prices less stable. It's a matter of game balance. As many great economists note, the most important terms are transparency and the legal infrastructure to facilitate trust, these are the terms that allow good decision making to occur, they facilitate the self-balancing of the game.

Now, let's step back from serious realism for a minute, and think about what trading securities is like from an experiential point of view.



The stock market appeals to a balance of conqueror and management styles of play. It's turn-based in that every sale of stock takes a few business days to clear; you can buy again while your funds are unsettled but you can't sell until they do. Lot's of research is involved because the noun array is composed of all the heterogenaity and novelty of the public companies in that given nation. Thers is a level of explorer-type play involved in the more daring stuff, like scoping out penny stocks in cleantech, or small-caps in emerging markets.

The futures market is more strongly a matter of winning at all costs than it is about management, this is because the distribution of cash between traders is zero-sum. You buy a ton of beans for delivery a year from now for, I don't know, let's say $500. If the price of beans goes higher than $500 a ton within that time period, you can sell that contract for a profit. You're basically swimming with the sharks in this kind of market, all your profit is coming directly from other trader's lossses. It's a real-time game as well, with a staggered turn-based mechanic created by the relative expiration of the contracts being traded.

The FOREX is like futures, but with a twist, the supply of the commodity is being created electronically by central banks all over the world, and then by commerical banks, who incidentally operate on the currency markets more than any other class of entity, since they help set exchange rates via arbitrage. Futures represent an obligation to deliver something you could eat or burn or bath in, like gold coins, but foreign exchange trading is like trying to play Q-Bert up the biggest pyramid in the history of man. As a result, there's always a bull-market somewhere. I think this kind of trading has a stronger exploration element than stock and commodities, but it's still dominated by victory-oriented management. I've created a game account on Oanda to play around with this. Data is shifting in real-time, fractions of a penny, fluid real-time.

I'd like to see a market that is fundamentally more equitable, so I decided to design it.

Barter Town

After stopping by Paul's place on Saturday, I rolled into a house on the side of a lightly trafficked highway in Conneticut, known to its residents as "Barter Town" - not to be confused with the place run by a stark rivalry between Tina Turner and a crazed midget riding on the back of a masked goliath. This barter town is instead run by hippies with dreads. Ari and I are going to live on a meager budget and crunch out a prototype for something interesting, which I'll talk more about as the situation permits. We're living the indie dream, Horatio Alger meets William Gibson, trying to cajole each other into more creative visions and fiercer productive sprints. Last year we tried this and ended up designing a pretty compelling multi-player game, so I've got high expectations of the next few weeks.

Jammin!

Over the past week Ari and I have been in a short-lived crunch, or jam, to complete a game for the Live, Love Game Contest. It's been hectic and intensely rewarding. Here's to us winning! If we do so, and it's ok with my collaborators (we had a crucial pixel artist do the sprites) I'm going to donate the winnings to the girl that the game was inspired by, and also named after.

Tommarow I'm going into Baltimore to record a choral line with Dan Deacon for his new single.

Then I'm rolling up to Conneticut for a few weeks for live collaboration with Ari. Now that we're wrapping up our art-game experiment, it's time to get serious. We're going to be prototyping an interaction model that could very well change the world. Stay tuned.

Missing Pieces

I got an interesting manga the other day, from the guy who did Astro Boy back in the 60s, Osamu Tezuka. It's called Dororo, and it's about a guy whose father made a pact with demons in exchange for all his body parts. He was born with no eyes, limbs, nose or ears, and is adopted in classic Moses style by a doctor who fashions him prosthetic limbs, glass eyes, the whole deal. He becomes a great warrior, as you might expect, replacing the five sense with preternatural ESP. As he slays demons on his journeys, he gains his body parts back, one by one. This premise was the basis of a 2004 PS2 game, Blood Will Tell, which I have yet to try.

Tezuka-san, now dead, established the tradition of using far-out action fantasy to paint a serious portrait of the human condition. Most of manga and anime would have turned out very different if it weren't for this guy. Dororo is replete with portraits of hardship, sadness, and the unrelenting human spirit, I have to recommend it. I also recommend you try and find the movie adaptation online.

Harry Potter meets CoD 4

Tell me this doesn't sound like it'd make one interesting game. Teams of students in different universities waging cyber war on each other, trying to take down each other's networks, raising armies of ZOMBIEs and masking their attacks with distracting fients. Then you've got the NSA, pwning over it all. If you think Starcraft took the RTS+Narritive dynamic to its peak, just let me write that script.

MetaProgrammer Sundays: Money!

I have been "blessed" to be born in an upper-middle class family that has afforded me the opportunities to be where I am today. Talent, hard work, these play a role, but the truth is if my parents made 50k a year, I wouldn't have nearly as much opportunity for success. I was talking this over with my friend Santiago, while eating pizza topped with Palmieto (the inside of a palm tree, very expensive, in pesos) and drinking Stella Artois, which is produced by the beer company that his father has performed legal services for, on a street-corner cafe in Recoleta, which if the name isn't a give away, is the second nicest part of the whole City/Country, by richie, luxury standards (Puerto Madero takes 1st place). The probability of somebody being born into a situation as nice or nicer than ours is 1/500, there are about 30 million people in the world that have it as good as we do. We're not so rich that we haven't had to work for anything, we've worked hard and tried to cultivate our talents to those applications, but we've have a very well-greased sprinboard to go off of.

Whenever people talk about money, there tends to be one of four responses. People either get anxious because they're reminded of their own uncertainty in surviving, or emotional because of the sklavmoral notion that the world is divided into poor victims and rich criminals (fun fact: it is) or they start talking figures and strategies. The last kind of response is to get horny, which while a significant niche, isn't as common. But let's have another kind of uncommon reaction today, a reaction that comes from our metaprogramming circuits instead of our survival, emotional, rational or sexual circuits. Let's consider what money is, and what money isn't.

You could say it's a fuzzy rule of metaprogramming that things which seem to be fundamental really were variable once, but then some effect lead to a change that made things seem like they'd always been that way, even though they hadn't. Money is like this. It used to be that emotions, survival, sexual fitness, and even decision making were completely independent of any particular commodity, with the exception of water. Water used to be the bottleneck for survival, eating and staying sheltered were pretty open-ended problems, like Dues Ex meets the sadly cancled BC. You could say water was the money, except it fell out of the sky on a regular basis. Today, private organizations called central banks control the rate at which new tokens (money) are created; if they were creating water they would be the ones who control when it rains and when it droughts. It seems like money is a fundamental lever for living on this planet, that economics defines everything nessecarily. If you define economics as not being about money, but rather the experiential attractors that drive human decision making, then yes, economics has been around since the human nervous system. But money is just the ever thinning artificial blood of our experiential body, and it is possible to undergo transfusions.

Consider the word "Arbitrage", a term used to describe deals that are garunteed to make money, involving selling something across markets, where it has a different value. Banks do this all the time, it's a main factor in setting exchange rates on a moment-to-moment basis. But it's also a word used to describe buying Take-Two stock on hopes that EA will buy it from you at a higher price, or borrowing money from the Japanese at 0% interest to buy another currency, what's known as a "carry trade". It's also a term one guy used to describe moving to Buenos Aires, where a mere million dollar net worth suddenly becomes three times as potent - "lifestyle arbitrage". And it was in experiencing this that I realized the arbitrary nature of it all. I felt after that, that money was irrelevant to the true quality of my experience, above a certain threshold.

On the other hand, the way things are now, money is a way of re-programming the reality around oneself and others, so for scientific purposes let's zoom in to rarer and rarer levels of wealth.

At the 1/1000 level you have people who qualify as "High Net Worth Individuals", people with a few million. At this level of wealth, you can invest your money at a lame 5% a year and live pretty posh, especially offshore. You can also do a lot for local infrastructure at that level of wealth, providing jobs, a new soccer field, maybe help local water pipes stay sanitary, stuff like that. But while being a millionaire seems like a cool thing to most people, it is relatively speaking, small potatoes. You can also fund small start-up companies, with the aim of effecting social change or, more likely, propelling your worth into the next bracket.

At the 1/10,000 level you have about 600,000 people in the world who have more than ten million. At this level of wealth you can get a private jet, an estate in both hemispheres, and have a bit of kush to play around on. Dick Cheney is around this level of wealth. At this point, you're not some fairly random, possibly libertarian eccentric who "lucked" into millioniare status with some good stock options, you're probably a firm benefactor to the establishment, either on the right in NYC/London or DC, or on the left in LA and SF, which happens to be geographical. You're wealth is latent in your network and potential to influence; in the example of Dick Cheney, he can put his millions in Euro-denominated investments and then enact policies that are disatrous for the health of the US Dollar, making himself sufficiently richer in the process. (Unfortunately for Cheney and co. Paraguay has just elected a decent leader who will probably sign extradition treaties with the US, so that $10 mil land deal the Bushes just did in this range will have to be liquidated, probably at a loss, so they can move somewhere that international law can't catch up with them, maybe Burma.)

At the 1/100,000 level, now we're talking about 60,000 people in the whole world, you've got somewhere around 100,000,000. Private Equity guys, Hedge Fund guys, people who may be in the market for a luxury submarine, or "submersible Yacth". You can buy island nations with this level of wealth, all the other options are probably put into perspective by this example.

At the 1/1,000,000 level you're talking about what some lackey dubs "The Global Superclass". These are people with networths in the range of .5 Billion and on into the billions. , Donal Trump, Sumner Redstone, Bill Gates, ect. At this level you can buy small countries, or more profitably, multi-national corporations, and you can eliminate millions of deaths from certain kinds of malnutrition and disease. You could invest in relatively cheap permaculture methods that would give people more effective food production infrastruture, as well as a variety of secondary benefits, going a long way toward eliminating hunger. You could invest in cutting edge technology that could define the future in radical ways (you could also do this as low as the 1/10,000 level) and of course, you can buy favor in governments to the point where you are effectively above the law.

At the 1/10,000,000 level, about 600 people in the world, you have wealth disseminated. For example, there are no people with a personal net worth higher than ~60 billion, but, John D. Rockerfeller had much more than that in inflation-adjusted dollars back in the early 20th century. These kind of fortunes were spread through various non-profit organizations founded by these people, which then proceeded to define the code of life throughout the 20th century. Women's Lib, Planned Parenthood, the guidlines that define education, the direction of international organizations such as the WTO, and so on, have been defined by the weight of this kind of wealth. Most notably, Rockerfeller was one of the original investors in the Federal Reserve bank, with has controlled the reserve currency of the world. In other words, this level of wealth owns the apparatus of money itself.

I want to note that some of the happiest times of my life have been when I had $4 in my pocket and a negative bank balance, was going hungry, and had a sweet girl by my side, feeding me crappy mac and cheese.

So, my views on money have gone through a pretty potent transformation, from being a nessecary reality that I'd rather not deal with, to being a big game perpetuated by the few in order to motivated the behavior of the many, and in that a game worth redesigning. If you play Endgame: Singularity, you'll experience the process of an AI eventually taking over the entire global economy via processes of efficient and adaptive investment algorithms and supplementary arbitrage enabled through total information awareness (not to be confused with it's real-life cousin). Money is just the tokenization of experience, and when Alan Greenspan makes a bunch of phone calls to solve, for example, the Savings and Loan Crisis, he's just balancing the game of our consensus reality, herding us indirectly. It's just a game. And it's a game that you play to the extent you choose. Those that opt to play less, scaling back their needs toward self-sufficiency, and those that play to the extreme, using their extensive wealth to effect real change in the world, are the ones who effect a redesign.

Getting Serious

Looking back on the canon of titles that were massively important for the cultural cache of the medium-at-large and/or watermarks in great game design, we see a typically understated amount of games that could fall into the "serious" category.

Here's my personal canon, it roughly matches the general consensus:

Myth

System Shock

Planescape

Starcraft

Civilization/Alpha Centauri

Balance of Power

Sim City

M.U.L.E.

GTA

Here's some stuff people generally don't agree constitutes a good game, but was important for the medium nonetheless:

Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

The McDonald's Game

Passage

The New York Stock Exchange (worst MMO ever)

What most of these have in common is that they approach a "serious" topic, but don't hesistate to utilize mechanics that might not seem out of place in a board game or computer game about sci-fi aliens. The games that are hailed as milestones in game design, games that "gamers" want to play, are roughly split between games that have fantastic themes and themes reflecting "reality", with stuff like M.U.L.E. filling the game, involving real-life dynamics (economics, supply and demand) in a sci-fi context. The stuff that is a major benchmark in the critical conversation about games, though maybe not great games in their own right, are almost universally fringing on "serious".

Now, I've worked on hardcore indie stuff, and I've worked on casual stuff, and I've worked on serious stuff, and I can tell you that these groups not only overlap, but they actively hybridize. CuttleCandy has casual gameplay with a theme that fringes on the serious. Super Columbine uses hardcore mechanics to talk about a deadly serious topic. McDonald's uses very casual interface design to explore an explicitedly serious resource-management model. Some of those older games, Balance of Power, Civlization, have really clunky interfaces by comparison to the context-sensitive, one-button mouse paradigm (no menus) that we're used to seeing in most web-games. Hell, even the excellent Dino Run, by all means an indie game, has a simple, casual interface and is marked around a scientifically credited event (the meteor hitting the Yucutan).

I think I'll have difficulty going to work on a game about orcs or power armor. And considering how dry, non-incentivizing interfaces dominate modern life, it's reasonable to conject that the most influential game designers of the future, as in the past (Miyamoto excepted) will have a more serious emphasis in their work. So I think that's pretty much where I'm at.