Virtual Worlds

The great singapore sale has started! And so, where do we find ourselves on a sunday afternoon?


Kino.

A buncha 20% discount coupons (w00t!) in life! (29th May for those who missed it) and the general tendency to gravitate towards the place anyway (must be all the weight of authority in those books) cause us to somehow magically appear in the bookstore. Or, well, fine, my sis went there first and i was looking for her, which was the other part of why i was in kino.

At any rate, i found her in the computer section (go figure) reading a book on 'designing virtual worlds'. The difference this time is that it's a rather easy to read book more humanities based than coding-based, which just means that this time i can actually understand what she's reading. And so the first part i saw was kinda sociological and about the types of players who Mud and their differing objectives, and the implications of your design on the proportions of people who'll stay in the long run. Interesting stuff. And there was a whole section on Game economics, too. I like. My sis like(s). I buy.

And while i'm reading the book, i inevitably draw many parallels to the Kingdom of Loathing which is this web-based MUD still in beta, but going official soon. The thing about MUDs in beta is that there're endless tweaks going on, and with a reasonably transparent economy you can see interesting (and immediate) effects. And all at once, here's all your textbook economic theory in living dynamic practice, all your demand and supply, your market structures, your macroeconomic controls, and there're people, intelligent people, discussing with good economic sense why certain policies would work and certain others wouldn't, and nice discusssions about the REAL opportunity cost of actions in the game and how to combat inflation and that sort of thing. So cool. Did i just lose everyone here? But i figure that if i don't manage to get that childhood dream of being an animator at squaresoft, maybe i'll get a chance to be an economist at squaresoft for their next incarnation of an MMORPG. I never really liked the idea of subscription-based Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs, but hey, it'd be fun to be on the other side. Yea and anyway, my mum was so completely aghast that my sis wanted to buy this $90 computer book from borders. So yea i didn't tell her that i'm fuelling her passion with this one. oh well. Excuse me while i return to my attempt at profiting from information assymetries.