Chinese jail for virtual currency extortion

 Posted by (Visited 7661 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jun 092009
 

So this gang of bullies strongarms a guy in an Internet cafe in China, and extorts a bunch of virtual goods and a pile of QQ coins from him. He gets caught, and the court rules that since the virtual goods were purchased, this was a valid case of extortion. Thee of the gang got fines, and the ringleader — three years in jail!

According to the Xinhua news agency, the man, along with three others, assaulted another man in the cafe, forcing him to give up various virtual goods and 100,000 yuan ($14,700) worth of the virtual currency known as QQ coins. The coins are the currency utilized by the major Chinese web portal, Tencent. It is used for the purchase of online goods and premium services for supported titles.

— Virtual Currency Extortion Leads to Three Years of Prison in China.

It isn’t too surprising that this sort of thing is getting taken seriously there; industry experts in China assess the virtual goods market there as being 25 times the size of the US market. (You can download an interesting report on this here, or just check out this slide show).

Gamasutra on free to play MMOs

 Posted by (Visited 7900 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Jun 092009
 

Gamasutra has an article up — “What Are The Rewards Of ‘Free-To-Play’ MMOs?” — that I was interviewed for. During the interview it became clear that many in the traditional AAA games community still have questions around whether this model is viable financially, and the article is centrally about the fact that yes, it can be.

Yes, good money can actually be made in the rapidly-growing world of free-to-play massive multiplayer online games (MMOs), but just how much can micro-transactions actually generate? Unfortunately, average revenue per user information is often concealed behind the fog of competition by privately held game makers reluctant to report either very high or very low results.

To add to the confusion, some developers choose to report their “average revenue per paying user” (ARPPU) which, by definition, is always more impressive than their “average revenue per user” (ARPU). (Both of these statistics relate to monthly logged-in users, and the amount of monthly logged-in users cited in ARPU is often a fraction of total registered users — a common metric used in press releases.)

Avatar body language

 Posted by (Visited 13355 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Jun 082009
 

Regular blog reader mrseb has a blog post up on emotional avatars in virtual worlds inspired by this NYTimes.com article (it’s behind a reg wall).

In short, the research is about how important blushing is as a social lubricant, as evincing embarrassment or shame serves to reinforce the social rules held in common by groups of people. It’s a sign that the person knows they are transgressing to some degree and is sorry for it, and people judging them tend to treat them less harshly.

Which leads Sebastian to ask (emphasis mine!),

Why are we still running around in virtual worlds with emotionless, gormless avatars?

It’s not that the question hasn’t been asked before. For example, back in 2005 Bob Moore, Nic Ducheneaut, and Eric Nickell of PARC gave a talk at what was then AGC (you can grab the PDF here)., which I summarized here with

The presentation by the guys from PARC on key things that would improve social contact in MMOs was very useful and interesting. Eye contact, torso torque, looking where people are pointing, not staring, anims for interface actions so you can tell when someone is checking inventory, display of typed characters in real-time rather than when ENTER is hit, emphatic gestures automatically, pointing gestures and other emotes that you can hold, exaggerated faces anime super-deformed style or zoomed in inset displays of faces, so that the facial anims can be seen at a distance… the list was long, and all of it would make the worlds seem more real.

I was at that talk, and in the Q&A section, which was really more of a roundtable discussion, the key thing that came up was cost.

Continue reading »

The Sunday Poem: After Serious Sunburn

 Posted by (Visited 8735 times)  The Sunday Poem  Tagged with:
Jun 072009
 

Stippled red striated speckles buttered deep
In cocoa, aloe; the slide of cloth on skin
Searing scars of sun and sand.

Skin in sheets, shed sly like sidewinds
Scrubbing rocks, sloughing like cicadas,
Scattered food for mites.

So starts the metamorphose, stretching
To a higher self, a sentience sophisticated
Now for SPFs of sixty-plus.

One is a Wise Crowd

 Posted by (Visited 6552 times)  Misc, Reading  Tagged with:
Jun 062009
 

I have written about The Wisdom of Crowds before many times (see here, and here, and here…). In short, given a problem with a fully objective, quantifiable answer, taking the average of many, diverse people’s estimates will give a more accurate answer than the estimate of an expert.

Now there’s a new study that shows that you can provide multiple estimates yourself, by putting yourself in a different frame of mind — then average them. And that average is likely to be more accurate than either of your two guesses, though not as accurate as involving another person. Neat mind hack!

…participants were given detailed directions for making their follow-up guess: “First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply?… Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.” When the participants used the more involved method, the average was significantly more accurate than the first estimate. The “crowd within” achieved about half the accuracy gains that would have been achieved by averaging with a second person.

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