On The Margins

Monday May 16, 2005

[ Networks ] Recent Study on Online Computer Games

This morning, my daughter demonstrated to me what she had been telling me over the weekend. She pulled up an eBay page of running auctions of virtual Runescape game assets. On the first page, one virtual asset was selling for more than $1000. Other items were listed in British Pound and in Australian Dollars.

There has been a lot of news on such auctions. Surely, these may never become as revenue generating as the spectrum auctions but they do deserve thorough study. I recently wrote a little entry about the auction of virtual gaming assets, and this morning, a recent entry on professor Lawrence Lessig's blog drew my attention to a study by OECD's Working Party on Information Economy, released on May 12, 2005 and exploring the economics and cultural ramifications of online computer and video game industry.

Here's the first paragraph of the report. For more, go to the original, which is available for free.

Computer and video games is a young industry with rapid growth underpinned by technological development. The global market in 2003 was estimated to be over USD 21 billion compared with USD 32 billion for the recorded music industry; US games revenue in 2001 surpassed film box office ticket sales. The main segments in 2003 were the console off-line (73%) and PC-offline markets (17%). Online and wireless games are still relatively small (6.4 and 3.4% respectively). However, there is a trend towards online games in PCs and consoles. New games are released with some online capabilities, and it is expected that nearly all will become at least in part online. Computer games are R&D and innovationintensive and games programming and design are highly skilled occupations. Market expansion is coming through development of online network technology, diversifying content and developing large-scale online games. The industry is also increasingly seen as strategic by major media, Internet and consumer electronics firms.

In the meantime, it is worth nothing that OECD's Working Party on Information Economy has also conducted a whole series of other related studies on digital content.

OECD study does seem to miss the important trend in online game communities I mentioned at the beginning of this entry—i.e., the auctioning of virtual game assets. In fact, it may have been worth noting that some online games, such as Runescape, seem to have been designed to enable exchange of virtual assets. Such ability to exchange unleashes all that comes with it, including real auctions performed with real money.

Online Games, Economics, Virtual Assets, Auctions.

2005-05-16 11:34:48.0 -- Comments [3] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Culture ] The Fine Art of Webloging and Immutability

Weblogs admit a daunting range of expressive styles, topics, media and direction.

What makes each weblog unique is the persona and the focus of the writer. Without a personal voice, weblog becomes another information "hub" or "portal" at best. With too much personality-based bickering it can turn into a very bad version of a "chat" room.

So, what does this broad versatility of weblogs mean in the long run of history? Will there be more people taking time out of their precious lives webloging? Will there be less of them? What will become of all the weblogs? Will we have, as a global civilization, masses and masses of notes, recorded in the multitudes of our beautiful languages, about how we lived, ate, walked, worked, talked, consumed and thought? Is this another publishing medium that brings writing to a broader base of authors, as was done with the advent of book printing, which replaced hand-written (or carved) propagation as the only means of spreading ideas?

One thing is for sure. Weblogging reduces the transaction cost of publishing to potential readers, and the exposure of one's personal whims only builds greater trust between the author and the reader. Elsewhere on this blog, I have discussed the importance of the pen and the paper to the writer, the reader and the learner. Here, I have also written about trust in the cyberspace. In general, we need to pay greater attention to exploring the much larger problem of how instruments we use can determine not only our intelligence but also our moral state and ethical behavior.

On the historial scale, the internet has not yet proven itself to be a replacement for books when it comes to immutability.

The multiplicity in the physical existance of the book, itself, is a guarantor of its chances of survival. People who build failure-resilient systems already know the value of physical multiplicity of identical instances of a system.

The physical multiplicity we have of weblogs is in the shear numbers of private publications, some of which may have a chance to survive over the centuries as a testimony of what happened to us now. Could this be a case where micro-motives and behaviors giving rise to macro-behavior and effects? Since electronic survival becomes somewhat random, with a severe and punishing destructive force in play, what exactly will we have in what survives?

Blogs, Writing, Books, Pen, Paper.

2005-05-16 08:14:06.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.