Choosing your major

Choose a double Econ/Psych major under the B.A. or B.Sc. schedules, or a Psych major with an econ minor, add in some courses in marketing after finding the ones that have some rigour. Go heavy on stats where you can. And then you can do this.

As a Marketing Insight Analyst, your responsibility is to understand how a game works as a service for its customers and how the customers behave in it, identifying and developing the purchase drivers in the game economy context, and providing recommendations based on player psychology (that can be backed up by statistics data) on design, tuning and pricing in order to improve game financial performance.

To do this, pre-release, you will direct the design of virtual products and have input on the features and methods a game uses to drive the desired purchase flow with tempting choices, based on basic psychological studies.
You will need to work with the GMM to measure the impact of updates/design changes in a given title, and work closely with the development team and the Game Economy Designer to refine the design.

Your job will be focused on both Game Evolution updates and new Creations.

...

Skills:


• Strong sensitivity to gameplay and game design, understanding how to build needs and emotions in the context of a game. 
• Strong analytical and formal thinking, able to break problems down in their key variables and identify the relations between them. 
• Strong econometrics skills, able to model problems into quantitative systems, and draw qualitative conclusions out of quantitative data
• Statistic knowledge, able to formulate ratios and indexes specific to each game, identifying specific weaknesses and strengths in its economy design. 
• Strong marketing knowledge, able to formulate adequate selling strategies to improve the financial performance.

Requirements :


• Graduate degree in Psychology or BA, preferably specialized in Marketing or Strategic direction.
• Fluent written and spoken English, concise writing skills. 
• Mastery of Excel. 
• Deep, up-to-date knowledge of the free-to-play market, both web-based and on smartphones. 
• Passion for games on all existing formats: board games, card games, sports, paper RPGs, gambling, all genres of videogames with special focus on MMOs and competitive games. 

While marketing is turning into a data-driven science blending econometrics and psychology, New Zealand's marketing majors are not particularly quantitative. So Gameloft has more particular requirements.

@WillTaylorNZ tells me they'd also had an ad up for a game economy designer. But what do economists know about games anyway? Ahem...

SimCity

As SimCity seems a training ground for future urban planners, here are a few features I'd love to see incorporated in the new edition.

• Real-time play with an unstoppable clock. You could wind it down to be as slow as the real world, but never pause it. Dithering over zoning decisions interferes with the simulated individuals' plans and has them leave in frustration. The clock should keep running, at real-world-time, even during saved games. 
• Bulldozing houses without above-market-value compensation makes residents unhappy. You should have to weigh these costs against whatever it is you're trying to bulldoze into existence.
• Inertia costs: building up a tighter regulatory structure and more prescriptive zoning rules causes delayed implementation of future changes. So if an earthquake hits and you were running a tight smart growth policy ex-ante, it takes you longer to change any of your zoning. If you've only been running the policy for a couple of years, maybe you get a month's delay. If you've been running it long enough that that's the only thing your bureaucrats know, change is almost impossible unless you fire them all.
• The new edition embeds intercity effects, at least according to the reviews. I'm really curious to see how they handle investment and mobility flows. Are simulated residents homogeneous in amenity preferences? How does Tiebout work in this world?
• I really hope that the new edition doesn't assume that stadiums could never exist but for local government financing.

The reviews of the new SimCity look great. Once they've added enough servers or added an offline mode to make the thing playable, or maybe once a cracked version without the mandatory-online-DRM-downgrade is widely available, I'll likely give it a shot. I hope at least a couple of these are in there.

Previously:

• For a Hayekian game
• Gaming the socialist calculation debate
• Gaming the socialist calculation debate: update
• Is the game rigged? Or is the world?

Econ Geek Envy

My grad school roommate was a few years ahead of me in the programme at George Mason. He went part time to work on the Hill shortly before I arrived there; the opportunity costs of finishing his PhD quickly became too high. He loved to tell the story of how David Friedman showed up for a barbeque at his house once after giving a seminar at George Mason. I always envied him that party.

In the New York Times via BK Drinkwater's shared items feed, Milton Friedman and Monopoly:

Monopoly was taken seriously in Shorey House at the University of Chicago in the late 1970s. A room was set aside as “The Monopoly Room.” But in that post-Vietnam, pre-Reagan era, all assumptions were questioned and a game our parents played was no exception. Rules were meant to be altered. The house even convened a “constitution convention” to change the official rules of the game to allow a person to build a hotel on a property without first having to own four houses. Mr. Zelenty, now a corporate lawyer in his native New Jersey, remembers holding a sign that said, “New Jersey Espouses / Hotels Without Houses.”

The other thing taken as seriously in that dorm was free-market economics or, more precisely, Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economics professor. This was a house that frequently invited Professor Friedman and his wife, Rose, to sherry hours. House members ran a snack bar in the basement of the dormitory called Tanstafl, an abbreviation of a saying favored by Mr. Friedman, that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

Mr. Zelenty owned the greatest of treasures any of us could imagine because it combined those two passions. He had asked Mr. Friedman to sign his Monopoly board at one of those sherry hours. The Nobel laureate did so, writing, “Down with” above the game’s name. We didn’t play on that board. No one ever played on that board. (Mr. Zelenty said he still has it and wants to donate the relic to the university one day. “It’s in a place of safety more than a place of honor,” he said.)

The precise details of our classic game are blurred by the alcohol consumed that night and the years that have passed since then, but this much is recalled. We decided that Monopoly was hostile to a free market because it restricted the number of houses or hotels one could buy. We voted that a player could buy as many hotels as a property could physically bear and rents would be raised proportionally.

Read the whole article to work through the effects on gameplay.

Zelenty got to drink sherry with Milton Friedman. And he has a signed Monopoly board memento. Econ geek envy.

But I got to play Dungeons and Dragons in an all economist D&D group where Bryan Caplan was Dungeon Master and William Dickens was a half-ogre named Grissumpf. David Mitchell was a gully dwarf. And Scott Beaulier was some kind of fighter. My Sage/Assassin, Dougal, had a charisma of 3 - I flipped the points over to other characteristics after a bad roll but really enjoyed role playing the lowest possible charisma. You might think it wasn't much of a stretch. You might be right. It was awesome.

If you ever get invited to Capla-Con, go. I can vouch for the "Punctuated Equilibrium" scenario; I generated the Dentist character in its inaugural playing.

Is the game rigged? Or is the world?

Monica Potts despairs that when she plays Civilization, The Sims, and SimCity, she always winds up using strategies she finds ideologically offensive. The (US) liberal has to play as a (US) conservative to win.

There are plenty of other games of which conservatives should approve as well. Sim City, which preceded The Sims, has players create a virtual metropolis instead of a virtual family. As a Sim City expert, I can tell you that things function much more smoothly if taxes are low and city government caters to corporate interests.
...
Those cities also always end up polluted: Wind energy is fine in theory, but old-fashioned petroleum and coal facilities really make them run.

I'll leave to one side for now that the SimCity style games ignore Hayekian insights - I've covered that before. But don't we have at least some evidence that cities function more smoothly if taxes and regulatory burdens aren't too onerous?

I wonder whether Potts's problem is less with the games and more with the world.

I blame some of my right-of-center leanings on the structures of the games themselves. Having children has the added bonus of extending game time in The Sims, because I get to continue to play the same family as the generations roll by. Maternity leave is mandatory for pregnant Sim women because of a long-standing technical issue within the game, but that replicates a long--standing real-world assumption about which partner should care for newborn children. The result is that my Sim women often leave work permanently because they've taken more time off than their Sim husbands, which actually mirrors the results of gender discrimination in the real world. If the game were set up in a less traditional way, I would likely play it in a less traditional way.

I'm not sure that it's rigging the game to have maternity leave of at least some short period be a necessary counterpart to childbirth. Would it be at all realistic to have the game coded to allow female Sims to have the baby in the morning and be back at the office that afternoon?

Then again, she might just not be all that good a gamer:

Civilization was not created by Wright but is similarly rigged. While, historically, there are plenty of Alexander the Greats who amassed power through conquest, there are also countries like Switzerland that became economically powerful by remaining neutral and pacifist. The conventional wisdom, however, is that war games sell--and Civilization is designed to be a war game. I can opt to commit my resources to building trade alliances and public libraries, but I don't have a choice about building an army to defend my cities against barbarian attacks. Once I have an army, I might as well use it to destroy my competitors. Waging war is the only way I've ever won the game. (It seems important to note that pulling off a "cultural" victory is extremely difficult.) The lesson: Getting results from liberal policies takes a tremendously long time. It's also, frankly, much less fun to have a scripted dialogue with Catherine the Great than to watch a samurai fall to a pikeman's ax.

I've never won through war and have only won through diplomatic and cultural victories. But I've only pushed that high through the computer player difficulty settings. Maybe things flip to advantage warmongering on the higher levels.

HT: @Isegoria

Thomas Paine in Machinima

This makes me wish I could read Chinese...

This game is no mere game. This virtuoso machinima “shot” entirely within virtual the World of Warcraft land of Azeroth is one of the most humorous, poignant and downright moving satires we’ve ever seen in China. The War of Internet Addiction (网瘾战争) is a many-layered creation that takes a good bit of unpacking. It’s a gutsy and surprisingly direct criticism of Chinese Internet censorship that touches on dozens and dozens of the major memes that created so much buzz on the Chinese Internet in 2009. At the very least, it should put to rest any assertion that Chinese lack creativity. Surprisingly, this hasn’t been written about as of this time in the mainstream western media, though Chinese media has reported on it fairly extensively. We’re frankly surprised that it hasn’t been “harmonized” yet.

Directed by someone calling himself “Corndog” (性感玉米, Xinggan Yumi, literally “Sexy Corn”) and dubbed by over 20 gamer volunteers, this home-made hour-long virtual fable-cum-political satire was produced in only three months using in-game footage from WoW’s China and Taiwan edition. The movie was first released on January 21, 2010, and quickly spread online even as Avatar was taking control of 3D screens across China. More than 10 million Chinese netizens have watched this movie on their low-resolution computer screens. More than a few Chinese netizens have hailed The War of Internet Addiction as more valuable, and more entertaining, than Avatar.

World of Warcraft helping to spread freedom. Whole post linked above worth reading; it includes selected translated excerpts from the machinima as well as the whole video.

Why we don't let the students write the syllabus

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing points to some interesting commentary on user-designed gaming levels. Writes the game designer:

• Players subconsciously calculate the cost-to-benefit ratio of content when deciding if it’s fun. For most MMO players, more reward = more fun. (This is a bitch of a lesson to learn, too. “My custom-scripted quest was so incredibly cool! Why aren’t players doing the quest? Well, yes, the reward was a little sub-par, but so what? You’re telling me they aren’t playing it because of THAT? Players can’t be THAT shallow!” Ha ha, newb.)
• Players aren’t objective reviewers. If you ask them to grade content, they will grade more rewarding content higher than other content even if it isn’t as good by other metrics (like plot, writing, annoyance factor, or originality).
• Many players spend incredible amounts of time finding ways to min-max the system so they can get more power for less effort. That’s part of the fun for many players. So there are tens of thousands of people actively looking for mistakes, loopholes, and gray areas in your game. All the time.

“Yes yes,” the other designers would say, “those lessons from the live team are interesting, but that isn’t exactly the same situation as user-created content, is it? Nobody can say for sure if user-created quests are problematic.” Maybe, just maybe, users could be convinced to grade content fairly. Maybe they would discover how fun it is to run really well-plotted quests instead of just trying to level up as fast as possible. Maybe players can change their stripes. Nope. MMORPG players are as predictable as the sunrise.

When City of Heroes released its user-created mission generator, it was mere hours before highly exploitative missions existed. Players quickly found the way to min-max the system, and started making quests that gave huge rewards for little effort. These are by far the most popular missions. Actually, from what I can tell, they are nearly the only missions that get used. Aside from a few “developer’s favorite” quests, it’s very hard to find the “fun but not exploitative” missions, because they get rated poorly by users and disappear into the miasma of mediocrity.

Most folks recoil from Nozick's experience machine, and most folks would reckon a hack allowing a direct XP-reset as cheating, but designing and playing levels that achieve the same thing somehow counts as "earned" and fair XP. A lot of this sounds familiar in academia: just replace XP with grades and "custom-scripted quest" with "great essay topic". Things for us to keep in mind as we redesign our major, endorsement, and honours pathways.