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Xbox Live Gamer Score is a gateway drug to full blown Game Addiction.

Matt Mihaly has an interesting article about his experience with Xbox Live Achievements. It shows how little it takes to get a player "hooked" on an arbitrary goal. In Matt's case, it is to kill 100 opponents with a shotgun in Gears of War for the Xbox 360.

Why? I don't know.

Matt doesn't know (and he's the guy who created a virtual addictive drug in his MUD).

Its kind of how I feel about my Nintendog. I feel compelled to walk Tina (my virtual Chihuahua) everyday, take care of her, etc. I've also been unable to convince myself to delete my trashed town, Erehwon, and character, Sorrow, in Animal Crossing.

Now, leave me alone, I've got to go walk my virtual dog.

Fake online identities are just a download away. While governments in China, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are attempting to control Internet usage by requiring real identity registration for services, players can download a software tool to generate an ID for Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan, according to Xinhua.

Apparently, the software will generate an ID once a person creates a false name, birthplace, and gender.

Players use these fake IDs to access games in other countries, because they don't trust game companies (or other online sites), and because they want to say and do things that they are afraid to have associated with their real identity.

This is problematic in all of these countries. China has mandated use of real IDs for blogs.

Online identity is a problem that has not even been addressed in the US. We do have the interesting advantage of using credit cards which provide a level of identity authentication that is not available with debit and payment card systems (which are much more popular in Asia). We do have the same problem with free sites and services, however.

44 suspects were arrested for stealing more than 700,000 yuan (nearly US$90,000) of virtual items from users of Tecent's QQ service in China, according to Xinhua (NOTE: Currently getting information out of China via the Internet is quite slow because of the earthquake earlier this week - it is unclear when this problem will be corrected). Users account passwords were stolen allowing the entire account as well as virtual items held in the account to be taken.

The thieves used a virus called Cockhorse to steal the information since May of 2005.

10 members of the group are in jail, one is out on bail (it is unclear where the remaining members of the group are).

The specific charges that the suspects are being held under were not provided, though China does have legal precedent for the legitimate value of virtual items.

Tencent reported that millions of its customers had complained about problems which spurred the company to contact authorities.

If games are art, can they take on challenging and taboo subject matter? Can a game about torture , rape, or underage sex be appropriate?

If you answered "No", what about Pulp Fiction or Lolita?

The provocative thoughts are raised based on the use of "virtual torture" in a social psychological experiment reported in Nature (paid link) and Slashdot. The results of the research are available here.There is a debate whether such virtual experiments are ethical.

For a believer that games can be art (and the certainty that no one will fund such a game) - what would a game look like that explored these taboo subjects?

So, in honor of the Board Game Developers Forum (a great site, by the way) and Psychochild, I present...

The Taboo Game Design Challenge

Design a game (board game, computer game, single player, multi-player, MMO) that explores one or more taboo subject areas (incest, rape, torture, choose your taboo) as an important part of game play (not through background or cut scenes). The game and game mechanics need to be described in sufficient detail so that a "practitioner in the field could reduce the game to practice"... give enough information so that someone who knows what they are doing can build the game. The taboo, and the decision to participate in the taboo, should be part of the game system.

No actual art or implementation is required. The game should be able to be described and posted as a comment to this blog entry.

The contest ends on 31 January 2007.

Legalize, Regulate, and Tax virtual item sales (in China). Chinese Ministry of Culture officials are considering the regulation of Real Money Transactions (referred to in China as Virtual Item Trade (VIT)), according to Xinhua.

China is not considering an outright ban on these transactions as they see it as impractical, but officials are seeking to protect players and address the government's concerns with internet addiction (no specific methods to do either are discussed).

Some nifty Chinese VIT info:

- A survey by a game website showed more than 70 percent Chinese gamers did not oppose VIT and more than 35 percent had conducted it.

- China has 460,000 regular online gamers, each of whom spends an average of 500 yuan (62.5 U.S. dollars) annually in trade.

- According to Shanghai-based iresearch, China's VIT volume reached more than 1.5 billion yuan (187.5 million U.S. dollars) in 2004.

- The VIT volume for the game Chuanqi, or Legend, one of the most popular role-playing games, is estimated at tens of millions of yuan.

- Chen Nian, the founder of joyo.com, one of the biggest e-business centers in China, predicted VIT volume would exceed the sales revenue of games in the next few years.

Note that there was no mention of the move to microtransaction / Virtual Asset Sale business models in the article even though this is an increasingly popular strategy.

Doppelganger Servers or MMO server piracy, the unauthorized duplication of MMO game servers to provide a competing game service seems to be a growing problem. Pacific Epoch reports that Shanda Interactive (Nasdaq: SNDA) has shut down a "private server" / pirate server for its Ragnarok Online (RO) MMO (a Q-style MMO - any help from my Chinese readers?). The GRO server had 260,000 accounts and over 3,000 peak concurrent users. Shanda is intending to sue GRO shortly. No information on whether GRO was charging for the service.

MMOs, and not just those targeting Asian markets, are going to need to start taking this problem seriously. Although there have been Doppelganger servers since the early days of graphical MMOs, the success of the industry makes it a target both from players seeking a free game and, more dangerously, from criminals using the Internet to set up a lucrative business.

There are good security approaches to fight this sort of attack (interestingly, allowing Real Money Transactions is one of them), but clever cryptography and key management can be used as well.

SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION: I have been working on some custom cryptographic protocols to fight this sort of attack - even if a live, legitimate game server is compromised.

What is the difference between a virtual currency and a virtual item? This rather bizarre question will need to be answered if pending legislation in Korea to regulate online gaming passes. according to Korea Times. After all, Habbo Hotel players trade furniture for cybersex... the difference between a virtual currency and a virtual item is in the eye (or database schema) of the beholder.

According to the revised bill, the government will not allow the selling, buying and exchange of cyber money, if it is considered a business. But the trading of cyber items is expected to be allowed.

The bill is vague about issues such as the definition of cyber money, how it is different from game items and whether trades between individual gamers may be tracked.

While I certainly support intelligent regulation, this law will simply drive the secondary market overseas... without changing the problem at all for the industry. Plus, Korea's game industry is global - this regulation will do nothing for Korean games outside of Korea.

Several game company officials are quoted in the article as supporting this effort.

While Real Money Transactions and Gold Farming may be problems, game companies need to look within to address them. Fix the game design and business model to make RMT impractical. Government is probably not the first (or the second, or the third) place to look for a solution to this problem.

It is ironic that Korea is trying to position itself as the world leader in the online gaming industry... yet this move may cede that position. After all, Q coins in China are establishing a powerful engine for online commerce thanks to their use as a viable virtual currency. More and more Korean games are using microtransactions (acorns, in Cyworld, I believe - are acorns a currency?).

Intelligent regulation of secondary virtual currency and asset markets may open up new businesses. Prohibition efforts will simply create an opportunity for criminals.

After all, a pervasive, unregulated but reliable virtual currency would be a great tool for illicit transactions and to move real currency around the world.

Any sort of asset that is perceived to have value can be traded, somehow. The real question is how easily and what is the transaction cost.

If game companies continue to support this regulatory strategy, they are actually more likely to wind up with government oversight of game design to ensure that there is nothing of any perceived value in the game at all.

Doesn't that sound like a fun game?

The ubiquitous QQ IM service in China continues to challenge real law with its virtual currency according to Xinhua. Q coins are purchased for about $0.13 (1 Yuan) per coin (they are purchased for about half that price at Q banks operated by other parties). These are used for value-added service purchases such as virtual assets both within QQ and at other services provided both by Tencent (the operator of QQ) and other online providers.

Both Chinese banking officials and government groups that oversee the Internet are concerned with the rise of the Q coin. Their objective does not seem to be to shut the service down, but rather how to oversee these transactions most effectively. Internet regulators, and Tencent itself, are particularly concerned with the exchange of Q coins back into Yuan.

Meanwhile, Tencent is developing ties with conventional banking through the launch of a QQ Show Card in conjunction with the Industrial Bank and, last year, started offering a debit card - QQ All-in-One Card with China Merchant Bank.

This is an area where China is truly leading the world. It will be interesting to see if any virtual currency really takes off in the US - and it is a wide open opportunity.




Disclaimer: I own the US ADR for Tencent Holdings which operates the QQ service (TCEHF:PK, on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (SEHK 700)).

Playstation Portable (PSP) owners can now play any of the original Playstation games on their handheld, thanks to a firmware hack reported at Joystiq. Players are able to play games that have been ripped to a MemoryStick.

As Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, WildTangent(? - I haven't heard much about their Virtual Gaming Console in a while) and Turner's GameTap continue to monetize casual games and re-release older titles onto their online player services, they are going to need to consider piracy. Now, I'm not just talking DRM, but also pricing strategies and other techniques to protect the assets and tie the players to the service (see articles on Rich Transaction Systems). These games cannot rely on the power or unique characteristics of the platform to protect them and will need to look at other techniques (not rootkits either, please!).

Amit's Game Programming Blog has an interesting article about problems with math on computers. Basically, as he shows, when we are programming, we are not really working with numbers - either integers or floating points, but constructs of the programming language often driven by the underlying microprocessor.

Amit demonstrates a case where this causes problems for computing money and a programmer chooses to use floats.

These programming problems can create exploits and other unintended consequences for games.

Even worse, network games can be run on different microprocessors with different clocks, word sizes, etc. This can result in games that work well in any given location, but when they are put online, they start diverging from each other. (It is interesting to note that in the recent Gamasutra article on Introversion's Defcon, one of the systems that needed to be developed was a deterministic physics package so the game would be have properly over a network).



SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION -(sigh) when am I going to get around to programming a physics package on top of SecurePlay? (SecurePlay provides secure control for time and for any randomization needed).