The Bloj

Video Game Theory

Posted on May 24th, 2007 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Games, Programming.

In some computer games, there is something Cheng would call the uppie trap. Basically, this involves a weak spot in the computer-controlled opposition’s armor. For example, a spot you can shoot from where the enemy will never return fire, or a strategy that will always score a touchdown against an opponent.

This system essentially changes the game from one of player vs. computer to one of player vs. designer. In my opinion, this is more interesting and more challenging; can you outsmart the person who built the game?

Uppie traps often come from deeper principles that are more generally applicable to other games. For example, in Baldur’s Gate II, one very useful strategy is to launch area attacks before you see the enemy. In general, monsters won’t acknowledge your existence until they’re in your site range. While this would seem to be specific to this game (it wouldn’t work in Diablo, for instance (update: actually, it does sometimes)), it does extend to a general idea. Each individual enemy does not have its own intelligence; the programmer has to compromise and decide what gets processing time. Thus, in any game, there is always the possibility of discovering blind spots; areas where processing has been avoided. In future entries we’ll cross apply this principle.

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Put your money where your mouth is

Posted on May 12th, 2007 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc..

Companies often talk really big and fail to deliver, so it’s not surprising that people tend to stop believing the things coming out of the PR factories of large corporations. A better way to ascertain the direction of a company is to see where they are spending their money, both on employee hires and acquisitions. I noticed an interesting acquisition made by Microsoft recently (from the Stuck In Customs blog):

Target: Massive
Acquirer: Microsoft
Transaction: N/A (Announced 5/4/2006)

Target Description: Massive operates a network for dynamic video game advertising that allows for all forms of downloadable media and advertising content to be contextually integrated into the game environment, including image, audio, video, and game object formats.

In-game advertising is becoming a serious factor in future game development. Gamers have been resistant to the tainting of their gaming experience with advertising, but I think it is likely that advertising is going to play a key role in the business model of the video game industry in the next three years or so. It looks like Microsoft is ensuring that it has technology to make this a reality.

Completely ad-supported games would be a very interesting business model. For one thing, there’s significantly less deadweight loss compared to a fixed-cost game. Suppose for a moment that we can assume that in-game advertising cuts your enjoyment of a game in half. This can be thought of as paying a price in proportion to the amount of utility you obtain from playing a game, or similarly, it is proportional to the amount of time you spend playing the game. For the purpose of this example, let’s also assume that whatever lost utility you have while playing a game is gained by the advertising company in the form of advertising revenue. This is probably a flawed assumption, but it will be useful to assume this. We now have a downward sloping marginal revenue curve and a horizontal marginal cost curve, as in the figure below.

Remember from my previous article that normal pricing for creative works results in monopolistic pricing that produces an inefficient market failure, since the economically efficient price would be zero (since there is zero marginal cost). The graph above makes some very large assumptions, but the result looks very interesting. There is zero deadweight loss. A more accurate model, however, would have to take quite a few things into account, including the fixed cost of producing the game.

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Incentives

Posted on May 9th, 2007 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc..

Economists love to talk about incentives. Without incentives, people wouldn’t go to work, or even get out of bed. People have incentives to do (almost) anything they do. Patents are one way of providing incentives. I won’t claim that the current patent system isn’t used and abused by those who hurt the economy, but without it, there would be little incentive for corporations to produce new research. So I find it a little strange when I hear quotes like this one from Mike Gunderloy (emphasis mine):

I’ve spent the bulk of the last fifteen years developing some amount of reputation and expertise in the Microsoft universe, having published dozens of books and hundreds of articles, worked as an editor and consultant, written (as a subcontractor) parts of various Microsoft products, and so on. I’m also the editor of the Larkware site, which tracks news in the Microsoft software world for developers.

Unfortunately, over that time I’ve also come to the conclusion that, even though it is staffed largely by smart and ethical people, Microsoft itself represents a grave threat to the future of software development through its increasing inclination to stifle competition through legal shenanigans. Its recent attempt to claim that no one can implement a user interface that looks anything like the Office 2007 ribbon without licensing some nebulous piece of intellectual property represents a new low in this regard.

I happen to know that many millions of dollars of research went into this particular aspect of Microsoft Office 2007. This is not an exaggeration by any stretch of the imagination. When the average salary of a high-level developer is over $100k, and a feature like this is developed by 10-40 developers/designers/PMs/GMs/etc over the course of two or three years, you can see how the research for a feature like this is extraordinarily high. This isn’t even counting the extremely costly usability testing that Microsoft does on a feature like this.

Suppose that there was nothing stopping Open Office or Google Docs from copying this user interface verbatim. Would there have been any incentive for Microsoft to do this research in the first place? Would the research have been done? I say the likely answer to these questions is no and no.

And in fact, the claim that “no one can implement a user interface that looks anything like the Office 2007 ribbon” is actually completely wrong. As long as you are developing a product that does not directly compete with Office 2007, you’re welcome to license the technology royalty-free. Jensen Harris has more information about the licensing program.

BTW, I saw this quote on Jeff Atwood’s blog, which is by far my current favorite blog.

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Table of Pimping (out)

Posted on May 4th, 2007 by Chris.
Categories: Chris.

I was talking to someone recently who mentioned that he had just ordered these headphones, which are somewhere in the range of $200+ dollars. This led me to wonder: who is interested in buying lots of stuff, and in what fields?

Cars, for example, get pimped out by a certain subset of people who like rims, underglow, huge subwoofers, speakers, in car displays, engines, and…I’ll stop, so you don’t get any more ideas. But it seems more likely that houses would get pimped out by women than men.

So, I thought it might be useful to produce a Table of Pimping - a chart detailing what we know about consumer fetishization in hobbies. Here’s what we have so far, in generalizations.

Add your own entries!

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