My (virtual) life as an MMORPG

Two great posts on Read/Write web for the game theorists among you - this post on gaming digg, and then this post pointing to an e-book on social nets as games, by C. Weng.

As readers of this blog will know, we are great fans of using game theory to understand the emergence of new markets, and have used game theory (as well as system dynamics etc) in quite a few of our consulting assignments, and posts reflect this (here, here and here for eg).

That these social networks are games, and are actively being gamed, should come as no surprise to the observer - after all Google is a constant war between its in house geeks and an army of SEO gamers outside, and digg-gaming is well covered..

What is more interesting is that books like these are appearing about Social Net games, much like hack books for the more usual games like Halo etc. The implication is that SocNets are, like Google and digg, going to have to enter the arms race themselves to keep their systems vaguely representative of reality - and therein lies the rub - a gamed digg is one thing, there are always other options - but if you have put all your links in the Facebook basket, say, and then find yourself in a sharply played gaming world - with all that data out there....

Interesting times indeed...another big thing for 2008

Update - saw this post by Dawn Foster as well, and noted the this re reputation systems:

I recently blogged about using reputation systems in communities with a discussion about people can game community reputation systems. The important thing to recognize is whether people are gaming the system in a productive manner that helps the community or in a destructive way that serves only to clutter the community with worthless chatter that annoys other members.

This is a fascinating area of online game theory - for example eBay reputations, where if you black someone they can black you back. This means people tend not to black each other, and instead "damn with faint praise" by saying nothing or being neutral. It is a good system in that only a transactee can (in theory) comment, so reduces the astroturfing Amazon is prone to - though no doubt eBay is gamed too.

Clearly one person who collects a lot of blacks is a bad risk, but they are few and far between - and in fact most of those re-join under new nom de plumes (yet another part of the game structure on eBay)

For most eBayers though, you look at the length of time, variety of transacters, and individual ratings, looking for the faint praise.