• A Tangled Web
• Eyeballing the Economy
• State of Information
• Communities of Serendipity
• Virtual Consumerism
• Different or the Same?
• Multiplicity of Self
• Postscript: A Chronocentric Tale
• But…

Axiological Interlude
Axiology, from Greek, is the study of value. Definitions of “value” vary between disciplines, for example: Economists tend to reflect Adam Smith-era notions of value – benefit to the buyer when used, labor to produce, gains from exchange. Sociologists tend to examine value through cultural perception – both personal and communal ethical differences – such as the World Values Survey. Philosophers initially consider value in terms of whether something “is good” – value theory. In practice, references to value often encompass (or even confuse) all these things. There’s a reason that I have not defined value…

A Tangled Web

Transaction costs are the key flaw in almost every attempt to build a payment system for the internet. Originally conceived by Ronald Coase, the logic is best explained as a mental accounting barrier:

Take a website. The average revenue earned from advertising is (in my case) about 1 cent (0.01 US Dollar) per visitor. Even with the most efficient payment system in the world, no rational human will waste time trying to evaluate whether to spend 1 cent or not. Assume someone can earn $12 an hour by working. Rationally, if they took more than 3 seconds to decide, they’d be “wasting money”. Trivial example, but it demonstrates why the information economy is increasingly either priced “free” or “expensive”: Handling tiny payments isn’t worth anyone’s effort. (People like Mike Masnick and Chris Anderson have written much about the resulting pricing models.)

A visitor that generates 1 cent of advertising revenue reads the website for an average of 4 minutes. Assume the time they spent reading they could have been working, 4 minutes equals 80 cents. Yes, value of time is a rather abstract concept, with many flaws. But there is a huge difference between the value of information received (expressed in time), and the payment for that information (expressed in indirect advertising revenue). There’s a tendency to under-value. Why do we under-value information? Because information is inherently:

• non-rivalrous – the amount one person can consume does not influence the ability of others to consume,
• non-excludable – once produced, there is no way to stop anyone consuming it.

Economically, it’s a public good. Individualistic, selfish humans simply take these goods. It’s (Western) human nature.

My writing is saving readers a lot more than the 4 minutes they spend reading, because (in this case) the information gained avoids time-consuming trial and error. Which points to another truth: Often information cannot be accurately valued at the point in time it is first consumed. This is probably true of everything, but is more extreme for information, which is inherently re-usable in different or unforeseen circumstances, often alongside other information.

Eyeballing the Economy

This is all part of a wider problem. Our economies are increasingly built around information, knowledge, skills, and other similarly intangible things, rather than physical production, or before that, land. The diagram below is based on the work of Derek Halden.

There are 3 circles representing different phases of economic development, chronologically, from left to right. The original diagram showed transport market failure, where the “Production and Consumption” market economy caused environmental costs that were resolved within the knowledge sphere. For example, the original transport-orientated diagram shows aspects like workers, vehicles, infrastructure and speed within the production sphere. Noise and emissions are outside in the Knowledge and Experience sphere. Economically, noise and emissions are “externalities” – a market failure, often requiring government intervention. Externalities tend to treated like public goods.

The stark implication is that within microeconomic theory, the competitive market is increasingly dysfunctional as the knowledge sphere grows in importance.

State of Information

Creating a competitive market for public goods tends to require government intervention. For example, copyright or patent law can make a public good excludable. Rights can be allocated. In theory, government can even act to reduce transaction costs.

Unfortunately typical state interventions tend to scale poorly:

• They can’t be used to effectively monetarise or protect $1′s worth of information.
• They are constructed around single right-holders, when so much “content generation” is collaborative.

Failing to scale down to the smallest exchange creates an inequitable structure, which only allows the owners of the most valuable rights to make any money from them. Make rights perpetual (give the ability to transfer ownership, especially after death, or as property), and an almost feudal society eventually emerges.

As the vast majority of wealth-generation within the economy becomes information-based, government will effectively control the right to make income. Ultimately such a high proportion of commercial activity becomes government-influenced, that it becomes rational to re-evaluate the reasons for maintaining a free market-based process.

Ironically, political government isn’t good at dealing with intangible concepts. Prestige, evidence, action – all are difficult to convey without a physical component. The underlying reason is that people aren’t good at dealing with intangible concepts.

Much contemporary thought (re-)establishes links with tangible aspects of the world: Home grown food that doesn’t “come from the supermarket”. Holes in the ice-cap as proxies for rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. It’s backward. It implies a finite limit on the information economy, since everything needs to be cross-referenced with a physical concept. It often still fails to convey value meaningfully – for example, financial instruments secured against physical bricks and mortar property, routinely exceed the value of the bricks and mortar, creating a dangerous accounting illusion.

Yet it is possible to simulate the emotions behind physical concepts using intangible forms. The solution lies in people: Specifically, the ability of people to manipulate other people.

Communities of Serendipity

I disagree with William McKeen, who declared that the internet made it more difficult to make serendipitous discoveries. Serendipity, “making an unsought finding“, only entered popular English language in the last 50 years. We didn’t need the word until recently. Yet randomised discovery is increasingly the only sensible way to proceed:

• During the Age of Enlightenment, one could know almost everything worth knowing by drinking a lot of coffee. Now it’s impossible to even understand one broad subject entirely. The days just aren’t long enough.
• James Austin defined 4 causes of chance in (medical) research, only one of which was pure luck. Active curiosity, unusual background, and distinct hobbies are also important. Chance, and therefore creativity and discovery, already contains a significant chunk of serendipity.
• In a highly intangible economy, with perfect communication, duplication and automation, theoretically only one person is needed to perform any activity: Once first done, the activity can be duplicated by machines, as often as the rest of society needs. Clone workers, with identical skill-sets, belong in the age of industrial mass-production.

In an optimised information economy, everyone is slightly different. Information discovery still needs to be bounded: Understanding most subjects requires a degree of specialism. And without good tools for constraining serendipity, we might never get anything done!

Serendipity can be bounded by freeform communities – “Communities of Serendipity”. The internet already does this, with limited success – from “blogrolls” and pages of interesting links, through discovery services like Boing Boing and StumbleUpon, to shared bookmarking, like Delicious. The idea is simple: Find someone with some common interests to you, and then find what else they are interested in. They’ll probably be similar enough to you, for you to understand anything they link to, but sufficiently different to sometimes expose you to something new.

Communities of serendipity have flaws:

• They assume reciprocity – that each member of the community will give as much as they gain from others. Human nature disagrees, something seen in the balance of activity in internet-based collaborative projects – Wikipedia, a good example.
• That people want to be different, when the whole notion of community implies they want to be similar.

These flaws become critical when trying to apply a value system – any form of economy – to communities of serendipity.

Virtual Consumerism

Hot-Or-Not‘s virtual flowers encompass 3 components – the image of a flower, the gesture of giving a flower, and the “trophy effect” of other people seeing that someone received a flower. The second 2 components are most important to the service’s success. A lot like the primarily emotional values of giving a physical flower, except there is no flower. And the virtual flower is only valuable within that community.

In many online games and other social virtual environments, an advanced form of consumerism is emerging. Jean Baudrillard‘s System of Objects characterises the value of the intangible component of goods with “symbolic” or “sign” values – the value in relation to another subject or group. In traditional consumerism, signs and symbols are in addition to concepts such as “use value” and exchange value.

The virtual consumerism found in many “virtual goods” consists only of signs and symbols. No significant production or utility values. If correctly implemented, no possibility of subsequent exchange.

Critically, there is no requirement for production using scarce physical resources. And so the internet transpires to be much more than a resource-efficient transport network: It’s a sustainable form of consumerism. Broadly the same consumerism that seems fundamental to giving (post-) modern society an illusion of purpose.

Virtual possessions can be used to convey far less tangible accomplishments, because in the appropriate virtual environment, virtual goods convey status just like physical goods.

Virtual consumerism is a far more attractive idea than “virtual currency” because virtual goods can directly link action to status. Value is more closely aligned to accomplishment: A contemporary failing of exchangeable currency is that the value of money is not precisely the same as the value of value.

The artificial scarcity required for such an economy is self-regulating: Rare (and hence desirable) items are only attained by those that accomplish something unusual. Common feats reward items that “everyone” has, and are thus less desirable.

Key to understanding why virtual goods “are valuable” is community: The community of people that recognize their meaning. Owning an Amani War Bear is worth nothing on the streets of New York, but everything when idling in Dalaran. Unfortunately this requirement for community highlights a conundrum:

Different or the Same?

It’s a curious quirk of evolutionary psychology that we claim to value inventiveness and difference, but actually tend to value imitation and sameness. The evolutionary success of humans is based on their ability to learn to overcome new challenges. Yet social acceptance is based on similarity to others. The genius that overcomes society’s biggest problems is invariably not a “dedicated follower of fashion”. Remember serendipity: Difference is core to discovery.

Fortunately, similarity is measured relative to community. And humanity is already organised into many different communities. Some would argue it is best organised into many small communities.

Within defined communities, concepts like virtual consumerism and even serendipity are possible. The problem occurs at the edges, where communities overlap – and communities of serendipity are all about overlap.

What problem? Money: The value systems of distinct communities are required to use a currency which is interchangeable between systems, even though each community actually has its own distinct values. For example, within their respective professional communities, a banker’s (infamous) million-dollar bonus conveys much the same value as a box of chocolates to a teacher. It’s only the exchangeablity of money which consequently appears to value bankers far more than teachers.

Virtual consumerism sidesteps currency as a means of exchange. Money is simply required to offset inequality. Inequality is a community-based concern: We primarily seek to even the wealth of people like ourselves. (One might even argue that morality itself is community-based.) In small, self-contained communities, inequality becomes irrelevant: Everyone is doing broadly the same thing (so has broadly the same wealth), direct assistance with actions replace indirect exchange, and who cares about anyone outside?

Yet serendipity requires people to be in multiple communities, hence experience the inequality between those communities, and seek to try and balance that inequality. Back to square 1.

Well, maybe not. It depends how we regard ourselves:

Multiplicity of Self

The idea of multiplicity of self grew out of my attempt to reconcile the fact that my Gnomish persona was not only better known than my physical persona, but that “she” had started to attain a degree of phenomenal consciousness – in the minds of some of “her” readers. This isn’t simply a case of my own mind effectively acting through an alternative, virtual body. It’s that the degree of “existence” of this self is primarily defined by other minds, not by my own. It is the other people that validate “her” – give her a meaning beyond pixels.

This is a more extreme version of celebrity, where the image of the celebrity in the minds of their fans invariably differs from the reality of the celebrity in that celebrity’s own minds: Visually, “she” is not physically me. It’s different from acting, since “she” is merely acting out me, not impersonating anyone else’s mind. And far more interactive than a character in a work of fiction.

It follows that the same rules should be applied to the physical me, which makes this very interesting indeed. I’ve struggled to find a philosophical concept that specifically describes my observation. Perhaps, a sort-of inverted-existentialism (where existence is primarily defined by everyone else) mixed with relativism (in which understanding is relative to others), all integrated into a re-configured mind-body dichotomy? I don’t understand it, and consequently can’t start to rationalise or debate it.

Conceptually, the multiplicity of self is very useful. Simply: One mind, multiple community-specific persona. Basic actions, rewards and values remain in each community, but the mind transfers information between. The whole system of communities and participation within those is constantly evolving.

It’s the basis of human “dandelionhood” (to twist Cory Doctorow‘s analogy slightly) – instead of being focused on one individual self, we can scatter ourselves to the 4 winds. A semi-emergent reality that retains a sense of the mind’s individuality, while gradually weakening the absolute notion of self. In turn weakening most established law and governance, up to and including the notion of sovereignty.

Scary stuff. At least for anyone that understood anything I just wrote.

Postscript: A Chronocentric Tale

Back in 1995, when the internet was new and exciting, a group of academics gathered in Teeside (North East England) to discuss The Governance of Cyberspace. Freshly inspired by the works of people like William Gibson and Howard Rheingold, cyberspace was to become a place where all sorts of utopian and libertarian concepts would challenge 20th century methods of political governance.

That it didn’t happen comes as no surprise to whose that have studied the history of communications technology. In his 1997 history of the telegraph, The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage concluded:

“The hype, scepticism and bewilderment associated with the internet – concerns about new forms of crime, adjustments in social mores, and redefinition of business practices – mirror precisely the hopes, fears and misunderstandings inspired by the telegraph.”

Perhaps those chronocentric revolutionaries of 1995 confused our use of technology to do something, with the deep underlying social drivers behind what we actually do? At a raw emotional level, technology changes very little. The correlation between anglers in the virtual world and people that fish in the physical world, is a simple example. Technically, the processes are very different. Emotionally, they are very similar.

I suspect that any proposal not built around what people already do, is likely to become a utopia, because people evolve slower than we might like to think. Likewise, any proposal which embraces peoples’ emotional desires may become a reality without anyone realizing.

But…

Unfortunately, this article is probably wrong. Almost certainly wrong. So much so, you might ask why I wrote it?

My attempt to write one compact text means that much of the supporting evidence and logic behind statements is missing. But I already know that much is contentious, and within many contentious issues lay further uncertainties. My normal method of analysis and problem solving considers a range of possibilities, and then a range of possibilities that influence the first set of possibilities, and continues this for several iterations. Eventually some themes recur. These themes tend to lead to the solution. In this case, the range of topics is too broad, and the number of iterations of thought too dense. The result is a sequence of ideas that I certainly keep thinking about, and vaguely seem to hang together, but yet remain utterly inconclusive.

In an essay on a similar topic to this article, Nick Szabo concluded:

“The measurement of value is one of the most intractable problems of civilization. Brilliant and highly non-obvious solutions to this problem – from markets to money to the time-wage to cost accounting – have constituted some of the most important steps from animal to civilization.”

Perhaps it is inevitable that I’m still searching for an answer to the question I can’t even define? Maybe I need the solution to reach the answer? Or is this simply too philosophical to ever reach the answer?

Something happened at the start of July 2008 that only happens once every 2 years. For a brief period, everything about the world was not public knowledge. A handful of people worked day and night to fill this chasm of information. To document everything that was suddenly new and uncertain. Meanwhile the world filled up with hardened veterans, many of whom seem to struggle with, well, everything:

“How do I get to Northrend?” – Well, perhaps that new harbour or zeppelin tower that’s been built might give you a clue?

“Where’s Dalaran?” – Did you try riding to the end of the road and then looking up to see what’s blocking out the sun? (Dalaran is pictured right.)

The world is, of course, the World of Warcraft. And the 2-yearly occasion is the start of public testing of the latest expansion, Wrath of the Lich King: The only time a significant proportion of the game world changes.

What’s alarming is that these questions are not from new, inexperienced players. These are from people that have already played the existing game for months or years. They clearly want to know, but seem to have lost the basic ability to explore the game world themselves.

This article explores the concept of “exploration”, and tries to explain how one of the most complex virtual worlds ever created has become popular among players that are not natural explorers. On this page:

• Defining Exploration
• Exploration in Game Design
• Information vs Exploration
• Where did the Explorers go?
• Long Live Exploration?
• Easy to Learn, Hard to Master
• A Fishy End

Defining Exploration

Richard Bartle’s “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who suit MUDs” characterised players of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) on 2 axis: Acting vs Interacting, and Players vs World. People whose play-style involved interacting with the world, he labelled “explorers”. Explorers enjoy finding out as much information about the world or its “physics” as possible.

Nick Yee’s later work on player motivations splits exploration into distinct elements: Discovery and Mechanics. He categorises each under different overarching factors (Immersion and Achievement respectively), which suggests quite a significant difference.

For the purpose of this article, I will categorise exploration as discovery of things within a world, rather than analysis of the underlying mechanics. But if the world is deeply complex, analytical techniques will be applied to the process of discovery, so these terms overlap slightly.

Exploration in Game Design

Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun builds from the premise that a game is only fun until the player has mastered the pattern behind the game. Players always try to optimise gameplay; and if they succeed, the game becomes boring.

Traditionally many video games have revelled in creating a sense of the undiscovered: Part of “mastering the pattern” involves exploring the geography of the game world. One of the best early examples was Elite. The 2,000+ planets were procedurally generated from an algorithm, to create an illusion of depth and complexity within the constraints of early 1980s home computing hardware. Add hidden missions and content to that universe, and players can spend a lot of play time just exploring.

Massively Multiplayer Online games must constrain the size of their game worlds, so that players are likely to meet other players within the world. Exploration tends to shift away from the discovery of places in the game world, towards discovery of things: Creatures, items, quests.

This is where the problems start.

Information vs Exploration

In a game like World of Warcraft (WoW), over time more and more things are added to the game world, which are not formally documented by the designers: Their presumed intent is that players will explore and discover this content.

Unfortunately the volume of things is so great that players have ceased to be capable of discovering, memorising and processing most information about the game world. For example, there are now about 40,000 different items in the game, most gained from very specific sources. Most players now rely on third-party sources that gather and manage that information for them.

When, as happened at the start of July, those third-party sources haven’t been written or researched yet, panic breaks out. Panic expresses itself in the game’s chat channels, where confused players question other confused players. Those that know often remain silent, frustrated by the constant repetition of questions. Based on the prevailing conversation in different zones, players either gradually learn by trial-and-error, or quit out of frustration – I am not sure which is more common.

Fortunately for most players of World of Warcraft (only 1% of players can expect to participate in beta testing), by the time the expansion is released to the masses, the guide writers, database maintainers, top raiding guilds, and helpful forum posters will collectively have documented (almost) everything. The core skill for most players will once again become “knowing where to read about…”, not “knowing how to explore…”

Where did the Explorers go?

Sandra Powers (herself a consummate explorer) commented that the “explorers haven’t left – they’re the ones writing the strategy guides.” I’m personally in that category, and enjoy uncovering the most obscure patterns the game has to offer. I know I’m in a very small minority.

I suspect that explorers were never common. In the mid-1990s, Bartle comments that, “unfortunately, not many people have the type of personality which finds single-minded exploring a riveting subject, so numbers [of explorers] are notoriously difficult to increase.” I’d go further, and the suggest that, almost by definition, natural explorers will tend to be amongst the “early adopters” of a technology or gaming experience. So early MUD user populations (the basis of his research) will have contained a disproportionately high number of explorers.

Long Live Exploration?

So why continue to build game worlds that require so much exploration? Exploration has become redundant for most players, because the only skill they need is information management. Explorers are a minority group, that games like WoW already fail to completely satisfy.

The fact that many customers struggle to play without an array of reference material created (mostly) by explorers, is not acknowledged by the game’s developers: Most of us are treated with indifference, tinged with the threat of legal action if we break too many unwritten rules. Perhaps the developers are oblivious to the dependence of players on explorers, and get annoyed when all their obfuscated content is immediately de-obfuscated and documented? Or does inertia keep exploration in the game until someone can work out how to safely remove it? As I discussed in Platform Azeroth, the current situation creates an utterly illogical structure of information transfer.

Open-ended exploration has been removed from a lot of content aimed solely at “achievers” – players primarily motivated by advancement and competition. For examples, examine the evolution of dungeon content. Some of the early dungeons featured a lot of open-ended mazes, with little structure as to how a group should progress through them – Blackrock Depths is a good example. Recent additions have tended to be much more linear: Exploration is bounded to learning how to kill individual enemies within the dungeon, rather than trying to find what needs to be killed.

Easy to Learn, Hard to Master

Maybe the core “easy to learn, hard to master” design philosophy is a factor? The graph below illustrates the approach, which characterises much of the design of World of Warcraft, and contributes to the game’s broad appeal.

The curve can be divided as follows:

1. At lower extents of play (left side of the graph), game complexity is very easy. Players can follow the quest-lines as they find them, overlook half of their characters’ abilities, and still be successful without any additional knowledge.
2. As game complexity rises, the value of exploration also rises: The player gains a tangible benefit from optimising their gameplay.
3. At the highest extents of play (right side of the graph), the game becomes so complex that it becomes virtually impossible for an individual player to learn everything by trial-and-error: There is too much to learn, and all that knowledge is absolutely critical to success.

A Fishy End

I will illustrate each stage – with fish! One can replace fish with almost any other game concept.

1. In the first stage there is no significant benefit from exploration. The patterns of fish catches are simple in the early zones, and all those fish have practically no value. Go ahead and catch something! Where, when, and how you fish does not influence how successful you are in the game at the start.
2. In the second stage there is a benefit from exploration, but you can still “muddle through” without it. So if you are prepared to spend some time catching fish at different locations, you will notice that some locations yield more valuable or more useful fish than other locations. That gives an advantage over another player that never explores different locations. But neither player absolutely needs that advantage.
3. In the third stage knowledge is essential, but so much information is required that most players will not have time to explore everything themselves. You are raiding 5 hours a day, 4 days a week; you need a heap of Golden Darter for each raid; and you have a job or school to attend. You don’t have time to explore the world, trying to determine the most efficient way to catch those fish – so you read information published by someone that has.

So perhaps exploration is alive and well: It just is not a universal trait among those testing the new expansion, who tend to fall into the third category? Or perhaps exploration is dying universally, because searching the internet replaces in-game information discovery at all stages?