Posted by
Ian P. Cook on
Apr 05, 2007; 12:55pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/One-of-my-projects-tp523626p523652.html
NOTE: Apologies if this is duplicated. Got a note back that I used the wrong
email addy on my last attempt, but it's Gmail, so it shows my response in
the chain anyway...
For an instance that may be somewhat akin to what's being discussed here,
I'd refer back to an even from two years ago in the MMORPG World of
Warcraft. A "plague" that was designed by the game programmers and intended
to be restricted to a particular server actually made its way onto other
servers. The plague spread rapidly, producing a fascinating -- to me, anyway
-- array of reactions. More on the issue is here:
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11330 .
In response to the question "how would the avatars know when they were
infected?", this was actually part of the game: health of the character
decreased incrementally. The plague could be spread, treated but not cured,
cured, etc. What I found most compelling was that the WoW community
responded in many of the same ways as you'd think people would in the face
of a real disaster. Whole neighborhoods banned entrance from unknown
players, some altruistic people went around giving out healing/resurrection
spells (things that have to be bought with money that is earned through
time playing the game, so not entirely without value), while still others
thought it amusing to spread the virus as far as possible. There were even
debates in various fora about retaining or eliminating the potential for
such an outbreak; that it got out of the hands of the designers enhanced the
realism to some, made the gameplay worse to others. In the wake of the virus
in WoW, I sent the people at Blizzard Entertainment inquiries about getting
anonymized data on various things they track, but got a polite "You must be
joking, right?"
While we often can't run experiments on humans, with the growth of
involvement in games like WoW, Second Life, Eve, etc, would it be impossible
to consider experimenting in these realms? The big mean bad guys in MMORPGS
are rather like agents, so there's already some precedent for mixing the
two. There's a growing study of gameworld macroeconomics, the value of time
people expend in increasing their online holdings (to the point of "gold
farming" being a big job for kids in urban China and South Korea), and so
on.
-Ian
On 4/4/07, Marcus G. Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>
> Phil Henshaw wrote:
> > how do you represent the systems of nature that are out of control and
> > making up altogether new rules???
> At some point that kind effort is less of an empirical science and more
> of a mathematical investigation into worlds as they could be. That's
> not to say it is bad, it's just a different goal.
>
> One way to proceed with that kind of investigation is with genetic
> programming. Create an imaginary world that has certain forces acting
> on the things in it, and then evolve computer programs that can survive
> in that imaginary world. After the agents survive very well, take
> apart those computer programs to try figure out how they work, or study
> how different computer programs interact in that world and possibly even
> change it. Classic example:
>
>
http://www.archive.org/details/sims_evolved_virtual_creatures_1994>
> With an avatar/gaming world, it's not hard to imagine automated agents
> learning how to fight or cooperate with human players. Then one could
> probe those agents to watch how they make decisions. To be more
> systematic and learn about learning one could have timestamps on each
> node/branch to compare the recent innovations from enduring logic.
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org>
--
___________________________________
Ian P. Cook
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