Virtual Gaming and Naval Simulation

The CDR talked about gaming today with a story about a man sucked into his virtual world oblivious to the reality in his life, which in the story told includes Mr. Gamers wife. Gaming is a topic I have intentionally avoided until now.

I have worked in the gaming industry... from several different angles. From an IT perspective, I recommend the gaming industry to anyone looking to become a better programmer, it is a thankless job for sure, but in virtual world gaming the subscription based revenue system drives rapid attention to sometimes major programming challenges, and in the end you will learn to value of process and efficiency in code unlike any other programming job out there.

I never made much money programming in the gaming industry though, and as a capitalist I quickly took a different perspective. Early on I recognized the value of Real Money Trading (RMT) which was part of the first game I was involved in, Ultima Online. RMT has since become a billion plus dollar industry and perhaps the biggest challenge to the gaming industry itself, in particular those games of competition. That led me to seeking out virtual worlds where competition was between players, then using my 'skillz' to create an unfair advantage in my favor. It wasn't hacking, we never attacked gaming code, but it is hard to argue it wasn't cheating, but in the top echelons of player vs player competition of virtual worlds, its commonplace and I don't apologize for it.

Ebay became my friend, as did IGE who quickly become one of my top buyers, and while players might cry foul about how terrible it is that people like me was selling virtual equipment for real money to the highest bidder, I learned over time many of the people I was selling to were the people crying foul the loudest. In other words, the while people morally disapproved on some level of people like me publicly, they were putting up dollars in bunches buying from me in private. Anything for an advantage...

Compared to most people who chose to play those highly competitive player vs player games, I played alot less than most, and learned to automate the gaming process so my individual characters would advance at a similar pace as the hardcore gamers. One side note though, when you engage in virtual world gaming, you unavoidably become part of a community, usually of similar mind as yourself, and you see the story the CDR describes first hand as people get sucked in. It's sad, it is quite pathetic, and it is a great deal more common than people believe. The thing is, non gamers do not realize just how enormous the communities are. They are huge, and as the picture shows (click the picture above to enlarge and see), there could be hundreds of people just on your screen at one time, with thousands unseen, and that is just one of dozens if not hundreds of servers in only one of several dozen countries.

Gaming, in particular virtual world gaming, is an interesting study though. As WIRED pointed out a couple weeks ago, government is using virtual world gaming as case studies. One such example recently reported by the BBC:

The "corrupted blood" disease spread rapidly within the popular online World of Warcraft game, killing off thousands of players in an uncontrolled plague.

The infection raged, wreaking social chaos, despite quarantine measures.

The experience provides essential clues to how people behave in such crises, Lancet Infectious Diseases reports.

In the game, there was a real diversity of response from the players to the threat of infection, similar to those seen in real life.

Some acted selflessly, rushing to the aid of other characters even though that meant they risked infection themselves.

Others fled infected cities in an attempt to save themselves.

And some who were sick made it their mission to deliberately infect others.

Considering people in the real world strap bombs to themselves to blow up others, it is not easy to dismiss that the virtual world response of individuals wouldn't imitate the real world response of individuals. In 2005 I knew a bunch of people who played WoW at the time, they were all into player vs player combat, and they organized into groups of infected and non-infected, moved to areas where you could kill other people, and would kill others in massive ambushes to protect themselves from the disease while sending out there infected to seek out in game rivals to infect them with the disease.

While the 2005 incident has been getting attention lately, one of the things that got me out of virtual gaming was another government research project, specifically regarding currency. Academia has been studying virtual worlds from all angles for years, but the most illusive aspect of these studies is the Black Market, the very aspect of virtual gaming I knew best. In 2005 I participated in a federally funded economic study conducted on 2 very different virtual worlds to test various theories on inflation, counterfeiting, and reactions to supply and demand disruption.

Working with the gaming companies, we targeted stable virtual world economies in two very different systems, one was a highly competitive virtual world involving player vs player competition, while the other was quite the opposite, with no player vs player competition. In both cases, by disrupting the supply by buying all available supplies and creating problems in the areas where specific items within the virtual world can be accumulated, we were able to directly effect the economy. We also manipulated the economy heavily through RMT, by buying up all the black market currency for specific virtual worlds over a period of time, we then unloaded the currency into the relatively stable economy in an attempt to gauge the impact of counterfeiting, and again we were highly successful in crashing the market by reducing the value of currency for a period of time.

Seems trivial and stupid huh, but the data collected could in fact effect your daily life, allowing the US government to gauge the impact of a massive influx of counterfeiting of greenbacks by North Korea for example.

Anyway, enough of virtual worlds...

There are two naval tactical simulations out there for those who are into such things. I have added a section on "Naval Simulation" on the links of my blog, mostly inspired by myk, whose blog I have been watching since he set it up. Both simulations out there are tactical, not strategic, and both are still works in progress in my opinion.

The first and best naval simulation out right now is Harpoon 3 Advanced Naval Warfare. It comes with a great deal of flexibility, and without question the community of choice for Harpoon 3 is HarpoonHQ, with no exceptions. Myk is there, as is Byron who is a frequent commenter over at the Phibian's place. Working with the HarpoonHQ database and Harpoon 3 is actually a good teaching tool regarding the realities of naval combat, a good tool for the navy hobby types to test theories and generally start thinking beyond simply blue platform X vs red platform Y. I don't know how things are today, but in my high school back in the day, my ROTC instructor used Harpoon and the Fleet series games to introduce us the basic terminology of naval warfare, to get us to think tactically, but mostly to get us together for activities after school other than drill under a Navy theme for those who wanted to participate.

The second and perhaps more interesting naval simulation out right now is Global Conflict Blue. Recently the Thai Navy, short on funding, decided to utilize the open source software to meet its requirements for official naval simulation (English summery here). I haven't played it much, but the 3D graphics are probably more appealing to the younger X-Box era generation, although I prefer the look and feel of Harpoon 3 better. As an open source project though, if it gets attention and potentially more government support worldwide, the potential is actually quite interesting.

Either way, check out myk's place if realistic tactical naval gaming is something you think you might enjoy. If you decide to buy Harpoon 3, I'll see ya at HarpoonHQ, where you are guaranteed to meet 100 people a lot smarter than I, and perhaps the smartest hidden navy related community on the web.

BTW, for those curious, the pictures are from Lineage2, a highly competitive player vs player game I made good money in, and ultimately became hated in the gaming community because of. Ironically, it was a copy of the tax payments I made with the IRS from profits playing the black market in that game the first few months in 2005 that ultimately landed me on the economic research team in fall 2005.