Estimates suggest 400,000 people are employed to build up credits in online games such as World of Warcraft and EverQuest by virtual gold mining or r such ways of building up in-game credits that can be translated into real value.This article titled “How gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gaming” was written by Josh Halliday, for The Guardian on Wednesday 25th May 2011 19.15 UTCTens of millions of people spend hours and pay big money for virtual gains on the most popular multiplayer online games, including World of Warcraft, Eve Online and EverQuest.Behind these games are “gold farmers”, who spend hours within the games each day, gathering virtual credits and selling them to gamers for real world cash.The most recent estimates, from 2009, suggest that 400,000 people are employed as gold farmers across the world, with 85% of those in China and Vietnam, according to Professor Richard Heeks of the University of Manchester.These gold farmers are almost entirely males between 18 and 25, and most are either cash-strapped college students or unemployed rural migrants. They sell in-game advantages – an increased skill level, or a virtual ore – to players eager to boost their online reputation.The multiplayer online games industry has boomed in recent years thanks to increased internet access and the rise of social networks. World of Warcraft, easily the most popular of its kind, had 12 million subscribers last year.According to a report published by the World Bank last month, gold farming was worth about $3bn (£1.85bn) in 2009 – most of which was kept by developing countries. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogHow gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gamingRelated posts:Farmers collaborate online to face rural uncertaintyOnline advertising in the UKRolling Your Own Online Office
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How gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gaming
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/29/how-gold-farmers-reap-huge-harvest-from-online-gaming
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May 29 2011, 9:16am | Comments »
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The London 2012 torch mixes the Olympian and the corporate
Sponsors to the fore in torch relay but who will light the flame in the London 2012 Olympic stadium?This article titled “The London 2012 torch mixes the Olympian and the corporate” was written by Owen Gibson, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 19th May 2011 09.58 UTCAs Seb Coe stood up to speak about the inspirational effect of the flame that will a year from now be passing through the cities, towns and villages of Britain having been “lit by the power of the sun on Mount Olympus”, three other figures looked on intently.They sat alongside him as he went on to talk about the galvanising effect he expected the tour to have on communities as the Olympic spirit coursed through them and they hosted their own celebratory events in the early summer gloaming.And they listened intently as Coe spoke affectingly about a husband and wife team who sold their house so the community gym they run in south-east London could survive – his nomination for one of the 7,200 out of 8,000 torchbearer slots reserved for members of the public.The three onlookers, who then got to take their turn to speak, were representatives of the three “presenting partners” – Samsung, Coca-Cola and Lloyds TSB – who get to plaster their branding over the torch relay. The man from Coca-Cola alone promised to bring “happiness and celebration” to the route.It is they (along with local authorities along the way) who effectively pay for the hoopla that will surround the torch relay that organisers hope will be the moment that the nation drops any lingering cynicism and truly embraces the Games.It was the most obvious manifestation in London to date of the sometimes uneasy, but ultimately profitable, mix of heady Olympic ideals and hard-nosed commercialism that has turned the modern Games into the globe-straddling event that it is.The genius of the International Olympic Committee’s commercial growth since the Los Angeles Games of 1984 has been to rake in huge sums from sponsors while enforcing very strict rules on how they can use the rights.As one of the very few events that the IOC allows them to overtly brand, the torch relay is where that symbiotic relationship – the organising committee Locog needs the sponsors to contribute £700m towards its £2bn budget, the sponsors want to extract every last drop of value out of their huge investment – becomes clearest.So it was that Coe began his press conference invoking the loftiest of Olympic ideals and ended it defending the involvement of Coke and answering questions on how many fizzy drinks his children guzzled.In common with their wider activity to date surrounding the London Games – which has tended to focus on warm and fuzzy corporate social responsibility activity rather than overt branding – all three sponsors have bought into the idea of using the relay as a means to run campaigns offering worthy members of the public the opportunity to claim their own slice of Olympic history and run a few hundred yards with the torch.A Locog team has spent two years painstakingly researching the 8,000-mile route and negotiating with local authorities. They hope that when the relay hits town, backed by wall-to-wall coverage from local media who will concentrate on the rich back stories of those running and the celebratory event that will take place every night (something between a Radio 1 roadshow and a county fair sponsored by multinationals, by the sound of things) Olympic fever will take hold up and down the country.Whether they succeed will depend to a large extent on those sponsors. If they get it right, Locog, the brands and the public will benefit. Get it wrong, and it could dent public enthusiasm.Sally Hancock, head of 2012 at Lloyds TSB, argued at the launch that in many ways the Olympics couldn’t have come at a better time for her company. Struggling to repair public trust and negotiating the internal challenge of merging two huge banks, the opportunity to create a feelgood factor around an event that is at once local and national in scale could be a huge one.But if the public is turned off and fails to buy into the concept – Locog has promised half the runners will be between 12 and 24 and 90% will be ordinary members of the public, to be nominated through four separate campaigns by the organisers and the sponsors– then it will feel like a long 8,000 miles.Locog will also have to get the balance right between safety and celebration. The defining public image of the Beijing international torch tour, which caused the IOC to turn it into a domestic event confined to the host country, was of a scrum of security guards bludgeoning their way through human rights protesters as bussed-in supporters of the Chinese government looked on.The UK’s experience will be becalmed by comparison. But Coe – who has often described Britain as a “slow-burn nation” that will take time to reach fever pitch over the Olympics – knows more than anyone how crucial it is that the relay is the moment at which the flame ignites that enthusiasm.And by the time the torch reaches the Olympic stadium, the eyes of the world will be on it. Which raises three obvious questions: Who will light the cauldron? How? And where will it be (there is still debate within Locog about whether it should be in the stadium, on top of it or on some sort of structure nearby)?The most memorable final torchbearers – Muhammad Ali in Atlanta, Cathy Freeman in Sydney – have held resonance beyond merely their status as sporting heroes in their home country. And the more spectacular the method of lighting the cauldron (the archer in Barcelona, the flying Beijing gymnast), the greater the risk of global humiliation.The task for Danny Boyle, the Trainspotting director already planning the opening ceremony in an east London warehouse, will be to come up with something to top what has gone before. Bookmakers immediately installed Sir Steve Redgrave as favourite, but will the emphasis on youth that characterised the bid promises lead organisers to a younger face? Coe, who might have been a leading contender were he not already so intimately involved with the staging of the Games, has already ruled himself out. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogThe London 2012 torch mixes the Olympian and the corporateRelated posts:London Olympics organisers appeal to protesters not to disrupt flame routeLondon 2012 Olympics countdown clock stopsLondon 2012: Ten best of the web
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May 19 2011, 5:24am | Comments »
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Game facing 60% drop in profits, warn retail analysts
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/26/game-facing-60-drop-in-profits-warn-retail-analysts
The computer game retailer Game, is expected to publish results badly affected by the rise of digital downloads in the same way as music filesharing has hit record shops.
This article titled “Game facing 60% drop in profits, warn retail analysts” was written by Andrew Clark, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.06 UTC Britain’s leading computer games retailer, Game, is likely to reveal a plunge in profits of up to 60% this week as electronic entertainment enthusiasts shun high street shops in favour of digital downloads. Game, which is expected to name former Ladbrokes boss Chris Bell to replace its soon-to-retire chairman Peter Lewis, is forecast by analysts to deliver profits of £37m-£39m for the year to January, a dramatic drop from £90m a year ago, in spite of the success of hit games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops and Fight Night Champion. In common with music specialist HMV, the company is facing fundamental structural challenges as sales migrate onto the internet. In a strategic review in February, Game promised a “step change” in its own online offering, pledging to triple digital sales to £300m by 2013 to offset weak trading at its 1,300 shops. Analysts at Deutsche Bank have suggested Game could be a takeover target for US retailer Gamestop, which has a handful of shops in Britain and is rumoured to be considering expansion.
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April 26 2011, 12:48pm | Comments »
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Olympics 2012: Are there ways to save on tickets?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/08/olympics-2012-are-there-ways-to-save-on-tickets
What’s the best way to get good value Olympics 2012 tickets without breaking the bank?
This article titled “Olympics 2012: Are there ways to save on tickets?” was written by Jim Griffin, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 8th April 2011 11.07 UTC Every week a Guardian Money reader submits a question, and it’s up to you to help him or her out – a selection of the best answers will appear in next Saturday’s paper. This week’s question: My husband is planning to spend more than £1,000 on Olympics tickets, which seems crazy to me. He wants to go for the pricier tickets, as he says the cheap £20 ones will be over-subscribed. Is he right? Any tips I can pass on for reducing his (our) bill? What are your thoughts?
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April 8 2011, 6:34am | Comments »
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Olympic stadium completed on time
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/29/olympic-stadium-completed-on-time
London 2012 Olympic Stadium designers hail ‘the beginning of the end’ of the construction phase as the main arena comes in on schedule and under budget.
This article titled “Olympic stadium completed on time” was written by Owen Gibson, for The Guardian on Tuesday 29th March 2011 19.51 UTC The designers of the Olympic Stadium in east London have hailed its completion as “the beginning of the end” for the construction phase of the 2012 Games. As International Olympic Committee inspectors arrived in the city for a three-day visit to check on progress, organisers hoped the good news on the completion of the Stratford stadium would overshadow an ongoing row with the British Olympic Association over how any hypothetical profit would be distributed. Lord Coe, the chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, watched Frankie Fredericks, a four-time Olympic silver medallist, lay the last piece of turf on the infield. The £486m stadium is the second major venue on the Olympic Park to be finished, after the Velodrome was unveiled earlier last month. “I do not want anybody to run away with the idea that this stadium is ready to stage a track-and-field championship tomorrow,” said Coe. “But as a chairman of an organising committee to be able to tick off this venue is terrific. It is fantastic. I think it will be an intimate theatre for sport and it has fantastic legacy potential, too.” Work began on the 80,000-seat stadium in May 2008 and the Olympic Delivery Authority, which is responsible for spending £8.1bn of public money on the infrastructure to host the Games, said its completion was a “huge milestone”. “The Olympic Stadium has been finished on time and under budget,” said ODA chairman John Armitt. “To complete a complicated project such as this in less than three years is testament to the skill and professionalism of the UK construction industry.” Rod Sheard, of stadium architects Populous, said he was looking forward to watching “this innovative design perform for the first time”. He added: “Its completion marks the beginning of the end of the construction phase of London’s Olympic Games.”
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March 29 2011, 3:35pm | Comments »
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Olympic Games 2012 medal haul will beat Beijing, promises UK Sport
Best showing ‘in living memory’ promised for London 2012 Olympic Games
This article titled “Olympic Games 2012 medal haul will beat Beijing, promises UK Sport” was written by Owen Gibson, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 15th March 2011 09.02 UTC With 500 days to go until the 2012 Opening Ceremony, the body responsible for Team GB has promised to beat its Beijing medal haul and record the best performance “in living memory”. Around 6.6m tickets will on Tuesday go on sale and UK Sport, which has invested £100m a year in Olympic sports since Beijing, said it would deliver “more medals, in more sports” than ever before. Peter Keen, the performance director, said a host of sports would be expected to step up and deliver “a load of ones and twos” to augment the medal hauls of those where Britain has recently excelled. “Some of the big boys are now pretty good at holding back and you’ve got some real wannabes who are coming up real quick,” he said. Keen picked out taekwondo as one sport that had invested its development budget wisely and built a “performance pathway” that would deliver in London and beyond. “We’re moving out of the comfort zone of sports we know well and do well and are able to translate those lessons into a wider number of sports while still retaining our performance in bedrock ones,” he said. “That’s a really good outcome and a really healthy one for the investment that has been made.” UK Sport on Monday set a new target range of between 30 and 61 world championship medals this year to keep them on track for success in 2012. Its chair, Baroness Campbell, said that British Olympic sport was in “a very strong place”, even compared to the same point in the Beijing cycle. “We’ve had unprecedented amounts of investment, we’ve got way better at targeting that and managing that money to have the results we want. We’ve got a really great set of world-class performance directors. We’ve got some of the best coaches in sport and our performances are better than they’ve ever been,” she told the Guardian. “Nobody wants to add even more pressure to the athletes but I think they are in a strong place and our ambition would be that the British team makes the nation proud and performs the best they have done in living memory.”
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March 15 2011, 4:09am | Comments »
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The internet is over
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/15/the-internet-is-over
Oliver Burkeman went to Texas to the South by Southwest festival of film, music and technology, in search of the next big idea. After three days he found it: the boundary between ‘real life’ and ‘online’ has disappeared.
This article titled “SXSW 2011: The internet is over” was written by Oliver Burkeman, for The Guardian on Tuesday 15th March 2011 08.00 UTC If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won’t, of course, because they’ll be too busy playing with the teleportation console – I’ll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican restaurant opposite a cemetery in Austin, Texas, halfway through eating a taco. It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world’s highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them, and I’d been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is “user experience”, really? What the hell is “the gamification of healthcare”? Or “geofencing”? Or “design thinking”? Or “open source government”? What is “content strategy”? No, I mean, like, specifically? The content strategist across the table took a sip of his orange-coloured cocktail. He looked slightly exasperated. “Well, from one perspective, I guess,” he said, “it’s kind of everything.” This, for outsiders, is the fundamental obstacle to understanding where technology culture is heading: increasingly, it’s about everything. The vaguely intimidating twentysomethings who prowl the corridors of the Austin Convention Centre, juggling coffee cups, iPad 2s and the festival’s 330-page schedule of events, are no longer content with transforming that part of your life you spend at your computer, or even on your smartphone. This is not just grandiosity on their part. Rather – and this is a technological point, but also a philosophical one – they herald the final disappearance of the boundary between “life online” and “real life”, between the physical and the virtual. It thus requires only a small (and hopefully permissible) amount of journalistic hyperbole to suggest that the days of “the internet” as an identifiably separate thing may be behind us. After a few hours at South by Southwest (SXSW), the 330-page programme in my bag started triggering shoulder aches, but to be honest it was a marvel of brevity: after all, the festival was pretty much about everything. We’ve been hearing about this moment in digital history since at least 1988, when the Xerox technologist Mark Weiser coined the term “ubiquitous computing”, referring to the point at which devices and systems would become so numerous and pervasive that “technology recedes into the background of our lives”. (To be fair, Weiser also called this “the age of calm technology”, implying a serenity that the caffeinated, Twitter-distracted masses in Austin this week didn’t seem yet to have attained.) And it’s almost a decade since annoying tech-marketing types started using “mobile” as an abstract noun, referring to the end of computing as a desktop-only affair. But the arrival of the truly ubiquitous internet is something new, with implications both thrilling and sinister – and it has a way of rendering many of the questions we’ve been asking about technology in recent years almost meaningless. Did social media cause the recent Arab uprisings? Is the web distracting us from living? Are online friendships as rich as those offline? When the lines between reality and virtuality dissolve, both sides of such debates are left looking oddly anachronistic. Here, then, is a short tour of where we might be headed instead: Web 3.0
“Big ideas are like locomotives,” says Tim O’Reilly, a computer book publisher legendary among geeks, embarking on one of the grand metaphors to which the headline speakers at SXSW seem invariably prone. “They pull a train, and the train’s gotta be going somewhere lots of people want to go.” The big idea O’Reilly is touting is “sensor-driven collective intelligence”, but since he coined the term “Web 2.0″, he seems resigned to people labelling this new phase “Web 3.0″. If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed. You’re still creating the web, but without the conscious need to do so. “Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications,” O’Reilly has written. “Motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we’re looking at, and how fast we’re moving . . . Increasingly, the web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an ‘information shadow’, an aura of data, which when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mindbending implications.” Alarming ones, too, of course, if you don’t know exactly what’s being shared with whom. Walking past a bank of plasma screens in Austin that were sputtering out tweets from the festival, I saw the claim from Marissa Mayer, a Google vice-president, that credit card companies can predict with 98% accuracy, two years in advance, when a couple is going to divorce, based on spending patterns alone. She meant this to be reassuring: Google, she explained, didn’t engage in such covert data-mining. (Deep inside, I admit, I wasn’t reassured. But then Mayer probably already knew that.) The game layer
Depending on your degree of immersion in the digital world, it’s possible that you’ve never heard the term “gamification” or that you’re already profoundly sick of it. From a linguistic point of view, the word should probably be outlawed – perhaps we could ban “webinar” at the same time? – but as a concept it was everywhere in Austin. Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world’s leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft. So why not apply that expertise to all those areas of life where we could use more engagement, commitment and fun: in education, say, or in civic life, or in hospitals? Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn’t some of that energy be productively harnessed? This sounds plausible until you start to demand details, whereupon it becomes extraordinarily hard to grasp what this might actually mean. The current public face of gamification is Jane McGonigal, author of the new book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World, but many of her prescriptions are cringe-inducing: they seem to involve redefining aid projects in Africa as “superhero missions”, or telling hospital patients to think of their recovery from illness as a “multiplayer game”. Hearing how McGonigal speeded her recovery from a serious head injury by inventing a “superhero-themed game” called SuperBetter, based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which her family and friends were players helping her back to health, I’m apparently supposed to feel inspired. Instead I feel embarrassed and a little sad: if I’m ever in that situation, I hope I won’t need to invent a game to persuade my family to care. A different reaction results from watching a manic presentation by Seth Priebatsch, the 22-year-old Princeton dropout who is this year’s leading victim of what the New York Times has labelled “Next Zuckerberg Syndrome”, the quest to identify and invest in tomorrow’s equivalent of the billionaire Facebook founder. Priebatsch’s declared aim is to “build a game layer on top of the world” – which at first seems simply to mean that we should all use SCVNGR, his location-based gaming platform that allows users to compete to win rewards at restaurants, bars and cinemas on their smartphones. (You can practically hear the marketers in the room start to salivate when he mentions this.) But Priebatsch’s ideas run deeper than that, whatever the impression conveyed by his bright orange polo shirt, his bright orange-framed sunglasses, and his tendency to bounce around the stage like a wind-up children’s toy. His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail. A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you’ve failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score? This kind of insight isn’t unique to the world of videogames: these are basic insights into human psychology and the role of incentives, recently repopularised in books such as Freakonomics and Nudge. But that fact, in itself, may be a symptom of the vanishing distinction between online and off – and it certainly doesn’t make it wrong. The dictator’s dilemma
Not long ago, according to the new-media guru Clay Shirky, the Sudanese government set up a Facebook page calling for a protest against the Sudanese government, naming a specific time and place – then simply arrested those who showed up. It was proof, Shirky argues, that social media can’t be revolutionary on its own. “The reason that worked is that nobody knew anybody else,” he says. “They thought Facebook itself was trustworthy.” This is one of many counterintuitive impacts that the internet has wrought on the politics of protest. But perhaps the most powerful is the one that Shirky – himself a prominent evangelist for the democratic power of services such as Twitter and Facebook – labels “the dictator’s dilemma”. Authoritarian leaders and protesters alike can exploit the power of the internet, Shirky concedes. (At least he notes the risks: in another session at the conference, I watch dumbstruck as a consultant on cyber-crimefighting speaks with undisguised joy about how much information the police could glean from Facebook, in order to infiltrate communities where criminals might lurk. Asked about privacy concerns, she replies: “Yeah – we’ll have to keep an eye on that.”) But there’s a crucial asymmetry, Shirky goes on. The internet is now such a pervasive part of so many people’s lives that blocking certain sites, or simply turning the whole thing off – as leaders in Bahrain, Egypt and elsewhere have recently tried to do – can backfire completely, angering protesters further and, from a dictator’s point of view, making matters worse. “The end state of connectivity,” he argues, “is that it provides citizens with increased power.” The road to that end state won’t be smooth. But the compensatory efforts of the authorities to harness the internet for their own ends will never fully compensate. Either they must allow dissenters to organise online, or – by cutting off a resource that’s crucial to their daily lives – provoke them to greater fury. Biomimicry comes of age
The search engine AskNature describes itself as “the world’s first digital library of Nature’s solutions”, and to visit it is to experience the curious, rather disorienting sensation of Googling the physical universe. Ask it some basic question – how to keep warm, say, or float in water, or walk on unstable ground – and it will search its library for solutions to the problem that nature has already found. The idea of “biomimicry” is certainly not new: for much of the past decade, the notion of borrowing engineering solutions from the natural world has inspired architects, industrial designers and others. Austin is abuzz with examples. “Nissan, right now, is developing swarming cars based on the movements of schooling fish,” says Chris Allen of the Biomimicry Institute. Fish follow ultra-simple mathematical rules, he explains, to ensure that they never collide with each other when swimming in groups. Borrow that algorithm for navigating cars and a new solution to congestion and road accidents presents itself: what if, in heavy traffic, auto-navigated cars could be programmed to avoid each other while continuing forwards as efficiently as possible? The Bank of England, he adds, is currently consulting biologists to explore ways in which organic immune systems might inspire reforms to the financial system to render it immune to devastating crises. “And what we’re looking for now,” Allen says cryptically, “is an interactive technology inspired by snakes.” ‘We are meant to pulse’
Until recently, the debate over “digital distraction” has been one of vested interests: authors nostalgic for the days of quiet book-reading have bemoaned it, while technology zealots have dismissed it. But the fusion of the virtual world with the real one exposes both sides of this argument as insufficient, and suggests a simpler answer: the internet is distracting if it stops you from doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn’t, it isn’t. Similarly, warnings about “internet addiction” used to sound like grandparental cautions against the evils of rock music; scoffing at the very notion was a point of pride for those who identified themselves with the future. But you can develop a problematic addiction to anything: there’s no reason to exclude the internet, and many real geeks in Austin (as opposed to the new-media gurus who claim to speak for them) readily concede they know sufferers. One of the most popular talks at the conference, touching on these subjects, bore the title Why Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy. A related danger of the merging of online and offline life, says business thinker Tony Schwartz, is that we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers. We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation. But “we were not meant to operate as computers do,” Schwartz says. “We are meant to pulse.” When it comes to managing our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear perspective with a cyclical one: “We live by the myth that the best way to get more work done is to work longer hours.” Schwartz cites research suggesting that we should work in periods of no greater than 90 minutes before seeking rest. Whatever you might have been led to imagine by the seeping of digital culture into every aspect of daily life – and at times this week in Austin it was easy to forget this – you are not, ultimately, a computer.
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March 15 2011, 4:07am | Comments »
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