Speaking of crises, I’m trying to clean up my desk. Here’s something easy to pitch out: a letter from Newt Gingrich. According to the envelope he needs my help to send a message to Congress:
Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less.
Strangely, he doesn’t mention that Drilling Here will net a nationally insignificant amount of oil, Drilling Now won’t yield that insignificant amount of oil for 8 or 10 years, and the Less we would be Paying would be about six cents per gallon. He also neglects to mention that we would be drilling in ecologically sensitive areas and all the profit from drilling would go to oil companies. Too bad this isn’t the World Without Oil game, where our hardheaded players put a natural check on unsupported, unsupportable emotional fantasizing.
Rewarding good players
And now I pick up a letter from the CEO of United Airlines, urging me as an airline customer to support efforts to curb oil speculators, whom the airline industries define as people who don’t actually use oil, i.e. people who are not them. I guess I can understand why the airlines would want to get the other bidders in the room out of the room, but would that really lower oil prices? Oil futures are different from other commodities futures: owners can’t sit on oil, to drive up its value; just because you pay more doesn’t mean it’s worth more; when the contracts come due, speculators need to sell their oil futures to someone who actually uses oil. If at that point the speculator paid too much for the oil, they take a loss. (We may see speculators taking such losses later this year, in fact, if oil prices don’t rise again.) Again, too bad this isn’t the World Without Oil game, which naturally invoked collective intelligence to examine claims such as the United Airlines letter for accuracy. But then again, maybe this letter actually supports the World Without Oil results; in the game, the airlines couldn’t adapt to the abrupt rise in oil prices, made bad decisions and went bankrupt.
At this point I am reminded of Jane McGonigal’s keynote at SXSW: Reality Is Broken: Games Can Fix It. In it, she listed four ways in which games do better than reality in generating happiness. I think that World Without Oil adds a fifth point to her roster: Games don’t reward people for sloppy play. Photo by Now and Here via Flickr.
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July 29, 2008 at 10:29 pm
The reality game is broken
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July 30, 2008 at 10:04 am
Tom
Excellent observations. It’s not *just* that games don’t reward sloppy play, because there is a difference between sloppiness and deliberate “spin.” In WWO there was no incentive for being able to fool some of the players for some period of time. I imagine that WWO would have been different if players had the option to play as stealth corporate lobbyists who could earn points for getting other players to believe some flawed explanation.
Some multiplayer games have structures that do lead to scams, such as the famous EVE Online scams ( http://mmorpg.qj.net/Biggest-scam-in-EVE-Online-history/pg/49/aid/62826 ).
But WWO was very well designed to use collective intelligence to “see through” the mass of nonsense and create good predictions. The funny thing is, on the whole the predictions were so good that I keep wondering about (and Monday-morning-quarterbacking about) the misses, like why we didn’t see that diesel prices would rise more than gasoline prices. It’s funny because I’m disappointed that the predictions from an online game weren’t *perfect*.
July 30, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Writerguy
Good points, Tom. Of course, people did have the option to play as stealth corporate lobbyists (and many did indeed have a viewpoint that they lobbied) it’s just that the game didn’t pay them to do so. People didn’t come to the game as employees, in other words; they came to the game as whole people, as fully themselves.
As you point out, WWO’s collective intelligence did do a great job in seeing through the chaff. As for diesel prices in WWO, that’s entirely my doing. I kept diesel prices low, especially in the early part, for story reasons (I didn’t want everything to go wrong all at once, so I spread it out a little). Plus I thought that what leverage the government had would be directed at diesel, which is the lifeblood or transport (and, as fuel oil, of winter heating). Real life has proved me totally wrong on that score so far. This Administration is paralyzed, apparently, and I fear that some of our citizens are destined to live out some WWO-like deprivation this winter as a result. The WWO future is here, it’s just not yet widely distributed.
Collective intelligence actually worked just fine with diesel prices – a number of WWO players wondered out loud why diesel prices were holding. But predicting prices and price progressions weren’t and aren’t the point of WWO. The point was elucidating how people would respond to them and the other changes that an oil shortage would spark – a much more interesting and difficult prediction.