My travels across the lush rolling hills of the internet hath today brought me to a pretty nifty little site - http://www.thesimexchange.com. Its purpose? A futures market built around the video game industry.
So I know what you're thinking. What in the world is a futures market? What am I doing reading this blog? And what happened to my pants? Sadly I'm really not qualified to answer any of those three questions. But, its my blog and I thus I reserve the right to pretend to know what Im talking about... occasionally.
A future's market is basically a market of ideas - a place where people buy and sell the possibilities that some quantifiable thing might happen. For example, in one market, people might be buying or selling the idea that "The San Francisco 49'ers will make the playoffs in the 2008 season", or that "Transformers the Movie will earn more money than Spiderman 3 by the end of 2007". An idea is posted. Stocks in that idea are sold. And then just like a real stock market, supply and demand dictate the price of said stocks, right until the end of an idea period is reached and the condition of the idea is either met, or not. It takes a little while to really conceptualize - but once you have the "ah ha" moment, its easy to see how such a tool could be used to gauge all sorts of metadeta from a vast, thinking public. Why does it work? Well depending on the market, you can make real money buying and selling ideas. People love money. Other markets are free, but we are prideful beings us humans. People love being right. And look at that... Stub's concise take on humanity, available in my new book, Stubstyle Psychology 101.
Sadly however, I have no idea why you are reading this blog, or where your pants are. But 1:3 aint bad =)
I'm just starting to play with it now, but thus far TheSimExchange seems like a really cool site - relativly simple, and yet chopped full of useful information. And best of all - its free. Unlike some future's markets, TheSimsExchange is all about creating a fun, low pressure environment for getting gamers interested in the concepts of stock and predicting industry trends. Your account comes with 1,000,000 DKP (the currency used in many online games) to get started with, and your success and failure is based entirely on your reputation - harnessing a gamer's natural competative instincts to succeed as the motivating factor behind particpating.
Oh yea... and there is always the chance that if a site like this starts to really take off, it could cycle back to the gaming industry as an input into the future of games.
Predictions by gamers dictating the creation of future games? I feel a rupture in the space time continuum coming on...
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