The IHT has a very interesting piece on the adoption of computer games by retirees. This makes sense: back at the start of my career in internet services, in the mid-90s, I worked for one of the first Welsh ISPs. We were somewhat surprised then to discover that a big part of our takeup was from the retirees and the housebound, who were liberated by the ability to go online. So the phenomenon the IHT is describing just the same thing writ large. The article’s full of interesting figures and quotes, though: one game manufacturer found that “71 percent of its players were over 40; 47 percent were older than 50; and 76 percent of [..] players were women.” Another says that “people 50 and older made up 28 percent of the visitors in February but accounted for more than 40 percent of the total time spent on the site. On average, women spent 35 percent more time on the site each day than men.” So, anyone going into computer game design has to be thinking about this. There’s lots more in the article: it’s definitely worth a read.
At the other end of the age range, I see that 165,000 Mexican classrooms are getting full-wall touchscreens. Some 5 million 10-11 year olds already receive their education entirely through this medium. That’s mindboggling. And the numbers are set to increase, in what’s called the most ambitious e-learning project in the world.
For those of us inbetween, the Times has a special report on online gaming. It focuses on WoW, but there’s quite a bit on Second life as well. Enough reading to keep me busy for quite a while!
I am not a computer gamer, nor do I play one on TV. I am a techie, though (or was until fairly recently) so games are on my radar, and I thought I had a reasonably good take on what’s happening. In recent weeks, I’ve had to do a lot of reading up on them for work, and gave a presentation on Thursday to a very diverse group of professionals, explaining to them how most of their professions can have an application in game design (much to their surprise). As a demonstration, and talking point, I showed them the famous Leeroy Jenkins machinima piece.
I’ve been doing a lot of exploring in Second Life as well, as you’ll have guessed from the spate of recent pieces about that. Thanks to Preetam’s directions, I found the virtual Singapore, which seems to be growing fairly quickly. Most of the people I’ve met there seem to be students (which here in Singapore means schoolkids rather than university-level as elsewhere), but I hope I’ll run into older people there at some point.
What’s got me thinking about this even more is finding a story in the WSJ on the rise of the QQ coin as a virtual currency in China. As the discussion about the story in Slashdot points out, most currencies are virtual anyway, since they’re no longer backed by reserves of precious metals. This was pointed out during my MBA finance courses as the dirty secret of the currency trade: although a currency may be ’sound’ based on economic and trade figures, intangible and irrational issues such as political events, rumours, or a simple lack of confidence can cause the currency’s value to crash, often with little warning. (This sort of thing is often done deliberately – George Soros, I’m looking at you!) In other words, a currency holds value only as long as traders believe in it.
This sort of process is happening now in China, with the sudden and unexpected rise of the QQ coin as an alternative microcurrency. Unless the Chinese government clamps down (which they inevitably must do) this is bound to develop in to a bubble, and a crash. Even so, one of the most interesting points of the article is that a virtual currency has occupied the economic niche that elsewhere is filled by credit cards. As a meme, I think that this means the genie is out of the bottle, and can’t be put back. Will this mean irreparable harm to the credit card in China? If young people (the only ones who will ever be affluent enough to be potential credit card users) are now attuned to using virtual money, who will meet that need? Will the credit card companies be able to change their model? Or will an indigenous Chinese or Hong Kong bank introduce a virtual currency and dominate the Chinese market? If China adopts “game money” instead of credit cards, what trends will that kick off in the rest of the world?
Of course, the QQ coin isn’t the only privately issued virtual currency to have a ‘real-world’ presence: Second Life’s Linden dollar also does, as one example. These game currencies are therefore just as real as Scottish bank notes or Hong Kong dollar notes, which are also privately issued. The difference with China, as always, is the number of people involved – and that as with other other technologies, China seems to be leapfrogging generations of financial tools, going straight from cash to e-cash, and bypassing cheques and credit cards.
It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. I’ll also point that in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, the collapse of the traditional states, and the rise of elective, non-traditional dispersed nations is credited to the inability of states to control online transactions, and the subsequent erosion of their tax bases. With the growth in the value of trade in Linden and QQ dollars, governments will eventually seek to tax them – but since the participants are global and often untraceable, it’ll be interesting to see how this could be done. If the Chinese and US governments try to do this via the parent companies, there will be the inevitable temptation to reincorporate in the Caribbean, or some other haven; what then?
I haven’t written anything about spaceports for a while; news has been a bit thin. Two relevant bits of information have popped up this morning, though:
The world’s ‘first’ commercial spaceport is moving quickly towards becoming a reality. New Mexico’s legislature has voted to approve it; the new venture is likely to be largely finded by a local sales tax, and the space port should launch its first flight in 2009 or 2010. I say ‘first’ spaceport with some doubt because, although that’s what the article’s headline says, the writer in fact mentions that our own spaceport here in Singapore may go live in 2009 – which as I read it, means it could beat the New Mexico facility to launch.
On the downside of space travel, flaming space debris passed within five miles of an Airbus jet between Chile and New Zealand. Yikes.
Via Slashdot, I find this interesting article about Russia pumping money into a high-tech centre to rival Silicon Valley. It’s based around the existing academic centre of Akademgorodok, near Novisibirsk. I have a gut feeling that it won’t work… On the other hand, if they put money into a new tech centre in the Russian Far East, which I’ve been keeping an eye on ever since I started blogging, something might come of it; that’s potentially a much more happening area…
Ever since I first started thinking about an MBA, back in 2003, Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley has been worried about the American housing market. Ever since, during my studies and afterwards, he’s been warning that the sector was overexposed, and when the bubble burst it could take down the American economy. Then we would have to see how much domestic demand there is in Europe and Asia: can these regions’ economies withstand a collapse of the American consumer market?
For four years, it’s seemed that he had it wrong; Americans kept on borrowing, and the economy kept getting stronger. Now, at last, it seems that maybe he was right; there are now scary warning signs – the first falling pebbles that herald the avalanche?
Possibly the least meaningful title ever used on this blog…
Anyway, further to my recent post on John Poindexter, the TIA, and Singapore, Dave Snowden has posted a response to, and clarification of the Wired article that led to my post. It explains what has really been happening.
Just logged into Second Life to look for the virtual Singapore featured in the Straits Times yesterday – and couldn’t find it! I searched for “Singapore”, “Suntec City”, “Lion City”, and “Chinatown”, and nothing turned up.
Gah, things are moving so fast! I seem to be really behind the curve on this, at least by my own standards.
OK, I’m still thinking about education, professionalism, and virtuality.
Here I ramble a bit.
As I wrote before, tertiary institutions here in Singapore have a dress code for students that forbids caps, long hair, and so on. This is so that they “look professional”. Personally I don’t agree with this, and during my time at NTU was rarely seen without a baseball cap firmly fixed on my head. Of course, special case: I was an MBA student, and so there’s an element of “if he’s paying that much to be here, if he wants to wear a cap, let him”. I wore it in class, too. There were good reasons – my hair was very, very short then, so the hat kept my head warm in the arctic air-con, plus it shielded my eyes from the harsh lighting. I don’t think any of my professors would say that wearing the cap hindered my participation in class. So the clothes are not really the issue; it’s the attitude – and the context. My feeling is that the concept of “professionalism” these rules are meant to support are out of date, and better suited for producing cubicle-dwellers and low-level managers.
Not all that long ago, I was on the election committee of the first male member of the UK House of Commons to wear an ear-ring in Parliament. He got a bit of press about it at the time, but the story went away quickly because no-one cared. Man wears ear-ring at work, big deal. Happens all the time.
I’ve also worked as a consultant with a number of multinationals, in Singapore and in China. The managers I dealt with there were smart – but they dress colourfully, creatively, and with style. No question about their professionalism, though.
How about a senior manager who has spiky dyed blond hair and wears a kilt to the office? What kind of image does that present? What messages does that send? Is that professional? What kind of company would endorse that?
Well, the answer is: IBM.
And yes, it’s in Second Life. Fast Company has a really interesting article on how IBM is using the virtual world for mentoring and training – not only in the US, but also in China. I alluded to this before; guess the guy who thought that Second Life is for losers really needs to get up to speed on what’s happening!
How does one’s professional online avatar reflect one’s real-life professional image? Should you try to make an avatar that looks like the real you? Does it matter less because it’s online, even though you’re doing your work there just as you would offline?
