Socially significant online games
Once a psychologist explained the uncontrollable enthusiasm (addiction) of computer (network especially) games in a degenerate way of social self-realization - players can achieve the highest skill in certain skills, for which they have respect and respect among the community of their own kind, but the problem is that these skills are practically not needed for “real” social self-realization, i.e. they do not carry any functional load in society, they are not socially significant. A person sticks with terrible force, donates food, sleep, study / work, family / relationships with the opposite sex, walks in the fresh air and other pleasures of life, but the result is inadequate to these efforts and victims. On the other hand, you can give an example of players for money with slot machines. In this case, addiction also often happens, but the gain is little associated with personal skills, because it depends on chance, and therefore there is no recognition in society.
These two cases of games do not so much reveal the causes of addiction, as they show two significant factors in the motivation of social activity in general, and usually both of them are present - society assesses the skills of individuals and recognition of merit, and money. In principle, recognition is indirectly monetized, since It means more opportunities to earn money, starting with easier employment for good places (as reminded by amilner ), ending with all sorts of “selling the name”, for example, when interviewing celebrities. However, recognition usually comes in specialized communities and is expressed in a more direct and concrete form - in delegating to the successful people an ever-increasing amount of authority, which gives them a greater level of personal influence in a certain segment of society. In other words, their “ copyright ” is expanding. These levels of influence are fixed in the hierarchical-official management structures (both in state structures and in private business) and are tied to the levels of money income. This method of stimulation can be summarized by the principle “you know more, you have more” and it is he who takes us to real self-realization in society.
You can set a goal to use the same principle in the organization of Internet services. Since we are talking about money too, it must be interconnected with the scheme of their monetization. In my previous article I talked about the benefits of creating conditions for the users to make money. In this regard, cash games are again of interest. For example, in the cards, the gain is determined by the results of the game, depending on the skills of the players, The principle “you know how to have one” also works. Although in this case you have not so much a sphere of influence as money directly, but this is not surprising for games of such a small scale. But the solution to the problem of monetization, when the participants themselves bring money into the system and then redistribute between them, can be identified as a separate model and called it “share” or “share”. Strange, but I hardly find any analogues for it, if I also demand the implementation of the principle “if you can, you have.” The only thing that comes to mind is all sorts of sweepstakes. Perhaps, such an exotic way of corporatization is also from this area. If we assume taxes are a kind of equity participation (albeit not voluntary), then we still need to include the state. In it, the principle “you know how to have it” works in full force. It seems to me that the Internet opens up new opportunities for the development of such models.
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To do this, you need to understand what people can do online. More precisely, that they can in principle be able to. As mentioned in the above article, this is firstly various operations with information (content) - its generation, filtering and structuring. If the process is constant and sufficiently long (usually it is), structuring and systematization, the emergence of enlarged and improving content units, like articles and books, should become the natural way out of generation. Usually this does not happen. Because of the incompletely formed cultural traditions in the internet, I think. And also because of the absence or lack of convenient formats (services) for this. Secondly, people communicate in the internet. Communication can also look like content generation, but now I mean only the communicative component. There are people who produce little meaningful content themselves, but stimulate other people to do so. The natural way out of communication activity is the formation of social connections and the acquisition of certain fame in certain circles. (This is not the same as recognition, because such fame does not necessarily mean an increased interest in the individual).
Now from the mass participation services we have a blog platform and social network. The former mainly satisfy the need to generate their own, as well as filtering of someone else's content (in many blogs, a significant proportion of the content consists of links and borrowings), the latter mainly perform a communicative function. Those. the most massive needs are already covered. What has been mastered insufficiently is the mentioned systematization component, as well as the potential of collective interaction of people taking into account the difference in their approaches to communication and work with information. Both means development in the direction of complication and, of course, in some form it occurs. In social media like Habr, the goal is still to generate content, but many people participate in the form of user ratings. In fact, it is a separate type of network activity - collective filtering by quality. Those. an attempt is made to explicitly use the principle “you know how to have”, in this case you have recognition. However, its value is measured in an implicit form - perhaps in the quantity and quality of social relations formed in the process. It is interesting to note that in LJ, on the contrary, there is no explicit rating system, but the quantity and quality of friends explicitly assumes the role of an indicator of success. As a result, a noticeable difference between the services of these two types is manifested mainly in the speed of indication of success, although this is probably an important thing.
Approaching our main goal - a more complete inclusion of the principle “you know how to have” in collective environments, the imagination can go into a whole fan of directions. First, you can conceive a fractional monetization scheme. More precisely, the club principle is the payment for participation, which can also be considered a variation of the equity model. For example, suppose a rating system in social media based on the ruble voting. Obviously, this will increase the interest and involvement of participants. On the other hand, we know the problems of rating systems - it is highly dependent on their specific implementation how effectively the display of the best materials and authors actually takes place. The introduction of the monetary component here will exacerbate an already complex problem and, perhaps, it will begin to resemble the struggle of search engines with optimizers. If the interest of the optimizers was purely sporting, this struggle would probably have noticeably less relevance. (However, this scheme does not fit the fight of antivirals with the creators of viruses. It is difficult to understand what motivates the latter, because there is no information about them). You can simulate the result. There will be a division of the competitive space into many highly specialized segments. Because few people are able to effectively compete in a wide thematic spectrum, but many are quite good specialists in their fields. In the money game, you assess your strengths and competitors, and if you decide to play, then you rate your chances highly. Perhaps most people are sane and do not dare easily lose their money in competition with the leaders. Another result will be an increase in the quality of the produced content, and hence an increase in the number of views by non-participants. From here follow two models of monetization of a service that provides such services: tax (percentage of participants' incomes) and contextual advertising (since niches are highly specialized, advertising in them must be effective).
Now I considered only the most obvious area - content generation. But we remember that there are different types of network activity and people are different too. Some, even good specialists in their fields, cannot always produce good content, but are perfectly capable of evaluating the work of others. This skill can also be made a subject of earnings. Recall the sweepstakes - riders and horses compete for the prize, and a much larger number of observers compete with each other in the ability to correctly assess the balance of forces and identify the leader. If you make the correct estimates constantly enough, they can bring not only a cash gain, but also a high rating of a good appraiser (that is, a more complete inclusion of the principle “you know how to have” for this type of activity). However, this is probably not the only way. I would consider more intelligent an automatic redistribution of funds from a common piggy bank in favor of higher-rated appraisers. In general, the rating system should devote a separate article.
As for filtering, structuring, cataloging and organizing content (and more generally resources), they are difficult to separate from just generation, for they are often also expressed in the form of content units. There are exceptions - the project Ashumova Flexum stimulates the specific activity of users to systematize thematic sites. There, an attempt was made to use the principle “you know how to have”, since users, besides the high rating (popularity) of their search engines, monetize this popularity by earning a portion of advertising revenue. My proposal for such an activity is in the “ objects + connections ” model. In this case, options for rating and monetary incentives can also come up. For example, again, redistribute from a common piggy bank in favor of users who produce the largest number of the most popular objects (and perhaps also connections). That is, if you take the system as a whole, then the cumulative rating of the user can be summed up from his ratings for various types of activity, so that everyone can maximize their ability to express what is most powerful.
Probably, these things are suitable for systems of any scale, including small ones. In small systems, respectively, and you will not earn much money. More precisely, it depends on the proportion of users - how big they are. Users, however, are quite capable of trying without money, being motivated by a single admission (how this article began). Provided, of course, that the service is interesting to them and conveniently formats their activity. People go where they find more opportunities to express themselves. By the way, under this condition, the fee for participation or equity contribution is practically indistinguishable from the fee for the services of the service in the traditional sense. Just the income will go to the owners of the service not in full, but largely redistributed between users based on the results of their activity. As the system grows, not only monetary interest grows, but also an opportunity appears for the manifestation of another type of activity — organizational. Speech on the previously mentioned delegation of authority. For example, users with a certain rating have the authority to further redistribute a certain amount of finance among other users to further stimulate any of their activity. Or, for example, by investing these funds in projects of other users, in particular, in projects to improve the service. Or in the same traditional stocks and other securities (ie, playing on the stock exchanges), thereby providing an additional influx of money into the system. Or in some socially significant projects. Users with a growing “managerial component” in the ranking, i.e. successful managers will receive more and more powers, including the empowerment of other users. This is a way to build vertically hierarchical structures that are still not intrinsic to the Internet. At the same time, by the way, the financial success of the manager is not obligatory. You can think of a situation where a person manifests himself in the cultural or scientific field and due to this has a high rating, bringing a correspondingly high income. In general, communication as a component of Internet activity contains a huge potential for both cooperation and conflict. The formation of favorable or unfavorable communication spaces is also a question of someone's (author's) skills or inability and, accordingly, competition.
The described scheme can be called a game, since in its principles it is similar to some money games - the distribution-share model of monetization, based on the principle of "you can-have." On the other hand, the latter principle can be implemented in it much more fully than in ordinary money games, to stimulate various socially significant activities, and in this respect the game is closer to “state-like” systems. As a result, services of this kind can be called socially-significant online games.
Of course, the success of such projects is critically dependent on the specific implementation of the rating system and serviceability for those types of user activity that are rated. It is clear that, due to the many parameters, these conditions can be fulfilled by a large number of options, it is very difficult to calculate the most successful of which in advance. In a good way, this is work for the whole scientific institute (institutes), with the defense of candidate and doctoral studies in various specialties :) - from psychology and sociology to mathematics. Not to mention the IT-technology. Therefore, there are two ways to see here - the usual competition of services that implement the same principles in different ways, and the competition of copyright spaces within the same service, when users are initially empowered to create communities according to their own rules of the game, with their size of assessed contributions, rating methods, delegation powers, their concretization and so on. You can also think of a situation where some users immediately make a large share, from which they can hire a PR manager and other specialists to help them develop their communities. However, these paths do not contradict each other and can be combined.
In conclusion, a comment on the future of such projects. You can imagine the situation is really more and more similar to the state, when the service itself does not have specific owners, and all of its income is distributed among users. Then, managing a complex system will require not just effective managers, but in a sense, “political” figures elected from users. With a sufficiently large increase in the number of users and incomes of the system, as well as its efficiency, it will be able to solve truly visible social tasks, gradually replacing the traditional state in this regard. I see the advantage in the effectiveness of a virtual state over a real one primarily in the highest level of information transparency and the possibility of user control over all processes. Secondly, of course, this and other advantages of Ineta over the real, which can be summarized in the thesis about the almost complete elimination of space-time obstacles to the interaction of all elements of the system. This is a “game of state”, as I understand it, in the style of the ideology of Us Now .
PS An interesting new article Level vs Skill with a discussion of the types of motivations in traditional online network games. Although I am not aware of their problems, because never fond of such games. They are based on the visualization of some fantastic realities, as I understand it. My proposal relates mainly to the “textual” world of ideas. But one is already massive and networked, the other is thought the same, so individual problems (rather, even basic ones) may well be universal.
These two cases of games do not so much reveal the causes of addiction, as they show two significant factors in the motivation of social activity in general, and usually both of them are present - society assesses the skills of individuals and recognition of merit, and money. In principle, recognition is indirectly monetized, since It means more opportunities to earn money, starting with easier employment for good places (as reminded by amilner ), ending with all sorts of “selling the name”, for example, when interviewing celebrities. However, recognition usually comes in specialized communities and is expressed in a more direct and concrete form - in delegating to the successful people an ever-increasing amount of authority, which gives them a greater level of personal influence in a certain segment of society. In other words, their “ copyright ” is expanding. These levels of influence are fixed in the hierarchical-official management structures (both in state structures and in private business) and are tied to the levels of money income. This method of stimulation can be summarized by the principle “you know more, you have more” and it is he who takes us to real self-realization in society.
You can set a goal to use the same principle in the organization of Internet services. Since we are talking about money too, it must be interconnected with the scheme of their monetization. In my previous article I talked about the benefits of creating conditions for the users to make money. In this regard, cash games are again of interest. For example, in the cards, the gain is determined by the results of the game, depending on the skills of the players, The principle “you know how to have one” also works. Although in this case you have not so much a sphere of influence as money directly, but this is not surprising for games of such a small scale. But the solution to the problem of monetization, when the participants themselves bring money into the system and then redistribute between them, can be identified as a separate model and called it “share” or “share”. Strange, but I hardly find any analogues for it, if I also demand the implementation of the principle “if you can, you have.” The only thing that comes to mind is all sorts of sweepstakes. Perhaps, such an exotic way of corporatization is also from this area. If we assume taxes are a kind of equity participation (albeit not voluntary), then we still need to include the state. In it, the principle “you know how to have it” works in full force. It seems to me that the Internet opens up new opportunities for the development of such models.
')
To do this, you need to understand what people can do online. More precisely, that they can in principle be able to. As mentioned in the above article, this is firstly various operations with information (content) - its generation, filtering and structuring. If the process is constant and sufficiently long (usually it is), structuring and systematization, the emergence of enlarged and improving content units, like articles and books, should become the natural way out of generation. Usually this does not happen. Because of the incompletely formed cultural traditions in the internet, I think. And also because of the absence or lack of convenient formats (services) for this. Secondly, people communicate in the internet. Communication can also look like content generation, but now I mean only the communicative component. There are people who produce little meaningful content themselves, but stimulate other people to do so. The natural way out of communication activity is the formation of social connections and the acquisition of certain fame in certain circles. (This is not the same as recognition, because such fame does not necessarily mean an increased interest in the individual).
Now from the mass participation services we have a blog platform and social network. The former mainly satisfy the need to generate their own, as well as filtering of someone else's content (in many blogs, a significant proportion of the content consists of links and borrowings), the latter mainly perform a communicative function. Those. the most massive needs are already covered. What has been mastered insufficiently is the mentioned systematization component, as well as the potential of collective interaction of people taking into account the difference in their approaches to communication and work with information. Both means development in the direction of complication and, of course, in some form it occurs. In social media like Habr, the goal is still to generate content, but many people participate in the form of user ratings. In fact, it is a separate type of network activity - collective filtering by quality. Those. an attempt is made to explicitly use the principle “you know how to have”, in this case you have recognition. However, its value is measured in an implicit form - perhaps in the quantity and quality of social relations formed in the process. It is interesting to note that in LJ, on the contrary, there is no explicit rating system, but the quantity and quality of friends explicitly assumes the role of an indicator of success. As a result, a noticeable difference between the services of these two types is manifested mainly in the speed of indication of success, although this is probably an important thing.
Approaching our main goal - a more complete inclusion of the principle “you know how to have” in collective environments, the imagination can go into a whole fan of directions. First, you can conceive a fractional monetization scheme. More precisely, the club principle is the payment for participation, which can also be considered a variation of the equity model. For example, suppose a rating system in social media based on the ruble voting. Obviously, this will increase the interest and involvement of participants. On the other hand, we know the problems of rating systems - it is highly dependent on their specific implementation how effectively the display of the best materials and authors actually takes place. The introduction of the monetary component here will exacerbate an already complex problem and, perhaps, it will begin to resemble the struggle of search engines with optimizers. If the interest of the optimizers was purely sporting, this struggle would probably have noticeably less relevance. (However, this scheme does not fit the fight of antivirals with the creators of viruses. It is difficult to understand what motivates the latter, because there is no information about them). You can simulate the result. There will be a division of the competitive space into many highly specialized segments. Because few people are able to effectively compete in a wide thematic spectrum, but many are quite good specialists in their fields. In the money game, you assess your strengths and competitors, and if you decide to play, then you rate your chances highly. Perhaps most people are sane and do not dare easily lose their money in competition with the leaders. Another result will be an increase in the quality of the produced content, and hence an increase in the number of views by non-participants. From here follow two models of monetization of a service that provides such services: tax (percentage of participants' incomes) and contextual advertising (since niches are highly specialized, advertising in them must be effective).
Now I considered only the most obvious area - content generation. But we remember that there are different types of network activity and people are different too. Some, even good specialists in their fields, cannot always produce good content, but are perfectly capable of evaluating the work of others. This skill can also be made a subject of earnings. Recall the sweepstakes - riders and horses compete for the prize, and a much larger number of observers compete with each other in the ability to correctly assess the balance of forces and identify the leader. If you make the correct estimates constantly enough, they can bring not only a cash gain, but also a high rating of a good appraiser (that is, a more complete inclusion of the principle “you know how to have” for this type of activity). However, this is probably not the only way. I would consider more intelligent an automatic redistribution of funds from a common piggy bank in favor of higher-rated appraisers. In general, the rating system should devote a separate article.
As for filtering, structuring, cataloging and organizing content (and more generally resources), they are difficult to separate from just generation, for they are often also expressed in the form of content units. There are exceptions - the project Ashumova Flexum stimulates the specific activity of users to systematize thematic sites. There, an attempt was made to use the principle “you know how to have”, since users, besides the high rating (popularity) of their search engines, monetize this popularity by earning a portion of advertising revenue. My proposal for such an activity is in the “ objects + connections ” model. In this case, options for rating and monetary incentives can also come up. For example, again, redistribute from a common piggy bank in favor of users who produce the largest number of the most popular objects (and perhaps also connections). That is, if you take the system as a whole, then the cumulative rating of the user can be summed up from his ratings for various types of activity, so that everyone can maximize their ability to express what is most powerful.
Probably, these things are suitable for systems of any scale, including small ones. In small systems, respectively, and you will not earn much money. More precisely, it depends on the proportion of users - how big they are. Users, however, are quite capable of trying without money, being motivated by a single admission (how this article began). Provided, of course, that the service is interesting to them and conveniently formats their activity. People go where they find more opportunities to express themselves. By the way, under this condition, the fee for participation or equity contribution is practically indistinguishable from the fee for the services of the service in the traditional sense. Just the income will go to the owners of the service not in full, but largely redistributed between users based on the results of their activity. As the system grows, not only monetary interest grows, but also an opportunity appears for the manifestation of another type of activity — organizational. Speech on the previously mentioned delegation of authority. For example, users with a certain rating have the authority to further redistribute a certain amount of finance among other users to further stimulate any of their activity. Or, for example, by investing these funds in projects of other users, in particular, in projects to improve the service. Or in the same traditional stocks and other securities (ie, playing on the stock exchanges), thereby providing an additional influx of money into the system. Or in some socially significant projects. Users with a growing “managerial component” in the ranking, i.e. successful managers will receive more and more powers, including the empowerment of other users. This is a way to build vertically hierarchical structures that are still not intrinsic to the Internet. At the same time, by the way, the financial success of the manager is not obligatory. You can think of a situation where a person manifests himself in the cultural or scientific field and due to this has a high rating, bringing a correspondingly high income. In general, communication as a component of Internet activity contains a huge potential for both cooperation and conflict. The formation of favorable or unfavorable communication spaces is also a question of someone's (author's) skills or inability and, accordingly, competition.
The described scheme can be called a game, since in its principles it is similar to some money games - the distribution-share model of monetization, based on the principle of "you can-have." On the other hand, the latter principle can be implemented in it much more fully than in ordinary money games, to stimulate various socially significant activities, and in this respect the game is closer to “state-like” systems. As a result, services of this kind can be called socially-significant online games.
Of course, the success of such projects is critically dependent on the specific implementation of the rating system and serviceability for those types of user activity that are rated. It is clear that, due to the many parameters, these conditions can be fulfilled by a large number of options, it is very difficult to calculate the most successful of which in advance. In a good way, this is work for the whole scientific institute (institutes), with the defense of candidate and doctoral studies in various specialties :) - from psychology and sociology to mathematics. Not to mention the IT-technology. Therefore, there are two ways to see here - the usual competition of services that implement the same principles in different ways, and the competition of copyright spaces within the same service, when users are initially empowered to create communities according to their own rules of the game, with their size of assessed contributions, rating methods, delegation powers, their concretization and so on. You can also think of a situation where some users immediately make a large share, from which they can hire a PR manager and other specialists to help them develop their communities. However, these paths do not contradict each other and can be combined.
In conclusion, a comment on the future of such projects. You can imagine the situation is really more and more similar to the state, when the service itself does not have specific owners, and all of its income is distributed among users. Then, managing a complex system will require not just effective managers, but in a sense, “political” figures elected from users. With a sufficiently large increase in the number of users and incomes of the system, as well as its efficiency, it will be able to solve truly visible social tasks, gradually replacing the traditional state in this regard. I see the advantage in the effectiveness of a virtual state over a real one primarily in the highest level of information transparency and the possibility of user control over all processes. Secondly, of course, this and other advantages of Ineta over the real, which can be summarized in the thesis about the almost complete elimination of space-time obstacles to the interaction of all elements of the system. This is a “game of state”, as I understand it, in the style of the ideology of Us Now .
PS An interesting new article Level vs Skill with a discussion of the types of motivations in traditional online network games. Although I am not aware of their problems, because never fond of such games. They are based on the visualization of some fantastic realities, as I understand it. My proposal relates mainly to the “textual” world of ideas. But one is already massive and networked, the other is thought the same, so individual problems (rather, even basic ones) may well be universal.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/64064/
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