On April 1st Vox Pop Design was pleased to host yet another Pow Wow. These are events where the friends and associates of Vox Pop’s distributed software development model meet and share what they know. In this round table excerpt the conversation finished up with a lengthy discussion on work as play, and just how that might be achieved.
Continue Reading...
I have interest in reputation economies, science fiction as tea leaves to the future opportunities, and the ability for game play to lead to new insights. Because of that, I am downright otaku in anticipation for Eclipse Phase, a newly announced RPG. Features include:
- Reputation Economies. In designing the game’s material culture, we threw out the idea of money as a major motivator for characters (“Money is for people who don’t know how to take care of themselves”), instead focusing on how characters network to get things they need. There are corporate interests in the setting trying to keep money alive, but we don’t portray this in a good light. We really want to see someone try doing this in a massmorg, and we’re hoping our game spreads the idea around. Reason: massive simulations of new economic systems in environments like massmorgs may well be predictive of how they’d work in real life.
- Weird sh*t. Players can choose to portray a giant transgenic crab with a cyberbrain run by a red market AGI if they’re feeling it.
- Wide synthesis of other transhuman SF concepts. Microfacturing, open source blueprints for same, personality uploading (leading to virtual immortality), and a lot of other stuff you’d see in works by Stross, Reynolds, and… heh, Doctorow. Making an RPG out of this gives people a toolkit to explore these ideas on their own, and we think that’s pretty cool.
- Creative Commons. The game is being released under a CC license.
They currently are not taking pre-orders for the rule book. But when they do (as I anticipate they will shortly) who’s in?
Continue Reading...Working in small, distributed teams can be an exercise in loneliness. The solitary existence can mean missing out on a shared revelation or not getting feedback on a forming assumption. The Vox Pop Pow Wows are a chance for a group of peers to get together over Skype, talk about the news of the day, and provide that professional support that we otherwise might go without. Here’s the transcript from a recent talk [edited for readability].
A. – Matthew Reinbold, Founder and Creative Principal, Vox Pop Design
B. – Matthew Orstad, Founder and Chief Engineer, Rocket Midwest
Akoha and Alternative Currencies
A. Let’s go up to the next thing: it’s a game called Akoa which I am going to purchase a deck to get to get started. They’ve billed themselves as being the, um, let me find the term…
B. Social reality game?
A. Social reality game where you pay it forward. You get a deck of cards, go to the website, give the serial number or some signifying aspect of the deck of cards, and then each one of the cards has something on it. For example, “take someone out to coffee”, or ”tell somebody thank you”; you know, worthwhile community, society building type of things – things you should probably be doing anyway. Then as the recipient enjoys their coffee or gets their thank you or whatever, you give them the card. You say, “OK now you know, if you go to this website and you put in the identifier for this card then you can play and you can pay it forward”. You can then go back to the website and you can see that, “Oh, im the tenth in line for this card.” You can watch the card travelling around the United States.
I think it’s a really interesting idea. I would love to see this in the context of alternative currencies. There is some value exchanging hands. It’s now trackable. Exchanging these kinds of cards, you know, maybe you’d really like the card that says, “Send someone..”
B. Free doughnuts?
A. Free doughnuts, sure, why not. Free doughnuts, and you don’t know anybody that’s playing that would give that card to you …
(laughter)
A. So maybe there’s an exchange or ebay where you go and you can buy the card. Now there’s a real world exchange value assigned because you’ve stated that the ‘Free Doughnuts card’ is maybe worth 3 dollars when you bought it at the end of the auction.
Theres some talk on the website how they want to make incorporate things like 2D barcodes so you can do it all with your mobile phone. You wouldn’t have to log into the site; you’re just scanning codes and it automatically knows the web url, based on the 2d code. Rushkoff has much to say about alternative currencies.
When I was in South Dakota it turned out that my home town of Timber Lake had done some kind of experiment in alternative currencies. It failed. They tried to give them out, but there was no way of exchanging Timber Lake bucks for real dollars. And with the number of businesses in town (being a very small farming community) there’s not a whole lot of businesses to choose from anyway. The businesses that do exist looked at this and said, “Well wait a minute, I’ll accept these but there’s no way of exchanging them for real money? Why don’t I just accept monopoly dollars? Because it would be about as meaningful.” There was a lot of things in how they implemented it that made it DOA.
B. Did you ever watch Corner Gas?
A. What’s that?
B. It’s a show on WGN. It’s by a Canadian; started by a Canadian comedian Brent Butt. It’s set in the fictional town of Dark River. They basically do this and his dad is this sort of cantankerous old coot sort of character. All the local businesses are going to have Dark River dollars and if you send 10 real dollars you get so many Dark River dollars and, of course, his dad goes on and uses the city hall photocopier and prints a whole bunch of copies.
(laughter)
B. And he’s buying all this stuff and getting free sandwiches at the local food parlor and they’re like “How many of those you got?”
(laughter)
B. But anyway he gets like busted in the end. They’re like “This is counterfeit!” and he’s like “How do you know?” “…because there’s a hair on every one of them”
(laughter)
A. Rushkoff puts forth that it should be easier to do alternative currencies now than it was previously because you can detect counterfeits. If we go back to this Akoa game every single one of these cards has a serial number to make it unique. Plus, they are tracking it every step of the way; to play the game you report who it went to. Then that person reports that they gave it to somebody else. If there’s ever a copy of the card then all of a sudden they know because it’s now split: it shows up in Montreal AND Vancouver simotaneously (or something). The technology is in place where the transaction costs of monitoring the stuff have been lowered to such a degree that they can do it. You couldn’t just run to a photocopier and copy a bunch of cards. I want to get the cards, I want to play with them, I want to see how the system works, and then I would love to implement something like this for independent web workers – some kind of alternative currency for designers and developers and writers. Maybe it’s locally based. I don’t know but I need to do this kind of research to kind of see how something like that could work.
Continue Reading...Want More? Signup for Vox Pop Pages, a free monthly email newsletter from Vox Pop Design.