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Faucets are ways through which game currency is injected into the game. This generally involve players receiving currency from the game system itself, as opposed to other players.

Sinks are ways through which game currency is removed from the game. This generally involve players paying currency into the game system itself, as opposed to other players.

The establishment by Blizzard of a real money auction house (“RMAH”) alongside a virtual gold auction house in the game provided players with an incentive to both farm the game for real world profits and to pursue arbitrage opportunities. The RMAH was also created, at least in part, to disincentivize players from patronizing third party markets outside the game.

Although its anonymity may make it subject to skepticism, several weeks after the game’s debut a source claimed that there were at least 1,000 bots active 24/7 in the Diablo 3 game world, allegedly “harvesting” (producing) 4 million virtual gold per hour.[4]

The RMAH had minimum and maximum dollar amounts for in-game gold transactions: $0.25 minimum, $250 maximum. Market participants were also limited to dealing in increments of a certain size, called a “stack.” The “stack” was initially set to 100K gold. But as gold prices fell owing to rapidly building supply, the stack size was changed in August 2012 to 1 million. This practice, known as redenomination, is a fairly standard (if cosmetic) method of addressing inflation, but was viewed by some players as tacit devaluation.

To be clear, at the time at which the redenomination was introduced, gold was still trading above the floor rate. But being artificial, caps and floors not only prevent markets from clearing, but give black markets a target to undercut, to say nothing of offering players an opportunity to avoid the 15 percent fee — another intended gold sink — levied upon transactions within the auction house.

By early 2013, the gold price had fallen to the exchange floor set by the game managers — $0.25/million — and players began to show signs of concern.

Hyperinflation is the economist’s equivalent of an astrophysicist’s quasar cluster or a marine biologist’s dolphin “stampede”: a rare exhibition of a unique set of circumstances which arise infrequently and are closely studied when they materialize.

when holders of money expect the supply of money to increase — particularly without any sense of timing, bounds, or other guidance

monetary demand in the present drops in favor of surrendering money for vendibles.

If historical cases of hyperinflation — real, and now virtual — have one thing in common, it is the instinct among its victims to blame the symptoms rather than the disease.

While RMAH prices for virtual gold rallied occasionally, the prevailing direction of black market prices for virtual gold was inexorably lower as third party sellers undercut the in-game gold floor.

Several competing definitions for hyperinflation exist, with the strictest — an increase of 50 percent in one month — defined by economist Philip Cagan in his 1956 book The Monetary Dynamics of Hyperinflation.

On May 7th 8th, 2013, Blizzard rolled out Patch 1.0.8, which contained the seeds of the last, hyperbolic surge of gold superabundance.

In just a few hours, the already gold-swamped economy saw trillions more created: a mammoth deluge of, by then, worthless virtual gold chasing finite goods, driving prices upward in leaps and bounds.

Blizzard quickly closed the in-game auction houses and audited transactions which took place during the blowout, banning players who took advantage of the bug and donating the proceeds of certain sales to charity. The gold stack size was also moved back from 10M to 1M.

Remembering that game economies are private and players are voluntary members, there’s no explicit mandate to ensure rigid inflation control as one often sees (however rarely pursued) in public economies.

More critically, though, whether structured as auctions or exchanges, markets must be allowed to operate freely, without caps, floors, or other artificialities. Unrestricted (real) cash auctions would for the most part preempt and obviate black markets. [24]

In Washington, no politician is bound to reach a compromise to solve any long-term problem. Everyone, however, is playing a game called “election,” and the only possible goal in that game is to win the next one.

Anyone who promises to fix or change Washington is merely attempting to impose a cooperative game on a town that, by design, can’t play one.

A game theorist would say that the President is trying to play a cooperative game in a town that can’t play along with him. The trouble for the White House is that the Republicans aren’t playing a game called “fix the budget deficit.” They’re necessarily playing one called “defeat Barack Obama.” A reasonable offer seldom works in a divorce; there’s no reason to expect it would in Congress.

Any game resembling Mario does not represent a ritual in the way I am defining it; it is merely a task (which, most would say, is an enjoyable one). To access the self-improving ethos of ritual, there must be more than set goals to complete. To play Tetris well, you must figure out new ways to play it, so your advancement in skill is about advancing your own learning.

Hank Rogers, the man responsible for bringing Tetris to Nintendo and the rest of the world, says of the game “It satisfies a basic human desire, and that is to make order out of chaos.” If this is true – and I would posit that it is – then Tetris accesses a basic human desire that was the genesis of rituals in ancient China.

if one is responsive to the natural structure of the game and plays it with a will to learn rather than overcome, Tetris can be a method of personal cultivation. It is a matter of finding one’s balance and then responding instantaneously to a number of stimuli, letting all affect the outcome for the better.

I have watched as my mother discovered the game (after my suggesting that she try it), and to see her moving the bricks at first was exhilarating to me simply because it was so true to how one should play the game: without any conceptions of skill or strategy. When confronted with this unknown challenge, I think the human mind will attempt to play Tetris in a way that is respectful to the game, but without skill. This is not completely different to the way in which we should be reverent to other people, the order of things, or when encountering anything greater than ourselves.

In addition, Tetris is about repeatable, consistent improvisational problem solving, not about having that one lucky shot or burst of successes.

Playing Tetris in the right way leads to a sense of harmony with underlying principles, but because of the randomness of the game, it is impossible to conform to a set of goals.

There are many ways to play Tetris, but they can be organized into two categories: to try to win or try and play well.

The first anecdotal evidence that Tetris provided lasting effects came soon after its inception into pop culture and was called the “Tetris Effect.” Gamers would report seeing falling blocks after playing, or obsessions with trying to organizse everyday objects into small spaces like little blocks.

Mihály Csikszentmihalyi, the renowned psychologist responsible for bringing forward the theory of “flow” talks at length in various books about his desire to move away from psychology obsessed with instinct and drives, saying instead that we are more about focus than desires.

And not only does it allow me to reflect, my level of clarity is directly connected with my progress in the game. If I have a calm and levelheaded approach to my life, I can attain a calm instinctive playing style.

It is a fulcrum around which both subconscious and conscious thought can pivot to find a level with each other.

People act crazy, but they’re at their craziest when they want something. All you can do in response is to make your most honest estimate of what the crazies actually want, and respond as if they are methodically pursuing it.

Because they are filmed with human actors, series like Star Trek and Star Wars leverage mostly human and very humanoid (vulcan, bajoran, betazoid) characters. Even though we are told humans are only one race among many, we somehow always end up running the galaxy and living everywhere. All the important characters who get the most screen time are human beings.

Run around the Citadel and you'll be damned if you find more than two or three humans out of hundreds of citizens milling about, shopkeepers hocking their wares, and government officials eyeing you suspiciously. The entire government of the galaxy, known as the Council, is run by non-humans. The majority of characters on screen at any given time are alien.  Being able to render any race with equal ease means that as a human, you truly feel like the minority species we are.

I can't very well rewatch all of Star Trek: The Next Generation with a female Picard of Middle Eastern descent who grew up on a space station. Mass Effect gives me that option with Shepard.

The critical difference is the duration and scale of the consequences of the decisions made in Mass Effect.

Further, each decision is clouded by an insufficient amount of information. Players often act in the dark, evaluating and analyzing the he-said-she-said of characters whose motivations are rarely selfless or noble.

A prime example is that even during rousing speeches, the player is able to make on-the-fly decisions that alter the pathos of Shepard's rhetoric.

During an interview I had with Daniel Erickson, lead writer for Star Wars: The Old Republic, he revealed two key elements of BioWare's process that makes their games ideal for ethical exploration.

Other media ask you to evaluate and observe the decisions of the main character. Mass Effect enables you to believe the world in which the story is told, to cast the major characters and to participate in the decisions and face the consequences of character choices. In short, one cannot help but become deeply invested in the universe and narrative Mass Effect builds.

Star Wars and Star Trek start with the assumption that humans will be important in galactic civilization. Why? In part because the medium forced that decision, but more so because both universes assume that human beings add meaning to the universe. Mass Effect doesn't make such an assumption. Mass Effect never lets you forget that we might not add one jot of meaning or benefit to intelligent life beyond our solar system.

Humanity's minority and irrelevant status is underlined by the fact that on the Citadel we are not only new, but one among many second class species.

Mass Effect is colored by this message in three distinct ways.

The constant presence of other species on the Normandy, a human Alliance/Cerberus ship, is a perpetual reminder that we are out of our depth in the universe. No problem, no matter how much the player may want it to be, will be solved unilaterally by human gumption and know-how.

Ok, now imaging playing that character within a context whatever the player's gender, race, or orientation, that the simple humanity of the player is subjected to believable and, within the Mass Effect universe, true prejudice, insults, and scrutiny. The impact of the message on the player's interactions with other species is that, after facing what feels like unwarranted treatment, the player is forced to recognize the perspective of any species one might encounter along the way. Mass Effect makes you view the reflection of humanity in a mirror darkly.

In Star Trek (TOS, TNG, & DS9), those who are genetically engineered are seen as myopic elitists and supremacists, convinced of their own vaunted status, not wishing to allow their world to be "tainted" by those who are impure. In Mass Effect, Miranda and Grunt are rich and rounded characters who are genuinely superior in some aspects due to their modifications, but also reflect the increased self-awareness and contemplativeness we would hope to see in a superior being.

In Star Trek cyborgs (Borg) and androids (Data) are one of two things: a threat to humanity or desperate to emulate it. In Mass Effect, Shepard's resurrection leaves her largely cybernetic while EDI, the ship AI, and Legion, an autonomous mobile geth platform, are more interested in helping and understanding humans than they are attempting to become or obliterate human beings.

In nearly great popular science fiction universe, there is a flaw. Born of systemic bias, the flaw is one that fundamentally undermines the narrative that carves its way through the characters, species, technologies and worlds that populate any given sci-fi story. Our greatest stories set in space often reference the flaw with oblique references to a long forgotten species, cataclysmic events, or godlike entities. Something is wrong with the universe, but we cannot place it.

There is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence, and perhaps are just a small species projecting their own mental idolatries onto the vast cosmos, ever susceptible to being wiped from existence at any moment. This also suggests that the majority of undiscerning humanity are creatures with the same significance as insects in a much greater struggle between greater forces which, due to humanity's small, visionless and unimportant nature, it does not recognize.

Mass Effect forces the observant player to ask, "Why fight for survival in a meaningless universe?" From the answer stems a story that demands the player confront the purpose of human beings in the galaxy at every level. To play Mass Effect is to consider the value of the lives of other species, the meaning of life on a cosmic scale, and the importance of individual relationships in the face of cataclysm.

Cosmicism underpins Mass Effect's ability to show the permutations of how the Drake Equation imagined intergalactic civilizations: warts and all.

Citadel Space is dominated by the same law as Dune's planetary empire: a ban on artificial intelligence.

The Reapers are biomechanical equivalents of the Elder Gods of H.P. Lovecraft. If the xenomorphs in Alien had a deity, it would be a Reaper. Inconceivable, immortal, uninvolved super-beings that are not divinities per se, but so far beyond our realm of existence as to drive insane those who encounter and worship them.

Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity. Amid the entertaining game play, the interspecies romance, and entertaining characters, cosmological questions about the value of existence influence every decision.

The value of Mass Effect as a science fiction universe is that it is a critical starting point for discussion about the purpose of humanity in a materialistic universe. Without an answer to that question, there is no real reason for Ender to defeat the Buggers, or for humanity to seek out new life and new civilizations, or for us to not let non-organic life be the torch bearer for intelligence in the universe.

I appreciate pquincy’s thoughtful comments. With regard to the reference to divorce, it’s also worth noting that – regardless of whether or not there are children involved – almost all divorce cases (along with almost all other civil cases) are resolved through a bargained solution (i.e., a settlement) rather than a trial. But in the vast majority of cases the bargained solution is not achieved until the parties arrive at a critical deadline such as the eve of trial. This is because, prior to the deadline and as suggested by Brams, “each player has an incentive to dissemble” in pursuit of a better outcome for itself. Since each player intuitively understands this, neither views the other player’s assertions about their “bottom line” to be credible, and neither can convince the other of the genuineness of its own position prior to the deadline.

Pquincy ‘s suggestion that this problem should eventually become less acute in a repeated game appears to be correct. But in the game of politics, it seems that (as in litigation), a player can be expected to pretend – in the pursuit of self-interest and for as long as it can – that it is less interested in arriving at a bargained solution than it is in pursuing some sort of abstract principle (such as what it would characterize as “justice” or “the public good”).

In contrast to some of the other people that have posted comments in response to this article, I don’t think the outcome that was ultimately arrived at in the debt ceiling negotiations can be fairly attributed to Obama’s having played the game poorly. Rather, I think the outcome was attributable to the fact that it was obvious from the outset that Obama’s objective (regardless of whether one wishes to characterize that objective as “preserving the health and safety of our most vulnerable citizens" or “holding on for a few more years to the remnants of a bloated welfare state”) would unquestionably be placed further out of reach if he were to walk away from whatever deal the other side was ultimately willing to grant as of the deadline. He could not credibly pretend otherwise.

Although this article muddles a few basic concepts, it serves to illustrate that game theory offers a relatively straightforward explanation for much of the conflict that exists in the world, certainly a much better explanation than is routinely put forth by partisans and commentators. Brams is spot-on. And it's a cop-out to claim that game theory assumes that people are hyper-rational, or that it does not apply when someone is seeking an unreasonable goal. Even if your adversary's goal is, at least in your view, unreasonable or irrational, game theory allows you to understand how you and your adversary can be expected to behave in the pursuit of your respective objectives.

This all occurs, as with the first BioShock, within the framework of a first person shooter.

The first major choice that players of BioShock Infinite are presented with is whether they would like to publicly punish an interracial couple or not. You may choose to throw a ball at the couple, who are tied up in front of a crowd at a fair, or you may choose to throw the ball at the man who is asking you to do so. The outcome of your choice is mostly the same.

Let’s think about that for a moment. BioShock Infinite, the game that many would hope to point to as an example of how art and subtlety might be found in expensive, mainstream videogames, sets up its moral stakes by asking the player if they would like to be a violent bigot.

Would you like to be for or against?

puts the lie to the claim that by engaging with these themes, BioShock Infinite is the place to find substance in mainstream videogames.

At the real Wounded Knee, over three hundred Native Americans—the Lakota Sioux—were massacred. Many of them were unarmed. Some of them were children. These were real people, with real lives and real families. The victims were buried in a mass grave, and many of the US Cavalry who led the massacre were later awarded the Medal of Honor, a decision that remains shameful today.

Wounded Knee, I believe, is not something you get to invoke in 2013 without also making a statement of sorts. The idea of publicly punishing interracial relationships, something that of course has happened in reality, is also not something you get to invoke in 2013 without making a statement.

For a game that so explicitly aimed to take on racism through its 1912 setting, the politics of BioShock Infinite are defined by evasion.

Such nihilistic disapproval is the absence of a political position masquerading as shrewd criticism. It may seem worldly, but it allows BioShock Infinite to be controversial to no-one by treating everyone with equal contempt.

You can argue that the faults of BioShock Infinite are the latest and most unfortunate result of the first-person genre that found bedrock in both Doom (reflexes and gore) and Myst (architecture and mystery) in the mid-1990s, two sharply different trajectories that have been bound into problematic convergence ever since. While the two genres remain fruitfully exploited in separation, all attempts at marrying the two—and thus discovering the elusive union of the shooter’s popularity and the exploration game’s more literary aspirations—have remained ill considered. In a way, mainstream videogames are still completely dumbfounded by Edge magazine’s famous 1994 criticism of Doom: “If only you could talk to these creatures.”

Where do those two circles converge in a Venn diagram?

By its conclusion, BioShock Infinite quickly forgets that it ever engaged with ideas of racism and American Exceptionalism in favour of a tangled Christopher Nolan puzzle plot about time travel. This is the sound of a thousand popguns going off, taking up the silent report of a giant cannon that failed to fire.

it remains difficult to point to a single videogame that is both artful, subtle and a successful mainstream videogame, and BioShock Infinite only muddies the waters further.

Could it be that having an avatar whose choices are taken away meaningfully is the same as watching a bunch of singer-dancers in masks tell you the cryptic backstory of a bloody myth?

Even after discovering which room yielded the highest payout –in real money– they STILL tended to go back and waste clicks on lower paying doors just to keep those options open even thought they didn’t intend to actually exercise them. This was totally irrational, but psychological reactance made them reluctant to lose those options.

Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets games wrong, mistaking incidental properties like points and levels for primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity. That may be true, but truth doesn't matter for bullshitters. Indeed, the very point of gamification is to make the sale as easy as possible.

Exploitationware captures gamifiers' real intentions: a grifter's game, pursued to capitalize on a cultural moment, through services about which they have questionable expertise, to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next bullshit trend comes along.