Gaming Open Market

I'm participating in a conference this weekend. Two conferences, actually. I was at BloggerCon most of yesterday, though I've bounced back and forth to this other conference, Accelerating Change 2004, which just happens to be two buildings away from BloggerCon on the Stanford campus. I'm lucky to live near Stanford.

Anyway, I'm sitting in a session entitled Real Money in Virtual Economies: The Future of User-Created Content. They're talking about gaming, and they're also taking about trading in the sense of eBay and stock markets and such. Gaming Open Markets. Right.

I guess my head has been in the sand or something, but I have no idea what they're talking about. That doesn't happen to me all that often at conferences. I'm able to figure things out on the fly, able to grok complicated things. I went to college at an excellent university. But what the heck is this about?.

The guy who's talking right now is saying, and I quote: "...spawn camping. There's a particular dragon in the game who has a particularly high quotient of some kind of treasure ... and that sort of supports these high-margin dealers, and it incents them to these anti-social behaviors ...." I guess collaborative games have some kind of secrets or commerce or something that people are willing to spend actual money on.

I'm sitting in this particular chair at this time because, according to the schedule, the next session at 10:30 is Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution which also sounds kind of high-minded, but the speaker is Doug Englebart, the guy who's credited with inventing the computer mouse, among other things. I expect it to be quite interesting. I'm not yet ready to run out and do some real-time trading in the gaming market, but there's still a half hour for me to become a convert. What, if anything, this has to do with Accelerating Change, I'm still waiting to discover.