Baffled By the Obsession With Pretend-Business Games

theodp writes "Newsweek's Daniel Lyons confesses to being mystified by all the people tending to their virtual farms and virtual pets on Facebook. Even stranger, he says, is their willingness to spend real money to buy virtual products, like pretend guns and fertilizer, to gain advantage in these Web-based games. Pretend products are a serious business, estimated to grow to $1.6B next year, and have captured the attention of economists and academics who view the virtual economy as a lab for modeling behavior in the real world. Still, Lyons can't help but question whether the kind of people who spend hours online taking care of imaginary pets are representative of the rest of the population. 'The data might be "perfect" and "complete,"' says Lyons, 'but the world from which it's gathered is anything but that.'"

Comments

He was also on SCO's side for _years_

[eddy]

Just saying, maybe we should take that into account.

Re:Bell Curve Appeal

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, every percent contains 1% of the population. Since percentile is cummulative, every percentile contains 1% more of the population than the previous one. Thus, by definition, nobody is in the 100th percentile, everybody is in the 0th percentile, and the 50th percentile contains exactly half the population. Therefore there are exactly as many people in the 50th percentile as there are not in it.

dom

Re:If only we could harness this in RL

[DogDude]

As far as starting a business, I would love to own my own business. I'm more concerned about the governments (local, state, federal) and the IRS than I am about my competition and legal concerns.

You're a liar. Turn off the Fox news. There's very little paperwork involved with starting your own business.

Re:Business Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Transport Tycoon was rewritten, and is now open source -> www.openttd.org, hast multiplayer with up to 255 clients, bots, custom graphics packs and a lot lot more.

Re:achievement porn

[GuldKalle]

Maybe we could use this drive to make the world better

Re:It mystifies me

[Reziac]

"However, unlike how the conservative, pro-consumerism people who propose starting a business as the simple solution to your each and every economic woe will tell you, it is a very difficult thing to do and you will likely spend a large amount of time and energy making it profitable in the first place."

Funny thing, it's the liberal micromanage-everyone's-life types who made it this difficult to succeed at building a business. After all, the best road to a classless society is to make sure no one can do better than their neighbours!! See http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/permits-index.html for a bazillion examples all in one handy place.

Senator McGovern (if I recall rightly who it was) discovered this after he retired from the Senate, and learned that the very laws HE had pushed for made it impossible for him to follow his dream of owning a nice hotel. He then said flat out that if he'd known how hard he was making it for small business, he would never have supported such laws in the first place.