My Mind Wanders

Persistent browser-based games (PBBGs) are a popular form of entertainment. Multi-player strategy PBBGs have great potential for research applications.  This type of game includes elements of leadership, conflict, planning, cooperation, competition, comparative metrics, and economics.  Games can represent real-world systems on a scale that can be studied and instrumented.  By changing the parameters of the system the game embodies, and adding and eliminating system features, the effects of real-world policies and systems could be inferred.

These games are not prohibitively expensive to build or operate.  Many have very limited graphics and animation and yet are still popular.  Typical popular version of this type of game are Eve, Evony, Grepolis and Battledawn. With limited advertising, these games have attracted many thousands of users.  The population required for study need not be thousands either.  My experience of playing a game that is exceptionally well-designed to model social interaction on cooperation and competition, Kings of Babylon, has convinced me that a player population of 250-500 is more than adequate.

How could these games be developed and used?   A partnership between Computer Science, Graphics Arts, and social science departments could be used to develop a game-based capability for use by social scientists.  The game technology itself has limited research potential, and could be developed and maintained by undergraduates as part of a game development curricula.  But the resulting game platform could be a very powerful tool for social scientists.  The features and parameters of the game platform could be used to instantiate game sessions that focus on particular social research questions.  By varying them, the effects of different real-world policies could be inferred.  The games could be used for a single short game session. But, many of these games have sessions that last weeks, months and even indefinitely.  Changes could be introduced mid-session or between sessions. Demographics of the player population could be controlled and, if they are made open to the public, could be very diverse. Most of these games are played internationally, so cultural differences could be studied as well.

What would a representative research project look like?   An economics researcher desiring to study the impact of taxation could create a session that included a taxation component in group economies.  A one month session could be played with tax set at 10% and be followed by a session with the tax set at 40%.  This could be reversed and repeated as often as needed to get a representative sample of behavior. The game would be instrumented to provide metrics on the player behaviors.

Just on taxation alone, it is easy to envision many experimental designs:
1)  Effect of lowering and raising the tax rate
2) The effect of who controls the spending of the taxes: leader, leaders, highly-taxed, everyone
3) The effect of graduated taxation vs flat tax
4) The effect of income taxes vs consumption tax