Gameworld: Virtual market for predicting game sales
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Prediction markets have been used  to forecast election outcomes, football games and even the  capture of Osama bin Laden.
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A selection of games that may some day be on every search marketers shelf.
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NEW YORK  - Video games involving multiple   players serve as informal gathering places akin to old-time   pubs and coffee shops, and can thereby boost the players'   social connections, researchers argue in a new study.
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A quick screen for making winning picks.
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Perhaps just as good as the release of Half-Life 2 this week is the introduction of Steam, a service that lets gamers buy and download sophisticated PC games. It's the way game retailing ought to be. Commentary by Suneel Ratan.
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The uncertain prediction market will get a new player this week when Hubdub introduces a combination news aggregation and predictive platform at the semi-annual Demo conference in Palm Desert, Calif.Demo conferences this year will bring on stage 77 companies with a good idea but not enough capital as they present their products to an audience consisting of VCs and executives from the investment arm of high-tech companies. Hubdub will try to convince one of these audience members that they will not be taking a chance by investing in its technology.The Hubdub platform creates a market around news events, such as how big will the final tax rebate be once it is signed into law by President Bush. Along with the question comes a selection of multiple choice responses.Yes-or-no response questions are also possible, such as, Will Barack Obama gain the Democratic Presidential nomination?The community wages Hubdub dollars to compete on predictions.The point of the game is to see who comes out right most of the time. If you are one of those folks, according to Hubdub officials, you will obviously gain street cred in your area of expertise -- politics, stock market, or technology, for example. Besides gaining some form of respect from your peers, credibility may also lead to more users coming to your Web site or blog. This, in theory, could be shaped into a business where a person's analytical capabilities are worth paying for.During the prediction and wagering process, the Hubdub site aggregates news stories and background data related to the predictions.Leveraging uncertainty appears to be the idea behind another Demo presenter, LiquidPlanner, a startup created by former Expedia, Microsoft, and Intel software engineers.What makes LiquidPlanner different, say company officials, is its use of "probablistic" scheduling tools.Rather than using project dates that are set in stone, the Liquid probablistic engine uses estimates that take into account project variables. This allows project teams to see a more dynamic timeline and understand at any single point where the project is headed with the idea that going down a wrong path can be stopped before it is too late.
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Seeing the world' the digital way on Second Life.
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From the jumble of November sales data, inspiration emerges.
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From the weekly media and coaches polls to the preseason rankings in a bevy of magazines to the annual end-of-season debate about the Bowl Championship Series, no sport is tied to polling as much as college football. Now there's a Web site that is giving fans a chance to have their say in a virtual futures market for college football teams.
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Who needs another video game? Teach kids how to watch their money grow.
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Video game developers,  eager to please all consumers, are increasingly including  features that let gamers play with or against their friends.
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Take your Virtual Wallet music shopping
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System latency can mean losses for stock traders and virtual death for online gamers. The developer of the EVE Online game hopes high-performance computing tools can save the day for its players.
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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Tycho:  We still think about Eye of Judgment quite a bit - sometimes I will sit in silence and think about it, or think about it while I lay dormant in my charge casket.  I think about placing cards carefully on its luxurious cloth mat, smirking as distant foes are gnawed by my lizard proxies.  We are overjoyed (joymax!) that they stuck with the new concept, the card thing, as opposed to the brutally sardonic original.    I don't like constantly being pushed to pre-order things, but there is also a point (it would be easy to graph) where I'm not willing to let fate's whimsical machinery determine what I play.  So during a recent mall run I put down some money on whatever I could remember at the time - unscientifically, it was Metroid, Stranglehold, Halo, Stuntman, and Mass Effect.  This doesn't account for everything between now and November, certainly, but it kind of felt like a quiz show and I was intimidated.  Then I remembered Eye of Judgement and its manifold pleasures, endeavoring to append it, listwise.  It was at this point that "John" told us that both the game and the Playstation Eye peripheral had been cancelled.    At this assertion Gabriel stood up straight and still, like a meerkat.    "No, it wasn't," said he, quietly.  A cold quiet, like space.        When I am confronted with mere distortions of facts, I can typically slice through them to the beating truth.  But when a person says something that is flatly false, this is very disorienting for some reason and I am without my mind's full power.  Then the guy compounded things by saying they had very few preorders, and this was accompanied by a sneer, as though the number of preorders was some crucial consideration when assessing quality.  He actually thought it was funny that I wanted to buy it.    I wanted to ask him if he understood that a product not being available for preorder and a product not existing, or never being allowed to exist constituted profoundly different states, but these are the deep thoughts that occur to a person while they are tucking in at the food court and not when they are face to face with strange men at the EB.       When we returned from the store, almost as if on cue the product began to appear at online retailers - for sixty dollars.  Yes, that's correct.  The Playstation Eye peripheral plus the card game, for ten dollars more than a Sixaxis?  I won't say that I expected extortion, but I at least expected profit.  Assuming you have the Triple already in hand, they're making the Eye (and Eye of Judgment) an easy decision.    Let me take a moment to welcome PAX attendees to this year's celebration, even though it isn't especially useful to readers in Glasgow.  I hope the new venue is to your liking.   Be kind to each other, even to your defeated foes!  And be kind to your Enforcers, for they have toiled in your service.
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Blog: Virtual worlds, or the 3D Internet, appeal to early adopters of games. Getting more people to come will require more applications, said experts.
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Video games with online components or multiplayer capability bring in much more revenue than stand-alone games.