I was reading this article on making Habbo Hotel a success and when I got to the following section, something struck a chord.

1. Create something to play with. “Lego are a good example of what you should be building.”
2. Intuitive interaction. “You need to kill the UI. If the users notice there’s a UI it’s probably too complicated.”
3. Set up a mood for play. “This is maybe the hardest part to explain. In the real world, as I mentioned earlier, it’s increasingly hard to play. Just celebrate the fact that people do stuff and don’t punish for failures.”
4. Support user-created goals. “Players know the best.”
5. Shared social setting. “Even when people create the content, let people walk into the room and [use] the stuff. If you want to play, you need to figure out how to play.”
The bonus sixth point, according to Haro, is safety. “The users need to feel as comfortable as possible.” Habbo bans players for passing personal info. “If you construct the game so that people can screw up what other people do, people won’t bother… it’s too difficult to maintain.”

Gaming in general is what people do for fun, if I needed to state that. As such a lot of effort has gone into researching how and why people have fun with relationship to computer gaming where a lot of money can be made. But what really struck me about the list above is how close to the financial markets this seems to be and almost life in general in a prosperous western nation. If I was to make a list for NZ it would be

  1. Play with houses
  2. Live in your house
  3. House goes up in value, get rich
  4. Tell your friends to buy a house and get rich
  5. Your friends tell you house prices go up
  6. (bonus) The media tells you house prices go up

I especially like the bit about don’t punish people for failures. All around we see the lack of punishment for failures. From the NCEA allowing txt language to be used in exams, parents no longer being legally allowed to physically punish their children, chronic fine defaulters having fines removed to prisoners having sentences reduced it’s all getting pretty ridiculous. Now we have the Federal Reserve Bank of the USA dropping interest rates once again to bail out the country and the British Government making tax payers bail themselves out buy lending money they’ve borrowed from themselves to themselves. Never punish for failures.

I expect something along the same lines will happen in NZ when the mess arrives. I haven’t worked out entirely what it will be yet. The rental tax package being bandied about doesn’t seem to not punish for failures enough. It scares me to suggest it but I can imagine Helen Clark diving into Michael Cullens war chest to shore up the poorest people’s house prices first (poor house owners will be the first to default in a recession). It’ll be a reverse tax most likely along the same lines as working for families.

Meanwhile the US is trying to work out if they can drop the reserve rate below that of inflation without screwing the economy. Oddly this is what most economists are predicting. It didn’t work for Japan so I’m not entirely sure how it’s going to work for the US of A. I feel the game is up, it’s paradigm shift time and as much as we don’t want to hurt anyones feelings, someone is going to get punished for getting it wrong.