Not 21 Yet? Gamble Online with Virtual Items, and Cash Out If You Can...

[Scenario 1]
College Student X: "Hey, do you want to go to Vegas next weekend?"

High School Teenager Y:"No, I am not 21 yet."

[Scenario 2]
College Student X: "Hey, there's big CS:GO tournament going on and you should bet some weapon skins on your favorite team!"

High School Teenager Y: "Yes! I will ask my mom to add some cash to my Steam Wallet so I can buy some more good skinzzz for betting!!!"

Now, you must have  questions after hearing these conversations. Well, let me start off by providing you with some more background in the second scenario.

Counter-Strike:Global Offensive (CS:GO) is  Valve's online multiplayer First Person Shooter game that came out in August, 2012. Its predecessors, Counter-Strike 1.6 and Counter-Strike:Source, made big appearances in the competitive gaming scene, also know as eSports. Being the much anticipated sequel, CS:GO gathered a pretty large player population right at the start and it continued to grow as more and more players start to form teams and compete in professional CS:GO tournaments.

One interesting feature Valve introduced is the weapon skins. Player can acquire skins in several different ways: random drops by the system at the end of a game, opening a weapon case for a random skin, and purchasing from or trading with other players online. Except the random drops given by the system, everything else involves real money of some sort! Opening a weapon case costs $2.49, which goes straight to Valve's bank; purchasing from a different player requires $ as well as there is no in game currency; and you probably need something worth money to trade with another player because free skins are not worth a nickel.

As an active CS:GO player, I have to say that the skins look really cool and I am pretty sure almost everyone in the game wants a good skin of some sort. You can tell people really want it by looking at some skins market price:

No, no, no... Your eyes are not blurry and those price tags are not modified. That's right, you can spend quite a bit of cash to buy a skin in CS:GO! In short, skins in CS:GO are worth real cash!

Are you thinking "so what?" Remember Scenario 2 mentioned at the beginning? Yes! Now we see some potential problems here, right? The biggest CS:GO skin betting website right now is probably http://csgolounge.com/, which also supports skin trading and selling. Any player can go on the website and put their skins on some upcoming matches to place bets. And I know for a fact that there's are a lot of players under the age of 21. There is no age restriction or parental control. Wow! What a brilliant idea! Everyone who plays CS:GO can wander into the realm of REAL MONEY GAMBLING! But wait a minute... Is it really gambling if no money is involved? What if I just want to invest my skins to get more awesome skins from a bet because my parents won't buy me more skins until next month? And another thing to consider is that, selling on Steam Market does not return cash into your bank. All the money are kept in your Steam Wallet, which only be spent purchasing more digital contents on Steam such as other games or more in game contents. So in that sense, the money on Steam are not real money but more of a virtual currency that you can buy with real money.

So can you convert CS:GO skins into real money that you can put in your bank account? Yes, but... really difficult and dangerous. There are people who are willing to pay money from outside of steam, meaning Paypal most of the time. But then there's no protection for the seller and the buyer because one party has to give the offer first, which leaves them completely vulnerable to a scam. That is why 99% of the time players don't take real money offers.

Well, the biggest winner in this whole thing is most certainly... Valve, of course. Each time a player sells a skin on Steam Market, Valve takes 15% of the sales price as their tax. In addition, a good number of players open weapon cases on a daily basis to get new skins. Keep in mind... each weapon case opened is $2.49 and the skins opened are worth less than that 90% of the time (maybe even more).

I think I have mumbled enough for now. I can't answer whether CS:GO betting is real gambling or not. And even if it is, how can it be regulated while the player population is a mix of people on both sides of the 21-year-old fence? As much as I respect the success of the virtual economy created by Valve in CS:GO, I'm really hoping they are aware of the grays and flaws and willing to address them in the near future.

Profile Post

This profile post is about a Keith Stuart, someone shows knowledge and passion in video games and the technologies used for games in throughout the history. Stuart is an editor from the Guardian’s games section. He has written about video games and related technology and media in the past 20 years. He started as features editor on the magazine Edge and then started writing about games as freelancer for big publications such as The Official PlayStation Magazine and PC Gamer and T3. Stuart is said to be the “main contributor to the Guardian’s award winning games blog and a regular on the Tech Weekly podcast” (theguardian.com).

Stuart’s experience in the past 20 years certainly shows his capability in writing about games and technology. He constantly follows the latest news and updates and delivers polished analysis and report of various things in the video games industry. For example, in his post about Oculus Rift and virtual reality (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2014/jan/23/oculus-rift-valve-virtual-reality-kickstarter), he accurately explained the current state and future predictions on how VR will affect the games industry and our daily lives. His observation and analysis are thorough and insightful as he examined the VR technology from the beginning of its history, back in the early 90s. Then, he mentioned on Valve’s statement that “VR can become a consumer reality by 2015”, which is considered to be highly authoritative because Valve is one of the few companies that made multiple significant impacts with their technology in the video games industry.

Similar to most technology bloggers, Stuart is excellent at delivering informative contents to the readers. Many of his posts are written in an objective style where he observes and analyzes his subjects. With the 20 year experience as a games reporter, it is difficult to find his observations false or inaccurate. Looking at the comments to his blogs, most of his readers talk about their reaction to the post or something they learn after reading the post. It is hard to find any comments that challenge or disagree with the points made despite that he expresses his voice in certain places in the post.

There are some posts where Stuart takes break from the informative reports. A good example would be his post on Christmas gifts for gamers (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2013/dec/13/alternative-christmas-present-gifts-gamers). Even though he chose the gifts based on his opinion, he offered some good insights on each of the items just like when he talks about new games or technology. Stuart almost never expresses his voice in an overly assertive way. It is easy to tell that even when he shows voice, he is not trying to start a debate with the people who believe in the other way. Although it is true that his blog topic is not a so serious one, you can feel that he consciously avoids any conflict and simply tries to make the readers enjoy the blog and things about video games in general.

Stuart usually makes couple of posts every week on the Guardian’s official blog site, although I do not know if he publishes in any other places. He definitely seems to be the major author in the Guardian’s game blog as he post significantly more frequently than other authors and I find his posts more interesting than the other ones, both the topic and his writing style. I will definitely continue to follow Stuart for more interesting blogs about various aspects in the video games industry.

Social Bookmarking Soulmate

I cannot find a social bookmarking soulmate so I decided to look for tags that are helpful to me. After searching various tags such as "game technology" and "game development", I decided to choose the technology subreddit because it has many useful links to my subject of interest. The forum contains resources and news on modern technologies, many of which are experimented by the game industry right now. Users of the forum puts up new content as frequently as every couple of hours so I have access to constantly updated information.

In addition to the contents that directly overlaps with my blog's topic, I can find things that give me ideas for me to expand the scope of my subject. For example, I get a better understanding of the current development of A.I. from this link: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-global-arms-race-to-create-a-superintelligent-ai-is-looming

Here's one about Valve's take on virtual reality: http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/vive-vr-valve-s-gabe-newell-says-zero-per-cent-of-people-feel-sick-after-use

And something I did not expect to find but thought about : http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150305-the-birth-of-3d-computer-graphics

Virtual Economy and Cyber Security

In-Game-Purchases has become an effective method for monetizing virtual contents. And as technologies like online banking and electronic credit card transaction became more widely used, most startup game studios prefer to have the Freemium business model.

Freemium games usually attract players with their “Free to Play” ad to get a healthy player population. But as the players progress in the game, they will feel less comfortable staying as a “free-player”. Obviously, the game designers made it on purpose so that players are more likely to purchase any extra contents or features offered through in-game-purchases. Almost all freemium MMORPGs contains cash contents such as various in game items, and in the early days of MMORPGs anything can be traded with another player.

Virtual economy systems that contains real world cash flow became increasingly controversial as in game crime rate kept rising. We see players getting their valuable items stolen or accounts hacked. Sometimes, the player’s personal information and even credit card number get compromised as a result. Such incidents are extremely difficult to resolve because it is just as hard to find these criminals as finding any other cyber terrorist like the ones who attacked Sony, Target, etc.

As a result, game makers began to improve security of the players' account and their in game properties. For instance, Blizzard Entertainment began to require every player who desire to spend cash on in game content to setup a two step verification process with cellphone or electronic authenticator. Valve has a system to ask players' to confirm an in game trade or cash transaction through e-mail so that a hacker cannot steal anything from the account unless he also hacks the player's e-mail. Some companies just do not want to deal the security problems and bind all of the players' in game purchased content to the purchasing account.

But even with all this effort, account hacking and in game scams are still not eliminated. Not even Blizzard's Battle.Net Authenticator can realize a perfect protection. (See: http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Blizzard-Admits-Accounts-With-Authenticators-Have-Been-Hacked-42909.html) Is there an ideal way to solve virtual property stealing? Maybe removing the virtual economic system so that no one can make profit from the in game items, but such rules will significantly downgrade the game’s playability. So how should online game companies further address such issues? They really could not do much about it because security has been a major issue since the beginning of the internet era.

By enabling the ability to anonymously connect users over the network, the internet inherently has security problems. If one computer can connect to another computer, then information on both end are exposed to each other. Although internet security has developed to the point that remote data access has become increasingly difficult without various authentication methods, there isn’t any bulletproof defense

Should game companies continue to improve their security systems? Of course they should, but we cannot expect them to completely eliminate the hackers activities in the virtual world. Even though digital computer have been around for more than a decade now, we still do not have a full understanding of its limitation. This back and forth battle between the hackers and security guards in the cyber space will continue just like the situation between thieves and police in real life. Lastly, I will just make this statement again even though it should be a common knowledge by now: you should take whatever action needed to make your virtual property more secure rather than putting all your hopes on the security systems.

How Games get Cooked

Have you ever wondered how video games are made? You can probably guess how they are produced today if you play any of the video games released in the past decade. But it took a long time for the video game production procedure to evolve to its current state.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, personal computers are not yet widely used, so video games are played on consoles that connects to TV screens. Every game is stored in a circuit boards that can be inserted into and read by the console, which then displays the game contents onto the TV screen. All the magic goes into that small circuit board.

Game engineers had to design the circuit board from scratch. And after the game is created, the manufacturer will make copies that gets shipped to the stores. One thing you might notice today if you are playing Candy Crush or Angry Birds on your phone is that they frequently get updates from the market place. None of those were available back then. Whatever the game makers ship stays the same way forever! What happens if there is a bug in the game? Well, you should return the game and probably wait for the sequel.

This production procedure is destined to bring the industry to doom. The biggest example of failure would have to be E.T., a game that is so terribly made that Atari, the developer had to dispose tens of thousands of copies to clear out storage space. The game was confusing in the sense that the player could not even tell if something is working as intended or a bug, and most of the players could not complete the game even though the game did have an ending. That is right! It is not because that the game had bug that prevents players from getting to the end, but that it was too hard for the players to figure out how to get to the end.

E.T. sounded like a disaster, right? It is said to be a big factor that contributed to the collapse of the game industry in the 1980s. Personal computer also emerged at the time, so video game companies began to go through an overhaul. The industry regained its stance around the late 1980s and early 1990s. But this time, games production are completely different. Most of the games are made on PCs, and this paradigm lasted till today.

Making video games programmatically on computers yields many advantages including easy setup, iteration, and testing. And it the production tools are more accessible, which means it is easier for people to build something on their own or in a small team than the circuit board era.

The evolution of game production process certainly has not stopped yet. There are a lot of useful tools today compare to three to five years ago. Applications like Unity3D gives anyone the ability to make a game. I am not sure where this evolution will be at in five years, but I am sure that the number of game developers will continue to grow.

The Beginning of Digital Computing

Today, computers are integrated into many aspects in our lives, but I noticed that the origin of computers has been quite a mystery to most people including myself. And I only started to learn about how computer was made because of the movie, The Imitation Game. I'd like to share what I have learned about

During World War II, the British were under siege from German battleships, submarines, and bombers. Although it was easy to intercept radio messages sent between the German fleets, no one could understand the meaning of the messages because they were encrypted. In addition, the encryption method slightly changed every day so that the pattern stays random. Cracking the code with human brain seemed impossible. Alan Turing realized that and started to make an automated machine to do the work in quicker time. He and his group of cryptographers finished building the machine in 1936, and it was able to crack every German encrypted message. This is the first time in history that we used machines to solve logical and mathematical problems.

So why is this machine powerful? First of all, it can understand numbers and process them quickly and automatically once the instructions are given. And because it is a machine with a determined setup, there is no way for it to make mistakes without any mechanical failure. Lastly, it has an infinitely long tape to read input from and write output to, so it will never run out of memory space. None of these can be done by human brain.

A more modern implementation of Turing machine

Most of the modern programming languages are Turing-Complete, meaning they can be simulated on a single taped Turing machine. The CPU in modern digital computers is essentially an advanced Turing machine unit. Such model has been studied and used for almost a century and this paradigm is not likely to be shifted in the near future.

From Table Top into Screens

Games existed for a long time in the history. One of the most famous and long-enjoyed game I can think of is probably chess, which people still play nowadays. But people can play chess in many different ways today whereas the environment for a proper chess game was very limited back in the old days. Imagine how to set up a chess game in the medieval times. You need all the chess pieces, a chess board, and probably two people who knows how to play the game in the room. Playing chess today has lot less restraints. You probably do not need any piece of board if you are playing on a computer, a cellphone, or other digital device. The players do not have to be in the same room because they can just connect with each other via the almighty internet. And what happens if you do not have someone to play with? You can play against a computer AI, which can be more skillful than a real human player.

Not only did computer technology make games easier to setup, but also greatly expanded the limit of a game’s content. Games do not have to be something playable in real life environment anymore. For example, you could make a game where player shoots aliens on a spaceship. I am not saying that is absolutely impossible in real life, but we probably will not encounter such scenario any time soon. Content in a video game were much less regulated back in the late 1900s. There was no age restriction on games that contained violence and any sort of Parental Control system like we have today. Game creators could put anything they want in games without being afraid of the game getting banned. A good example would be a game made in 1976 called Death Race. Player’s goal in the game was to run over as many people as possible before the time runs out in order to get a high score. That sounds terribly wrong, right? But there were no laws to control any types of game content at the time, so game companies will just make whatever sells, which ties to the most important reason that games evolved to exist in a virtual space.

Making a fun and popular game is satisfying indeed, but if the product is considered a failure if it cannot convert enough profit. Video games are not only cheap to create, but also easy to distribute. Using the example of chess again, we can clearly see why a company would prefer to make a digital version of the game. To make real chess pieces requires real materials such as wood or plastic. The more units manufactured, the more cost needed for the production. In contrast, to make multiple units of a digital chess game, only one working copy of the game is needed. Then, it can be shipped on an online web-store or in a compact storage such as a CD or flash drive whereas a real set of chess must be packaged in a box and picked up in a local shop. It is undeniable that board game still has a solid share in the market, but it is extremely difficult for it to grow or even stay par with the rest of the competitors that are mostly digitalized.