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.