Meeting notice: The 04.Jan.20 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the Royal 
East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and 
Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably 
know where we are. More details below.

Suggested topic: I've been playing for a while with the idea that one of the 
better windows into the look and feel of a nanotech-enabled world are synthetic 
worlds.  Recently Ed Castronova, Associate Professor of Economics, Cal State 
Fullerton (http://business.fullerton.edu/ecastronova/) published a study of 
virtual world economics, or "avatar economies".  Among his observations three 
stand out in this regard: 

--  Economics in the real world assumes that work causes disutility.  In an 
avatar economy, however, it is lack of work that causes disutility.  Regardless 
of earnings and loot rates, people who play games must have something to do or 
they will be bored.  If a game structure limits their ability to be meaningfully 
engaged in some mission, quest, or activity, they will be unhappy.  Work is 
good.

[I've been poking around in the VW "Second Life," which is optimized to 
encourage the creation of clothes, vehicles, interiors, and structures. Today I 
dropped by a night club in the game at the invitation of a friend who works 
there as an exotic dancer. I found it closed (I was too early) and began 
wandering around the neighborhood.  In the back of the club I found a female 
avatar building a house.  I mentioned the club and she said it was the bane of 
the neighborhood.  Loud music, etc.  Crowds.  Server lag.  Plus people kept 
dropping cigarette butts on her lawn.  

Think about that.  In this world in order to drop a butt on a lawn you have to 
get out Photoshop and build a butt to begin with.  That is work trophism in 
spades.]

-- In RW economics growth is always good. In an avatar economy, however, 
increases in per-capita wealth -- which make it easier to accomplish various 
quests and missions -- will lower the challenge level of the game, potentially 
making it a less interesting puzzle. Growth can be bad.

--  Economics, on Earth, takes the population of humans as fixed, and also 
 assumes that their tastes and initial abilities are fixed. In an avatar economy 
 people are free to choose a significant subset of their abilities. They also 
 can choose when to be alive and when not to be, as well as how many different 
 people to be. The choosing economic agent can be a fairly complex entity.
 
 All this ring a bell???   
 
 
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 Disney + nanotech = nanoland.
 http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan04/NanoExhibit.bpf.html 
 
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In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon.

				-- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the first and 
third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant 
located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If 
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