Talk about Fame League

Today is my first time to play Fame League. It's a very complicated game for a raw hand. It makes me very confused. But after playing(actually random clicking) for a long time(around 4 to 5 hours), I realize that this complicated game in fact has many good ideas behind it. It combines some of the most popular and advanced elements, like Prediction market and the wisdom of crowds, althrough the technology of it sucks. I don't think it's user-friendly and its UI is good enough. Maybe that's why it's hard to learn. But I don't want to talk about the technology, because I believe technology will always be better and better after some time. I want to analyse the ideas behind the game which I believe are more important. Actually these ideas are all mentioned by the presenting team in the presentation. I just want to summarize them and add some my own thoughts.

1. prediction market. In economics, prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event (e.g., will the next US president be Obama?) or parameter. The current market prices can then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter. People who buy low and sell high are reworded for improving the market prediction.

In fame League, it uses prediction market to predict fame. It's very interesting. It seems that no matter who the people are, No matter whether they are famous actor, American presidents or ordinary people, their fame can not be decided. Nobody can give an accurate prediction of people's fame. Is that mean prediction market is useless in fame? No. Fame League gives you the answer.

Fame is the state of being known and talked about by many people. So if more people know you and think you are famous, you are more famous; On the other hand, If less people know you and think you are famous, you are not famous. All the fame depends on the wisdom of Crowds(Which I will talk about later). So the people who make the choose the same as the majority, improves the market prediction; who make the choose opposite to the majority, degrades the market prediction. Prediction market works well in Fame League.

Prediction market has a lot of potential. Because in a democratic world, it's very important and useful to listen to the majority. Through the voice of the majority, people can know what makes the majority happy, and what will infuriate them. Public figures and the government can make good use of it. In the past, it's very hard to collect the opinions of a large number of people. Now according to the internet, collecting becomes much easier. And prediction market makes it more convenient. Everything has been reflected as a simple number. It's easy to operate and understand.

2. The wisdom of crowds. It means that the many are smarter than the few and collective wisdom can solve many problems which can not be solved by computing. In the Fame League, the use of the crowds wisdom is very direct -- deciding the fame of people. It's a perfect usage of crowds wisdom because the fame of people is fortunately decided by the crowds.

Here, I want to talk something else about the wisdom of crowds. Google is the company I think make the most advantages of it. Except Image Labeler and SearchWiki these two tools which are based on users' interests and voluntariness, I think the best of all is the reCaptcha service which has been bought by Google. reCaptcha is a system originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University that uses CAPTCHA to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access. Google buys it to help realize the unrecognized distorted words in book scanning. Every time, users can see two words. One is that the reCaptcha has already known the correct answer, the other one is the one that reCaptcha hasn't known. If user answers the first one correctly, they can be proved that they are not machine. Then they can answer the second one. If his answer is the same as the majority, this one will be recognized to be true.

Not only these little application, more and more problems which are thought hard have been solved and are being solved by the wisdom of crowns. For example social search and social news. This trend looks very familiar with the Cloud Computing. They all use the resources of one large platform to solve special problems.

I only want to talk about these two points. Because all the other ideas are actually included in these two or they are not as representative as these two. Especially for the wisdom of crowds, I believe it's the developing trend and key point of future. No matter how the technology is improved, it's impossible to replace the wisdom of people.

Ideas behind a game are the most important. Technology is also important, but people can improve it anyway. Sometimes users can even bear bad UI for a good concept game. If a game lacks good and fresh idea, It has no soul.