Obtained from APCUG with the author's permission for publication by APCUG member groups.

Millions of people of all ages, worldwide, spend a large part of their lives in the make-believe online world of the Internet. MySpace.com is representative of several virtual social gathering places were participants, young and old, meet to chat and make virtual friends. So far, so good. But for many it has become a measure of someone's popularity how many “friends” they have and how cool they are. According to ZDNet (3/20/07), “Barack Obama is en route to a landslide victory over Hillary Clinton in the MySpace friends contest: Obama 55,674 friends versus Clinton 26,702 friends....John Edwards calls his MySpace friends Pals. He has 12,319 of them ... Republican candidates are trailing the Democrats overall at MySpace, big time: Rudy Giuliani 928 friends, John McCain 340 friends, Mitt Romney, 308 friends.”

Lesser mortals are also competing for friends in the popularity contest. It's not only the number of friends that counts, but they have to be cool and glamorous. Enter Brant Walker who noticed, while browsing MySpace pages, that “some people would have a lot of good-looking friends, and others didn’t.” He came up with the idea “to turn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets” by providing fictitious postings from attractive people. So he set up a business, FakeYourSpace.com, to provide MySpace inhabitants with photographs and comments from hired “friends” — mainly attractive models — for 99 cents a month each. He used photographs of models from iStockPhoto.com until they found out about it and put a stop to it. According to The New York Times (2/26/07) Walker is regrouping and may soon be back in business again, together with others anxious to get in on a social reputation enhancement scam.

Meanwhile, online gaming continues to be an addiction for many. Although many of these games are violent and crude, others offer many examples of complex play that involve social interaction, collaboration and long-term goals. The major games, often referred to as MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), involve tools, weapons, and other artifacts that the players collect while playing the game over a period of time. Since some games started to allow transferring those artifacts to others, a lively market has sprung up on E-bay and similar sites where they are sold for real money. As a consequence, game “farms” have sprung up, mostly in third-world countries in the far East, where thousands of players are being paid to play MMORPGs all day to generate in-game goodies for sale at a good profit.

The amount of money involved is mind-boggling. In November 2006 Business Week reported that Second Life player Ailin Graef had become the first millionaire (in US dollars) based on the value in game dollars of land holdings by her avatar, Anshe Chung, in the online virtual world. A runaway success, Second Life is the creation of Linden Labs and its currency, Linden dollars (L$), is pegged at about L$270 to the US dollar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_life). There are currency exchanges where game dollars can be traded for real currency, and Linden Labs intervenes in the background to keep the exchange rate fairly stable by adding or withdrawing game dollars from the virtual world. Maybe this is a good retirement hobby for Alan Greenspan!

Not surprisingly, the IRS is taking a good deal of interest and is considering taxing the proceeds from gaming. According to PC World (March 2007), the Joint Economic Committee of Congress (JEC) is working on a report regarding the economies of World of Warcraft, Second Life, and other MMORPGs. With an estimated world-wide “real-money trade” of $ 1 billion the tax man's hands are itching. But wait, there is more! It is estimated that the total wealth created within these games (in the form of artifacts not sold for real money, yet) amounts to some $10 billion. Exchanges of these artifacts between players in Second Life (instead of outright sales in real money) might be considered bartering, and bartering transactions are taxable according to IRS regulations. With $10 billion of assets being exchanged between players, the potential tax liabilities would be significant. The tax gurus are having a fine time pondering this. Fortunately there are other voices that don't want to spoil the fun of online gaming. We'll have to wait and see what the JEC comes up with. But just to be proactive, H&R Block has already established a virtual tax preparation office in Second Life (http://slurl.com/secondlife/HR%20Block/)

Not all online gaming is frivolous. Search engines such as Google have great difficulty labeling images so that they can be retrieved through keywords. It takes direct human involvement to describe an image in meaningful words, an impossible task with the untold billions of images on the Internet that have no captions or descriptions. Unless you make it into a game, that is.

Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, developed a game called ESP in which two participants who can't communicate with each other are shown a picture and asked to come up with descriptive labels within a short time period, such as 90 seconds. Matching labels are awarded with points. The resulting matching labels proved to be highly descriptive of the images. The game turned out to be highly addictive. Google has licensed it and created its own version, Google Image Labeler (images.google.com/imagelabeler). It is surprisingly difficult at first to generate descriptive labels for an image that is flashed on the screen for 90 seconds, but it probably gets easier with more practice. Obvious labels, such as “church” for a picture of a church that may have been generated previously, are declared off-limits. With an unending supply of images on the Web, the game can continue indefinitely. Give it a try!

Von Ahn was earlier credited with developing Captchas, those words written in a way that computers can't read them but humans can. They are used frequently to make sure that a human is at the end of a transaction, rather than another computer. You have probably encountered them, for instance when you signed up for a Yahoo email account.

Von Ahn is currently working on other games to help with recognition problems, such as locating objects inside an image, summarizing text passages, and developing common sense. (Science News, 3/17/07, thanks to Mike Borman)

© 2007 Willem F.H Borman. This article may be reproduced in its entirety only, including this statement, by non-profit organizations in their member publications, with mention of the author's name and the South Western Indiana PC Users Group, Inc.

This article has been provided to APCUG by the author solely for publication by APCUG member groups. All other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).

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