Games are fun and payments are fun so when you put them together you get doubleplus fun.

Hey it was what we Brits call “half term” recently, so the kids got a week off of school, for no obvious reason. I expect it must be something to with ploughing fields or shearing cows at the dawn of mass schooling back at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The holiday, for many families, means kids hanging around all day playing games. Our family was no different. So I took a couple of days off work to organise a Dungeons & Dragons day (classic 3.5, of course) for no.2 son and some of his friends and to play a few board games for relaxation before the madness of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Our favourite board games are the same as everyone else’s: Settlers of Catan (which many believe to the be the best board game of all time), Dominion, Carcassone, that sort of thing. The boys current favourite is Game of Thrones and they’ve had a few late night sessions with mates around the Westeros map.

Anyway, since I was home, I thought I’d get down with the boys and teach them to play a few games that would turn them away from swords and sorcery fantasy and on to one of the world’s most interesting subjects: retail payments. I went and dusted off my copy of the “The Diners’ Club Credit Card Game”, published by Ideal in 1961. This was time when cards were far from a mass market proposition, so it looks to me as if the promotions people at Diners had had the idea of using the popular genre of the board to game to raise awareness of what exactly a card did and why anyone might want one.

It’s nice game, a little random, but it works ok. It teaches you to spend for big-ticket items on your card so that you keep cash in hand for other purposes (investments etc). It didn’t take long to pick up and get going and we had fun playing it but to be honest I’m not sure if the youngsters would, unprompted, pick up and have another go.

Having helped younger members of the community to understand what a card is, it was then time to move on to a more sophisticated game. I broke out “Charge It! The Credit Card Game”. The original version of this game seems to date from 1972, when the combination of technological and regulatory change (ie, the introduction of the magnetic stripe and Visa’s BASE I authorisation system together with the change in state usury laws) were pushing credit cards to the mainstream. My version of the game is a later revamp from 1996, in which players collect up to four different cards (thinly disguised Visa, MasterCard, Amex and Discover schemes) and move around a board collecting stuff of one form and another. Here’s no.2 son defying his father by using cash to purchase at carphone for $400, having first had to ask me what a carphone was.

When we were playing D&D 3.5, we were playtesting a Viking-themed variant with some house rules removing arcane magic from the game. Variants are a great way to have more fun. I decided to make “Charge It!” even more fun by replacing the pretend cards with real ones, but I’m sure your family would have just as much fun with the cardboard ones.

When I was looking up some background on these games, I noticed that they were classified as “economics” games. I think I take issue with that. I suppose you might argue that they are about economics in the original sense of the Greek root (ie, household budgets) but they don’t really teach modern economic concepts. My kids learned their economics from games, of course, but they learned them from:

• World of Warcraft. All parents should insist their children play this game while at middle school. My kids learned all basic economic concepts from playing this game: supply and demand, comparative advantage, price curves, options and futures, auctions and reverse auctions, arbitrage and so on. They also learned all of the basic tools of the modern investment banker, including market manipulation, price-fixing, insider trading and shill bidding. It’s a shame they have both opted to study socially-useful STEM subjects at University, much against my direction.
• Crunch. This is a card game that teaches the rudiments of banking, and we all loved it. Each player is a banker and, in essence, you have to collect asset cards so that you can make loans and investments. The really clever part of the game is that the banker with the most money at the end wins: it doesn’t matter whether their bank goes bankrupt. If you over-extend the bank but manage to trouser the treasure before the roof falls in, more power to your elbow.
• Illuminati. This remains my favourite table top card game of all time and I’m glad the kids loved it too. It has a superbly clever game mechanic which means that you build up power structures based on secret societies (e.g., The Gnomes of Zurich) but you need money to consolidate the power and you basically can’t win without screwing someone else over. A much better introduction to 21st-centruy pseudo-capitalist Corporatism than any text book.

Meanwhile, back at “Charge It!”, I’ll just mention that I liked the two-track board idea and I thought it worked well in terms of game dynamics. You basically choose whether to go round an outer track or, once you have some credit cards to your name, an inside track with different kinds of interactions. The players don’t know what each other player is trying to collect so you have to keep an eye on what your opponents are buying as the game develops. We enjoyed playing this game and I think the kinds might well play it again sometime.

It was then time to return to an old favourite, Monopoly. Now, the truth is that I’ve never much liked Monopoly (it’s too random for my liking) but my kids have always liked it and they still play it (the World of Warcraft edition is the current favourite). We started with our copy of Monopoly Electronic Banking edition, which replaced cash with cards some years ago and thus obtained my deputy-head-of-household seal of approval.

You may be aware that the annual Consult Hyperion Forum (“Tomorrow’s Transactions”, this year on the 19th-20th March 2014) is a not-for-profit event and any surpluses that we are able to create, thanks in no small part to the generosity of our sponsors, go to a variety of charities. When we had our tenth anniversary Forum back in 2007, the wonderful people at Hasbro very kindly donated a few Monopoly Electronic Banking sets to the event and we ran a tournament!

Well, the tenth Digital Money Forum turned out to be a big, big success. The feedback that we received was unbelievable: not only did we all get some new ideas and meet new people, but we had a lot of fun doing it, what with the guided tours of the historic Royal palace of the Tower of London and the Monopoly electronic banking charity tournament.

[From The big 1-0 - Tomorrow's Transactions]

Within a couple of years, our thoughts had naturally turned to mobile and contactless, so we played a version of the game using contactless cards and NFC phones using some software that I pestered our in-house development team (the “Hyperlab”) to put together for the event.

And so we meander to present times. As I said earlier this year, proximity and vicinity interfaces are going to be big in the coming twelve months: we’re finally going contactless and in a variety of different ways. So it seemed fitting to have a game of Monopoly Zapped. In this game, the players have cards (with no embossing any more, unlike the replacement payment cards sent to me in last month by my actual card issuers following the Target hack-insipred reissuing) and the “bank” is your own iPad rather than a custom piece of hardware. How right this is, on so many levels. To effect a transaction, you simply touch your “ID card” to the iPad when necessary.

The family verdict on this one was very positive indeed. The contactless interface was quick and simple, it was convenient having the iPad keep track of everything and the game play zipped along at a decent pace. If your kids like Monopoly, they will like this. I think my kids and their friends especially enjoyed.

Which brings me to my point. In 1961, Diners’ Club needed a game to teach people about cards. In 1972, “Charge It!” taught people about credit. Monopoly Electronic Banking introduced a cashless economy and Monopoly Zapped the contactless economy. So I think it is time to create a game to teach people about cryptocurrency. I’m thinking either a combination of Crunch and Illuminati that builds the blockchain on the table in front of the players with some kind of Trivial Pursuit-style game to represent the distributed proof-of-work or a combination of Cluedo and Monopoly where the goal is to find the Satoshi (“It was David Chaum, in the library, with a TRS-80”) while hoarding your Bitcoins and stealing your opponents. Anyway, I’ve started to make a prototype, let me know what you think…

While I was kicking around some ideas on this I remembered the fun we’d had with “The Privacy Game” back in 2012. We were working on a project concerning informed consent and trying to find ways to help members of the public to understand the consequences of different choices that they might make around data sharing. Our partners at UCL came up with the idea for a game, which I have to say that I loved. We play-tested it at Intellect, it memory serves, and have a variety of different friends come and join in. So I decided that something based on cards would be good (especially given the deep irony of Mt. Gox having started life as a shrine to Magic The Gathering) and got to work.

So my idea is that there are like 100 wallets, each with a two digit number and when players create a new wallet they get to pick the next card from a shuffled deck. So each player knows which wallets are theirs. Money gets transferred between wallets according to some kind of trading that I haven’t worked out yet and the players try to nudge the game so that more money ends up in their own wallets. At the end of the game (when the last coin has been mined) the wallets are given to their owners and the contents added up so the person with the most money wins. At various points in the game, players can prove ownership of a wallet and cash it out into $$$. Players will be trying to hack each other throughout the game and will gang up to stop the richer players from winning. I haven’t thought it all through yet, but basically unconfirmed transactions go onto the table and when player gets a puzzle question right (or maybe all the players are given the same puzzle?) they get to add the unconfirmed transactions to the blockchain and win an extra Bitcoin for themselves.

Here’s a few more “Uncontrollable Event Cards” from the game:

“Hard drive crash, lose all of your Bitcoins”

“The exchange has been hacked, lose all of your Bitcoins”

“The dog ate your cold wallet, lose all of your Bitcoins”

“Your favourite exchange turns out to have been a scam, lose all of your Bitcoins”

“Your PC is infected with malware that stole your password, lose all of your Bitcoins”.

It’s got winner written all over it, but on the outside chance that one of you may have a better idea, I’m all ears!

These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

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We’ve just been out to Pizza Pod to celebrate, Mum, Dad, my older (only by eighteen months) brother Wilfred, me and my best friend Gertrude. It was just a bit embarrassing as Dad insisted we did it in the restaurant. Silly, really. All it really is, if you think about, is him sending a clip to the administrators asking them to unhook my Companion’s account from his. They just check WorldData to make sure I really have turned twelve – just – and then all they have to do is authorise the Separation. Still, it was lovely, really, of my parents to mark the occasion with a real celebration. A lot of people have stopped bothering these days. It’s important. A rite of passage, Dad called it. I asked the WikiP about it and it’s this really old-world, pre-digi thing that used to involve religion and special food and sometimes kids getting their faces painted and all sorts of weird stuff. Only they weren’t really kids, a lot of the time. Eighteen, twenty-one. Mature adults having to go through their own freaky Separations. You can still see some of these things going on in those biomes where they’ve preserved endangered habitats – like that one Pixney run in Africa. My head spins when I think about the Points you’d need for a holiday like that.

I’m totally excited that I have a real grown-up Companion now. I can do anything I want, wherever I am. I don’t have to watch my brother, walking down the street, swiping at some invisible enemy on another continent, racking up real Points against whoever, and wishing I could do that. Not that I’ll be doing that neeky stuff with mine. I have better things to do, like swapping clothes with my cousin in Sydney. She showed me this really cool app on the PriMarks site where we can try on each others’ PriMarks outfits (which is pretty much everything in our wardrobes, of course) onscreen and orderclick them if they fit and look good. I blew half this month’s Points in a coupla hours last night, fifty per cent of my allowance gone and it’s only the twelfth of the month. That’s the only thing about being newly Separated, I could easily lose it with the Points. ‘Learning from experience’, my Dad calls it.

So I’m focussing instead on all the cool things I can do now. I can do my own legals – contracts, litigation, indemnity – everything I learned in Basic Law. I can get a day rate signed off, post it on my site and start generating some Points of my own, rather than just relying on an intercred from Dad every month. The sooner I start earning, the less I’ll have to pay back to my parents later.

I’ll still do all the things I could do before, though. I don’t intend to stop collecting and spreading stories about my favourite Clip stars or bands or friends anytime soon, not unless one of my girlfriends puts a blocker on a story because it’s just tooooo personal, though it’s hard to imagine what that would actually be. Mostly they trade off the stats at school – how many hits, how many interacts on their sites – not just because of the social currency ratings they’re chasing, but because ratings mean Points.

I’ve always been able to find pretty much anything I needed and pay for it with my Little Companion, but Dad always had a veto option and access to my real-time Points scores. Now I have the right to block him if I want and the only people who can stop me doing that I want with my stash are the Intercred authorities, BarcEx, who obviously make sure you can’t spend Points you don’t have. I can still go into a store and find out where anything was made, who made it (their names, urls), what it’s made out of, where that came from, just about everything – just by pointing my Companion at it. Only now I can go to the next level. I can start a WOM if they’re sweatshoppers, right there in the store, close them down just like that. I know my rights.

I can eepeegee and watch anything I want now: Bad News, the really extreme reality shows, live porn…though most of that stuff sounds so completely gross it’s hardly a privilege.

A big thing for me is getting closer to the bands I’m into: I can get access to the deeper levels on their sites now, get nearer to who they really are, what they’re really like. One of the first things I’m going to do is get into Iggy II’s house (I’m not convinced it’s the real one, but I don’t really care). I’ve done all that hanging out in the front drive on Primary Life with all the other losers: now I can get in through the front door, see him getting breakfast, watching TV, showering – though Ig2 apparently has one of those fuzzy screens, either in his actual bathroom or in PL, doesn’t matter which. There will be masses of clips of him in the buff, anyway, in the Reality News archives or on the fan socnets, if that’s really what I want and I’m prepared to pay for it. I’m really not sure how I feel about that, though. I guess I respect his privacy too much to go there, even if I can now..

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

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I’m sick already of this fashion for reviving old technical terms in a desperate attempt to freshen up this debased language of ours. I can live with it at home – it comes with the territory when you’re a mother of teenage adults. People say having them later in life exaggerates this kind of inter-generational disconnect, so I’m relieved I got on with it and had mine in my early fifties. If I’m honest, I quite enjoy their arcane jive, the self-conscious sharing between them and their friends of terms like ‘mobile’ (‘telephone’, even, I heard one of Ernest’s friends say recently), ‘television’, ‘video’ and all the rest of it. Sends me scuttling onto the WikiP for the original meanings, the back stories. Proves the adage about your children educating you, rather than the other way round.

That’s all fine. Except that it’s starting to happen at work. I’m quite possibly the last person to pick up on such things: when you’re the CEO I believe you should try to spend time with your team at least once a day, but it doesn’t always work out like that. And anyway it’s usually the demand for my firefighting skills that gets me out of my cubicle and off the Head Office screen: people querying their profile or day rate, demanding updates to their site, raging about injustice or discrimination as if what we do had a subjective element. It must be years since we found any real errors in the profiling engines: ever since self-adaptive alogarithms broke through, the systems have steadily evolved to iron out any residual tendency to make mistakes. It’s nigh on perfect now, so our job is basically customer service. Which is why language is so important. It’s not just about what you say: it’s about how you see people, how you treat them. If we don’t get that right, what are we here for? The small number of individuals that the AIs can’t cope with have to be dealt with P2P. Anything else is giving Profiling a bad name.

So I’ve been disturbed to hear the kind of loose talk that can be dismissed as a normal teenage quirk slipping into the dialogue at the office. I heard a couple of the interns talking about ‘The Internet’ yesterday: I haven’t heard that one since college. They thought they were hilarious. “Shall we go on The Internet and look at some Web Sites?” That’s another phrase that suddenly everyone under fifty seems to be saying. There’s something so quaint and laughable about the notion of a platform that is separate from, well, everything else and the idea that there might be distinct places on it to go and find things you want, that it seems to bring young people out in a rush of irony. Personally, I think it’s actually because they can’t get their heads round it. I think mine was the last generation to really get that concept of a duality between what’s ‘real’ and ‘virtual’: because it’s experientially disappeared for the next wave, they actually find the concept quite disturbing.

So now I’m hearing ‘Search’, ‘Hard Drive’ and – this appears to be the favourite, this week at least – ‘PC’. I’m not aware of anyone using ‘Mac’ yet, though there’s no telling just how obscure these dredged-up terms have to be to keep the speaker one step ahead of their peers. I can write all this off as youthful banter as long as it’s kept in the back office and as long as it doesn’t impinge on what we do or how we’re perceived as an organisation.

So I threw a fit when I heard one of our P2P’s talking about ‘Consumers’ in the company sushi bar. For me, it’s a matter of ethics. We are not a backstreet bunch of low-res data scrapers, cobbling together a few Profiles from old interact records and cut-price Intercred stats. We’re meant to be the best, precisely because we have the most completely human way of looking at people. It’s why we have the word ‘Holostic’ in our name, for goodness’ sake. Proper profiling takes into account the whole person, not just the bit of them that makes purchases. It’s immoral, as far as I’m concerned, looking at people in that narrow, instrumental way. It’s what our competitors do. And besides, it doesn’t make any commercial sense. How can we introduce people to the things they want – especially the things they don’t yet know they want – if we don’t take into account everything about them: how they think, what they feel, whether they love their partner, their fears, their aspirations, their pet hates, their favoured sexual position. Anything else is just amateur hour as far as I’m concerned. So if I do hear anyone else use that wretched word ‘Consumers’ again in my presence, that’s it, they’re out on their ear.

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Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

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Technorati Tags: business, future, loyalty, payments

[Steve Taylor] 68, unlike the London bus route after which it is named and on which it is being written, started in two different places. It began as a reasonably straightforward business book, a series of descriptive ‘Extreme Scenarios’ (to adopt the name of a technique commonly used in Idea Generation) with the aim of helping people involved in the media and communications industries to think the unthinkable.

But the scenarios were too dry, too functional: they needed bringing to life. So I turned to a satirical futuristic novel that I had started and abandoned, a third of the way through, a couple of years ago. ‘Pointless’ (I know: tempting fate, or what?) is an action adventure set in a futuristic society where private currencies, in the shape of rewards points schemes, have replaced money. (Not the only novel based on this premise: see ‘Jennifer Government’ by Max Barry). The concept is usually attributed to the right-wing Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek.

I became aware of the notion of private currencies several years ago when working with Dave Birch on a project that ended up with the idea being proposed to Virgin: they didn’t get it.

Apart from the competing currencies of Points there are a few generic features of my future world that are not immediately self-explanatory:

Remedies (often shortened, conversationally, to Rems) are smart pharmaceuticals that successfully tackle many of the diseases that are killers today: their cumulative effect is to prolong life well beyond its current span.

Points and Remedies are inextricably linked: in an exclusively mercantile society, if you have none of the former you cannot get any of the latter. This can lead to a sudden, dramatic reversal of the Remedies’ anti-ageing effects, decades lost in days. Some retro-culturally aware wag termed these unfortunates ‘Dorians’.

Google (‘The Big G’) has blasted its servers into orbit around the Earth – oodles of solar power and zero cooling problems.
Only ten 2007-style TV commercials are made a year and they are known as Big Clips. They are an ostentatious indulgence by the few brands so flush that they can afford advertising that has no directly attributable ROI.

Mobile devices are known as Companions: they’re the way you get everything.

Finally, the term Pointless describes exactly what it says – people with no Points, who live an outlaw existence beyond society.

*****************************************************************************************

68 takes the form of a series of ‘first hand reports’, people from the future talking in their own voices about their work, their lives and their relationship with communications. People in my industry (media) are currently being faced with changes so fundamental that they challenge every assumption on which the business has be predicated for the past quarter-century. When Gary Hamel says that

a company’s legacy beliefs are a much bigger liability than its legacy costs

he could have been writing specifically about the media business. The ability to imagine a visionary, disruptive future is as rare as it is necessary. Which is why I began writing 68: to utilise storytelling techniques to help people think about the unthinkable.

The first installment of 68, “Mudge’s Story”, will be published on the Digital Money Forum blog next week.

These opinions are my own (I think) and presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]

These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

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Remember that if you are coming to this year’s Forum you will be getting a copy of the book in your delegate pack along with, amongst other things, David Edgerton’s book…

"The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900"

My opinions are my own (I think) and are presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public. [posted with ecto]

These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

The post Blook update appeared first on Tomorrow's Transactions.

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Jane and I have edited the posts (slightly) and organised them (slightly) to create something that I hope our clients, partners and friends will enjoy dipping into when bored on trains.  I don’t expect it to win this year’s Blooker Prize, but I hope that someone, somewhere will send us a nice review that we can put on the site somewhere!

Naturally, there’s a spare copy waiting (or at least, there will be once they get back from the printers) for the first person to comment on this post, excluding employees of Consult Hyperion, blogmeister Jane and members of my immediate family.

My opinions are my own (I think) and are presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public. [posted with ecto]

These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

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