Microsoft Research launched its first Game theory Facebook game
Relative link: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-readies-a-facebook-game-theory-lab/10803
Microsoft Research recently has just updated its first Facebook game, called Project Waterloo. It is an implementation of Colonel Blotto game, which is an economic game. In this game, each player will have 100 troops to distribute over 5 territories. If one player allocates more troops in one territory than other players, he/ she will win the territory. Once you finished your move, you can challenge another player. If the person you selected hasn’t joined the game yet, Facebook will send invitation to him/her. Once she joined, you can immediately see your opponent’s move. Or you can accept other random players’ challenge and make a move.
Due to the dramatic development of Internet, the traditional game theory would also be affected. People gradually develop different habits of interacting with each other. Therefore, it is crucial to construct a research to analyze people’s behavior in an online game theoretical interaction environment, in order to find out how the classic game theory has been modified by digitalized world.
I have to say that it’s a really efficient way to do research relating to game theory. Instead of arrange large-scale research to ask people to participate in certain studies about the game theory in realty and pay a considerable amount of money for participants for compensation of their time, the research automatically conducted under the Facebook game. People enjoy playing the game with their friends or strangers, while the company can gain the data to conduct the economic research without paying money to participants. Moreover, according to the news, the Microsoft Research seems have interest in implementing advertising into the game. In this way, they would even earn money, so that it would be a win-win situation.
The game itself is a famous economic game. The game itself reminds me of the traffic problem, which we learned from lecture. Instead of distributing a certain number of cars to different combination of certain roads, we have a total number of troops we can distribute over different combination of territories. But instead of choose a combination of roads that we will spend least time, we need to distribute in a way that we could get most of troops in certain territories, in order to win the game. It would be interesting to find out whether there is a dominant strategy.
While the gathering of the data generated from the game could be a useful resource for people to learn about the game theory in the real world, the spread of the game on Facebook also exemplifies us with some social networks related theory. Since it would be more fun to play with your friends in this game, people usually would invite their friends to join and friends will invite their friends to join. In this way, the game spread out on Facebook. The pattern of how the game has spread out can indicate the social network circles in Facebook. With the knowledge of who invites whom to join this game, we could construct a social network by regarding every person as a node, as what we learned from the course. If a person invites a person, we can regard they have a tie between them. As the number of times they played with each other increases, we can distinguish whether they have a strong or weak tie between them. It would be an interesting case to investigating the social network formed by this online game.