Hungry Hungry Hippos

Anyone remember the (board) game Hungry Hungry Hippos? If so, read on! If not, do a google on it, then read on!

Retailing in SL reminds me a lot of this game. Basically, there are tons of content creators and merchants selling their wares (hippos) and trying to get as many of the marbles (L$s) as possible. There are a fixed number of marbles and the one at the end of the game (lets hope the game, SL, doesn't end!!!) wins!!!

Right now it seems apparent as to who is "winning" but hopefully this game is a long time from being over so the end winner may not be those who are currently ahead.

Who will win?

Thats excitement!!!

The economy is not a zero sum game.

Lol - cute! Yeah, I can see it.

hippococo

I like A.C.'s (a grindcore band from Massachusettes) cover of the Hungry Hungry Hippos commercial. Its 16 seconds long.

-Flip

Did they do Bananphone as well?

Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring, nah nah nah nah nah nah....

As for the hungy hippos, I was expecting a new sim-killing action game!

Burke, I can see you scripting a seriously violent version of hungry hungry hippos.
I bet it would kick ass.

Damn, I thought this would be about infohubs.

An avatar-scale HHH game at an infohub would rock.

Don't buy the current version of Hungry Hungry Hippos. I bought it for my kids for Xmas and it SUCKS!! It is not all one piece now, the hippos snap onto the game board and my two year old rips them off mid-game. The "marbles" are crappy heavy plastic balls, no longer real white marbles. SUpposedly the hippos snap off so you can store the game in a box. I remember having a friggen box back when I was little and the whole thing fit in it. It was kinda big, BUT IT WAS A BOX...THAT FIT!


If you are considering buying this game, go on ebay and buy one. I would consider it well worth the 20-30.00 you'd end up paying for it, rather than the 14.99 box of crap you get now.

I hate it when the companies start using all cheap stuff and then some dumbass suggests removable pieces to help with storage issues. Whoever made the hippos detachable should be bitchslapped.

EXTREME! Hungy-Hungy Hippos Unleashed!
They move about in a feild, and things they eat give them powers to suck in... more things to eat. including eachother!

heh i see it too

side note tho, that would be a killer SL game, well it would if the physics didnt keep everything 0.100m away.. or the fact that many marbles would bog a sim to stand still...

gah nevermind my imagination my ass

ohh maby if the board was like 2048m2 and i used Av's rolled up in little balls... hmm

Yes it is. Every Linden spent one place is a Linden not spent at another.

Oh, really? Are those Lindens then destroyed after being spent? Please, give us more details on this fascinating issue.

Damn you, beat me too it.

.

Although I don't think the SL economy is zero-sum, I do think that the reasons why not would be interesting to discusse.

The RL claim usually goes that the reciever of the money then spends it on the business, which helps them create new products, increase efficiency, etc., thereby meaning they can contribute more in the future, reducing scarcity, lowering prices and giving everyone more. In SL this doesn't apply - there are no production costs (and therefore no production efficiency) and it doesn't cost anything other than time to create new products, so businesses gaining money doesn't enable them to do either of these any more than they could have done before (other than the few professional SL players who gain time)

Secondly, fairly significant numbers of Lindens are hoarded. I heard yesterday that somebody who is a fairly - but not massively - well-known creator had over L$500k sitting in their account; I presume the "big names" have even more. That money is effectively destroyed. Other Lindens go into the "land loop" - buy to buy land, sell to pay tier, buy to buy land, sell to pay tier, buy to buy land... etc. - where their movements don't really effect the in-world economy because land transactions are governed by fixed US$ prices.

Incorrect. Businesses gaining money are able to justify increased production (time). Time is very valuable. If I can spend time in SL and increase my economic activity there instead of working a part-time job, that's a whole lot of increased production.



Savings != destruction. Savings == savings.

(nod) The thing with this, though, is that it works in margins. IRL, there's a whole bunch of different jobs and their pay level fluctuates all the time, leading people towards the best ones. In SL, there's a big margin at the point where SL becomes doable as a part-time job, and then a big margin at the point where SL becomes doable as a full-time job. And these margins aren't about amount of money you have, but about continuous income level. So it can still make a difference but it's less pronounced than IRL, and there may be a top limit to the number of people who can have that amount of continuous income.



Savings can == destruction if they're never spent.

Welp, we can talk about that either at the final closure of the universe or when Linden Lab goes out of business, whichever comes first. In practical purposes, there's nothing even approaching destruction in savings unless the L$ supply stops growing.

I was unable to make sense of the rest of your post.

----

Anyway, as for the zero sum business, no one has bothered to address it so I guess I may as well do so myself.

If the amount of L$ were fixed in any given point in time, we would indeed be dealing with a zero sum game.

It isn't and we're not. The currency pool, via stipends, is scaled according to both the number of new residents SL accumulates and the number of weeks the population continues to exist. This ensures that while a certain amount of L$ is destroyed via the usual sinks, there's also L$ created to continue allowing for unrestrained commerce.

If SL were truly a hippo game, there would be no fluctuation in the currency exchange. There would simply be a steady rise in US$/L$ prices until it cost you US$10 to buy L$5, and so on. Obviously this does not and will not happen because the currency pool continues to scale. Even if population remains flat or even begins to fall, the currency continues to scale at least on a weekly basis.

Well, no, but IRL as in SL, there are some people (Bill Gates) who have more money than they can ever spend. Unlike RL, that money doesn't go into loans and interest generation because of the trust issues with that in SL.



What I mean is, suppose there's Anne and Betty. Anne makes L$250 a week, and Betty makes L$2500 a week (including stipend). Neither of them have enough money to make SL a part-time job, so they will both have about the same amount of time to spend creating stuff - even though Betty is earning ten times as much as Anne. In RL that would make a difference, but in SL, unless it's enough to buy you out of a real-world job (full or part time) it doesn't make much difference to time.



True, however, the majority of this created L$ is in the form of L$50 stipends for basic accounts. When distributed like this it is too little to make a difference to whoever has it, and when several of them have conglomerated they are likely in the hands of someone who was already very rich and therefore has little or no utility for any number of extra L$ (the hoarders above)

It makes a big difference to the people collecting it. And the point is that if the money increases in supply rather than becomes more scarce, it's not a zero sum game and that sort of discussion is moot. The origin, however scattered, is irrelevant, so long as it exists.



Big deal. Five to ten people make a lot of money and exchange it out a little at a time. They're the heads of a very, very long tail of other relationships with vastly more liquid behavior.

It's also not very productive to base an entire discussion on hearsay about a tiny percentage of a population when there's no hard numbers to back it up. Particularly when we already have evidence that the market behaves as you would expect it to with a growing (non zero sum) economy.

This isn't WoW. There's no enforced scarcity. Anything of value can be created by people who want to work for it, without the permission or cooperation of anyone else. Residents create things from their own sweat, which stimulates new demand in previously unexpected sectors. The more stuff people want, the more often currency will be exchanged. It's a beautiful thing.

I lost all the marbles to that bloody game.

http://img75.imageshack.us/img75/7320/hippo0011hw.jpg

Suppose there's Anne and Betty. They each have a website. Anne makes $10.00 a month after costs, and Betty makes $100.00 a month after costs. They both get their Internet and webserver paid for, but that's all. They're still hobbies.

Even though it's RL and not SL.

And in SL, that means Anne doesn't have a house or lives in Pinchprim Manor, and Betty rents a 4096 on an island and pays for it in Lindens. Anne builds in a sandbox and has to waste time setting up and cleaning up and putting up with griefers, while Betty has a permanent build and ban lines.

Or - maybe one of them just sucks. Seriously... given the magical world where they both have the same amount of time to build things, their skill level hasn't been assertained.

Or one of them builds something that grabs and inspires people, and the other makes the 'same old same old'

Maybe one does sex anims and the other does prim chairs..

Eh I dunno - I think Einstein nailed it when he said 'Imagination is more important than knowledge'

I thought everyone knows that if you buy directly from the source, you save ALOT of money? Allow me to make an example. And yes, sorry kind of warping this here, bare with me.

Say you are in the market for a new Hippo, say for a theme plot or the like.

You could buy a copy of this "Best Hippo In SL!" for say L$1,000 from a retailer.

Although, it's a proven fact that if you buy from the source, the factory (creator), you may find this same "1967 Explorer Hippo" for Free!

Now anyone with half a brain cell should know that, heck the choice is an easy one as to which makes the most sense. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I mean, isn’t it clear as a consumer which option would be the "Winning" Option?

- Sam

(Sorry about that off-topic-ism, you may now return to useful posts)