Since I’ve talked about it occasionally but never gotten in to a ton of detail, the blogging challenge offers a perfect opportunity to do so. Already, Liam and my brother in law Pete have been dragged in to the clutches of EA…perhaps others will choose to follow as well. And then my dark lord will feed on them and…uhhh…give them respect. And candy.
I found out about it while it was in Closed Beta through…yes…GAMES. One of the people I follow on Twitter is a guy named Tom Ohle. Tom does PR for a lot of gaming companies…Paradox, BioWare, CD Projekt, etc….so that’s why I had started following him. He’s one of the many PR people and web developers who pooled up to start Empire Avenue in the first place. So when he started talking about it, I got curious and decided to sign up for an invite.
Empire Avenue is basically a new social network that lets you buy and sell people. Yes, chatting about video games AND a basic slavery business have finally come together in glorious harmony! It’s like Roots, but without all the nasty stuff and more geeks.
Every person is also a commodity…that badge in the upper left of this blog marked ‘My Worth’ is my stock value on the market. Two things can change your value. The first is trading…being bought and sold affects your share value like a real stock. The second is content. You can plug in blog feeds, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr at the moment, with all of those affecting your share price. You can also plug in other RSS feeds, though the affect of those is negligible at best. So long as you have enough control over a feed to add a verification code to it, it’s fair game. How much content you produce also affects what sort of dividends you give to your investors, so that is the driving force behind someone deciding to ‘keep’ you.
At the same time, it’s also a social network. There are various communities one can join (though you have to reach a value of 14 Eaves…that being EA’s currency…before you can join Private ones). Since everyone’s content is splashed in to their front page feed, you can see what people are in to from that as well. A lot of the people I chat with over Twitter are those who I’ve met through EA, actually…there are plenty of raging rant mongering video game nuts on there. And I’ve noticed a definite uptick in traffic on this here blog since joining, so that’s cool.
In the beginning, I got hooked on the trading aspect of it…it was primarily like a virtual game of Stock Ticker. I really didn’t chat with very many people and just used it as some sort of weird fake investment system. Then something happened…I suddenly started noticing that several people there were in to the same things I am. Actually, it was right around the time of E3, when several other people were lighting Twitter ablaze with mockery of Ubisoft’s ridiculous press event, and writing blog posts about what games were coming up.
This was around the same time that I was already starting to use Twitter a bit more and becoming fearless in who I was responding to. Celebrity? Indy games journalist whose stuff I like? Front man of a band I’m in to? Friend for the last 15 years? Who cares who it is, if you have a reply…just fucking reply. So the two events kind of smashed together and formed a gigantic super event. With lasers. And a cool guitar soundtrack that starts up whenever it arrives somewhere.
Actually, it’s only quite recently that I’ve finally started melding the investment part of EA with the community part, and focusing on ‘buying’ people whose content interests me at all. That came about after the dev team had to put in several buying and selling limits to stave off those who were artificially inflating a stock just to dump it and reap the rewards. It’s illegal on a real life stock exchange, and to do it on a virtual system with virtual money and virtual value leader lists…well, the word pathetic comes to mind. You REALLY have to be compensating for some horrible thing Uncle Creepy did to you during childhood to honestly care that much about winning a thoroughly made up exchange.
Anyway, part of the reason for nailing down limits to avoid things like that is that real life rewards systems are being started up. Right now, I can exchange 1000 Eaves (just to put this in perspective, I earn about 8,000 or so Eaves a day in dividends) for $1 off any game purchased at Beamdog, a new local digital retailer started up by a couple of ex-BioWare guys. Or, a similar investment of Eaves can get me 10% off something at Cream Junkie. And more is on the way. Eventually, they plan to allow advertisers to approach EA users to inquire about advertising on their site or blog.
It’s already huge in Chile…no, I’m serious. Apparently, some hyper popular blogger started using the closed beta and started talking about it. Now, probably 40%+ of the entire EA population is Chilean…the Chilean version of CNN did a report about it, for Chrissakes. A number of charitable groups and companies have jumped in as well, and it seems to be working quite well for them.
Anyway, if it sounds interesting, hop in. It’s in Open Beta now so you don’t even need to beg me to invite you. Or don’t. At any rate, you now know what there is to know.
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