Halting State

local game is voted on by at least three peers, and we rely heavily on the phone’s trusted processing infrastructure. Incidentally, this means we’re into the same authorization and authentication business as your credit card company. Because if somebody finds a way to change stuff without our authorization, they can create value from nothing, then sell the results on IGE or eBay. Which is ultimately deflationary, not to mention being a howling whirlwind of No Fun At All for everybody who’s trying to play the game by the rules.

“That’s one way of looking at the picture. Not only is there this whole raft of mind-numbing automated administrative stuff that goes on every time you add a player—which is what the game developers worry about— there’s inflation. Inflation happens when money and loot flow into the game. But to keep the customers happy you have to keep rewarding them. Playing the game is inflationary because they keep burgling the tombs of dead gods, breaking into the governor of Jamaica’s dungeon vaults, colonizing the Andromeda galaxy, and so on. And you know, you can’t tax them or make the money decay, because that would be No Fun, and if the game stops being Fun, why play? That’s the difference between in-game economics and the National Bank—the bank doesn’t have to worry about whether we’re enjoying ourselves. So we have to control this tendency towards galloping stagflation, and we typically do this by offering short deposit accounts for star-ship captains, controlling the after-market in magic wands, providing mortgages for prestige-rank necromancers wanting to build their own crypts, and all that sort of thing.

“Then there’s immigration and border controls. Most modern multiplayer games run on a couple of distributed-processing platforms—Zone runs on Symbian/GDF and Microsoft Arena runs on.NETSpace—and they’ve standardized on a common client engine so they can focus on developing new content. Competition is fierce. They’ve all got scrapers and immigration incentives to persuade customers to migrate from one game to another, taking their characters and loot with them. It’s against the terms of service, but no game vendor is willing to cut their own throat by enforcing it—that’d piss off the customers. So, you’ve got out-of-band merchant sites like IGE and eBay’s Gameboard, and a whole bunch of coyotes who make their living by providing tools to migrate avatars from one environment to another, using the exit game assets as arbitrage against a position in the entry game. Which in turn means there are exchange rates between games—and not just game-to-game, I’m talking game-to- euro rates, game-to-yuan, game-to-rupee. All the strong currencies, you name it, even US dollars. So there’s currency speculation and an external market in gaming currency hedge funds, not to mention the Magic bugs who believe in keeping their loot in the most powerful magic items they can buy, like the guys who keep their savings account in a roll of gold coins under the bed. There’s dirty stuff, too, dirty tricks some of the game companies play on each other, hostile speculation and attempts to dislodge or recruit each other’s customer bases, but we don’t do any of that stuff at Hayek Associates. We play strictly by the rules.

“One way we take currency out of circulation is to sell imaginary real estate. Another is to provide safety deposit services so that players can stash their gold or loot with us for a fee—this works in game spaces with encumbrance rules. If we spot a deflationary sump, we have to create liquidity until we can plug the gap—this is something a real bank can’t do—so we can start offering interest on deposits, handing out free resurrections, that kind of thing. And while all this is going on, we have to keep an eye on how the customers are enjoying their market experience. If people start grumbling, we’ve got a problem.

“My job—well. I commission in-game campaigns to track customer satisfaction, establish hedonic goal posts, and set targets so our programmers and quants know which way to drive things to maximize fiscal stability. It’s like being chancellor of the exchequer, except you can substitute ‘fun’ for ‘profits’—up to a point, until interdomain currency conversion and hedge funds come into the picture. In monkeyspace—sorry, I mean, outside the games— I’m also in charge of marketing and sales liaison with our corporate clients. We each wear three different hats here at Hayek Associates. Making a single sale, even to a tier-three game, is potentially a multi-million euro contract for us, so a lot of work goes into it…what? Yes, I work with Marcus on closing new accounts. Yes, he’s senior to me…I suppose you could say that [he’s in charge]. No, I’m the Marketing Director. I’m only worth.5 per cent of the company’s market cap. I’m insignificant, obviously beneath your notice…

“Okay, yes, I understand that. Sorry. No more sarcasm.

“Let me see…at about a quarter past ten this morning, I was in a meeting with Marcus and…why the hell am I repeating this? You’ve seen the stream. I’ve seen the stream…No, I can’t swear that it really happened because it’s something I saw on a screen. What I thought I was seeing was a bunch, thirty, maybe forty, Orcs—they’re a character race in Avalon Four—march into the central bank. It’s in a magic castle carved out of a diamond the size of a hill, in a city floating on a mauve cloud near the Spinward Mountains, and the bank vaults are—look, they’re not a real physical vault, it’s just a database table that stores a bunch of cryptographic hashes on objects that are registered as being lodged in the bank, okay? The objects are stored in a holographic database on the players’ smartphones and the game engine keeps track of them for us. No, I can’t tell you whose phone stores a given item. They move around a lot, and there are usually copies on three or more phones at the same time. The bank is a different matter, the root authentication keys are locked down and stored in a trusted database on a server…yes, where else would you put a bank? That’s why we’re based in a nuclear bunker. It’s good public relations. Yes, the root keys are signed by the Bank of Scotland in monkeyspace. The real security is all in the firewalls, and the data integrity schemas. Nobody ever imagined a band of Orcs would steal a database table…”

END RAW TRANSCRIPT

ELAINE: A Catastrophic Loss of Goodwill

You enjoy facials about as much as you enjoy visits to the dentist. One of these years, when you’re really rich, you plan to set aside a week and turn yourself over to a dental surgeon who will put you under general anaesthetic, yank out all your pearlies, and install ceramic-andtitanium memory-metal implants socketed into your jawbones. Once you get over the hang-over you’ll be able to say good-bye to fillings, secure in the knowledge that you’re going to go to your coffin wearing an enigmatic diamond smile. And won’t that fuck with the archaeologists’ heads?

Unfortunately, there’s no such easy cure for facials, but you’ve acquired various coping strategies over the past four years in DBA: a ristretto and a trip to the bathroom first, so you’re awake and comfortable; a copy of the agenda and a full battery charge on your old-fashioned folio, so you can scribble notes on it and do what-if modelling on the fly; and a chunk of time allocated ahead of schedule so you know what the hell you’re meant to be talking about.

But sometimes they call the meeting at short notice, and there’s no agenda on the server, and your folio’s fuel tank is half-empty. So then you have to tough it out, like having a cavity drilled out without local anaesthetic. It’s all part of being constructive.

The sudden-death summons to an agenda-less face-to-face meeting about the Tiger Investments account does, it must be admitted, suggest something interesting is afoot. Chris handles their business, and while you haven’t had anything to do with it before, you sort of knew what it was about. TI is an angel specializing in high- tech start-ups, your typical Web 3.1415 outfits, and TI contracted DBA—in the person of Chris Morgan, full partner (and Director of Risk Management)—to produce full pre-IPO investment reports on their clients. Now one of them appears to have gone spectacularly pear-shaped.

“I got a call from TI yesterday evening,” Chris explains. He’s got that post-augmented crash look, as if he’s been burning bandwidth all night. He’s in his midfifties, with heavy black eyebrows and a perpetual worried expression behind his thick-rimmed glasses, as if he’s certain he’s forgotten something important. “Their latest clients have had a catastrophic intrusion. More to the point, their lead programmer is missing, and they’re screaming about an inside job. I don’t have the full picture yet, but it appears someone called in the police, and I understand the local force are escalating it to SOCA. TI have mostly cashed out, and obviously they’ll be under suspicion of ramping. Our direct liability is capped at five million, but the implication that we missed something is clearly there.” He pushes his specs up his nose. (He may be one of the last generation who grew up with PCs with glass tubes, but he’s kept abreast of the times: those high-resolution Armani displays conceal lasik-enhanced eyeballs.)

Brendan clears his throat. “What’s the plan?” he asks mildly.