BlogShares

BlogShares is an online fantasy stock market for weblogs where players invest fictional money to buy stocks in an artificial economy. Weblogs are the companies, issuing shares and producing commodities called 'ideas'. Created in 2003 by Seyed Razavi, the game suffered a near-fatal crash later that same year, and was resurrected only after Jay Campbell of Santa Cruz Tech purchased the original code. Today the game has thousands of active members, tracking well over 7.2 million blogs and 6.1 million links between them as of January, 2007. BlogShares relies heavily on volunteers for most game support and development, and offers many opportunities for interested and active players to help build and maintain the site.

Gameplay and interaction
Blogshares is an online fantasy stock market for weblogs. Weblogs, or blogs for short, are valued by incoming and outgoing links which become business deals in the simulation. Each player starts with $500 which they use to speculate on the fortunes of thousands of blogs by buying and selling shares. A whole host of options exist for advanced players including gifting shares, leveraged buy-outs, artefact (spelled differently than artifact) building and usage, and additional share issues. Players can also take part in the ideas market, player bonds, voting blogs into categories, and reporting spam or dead listings. Extensive documentation is available in the BlogShares Help system. The BlogShares community utilizes on-site messaging, forums, an IRC channel, and numerous unofficial BlogShares-related blogs and sites maintained by players.

Objectives of the Game
Playing Blogs
The most basic objective of the game is to trade virtual shares in listed blogs. Each blog is automatically set to issue 5,000 shares, 1,000 of which are reserved for the blogger who actually authors the blog. Players can buy or sell shares from each blog's page in the game, and can manipulate prices through trading and artefact functions. The basic advice of 'buy low, sell high' applies. Through other artefact functions, players can forcibly take some shares in the blog from current holders, known as a restructure. A player may also grab all shares of a blog, known as a hostile takeover, though they must pay three times the current trading price of each share to accomplish this.

Industries and ideas
Industries in BlogShares are the same as categories. Ideas are produced when blogs (which have been voted into categories by players) are re-indexed. Essentially commodities, ideas are produced every 15-30 minutes in many of the 6,500+ Industries. Ideas production is based on a mathematical algorithm that takes various factors and variables into account to determine the number of ideas to "drop" on the market.

Apart from increasing wealth, ideas are also the product used to create the main gameplay tool, artefacts. The composite rankings also consider how many unique industries a player holds Ideas for, leading many players to attempt to own at least 1 idea in as many industries as possible. This is also known as "Collecting."

New Industries are added often, dictated by the dynamic emerging content of blogs. Some recent additions have captured the booming NeoPets site, several ailments and illnesses, and hundreds of cities and countries. Players can suggest new industries, and build up existing ones by voting blogs into correct categories.

The algorithm behind ideas production changed from the original code as rescued, to an algorithm developed by game player Alan Dean on . The algorithm worked partially as intended, but created a market where prices continually inflated and rarely fell. On the plus side, ideas became a long-term investment of choice for veteran players, with little volatility or risk. On the downside, free cash within the game over time became completely consumed by the ideas market as players became more and more invested.

This situation was temporarily resolved by "Black Friday", which occurred on November 25, 2005. BlogShares Currency was re-valued on a 1:10,000 ratio; the ideas market lost approximately 99% of its value. However, due to the uniform revaluation, no player lost their game ranking. While the revaluation and associated market crash alleviated the growth problem in the short term, it did not address the underlying cause. Over time, the market would consume all free cash once again.

Since Black Friday, another new algorithm was created and improved upon to solve the flaws of the previous implementation. The new math was eventually ratified by the and the . After much testing, the game was switched over to the new system on . Although it is too early to analyze the impact of the change fully, initial indications are good.

Composite rankings
In April 2006, a new scoring system was implemented which awards points based on player rankings in six categories: wealth, artefacts, chips, industry ideas, karma, and sigma. The original implementation ranked only the top 100 in each category, but in April 2007 this was expanded to the top 1000.

The top 1000 players in each category are awarded points based on the formula Points = 1001 - Rank. A player ranked #1 in wealth would receive 1000 points for that category, and the player ranked 1000 would gain 1 point. Only the Top 1000 in each category are considered, and a player who does not rank receives zero points for the category. The composite score is the total of all six categories for each player, which then determines the overall composite ranking. A player ranked #1 in all six categories would have the maximum of 6000 points. Rankings are recalculated every hour.

Gameplay
Artefacts
Artefacts are tools in the BlogShares universe. They have six functions that can affect blogs and one that affects ideas. Artefacts alone have no value, and do not contribute to overall net worth, but can be used to influence the player's wealth by raising share prices of blogs. To create an artefact, a player must have 10,000 idea commodities in the artefact's industry. Artefacts are only usable on blogs that have been voted into the artefact's specific industry. For composite rankings, the total number of artefacts are counted for each player.

Voting and moderating
Players can categorize blogs based on the content they find. For example, a blog written in Swedish by a woman in Kenya, which frequently includes discussions of cats and birds, could be correctly voted into the Swedish, Kenya, Female, Cats, Birds, and Animals / Pets industries. Descriptions are available for industries so that voters can readily understand how to vote certain blogs into their corresponding categories.

Moderators can pull up slates of ten votes and check them for accuracy. Upon approval or rejection, the original voter is either rewarded or penalized in both karma and chips based on the moderator's decision. Because of this power over the success or failure of others, players can only become a moderator by first achieving a karma level of 750.

Karma
Players receive karma for correctly voting blogs into categories. Each moderator-approved vote yields the voter 1 karma, as well as 5-40 chips depending on the specificity of the vote. Moderators also receive Karma and chips, gaining 1 karma and 25 chips for each vote moderated.

Sigma
Introduced in , sigma is awarded whenever a player's report of a spam blog (splog), dead listing, or non-blog, is used to remove a listing from the game. Sigma is awarded at the rate of 1 per report, which also gives the player 20 chips.

Currencies
The functional currency used in BlogShares is B$. The long form of this is referred to as 'BlogShares Dollars' or 'BlogDollars'. B$ is the currency used to purchase shares in blogs, ideas in industries, or can be traded among players. The B$ has no real-life value supported by Santa Cruz Tech.

The "social currency" of BlogShares is known as chips. They can be earned in a number of ways, including categorizing blogs (voting), answering quick survey questions, being gifted chips by another player, or receiving incoming referral links. Chips can then be used to participate in raffles, which can include real-life prizes, services, or game assets. Chips may also be used to buy advertisement space on the front page, or can gifted to other players.

Rules and enforcement
There are numerous rules players must follow in the game. Three frequently broken rules deal with the number of accounts, poor voting/moderating, and usage of unapproved scripts. Only one account may be created per player. Any automated off-site tools, such as a bot or page scraper, must be approved by game administration prior to any use. Players are expected to read and understand all game rules.

BlogShares has a powerful rule-enforcing department, the Blogshares Securities & Exchange Commission (BSEC). The BSEC is made up of several volunteer players who pursue cases of cheating, investigate said cases, and hold deliberations to determine guilt, and if necessary, punishment. The BSEC has the right to suspend players from the game, fine or penalize game assets, or recommend other administrative punishment. The BSEC has at times been accused of using their position to persecute players they dislike, but it should be noted that even these cases involved actions considered to be in violation of game rules. Further, the game's administration reserves the right to amend or overturn any BSEC decisions. Game administrators might take any means necessary to protect the game, its servers, and other players. Anyone caught breaking rules at BlogShares is known as a Cheatypants.

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