Birth of an idea

My name is Brian Shiau. I have been working on applying prediction markets to finance and consulting applications for the past couple of years. My advisors and I have discussed in depth how prediction markets can serve as great information aggregating tools for consulting and market research. However, participants in such prediction markets often get bored and so the markets cannot garner sufficient trading interest to maintain liquid trading and therefore do not predict any useful information.

Instead, I have decided to experiment by launching a prediction market for trading something fun--video games. I'm a gamer myself. I enjoy reading about upcoming games and gauging whether a game will catch enough buzz so that their multiplayer experience will be worthwhile when the game comes out. But there are just too many games to read every preview out there. I had just learned that Chris Taylor is working on Supreme Commander (the spiritual sequel to Total Annihilation, one of my favorite games) due out in early 2007. The game had been presented at E3 2006 and won the award for best strategy game, but apparently I had missed it in the deluge of news on Sony PLAYSTATION 3 and Nintendo Wii.

My idea is to create a website where gamers could learn more about upcoming games, then express their opinion about it by buying or selling a stock that serves as a proxy for the game's buzz. A visitor could then quickly see which upcoming games are attracting the most buzz--those with the highest value stock or the most trading volume. Essentially, this could be a new way of aggregating gamers' expectations for upcoming games and a faster way of identifying which games to learn more about.

So far, I've developed a homepage explaining the project and a template page for presenting a game and its stock.