This weekend I hope to release Rock Exchange, my latest WikiGame on the RockMonkey wiki. I’m just finishing performing some tests and fine-tuning on it now. Here’s a screenshot:
In Rock Exchange, players will be able to invest their hard-earned Rocks (a unit of currency) in shares in the various pages on the RockMonkey wiki. The value of these shares will fluctuate based on several characteristics, and players will have to play the odds in order to know when to buy and when to sell to gain a return on their investment. A page’s shares fluctuate based on:
- Popularity: so if a new page seems likely to attract the attention of a lot of passing Googlers, it’s worth investing in, whereas an “in joke” that’s died out is not. Similarly, players can manipulate wiki page links in order to attract interest. The most valuable indicator of popularity is how many people come to the site for the first time, entering on a given page.
- Investment: investment in pages will put positive pressure on their value, but selling shares damages this value by flooding the market – who’ll be first to pull out of a high-flying page, thereby forcing other shareholders to suffer?
- Interference: there will be several methods for people to drastically interfere with the value of their shares and the shares of the other traders, but these won’t necessarily be immediately apparent.
- Random factors: the rock market, like the stock market, is an unpredictable animal, and there’ll be a small amount of luck in any investment.
The game’s pretty much “ready-to-play” in it’s most basic form right now, but I want to run it alone awhile longer and see if I can improve the balancing factors in it.
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