Dungeons and Dragons and Derivatives and DOOM

[Danascot]

"It is helpful to me, as both an intellectual exercise and as a way to paint a picture for me and for others, to try and explain the current economic disaster via metaphor. (In fact, this concept of metaphor vs. literalism was a major thread in yesterday’s discussion on TAE regarding my post on the Fall of Rome) Anyway…"

snip

"My thesis here is that the creation of the home computer, followed by the development of a public “Internet”, followed by the coming of expanded bandwidth and wireless connectivity and large server farms and the Google universe, followed by the development of online gaming communities and virtual worlds, has played an instrumental role in the impending downfall of civilization as we know it. And this I believe for two primary reasons. One reason is that this virtual world exists void of any external controls, is totally self-governed and thus susceptible to exploitation carried out by its most influential and powerful members. The second is that people who live and interact in these virtual worlds actually come to believe that their virtual existences are utterly real: that multi-billion dollar swaps and trades, created and consummated via email, are actually real in that they represent real wealth and real growth and real compliments to the nation’s GDP and real production of goods and services. But of course we know that these interactions are no more productive of real growth than are the harvests of a billion acres of corn in a virtual game world: unreal corn in a unreal world. Corn that cannot be eaten, cannot be used to feed cows, cannot be used to fuel automobiles.

"OK, so back to Gretchen M’s piece about mortgage modification. One of the reasons why mortgage modification will be an abject failure is because the rules of mortgage bundling viz securitization were created in a virtual world by dungeon masters who created all of the rules as a way to make themselves richer and who created a system of “regulation” (ha ha!) in a virtual world that only they could understand and that really had nothing to do with regulation but instead had everything to do with making ALL of the players in the game richer and richer. These folks didn’t give a shit about accounting standards or organization of data or anything like that because (a) it didn’t have any useful part in the game, (b) it didn’t compliment their collection of more constitution points (money?), and (c) they were in charge of the whole game so why create silly rules that they could simply make up as they went along. Look at Paulson and Bernanke now! Making up rules as they go along, because they have been 2 of the primary game-masters and they have been ruling these virtual worlds without any difficulty for years and simply making it up as they go along and making themselves billionaires in the process."

http://ashizashiz.blogspot.com/2008/12/dungeons-and-dragons-and-derivatives.html?ref=patrick.net

[notesdev]

1. Someone already thought of that

minus the derivatives: