Exercise: The Nigerian Scam Artist Game

#1 "To the moon Alice" Of course I'd like the moon to be in my pocket and not someone elses......actually wasn't that phrase a thinly veiled wife abuse threat.....perhaps I should have said Ad Astra...to the stars (latin)....or maybe....heck I got nothing for ya sorry.

#2 I think it would be interesting to have a game where your primary role is to try to be a scam artist, and game progress is measured by how many people you can convice to give you money. The marks would have to be fully AI controlled (obviously), and this game is almost exclusively AI driven.

You'll need to use something like Ted's emotion modelling concept, and integrate the concepts of a particular scam a player comes up with to influence the emotional model of population samples of the total available marks. Mapping scam elements to emotional trigger points in the model would be the most difficult, as you'd want to be able to give the player as much flexibility as possible in creating a new scam--having them simply select known elements from a state machine of some sort would obviously become quickly boring (although possibly fun for a short time).

#3 That could be kinda interesting - play with trying to appeal to their greed vs. their disbelief. Finding the right combination to make the "con" - without getting caught. Always have to watch out for the Interpol guy posing as a victim.

Or of course you could be would-be victim trying to hunt down the scammer, leading him on and trying to encourage him to reveal clues to his whereabouts...

Or maybe you could be a real deposed prince, trying to actually get your small fortune back...

#4 Interesting...but I'd like something that was more revolving around trust with *you* trying not to get scammed...a game in which there are many characters and at least 90% of them want to rob you (or perhaps kill you, but not in the traditional sense--i.e. putting a grenade launcher to your head, or the like--but something more subtle and indirect, perhaps), scam you in some way.
Maybe you're a homeless guy who finds a million dollars in a sack somewhere and your 'mission' is to get a life, but you're a tad loony and believe everyone is after you and your new money (in fact--like real life--most of them are after it). So, a case of non-delusional paranoia.

Maybe not too loony or else it just might turn into a "what's real?" sort of game, which wouldn't be a bad idea, I guess...haven't seen anything like that done in a game (instead of being a superhero, you are mentally messed up and need to get 'saner' just to be on equal footing with other characters; i.e. stop hearing voices, hallucinating, whatever...your character could even have a basic volition, will power--its own wonky AI--so that if you don't do certain things, your character will start to wander off, drift, get strange ideas, and be difficult to control... ranting in public places ;) ).

#5 Heh - we're getting some really cool, different ideas here!

#6 >your character could even have a basic volition, will power--
>its own wonky AI--so that if you don't do certain things
Your character has a compulsive gaming disorder. If you don't play the game often enough, your character's AI has to kick in and start the game up for you :) Joking aside, I like your ideas, Hempstock. A game that encourages you to role play an insane person... if you don't follow the behaviors that are expected for you particular form of mental disorder, then the AI kicks in to implement some other sort of mental disorder that's even worse. For example, maybe touching flag poles often enough will reduce the occurrence of halucinations. If the halucinations included a few fake flagpoles...

#7 Returning to the original scam idea, you could try for an Ocean's Eleven style game that is part RPG, part puzzle and part adventure. You play as the head of an expert stealing team (but non-violent, no go in and kill everything option). The RPG element comes in in recruiting your team over time, and dealing with people getting caught, maybe breaking them out of prison.
The actual stealing missions could be done on a contract basis, or you could just pick them up from sources in the underworld, allowing you to balance levels of risk against potential payoff. You then define a strategy for the mission and send in the team. Maybe you can cycle through control of characters, maybe you just play your single co-ordinator and have to give instructions. Particularly you can have someone hack into security networks and show you where the guards are etc. The trick would be in avoiding hitman style scripting as much as possible. The idea is that you can generate missions more easily by having more generic ai and events. The challenge should very much be in the planning, rather than the execution, (although things could sometimes go wrong :-) ). You can't really afford to be spotted (unless it is part of a very cunning plan) before you escape, so there has to be a right way to approach each problem.

#8 I rather fancy seeing a sim scammer style game, where your aim is to catch that sucker born every minute.

#9 Frankly I'd take a different track altogether because I like money. This would be ACADEMIC software, peddled to the fraud camps in Nigeria. Sort of like military sims for the government, only evil.

The game would be a Fraud Simulator. Essentially it would force players to mimic and apply real-life fraud techniques or face dire consequences. First the players are "trained" in a specific fraud technique (either through classroom work with their real-life 'professors' or, *better*, through an interactive training seminar found within our game). After they pass a Fraud Final Exam for the specific level, they embark on a simulated run which highlights the featured skill set.

Case in point:

One scam is to deposit and then outrun money. Ie. Deposit a check for an amount in one bank, then constantly open new accounts which reference that original account until you get far enough ahead to withdrawl the money two or three times over from different banks, leaving everyone holding the bag.

In the sim, players would have to case banks - make choices as to WHICH bank to defraud, how much to deposit, what banks to make false deposits into, identify concealment - a LOT of good evil all wrapped up into one velvety package of WRONGNESS.

Then i would sell it for huge profits to the fraud camps in Nigeria. Once sales there had stabilized, I would then market it to INTERPOL nations as a policing tool (at a significant markup).

#10 Pure genius :)

#11 If only Steve could learn to use his powers for good instead of evil... ;)

#12 This is a really clever idea, kudos to the creator, and to the great ideas employed thus far.

I see an immediate, practical use for this: as a game to help people train their bayesian filters. :) Not sure, necessarily, how practical it would be -- but, goddamn, it would be a lot of fun. And if it was client-server, even better -- we could use it to train a MASTER FILTER! Reward the people who got their spams past the filter, and then grade their spams on how convincing they are.

That last part would be hard to automate -- I can't really think of an easy way of doing it without human intervention; even natural-language AI stuff doesn't tend to be sophisticated enough to make any more than arbitrary desicions about whether or not a person is telling the truth (without an extensive base of built-in knowledge about the person, the world, and the domain under discussion -- and, in fact, neither do the people taken in by these scams, which is WHY they tend to be effective).

#13 >That last part would be hard to automate -- I can't really think
>of an easy way of doing it without human intervention

Automating it? No problem. The goal of these emails is to hook a victim and convince them to respond. A return email address will be supplied at the bottom of the scam (players put the symbols somewhere in their scam which the server will replace with a real email address by the game server). Players would also have other symbols they could use like to get the username of their target. Each scam is actually sent out to, say, 100 randomly chosen people off of a mailing list. Score is based on how many people send mail to . Of course you will only be on that mailing list if you "opt-in" just like any other marketing mailing list. I wonder why I don't remember signing up for all those viagra/cheap-meds/popular-software lists...

#14 :lol:

You realize that we've basically described a game-driven method for massively exploiting loopholes in bayesian filters.

A typical answer to why beating bayesian filters is a downhill game is that it's hard to get spam past 1 or 2 filters, and by the time you get your message tweaked so that it gets by a majority of them, the majority will have shifted to be largely immune, especially the large filters like gmail and yahoo.

The premise here is that our master server provides a breeding ground to test the best of the best, like a virus factory, and then we send our most potent warrior to wage war against the world.

#15 >You realize that we've basically described a game-driven
>method for massively exploiting loopholes in bayesian filters.
True, but it's completely harmless exploitation. We're just tricking some sap to send an email that increments some player's score. The same guy probably gets tricked by the real thing all the time.

>by the time you get your message tweaked so that it gets by a
>majority of them, the majority will have shifted to be largely immune
If players are provided with good information about the successes and failures of their comrades, they will adapt quickly enough. I have full confidence in the resourcefulness of hardcore gamers. On the other hand, there is also the issue of keeping our own filters up to standards. Maybe we wouldn't have to though. Do any of these big companies provide add on spam blocking for corporate email servers? We could contract the protection of some mailboxes to these spam blockers. Each time a player creates a new scam, we send it to each of the protected mailboxes in turn, sending the player feedback about which spam blockers caught him. If he makes it through enough of them (say we set the bar at 70%) then he is given the opportunity to send his warrior out into the world. If 70% isn't good enough for him, he might choose to hold back and keep tweaking for a while.

>The premise here is that our master server provides a breeding
>ground to test the best of the best, like a virus factory, and then
>we send our most potent warrior to wage war against the world.
In fact, it's even better than that. Our most potent (say top 10%) get to go out and wage war against the world, which itself is a further test of their abilities, allowing us to rank some portion as being top 1%. The test as to which ones make the top 1% (beating our own filters, the filters of corporate spam blockers, and beating the intelligence of our gullible targets) provides valuable feedback for developing the next generation of warriors.

#16 I'd see it as a puzzle style game where you're tracking down IP addresses and what-not Kevin Mitnik style to find the scammer. You wouldn't do actual hunting and typing of esoteric commands but rather the gameplay would be employed in some kind of puzzle type game. I know "puzzle game" is a genre but for brevity purposes that's the best I can do :)

#17 No worries, 'sokay... it's the spirit of the law that matters, not the letter.

There have been some really cool ideas here - and some truly bizarre ones! I think it's great!

#18 I think it is messed up that some people are advocating sending spam email and getting real people to reply all to play a game.