New twist in space game
Posted: Monday, January 15, 2007 9:14 PM by Alan Boyle
Nine months ago, economist/entrepreneur Sam Dinkin set up an online skill game called Space Shot. People paid $3.50 a shot to forecast the weather, in hopes of winning a future suborbital trip into space. But so far, the competition has yielded no winners - so today Dinkin launched the venture's second stage.
Instead of pay-for-play, the contest is now free for players, and dependent instead on advertising revenue. The offered prizes now include a zero-gravity airplane ride as well as flights on next-generation suborbital, orbital and round-the-moon spacecraft that have not yet been built. And the target market is next-generation as well: Dinkin is hoping to grab the attention of pre-teens who are years away from being able to take their ride to space. Will Space Shot 2.0 fly any higher than 1.0? That all depends on the kids.
Dinkin, who has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Arizona, admits that Space Shot 1.0 taught him a lot about the online marketplace as well as the appetite for spaceflight.
"Being first means that you get to find out the easy way, or the hard way, for everything that happens in the market," he told me today. "A lot of people learned that it's really hard to charge for online content. Well, it's really hard to charge for online skill games. So we're not."
The basic premise for Free Space Shot has been fine-tuned: Contestants still vie against each other to predict the high and low temperatures as well as the humidity and precipitation levels at New York's Central Park on the following day. The winners of each head-to-head contest rise to the next level, or milestone.
To win, say, a zero-G flight, you would have to win 19 straight head-to-head contests. It's kind of like an NCAA basketball bracket, except that there are 524,288 entries on the bottom rung of the bracket. For the higher-level prizes, there'd have to be millions or even billions of entries on the bottom rung.
The suborbital trip would be on Rocketplane Kistler's rocket-jet hybrid plane, and the orbital trip would be on the Kistler K-1 vehicle, also under development by Rocketplane Kistler. The round-the-moon trip would be via Lunar Express, a space-transport system that's been proposed by Constellation Services International. None of these vehicles are yet ready for prime time.
Who on Earth would have the motivation and the time to put so much playing effort into something so speculative? Dinkin is putting his money on the 9- to 12-year-old market. He pointed to statistics indicating that pre-teens can spend several hours a day playing video games - and said the kids represent a coveted market for advertisers.
"At all of the conferences we went to, the people who were most excited about this were not the people who saw the moon landing in the '60s - it was the kids," Dinkin said. "It's intuitive, if you think about it. Their parents tell them they can be astronauts, and they believe it."
"Their attention is worth enough so that, if they believe, we can actually pay for a spaceflight," he said. "Three hours a day, that'll generate hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars of advertising revenues."
Space Shot is gathering together online resources and even lesson plans (focusing on weather prediction) to attract students, parents and teachers to its Web site. The back story behind Space Shot's weather-guessing game also has been tweaked to be more kid-friendly. The old pay-for-play contests will be transitioned over to the new system, with active contestants inserted into an equivalent place in the new brackets, Dinkin said.
I wondered whether some parents might think it unseemly for a Web site to draw kids into an online game, even though there's no money involved. Dinkin replied that Space Shot 2.0 received a positive reception during test runs in Austin, Texas, and Mexico City. To ease grown-ups' concerns, Space Shot says that parents or teachers should sign up for pre-teen players - and notes that young winners would not be able to fly into space until they turn 18.
"We're really, really trying to make it easy for parents to say this is a great idea," Dinkin said.
He said kids already take part in contests ranging from scratch-off games at fast-food restaurants to online video-game tournaments.
"If they're going to play one, this is a particularly good one," Dinkin said of Space Shot. "It's like the Teachers in Space program - this uses an interesting premise to get the kids interested in math and science."
For more background, check out Dinkin's article this week in The Space Review - then let me know what you think of this play by adding your comments below.
Update for 9:35 p.m. ET: Dinkin sent along these additional observations on the issue of kids and the weather prediction game:
"Regarding gambling, our game doesn't cost anything so it doesn't fit the definition of gambling. It also isn't a game of chance. People spend hundreds of millions of dollars researching the weather at the National Weather Service and AccuWeather. Would you say that Willard Scott has no skill in predicting the weather on the TODAY show? Weather prediction is a skill. It's a skill that is not respected, which was part of the premise of the Nicolas Cage movie 'The Weather Man.' One reason for this is cognitive bias; people remember when the weather forecast was wrong and don't remember when it was right. This is an asset for Free Space Shot because the skill must be perceived as one where a kid can do as well as a weatherman, at least sometimes. It is a fine balance because if it is a skill that is so hard that people of average skill perceive they can't be competitive in a tournament, then few will want to play.
"The kids will do better than the weathermen, certainly as a group. I say that as an economics expert. We anticipate making genuine improvements in forecasting. How often do you look up yesterday's weather forecast? These kids will. In aggregate, they will do better than any weather expert, and we plan to provide that forecast to the media and the players.
"Would you ask Willard Scott for me if he is willing to test his mettle against the average prediction for Central Park for 150 Austin middle schoolers for a week? If he wins, Space Shot will take him on a zero-G airplane flight (a $3,750 value) and we will have a second competition: Who can fly in zero-G with your camera crew and keep our breakfast down?
"If he loses, he has to report what the kids say the high and low in Central Park will be for a week on the air, and he has to charter a zero-G airplane for a couple of days (approximately $150,000) so all the kids who competed against him can fly in zero-G."
"What do you say?"
Dinkin's Space Shot may not be a gambling game, but there's no question that Dinkin himself is a gambling man. In fact, I'd be afraid that such a challenge would run afoul of Space Shot's own terms and conditions (see Item 2a). In any case, let this stand as notice to Willard Scott - just in case he's a gambling man, too.
