What do Atari and Bitcoin have in common? The effect of imitation in technological work

Under a layer of cement in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico (USA), there are more than 700,000 Atari game cartridges. Among other things, there are copies ET, a game based on the film by Steven Spielberg. This heartbreaking scene symbolizes the collapse of video games in 1983, when the demand for games like ET it plummeted and Atari threw away (literally) hundreds of thousands of cartridges to cut shipments and keep prices down.

But why did the demand for Atari games grow exponentially, only to then plummet? Once original Atari games such as centipede And space invadershit the shelves of stores, a lot of fakes flooded the market.

When innovations become profitable, there are many imitators who seek to make the original work profitable without taking on the high risks of innovation. This phenomenon is not only characteristic of Atari or video games, but also of creative products. For example, there are over 20 movie sequels. Avengers And X-Men from Marvel.

As Atari games grew in popularity in the 1980s, new creators and programmers entered the video game business, creating literal copies or plagiarisms of the most successful games (such as space invaders), How Phobos, fluffy, Quarkson, Yachtman, caterpillar And digger.

Since imitators copied the original and then copied the copies, the first programmers to create groundbreaking Atari games such as pong, the battle And super breakthroughthey were no longer directly involved. His creativity and innovation was diluted by a large number of video game developers who copied each other.

An international team of researchers has studied this process, which we have called “creative dissolution.” In a recent study, we analyzed how imitations affect the product. We wondered: were there measurable warning signs before the collapse of a multi-billion dollar market like Atari’s? The results of this research can help investors and consumers better understand the trends and cycles of creative products, as well as distinguish between innovative creators and those who imitate them.

Cycles of growth and collapse

Our team addressed this issue using our collective expertise in network theory, anthropology, cultural evolution, and evolutionary biology.

We looked at three classes of creative products that experienced exponential growth followed by sudden collapse: the aforementioned Atari games from 1979 to 1991, cryptocurrencies from 2009 to 2020, and Reddit posts in 2018. for the attention and money of consumers, flooded the market and diluted the original work.

Simulation is especially easy for products based on text or code, since small changes in words or characters are considered a new version. Reddit posts, for example, are usually short posts written in English, very often copying previous posts with minor changes. Atari games are a set of 8-bit machine code sequences that have been given to the company’s programmers and may also have been copied or reverse engineered by other companies. Cryptocurrency white papers are documents written in English that contain technical information about the currency and business.

Can imitation predict failure?

In all three cases, we measure repetition, which in linguistics is called lexical diversity, and originality, measured through the information density of the text. For example, “hello, hello, hello!” It’s more repetitive than “hello, how are you?” This second sentence is also more original, as it includes new words not found in the other example.

Comparing the uniqueness and repetitiveness of a work with previous versions can give us an idea of ​​the level of plagiarism. If new texts are copied and edited with little originality from earlier texts, repetition and uniqueness should decrease.

In fact, we found that the collapse in the number of product launches was preceded by a certain decline in originality in each of our case studies. Between 1980 and 1983, the number of video games released by Atari grew exponentially. This phase of tremendous productivity corresponds to a marked and permanent loss of originality in computer codes.

That is, with each copy, the underlying machine code of games became more and more simple and repetitive. The imitation and duplication of the contents of the originals contributed greatly to the downfall of the market.

Innovation as a collective process

When modifications are made by imitators rather than the experts who created the original product, those experts’ original ideas can disappear under the layers of mods. This creative dilution describes content that is copied and copied again with a few innovative modifications.

As copies multiply and the number of works grows, the creativity that gave freshness to innovative products is increasingly buried like Atari cartridges in a landfill.

For Atari, over time, there were too many video games similar to space invaders. In the case of cryptocurrencies, many digital currencies like bitcoin have emerged, although it is still the most popular. On Reddit, due to too many posts on hackneyed topics, users lost interest, which reduced the number of subscribers.

When imitations flood the market, the professional creativity that acted as a catalyst wanes. Consumers lose interest, as with Atari, or investors lose their money when they can no longer tell an innovation from a bad imitation.

Can we see it?

Imitation is not bad. After all, copying successful ideas is the key to the development of culture and technology. New products are rarely created in isolation; ideas from the past are the basis for future innovation.

A boom in certain creative products is likely to end in a bust when imitators far outnumber the supply of fresh ideas or creativity. The methodology used in our study can predict this collapse. In the future, this analysis may be applied to complex systems such as technology patents and musical genres.

Salva Durán-Nebreda, Research Fellow, High Council for Scientific Research (CSIC); Michael J. O’Brien, professor of history at Texas A&M University in San Antonio; R. Alexander Bentley, Professor of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, and Sergi Valverde, Staff Fellow, CSIC

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.

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