Scrobble Exchange: A massively multiplayer game

Client: Sunil Shah, Last.fm - sunil@last.fm

Scrobble Exchange - A Massively Multiplayer Game

Last.fm is the world's most popular music recommendations website with tens of millions of users. We've recently built a prototype service (not available to the public yet) that shows in real time the number of people scrobbling<http://www.last.fm/help/faq?category=Scrobbling> (or listening to) a certain artist. This feed can be filtered by a number of variables such as geography and genre. Using this service and our extensive API<http://www.last.fm/api>, this project's goal is to create an online multiplayer game where users can invest in a portfolio of artists and gain returns based on the performance of their portfolio. The mechanics of the game are up to you but you should take steps to prevent cheating, and implement market dynamics so users' behaviour has a visible effect on the market price of an artist. A successful project would likely see implementation on Last.fm and be made available to our large userbase, so scability is a key design goal, as is portability to the Last.fm operating environment (Python or PHP against a Postgres database under Debian Linux).