Are leaked BitTorrent releases being used to gain knowledge about show quality? That's funny, because I believe there was a certain Penn professor who had a similar idea years ago that was told he was crazy and didn't know the business.

Failure cascades. Interesting due to its potential to use real video games to do good social science. I think this approach holds more promise than building fake games to do so, because even with large grants you can't compete with the resources put into a commercial game. There's a classic tradeoff between the large volume of difficult-to-interpret data which comes from observational studies vs. small amounts of highly detailed data which comes from experimental studies which seemsrelevant here.

--Ari