After seeing the word "Ponzi" haphazardly misapplied to so many different things in the tech space[1], it's incredibly gratifying to see it used here properly!
“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#82How is this not a Ponzi scheme?
So a Ponzi scheme works like this: * You take money from investors * You then claim that you are making money from some legitimate business * You return money to earlier investors by just feeding them the money later investors put in So who are the early investors here, what's the legitimate business, and how are we taking money from later investors to give to early investors? EDIT: Guys, it's not a zero-sum game. Yo…
The economy is zero sum. The early investors are the people that bought in early and they cash out by selling to the later investors. The “legitimate business” claim is Axie itself and the claim that it can both reward investors who hold and rent Axies as well as pay people to play the game. An idea that only works if more people keep putting money in. To further this claim Axies developers make an awful lot of noise about how they are going to introduce new mechanics which will supposedly fix this.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the article?
Yes! However, as stated in the article, earning currency or items in videogames and reselling them have been around since the earliest days of online gaming. Plus these people are entrepreneurs working for themselves. I'm really not getting the link.
Because it doesn’t provide any value. The game developers created an artificial demand by making a particular aspect of the game so unenjoyable that some people would pay others to do it. They could, instead, just offer people the better experience uniformly and deliver more value to their users.
In this way, the demand and output is entirely artificial.
The author here describes the main difference this new model and older games where similar economies developed is that this is considered a primary feature of the game and people are entering it for the purpose of grinding for cash. I remember many of the other games described such as RuneScape, Second Life, WoW, etc. where people sold in game currency or profiles, but they weren’t advertised as economic opportunities, but as games you play for entertainment. VCs weren’t investing in them for this purpose either.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
So if I paid you a salary to dig a hole and fill it up again, ad infinitum, that job would have inherent value just because I'm paying you to do it? If so, welcome aboard.
My problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is the "inherent value." There are plenty of jobs that have little societal value, but provide plenty of value to the person employing the person. For example, plenty of jurisdictions give large tax breaks to farms, so it is reasonably common for developers holding land to turn their land into a "farm." One fellow I heard of put 6 cows on a plot of development land and paid so…
Yeah that's bullshit though - it's a warped incentive caused by social systems. In a healthy social system, these incentives to make money doing pointless bullshit should be minimised. David Graeber is an anarchist, and the whole bullshit jobs concept is a criticism of capitalism.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#85As I was reading Graeber, it's useful to imagine useless job economies of the past. Is a medieval abbey "useless?" Clergy? Servants to the clergy? How about courtiers? Courtiers' dress makers? These classes represented a small part of most societies in the past, though not always that small. In any case, it's obvious that whatever needs these jobs serve are cultural. Don't underestimate culture. Money is a cultural c…
In the book version of his essay, one of the things he talks about is how most of the things people would write to him about being "bullshit jobs" were not his original definition of bullshit jobs.
He gives the example of how a lot of people wrote to him about how useless hairdressers were, since people could just style their own hair. But, to Graeber, these are very much real jobs, because it's easy to see what was exchanged for payment (hair service.) Whether it was worth the money is a different question.
Clergy, in the middle ages, wouldn't be so much a bullshit job, but might be a privileged caste. The servants of the clergy, according to Graeber, are not bullshit jobs, because like the hairdresser, they are doing something for someone (presumably.) Doing laundry or bringing tea or whatever we are imagining they are serving as servants.
I believe in the book, he resigns to include the concept of "different types" of bullshit jobs, since most people seem to be unable to stick to his original definition.
The canonical bullshit job to Graeber would be someone in a large administrative bureaucracy. This is tied, in his original essay, to examining the statistics of increase in jobs in different sectors, cross-referenced with data about the growth in the productivity of a single worker. He shows that while manufacturing and service jobs have remained steady, "administrative" jobs have increased in proportion with productivity, which he says demonstrates the "bullshit job" as purely a way of having more administrators sitting around in meetings while the same number of people do actual stuff.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#86As I was reading Graeber, it's useful to imagine useless job economies of the past. Is a medieval abbey "useless?" Clergy? Servants to the clergy? How about courtiers? Courtiers' dress makers? These classes represented a small part of most societies in the past, though not always that small. In any case, it's obvious that whatever needs these jobs serve are cultural. Don't underestimate culture. Money is a cultural c…
What's the cultural value provided by sitting on Axie and grinding for hours?
It's the same cultural value provided by a slot machine.
A way to hack someone else's brain and turn them into a slave zombie.
But I guess a lot of "real" culture is basically trying to do something similar: religions, corporate cults, schools, etc. Those are maybe only superficially less grotesque.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#87In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…
Nitpicks because this game was my childhood. I totally support your sentiment though.
> It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level
* 97 logs (30 minutes)
* 293 oaks (1 hr)
* 714 willows (2.5 hr)
* 19,246 maple (very inefficient compared to willow cutting rate - 60 hour). If you did yews it would be many hundreds of hours.
About 70 hours done inefficiently.
> What if I wrote a macro
Macros were fine but easily detected due to the repeated patterns. Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014. Interesting how botting numbers drastically inflated player counts and engagement and the company Jagex became a private equity darling getting bought and sold several times, its almost like they had an incentive to keep the practice going.
> Economics
Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when Microsoft cloud launched.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#88After seeing the word "Ponzi" haphazardly misapplied to so many different things in the tech space[1], it's incredibly gratifying to see it used here properly! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698967
Thanks! I share your frustration :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808561
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#89Play-to-earn will die a painful death, but the takeaway here (which this article dodges) is that players should own their in-game assets. This is really where blockchain comes into play. Diablo 3 tried to do this, but they were too early and too greedy. If done correctly, owning your digital items is certainly more preferable than not. Again, this is touched in half a paragraph, but this is the real revolutionary asp…
The article “dodges” the notion players should “own” their in-game items to the same extent you underplay the implications. consider what the article emphasises: the contradiction implied in a live game being rebalanced in real time, affecting “owned” assets.
Do you really own it if the item’s form, function, and even in-game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised authority—the game’s administrators?
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#90How is this not a Ponzi scheme?
The claim seems to be that the game will attract people who don't view the game as an income stream, but rather just as a game. They pay the entry fee, and then may also buy assets from other players, thus funding the play-to-earners.
I think there's a slim chance this could be a viable business plan, but probably not in any socially-good way. The mobile games industry reaps a good chunk of its profits from "whales", customers who spend crazy-seeming amounts of money on games. Blockchain-based games may also be especially dangerous to young gamers who get access to a parent's credit card and rack up huge charges. This already happens in games like Fortnite, but whereas Epic Games can be pressured into giving refunds to parents when this happens, a blockchain offers no protection if the rules of the game don't allow for it.
We're probably better off if it _is_ a Ponzi scheme.