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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#141

Post by thelamest »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #130
gitfan86 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what people don't seem to understand about BitCoin. It is cashflow negative, Money has to keep coming in to keep the price up due to paying miners. It is totally fine if you think BTC is better than the USD or Gold for whatever reason. But Bitcoin is still cashflow negative. You have to keep pumping money into it to keep up its value. Where is that money going to come from? Is it coming from Tether? Is it com…

I must admit I don't understand why it is "cashflow negative". I'm not invested in any crypto, but I have thought about it, and my casual thoughts have come to the opposite conclusion. The higher the price of a cryptocurrency, the greater the interest in mining and investing. It seems like a positive feedback loop to me. Why is it not?

Where’s the value added coming from though, and how far are you from there? If crypto enables someone to dodge taxes, sell drugs, or wire remittances with less overhead, that’s a potential value add [arguably, with externalities]. For how many of such activities do we need byzantine consensus, i.e. can they stay competitive in the long term with solutions built on tradfi & SQL? How much of these gains can be captured from sidelines by, essentially, exchange rate traders? Positive feedback loops without a sustainable value proposition will pop sooner or later.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#142

Post by anonporridge »

gitfan86 wrote: post #105
duskwuff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a there there without an underlying token that's gone up XX% in the last N months and everyone hopes will still go up XX% in the next N months? Alternatively, even simpler: where is the money coming from ? A bunch of people playing a game are a closed system, and no value is created by playing the game. If the only reason why players are earning money from this game is because more people are continually b…

This is what people don't seem to understand about BitCoin. It is cashflow negative, Money has to keep coming in to keep the price up due to paying miners. It is totally fine if you think BTC is better than the USD or Gold for whatever reason. But Bitcoin is still cashflow negative. You have to keep pumping money into it to keep up its value. Where is that money going to come from? Is it coming from Tether? Is it com…

Isn't the same true of gold?

The gold supply is inflating at about the same rate as bitcoin right now, but has enough incoming cash flows to keep the priced propped up enough to maintain a $10 trillion market cap. Obviously some of that incoming cash flow is for actually generative industrial use cases, but it's a minority, https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in.... The lion's share of incoming money flow is for jewelry, long term savings/investment, and central bank holdings, and you could argue that most of the jewelry use case only exists because it's a good store of value, since we can easily make jewelry that looks as pretty for much cheaper than the real thing.

So, since most of the cashflows into gold are just people holding long term with the expectation that there will still be people wanting to buy it for investment purposes in the future, and this scheme has worked incredibly well for 5000 years, why couldn't the same be true of bitcoin?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#143

Post by danShumway »

Everything old is new again. You could go back and look over the game design discourse about pay-to-win games and microtransactions and see the same discussions about how these systems would influence players and designers. You could go back and look at the discussions around Facebook social games back when they were a big thing. And all of those arguments still hold up today.

Play-to-earn games are the same system, just with a bit of a pyramid scheme glued on top so that players will think they're part of the grift.

What players of these play-to-earn games are hoping is that the grind in the game is so heckin awful and unpleasant that other players will pay someone else in order to skip that. But I don't think I'm unique in saying that I personally like my games to be fun, and I think that maybe something is going wrong with a game design process when a game is so much of a chore that people are paying to skip the game. Imagine making a movie where people didn't give you money to see it, but to stop seeing it :). That's the play-to-earn model, making something so artificially unpleasant and badly designed that players believe there's value in making the game shorter and will literally hire someone else to play it for them.

And this is not a new thing, you can go back to the grinding process in Runescape, to Cow Clickers on Facebook, it's the same grift over and over just in different decorative hats and with different little sparkly jpegs. It's always the same proposition: do something that's been made artificially boring and hopefully you or someone else will think there's value in paying someone real money to skip it.

----

Which I guess live your truth if that's what you want out of games, but I personally like games that make me excited to play them or at least give me some kind of meaningful emotion, where I play them because I like feeling that emotion and because the gameplay is fun.

Incredibly, it turns out there are designers who are somehow through some strange magic able to design games that are so fun that they don't even need to bribe players into playing them. Their games are so fun that people actually (get this) pay the designers money to be able to play them more, not less. It's the complete inverse of the play-to-earn model where actually all of the players in the game enjoy what they're doing, and the game isn't just a platform for the company or for a subset of players to make a job out of extracting profit from another part of the playerbase's boredom, because in these games nobody in the playerbase is bored.

If you've never tried one of these games in the "fun" genre before, you've got to check them out, they're really something else.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#144

Post by larsiusprime »

nlh wrote: post #38

A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project? I do this a lot because I've made the conscious (and perhaps financially foolish) choice to stay away from everything crypto/blockchain related (for now, at l…

I did a report on this game for a client a few months back -- the amount of daily earnings a player can expect has crashed significantly over the past few months, and it's only gotten worse ever since.

https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1459191090100244483

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#145

Post by Animats »

Axie Infinity spokesperson: "It is a little bit dependent on capital inflows."

Er, yes. All those players are paying about $1000 to get into the game and then grinding away to get Smooth Love Potion tokens. This is the SLP price graph.[1] Down 92% since the peak. A lot of suckers lost big. Many of them poor people in the Philippines, where Axie is big.

Axie is frantically trying to obfuscate this with a second token, PR, claims of new revenue sources, etc. It's not working. In the end, it's a classic Ponzi scheme, and it collapsed after only a few months.

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#146

Post by NieDzejkob »

ericjang wrote: post #79
nlh wrote: post #38

A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project? I do this a lot because I've made the conscious (and perhaps financially foolish) choice to stay away from everything crypto/blockchain related (for now, at l…

I agree with your point that the operative word here is "earn", and not "play". To play the devil's advocate: many crypto developers continue to build in the space (or have done it in the past) despite large drawdowns in token prices (denominated in USD). Would that constitute a sufficient signal that "there is something real there", distinct from the question of "is the valuation too high"?

Nah, it's just that the target audience ("investors") won't care about the few bucks.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#147

Post by dvt »

blueboo wrote: post #89
dvt wrote: post #51

Play-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?

> 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?

This happens literally all the time with Magic cards, lol.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#148

Post by vsareto »

lordnacho wrote: post #15

> I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism But if we take Darwinian evolution as our analogy, there are plenty of strategies that essentially piggy back on other organisms. Cuckoo birds, intestinal worms, a whole coterie of sexual behaviors. It's also the everyday experience of just about everyone that they perceive certain others to no…

Capitalism has very little in common with Darwinism because of the nature of the rules involved. Darwinism has a lot of physical rules which you can't circumvent. Capitalism deals far more in social or soft rules which can be circumvented and give you an advantage if you aren't caught. And if you are caught, the punishment might only be a percentage of the total profits.

I'm not going to stay alive because the universe forgot to enforce the dying part of me being mauled by a bear.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#149

Post by mrtksn »

duskwuff wrote: post #52
nlh wrote: post #38

A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project? I do this a lot because I've made the conscious (and perhaps financially foolish) choice to stay away from everything crypto/blockchain related (for now, at l…

> Is there a there there without an underlying token that's gone up XX% in the last N months and everyone hopes will still go up XX% in the next N months? Alternatively, even simpler: where is the money coming from ? A bunch of people playing a game are a closed system, and no value is created by playing the game. If the only reason why players are earning money from this game is because more people are continually b…

Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free to use? They all were working to "make the world a better place" and not making money as they were burning billions each year, challenging the traditional and profitable companies. With Amazon prices were amazing, you had unlimited rights and not only buying but also selling was great. Bezos was worth quite a much but his company never made any profit up until a few years back.

The news business was destroyed in the process, just as the retail and once the establishment lost its ground the money began poring in. From 90's up to late 2000's the internet was amazing as everything was paid by people who were about to reap their investment back a decade later.

My point is, following the money is tricky. Maybe we are at the verge of another change where the costs are payed by crypto bros who will be splitting countries and starting wars once they are done growing the landscape.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#150

Post by scatters »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #69
advisedwang wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done. There's no actual economic output to paying people to break rocks.

Exactly. One could make an argument that the work some users put in, once sold, result in value to the buyer, but that value isn’t generated by the worker. The developers created the scheme and could deliver the value directly at no cost to all players, poor and wealthy, but instead chose to create meaningless work by making grinding opportunities.

I have the feeling that buyers feel they are getting more value if the item was "generated" by grinding than if it was created ab nihilo by the developers. Why, I have no idea.
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