A reminder that the Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis at one point in his pre parliamentary career did extensive work on the economics of MMOs for valve, eve online.
“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
231–240 of 700 posts
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#232In 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…
I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…
That’s a very romantic view of the goals of game design. For a live service game the metrics to hit are mainly retention and monetization. Whether something is subjectively fun doesn’t really come into the picture
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#233I still totally fail to understand this concept. Is there anything here beyond impotent whining? What are they proposing to do? They subjectively call it bullshit but other people choose to play totally free from compulsion.
What should we do? Physically restrain them from playing?
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#234So many of these conversations can be broken down to the things you find valuable might not be the thing others find valuable and there is no right or wrong. You either get it or you don't. I have zero desire to collect model trains, but I understand some people do and there is probably value there in that community.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#235Meanwhile there are legit decentralized, fun, self hosted games whose hosts barely make any money to sustain their servers. But because they are truly decentralized, VCs won't touch them because they can't control them. I swear this web3 thing will die from lack of market fit
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#236In 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…
I wonder if we’ll have politicians and political philosophers in the near future who will credit MMO games for awakening their keen eye on societal issues. MMO worlds and their economies taught many how the basics of our economy works. As a kid you got exposed to virtual versions of negative aspects of free markets that went against the meritocratic ethos of the game. (Especially if you were one of the kids not permi…
No post body was provided.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#237In 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…
I traded custom scripts on a IRC channel. People would pay me with party hats and Santa hats which were some of the most ridiculously priced assets in the game.
The macro client even had a captcha queue where other miners could earn credits by filling out the captchas other players were getting and then use the credits to have other people fill out their captcha. This way you could leave it running all night as long as you did your part . You would get a captcha if you did the same thing for too long
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#238No post body was provided.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#239Certain jobs sufficiently far from the obvious value creation have a tendency to look useless. In many cases they are useless and could be bundled into other jobs, but when a job is over loaded there is efficiency to unbundling them. Factor in the communications synchronization overhead and it's no wonder that small organizations can perform incredible work. Large organizations have scale though.
I think there’s something to this comment and the one from zzbzq about Graeber’s “canonical bullshit job.” I’m also drawing some threads from Goedel Escher Bach. Perhaps the growth in the administrative sector is a new class of job, that results from scale, coordination costs, Metcalfe’s law, and Goodhart’s law. The job is to combat the diminishing returns on communication decay due to scale by measuring the system a…
Scale increasingly becomes constrained by organizational interfaces. At a certain point, trying to add people to an organization actually makes it less productive unless their contributions can be abstracted globally.
At a certain extent, the system must become inhuman: metrics and interface contracts are needed to prevent overhead growth.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#240Axie 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,…
This. Axie Infinity only had traction, because the earned coin had speculative value. The traction was from people "playing-to-earn" as a job. I doubt that there are that many people playing for the fun of it. When the token loses value, there isn't a reason to continue playing.