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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#241

Post by TameAntelope »

danShumway wrote: post #170
58x14 wrote: post #32

In 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…

I wouldn't think of a game like Runescape as one thing, but more of a collection of many things.

What you pay for is the ability to skip the parts of the game you don't like, so you can focus on the parts of the game you do like. Ideally everyone would like everything you make, but that feels more like a naive way of thinking than to worry about people wanting to skip parts of your game.

As long as "pay to skip" doesn't become "pay to win", I'd say a game is probably fine, overall, if people are enjoying substantial portions of that game, even if they're not enjoying all of it.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#242

Post by betwixthewires »

I'm a bit of a fan of the whole cryptocurrency thing, the early scope of the concept anyway, replace money, programmatic agreement enforcement, creating financial assets that can't be controlled, incentivizing things that need incentivizing and all that. It's interesting stuff.

But this whole metaverse and play to earn is obvious nonsense.

But then, if you show me a slot machine and explain it to me in plain English, that it pays out less than you put in, that it is designed to addict you, that you sit there sticking quarters in and pulling a handle all day, I'd laugh at you before I stuck a dollar in the thing. But people do. All the time. So I'm not so sure this nonsense is going to crash and burn, but I'm certain it isn't worthwhile in the least.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#243

Post by mgraczyk »

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…

Money doesn't have to come from anywhere. Sometimes new value is created and the money is brand new. This is how GDP grows.

In the case of BTC, it's pretty clear that a huge portion of the market cap didn't come from anywhere. It's new capital. That doesn't mean it can't go to 0 and vanish overnight. But it does mean that play to earn games don't always need money coming in to pay out.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#244

Post by orasis »

Play-to-Earn with real world earnings will never be sustainable given the state of the art in reinforcement learning.

The RL game playing agent essentially becomes a form of NFT mining that no human could ever complete against.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#245

Post by Calavar »

jayd16 wrote: post #183

Selling digital goods for real money is pretty well tread. What does web3/crypto add here? Game assets can't be used in another game. You need full support from the game developer. The devs could much more easily and cheaply sell the assets direct or support trading. If the game is distributed or has private servers or something that might warrant defi trades, but wouldn't gamers just hack their own items? If they co…

It is a marketing gimmick. Like the article says, the addition of NFTs is just a bunch of techno mumbo jumbo to build a facade of credibility and blind people to the fact that these games are digital Ponzi schemes.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#246

Post by gjs278 »

58x14 wrote: post #32

In 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…

No post body was provided.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#247

Post by themacguffinman »

danShumway wrote: post #170
58x14 wrote: post #32

In 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…

While I personally agree with your view that gameplay should always be actually fun, I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers.

Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game-like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In fact, the harder your life is, the more rewarding it can be.

These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world and life that's more rewarding than reality. The parallels with real life are direct and intentional: "grinding" is like real work that earns you fungible profit that you can then trade to skip other types of work that you don't like to do. This is a proven loop of reward in reality and it works in games too, being consistently "fun" isn't the only way for a game to satisfy players. I can't speak to Axie Infinity which seems like it's not even well developed to that extent, but for other games in the field these grinds aren't exactly a failure of design, they're effective at constructing a life-like reward system that doesn't solely rely on "fun".

Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial, hence the whole article about this being a bullshit job. I personally avoid these types of games (basically all MMOs) for this reason and I don't see how web3 makes any of it better. But I find it hard to criticize it objectively. I think real life is bullshit anyway, so the cheap imitation of life that these games offer isn't always completely worse. I can see why many people willingly buy into it.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#248

Post by webinvest »

stnikolauswagne wrote: post #194
wswope wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014. There’s a weird, secret history around Runescape botting that I really hope gets told in full one day. Essentially, the biggest and best botting client from the 2008-2011 era was Powerbot, later rebranded RSBot. It was written and managed mostly by some CS student from the UK, who went by the handle Jacmob, and used some bytecode editing + r…

For those interested, here is a pretty well produced video on the situation: https://youtu.be/4ELRFROUf64 One thing that was left out in your summary is how jacmob was hired: Shortly after the Bot Nuke he showed up at the annual convention of Jagex and showed off his (still working) new Bot to the one of the heads of Jagex, who ended up hiring him.

The Youtuber Colonello also has a lot of good videos on this topic

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#250

Post by Liron »

Here's patio11's thread: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1459682519360491523

I was shocked to see A16z recently investing $150M in Axie Infinity and doubling down on their justification of play-to-earn as a coherent concept, as if it's not fundamentally a pyramid scheme. It's lowered my expectation of what passes for thought leadership in our industry.

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