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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#291

Post by TheGigaChad »

meheleventyone wrote: post #82
renewiltord wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#292

Post by anigbrowl »

mherdeg wrote: post #18

Is this different from the phenomenon described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming ? Honestly it seems like a pretty great career -- you get to spend your time indoors, probably somewhere climate controlled with electricity and restrooms. This is way better than the workhouse. Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically donating their wealth to others, like a kind of privatized welfare. If p…

Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically donating their wealth to others

No, donating would be 'here, have a bunch of games resources, enjoy.' People who buy virtual goods are purchasing status - maybe purely social status Veblen goods (eg hats and other rare-but-fundamentally useless items) or maybe strategic status (eg weapons/armor that give you a combat buff in their own right, plus might also indicate that you're tremendously experienced if you earned rather than purchased it, which is often unknown to the other players).

some years ago I got into a Roman Gladiator game that ran on this model, that was both fun and easy (for me, ie I happened to be good at it). So I ground my way to being quite a high level player and winning a number of fancy items, and accepting challenges from other players. In a well balanced game every item buff has some sort of weakness, eg it's vulnerable to particular spam attacks or regular hits from some other specific weapon. I had figured out most of these by grinding my way up, and after a while I noticed that people who had a lot of fancy items got super abusive if they lost a combat to grinding techniques rather than better gear, to the point where multiple players started harassing my platform account rather than just my in-game character. There was a big inverse snobbery against working too hard at it; I was even accused of 'violating the spirit of the game' ¯\(°_o)/¯

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#293

Post by rideontime »

tfang17 wrote: post #213

Axie is built on Ethereum, meaning in-game assets (NFTs) are technically transferrable off-platform. Vitalik (creator of Ethereum) attributed one of his reasons for creating Ethereum to Blizzard taking away one of his in-game items in World of Warcraft in 2010: "I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard r…

Axie has banned the assets of players who have violated the TOS, so apparently they aren't decentralized enough to prevent Vitalik's origin story from reoccurring. Or is your point that those assets could be used in another game? Why would anybody do that?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#294

Post by rideontime »

EGreg wrote: post #265

Did the SEC give Axie Infinity a no-action letter? How do they get around the securities laws thing?

By ignoring it until the government catches up, like every other startup does with regulations which should preclude their "disruptive" business model.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#295

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

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…

> It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this [woodcutting] level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum.

[laughs in agility]

Anyway I agree with Runescape teaching some real world skills. Runescape (and some other multiplayer games) also taught me about scams and I think trained me to be skeptical whenever something seems too good to be true. For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#296

Post by prepend »

Animats wrote: post #151
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…

Bitcoin has a use case for money laundering, tax evasion, evading China's exchange controls, and drugs. That market turned out to be larger than expected.

Interesting it’s like meta money laundering. It allows regular folks to make money off the illegal economy.

In some ways this was the extra profits banks made off illegal activities but that was largely held within the bank, not available to normies.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#297

Post by andrepd »

tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #87
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…

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 w…

>Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when Microsoft cloud launched.

I mined cpuminer cryptocoins on azure free servers about this time. I got banned fast but still made a few 100s of dollars (which is basically a million to a 16 or 17 year old like me).

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#298

Post by syvolt »

cortesoft wrote: post #280
TameAntelope wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" does…

I don’t know if it is possible to have “pay to skip” not become “pay to win” in an MMO. The whole point of an MMO is that your character progresses and gets better as they do more things in the game. If you are paying to skip something that makes your character better, your character will be better than if you didn’t pay to skip that. If what you are skipping is not making your character better, you wouldn’t be doing…

People getting around games ToS' will always be a thing - since Runescape is the example being used, it is expressly banned to both purchase and sell gold coins. This is not a problem exclusive to MMOs, it's a problem with any game with a leveling system, currency, or items that are tradable between players.

Examples: FIFA packs, Runescape/MMO gold, League of Legends accounts/boosts (names as well) , Valorant accounts/boosts, CS:GO items (names, accounts and boosts as well), Neopets items and gift boxes, Diablo 3 boosts/accounts, and on and on...

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#299

Post by agentdrtran »

np- wrote: post #283
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #260

The thing I really like about this article is that, at least in my mind, it really helped me clarify what I think of as "Bullshit Jobs". It's not so much "do you consider your job useless", but it's more along the lines of "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally, arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?" A great example of this is tax departments at large companies that look for tax avoidance strate…

> "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally, arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?" But isn’t this basically every job that doesn’t directly support a human need (like food, clothing, shelter)? Just arbitrarily working to meet some other human’s desires?

Meeting a desire is not a bullshit job, depending on the desire. One example in the book is a receptionist. Some places need receptionists to answer phones or receive packages, but one receptionist was hired at a firm that didn't need her to do any work - but a competing firm in the same building had one, so they wanted one too. Meeting your desire for nice hair, even a desire for a butler to pick up your laundry or whatever, is still meeting a need, but it's less superfluous than "I need you to sit there because someone else has someone who does something similar)

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#300

Post by beaconstudios »

Aunche wrote: post #274
beaconstudios wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but that airlines hire essentially customer service reps to face the brunt of people's anger while the company changes nothing to prevent the problems is a classic corporate strategy. They exploit customers and neglect their responsibility and then hire some poor mug to get shouted at. I don't know if that's David Graeber's specific criticism but it is mine.

>airlines hire essentially customer service reps to face the brunt of people's anger while the company changes nothing to prevent the problems is a classic corporate strategy. I'm sure airlines do a lot behind the scenes to make sure they don't lose their luggage. Even if they didn't, I don't see why a worker co-op wouldn't have the exact same incentives.

Well for a start, worker coops are not commanded from the top down so the owners don't get to just ignore customer complaints, because the owners, being the workers, are the ones taking customer complaints. Worker coops don't solve the problem of the profit motive though, where solutions that hurt the bottom line won't be implemented. That's an issue with markets themselves.

I'm far from an expert in this, and I'm no utopian, but I think it's important that we understand and identify where the problems in our society come from.

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