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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#301

Post by mattnewton »

devteambravo wrote: post #289

Bullshit jobs? Let me tell you what a bullshit job is: Transcription. It's basically poor, often disabled people w/ 0 other options doing it. For slave-wage. That's right, one of the best way for disabled people in America to make $$ is to spend hours transcribing you next Sex & the City remake at breakneck pace. Excuse my french, but F this. Axie sounds like a lot less bullshit

After that work is done though, the value of the content being transcribed is increased. They are solving the problem that the actual dialog spoken by the actors and audio cues aren't captured in a non-audio format yet. Axie is creating problems when designing the gameplay and allows people to sell solutions to it; they could easily just provide the "value" at the push of a button.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#302

Post by TameAntelope »

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…

Then maybe it's fine to be "pay to win"? Seems like millions of people are enjoying their time spent, and are willing to spend more time to continue to win.

Who are we to judge?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#303

Post by rtkwe »

wyre wrote: post #179
jayd16 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get it. We already sold digital assets so why do we need NFTs or Blockchain? What does it add here?

NFTs are the equivalent of decentralized RS party hats.

Except instead of a fixed (or decreasing as people slowly accidentally lose or leave the game with them in their bank) amount anyone can make a new (ugly as hell) party hat any time.

Oh and the party hat could just disappear leaving you with a receipt saying you own... something no one can see any more.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#304

Post by emodendroket »

themacguffinman wrote: post #247
danShumway wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can't stand this kind of thing, but I do enjoy a lot of games that basically punish you until you develop enough skill to beat them. This is its own form of "grinding," I suppose, but one I find much more rewarding than essentially being rewarded for the number of hours I'm willing to do monotonous tasks.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#305

Post by fragmede »

duskwuff wrote: post #35
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…

It's different inasmuch as it's even stupider. Gold farming is, at least, based on the premise that there are people who are willing to pay other people money to perform repetitive actions in a video game for them. It's still kind of dumb and it has harmful effects on in-game economies, but at least there's some semblance of money being exchanged for goods and services. "Play to earn", on the other hand, is based on…

Pay-to-earn is such a scam inflicted on the poor though. Imagine you've been trying to get a job for months, your meager savings are dwindling, and a company says that to get the job, you need to pay them $100 to run a "background check". Of course, you don't get the job. but you're still out that money. On the remote chance that you do, it'll take you almost a week at minimum wage to earn back that money, and you're likely to have to wait 2 or 4 weeks until you see it (which you don't have the money for). None of this works from an economic standpoint, it's outright slavery!

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#306

Post by Lammy »

thombat wrote: post #230
cardosof wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is what happens with any open world MMO. There's no storyline to finish, there's no ending, and game devs have incentives to keep players playing forever (the more hours a player plays, the more likely he will spend more money). There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics. Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just chan…

Now you've made me wonder: those hours I spent mesmerised by watching the colourful display of Windows 95 defragging the disc, would I have paid a monthly subscription for it? What if they'd added achievements, or leveling up? "Congratulations! Your wizard can now restructure directory chains!"

http://progressquest.com/

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#307

Post by aahortwwy »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #281
Zaskoda wrote: post #279

I have gone down the play-to-earn rabbit hole in an unexpected way. In 2017 I started learning about Ethereum. Once I understood it as a virtual machine, the idea hit me that one could build a game. About that time, CryptoKitties hit and became an example of what could be built. Shortly late, a tutorial called CryptoZombies helped teach "a way" to build crypto collectable style games on distributed virtual machines l…

> I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value higher than the cost of creation. Other than speculators hoping to flip them to someone else, what would give them that value? Like most crypto games, the value would inherently have to come from new players putting more money…

Paying to skip the grind in a game is a pretty common thing. As a commenter in another thread mentioned, this has been happening since Diablo II at least. If a game has content that is gated by tens or hundreds of hours of grinding some people will happily pay to experience that content immediately. Historically this has been viewed as dubious behavior - especially in MMOs - but it's becoming more normal.

EVE Online, for a time, had a monthly subscription. It also had an in-game item called "PLEX" which could be purchased using real money and then used as a substitute for the monthly subscription. Because it was an in-game item PLEX could be bought and sold on the in-game marketplace. I happily bought a few PLEX with real money and sold them in-game so that I could purchase the ships I wanted without having to spend hours "earning" in-game money. On the other hand, I knew people who had set up efficient in-game money-making schemes that let them avoid paying anything to play - each month they'd just exchange some small fraction of their enormous in-game wealth for a PLEX token purchased by a person like me. It was an interesting system, I don't know what their monetization looks like now.

Point being, I think there can be a value to these things outside of speculation. That said, I have a fairly dim view of most of the crypto-enabled games that I've come across. From the start, the developers have always seemed more interested in enriching themselves at the cost of their players than they have in making enjoyable games.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#308

Post by worldsayshi »

> gameplay designed to be dull enough that rich players will pay to outsource it to poor players

Do I understand it correctly that the point here, and maybe the central point of Bullshit Jobs, is that we tend to structure our economies with built in inefficiencies so that tedium appears where there is no need for it. And the reason for this is that otherwise the organisation or person solving a given problem would immediately remove their own lifeline, their income or their raison d'etre?

So the point of this article is point out how this happens even when there isn't a problem to be solved - which is reason to believe that it happens all around us as well in situations where we're "solving an actual problem".

It's like a machine that endlessly inflates all pockets of human interaction with tedium and labels it as efficiency or "fun". A paper clip maximizer of sorts.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#309

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

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…

Grinding is boring but it's also extremely satisfying when you finally achieve your desired level. It feels like a real achievement, and it lets you show off to other players because they know how much time you had to spend. If it was also fun, it wouldn't be as impressive. In that way it's sort of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin. If it wasn't a total waste (that is, if the work itself produced something useful that was worth something) then it wouldn't do its job as a disincentive to cheat the system because you're not actually wasting anything by doing the work.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#310

Post by Cthulhu_ »

nightski wrote: post #162
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…

You aren't talking about the intrinsic value of Bitcoin. You are talking about it's value relative to USD. These are completely different things. Bitcoin has intrinsic value outside of the fiat system. It can be used entirely independent of fiat. Whether that will become common is another matter, but the value of Bitcoin does not have to depend solely on it's value relative to USD.

Bitcoin itself does not because its low transaction speed makes it unusable for real world applications. Second, why use something in a financial transaction whose value can fluctuate 10-20% a day? That's not a stable currency.

So for all intents and purposes, Bitcoin is an unstable investment product.

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