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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#331

Post by gitfan86 »

wyager wrote: post #320
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…

> Money has to keep coming in to keep the price up due to paying miners This is incoherent. It's hard to refute this because it's not even on the right page. Demand for Bitcoin comes from demand for money (to transact, to store wealth, etc.). It sounds like you're trying to model it using some idea of how equity pricing works - is that accurate?

All assets ( BTC, Stocks, Gold ) are priced on supply and demand. If demand goes down for BTC the price will go down.

It doesn't matter if the fed prints money or not BTC needs a constant infusion of new investment to keep the price up. Unlike a company with positive cash flow who could buyback shares and never get any new investors and still keep the price up.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#332

Post by mintplant »

> People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.

So I basically grew up on Second Life, back when "the Metaverse" was just a geek thing no one cared about. The comparison doesn't really work here, because the virtual items people sold on SL were (generally) their original creations: 3D modeled, animated, programmed, etc. Not simply doled out by pre-programmed in-game systems.

Axie Infinity's economy is more like "real-world trading" on MMOs, but officially endorsed by the developers instead of being considered a game-breaking, bannable offense. In fact, the mention of Axie Infinity providing an income stream to people in developing countries who spend their time grinding also parallels the MMO space: you can find plenty of stories about illicit "gold farming" economies surrounding the major online games, going back decades.

> Axie Infinity is novel in two ways, which are worth exploring separately.

> - It elevated the ability to earn an income stream through the game to a core feature, coining play-to-earn as a new game genre.

> - It uses NFTs to represent in-game items, so the economy is (ostensibly) decentralized.

Going back to SL, the virtual economy was always a "core feature". We had a whole digital currency and ecosystem of first- and third-party exchanges and money markets where you could buy and sell Linden dollars for real money, with moving exchange rates and everything. People very much made serious income off of in-world business. The true novelty here is that Axie & friends are built on decentralized technologies, instead of having a company like Linden Lab managing everyone's account balances and virtual item ownership rights.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#333

Post by devteambravo »

mattnewton wrote: post #301
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.

Yeah, that's the basis of my issue with it all. Value created by people who do not benefit from it whatsoever.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#334

Post by Bjartr »

TameAntelope wrote: post #302
cortesoft wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The presence of aggregate societal harm tends to be the motivator for other regulation around otherwise voluntary behavior such as gambling. So if that harm can be demonstrated then there may be a case for legislating if companies can offer such games and on what terms they can do so.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#335

Post by 58x14 »

Arubis wrote: post #288
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…

If you haven't already read it (or, heck, even if you have), I _strongly_ suspect you'd have a blast with Neal Stephenson's _REAMDE_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde

Wow, thanks for the recommendation, I've added it to my reading list!

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#336

Post by anonporridge »

whatshisface wrote: post #166
anonporridge wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bitcoin is unlikely to have a 5,000 year lifespan because unlike gold it can be obsoleted.

Gold has already been obsoleted by fiat money because it's too expensive and slow to transact with in the modern world.

Bitcoin won't necessarily have the same problem, because it's an information protocol. Protocols can be updated and improved. Even if the main chain ossifies and can't be improved, bitcoin tokens are already being moved to alternative blockchains (sidechains) via 2 way pegs.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#337

Post by JCharante »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #54
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.

I guess it depends on the grind involved. Some streamers are paid to play games. They confess they don't always enjoy it or every game that people want to watch, but it seems better than some alternatives. And a few YouTubers I follow have admitted to less than stellar career prospects otherwise. Now if it's pure, unfun grind that only pushes numbers around in an MMO then I'd agree it's basically just outsourced chea…

They aren't paid to play games, they are paid to interact with the audience and tell stories. Looking at view counts of clips with just stories vs clips with gameplay going on will show it. Also, games have been the background in videos or streams for a long long time, people who were on YouTube circa 2010 will remember the YouTubers like WoodysGamerTag or whiteboy7thst who played Call of Duty, but that's never why people watched them. It was the hook but people watched for their personalities.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#338

Post by sfblah »

I’m getting tired of this Ponzi scheme stuff. Can we have some kind of protests to insist the Fed raise rates and put an end to this? I’m not a big activist by nature, but that’s something I could get behind.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#339

Post by [deleted] »

balaji1 wrote: post #319

Who else immediately ordered the book on Amazon? Lol Bullshit Jobs: A Theory https://www.amazon.com/dp/0141983477 The first review is lit. Quoting: """ Manifesto for the Professional Class Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2018 This review was written at the desk of a salaried office job, where I am paid $65,000/yr to do virtually nothing important, so I mostly sit in my chair and listen to podcasts and audiob…

[deleted]

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#340

Post by syntheweave »

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…

The reason grinding exists is also economic in nature: the "consumer value for money" equation is often reduced to maximizing hours of playtime. This has led to extremely padded gameplay all throughout when we compare to arcade games, which are premised on "operator value of time" and therefore always endeavor to shuttle players in and out of their session in a few minutes.

The other day I visited the local pinball joint and the old EM game I was playing got stuck counting up the 3000 point bonus during gameplay. I cradled the ball on the right flipper, thinking "hmm, how interesting!" One of the staff came over and apoplectically remarked "If you don't continue play I am going to have to turn the game off", and when I did as instructed, showed great distress at how I had managed to roll over the score and accumulate two free credits, but also appreciated that he had gotten a bit closer to the mysterious issue of the game repeatedly ending up with 9 credits.

I see the impact of NFTs as a pendulum swing towards "item value in context", which has no particular relationship to time or even defined scarcity, but would instead favor broad reusability across numerous contexts. P2E is just the early mimicry every new model has to go through before getting to the good parts, in the same way that early console games took a few years to start relaxing the constraints of arcades in earnest.

I think a much more likely early candidate for interesting NFT gaming will be small collectable games, derived from the procedural arts scene. Scarcity sets individual prices within a collectables market, but the value of the collection as a whole is determined by other modes of context. There's no need to squeeze or stretch the gameplay loop or make it addictive or insert monetizing gates; every instance can be exactly designed to be "ideal" on its own. Instead the game has to cater to speculative interests, which is a whole other set of trade-offs and can even favor characteristic flaws. For some reason I have not yet seen the "pay to lose" NFT game, but to me it seems blindingly obvious that being able to lose in an interesting way will command speculative interest.

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