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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#341

Post by JCharante »

jeremyjh wrote: post #62
duskwuff wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The question is answered in TFA: > These “economic opportunities” are essentially a wealth transfer from new players to established ones. Gameplay requires the purchase of three Axies, which currently cost in the hundreds of US dollars each. Players who buy in treat this as an investment, since it’s a necessary buy-in in order to work in the game. It sounds more like a Ponzi scheme in a Gold farming disguise to me. I…

The problem with play to earn however is that it encourages people to play the game to earn money instead of fun, which causes inflation to the point where it's not worth the time of a casual player to do the grindy parts of the game and instead just lay people who grind all day. This is why play to earn is terrible, gold farmers will increase currency faucets without increasing currency sinks, and it is terrible for any game with a lot of player trading.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#342

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

#343

Post by digitailor »

kibwen wrote: post #321
digitailor wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

If your argument hinges on the premise that being either a police officer or a politician makes someone either a paragon of morality or wholly incapable of committing crimes, then I'm afraid I have some bad news for you.

My argument hinges upon the fact that Mr Nagle has been waging a FUD campaign for some time without much contest here, through leveraging his reputation. It's become tiresome, very few LEO support his concerns at this point, yet he continues unchallenged. It's mostly cherrypicking and well below the quality of his other posts.

All of us who've been around enough know what FUD campaigns look like on well-managed Internet forums. I am middle-aged and find this worthy of countering as it appears obsessive. Younger technologists are constantly having their efforts defamed needlessly on this leading technology forum with nothing being added to the conversation.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#344

Post by post_from_work »

WJW wrote: post #210
nightski wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding that's not exactly how Bitcoin mining works. It scales based on the amount of miners. So if the situation is as you described (value relative to USD tanks - which I find very unlikely due to inflationary nature of fiat) people would stop mining which would decrease the difficulty of mining causing it to use less electricity. There are however miners using nearly free sources of electricity such…

> people would stop mining which would decrease the difficulty of mining causing it to use less electricity. This is true, but then you have a bunch of costly mining ASICs sitting idle. The bitcoin network does not pay miners out of the goodness of its heart but because it needs a very high hash rate to defend against double spend attacks. Guess what those unused ASICs might be very effective at? A prolonged fall in…

>>> This goes all the way down the supply chain down to the real-world miners who dig up the ores for the solar panels and even they will need to pay their taxes, which you cannot do in bitcoin.

Unless more countries follow El Salvador's example, and accept cryptocurrencies as legal tender. If El Salvador hadn't banned metals mining in 2017, you could the guys digging up ores with BTC today.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#345

Post by q-big »

mertd wrote: post #284
admax88qqq wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't pay my hydro bills with shares of a private company either or japanese yen either, it doesn't mean those things have no intrinsic value.

The difference is that you can pay someone with JPY and that's the whole transaction. When you pay someone in BTC, you also have to pay the power company with something. The system is an inherently leaky bucket.

> When you pay someone in BTC, you also have to pay the power company with something. The system is an inherently leaky bucket.

The same holds for, say, transactions in US dollars. Here, you also pay your bank or your credit card company.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#346

Post by JCharante »

shkkmo wrote: post #316
aahortwwy wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> It was an interesting system, I don't know what their monetization looks like now. It works more or less the same, but now with an expanded F2P option that provides access to only early ships / skills (and some other limits). The PLEX is now used to pay for an account to have full access to the game for a month.

Well really it's that you pay for Skill Points now, because a subscription is almost free if you extract and sell the skill points earned.

Allowing RMT would ruin the economy because as a small guy I can generate $1050 in profit per month if you convert 500 Plex to cash at $20, although the black market rate is closer to $7. If I could generate real money then I would play more than 1 hour a day, I would probably quadruple my industrial operation and then everything is massively inflated in price locking out casual players from the gameplay they want, and the margins on a lot of items would decrease meaning you have to make up for it in volume, except a casual player isn't going to be running 30 accounts.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#347

Post by JCharante »

devteambravo wrote: post #333
mattnewton wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well it's a very valuable but underpaid job. A lot of college lecture VODs get transcribed and it is great for making it more accessible for people with hearing impairments.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#348

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Some random thoughts

- bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been automated. Jeff Bezos pays a Uber driver to turn a steering wheel until the robot can, and he pays a Amazon Project Manager to make graphs until the Perl Script can.

- such jobs don't exist because the "elite" are scared of proletariat, they exist because organisations are badly designed hurriedly put together and really hard to dismantle.

- it's usually simple to spot the people at work who are solid contributors and those who bullshit. But it's amazingly hard to demonstrate it sufficiently for firing people.

- But imposter syndrome means that if there is not a open transparent process to code the under performers, everyone becomes afraid, destroying the organisation anyway.

- it's hard to fire unproductive people, in short. In fact it's probably easier to build a new company and not hire them.

- this is usually done via Schumpeter- but if a company could be programmed, designed to have fewer people, it can be shutdown more easily and replaced?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#349

Post by Beldin »

cardosof wrote: post #219
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…

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…

> There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics.

I'd argue that PvP is a third option. Though that does impose its own requirements to do justice and ensure longevity.

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