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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#371

Post by zeven7 »

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…

I know that there were many people who stayed interested through 4 years of bear market

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#372

Post by simonw »

mrtksn wrote: post #203
542458 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free to use? I don’t think this is very mysterious. It’s coming from investors who are spending money in the expectation of future profits as the business scales and reaches greater efficiencies and increases monetization. In the case of this cryptocurrency there’s no obvious point where these tokens sudden…

All these coins and projects have a mission statement and high level overview on how they think it will be useful in the future. It's up to you to believe them but they do have a proposal. The stocks are more opaque in that regard, they are required to publish some declaration and financial disclosure but explaining why you need to invest in that company stock often comes down to CEO's appearing in the press. Countle…

> All these coins and projects have a mission statement and high level overview on how they think it will be useful in the future.

The thing I like about Dogecoin is that it's at least honest: it's not selling itself as anything more than a token with a price that will go up if more people buy it.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#373

Post by gedy »

taurath wrote: post #324
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…

It’s a bit disheartening when you look at how many people deal with the numbness ever present in their lives by playing games that mete out little rewards in easily quantifiable bits. This is not what humans need, or, if we’re honest, want.

Isn't this the same as many of us do even outside of games?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#374

Post by musicale »

Lammy wrote: post #306
thombat wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Apparently the original idle game (according to wikipedia at least) although modern idle games are probably influenced by Cookie Clicker and others as well.

I've occasionally been tempted to play Idle Champions which seems similar.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#375

Post by jonwalch »

jayd16 wrote: post #215
jonwalch wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're missing a ton. Getting game developer buy in is definitely the biggest challenge. I think "GameFi" is the most compelling use case. Use your in-game items (NFTs) as collateral for a loan, or lend it to other players to use while you retain ownership. Game devs could build all this functionality themselves, but they get it for free if they don't take the walled garden approach.

You say free but they'll need to integrate with the chain for all transactions. Simple loot drops will need to be put on the chain. Seems pretty onerous compared to the normal implementation. Odds are they would need to duplicate all the functionality in game as well.

My bad, I assumed we were already talking about on chain games. I agree that on chain loot drops are more difficult to implement than the traditional way. We'll have to see how much gamers in the future care about their items being NFTs or not.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#376

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

gitfan86 wrote: post #269
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must admit I don't understand why it is "cashflow negative". I'm not invested in any crypto, but I have thought about it, and my casual thoughts have come to the opposite conclusion. The higher the price of a cryptocurrency, the greater the interest in mining and investing. It seems like a positive feedback loop to me. Why is it not?

Imagine if you had the option of buying a piece of gold or a piece of land with good irrigation and good soil. You can plant vegetables on the land and sell those vegetables for other people to eat. Therefor your investment is generating profit and "cashflow". Gold on the other hand just sits there, and you may want to keep it in a safe at a bank and the bank will charge you a fee for storage making it negative cashf…

Your gold analogy might actually help me make my point. When the California gold rush was happening people went nuts trying to mine for it. Eventually the mining slowed, presumably because the cost to mine it started to exceed the value of it. Bitcoin claims to be this way (you may have known this; I had to look it up), stating that mining will halt at 21 million Bitcoins. But didn't Bitcoin already fork in the past? And won't there always be a new cryptocurrency to fall in love with? Unlike gold, when Bitcoin mining wanes someone can just invent "gold plus" with a few keystrokes and then here we go again. The feedback loop may not be confined to a single cryptocurrency but I still don't understand how it will ever end.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#377

Post by jonwalch »

Kiro wrote: post #224
jonwalch wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my gamer friends don't like grinding and usually stay away from "grindy" games.

Just because most people don't like it doesn't make it intrinsically unfun. If the above definition holds true no-one would like it except masochists. Anyway, as a counter-point RuneScape has a great grind with a huge player base and I know a lot of people who love grinding.

I missed the intrinsically unfun part. Grinding is definitely fun for many people.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#378

Post by musicale »

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…

> even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing

Fishing in Final Fantasy XIV is boring yet strangely relaxing, and in many cases doesn't even require looking at the screen.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#379

Post by gitfan86 »

shazzdeeds wrote: post #369
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…

This is addressed in the original white paper. In a world where BTC is valued at 1M USD/coin you’d also expect a decent amount of day to day usage. Miners could still make decent profits based on transaction fees just from confirming blocks even once the Coinbase rewards stop. I’m not saying that’s currently the case, but that is the design. Also if miners are making a profit off let’s say $40k/coin and the price goe…

Miners could make a profit at $1/coin. The issue is that profit comes from somewhere. And that somewhere is new money being put into BTC. Hence, BTC is negative cashflow.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#380

Post by shkkmo »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #348

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.…

> bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been automated

This is not what the term is intended to mean. "Uber Driver" (or taxi driver) is a job that performs a necessary function but one that may not necessarily need to be done by a human.

A bullshit job is one that does not really need to be done, one that provides no value to society at large and exists because of zero-sum games, ego, tradition, etc...

I don't agree with all the jobs Graeber described with this label, but it is a very useful concept.

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