Bullshit activities… the new drugs. Love them guys who sustain these mind traps. Nothing new under the sun as King Solomon said, but then again - do not dare claim moral superiority, u will go down sooner than not.
“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
381–390 of 700 posts
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#382Some 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 job from the OP is something more like high frequency trading or SEO.
There's not really a service that makes people happy, or a good being created.
It's just shuffling money around in a way that's net-negative for society.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. One could make an argument that the work some users put in, once sold, result in value to the buyer, but that value isn’t generated by the worker. The developers created the scheme and could deliver the value directly at no cost to all players, poor and wealthy, but instead chose to create meaningless work by making grinding opportunities.
One could also argue that if the developers did that, the market value of the digital item in question would drop. The value that the buyer receives is grounded in the large time investment required to acquire the item in the game. Even though it is completely artificial, it makes the item more scarce and therefore more desirable to other players. I totally agree that the fact that this power is in the hands of the d…
This implies that anything that is scarce or requires labour to obtain automatically becomes desirable and rises in value.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#384Earlier 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…
> 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.
There's something fundamentally satisfying to the human psyche about understanding a set of rules and optimizing actions against them. I think it hits that 'feeling smarter than something' nerve.
We've probably lost some potentially fantastic physicists to MMOs.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#385Earlier 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.
Now that Monero exists, not really.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#386Slightly OT, but for the historical record: > People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005. I saw it happening at least as far back as ‘98 in DragonRealms, a MUD and (when it moved off of AOL) one of the first online games with a monthly subscription.
Yeah, I sold stuff in Ultima Online much earlier than 2005. Lazy research in this article.
That doesn't come off as "lazy research" to me. The author didn't write "the earliest time this happened was 2005", but rather "at least as far back as ....".
The author's correct in their wording, and the point was simply that getting real money out of games in some way is not novel to this new "play to earn" genre.
The point of the article was to talk about Axie Infinity and Bullshit Jobs in the present, not to spend significant time on historical background.
To be honest, I think using Second Life, or runescape, or such as an example, instead of Ultima Online or such, actually is better writing in that it's more likely to be something the audience is familiar with, or at least can google and read more about. In that sense, using a well known historical example is less lazy writing than finding the oldest possible thing that others are unlikely to relate to for a peripheral comparison which already explicitly was worded as "at least as early as" ("kinda old, but not necessarily the oldest").
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#387> I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism But if we take Darwinian evolution as our analogy, there are plenty of strategies that essentially piggy back on other organisms. Cuckoo birds, intestinal worms, a whole coterie of sexual behaviors. It's also the everyday experience of just about everyone that they perceive certain others to no…
I hate when people refer to our regime of interest-rate intervention as capitalism. The primary feature of capitalism is price discovery, which we have intentionally given up. EDIT: If there are any economists out there who can point me in the direction of a primary source that elucidates the relationship between price discovery and interest rates in a way that will help me understand contemporary monetary policy as…
The defining feature of capitalism is the private ownership of capital. You can have whatever pricing mechanisms you like as long as the profits go to the owner
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#388> Web Two was don’t be evil. Web Three is can’t be evil. You bake it into the code that you can’t be evil. Yikes. That's a philosophy that really misses the nature of evil. In fact, I think we're doing ourselves up for colossal failure if we assume we can create an unexploitable algorithm that we then cannot modify that can be crafted to be evil-proof.
Sounds reminiscent of when ML scientists were surprised that they built racist systems, assuming that their race-free math meant that the resulting system would also be race-free
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#389Earlier 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…
> Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial
It's only artificial in a sense that it's one level deeper than our current economy (and is smaller and subject to the whims of the developers), but in the grand scheme of the universe our current economy is just as artificial.
Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
#390Everything old is new again. You could go back and look over the game design discourse about pay-to-win games and microtransactions and see the same discussions about how these systems would influence players and designers. You could go back and look at the discussions around Facebook social games back when they were a big thing. And all of those arguments still hold up today. Play-to-earn games are the same system,…
There is a good way of grinding, but I think it should really be called practice.
At the end, your in game character is just as good as it was at the start, but you're better at using it