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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#441

Post by lazyasciiart »

tptacek wrote: post #412
emodendroket wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The distinction is that you would never pay someone to learn how to beat the Orphan of Kos for you; the pleasure is in getting your ass kicked to the point where you throw the controller across the room, only to pick it up again a couple hours later. That's exactly the experience these Bullshit Games aren't creating.

I don't think it's true that nobody would pay to learn it. A friend made significant money as a dota tutor, and there's whole sites full of people selling tutoring time https://www.superprof.com/lessons/gaming/united-states/. Similarly, people pay for cheats/unlocks/walkthroughs.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#442

Post by gitfan86 »

shazzdeeds wrote: post #422
gitfan86 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Profit comes when their operating costs are less than the take home from any transaction fees and Coinbase rewards they’ve collected in the same period. It’s not a direct function of liquidity entering the system. It’s true that rising prices from new cash flow means more profit for miners, but that doesn’t imply the opposite. The price could stay constant for the next 100 years and miners that have found a way to re…

If the price stays constant for 100 years where is the money coming from to pay for those NVIDIA cards that the miners are using?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#443

Post by emodendroket »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #441
tptacek wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction is that you would never pay someone to learn how to beat the Orphan of Kos for you; the pleasure is in getting your ass kicked to the point where you throw the controller across the room, only to pick it up again a couple hours later. That's exactly the experience these Bullshit Games aren't creating.

I don't think it's true that nobody would pay to learn it. A friend made significant money as a dota tutor, and there's whole sites full of people selling tutoring time https://www.superprof.com/lessons/gaming/united-states/ . Similarly, people pay for cheats/unlocks/walkthroughs.

Metafy is a big one too. But notably people are largely willing to pay if the game is played competitively. For single-player games, not so much.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#444

Post by chii »

xg15 wrote: post #383
jbergqvist wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

scarcity is a necessary, but insufficient condition for desirability.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#445

Post by jrochkind1 »

Many historical "bullshit jobs" are basically "reward to the metropole from colonial extraction" (how many of Graeber's "bullshit jobs" exist in colonized vs colonizing nations, hm?)

But for this newest iteration of cryptocurrency bullshit, I'm gonna go with "crisis of capital accumulation".

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#446

Post by dools »

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…

Seems like it taught you a lot about finance, which is different from economics.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#447

Post by shp0ngle »

Liron wrote: post #250

Here's patio11's thread: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1459682519360491523 I was shocked to see A16z recently investing $150M in Axie Infinity and doubling down on their justification of play-to-earn as a coherent concept, as if it's not fundamentally a pyramid scheme. It's lowered my expectation of what passes for thought leadership in our industry.

No post body was provided.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#448

Post by gitfan86 »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #376
gitfan86 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Yes, I agree, this can go on forever. "DeFi", "web3", and then something else

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#449

Post by syspec »

digitailor wrote: post #328
syspec wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a political publicity stunt, and does not counter any of the points made by the parent

Help me understand. Are you saying that former LEO are well-served from a PR standpoint by attaching themselves to the "points" you're holding are clearly evidenced by the parent post?

Yes, especially the ones that become politicians.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#450

Post by narrator »

There is such an enormous amount of slack in the system. 2% of the workforce is involved in agriculture, and it used to be 90%. What did the other 88% do with all that free time?

A lot of the Web3 and game economy is just people massively overpaying for entertainment.

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