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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#471

Post by danShumway »

jkhdigital wrote: post #451
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…

People play games for all sorts of personal reasons. “Boring” gameplay is apparently in demand. If you don’t like that kind of game, don’t play it. If you don’t understand how anyone else could possibly spend time on it, then maybe you should open your mind and talk to some of these people to try and understand what is undoubtedly a much more complex phenomenon than you believe it to be.

This is ignoring the reality that people are paying to get rid of this gameplay. I do understand why people like boring games, I've sunk my own share of time into therapeutic experiences like Animal Crossing, and even a few pure idle games. I've grinded out 100% soul collections in old Castlevania games. That kind of repetitive action and optimization can be personally rewarding and emotionally satisfying. And I've no doubt that some players of these games genuinely enjoy the minute-to-minute process of chopping logs.

But you're just kidding yourself if you say that's the primary thing going on here. If people enjoyed the grind, they wouldn't pay to remove it. The difference between grinding in a game like Castlevania and grinding in a game like Runescape is that there's not a Castlevania real-world monetary economy based entirely around shortening the game.

We can't really seriously say that everyone playing Runescape enjoyed the grind if there was enough demand for gameplay automation to make botting a reliable income source.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#472

Post by jeremyjh »

JCharante wrote: post #341
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least for the years I played CCP managed to create keep inflation under control and markets functioning pretty well. I think the percent of players who were either buying or selling ISK was fairly low, less than 15% is my guess but there are a lot of different ways to play the game so my experience may not be representative.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#473

Post by danShumway »

58x14 wrote: post #317
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 agree with you ideologically but challenge this statement: > [that] gameplay should never have been in the game How many millions of hours of 'pointless' content are uploaded weekly that people watch? No one is forced to play this game, or to pay for it. Why should it not exist? If game developers create something that people play, is that not a success from their perspective? This quickly becomes a philosophical c…

There is a valid conversation to be had about whether art needs to be edifying. However, I think we're talking about an entirely different level of exploitation when we talk about making something so unpleasant that people are willing to pay to get rid of it.

Millions of hours of pointless content gets uploaded to Youtube, but if people choose to watch it, fine. That's a conversation about edification and people choosing to waste their own time. What we have here instead is a system where people are signaling with real money that the experience is unpleasant for them. We're not talking about deciding what's best for people against their will or forcing art to have emotional/intellectual value, we're talking about building an experience that's monetized around players openly signaling that they dislike what we're doing to them.

Not that the deeper conversation you bring up about addiction or "junk-food" stimulation doesn't have value, but I think exploiting pay-to-skip mechanics is a more obvious form of exploitation that's just on another level of harmful. The comparison here isn't giving people junk food or hooking them on useless Youtube videos -- the comparison is the ads that roll in front of those videos. It's giving someone a meal and putting something gross in it, and then forcing them to pay you to remove it or to pick it out themselves. It's taking something that people want, and then breaking it or obscuring it, making it so cumbersome to get at that valuable core that the act of playing the game is no longer satisfying to the player.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#474

Post by c0nducktr »

jkhdigital wrote: post #467
mjr00 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin has intrinsic value outside of the fiat system. Not really, because even though the number of Bitcoins is limited, the number of cryptocurrencies is not. In any application that uses Bitcoin, you can substitute Litecoin, Dogecoin, or most other altcoins/shitcoins in existence, and there would be zero difference. In fact, Bitcoin's only advantage over those coins is extrinsic --it has more longevity, better…

> even though the number of Bitcoins is limited, the number of cryptocurrencies is not. There will only ever be a single dominant SHA-2 PoW cryptocurrency, because mining power can be expended on only a single chain. Doesn’t matter how many new genesis blocks are minted, this is a natural monopoly and Bitcoin clearly is the monopolist.

Bitcoin being the "dominant" cryptocurrency doesn't seem to change any of the parent commenters points, right? Those regarding intrinsic vs extrinsic value?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#475

Post by kingcharles »

wswope wrote: post #156
tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpicks because this game was my childhood. I totally support your sentiment though. > It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level * 97 logs (30 minutes) * 293 oaks (1 hr) * 714 willows (2.5 hr) * 19,246 maple (very inefficient compared to willow cutting rate - 60 hour). If you did yews it would be many hundreds of hours. About 70 hours done inefficiently. > What if I wrote a macro Macros w…

> Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014. There’s a weird, secret history around Runescape botting that I really hope gets told in full one day. Essentially, the biggest and best botting client from the 2008-2011 era was Powerbot, later rebranded RSBot. It was written and managed mostly by some CS student from the UK, who went by the handle Jacmob, and used some bytecode editing + r…

The key to a lot of bots isn't making them smart so they can grind all day - that is usually the easy bit - but making them dumb so they look like humans.

When I wrote a bot to grind Star Wars Galaxies for me I coded a ton of mistakes into it so it would click on the wrong buttons, miss the buttons completely, just generally do daft stuff. It looked human. Except for the fact it was grinding 24x7. I guess they never checked for that.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#476

Post by ec109685 »

JCharante wrote: post #329
Animats wrote: post #145

Axie Infinity spokesperson: "It is a little bit dependent on capital inflows." Er, yes. All those players are paying about $1000 to get into the game and then grinding away to get Smooth Love Potion tokens. This is the SLP price graph.[1] Down 92% since the peak. A lot of suckers lost big. Many of them poor people in the Philippines, where Axie is big. Axie is frantically trying to obfuscate this with a second token,…

I can't believe the buy in is $1000, it would have to be a AAAA game to demand that price tag, but it's not so it's just a disguised Ponzi scheme. The way the media have been reporting this as a way for Filipinos to earn income is disgusting, because they're tricking financially challenged people to fall for this Ponzi scheme by making it look legitimate with the media attention.

They talk about the economics here and payback time: https://medium.com/coinmonks/axie-infinity-a-developing-worl...

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#477

Post by danShumway »

TameAntelope wrote: post #241
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 wouldn't think of a game like Runescape as one thing, but more of a collection of many things. What you pay for is the ability to skip the parts of the game you don't like, so you can focus on the parts of the game you do like. Ideally everyone would like everything you make, but that feels more like a naive way of thinking than to worry about people wanting to skip parts of your game. As long as "pay to skip" does…

It's odd that this doesn't come up in other media or other experiences, right? The closest analogy I can think of is unskippable advertising.

We never have a movie series where people pay extra money to remove scenes. You never go to a restaurant where the owner forces you to eat carrots before you can have your main meal, even though some diners might like carrots. It's basically just games and advertising where we have this model that consumers should either be forced to endure a part of the experience they dislike or that they should pay us money to give them the stuff that they directly do like.

Like, imagine if you were watching a show on Netflix, and you tried to skip a filler episode or fast-forward through a gory section, and Netflix wouldn't let you continue the series until you either watched that content in its entirety or paid them 99 cents.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#478

Post by jsemrau »

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…

What finclout does differently here is that there is a clearly defined regulated external incoming stream from Proof of Stake treasuries. That avoids that the project needs to rely on a scammy "need to purchase" and in addition with more people overall reward volume increases as well.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#479

Post by Animats »

JCharante wrote: post #329
Animats wrote: post #145

Axie Infinity spokesperson: "It is a little bit dependent on capital inflows." Er, yes. All those players are paying about $1000 to get into the game and then grinding away to get Smooth Love Potion tokens. This is the SLP price graph.[1] Down 92% since the peak. A lot of suckers lost big. Many of them poor people in the Philippines, where Axie is big. Axie is frantically trying to obfuscate this with a second token,…

I can't believe the buy in is $1000, it would have to be a AAAA game to demand that price tag, but it's not so it's just a disguised Ponzi scheme. The way the media have been reporting this as a way for Filipinos to earn income is disgusting, because they're tricking financially challenged people to fall for this Ponzi scheme by making it look legitimate with the media attention.

It works kind of like Pokemon. You need some starter Axies to breed and fight.[1] There are people offering "scholarships" where they loan you Axies to grind. This was profitable last summer but is now a lose for both parties.

[1] https://leveldash.com/how-much-to-start-playing-axie-infinit...

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#480

Post by jkhdigital »

nathias wrote: post #134
duskwuff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a there there without an underlying token that's gone up XX% in the last N months and everyone hopes will still go up XX% in the next N months? Alternatively, even simpler: where is the money coming from ? A bunch of people playing a game are a closed system, and no value is created by playing the game. If the only reason why players are earning money from this game is because more people are continually b…

There are no closed systems, and players playing a game does create value. It's almost the only important aspect of software's value - users. Anyone can write some garbage software, or hire people to do it, not anyone can make things people will want to use.

> There are no closed systems

This single fact destroys most arguments about almost anything, but especially in economics

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