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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#481

Post by kingcharles »

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.

Not just financially-challenged, but under-educated too. If your education was sub-par then it's easy to get tricked, especially with something as complex as the crypto world, where someone like me who had a great education, minted Satoshi's finest like they were water from a firehose, and almost 40 years of coding, still has a really hard time understanding the current plethora of blockchain shenanigans.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#483

Post by digitailor »

digitailor wrote: post #313
Animats wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

(To help qualify my perspective and insistence... I was involved in stopping a long term predatory crime this year where digital assets were used to help protect the victim against perpetrators using dollars. As you might imagine, having clear records of transactions is likely to be more helpful to the targets than the perpetrators in these cases.)

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#484

Post by ashtonkem »

danShumway wrote: post #170
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…

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…

At a certain point these look less like games, and more like status symbols being pursued. I suspect that this explains much more of the economic and social aspect of things like Runescape more than trying to think of them like a game.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#485

Post by danShumway »

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…

> But, as lame as it sounds, some people do like it. I'm guilty of playing a RuneScape-like game for mobile (Ancients Reborn). Things are slow and you need hours and hours to raise skills but, even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing.

To be clear, I don't think that part is lame at all. That part is great. I'm all for relaxing repetitive games.

But I don't think that is what happens for all of the players in a game with pay-to-skip mechanics, and I think when we talk about the positive aspects of a game like Runescape, we're kind of engaging in a little bit of wishful thinking about how universal that experience was for all of its players. If a game is genuinely optimizing for creating a relaxing repetitive experience, then it (and 3rd parties around it) probably shouldn't also be monetizing getting rid of that experience.

Runescape grinding in theory was a relaxing, great experience for some people. I'm very happy for those people, but in practice, enough people obviously hated the grind enough that they were paying for bots. I am less concerned about the people who genuinely enjoyed chopping down trees, and more concerned about the obvious subset of players who were somehow feeling trapped by the game into spending real-world money to avoid something that was obviously unpleasant for them.

Willing theraputic, relaxing, repetitive grind is great. Hard to monetize with microtransactions though, and when I look at the play-to-earn model more broadly, that model literally doesn't work if people enjoy the grind. The only way the money comes into the game is the grind isn't theraputic or relaxing, a nontrivial chunk of the playerbase has to hate that process or else nobody makes money.

The healthy, relaxing, kind of best-case scenario grind you describe is the opposite of what a play-to-earn game designer wants; those designers have a strong incentive not to allow their games to have enjoyable grinding, because the whole point is that they expect the majority of their players to pay money buying resources from other players. That monetization model only works if people aren't enjoying the grind.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#486

Post by temprs »

alexchantavy wrote: post #394
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…

Macros are what got me into programming. I wanna write a blog on it if no one else has done it yet but you had different tiers of it in between 2005-2007: AutoRune: top-tier -- This was the absolute best RuneScape classic bot but you had to pay $15 a month for an auth code to use it, which is extremely expensive for a school-aged kid. One of its killer features was that you could run the game in headless mode with no…

The ecosystem around SCAR was really impressive, and with just enough drama to keep everyone interested as well. Basic color clicking in SCAR was a concept but not enough to make really sophisticated bots or to keep up with attempts at detecting repeated behavior. The mods caught on to exact pixel finding, abrupt mouse movements, and other stuff that a typical SCAR script would generate. The botting community developed the SCAR Resource Library (SRL) to generalize common operations in a way that would be undetectable (findObject, moveMouse, etc.), all with a sufficient amount randomness baked in. With this library you could write some _very impressive_ bots even though it all boiled down to pixel finding and clicking at some level. Over time there was some disagreement over the development of SCAR (it was closed source and had a single developer), and the SRL community rebranded to SRL Resource Library (SRL) as the first attempt to move away from SCAR as the only home for this pixel-finding-based library of advanced botting functionality. Some maintainers of SRL then introduced there own client as an open source alternative to SCAR called Simba.

I have had a 10 year career now developing software for the biggest companies on the planet, but to this day a lot of the most complex and robust code I've ever written was as a teenager in SCAR. Good memories. Would love to see some wiki history of this written up somewhere.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#487

Post by coffeecat »

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?

The parent post argues that cryptocurrency is most useful, in practice, for illegal activities. It does not argue that this is how it's perceived by the general public, by the NYC municipal government, or by Eric Adams. The perception is that it's a sexy new technology of the future, whereas the reality is that it's mostly a playground for "investors", fraudsters, and criminals.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#488

Post by ashtonkem »

duskwuff wrote: post #52
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…

> 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…

It's not just a closed system, it's zero sum. It's only possible to cash out for a profit if there are more people willing to buy in.

Some of the anti-bitcoin crowd tried to make the term "Nakomoto Scheme" a thing, and clearly failed. The basic idea is that things like Axie Infinity have some of the aspects of a ponzi scheme, without the central organization and coordination that makes an actual ponzi scheme illegal. While there isn't a central operator paying out old investors with new investors money, anyone currently invested can only cash out if new people join. This begins to look a bit like a decentralized ponzi, with everyone currently invested in it motivated to evangelize it and convert new people in order to ensure the fresh supply of new buyers to keep the price up and/or let them cash out.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#489

Post by gexla »

duskwuff wrote: post #52
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…

> 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…

If the game were actually fun, there could be money coming in from players who value the fun more than making money. Axie may have an element to this, but I hear it's not fun. The term for these players is "whales." They are willing to spend a lot for fast progression and domination. A game which pays Filipinos may have money coming in from a well-off player in China. There could be schemes where whales hire Filipinos to grind for loot and gold. However, it's hard to see a situation where a game could pay for development and support thousands of grinders. It would be interesting to see how big the MMORPG grinding economy is. That might give us an idea of how many people these games might support.
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