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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#491

Post by j2kun »

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.

You'd be surprised how much VCs idolize ponzi schemes. They aren't even shy about it, and haven't been for years if you get to talking to them.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#492

Post by meowface »

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…

>There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics.

You neglected what's by far the funnest and most important and user-retaining aspect of open world MMOs: player-to-player interaction - be it friendly, neutral, or hostile.

The absolute most enjoyable open world MMOs I've played had essentially no content. Players forged their own content in the form of geopolitics, war, economics, and copious communication (propaganda and shittalking, largely). They felt like a completely unplanned, natural simulation of militaristic human societies from hundreds or thousands of years ago. Probably not ideal in real life, but very fun for a game.

I'm convinced the best MMOs to come out over the next 20 years will have very little content and very sparse grinding mechanics. The magic is the emergent game and meta-game that springs forth from the bonding and strife between gargantuan numbers of human agents.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#493

Post by digitailor »

coffeecat wrote: post #487
digitailor wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand your point of view, but you haven't even attempted to qualify it.

I can tell you that I helped stop a predatory crime that was being committed using US dollars this year, partially by using digital assets defensively. Defamatory general statements about the target and digital assets had been made in the past in this case, and it backfired on the perpetrators- horribly, in the federal jurisdiction.

Could you take a moment to consider why unqualified generalizations like yours could concern some? In the past, the perpetrators had attempted to capitalize on the perception you are asserting as reality. The possibility of resultant ankle bracelets or worse for them is high, due generally to record keeping and time stamps.

The reality of this technology is that it solved the technical problems associated with Internet native asset classes. The rest is editorializing.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#494

Post by mizzao »

armchairhacker wrote: post #58

We should create a game like Axie infinity, but instead of making money from useless Axies you make it from writing code. And then since crypto is bad we just pay people with regular money instead. Also maybe have them sign a contract for working fixed hours and/or completing a project in X time. So you know, the project actually gets done.

There was a great game in this vein (coding) that shut down due to lack of monetization but I feel would be perfect to relaunch as a crypto version, especially since playing at the top levels required coding: https://bot.land/

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#495

Post by bagels »

talove wrote: post #427

Axie Infinity isn't interesting as a game, but as a model it is. The other day I was going through air port security. I had to wait 10 minutes for one of my bags to be screened a second time. I happened to be waiting while some type of manager was doing a huddle for a new shift of employees about to start. The dumb shit the manager was telling the group of 12-15 TSA workers was abhorrent. Just really vile statements…

What were the vile statements?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#496

Post by joombaga »

musicale wrote: post #374
Lammy wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty into the idle/incremental game concept, though they're rarely implemented to my taste.

It's difficult to quantify what makes a good one, but my favorite is Universal Paperclips.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#497

Post by duxup »

victorvosk wrote: post #33
duxup wrote: post #6

Sorry to get a bit off track: So is web3 just “ blockchain related things “ ? I feel like web3 as a term usage has exploded to the point that I’m not sure what people are talking about when they say “web3”.

Web3 as a concept is decentralization primarily, though it was invented by people championing crypto. The idea that the web can't be censored or controlled by gov't or large corporations. Everyone should be able to easily contribute and maintain web3. The blockchain is the "logical" place for it to live since a blockchain is just a distributed compute and database platform. There are several massive hurdles to overco…

Thank you.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#498

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

danShumway wrote: post #469
jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grinding is boring but it's also extremely satisfying when you finally achieve your desired level. It feels like a real achievement, and it lets you show off to other players because they know how much time you had to spend. If it was also fun, it wouldn't be as impressive. In that way it's sort of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin. If it wasn't a total waste (that is, if the work itself produced something useful that wa…

> It feels like a real achievement I've mentioned this elsewhere, but if people can pay money to skip something, then I don't think doing it is a public/social achievement. At best, it's a personal achievement, which could hold value for some people. But you're not really signaling anything publicly by going through a grind if someone else can pay to skip it. This is also why I'm kind of skeptical of NFT games as bei…

You can buy your way into a prestigious school. I don't see how some people paying to skip the work denies the achievement of those who don't skip it.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#499

Post by tiltrus »

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…

There was also a lot of other history outside of Jacmob...

There was iBot by Ruler Eric who got sued in Florida court by Jagex, with Jagex winning. iBot started of as a color bot, then eventually completely transformed into byte code editing.

Before Powerbot/RSBot, there was Arga, and before that, Aryan. IIRC Arga was the first bytecode editing bot, and Aryan was just a modified RuneScape client.

There was also a C++ Chinese bot used amongst all the Chinese farmers during the Arga days IIRC. This bot apparently working at the packet level (this is what AutoRune did back in the RSC days) and had super low resource usage. However had access to this bot definitely had a huge leg up to any other offerings.

Scar always existed, the forums exploded with activity inbetween the bot nukes (Aryan dying, etc.). I also remember SRL, and the horrible Pascal that came with it. All the random event solvers (e.g. magic box weren't open source -- they were hidden behind a compiled DLL that shipped with SRL).

Weird history, but I'm still in contact with a lot of people from the scene I've met 10+ years later.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#500

Post by ikr678 »

chii wrote: post #423
shkkmo wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax avoidance just moves the tax burden around, it doesn't create value. Tax collection and tax compliance does create value, but spending time specifically figuring out how to pay as little taxes as possible creates no value. It see likely that some level of bullshit jobs are an unavoidable side-effects of value producing activities. The interesting part of the idea comes from thinking about how we can structure tho…

> Tax avoidance just moves the tax burden around, it doesn't create value. only if you believe that taxes paid is automatic value added to society. > pay as little taxes as possible creates no value it doesn't create value, it retains value for those who created it.

Avoiding taxes and utilising tax minimisation strategies keeps value with you, but it also distorts your consumption in other ways. EG you are incentivised in the US to purchase more housing (via mortgage interest deduction) than you might want or need.
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