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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#511

Post by solatic »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #260

The thing I really like about this article is that, at least in my mind, it really helped me clarify what I think of as "Bullshit Jobs". It's not so much "do you consider your job useless", but it's more along the lines of "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally, arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?" A great example of this is tax departments at large companies that look for tax avoidance strate…

I'm not a communist, but I recognize that one of the economic arguments for the State owning the means of production is that there's no longer any need for such jobs on a per-organization level. Why engage in tax-avoidance when the sum total of corporate profits belongs to the State anyway? Why answer per-client security questionnaires when the State audits and polices your security before certifying the company, so that it can continue to play a part in the State-managed economy? Why employ marketers and salespeople when the State guarantees demand? Etcetera.

Of course, in the real world, we understand that theoretical economic efficiency isn't quite as attainable as the real efficiency that is made possible with price signalling. Demand is a fickle and complex beast that eludes the best intentions of the best central planners. But, as contrasted to that theoretical efficiency, a price-signalled economy involves some waste and costs. This is fine / acceptable as long as we appreciate that it permits a larger system that is better than the alternative.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#512

Post by DarylZero »

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.

You should think of it this way. The reasons that tax policies are complex are that the government uses tax incentives both as a "carrot" to control people; and also to buy political support from interest groups who benefit.

The tax compliance and tax avoidance jobs should be understood to be part of one of these schemes. Either they're low-level enforcers in the government's heavy-handed tax-based system of control; or else they're co-conspirators in the influence-buying grift.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#513

Post by Talanes »

danShumway wrote: post #468
themacguffinman wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers. I don't doubt that some people are enjoying this, and I think that's great; meditative games are fine. But I've never played a meditative game and been tempted to pay real money to turn it off. I think there's a little bit of wishful, optimistic projection about player intention that happens during these conversations, because if everyon…

>They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.

For them, personally. There's a good deal of microtransactions where the person spending the money still wants everyone else to have to grind for it. MMO's tend to breed a lot of prestige-seeking behavior.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#514

Post by oreally »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #403
mgraczyk wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money doesn't have to come from anywhere. Sometimes new value is created and the money is brand new. This is how GDP grows. In the case of BTC, it's pretty clear that a huge portion of the market cap didn't come from anywhere. It's new capital. That doesn't mean it can't go to 0 and vanish overnight. But it does mean that play to earn games don't always need money coming in to pay out.

Fiat is created by banks - by originating loans. A bank does not actually need to have that money to create the loan - it is not transferred from somewhere else, it is just that the bank's balance sheet expands. There are rules on how much a bank is allowed to create, as you might imagine. The BTC system does not create money - you can follow the creation of a coin system to its eventual destruction and discover that…

> You will know this because the 'price' of BTC will be zero.

To be exact in this scenario, the 'price' of BTC will still be the price of the last trade in cryto exchanges. The trading volume however, will be 0, and there will no demand on the bid/ask. Hence you're stuck with BTC you can't offload.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#515

Post by Talanes »

danShumway wrote: post #477
TameAntelope wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>We never have a movie series where people pay extra money to remove scenes.

Star Wars fans keep asking though.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#516

Post by Natsu »

hailwren wrote: post #384
musicale wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is the hard part about "value creation." Is something that makes someone happier--even if others see that same thing as pointless waste--value?

We don't all want the same things and people want things we don't want, but this also allows us to trade and have both parties come out ahead from their own perspectives.

So there's always a tension between whether people should even be allowed to want some things or they should be forbidden due to being bad or wasteful in some capacity.

But I do think there's a special kind of irony to be complaining about the BS of someone getting money for moving bits and pixels around in a blog post on the internet frequented by a bunch of people, many of whom move bits and pixels around for a living.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#517

Post by skinkestek »

unnouinceput wrote: post #452
chii wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like herbalife or many of those MLM schemes, the initial entry fee does sound like scam. I wonder how long it takes to earn back the initial entry fee?

And let's not forget the oldest of them all, Star Citizen. Bet another pandemic will come and go and that game will still be in alpha

> And let's not forget the oldest of them all, Star Citizen.

Definitely not the oldest..?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#518

Post by lotsofpulp »

ikr678 wrote: post #500
chii wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Mortgage interest deduction is not utilized much anymore since standard deduction was increased in the 2017 tax changes. You have to itemize to get it, and only 11% of tax filers itemized in 2019.

There is a statistics page that shows this on its.gov, but I am on mobile and it is too much work to find it.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#519

Post by NickNaraghi »

danShumway wrote: post #468
themacguffinman wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers. I don't doubt that some people are enjoying this, and I think that's great; meditative games are fine. But I've never played a meditative game and been tempted to pay real money to turn it off. I think there's a little bit of wishful, optimistic projection about player intention that happens during these conversations, because if everyon…

> When a player is earning $10 every 4-6 hours by automating chopping logs, that's a sign that some of your playerbase isn't enjoying what's happening to them. They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.

Unfortunately, in the scope of Runescape, this misses the point in a big way. Runescape has a robust economy where every action can be measured in gold and experience per hour (when played efficiently). Someone might be buying magic logs for gold because cutting them down is a poor choice for them from an opportunity cost perspective (i.e. they can make more gold per hour via other activities their character has access to).

Zooming out, the system is actually incredible if you get a chance to analyze it a bit more. For the hardest of the hardcore players, there's a resource called CrystalMathLabs[0] that shows exactly how much time and gold it costs to max your character. And the devs are constantly optimizing new content around these "max efficiency" rates.

0: https://crystalmathlabs.com/tracker/suppliescalc.php

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#520

Post by eitland »

dqpb wrote: post #406
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.

Play-to-earn would be a coherent concept if the playing produced something of value. HN is play-to-earn. Except all you earn is worthless non-exchangeable karma.

> Except all you earn is worthless non-exchangeable karma.

I think you look at it the wrong way:

For me that "karma" counter on the profile only roughly signals someones worth here: it might either be because they've been helping others for a long time or it might be because of tactical posting of a few interesting stories ahead if everyone else or even just grinding by trying out a couple of (non spam) stories a day or something.

The real value of HN comes from what I have learned over the years, and for many others from the business opportunities they have found as well.

Bonus: I think the only real value of those stupid internet points is to look at threads and see which ones are getting upvoted or downvoted.

If they are upvoted it signals that people found them useful.

If nothing happens that either means the comment was seen by others as correct but not very interesting or few people read it because discussion moved elsewhere.

If they get downvoted then either they:

- said something mean

- was wrong

- said something widely believed to be wrong

- wrote in a way that made people misunderstand your otherwise correct explanation

- you poked a wasps nest, saying something correct that angered many easily angered individuals.

In fact I think we could (not should) remove the accumulated scores from profiles and not lose much of value (though I think many glances profiles sometimes to get a feel for who the person they talk to are).

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