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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#601

Post by ljm »

nextaccountic wrote: post #550
meowface wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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,…

> 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. Wha…

It sounds a bit like EVE Online, which is also an MMO where the base game is really just a foundation for everything else that happens.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#602

Post by JohnWhigham »

xg15 wrote: post #113

> We believe in a future where work and play become one. I'd like to nominate this statement as one of the most cynical sentences of the year.

People can now no longer say those who wish for the games of decades past are wearing rose-tinted glasses when there's this dog shit that's actively being peddled as the future of games.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#604

Post by jrootabega »

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…

In my experience, plenty of people will want to skip even the most fun game experiences to get to the farming/grinding endgame just to watch their numbers and loot collection expand.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#605

Post by lou1306 »

avgcorrection wrote: post #555
firekvz wrote: post #424

I didnt read much of the thread but I will assume that most of the people here is aware of how every single NFT game is just a ponzi. But I've lived myself, what the author mentions as a "way to lift people out of poverty.", from the era before NFT or "play to earn" games existed. I come from Venezuela, a full 3rd world country and I was "lucky" to play an MMO (lineage 2) during my young days and somehow I was good a…

> I come from Venezuela, a full 3rd world Considering the Red Scare rhetoric in the West about Venezuela I’d say it is solidly second world.

Not really. Yugoslavia, another socialist country, was probably the most prominent European country that identified as "third-world". "Second world" was basically the Warsaw Pact, China and their other satellites, not just any socialist state.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#606

Post by Valakas_ »

Animats wrote: post #151
gitfan86 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what people don't seem to understand about BitCoin. It is cashflow negative, Money has to keep coming in to keep the price up due to paying miners. It is totally fine if you think BTC is better than the USD or Gold for whatever reason. But Bitcoin is still cashflow negative. You have to keep pumping money into it to keep up its value. Where is that money going to come from? Is it coming from Tether? Is it com…

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.

It must be safe to do tax evasion, money laundering, and drugs with a system that is transparent and traceable till the beginning of its existence.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#607

Post by Valakas_ »

whatshisface wrote: post #166
anonporridge wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the same true of gold? The gold supply is inflating at about the same rate as bitcoin right now, but has enough incoming cash flows to keep the priced propped up enough to maintain a $10 trillion market cap. Obviously some of that incoming cash flow is for actually generative industrial use cases, but it's a minority, https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in... . The lion's share of incoming…

Bitcoin is unlikely to have a 5,000 year lifespan because unlike gold it can be obsoleted.

!remindme 100 years

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#608

Post by exikyut »

animal531 wrote: post #582
thombat wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you've made me wonder: those hours I spent mesmerised by watching the colourful display of Windows 95 defragging the disc, would I have paid a monthly subscription for it? What if they'd added achievements, or leveling up? "Congratulations! Your wizard can now restructure directory chains!"

I once defragged a drive multiple times, which promptly killed it, so I'm not sure how turning it into a game would have turned out.

Hmm, that's a pretty powerful proof-of-work mechanic you've got there. "DefragCoin", anyone? Now we just need a way to achieve unilateral consensus about whether a given HDD is dead...

(/s)

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#609

Post by gitfan86 »

jkhdigital wrote: post #470
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…

> Imagine if you had the option of buying a piece of gold or a piece of land with good irrigation and good soil. Why imagine? Both of these things can be purchased in the real world. And yet we see that some people purchase farmland, and others purchase bars of gold. Why is that? Turns out, people called economists have been pondering such questions for hundreds of years and have developed quite sophisticated and nua…

You may want to look up how often these "quite sophisticated and nuanced theories" are accurate.

https://www.economist.com/economic-and-financial-indicators/...

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#610

Post by toyg »

Valakas_ wrote: post #606
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.

It must be safe to do tax evasion, money laundering, and drugs with a system that is transparent and traceable till the beginning of its existence.

But it's infinitely pseudonymous, and can be easily piped into more obscure systems.
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