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-game currency, gold pieces or GP. It was something like $10 to 1M GP. I could chop enough magic logs in about 4-6 hours to make $10.
I had a breakthrough. What if I wrote a macro to record my cursor and clicks during my route from the 'bank' (where you can deposit any amount of any material) to the nearby respawning magic tree forest?
Weeks went by and I had passive income. Runescape eventually introduced the Grand Exchange, a literal in-game stock market that allowed power users like me to sell much larger quantities of certain items instantly, across all Runescape servers (referred to as Worlds) simultaneously. This required a standardized pricing mechanism, like an order book, where prices of any item would fluctuate based on buy and sell orders.
Suddenly, I now could see a +-10% change on the value of my digital assets, on which my passive income was built.
I could go on; Runescape in fact taught me much about economics. What's extraordinary is selling Runescape gold led me to Bitcoin, and I've watched cryptocurrency for nearly a decade, seeing trends from a MMO propagate throughout the world. It seems human nature to innovate and stagnate, and the more immediate our collective feedback loops, the quicker these cycles are.
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 Runescape was bad; people were willing to pay $10 of real money to remove 4-6 hours of gameplay from the game.
Well frankly, that's 4-6 hours of gameplay should never have been in the game in the first place. Players should not feel bored playing your game for that long, certainly not bored enough to pay money to get out of it.
I have no doubt that learning how to exploit these systems was really fun for people, because learning how to exploit systems and build macros and read economic signals and avoid detection from a company is genuinely really interesting, fascinating work. It's just a shame that the only way Runescape could (inadvertently) enable that experience for people was to make a crappy grind process for an even larger portion of their playerbase.
I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase.
And I think that perspective is worth keeping when we look at play-to-earn games. These are boring games, and some people are doing some fun economics stuff on top of them. That doesn't make the core gameplay any less boring though, and the fun economics stuff only works because a lot of other players are having a miserable time with the intended mechanics. I don't like praising a design ethos that says that a nontrivial portion of your players will be bored and will pay someone else to play the game for them.
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 change names - a lv10 tree, a lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires imagination, development, testing.
So most open world games will have a high grinding/content ratio. 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. And there's pvp and talking to fellow players to keep it fun. So, in the end, I agree with you it sucks to have a game some players pay to not play it and others have fun cheating it, and it's a cheap design choice, but there are some people find it relaxing to watch a little toon chop down a magic tree.
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. In fact, the harder your life is, the more rewarding it can be.
These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world and life that's more rewarding than reality. The parallels with real life are direct and intentional: "grinding" is like real work that earns you fungible profit that you can then trade to skip other types of work that you don't like to do. This is a proven loop of reward in reality and it works in games too, being consistently "fun" isn't the only way for a game to satisfy players. I can't speak to Axie Infinity which seems like it's not even well developed to that extent, but for other games in the field these grinds aren't exactly a failure of design, they're effective at constructing a life-like reward system that doesn't solely rely on "fun".
Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial, hence the whole article about this being a bullshit job. I personally avoid these types of games (basically all MMOs) for this reason and I don't see how web3 makes any of it better. But I find it hard to criticize it objectively. I think real life is bullshit anyway, so the cheap imitation of life that these games offer isn't always completely worse. I can see why many people willingly buy into it.
The reason grinding exists is also economic in nature: the "consumer value for money" equation is often reduced to maximizing hours of playtime. This has led to extremely padded gameplay all throughout when we compare to arcade games, which are premised on "operator value of time" and therefore always endeavor to shuttle players in and out of their session in a few minutes.
The other day I visited the local pinball joint and the old EM game I was playing got stuck counting up the 3000 point bonus during gameplay. I cradled the ball on the right flipper, thinking "hmm, how interesting!" One of the staff came over and apoplectically remarked "If you don't continue play I am going to have to turn the game off", and when I did as instructed, showed great distress at how I had managed to roll over the score and accumulate two free credits, but also appreciated that he had gotten a bit closer to the mysterious issue of the game repeatedly ending up with 9 credits.
I see the impact of NFTs as a pendulum swing towards "item value in context", which has no particular relationship to time or even defined scarcity, but would instead favor broad reusability across numerous contexts. P2E is just the early mimicry every new model has to go through before getting to the good parts, in the same way that early console games took a few years to start relaxing the constraints of arcades in earnest.
I think a much more likely early candidate for interesting NFT gaming will be small collectable games, derived from the procedural arts scene. Scarcity sets individual prices within a collectables market, but the value of the collection as a whole is determined by other modes of context. There's no need to squeeze or stretch the gameplay loop or make it addictive or insert monetizing gates; every instance can be exactly designed to be "ideal" on its own. Instead the game has to cater to speculative interests, which is a whole other set of trade-offs and can even favor characteristic flaws. For some reason I have not yet seen the "pay to lose" NFT game, but to me it seems blindingly obvious that being able to lose in an interesting way will command speculative interest.
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 was worth something) then it wouldn't do its job as a disincentive to cheat the system because you're not actually wasting anything by doing the work.
Runescape never intended folks to hit that high a level. Two brothers made the game and they just kind of filled the endgame levels never expecting anyone to reach it. Later, they added more and more content to fill those later levels. So it also suprised them I guess.
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
The things that people are willing to spend money on in games are usually interesting for people for the exact reason that those things are scarce. So it is, from my experience, all about showing off.
Saying this as someone who exploited a lot of games and made some large passive income from that, "back in the days". I'd say 95% of -- "end-customers" (as opposed to resellers which you need if you move a lot,) bought stuff just to show off.
So if those things were readily available and didn't require grinding, people wouldn't desire them. It's almost a bit of a paradox, I guess.
It’s a bit disheartening when you look at how many people deal with the numbness ever present in their lives by playing games that mete out little rewards in easily quantifiable bits. This is not what humans need, or, if we’re honest, want.
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" doesn't become "pay to win", I'd say a game is probably fine, overall, if people are enjoying substantial portions of that game, even if they're not enjoying all of it.
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.
I agree with most of this including pay-to-earn, more worryingly there are other types of to-earn being floated like learn-to-earn. It’s almost like people are rushing headlong into dystopia and ignoring all the downsides of extrinsic rewards.
That said a successful game like this will always have a non-trivial part of the player base willing to pay to skip parts of the game. They want the success now not later and aren’t willing to work for it. Even if the journey is actually fun. Most games take this quite seriously though and work against gold farming and cheating as it ruins the experience they set out to make.
Where it becomes evil is when you set out to make it horrible intentionally so a bigger part of the player base has to pay to remove it and continue playing.
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 conversation. As others mentioned, how much of life is the boring, grind-y parts? How many of us on HN find clever ways to circumvent, augment, automate the grind? Is it immoral to create profitable, addictive systems of human engagement? Does 'good' game design have a quantifiable definition?
That’s a very romantic view of the goals of game design. For a live service game the metrics to hit are mainly retention and monetization. Whether something is subjectively fun doesn’t really come into the picture
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
If you're designing a free to play game and want to make money from it, this is not just good, it's a design goal -- as long as the developer is the one making the real world money.
Clash of Clans perfected this model over 10 years ago:
> I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase.
I can’t stop myself from reading this as an argument about the real world :)
The grinding pricess certainly gets boring sometimes so we begin hacking a more exciting game on top of it for sure ;)
I have to say that many of my fondest memories from all kinds of systems; games, work, play, all of my favorite times were when I was finding an unscratched edge in a model. There’s something superlative about finding a hack, a way to obtain something that the designer of the game did not intend. The feeling of “I know your game better than you do” is something I shall never forget.
Those fleeting moments where you have a temporary advantage gained without malfeasance but with pure cunning and skill (or cleverness if we’re being bold), those are the happiest times in my life.
Finding the little edges where things just don’t quite add up, shining a light on them, and wielding them as your own; that’s the stuff from which real hackers are made.
> … 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?
This was addressed brilliantly in a South Park episode, “Freemium Isn’t Free.” In it, a character, Stan, blows a ton of money advancing a by-design boring game. The game is revealed to be a sham to bleed players of cash. It likens addicted gamers to alcoholics. This mock commercial appears in the ep:
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.
> 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?
From a business perspective, you're allowing for engagement despite different time valuations by player personas. The savvy game designer would not only encourage this, it would develop a way to capture a portion of the proceeds.
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
The difference between now and then is that people had to go to third parties; nowadays the game developer themselves will sell you the skip. Or a chance to gamble at a boost.
Some of these mechanics are "compelling", in a very visceral sense - they compel people to spend time or money, in a way that isn't quite describable as fun. And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular.
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.
This kind of grinding is probably the part I enjoy most about games. It's almost meditative. I usually play games to kill time anyways. I guess that's why I enjoyed games like FF8, WoW, and Maple Story.
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 were fine but easily detected due to the repeated patterns. Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014. Interesting how botting numbers drastically inflated player counts and engagement and the company Jagex became a private equity darling getting bought and sold several times, its almost like they had an incentive to keep the practice going.
> Economics
Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when Microsoft cloud launched.
> 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 + reflection to bind game objects directly, meaning that it allowed full interactivity with the underlying game, rather than just a simple image recognition and mouse control framework.
During this era, Jagex (makers of Runescape) made some big efforts to combat the botting. They started using obfuscators to make reverse engineering the bytecode harder, and reworked the handling of all String objects internally to mask them. There were more efforts, of varying success, but without fail, this one guy would have the botting client (and by extension, the whole botting ecosystem) back online in a week or so.
Flash forward to 2011, and Jacmob starts teasing something big for his RSBot 4.0 release: a “web-walking” API that would allow script writers to input any two positions on the world map, and have the botting client find them a path there, navigating through buildings, portals, teleports along the way. This was going to be an absolute game changer - script writing required insane attention to detail, trial and error, and tedium to navigate the world map in a slightly-randomized/hard-to-detect way. And yet a week or so before the big release… boom, another big effort comes from Jagex to stop the injection clients: the Great Bot Nuke of 2011.
This was different from the prior attempts by Jagex. Radio silence from Jacmob and the RSBot team, which was weird given the pending release. As the dust settled over the following weeks, it comes out that Jacmob, King of the botting community, has become Mod Jacmob, employee of Jagex, with very little fanfare both then and ever since. RSBot 4.0 was not to be.
Jacmob left the company several years later, but led their efforts through 2014 to combat botting, with great success. There’s very little information publicly available, but I strongly suspect he was using the obvious strategies of looking at probability distributions for click positioning on game objects and delays between certain behaviors to spot automation.
Jagex’s operations have grown much sloppier after his departure, but the scene has never returned to its former glory pre-2011. One nerdy, talented, quiet figure was responsible for so much of the Runescape community’s development - and yet you’d never know it without having been there yourself. Quite a world we live in.
(@Jacmob, if happen to read this - can I interview you pls <3?)
Edit: this is all from memory, I’m probably bungling the details in quite a few places.
>Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when Microsoft cloud launched.
I mined cpuminer cryptocoins on azure free servers about this time. I got banned fast but still made a few 100s of dollars (which is basically a million to a 16 or 17 year old like me).
Delightful, I very nearly stopped my stream of consciousness to check the numbers, I wondered if anyone else would. It seems many of us share nostalgia around RS.
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 graphics so your PC would not be overloaded due to running too many expensive Java applet graphics processes.
If I recall correctly it had its own intuitive scripting language. Some of these scripts were extremely coordinated: you could have several accounts mine ore, another account transfer it, and another account to manage smithing it in an orchestrated fashion.
If you were into player-versus-player, RS Classic had this unintended concept of "having catch" on someone based on your player ID on the server. Essentially if your player ID on the server was lower than your opponent's, then in a fight it would be significantly easier to chase them until they were dead. Catching a player took some well timed clicks and coordination. AutoRune (and the other bots I'll talk about) exposed this player ID to you so you could log out and in until you received a player ID that was sufficiently advantageous enough for you.
Even more scary was that it had an autocatcher that made it effectively impossible for another player to escape you in PVP so that you didn't need to learn the proper catching technique.
There were also free to use but less powerful bots like IT-bot (scriptable with Java) and Runebot (IIRC only allowed you to autotrain).
Fatigue and CAPTCHAs defeated by crowd sourcing with Sleepwalker --
To deter bots, RuneScape implemented a concept called "fatigue" where your character would supposedly get tired after harvesting items or gaining a certain number of experience points and you would be forced to use your sleeping bag to rest. When you rested, you would have to solve a CAPTCHA to wake up. I am still amazed with the level of coordination that happened here: someone built a tool called SleepWalker where you would write CAPTCHAs for other people and gain points. Each point you wrote for someone else became a word that you were allowed to have someone complete a CAPTCHA for you. You were also able to pay money to avoid writing CAPTCHAs yourself, and Sleepwalker was smart enough to integrate with whatever bot you were using. Eventually the more sophisticated bots like AutoRune and IT-bot implemented their own OCR so SleepWalker became something only used by people who couldn't afford OCR, but I'm still amazed by the community coordination here.
Now, these bots interacted with the RuneScape world by sending server side commands so you would never need to actually click on anything in the world to watch your character do things. The problem here is that these methods were comparatively easy to detect so Jagex would periodically ban players caught cheating. This is where SCAR comes in.
SCAR = Shit Compared to AutoRune --
SCAR was a less sophisticated but extremely effective botting tool that relied only on clicking colors. You wrote scripts in Pascal (of all things!) to do the tasks you wanted like mine ore or kill chickens and it did this by clicking predefined pixel colors with the timings you specified. To do it properly, it calibrated your in-game compass to align properly so the pixel clicking would work. It also implemented its own timing and color jitter so that the simulated clicks would appear to be from a human and not a bot. There were also scripts that would handle cases where a mod would message you and ask if you were a bot and it would respond with 'noope im not a bot, gtg bye!'.
All the characters I automated with the API-based bots ended up banned, but I'm pretty sure the one that I used SCAR on never got banned. The clicking approach became extensible when RS Classic became RS2, and I'm sure AutoRune continued into the future too but this is where I became too busy with school to keep up with all this.
Anyway, RuneScape automation is near and dear to my heart and got me started in CS so I love talking about this haha.
In my early 20s I played an MMO called Asherons Call. I discovered a vendor in one high level area that would sell bows for less than a specific vendor in a low level area would buy them, netting you a small margin per bow.
Being a programmer I wrote a script that used two different teleport skills (lifestone and portal recall I think?) and a bit of movement and clicking based on pixel (Color) matching to deal with latency, tweaking it over time, and started printing in game money. I would come home from work to a backpack full of D notes (unit of currency I adapted my script to convert).
Then I would sell these D notes on eBay. Did this for a few months. First month I made over 7k USD (I shit you not). 2nd month about 3.5k, maybe 1k third month, so basically the market collapsed and I moved on (to other fun exploits… once you’ve been bitten by the exploit bug…).
In retrospect I regret it.
I’m a total hypocrite saying this, but I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs, and gotten far more advanced and efficient over the years.
The fun I had in AC before I started doing this stuff is something I wish more people could experience, but I suspect has been lost.
Once you start allowing (or failing to prevent) real world transactions from altering the play of the game, which is really hard to do while still allowing any sort of item/money transfer between players, some subset of the player base will view their effort as devalued. Some other part of the player base will be delighted that while they don't necessarily have the time to put into the game, they can still get help progressing. There are of course the fringes of those that devote themselves to supporting this market or exploiting the market to support their power fantasies (which of course include flexing that power on other players).
There are valid uses for that market though, such as those aforementioned players that don't have time but would like to not be stuck for inordinate amounts of time at certain power levels. Basically, the same reason some games have difficulty levels. Some people want the challenge, others just want to experience the game.
> In retrospect I regret it.
It's sort of like allowing yourself to use a cheat in a game the first time through. If you take away a significant portion of the challenge when that's one of the things you're there for, the game can become much less fun. Other times, it just becomes a game within a game where you're playing market trader or whatever, which is fun while money/resources are still scarce, but then less fun after they aren't because of your wealth, and then you return to the main game to find it's less fun too.
Similar to your story, I learned how to program by writing Runescape botting scripts.
Fast forward to today, and my hobby tech project for the past few months has been building a OSRS market-intel website for trading on the Grand Exchange. Great toy market that eliminates a lot of the complexity of “real-world” economics. Funny how outsized that damn game’s influence has been on the world.
RS was the perfect game for me and dramatically changed my life. Started when I was 12, played for YEARS slowly getting better.
Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money). Got into botting with some friends, made a little money doing that too.
My experience with RS led me to an interest in economics, and I'm now an accounting PhD student about to graduate. My bro got into coding bots, and is now an SWE doing high level work.
I love the game to pieces, and it isn't because I made money playing.
> Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money)
Do you feel any remorse or regret about scamming people out of thousands of dollars? I am a bit surprised that you are bragging about this sort of unethical\illegal behavior on an account directly tied to your real world identity.
Very similar story here.. I had a few party hats in Runescape which made the whole NFT thing and to a lesser extent Bitcoin so much easier to understand.
Long ago there was an MMO called Ultima Online. At one point gold on there reached the point that it was more expensive than the Italian lira. This was in a kooky time in 1999 when everything was at a peak. Here's the old article.
The NYT just wasn't having it.
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
THE NEW ECONOMY
Money for Nothing
A new breed of Internet profiteers is spinning virtual gold into hard currency. By JOHN COOK
Fixer-upper w/moat: The real market for imaginary property in Ultima is booming.
enjamin Schriefer and Michael Gmeinwieser make money the new-fashioned way: they sell stuff that doesn't exist. And their customers, who pay them in cold, hard cash, don't mind one bit.
I remember castles in Ultima Online going for thousands of dollars around then on eBay. I think an 800pt Grandmaster build character went for a couple hundred dollars to $1k depending on the skill set.
I knew someone at the time who bought a brand new sports car with all the money they made off Ultima Online.
I honestly miss the game, had a blast playing it back in the day.
Here's a story about The Sims Online I posted a few years ago, in which I described making a maze solving bot to quickly and automatically generate millions of Simoleons, and an ad-hoc solution to the delivery problem:
I wrote a bot for The Sims Online that manufactured Simoleons, then repurposed it to catalog and describe objects in the game for you with a speech synthesizer.
TSO had some ham-fisted money making multi player games that forced players to interact with each other in exchange for Simoleons.
One of them was a maze solving game for two players, where one player is lost in the maze and can see the local walls around them, and the other player can see an overall map of the maze without the player's position, and has to guide them around and figure out where they are and how to guide them out by asking them what they see and telling them which direction to move.
That required a lot of work for two people to do manually, so there was a big reward, but it was trivial and fun to solve mazes programmatically! (Plus it made cool bleeping and kaching sounds as it solved the mazes and printed money!)
I would run two TSO clients at the same time, logged into different accounts in different windows. The bot attached to both of them, then screen scraped pixels and injected events to repeatedly solve mazes by moving the player around until it identified where they were, solving for the shortest path, and bringing them straight home quickly by machine-gun clicking on the arrow buttons.
My housemate had a good eBay reputation, so as an experiment, we tried selling Simoleons on eBay for real currency via PayPal.
I could generate arbitrarily huge amount of virtual currency quite quickly. The bottleneck was selling it, and the problem was customer service.
The problem was that many of the customers were pouty temperamental 15-year-olds using their parent's eBay accounts, who would give scathing eBay reviews if their order wasn't delivered instantly, or they suffered some imagined slight.
And the other problem was that TSO just wasn't designed to make it easy to transfer large amounts of Simoleons from player to player.
You couldn't just "wire" somebody an arbitrary amount of cash via in-game email -- you had to show up on their lot and meet them at a specific real time, and suspiciously hand it over to them $1000 at a time.
There was another better way to transfer cash more efficiently than handing it over grand by grand, and that was with tip jars: You could fill a tip jar with $5000 using the pie menu with a couple of mouse clicks, and then the user could empty it the same way.
So when I had to deliver our first million Simoleons, I came up with a system where I'd go to the lot of the customer and meet them, then ask them to line up a bunch of tip jars in a row. I would then use bot macros to fill each tip jar one by one with $5000, while the customer would quickly empty them as I filled them up, and then we'd go back to the beginning of the row and start all over again, until we'd transferred the entire million Simoleons, in only 200 $5000 hand=>jar=>hand transactions instead of 1000 $1000 hand=>hand transactions.
One time when we were making a big delivery of cash, running the gauntlet of tip jars in our customer's living room (which I admit looked pretty fishy), and their housemate came home, saw what was happening, and wisely sussed up the situation that there was some kind of deal going down, that she wanted in on.
So she put her own tip jar down at the end of her housemate's row of tip jars, and I blithely deposited $5000 into her tip jar several times, which she immediately snapped up.
When I realized what happened, instead of contracting The Sims Mafia to do a hit on her, I congratulated her for her loose morals and ingenuity. It was such a great hack, and I totally fell for it, and had more Simoleons than I knew what to do with anyway. It's all about good customer service!
It was a fun experiment, but other bots and offshore farmers were starting to work the system too, and customer service and delivery problems made it not worth continuing.
So the unemployed Sims bot wouldn't feel bored, I retrained it into a more practical assistive utility called "Simplifier", which knew how to recognize and navigate the Sims user interface to show, scroll through, and enumerate all the many items, wallpapers, floor tiles, etc, in the catalog.
It took snapshots of the icons, and read the text off the screen to capture the title, price and description (it was all in a bitmap Comic Sans font, so it was easy for a bot to recognize, if not for your eyes to read), and made a searchable illustrated database of all your built-in and downloaded content.
Simplifier addressed the problem that many players would download thousands of objects from web sites, or make their own custom objects with tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic (shown earlier in the demo video), but it was impossible to search or keep track of them through The Sims interface.
And it was useful for Sims web site publishers to make illustrated catalogs of their own objects.
You could also operate it in manual mode, where you press and hold on an icon in the catalog, and it reads the object description to you with a speech synthesizer.
That was useful for kids learning to read, old farts with bad eyesight, and snobby designers who hate Comic Sans, who would enjoy having the object descriptions read to them.
Schneier on Security: Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds:
Yes but games now actively have to fight this or they become a Money transfer agent and then you have to comply with anti money laundering laws.
I think that Bitcoin and Ethereum tie a lot of things together that make them weaker but are great technological achievements. Eventually governments will regulate them properly and the whole environmental impact needs at least a layer two solution.
If you haven't already read it (or, heck, even if you have), I _strongly_ suspect you'd have a blast with Neal Stephenson's _REAMDE_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde
I wonder if we’ll have politicians and political philosophers in the near future who will credit MMO games for awakening their keen eye on societal issues.
MMO worlds and their economies taught many how the basics of our economy works. As a kid you got exposed to virtual versions of negative aspects of free markets that went against the meritocratic ethos of the game. (Especially if you were one of the kids not permitted to use money to buy virtual currency.)
I wonder the same. Played MMOs growing up. Got scolded a lot for wasting time on video games.
But I look back now and realize a lot of my foundational knowledge on economics, programming, networking, teamwork, came from MMORPGS. They are social games where you deal with people - and that is a valuable experience.
Unfortunately modern MMO’s are very asocial games and I don’t think much can be learned from them.
> It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this [woodcutting] level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum.
[laughs in agility]
Anyway I agree with Runescape teaching some real world skills. Runescape (and some other multiplayer games) also taught me about scams and I think trained me to be skeptical whenever something seems too good to be true. For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago.
> For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago.
Isn't this kind of thing illegal with real assets?
I traded custom scripts on a IRC channel. People would pay me with party hats and Santa hats which were some of the most ridiculously priced assets in the game.
The macro client even had a captcha queue where other miners could earn credits by filling out the captchas other players were getting and then use the credits to have other people fill out their captcha. This way you could leave it running all night as long as you did your part . You would get a captcha if you did the same thing for too long
I'm hoping the rest of the story was you putting some of your magic tree earnings into a few hundred Bitcoins when they cost pennies, and you are now a Runescape multi-millionaire.
Others in this thread mentioned similar patterns of acquiring and selling virtual assets. PayPal was a common money transfer platform and eBay was a common marketplace (before they banned the sale of digital items).
I stopped using PayPal for... a number of reasons, and BTC was a functional alternative.
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 least). So I have some perspective in being able to ask myself "Why is this interesting?" without any emotional-financial attachment. I do this little exercise every time I read about some new brain-twisting scheme to move money around and capture some of the XX%/month rise.
Play-to-earn seems to fit the same mold: You can talk all you want about how play-to-earn is "the new new" and how it's helping people out of poverty and changing the dymanics of gaming and yadda yadda yadda. But just ask yourself: If the money music stopped tomorrow, would you play the game?
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?
It sounds like the answer, at least when it comes to Axie Infinity, is no. It doesn't sound fun. It doesn't sound compelling. It DOES sound like an opportunity for people to extract money from the crypto system that's fundamentally based on the assumption that the crypto system will continue rising in value forever.
> 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 buying into the game and entering that system, that sounds more like a pyramid scheme than anything.
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 coming from people looking to make quick money? And when BTC hits 1M/coin, then what? You still need more money coming in to keep it above 1M.
This is the most crucial question about everything crypto-related.
Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-sum game. If you invest, you are guaranteed to lose on average. If you do happen to win, your gains are coming out of the pocket of someone else who lost even more.
The price of the token in question doesn't enter into this at all. It can rise, fall, anything. It is still a negative-sum game, but some people have not yet realised that they lost.
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.
Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free to use? They all were working to "make the world a better place" and not making money as they were burning billions each year, challenging the traditional and profitable companies. With Amazon prices were amazing, you had unlimited rights and not only buying but also selling was great. Bezos was worth quite a much but his company never made any profit up until a few years back.
The news business was destroyed in the process, just as the retail and once the establishment lost its ground the money began poring in. From 90's up to late 2000's the internet was amazing as everything was paid by people who were about to reap their investment back a decade later.
My point is, following the money is tricky. Maybe we are at the verge of another change where the costs are payed by crypto bros who will be splitting countries and starting wars once they are done growing the landscape.
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.
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.
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.
I did a report on this game for a client a few months back -- the amount of daily earnings a player can expect has crashed significantly over the past few months, and it's only gotten worse ever since.
That's pretty impressive. What do you know what caused the May 2021 spike? what is your feel of how 'sustainable' the whole eco-system of this game is..
Agree with this reasoning - NFTs seem like they clearly have little to no real value and I think the people buying them understand that and are just doing speculation (and we know how that ends up). BTC/ETH are a little harder to gauge because they market themselves as alternative currencies rather than a product in-and-of-itself, but I still get the same fear that it's entirely based on sentiment and nothing in the real world. One article (or Elon tweet) could cause it all to drop overnight.
The USD might fall the same way, but it'd be slower and would require real-world change to happen instead of people just deciding not to use something anymore, and it's so tied up in the global currency exchange that we'd have way bigger problems to worry about than "my investment account lost all it's money". I'm pretty risk averse so I get that other people would want to play that game, I'm just not much of a gambler.
Ethereum seems slightly better than Bitcoin for the reasons you stated as well - ETH could drop to almost zero value and smart contracts would still be cool, but ultimately I'm into the tech. Feels a lot like having a lot of reddit karma to me - it's cool to the people that think it's cool, but doesn't mean much outside of that, unless you can convince someone that does think it's cool to take your fake assets and trade them for "real" assets.
> 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?
There are hundreds of ways for that answer to be yes, and this is what is attracting so many builders to the space and why it builds so fast.
Many crypto enthusiasts and the skeptics that surround them are looking at linear bets. Put in X capital, receive X+Y% of capital back, or lose X-Y%. Although very popular approach, it is basically the tip of the iceberg of what's going on.
You can start with no capital and earn the crypto. You can earn lots of it. The price of what you earn can stay flat. The price of what you earn can decrease and you still come out ahead, because you are earning a lot. Not different than earning shares at a FAANG (or NAAAM these days?), except in crypto the earning is is waaaay faster than FAANG vesting periods, and every project has waaaay more upside without wasting decades of your life praying for exit liquidity at a private startup.
So the basis of your question is really project dependent. If I found a way to earn Axie SLP, NFTs, or Axie tokens fast, I wouldn't care about the exchange rate of any of those (unless the dilution outpaced the point of earning) and I think you - and many others - are missing that.
A lot of people stand up smart contract products that accept existing assets as deposit, and take a few basis points of the assets upon deposit or withdrawal, and thats the whole business model. They all do different things thats usually solving an interest or need for the people with the other assets. Completely passive income. I've even seen code that will accept an asset, take the cut, and immediately exchange the cut for a stablevalue asset, all initiated and paid for by the user that made the deposit.
There are many non-linear earning opportunities in this space. Many rival what the largest tech companies offer, even if the exchange rates of the things earned stayed flat. So the calculus is pretty clear: smugly exploit yourself for an ad conglomerate, or directly earn and build in this other even faster moving economy.
> 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 use this yard stick when reviewing all of my tech investments. Providing real value with interesting technological innovations is why ETH outperformed every other alt-coin, just like why Amazon and Google survived the dotcom bust. It seems fundamentally unfair to ask this question specifically of “crypto/NFT/web-3” when it applies equally to all assets and projects.
I agree with your point that the operative word here is "earn", and not "play".
To play the devil's advocate: many crypto developers continue to build in the space (or have done it in the past) despite large drawdowns in token prices (denominated in USD). Would that constitute a sufficient signal that "there is something real there", distinct from the question of "is the valuation too high"?
This might just as well be an "emperor's new clothes" situation, in which a significant number of people are either deluded in thinking there is something of value or heavily invested in making others believe so. Neither of which means there is actually anything "real" there.
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.
Yes. The stocks in the SP500 sometimes go down in value, sometimes in the aggregate for a long time. Individually some of them go down forever.
If a stock goes down in value and it still pays a dividend it becomes more valuable for this. Setting that aside all stocks have a not very senior claim on assets. As the stock goes down sometimes it is worth less than the assets it has a claim to. At that point its better to buy up a controlling interest and sell the assets. Thats what private equity does. So yes I am interested when the value goes down.
Sure, my fear is that my average peer won't be though. Even if I can see the technical merits...if all my peers are just in it for that quick buck this is going to end badly
Is there any difference why anyone would invest in the stock market? Of course people asset prices to inflate. Isn’t that the whole point of investing in anything?
But Web3/Crypto/NFT is so much more than the financial incentives. It's much more about culture, belonging, tribalism (the good version) and the endless opportunity space of what I would call a resource. Digital assets that behave as if they are physical.
I have been involved in crypto since the beginning and the least interesting things for me is about the value. It's just a savings account. All the fun stuff is what we build on top of that.
I hope web3/crypto/NFTs are what will finally make us realize that money is essentially meaningless, so that we can forget the concept of monetary value altogether in the long term.
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 at it, i invested so many hours on it and managed to get into top tier guilds and worlds 1st event, and somehow, my character and my items were worth thousands of dollars in the market, and suddenly i went from being a 14 y.o boy sitting in pc, to bringing more money in 1 week to my family, than my entire family together for 1 year.
I could understand that, while all other people on the game were playing for fun, it became my job, a job that actually got me and my family out of poverty...
At the time (2007) there were a lot of chinese "farmers", and people used to make fun of them, not only fun but the rest of the players were blantantly denigrating towards them, at 1st I didnt understand but once that I became a non-chinese farmer, I realized how It was a really good thing to do.
Eventually I started botting, I bought more PCs and had a full army of bots, I kept making more and more money, and it helped me and my family leave the country and pretty much bought a house, a car and paid my family expenses for like 4 years out of lineage 2 adena farming.
Also, scripting the bots pretty much got me to learn programming and english, so what I am now it's pretty much the result of some guy from chicago offering me 20$ in paypal for an item i had in my inventory that i got it while killing a monster, it all started there, that litle forbidden transaction in an MMO, changed my life completely
So, even tho it was like a job for me, I never saw it like a job, even tho it gave me a lot of money, i never got into the game as a way to get money, i was just a young kid trying to have some fun..
But now, I get really sad everytime I see those ponzi NFT games, that only sell the idea of getting rich, and I get even more sad when I see tons of venezuelan youngsters fall for it, honestly, they are just playing with their desperation.
That's an awesome story. While I've never lived in poverty, I got my first taste of making money by making bot for a FaceBook game in 2008 (WarBook, if anyone remembers that). I only made around 2,000 USD but that experience really changed my life.
Esa era la mejor era para ese tipo de juegos, entretenidos y se sacaba un rialero, por aqui haciamos lo mismo, con Silkroad y Mu.
Esos de ahorita son diferente, parece hasta macabro. Dan "becas" para que otros "jueguen" y ganen por ellos prometiendoles una parte de la ganancia, eso si, siempre y cuando el nft no caiga.
De vez en cuando conocidos me preguntan que si es bueno entrar en esos juegos nft a todos les digo que ni locos se metan ahi, da mas plata y es mas estable sembrar.
It seems like a bold statement to claim every NFT game is a ponzi. Some existing games are looking into incorporating NFTs to help facilitate the kind of transactions you previously needed paypal for. It seems a bit dismissive to hand-wave any games that want to incorporate the technology as not being able to operate sustainably.
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.
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, PR, claims of new revenue sources, etc. It's not working. In the end, it's a classic Ponzi scheme, and it collapsed after only a few months.
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.
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.
This. Axie Infinity only had traction, because the earned coin had speculative value. The traction was from people "playing-to-earn" as a job. I doubt that there are that many people playing for the fun of it. When the token loses value, there isn't a reason to continue playing.
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.
Yes but even an amoral organization could be expected to anticipate damage to their reputation when they're seen to be propping up a sufficiently transparent pyramid scheme, and decide not to cross that line. I'm still not sure they made the right move for their long-term interests, considering there's more reputational damage to come when the pyramid implodes. (They probably won't take financial damage though, as they're likely to sell near the peak.)
Oh my god. That podcast with the Axie dude made me recoil with disgust. The way they're selling the pay-to-earn concepts comparing it to mobile games is absolutely vile especially when mobile games are equally predatory
Sometimes I wish I didn't have any scruples so I could mint money from misery like this
> 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).
some games manage to do this - EVE Online has a play-to-earn model, and those who grind to earn become gameplay elements for other players (the whole game is PVP non-consensually).
VCs have to put their monthly influx of FedBux somewhere!
Less sarcastically: cheap money effectively lowers the cost of risk, thus increasing the number of risky investments made. And Axie seems like less of a risky investment than Yo was, at least.
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 strategies. On one hand, these strategies can save companies many millions of dollars, but on the other, they really produce nothing of value and are just a product of the complexities of a (human designed) tax system. Lots of regulatory compliance work also goes into this bucket. I wouldn't say all of it, because there are definitely regulations that do actually make companies safer/more transparent/etc., but anyone who has had to fill out a page after page after page "security questionnaire" knows at least half of it is bullshit that nobody is going to read in the first place. Sometimes I've been tempted to just add "Mickey Mouse" answers just to check if anyone sees it. Writing something that nobody ever reads seems like it's hard to believe that's anything else except bullshit.
> On one hand, these strategies can save companies many millions of dollars, but on the other, they really produce nothing of value and are just a product of the complexities of a (human designed) tax system
Businesses that spend less money on taxes can spend more money on expenses, such as payroll and higher quality materials and land, or it can allow them to sell products/services at a lower price, providing a competitive advantage.
But they are a product of a human designed tax system, which may or may not be bullshit. There is no single clear, correct way to implement taxes.
> Businesses that spend less money on taxes can spend more money on expenses...
Does that actually happen? Small businesses, sure. My cousin's restaurant directly ploughs that money back into the business.
But it seems large corporations mostly do executive bonuses and stock buybacks.
I guess my pendant comes down to my objection over treating all "business" as the same, morally and economically. As though megacorps are same as my cousin's restaurant, my uncle's farm.
Whereas I favor excessive generosity for small and young businesses (and farmers), anything less than levying repeated radical cashectomies against large firms is a moral disaster and economic selfown.
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 those value producing activities to minimize the bullshit side-effects and thus increase economic efficiency.
Taxes are an area with a lot of low hanging fruit, unfortunately Intuit and other tax prep companies spend a lot of money lobbying to maximizing the bullshit jobs side effects of taxation because it makes them more money.
> "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally, arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?"
But isn’t this basically every job that doesn’t directly support a human need (like food, clothing, shelter)? Just arbitrarily working to meet some other human’s desires?
Meeting a desire is not a bullshit job, depending on the desire. One example in the book is a receptionist. Some places need receptionists to answer phones or receive packages, but one receptionist was hired at a firm that didn't need her to do any work - but a competing firm in the same building had one, so they wanted one too. Meeting your desire for nice hair, even a desire for a butler to pick up your laundry or whatever, is still meeting a need, but it's less superfluous than "I need you to sit there because someone else has someone who does something similar)
I'm not arguing that it's about meetings some other human's desires. Indeed, jobs that give real pleasure or sense of accomplishment to other people (actors, massage therapists, yoga teachers, personal trainers, artists, language coaches, yada yada) I find incredibly valuable.
I'm talking about when someone, specifically a gatekeeper, creates what is basically a little tedious maze for you to run, not for their own pleasure, not even for someone else's pleasure, but often just to justify their own job, usually in a "CYA" fashion.
I don't know of any arbitrary tasks set up by gatekeepers. I mean, people don't just sit around and think up stupid tasks for fun. These jobs usually arise something like this:
In order to process request X, we need pieces of information A, B, C, D. Users frequently send in incomplete information. So we have to hire someone to check that all the required information is provided and accurate.
Yeah, it's kind of bullshit because it wouldn't be needed if people just did the right thing, but people are people, and they don't. In some cases it can be replaced with a web form with proper validation, but sometimes the information is something you can't verify with Javascript (like checking for a valid driver's license or something), so you need a human. So it goes.
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.
This reminds me of the last time I went to Vegas with my two best buds from college. I was a broke grad student, so I couldn't really do any of the entertainment stuff in the city. I also don't really like gambling, so I had a conundrum of how to spend the daylight hours, before the nightlife started up.
We ended up sitting at the nickel slots, playing just enough to stay busy so we could flag down cocktail waitresses for comped drinks. If you were economical enough with your slots play, not selecting multiple lines or multipliers, it was a cheap way to drink.
Pretty quickly, it occurred to me that I was doing a bullshit job. Why had I come to Vegas to feed a machine that wasn't even entertaining me? I felt like livestock.
Eventually, I cracked to the peer pressure of my buddies and decided to play poker with them. I won about $700 as someone who had played maybe twice before in my life, but that's another story...
Interestingly, one of the friends I was with was one of the first people I ever met to make money selling virtual goods. As a high school kid in 2001 or 2002 (well before the Second Life example the author cites in 2005), he made money selling Diablo II accounts he had beefed up in his spare time.
>>>As a high school kid in 2001 or 2002 (well before the Second Life example the author cites in 2005), he made money selling Diablo II accounts he had beefed up in his spare time.
One of my fraternity brothers paid for a vacation in Europe and a digital camcorder from selling Diablo characters, leveled up via macros, on Ebay. This was also in ~2001-2003.
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/
As I was reading Graeber, it's useful to imagine useless job economies of the past. Is a medieval abbey "useless?" Clergy? Servants to the clergy? How about courtiers? Courtiers' dress makers?
These classes represented a small part of most societies in the past, though not always that small. In any case, it's obvious that whatever needs these jobs serve are cultural. Don't underestimate culture. Money is a cultural construct. Power. Politics. Macroeconomics. Etc.
In the book version of his essay, one of the things he talks about is how most of the things people would write to him about being "bullshit jobs" were not his original definition of bullshit jobs.
He gives the example of how a lot of people wrote to him about how useless hairdressers were, since people could just style their own hair. But, to Graeber, these are very much real jobs, because it's easy to see what was exchanged for payment (hair service.) Whether it was worth the money is a different question.
Clergy, in the middle ages, wouldn't be so much a bullshit job, but might be a privileged caste. The servants of the clergy, according to Graeber, are not bullshit jobs, because like the hairdresser, they are doing something for someone (presumably.) Doing laundry or bringing tea or whatever we are imagining they are serving as servants.
I believe in the book, he resigns to include the concept of "different types" of bullshit jobs, since most people seem to be unable to stick to his original definition.
The canonical bullshit job to Graeber would be someone in a large administrative bureaucracy. This is tied, in his original essay, to examining the statistics of increase in jobs in different sectors, cross-referenced with data about the growth in the productivity of a single worker. He shows that while manufacturing and service jobs have remained steady, "administrative" jobs have increased in proportion with productivity, which he says demonstrates the "bullshit job" as purely a way of having more administrators sitting around in meetings while the same number of people do actual stuff.
So... I think a lot of people (not you) missed the fact that graeber writes from what I think is a traditional anthropological perspective, as opposed to other social philosophy traditions.
Bullshit jobs described as such by the worker was a very big part of his definition. I think the definition has to drift, since an anthropologist won't typically want to impose a typology.
In any case, if medieval monks themselves considered monkery bullshit... there are snug places in Graebers' typology for them. In fact, I believe an average monastery could man every type of bullshit job category. It would depend on whether or not they themselves believe in the monastic institutions... and I would not necessarily assume that they did.
I'm not sure "value" is the correct question. Value depends on... values, I guess.
In any case, I suspect Graeber would have advised asking them. The grinders in manilla. The currency buyers, traders, etc. Cultural reasons are hard to extract from their cultural context without resorting to essentialism.
There are differences between a game where money comes from grinding, even if 3rd party and outsourced, and a pay-to-play currency. I suspect the people participating in that economy have a narrative, and that it makes some sort of internal sense. That's culture.
It's the same cultural value provided by a slot machine.
A way to hack someone else's brain and turn them into a slave zombie.
But I guess a lot of "real" culture is basically trying to do something similar: religions, corporate cults, schools, etc. Those are maybe only superficially less grotesque.
I think the point of Graeber (RIP btw) was to highlight that certain jobs (the bullshit ones) are self-fulfilling promises; specifically jobs "that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones." [1]
What's going on here is people doing work knowing it's actual bullshit. Just like grinding in the game. There are entire sweeps of the economy dedicated to this kind of work and it's a huge waste.
> Is a medieval abbey "useless?" Clergy? Servants to the clergy? How about courtiers? Courtiers' dress makers?
You're really misinformed. Monks have been producing goods like wine, cheese, keeping society's records for centuries, or even being involved in woodwork or construction work, providing useful services to their communities. What does it have to do with "bullshit jobs"? Nothing.
Your comment sounds like a gratuitous provocation.
Honestly it seems like a pretty great career -- you get to spend your time indoors, probably somewhere climate controlled with electricity and restrooms. This is way better than the workhouse.
Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically donating their wealth to others, like a kind of privatized welfare. If people are buying these things as a speculative investment, they're participating in a private lottery. That all seems … fine?
Gold farming is, at least, based on the premise that there are people who are willing to pay other people money to perform repetitive actions in a video game for them. It's still kind of dumb and it has harmful effects on in-game economies, but at least there's some semblance of money being exchanged for goods and services.
"Play to earn", on the other hand, is based on the premise of cutting out the middleman and having the game developer just straight-up hand players money (or something money-equivalent) for playing their game. How this is even supposed to work from an economic standpoint is a question that I've never seen adequately answered.
> 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'm very familiar with Gold farming from Eve Online, where selling game currency (ISK) was permitted via exchange of game time cards sold by the game's developer. There was always a secondary market for game time cards sold for real money and that was legal too. The reason it all worked is because playing the game was really fun, but required to grind to get ISK. People with more money than time would prefer to buy themselves new spaceships to get blown up in than grind for them.
It really sounds though like Axie Infinity is not a fun game and no one treats it as one. So it is something new.
> it’s hard to find any reviews on Axie Infinity as a game rather than as an income stream or speculative investment
Pay-to-earn is such a scam inflicted on the poor though. Imagine you've been trying to get a job for months, your meager savings are dwindling, and a company says that to get the job, you need to pay them $100 to run a "background check". Of course, you don't get the job. but you're still out that money. On the remote chance that you do, it'll take you almost a week at minimum wage to earn back that money, and you're likely to have to wait 2 or 4 weeks until you see it (which you don't have the money for). None of this works from an economic standpoint, it's outright slavery!
Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done. There's no actual economic output to paying people to break rocks.
Exactly. One could make an argument that the work some users put in, once sold, result in value to the buyer, but that value isn’t generated by the worker. The developers created the scheme and could deliver the value directly at no cost to all players, poor and wealthy, but instead chose to create meaningless work by making grinding opportunities.
I guess it depends on the grind involved. Some streamers are paid to play games. They confess they don't always enjoy it or every game that people want to watch, but it seems better than some alternatives. And a few YouTubers I follow have admitted to less than stellar career prospects otherwise.
Now if it's pure, unfun grind that only pushes numbers around in an MMO then I'd agree it's basically just outsourced cheating. And a net negative both because it compromises a social form of entertainment and doesn't produce anything else of tangible value.
Imagine there’s a multi-billion dollar industry where some people record sound waves made with their vocal cords, and other people pay _real money_ monthly to have a chance to replay those waves for entertainment only.
>Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done.
Who decides what work, "needs to be done"? I suppose you could argue that activities that create the necessities needed to survive (food, shelter, clothing), "need to be done", but everything else is simply a matter of choice. Economic output is a subjective, contrived metric.
But there's an economic drain if you fire all the rock breakers, and they end up on the streets.
With automation coming for most jobs, we can either live in a low to no work Utopia or a hypercapitalist hell. Given recent trends, my money is on hypercapitalist hell.
The original article seems to assert that there are essentially no non-grinder buyers (which would be a key distinction from the gold farming) that in this case the existing grinders are selling the items to the new-potential grinders who are paying an initial investment with the hope of recovering it by grinding - if that's the case, then it is essentially a classic pyramid scheme where you as a newcomer pay so that future newcomers would pay you more afterwards; which works until the stream of new incoming money dries up.
Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically donating their wealth to others
No, donating would be 'here, have a bunch of games resources, enjoy.' People who buy virtual goods are purchasing status - maybe purely social status Veblen goods (eg hats and other rare-but-fundamentally useless items) or maybe strategic status (eg weapons/armor that give you a combat buff in their own right, plus might also indicate that you're tremendously experienced if you earned rather than purchased it, which is often unknown to the other players).
some years ago I got into a Roman Gladiator game that ran on this model, that was both fun and easy (for me, ie I happened to be good at it). So I ground my way to being quite a high level player and winning a number of fancy items, and accepting challenges from other players. In a well balanced game every item buff has some sort of weakness, eg it's vulnerable to particular spam attacks or regular hits from some other specific weapon. I had figured out most of these by grinding my way up, and after a while I noticed that people who had a lot of fancy items got super abusive if they lost a combat to grinding techniques rather than better gear, to the point where multiple players started harassing my platform account rather than just my in-game character. There was a big inverse snobbery against working too hard at it; I was even accused of 'violating the spirit of the game' ¯\(°_o)/¯
I wouldn't call it donating if they're grinding for it.
Imagine you could go to a prison and get paid to break rocks all day for money whenever you want. OK, sure, the people doing it are doing it because they need it. But would you call the person running such an establishment charitable?
It's just dirty, when you take out all the in between and just look at the ends of the process, it's basically paying poor people to waste their time because they need food because you get off on it.
AC costs money, in most of the world they would do without and have extra heat from the PC. Also, limited range of motion plus extremely long workweek quickly results in RSI.
The problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is similar to this common saying in advertising: "I know I'm wasting 80% of my ad spend. I just don't know which 80%." The same principle likely applies to wages across the economy.
I think it's rather obvious that a huge fraction of employment is worthless. The problem is determining which fraction that is. It's not obvious. Many jobs that look and feel like bullshit may have some hidden function within an organization that is essential (and may not even be the "primary function" of the job as per the job req), and many very important looking jobs may create little to no value. There are probably companies that could knock out the CEO but would have a tougher time without one of their office assistants, but where telling which office assistant this is would be almost impossible without spending months observing the intricate details of operations.
The fact that markets are bad at optimizing out this obvious cost center makes me wonder if it might be "non-computable."
The only way we know of to discover this is to use Darwinian methods, but this is incredibly destructive. Deep recessions take out a lot of good but not-yet-robust businesses along with the bad and the obsolete. The modern practice of pumping economies along forever and not allowing deep recessions probably leads to a ton of dead wood building up but it's also probably why we have progress in quantum computers, electric vehicles, and space flight among other speculative areas that would probably implode in a deep recession (without being specifically subsidized). Forest fires burn the dead wood but they also burn a shitload of trees, especially immature ones who don't have layers of flame retardant bark. Lots of old and injured animals die but so do the babies who can't run fast yet.
Also, many jobs are probably partially bullshit or mostly bullshit, but also have one critical (often undocumented) function wrapped into them that if eliminated, would cause enormous damage.
Companies often barely have any idea of what employees spend the majority of their day doing. They are never going to catch all the little things.
Yup, and it gets worse when you consider that everyone is usually trying to make their job look important regardless of how important it actually is. It's likely that a deliberate attempt to weed out BS jobs would select for good fakers, ass kissers, and con artists and weed out a lot of heads-down productive people.
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.
I'm a bit of a fan of the whole cryptocurrency thing, the early scope of the concept anyway, replace money, programmatic agreement enforcement, creating financial assets that can't be controlled, incentivizing things that need incentivizing and all that. It's interesting stuff.
But this whole metaverse and play to earn is obvious nonsense.
But then, if you show me a slot machine and explain it to me in plain English, that it pays out less than you put in, that it is designed to addict you, that you sit there sticking quarters in and pulling a handle all day, I'd laugh at you before I stuck a dollar in the thing. But people do. All the time. So I'm not so sure this nonsense is going to crash and burn, but I'm certain it isn't worthwhile in the least.
Well the idea behind bitcoin and what not is to use it as money. You might not think it fits the bill but that's the idea, and I think it's a good idea, whether or not execution in it's current state is sufficient.
We have a court system primarily because it was the most efficient way before. It is older than computers, it exists because there was no other way, not because writing logic is hard, although it is. But there's a trade off, if we assume you can never write logic to handle laws then you accept that you will always create a position of power from which law can be abused.
After seeing the word "Ponzi" haphazardly misapplied to so many different things in the tech space[1], it's incredibly gratifying to see it used here properly!
> gameplay designed to be dull enough that rich players will pay to outsource it to poor players
Do I understand it correctly that the point here, and maybe the central point of Bullshit Jobs, is that we tend to structure our economies with built in inefficiencies so that tedium appears where there is no need for it. And the reason for this is that otherwise the organisation or person solving a given problem would immediately remove their own lifeline, their income or their raison d'etre?
So the point of this article is point out how this happens even when there isn't a problem to be solved - which is reason to believe that it happens all around us as well in situations where we're "solving an actual problem".
It's like a machine that endlessly inflates all pockets of human interaction with tedium and labels it as efficiency or "fun". A paper clip maximizer of sorts.
Selling digital goods for real money is pretty well tread. What does web3/crypto add here?
Game assets can't be used in another game. You need full support from the game developer. The devs could much more easily and cheaply sell the assets direct or support trading.
If the game is distributed or has private servers or something that might warrant defi trades, but wouldn't gamers just hack their own items? If they control the server code, surely it's possible.
Seems like a marketing gimmick at best. What am I missing?
I don't think you're missing a ton. Getting game developer buy in is definitely the biggest challenge.
I think "GameFi" is the most compelling use case. Use your in-game items (NFTs) as collateral for a loan, or lend it to other players to use while you retain ownership. Game devs could build all this functionality themselves, but they get it for free if they don't take the walled garden approach.
You say free but they'll need to integrate with the chain for all transactions. Simple loot drops will need to be put on the chain. Seems pretty onerous compared to the normal implementation. Odds are they would need to duplicate all the functionality in game as well.
It is a marketing gimmick. Like the article says, the addition of NFTs is just a bunch of techno mumbo jumbo to build a facade of credibility and blind people to the fact that these games are digital Ponzi schemes.
> People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.
I saw it happening at least as far back as ‘98 in DragonRealms, a MUD and (when it moved off of AOL) one of the first online games with a monthly subscription.
That doesn't come off as "lazy research" to me. The author didn't write "the earliest time this happened was 2005", but rather "at least as far back as ....".
The author's correct in their wording, and the point was simply that getting real money out of games in some way is not novel to this new "play to earn" genre.
The point of the article was to talk about Axie Infinity and Bullshit Jobs in the present, not to spend significant time on historical background.
To be honest, I think using Second Life, or runescape, or such as an example, instead of Ultima Online or such, actually is better writing in that it's more likely to be something the audience is familiar with, or at least can google and read more about. In that sense, using a well known historical example is less lazy writing than finding the oldest possible thing that others are unlikely to relate to for a peripheral comparison which already explicitly was worded as "at least as early as" ("kinda old, but not necessarily the oldest").
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 about how to interact with people going through the security lines.
It dawned on me that the only rationale for this completely useless facade of stress inducing security was simply that these were low-income workers who needed a job, and we're subsidizing it through various types of taxes.
I believe Axie Infinity is dumb, but so are much bigger things around us that we talk much less about. However, Axie Infinity is a good model for a way of creating economies to support people who need jobs. What might help society is if, instead of time wasting games, and meaningless security jobs we paid people to learn valuable skills through a gaming like system.
Afghanistan was invaded because the people in charge of it were tragically unwilling to turn over their unruly house guests and we were tragically unwilling to demand they do so in a contextually appropriate way. I think it is probably one of the biggest tragedies of foreign diplomacy in recent US history.
In hindsight the Taliban probably could have negotiated a "we'd love to get rid of the terrorists but we need your help" deal and then just let us pump them full of military aid on the condition that they add the groups we want to their list of persecuted people. It's not like we hated them out of principal. These were the same guys we armed to kick out the Russians. Taking a page straight out of the South America playbook would not have been that big a stretch.
Agree with the first part of the comment, but at the end, when you say:
>> "what might help society is if [...] we paid people to learn valuable skills"
We actually have plenty of very qualified people, both with academic titles and without them, but many of them are still doing jobs that don't "make society better". The problem is that we used tech to cut the time and labor required to do most things, but we haven't freed that time for people, we only keep distributing the benefits of those "improvements" unevenly.
And the real problem is that even if you were to redistribute them evenly, when there's low pressure, abundance of resources and an environment that provides more than what you are consuming, any species will start having more offspring, until the pressure increases and you are in trouble again (kinda like a malthusian trap). We could only escape that limit if we were able to create unlimited space habitats or our population growth rates were slower than the time it took us to find and travel to new planets. Some might argue that the systems will self-regulate, but self-regulation only happens in high pressure states, and that means that a lot of people is suffering under them.
The fact is that we don't need much, and we already have it. The problem to solve is not to become better or faster or more efficient at producing and creating more. The problem to solve is to collectively find a compromise on how much we want to have and design mechanisms to keep us in that sustainable lane. Not sure that's possible, but it's the only approach to "help society" that I really believe in.
- bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been automated. Jeff Bezos pays a Uber driver to turn a steering wheel until the robot can, and he pays a Amazon Project Manager
to make graphs until the Perl Script can.
- such jobs don't exist because the "elite" are scared of proletariat, they exist because organisations are badly designed hurriedly put together and really hard to dismantle.
- it's usually simple to spot the people at work who are solid contributors and those who bullshit. But it's amazingly hard to demonstrate it sufficiently for firing people.
- But imposter syndrome means that if there is not a open transparent process to code the under performers, everyone becomes afraid, destroying the organisation anyway.
- it's hard to fire unproductive people, in short. In fact it's probably easier to build a new company and not hire them.
- this is usually done via Schumpeter- but if a company could be programmed, designed to have fewer people, it can be shutdown more easily and replaced?
I have read parts of his book all the way through ...
Let's look at two examples I remember - Dog walkers (washers?) and corporate lawyers.
As I understand it Bullshit jobs are those that exist to serve the elite who otherwise "should" do the work themselves (dog washers), or jobs that have no labour-force power and so cannot improve their lot through collective action (which can range from air traffic control to uber drivers and ... dog washers). Finally there is some kind of self-aware bullshit job that is the corporate lawyer.
There are two issues at play here - a moral judgement and a power judgement.
The moral judgement is aimed at dog walkers (or washers?). This is a job that "should" not exist - people should take care of their own pets. Well maybe.
They also have a power issue - who has heard of a dog walker strike?
The dog walker fills a space in the ecosystem - mother nature has so many examples of non intuitive niches that we should not leap to claim this one is bad.
Corporate lawyer - this is more likely a bullshit job - it exists because humans created the law, so it exists as the very definition of government regulation and interference.
But most of the bullshit about it is not legal, but the tournament set up to go from newbie lawyer to partner which drives a lot of the soul destroying ness, simply to clear the field. And yes it is soul destroying to have to justify the unjustifiable- something i suspect corporate lawyers spend a lot of time doing.
But that is again a moral judgement- yes it is bad that corporations break the law and people in bullshit jobs have to help them get away with it. But that is a different failure of regulation.
I think his view is extremely negative - that these jobs were created / kept around to serve the implied result rather than an underlying failure. The airline baggage example is a good one. Getting millions of pieces of luggage to the right place at the right time is fundamentally hard - and claiming that the solution is to "fix it" then get rid of stewardesses of whatever is disingenuous.
It's not impossible to remove bullshit jobs - automation promises to remove many, which is I guess Graber point and mine. My view is that the jobs continue to exist not because the elites deem it nice to have flunkies (I mean they do but they employ those directly) it that fixing the ecosystem that supports these bullshit jobs takes a long time to fix. It is likely that smaller new companies will simply not hire to bullshit poisitions. But given that Amazon has now reached what 1M employees I suspect some bullshit has slipped in there.
Plus there seems to be a confluence in your comment between HFT and bullshit jobs. I am sure there are socially net negative or socially net neutral jobs (HFT is arguably positive but whatever), but that's different to bullshit jobs (as I understand it)
A job that is net negative has always been a problem - is the guy making Drones in a factory knowing they will be sold to evil regimes a net negative? It may be but I don't think that sits as a bullshit job.
So there is a difference between jobs that are "created" simply to give the middle class something to do (Graber view, not mine), jobs that exist because they have not been automated yet (my view, maybe Grabers) and jobs that are socially net negative (this depends on your politics as to what is net negative)
In short the psychological harm of bullshit jobs depends much more on the employees perception of its value than some objective measure. Especially as that objective measure is so hard to come by.
In short - net negative jobs are not bullshit because choosing the externality is hard / social decision (ie the boss of shell is unlikely to have a bullshit job, even if it is net negative)
And bullshit jobs are rarely created just to lord it over people - the truly elite just hire someone to loo after their dogs / horses. The sub-elite get it created as part of the market.
Edit: running out of time - this is an interesting area but I have reached th limit for a comment
> bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been automated
This is not what the term is intended to mean. "Uber Driver" (or taxi driver) is a job that performs a necessary function but one that may not necessarily need to be done by a human.
A bullshit job is one that does not really need to be done, one that provides no value to society at large and exists because of zero-sum games, ego, tradition, etc...
I don't agree with all the jobs Graeber described with this label, but it is a very useful concept.
By this definition being a soldier is a bullshit job, because the only reason it's needed is because other countries have soldiers as well (i.e. zero sum).
But I don't think most people would agree that it can be done away with. Zero sum games are just an unavoidable part of life.
An uber driver is not a bullshit job as defined by Graeber (and most certainly NOT a term to define a job that has not yet been automated). It's a shit job, but not a bullshit job. Short of reading the book, this is a good primer: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
I did not read the book, but my understanding of "bullshit job" is a job that is useless to the entity paying for it: you could remove that person completely, and everything would continue to work. This seems very different from what is at play here: the game studio very carefully designed the game to attract those grinders, and this is how the studio makes money. The article clearly sees this as well, by labeling the game as a ponzi scheme.
The point is that bullshit jobs don't contribute anything to society (at least my take after reading the book).
If the game studio never existed not much in society would change, let's go even further and say all game developers never existed. Society wouldn't change. Now lets get rid of all the elementary school teachers. Would society drastically changed?
One of the core points in the book is that the "more prestigious" and "higher pay" a job is, the likelihood of it being bullshit is high. While important jobs like janitor, barber, or a retail worker are very important and pay terribly.
I'm a programmer that develops CRM software. If my company cease to existed the world wouldn't even shrug.
The next wave of exploitation in this web3 space will involve lending practices. Kids will pledge their digital assets as collateral to buy other goods on margin. Their assets will lose value in the market and the kids will receive margin calls to restore balances or forfeit everything in the game, including reputation.
> In a crypto economy crowded with vapourware and alpha-stage software, Axie Infinity stands out. Not only has it amassed a large base of users, the in-game economy has actually provided a real-world income stream to working-class Filipinos impacted by the pandemic. Some spend hours each day playing the game, and then sell the in-game currency they earn to pay their real-world bills. That’s obviously a good thing for them, but it also appears to be a near-Platonic example of Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job.
That part about the pandemic might be the most important thing in the article. Would something like this have taken off had pandemic restrictions not wrecked the Philippine economy?
A glance at the exchange rate for the Smooth Love Potion token shows a vertical surge right as lockdowns started to be imposed, followed by a 90% crash that started in around July of this year:
The start of the crash coincides with the start of noticeably higher CPI in the US and well-known product demand shock. That shock must have put higher upward pressure on demand for labor in the developing world, making Axie less appealing.
I can't help but think of this as a preview into a future world in which automation and economic stagnation renders ever larger parts of the real economy ineffective at supporting a living wage.
This kind of bullshit job offers a wealth transfer mechanism from those who have it to those who don't, with financial speculation being the conduit. Universal Basic Income is another path. Revolution is a third option.
> People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.
So I basically grew up on Second Life, back when "the Metaverse" was just a geek thing no one cared about. The comparison doesn't really work here, because the virtual items people sold on SL were (generally) their original creations: 3D modeled, animated, programmed, etc. Not simply doled out by pre-programmed in-game systems.
Axie Infinity's economy is more like "real-world trading" on MMOs, but officially endorsed by the developers instead of being considered a game-breaking, bannable offense. In fact, the mention of Axie Infinity providing an income stream to people in developing countries who spend their time grinding also parallels the MMO space: you can find plenty of stories about illicit "gold farming" economies surrounding the major online games, going back decades.
> Axie Infinity is novel in two ways, which are worth exploring separately.
> - It elevated the ability to earn an income stream through the game to a core feature, coining play-to-earn as a new game genre.
> - It uses NFTs to represent in-game items, so the economy is (ostensibly) decentralized.
Going back to SL, the virtual economy was always a "core feature". We had a whole digital currency and ecosystem of first- and third-party exchanges and money markets where you could buy and sell Linden dollars for real money, with moving exchange rates and everything. People very much made serious income off of in-world business. The true novelty here is that Axie & friends are built on decentralized technologies, instead of having a company like Linden Lab managing everyone's account balances and virtual item ownership rights.
I have gone down the play-to-earn rabbit hole in an unexpected way.
In 2017 I started learning about Ethereum. Once I understood it as a virtual machine, the idea hit me that one could build a game. About that time, CryptoKitties hit and became an example of what could be built. Shortly late, a tutorial called CryptoZombies helped teach "a way" to build crypto collectable style games on distributed virtual machines like Ethereum.
Like many people, I went through the tutorial and I started working on my own game. A big difference between myself and many others is that many others only slightly deviated from the CryptoKitties formula. The inspiration for my game, Orbiter 8, came from an old BBS game, so I deviated a lot.
I worked on Orbiter 8 for a couple of years and released two demos before I bothered with ERC20/ERC721 interfaces. The game concept has an in-game currency and ownable assets so I created interfaces making those things tradable outside of the game. This was sort of a no-brainer. By using ERC721, I can use open markets like OpenSea to trade my game assets as NFTs. By using ERC20 I can put the in-game currency on SushiSwap and let the public trade the currency as they wish.
I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value higher than the cost of creation. But for all intents and purposes, the emerging model is a pretty decent Play2Earn model.
Most games are about progression. You typically "grind" in any game to acquire better items and stats. The only step to make any of these games P2E is to allow those things to be traded on open markets. So if you build a game natively on one of these networks, P2E is an extremely natural emergence.
P2E F2P and P2W are more loose buckets than categories with hard and fast distinctions.
I don't think that P2E is inherently bad. Indeed, the history of RMT in games that try to prohibit it (WoW, Eve, etc) shows that P2E is a mechanic that is hard to avoid in certain types of grindy mmo games.
What makes Axies a pyramid scheme is not the incorporation of P2E mechanics directly into the game, but that the game requires players to "buy-in" to the economy to start playing and tries to incentivize that initial purchase by promising later earning capacity.
> I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value higher than the cost of creation.
Other than speculators hoping to flip them to someone else, what would give them that value?
Like most crypto games, the value would inherently have to come from new players putting more money into the system to cash out old players. It works as long as hype exists and the users curve continues upward, but it crashes immediately as that stops and everyone wants to extract whatever value they can.
Paying to skip the grind in a game is a pretty common thing. As a commenter in another thread mentioned, this has been happening since Diablo II at least. If a game has content that is gated by tens or hundreds of hours of grinding some people will happily pay to experience that content immediately. Historically this has been viewed as dubious behavior - especially in MMOs - but it's becoming more normal.
EVE Online, for a time, had a monthly subscription. It also had an in-game item called "PLEX" which could be purchased using real money and then used as a substitute for the monthly subscription. Because it was an in-game item PLEX could be bought and sold on the in-game marketplace. I happily bought a few PLEX with real money and sold them in-game so that I could purchase the ships I wanted without having to spend hours "earning" in-game money. On the other hand, I knew people who had set up efficient in-game money-making schemes that let them avoid paying anything to play - each month they'd just exchange some small fraction of their enormous in-game wealth for a PLEX token purchased by a person like me. It was an interesting system, I don't know what their monetization looks like now.
Point being, I think there can be a value to these things outside of speculation. That said, I have a fairly dim view of most of the crypto-enabled games that I've come across. From the start, the developers have always seemed more interested in enriching themselves at the cost of their players than they have in making enjoyable games.
> Web Two was don’t be evil. Web Three is can’t be evil. You bake it into the code that you can’t be evil.
Yikes. That's a philosophy that really misses the nature of evil. In fact, I think we're doing ourselves up for colossal failure if we assume we can create an unexploitable algorithm that we then cannot modify that can be crafted to be evil-proof.
Sounds reminiscent of when ML scientists were surprised that they built racist systems, assuming that their race-free math meant that the resulting system would also be race-free
According to Graeber, a job is bullshit when the one who does it thinks that the job is bullshit. By this definition, chores, menial tasks don’t count as bullshit. I don’t see any quote from players who call what they are doing bullshit.
It has been a few years since I read the book. But I recall very clearly that he states that the definition is very narrow and strict in order not to get into subjective arguments on whether a job is necessary or shouldn't exist. For instance, one could argue that the world would be better off without telemarketing, yet the argument doesn't make telemarketing a bullshit job. IIRC, military was another example from the book of such a case.
"""
Manifesto for the Professional Class
Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2018
This review was written at the desk of a salaried office job, where I am paid $65,000/yr to do virtually nothing important, so I mostly sit in my chair and listen to podcasts and audiobooks all day. I do this until enough executives and managers above me are gone that I can feel comfortable sneaking out. With my income from this sit, I then outsource all my chores to a slew of below living wage 21st Century gig economy employees--Uber drivers, food delivery, meal kits, laundry.
Having been one of these low paid wage laborers several years ago, it seems like a cruel joke. The higher paying job I find, the less I actually have to work. The higher ranking the position, the less the job is about doing things and contributing to society.
Is this a blessing or immoral sin? Yes. But it turns out, I'm not alone.
This is an entertaining book of anecdotes and statistics on what turns out to be a common phenomena. It is one of the most refreshing reads that a college-educated conscious working professional can have in their library. Put down every other garbage business book that supposedly empowers you. You don't need to practice mindfulness, or rules for life, or launch a lean startup. Breathe in and breathe out, your job is unnecessary and so are most of the other jobs!
Admitting this is the first step of us all solving the collective problem.
"""
It probably is, but it's a Ponzi scheme with a potentially addictive lower layer in the form of a game, which is going to make previous ponzi scheme architects jealous.
Me giving money to Bernie Madoff via wire transfer hoping for gains isn't really addictive. The graphics and gameplay of a game might be. If you happen to build a ponzi scheme into that game, you benefit from its addictive qualities.
Keeping a healthy population of the lower levels of a ponzi scheme is key to keeping it going.
The claim seems to be that the game will attract people who don't view the game as an income stream, but rather just as a game. They pay the entry fee, and then may also buy assets from other players, thus funding the play-to-earners.
I think there's a slim chance this could be a viable business plan, but probably not in any socially-good way. The mobile games industry reaps a good chunk of its profits from "whales", customers who spend crazy-seeming amounts of money on games. Blockchain-based games may also be especially dangerous to young gamers who get access to a parent's credit card and rack up huge charges. This already happens in games like Fortnite, but whereas Epic Games can be pressured into giving refunds to parents when this happens, a blockchain offers no protection if the rules of the game don't allow for it.
We're probably better off if it _is_ a Ponzi scheme.
I agree. To me its a Ponzi scheme in a gold farming disguise. Gold farming only works when the game is fun enough that people will buy gold to play with in it. In this game, everyone playing it is buying in for hundreds of dollars and most likely that is the only source of the payments that are going out.
* You then claim that you are making money from some legitimate business
* You return money to earlier investors by just feeding them the money later investors put in
So who are the early investors here, what's the legitimate business, and how are we taking money from later investors to give to early investors?
EDIT: Guys, it's not a zero-sum game. You can breed new axies, etc. By the logic espoused by everyone in the responses, the stock market is a ponzi scheme because later participants buy stock from earlier participants. This may be my fault with the defn lacking some things, but clearly the stock market isn't a ponzi scheme, so something is wrong.
"Gameplay requires the purchase of three Axies, which currently cost in the hundreds of US dollars each."
> what's the legitimate business
"By blurring the line between “player” and “worker”, the game has effectively built a Ponzi scheme with built-in deniability. Sure, some users will be net gainers and other users will be net losers, but who am I to say the net losers aren’t in it for the joy of the game?"
So I guess the "legitimate business" is making the game interesting for people who.. enjoy it?
> and how are we taking money from later investors to give to early investors
I don't know how the in-game mechanics work but later investors also purchase Axies and somehow that money ends up in the hands of the former investors. Maybe not automatically, I guess it depends on what in-game actions you take, but given that you first have to invest before you can play...
Early investors: people who “invested” hundreds of dollars to play. Legitimate business: “we’re a game studio.” Later investors: newer players who see the earlier ones making money.
The economy is zero sum. The early investors are the people that bought in early and they cash out by selling to the later investors. The “legitimate business” claim is Axie itself and the claim that it can both reward investors who hold and rent Axies as well as pay people to play the game. An idea that only works if more people keep putting money in. To further this claim Axies developers make an awful lot of noise about how they are going to introduce new mechanics which will supposedly fix this.
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 overcome that non-technical people gloss over or flat out don't understand. Even if you store all the data in a distributed database, store all static files in distributed file systems, a single user would still need a single point of entry to access this network. It seems like a centralized DNS like system would still be needed.
Even if there were multiple providers of this DNS like service, it would put the onus on the user to figure it out. This has never historically worked well for the average user. Also, internet access itself is still typically controlled by a few providers given a users area.
The reality is web3 and crypto is putting too much responsibility on the user. Everyone uses gmail and google because its easy and effective and no one cares its centralized. iPhones are popular because they are easy and the average user doesn't care that Apple controls the ecosystem.
Generally refers to decentralized technologies that somehow benefit from blockchain-like data structures. For example, you can compost these three technologies to build a decentralized webserver.
- Filecoin & AR Weave: decentralized file storage. Spend tokens to store files, earn tokens by storing others' files.
- ENS (Ethereum Name Service): DNS-like system for addresses.
- Smart Contracts of various sorts (e.g. Ethereum): Similar to perpetual AWS lambda functions. Spend tokens to publish & call functions; earn tokens by executing functions.
The blockchain aspect is merely a way to have verifiable incentives without explicit trust between actors.
I feel like maybe people watched a little too much Silicon Valley and similar shows and some wires got crossed to make people think this is actually a workable mass market idea. IMHO.
> Gamers have a word, grinding, to describe repetitive tasks undertaken to gain some desired in-game goal, but are not fun in themselves.
Before gamers used “grinding” it was in normal use for hard work. More commonly used as “on the grind.” Looking up the origin it’s “back to the grind” referring to returning to work from break, but also specific to the ancient job of a grinding grain at a mill.
All things being equal, the thing about “crypto,” as the article labels it, is that playing games or being a early adopter of technology was not historically a paid or rewarded activity.
Maybe web3 is exploiting attention spans the same way as web2, but no matter how web2 spins it, token airdrops to web3 users are often 10’s of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands, and even millions in some instances.
Where business has historically been about maximizing shareholder value by exploiting labor, web3 is proving to maximize user value by directly rewarding users. In many cases it is life changing money for young, regular folks who would never have had a shot at that type of financial freedom, in fact likely would have gone in to debt trying to pursue their education for a better financial future.
I think so much of life is already gaming: sports, bowling, football, watching sports on TV/YouTube/cable. Many of these so called time wasters existed outside of the digital world and people have already consumed a lot of time and attention for hundreds of years. In fact empire building and war are probably two of the oldest sports known to humankind
> Since Filipinos are the largest growth market for Axie Infinity, they must also be a major source of money flowing into the system. Instead of being a net provider of jobs and capital, it appears to just be redistributing the same wealth between Filipinos, and collecting a 4.25% cut for the service.
It seems that the source of money flowing into the system are individuals with capital to buy the incoming producing PPE-type assets (i.e., Axies).
Guilds pool capital to buy P2E assets and rent it out to scholars for a % of all income earned by the player (known as scholars in the current P2E nomenclature).
I think there are currently two acceptable ways to earn income in our society:
1. Take relatively less risk, get paid a wage. Owner of incoming producing assets bear the risk of deploying capital in such a manner.
2. Take high risk. Deploy capital to acquire assets and pay wages to others who utilize those assets to produce (unguaranteed) income for you.
P2E introduces a third: deploy capital to acquire assets, loan the assets out, and take a cut of income generated.
P2E in its current form has similarities to serfdom. The owners of Axies (and the AXS tokens) are the lords.
Certain jobs sufficiently far from the obvious value creation have a tendency to look useless.
In many cases they are useless and could be bundled into other jobs, but when a job is over loaded there is efficiency to unbundling them. Factor in the communications synchronization overhead and it's no wonder that small organizations can perform incredible work. Large organizations have scale though.
I think there’s something to this comment and the one from zzbzq about Graeber’s “canonical bullshit job.” I’m also drawing some threads from Goedel Escher Bach.
Perhaps the growth in the administrative sector is a new class of job, that results from
scale, coordination costs, Metcalfe’s law, and Goodhart’s law.
The job is to combat the diminishing returns on communication decay due to scale by measuring the system as a whole or in part and attempting to optimize that part.
There is no “product” other than the change in metric selected. There is no external or intrinsic value other than whatever 2nd, 3rd, nth order effects the measurement focus has on actual observable inputs and outputs of the system.
The job, in a GEB sense, is just a theorem that references some or all of the system itself, and which may not mean anything whatsoever outside the context of the system.
Scale increasingly becomes constrained by organizational interfaces. At a certain point, trying to add people to an organization actually makes it less productive unless their contributions can be abstracted globally.
At a certain extent, the system must become inhuman: metrics and interface contracts are needed to prevent overhead growth.
One of the interesting things about Graeber's typology is that it includes things that you wouldn't consider to be bullshit jobs. There's an entire category of his typology dedicated to jobs that destroy productive output; like if a business were to hire lawyers to sue the pants off of competing businesses. They get a competitive advantage by increasing everyone else's compliance and legal costs.
I believe this particular categorization could apply to game development in the context of NFT or microtransaction driven gameplay. The economies that these games provide are specifically engineered to increase user spend by targeting "whales". Someone being paid to play a game for someone else is providing a valuable service; but the game doesn't just exist naturally. It's designed. Building a game so that you need to pay to skip the grind is a bullshit job. And if that's a bullshit job, then the people selling their Axies and other game resources have transitively bullshit jobs, even if their own job is not inherently bullshit.
Such games are online games where other players are part of the game challenge. Some players want to play those game so much that they are willing to spend insane amounts of money on this game. But if the only users of the game were those players the game wouldn't be as fun for them. So the game needs to incentivise players that that don't want to play it that much or at all.
Most of the games manage this by offering free version of the game to anyone willing to play. It's not as good as the version paid consumers get but it's something.
The game mentioned in the article went the step further, not only does it offer some entertainment for people for free, but pays them out of profits gained from the paying players.
So basically gamers that earn money in that game provide meaningful service for paying players by working as opponents for them that enhace their entertainment. It's less bulshity job than many real ones.
So many of these conversations can be broken down to the things you find valuable might not be the thing others find valuable and there is no right or wrong. You either get it or you don't. I have zero desire to collect model trains, but I understand some people do and there is probably value there in that community.
Tibia was very popular in my country, I know people that are still playing it, but back when I was younger, like 10 years ago I knew a few guys that were making regular income out of it by selling gold coins and items. Good times, games like Tibia taught me something about the market and demand/supply distribution.
My problem with these Play2Earn games is that it provides a dark motivation for kids to play them.
Previously, you'd play something like Doom or Quake because you enjoyed it and you'd quit after an hour or two because it would rapidly become repetitive and boring. You knew deep down that you were wasting time on recreation and that you should probably do the things you should be doing (e.g. the dishes, reading a book, etc).
Now, there's a small voice for players of these telling them that this time is productive. They're earning money and that's a noble goal to ourselves. Even worse are the games like League of Legends and WoW where there are professional scenes. It's very easy to deceive yourself into thinking you're just practicing those games in order to one day go pro.
The point that the other person was making, is that if you are arguing that these "games" are actually a good/effective way of making money for kids, you are lying.
That's the problem. The issue is they there could be people who are tricked into believing that this is an effective way of making money, when it is clearly not for most people.
Reading books and maintaining personal cleanliness are controversial activities now? In what clown world should anyone ever be advised to play video games instead of doing those things?
Meanwhile there are legit decentralized, fun, self hosted games whose hosts barely make any money to sustain their servers. But because they are truly decentralized, VCs won't touch them because they can't control them. I swear this web3 thing will die from lack of market fit
Though provoking article. The main problem that play-to-earn games have is that they need to rely on external cash-inflows to reward the players. This makes them very close to Ponzi schemes or Casino's.
If the moral product is to earn a livable wage in Web3, that is not the way.
This play to earn title is a particularly annoying dig at the recently blown up phrase where users can play to earn Blockchain tokens in nft based games which has actually enabled young men in the Philippines to quit their jobs as taxi drivers and involved them in an ecosystem which otherwise has exacerbated inequalities and trampled on the rights of humans in their country as historically corrupt government has minimsed the earning potential of the working class not and left the upper class eternally skeptical of their own government.
To make a dig like this and then not even acknowledge it in the content is exactly what I would expect from a white American who has no concept of how certain trends impact anyone other than themselves.
The article's point was to say that these grind games are not actually adding economic value, because it required existing wealth to come into the system to pay out the grind (and the company sucks out some transaction fees).
The game itself may possibly be fun for those that pay (instead of grind), but that's hard to judge.
There is something really wrong about doing something that you know is complete garbage and yields no benefit to anyone else in terms of productivity. But after one level of indirection we see all sorts of tasks around us that people do and also benefit no one, for example when someone destroys a pallet of watermelons or fills up a swimming pool with orbeez that end up in garbage hours later. The person who cultivated the watermelons or the worker that toiled in the orbeez factory to make them saw the fruit of their labor yield no benefit to anyone else in terms on productivity. This type of task happens far too often.
Only difference is, there is no masquerade in the NFT app a16z funded.
It's saddening that folks say Axie is a play-to-earn pioneer. This genre existed for ages and is called gambling. Poker being a prime example of a truly successful game combining luck, fun, and skill. The best part -- no NFTs required.
A dutch economist once estimated that about 50% of a modern economy is bullshit, basically just keeping each other busy.
It's made possible because of the naive belief that markets create supply out of demand, and that this mechanism is ruthlessly efficient.
Right now, somebody is "inventing" potato chips flavor #16,333,132. Nobody asked for it, but a whole bunch of people are involved in its creation. Next, the product is pushed, and if not totally disgusting, you might try it. If the push is large and prolonged, you may even make it a regular buy. Even more so when you see lots of other people eating it.
Did this product meet your demand? No. Do you believe its a good use of labor to make this product? No. Your "demand" was fabricated out of aggressively pushing supply.
Are the top 10 songs in the charts the songs most in demand, the market efficiently selecting the best songs, taking into account all recent music produced? No. The songs are pushed. Supply decides, not demand.
Right now, thousands of engineers are working on the next iOS version, adding hundreds of new features. You'll probably use 2 of them. You'll get all 500 features anyway, regardless of demand, as you will definitely buy the next iPhone.
That's the 50% I'm referring to: artificially created demand that really is just marketing and manipulation.
Another way in which markets aren't efficient is a lack of competition. After all, it's every market player's goal to basically exit the arena, not needing to fight for their continued existence. Several sectors have big industry players that effectively have no competition. The same can be true for businesses where locality is a unique benefit. And it applies to local and federal governments, whom have no competition at all. And there's patents, cartels and other ways to escape market forces.
These non-competitors sustain armies of workers with bullshit jobs.
Ultimately, our economic system doesn't care. When you have a paid job, nobody asks questions about whether it has meaning. Your government will like you and so will your family. Bullshit or not. We have build a system that celebrates meaningless consumption and meaningless work.
Do the players who earn money from the game somehow make the game more entertaining for other players?
I had a friend who was a tennis teacher. He didn't really teach so much as play with other less skillful players and get paid for doing that. That's kind of a similar situation right?
The answer depends on whether the players who get paid are rewarded for a service, something that other players perceive as having value to them. Or is it just a way by the game providers to lure people in to the game?
> Games that maximize property rights (as Axie Infinity wisely hasn’t) are bound to be overrun with cheaters and bots, which in turn will just bring down the value of in-game assets anyway.
This may happen temporarily, but a sufficiently well tested and bullet proof enough game should able to combat that.
This is the same argument people made before BTC: it's just a matter of time before any decentralized currency would get hacked therefore we cannot have a decentralized currency.
Games that aren't fun are work. Axie, from all accounts, looks like work.
On the flipside, there are tons of regulated games that are both fun and allow users to flex their niche knowledge, like FanDuel (sports), BigBrain (trivia), and so on.
Just because Axie is a poorly designed game doesn't necessarily invalidated the larger point that jobs and income are changing, and gamification of skills is an interesting trend that is likely here to stay.
Paying for someone to stand in line for you isn't a bullshit job tho - it's generating value because the person paying is obviously otherwise occupied with a better use of their time, and thus can afford to pay someone else to stay in the queue.
At this point, I'm starting to think our species had a good run, but it's time to replace it with a more evolved one. And just like dinosaurs were wiped by a global catastrofe and left room for mamels, it's time for homo sapiens to leave room for a new species.
The silver lining? We don't really need to do anything, just watch for our self-made catastrophie to unfold.
Jobs which don' create positive value to the world are not bullshit. Our western economy is mostly based on the meaningless consumption of stupid things. These products have to be marketed and pushed into clients by manufactered believe that they need to buy it.
Other part of this are the zero-sum games. Trick people into buying it by introducting artifcial scarcity.
>Games that maximize property rights (as Axie Infinity wisely hasn’t)
>are bound to be overrun with cheaters and bots, which in turn will
>just bring down the value of in-game assets anyway.
Bitcoin comes to mind as a good example. A the beginning there were geeks mining it on their gaming machines and buying expensive video cards to both play games and mine.
Many historical "bullshit jobs" are basically "reward to the metropole from colonial extraction" (how many of Graeber's "bullshit jobs" exist in colonized vs colonizing nations, hm?)
But for this newest iteration of cryptocurrency bullshit, I'm gonna go with "crisis of capital accumulation".
I agree. It's not a gamer word either. Derived from "the daily grind", it's just about lucrative but repetitive tasks. Sometimes they are fun but I also agree the connotation is that it is most likely boring unless specified otherwise.
Just because most people don't like it doesn't make it intrinsically unfun. If the above definition holds true no-one would like it except masochists. Anyway, as a counter-point RuneScape has a great grind with a huge player base and I know a lot of people who love grinding.
Followers, likes, karma, all aren't directly worth anything. But it takes work to get them.
I know a bunch of prominent internet people who don't make much money with this status, because it's not easy to monetize it without compromise yourself.
> David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status quo.
Isn't it unavoidable in a world with food surplus and automation?
Our fiat based economy is play to earn with the government that backs your favorite currency as overseer that can “ban” or penalize you. You’re required to participate to gain access to exchangeable currency. And the platform you’re using (your government and their economy) takes a cut in the form of taxes - and inflation when they’re printing money.
You get to choose to team with others in companies or other organizations, or go it alone which is much tougher.
Like Axie, if you choose to work for someone you’re using their subplatform, like Axie is a subplatform within crypto. And the organization you’re part of has rules and quite a lot of power over your future as long as you’re participating.
In a real world org you can choose to exit and liquidate any equity that you’re allowed to turn into cash. Same with Axie assets that you sell in exchange for something else - maybe a cryptocurrency.
As with Axie, there are many bullshit jobs in the real world that exist for silly reasons and can easily be automated away.
I think these bullshit jobs are bugs in real world economies and virtual economies. Sometimes they’re intentional bugs that benefit the owners or controllers of a platform or economy.
I’d caution one about conflating these anomalies with NFTs or crypto as a whole. Blockchain primitives have the potential to free the proletariat from exploitation by large corporate platforms. Creatives, for example, can own and profit from their art for centuries without an intermediary like Spotify, record companies, film studios or publishers keeping the lions share of the return. It has the potential to disintermediate banks, which is a huge deal, which you’ll know if you’ve ever worked for an investment bank or even walked through any major financial district.
Bullshit jobs abound. But these primitives Axie is playing with are not the cause. They have the potential to free us all.
The point seems to be that the game is nothing but gold farming, and the only money going into the system comes from prospective gold farmers paying a participation fee.
There is such an enormous amount of slack in the system. 2% of the workforce is involved in agriculture, and it used to be 90%. What did the other 88% do with all that free time?
A lot of the Web3 and game economy is just people massively overpaying for entertainment.
It seems that after a few years of relative calm in the crypto scene (bitcoin just used to transact, mine or invest) the easier it got to roll-your-own-crypto the more magical ways we are finding uses for it. I had no idea this existed before.
I’m getting tired of this Ponzi scheme stuff. Can we have some kind of protests to insist the Fed raise rates and put an end to this? I’m not a big activist by nature, but that’s something I could get behind.
I’m sure there’s something valuable to be done with NFTs, but why is it that it seems that everyone involved in it is only focusing on meaningless applications like pepe frogs and boring games?
A reminder that the Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis at one point in his pre parliamentary career did extensive work on the economics of MMOs for valve, eve online.
Everything old is new again. You could go back and look over the game design discourse about pay-to-win games and microtransactions and see the same discussions about how these systems would influence players and designers. You could go back and look at the discussions around Facebook social games back when they were a big thing. And all of those arguments still hold up today.
Play-to-earn games are the same system, just with a bit of a pyramid scheme glued on top so that players will think they're part of the grift.
What players of these play-to-earn games are hoping is that the grind in the game is so heckin awful and unpleasant that other players will pay someone else in order to skip that. But I don't think I'm unique in saying that I personally like my games to be fun, and I think that maybe something is going wrong with a game design process when a game is so much of a chore that people are paying to skip the game. Imagine making a movie where people didn't give you money to see it, but to stop seeing it :). That's the play-to-earn model, making something so artificially unpleasant and badly designed that players believe there's value in making the game shorter and will literally hire someone else to play it for them.
And this is not a new thing, you can go back to the grinding process in Runescape, to Cow Clickers on Facebook, it's the same grift over and over just in different decorative hats and with different little sparkly jpegs. It's always the same proposition: do something that's been made artificially boring and hopefully you or someone else will think there's value in paying someone real money to skip it.
----
Which I guess live your truth if that's what you want out of games, but I personally like games that make me excited to play them or at least give me some kind of meaningful emotion, where I play them because I like feeling that emotion and because the gameplay is fun.
Incredibly, it turns out there are designers who are somehow through some strange magic able to design games that are so fun that they don't even need to bribe players into playing them. Their games are so fun that people actually (get this) pay the designers money to be able to play them more, not less. It's the complete inverse of the play-to-earn model where actually all of the players in the game enjoy what they're doing, and the game isn't just a platform for the company or for a subset of players to make a job out of extracting profit from another part of the playerbase's boredom, because in these games nobody in the playerbase is bored.
If you've never tried one of these games in the "fun" genre before, you've got to check them out, they're really something else.
>but when I read the book a few years back, I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism.
Well, here's the problem: Darwinian doesn't mean evolution towards something specific (i.e. more efficiency).
In fact, regression (in certain skills, etc.) is just as likely (like cockroaches, not humans, being the fittest in a certain environment).
So, Darwinian, broadly and metaphorically speaking (like the author) just means more fitness for survival.
And this is totally compatible with BS jobs, when it comes to the survival of the overal system.
One specific attribute of capitalism today is also that it's always somebody else's money, what with public companies, and golden parachutes, and bailouts, and such - and the rise of pharaonic middle management.
Axie is built on Ethereum, meaning in-game assets (NFTs) are technically transferrable off-platform.
Vitalik (creator of Ethereum) attributed one of his reasons for creating Ethereum to Blizzard taking away one of his in-game items in World of Warcraft in 2010:
"I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit."
Axie has banned the assets of players who have violated the TOS, so apparently they aren't decentralized enough to prevent Vitalik's origin story from reoccurring. Or is your point that those assets could be used in another game? Why would anybody do that?
> I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism
But if we take Darwinian evolution as our analogy, there are plenty of strategies that essentially piggy back on other organisms. Cuckoo birds, intestinal worms, a whole coterie of sexual behaviors.
It's also the everyday experience of just about everyone that they perceive certain others to not be contributing anything at all. The surprise is that some people are willing to admit they are one of those people as well. It's not hard to think of how this would work, either. Convince someone to hire you, and then don't contribute, while taking a salary. If it's hard or expensive to detect the non-contributor, there will be NCs in the organization.
Capitalism has very little in common with Darwinism because of the nature of the rules involved. Darwinism has a lot of physical rules which you can't circumvent. Capitalism deals far more in social or soft rules which can be circumvented and give you an advantage if you aren't caught. And if you are caught, the punishment might only be a percentage of the total profits.
I'm not going to stay alive because the universe forgot to enforce the dying part of me being mauled by a bear.
I hate when people refer to our regime of interest-rate intervention as capitalism. The primary feature of capitalism is price discovery, which we have intentionally given up.
EDIT: If there are any economists out there who can point me in the direction of a primary source that elucidates the relationship between price discovery and interest rates in a way that will help me understand contemporary monetary policy as something other than political expediency, I would greatly appreciate it.
The defining feature of capitalism is the private ownership of capital. You can have whatever pricing mechanisms you like as long as the profits go to the owner
Hmm I think I meant menagerie. But yes, evolution and especially sexual selection creates a lot of interesting behaviors, and some of them a purely win-lose, and yes in people as well. There's a reason cheating on your partner is a trope of soap operas.
Gamer #1 likes to play the game. There are some parts he likes more than others.
Gamer #2 comes along and says, OK I will do the parts you don't like, and I'll sell my output to you for $XXX.
Gamer #1 agrees, the transaction takes place, it is entirely voluntary, and both participants find the outcome to be valuable for them.
How is this bullshit?
This is pretty much the reason we have money.
What sounds like bullshit to me is there is some... quasi-socialist I guess? value framework being imposed by some would-be intellectual who's totally uninvolved in the transaction, but thinks he knows better than the ones who are. Fuck that guy, he has no skin in the game.
I'm not familiar with the game in the article, but I think the author is referring to the inclusion of in-game tasks that have no benefit or reason to exist other than to create an artificial "requirement" for work of some sort.
Honestly though, who cares? Even if it's a "bullshit job", you can perform it from the relative comfort of your home, mostly on your own schedule; so it's better than most BS jobs in the real world. In my opinion, the more opportunities afforded to people to earn money, the better.
I do not know which definition is used here. But I would call this bullshit, because this is artificial scarcity which is controlled by grindy, non-constructive and typically non-fun work. The makers of the game could just sell the NFT directly instead of requiring other people to waste their time.
I disagree entirely with the thesis of "bullshit jobs". Unless it's a government job or mandated by regulations, someone is paying for a task to be done voluntarily. Therefore it isn't bullshit to the payer, even if it might seem like bullshit to the worker. I have never stumbled on a single job that wasn't government-required labor that had no purpose whatsoever, and furthermore the laborer wasn't able to quit.
Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance officers.
You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist. Unfortunately, that’s also the exact view I often see in tech, where people tend to devalue work of others because its value does not seem to be self-explanatory in the first 60 seconds they spend on analysis of the situation.
In real life your lost baggage experience would suck without the person behind the airline desk, you org won’t be able to scale without middle management, and your business would suffer budget cuts due to legal fines because the only proper way to stay legally compliant today is (surprise!) to hire a compliance officer.
Good luck inventing some imaginary perfect-world systems where those issues do not exist and do not require extra staff you label as “bullshit”. Any kind of system which is designed and managed by people will have flaws and will require extra jobs handling these flaws. These jobs are not bullshit, they are valuable because they allow the system to exist and stay efficient.
My problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is the "inherent value." There are plenty of jobs that have little societal value, but provide plenty of value to the person employing the person.
For example, plenty of jurisdictions give large tax breaks to farms, so it is reasonably common for developers holding land to turn their land into a "farm." One fellow I heard of put 6 cows on a plot of development land and paid someone to drop hay off for the cows as the land had next to no grass, as it was under development.
No real value is being generated from the cows. The output of 6 poorly fed and housed beef cows is well under the money paid to the cow carer and for the hay and for the damage caused by the cows to the neighbourhood when they escaped.
But the developer saved 80K a year in various property tax after all expenses were considered.
I found his bullshit jobs article to be terrible and unconvincing, and many of the things he said about jobs just inaccurate.
But I think your objection is not very strong and his thesis can be rescued from it.
> it isn't bullshit to the payer, even if it might seem like bullshit to the worker
I think a lot of jobs really are "bullshit jobs," not because they have no value to the payer, but because they have negative value to the economy overall.
For an extreme example, some people are willing to pay to have witnesses murdered so that they can continue committing crimes without legal repercussions.
Or, some people are doing jobs that are purely for positional advantage and that are even "cancelled out" by other people in other companies doing another job. Advertisers seeking to take over market share from competing companies.
Or, some extractive industries may be more beneficially halted because of negative externalities; but those who benefit from the extraction will still hire people.
You can create a job whose only function is to increase your cost and consequently allow you to charge more for your product or service. It doesn’t work if you do it on your own, but it does work if you can get the government to force your competitors to do it too.
If you pay close attention, you will find that most government regulations that affect whole industries are actually the result of lobbying by the industries themselves. This is clearly visible in finance but it happens for almost any industry where there are powerful players.
No one wants to increase their productivity without a corresponding increase in revenue - this includes corporations as well as individuals. Bullshit jobs need to be created to maintain high prices in face of constant downward pressure.
I've read his essays, but not his books. Graeber does what every popular nonfiction writer does. He starts with a provocative conclusion, and cherrypicks data to support it. Bullshit Jobs is particularly bad in this aspect.
Bullshit jobs? Let me tell you what a bullshit job is: Transcription. It's basically poor, often disabled people w/ 0 other options doing it. For slave-wage. That's right, one of the best way for disabled people in America to make $$ is to spend hours transcribing you next Sex & the City remake at breakneck pace. Excuse my french, but F this. Axie sounds like a lot less bullshit
After that work is done though, the value of the content being transcribed is increased. They are solving the problem that the actual dialog spoken by the actors and audio cues aren't captured in a non-audio format yet. Axie is creating problems when designing the gameplay and allows people to sell solutions to it; they could easily just provide the "value" at the push of a button.
By ignoring it until the government catches up, like every other startup does with regulations which should preclude their "disruptive" business model.
I still totally fail to understand this concept. Is there anything here beyond impotent whining? What are they proposing to do? They subjectively call it bullshit but other people choose to play totally free from compulsion.
What should we do? Physically restrain them from playing?
We should raise awareness that it's a scam so that reputable people don't fund and promote it. In particular, I hope they can be stopped from raising a series C, limiting their ability to keep the scam going once they exhaust the $150m A16z gave them.
What we have now is not capitalism. Capitalism requires hard money as a foundation. An inflationary currency whose supply compounds exponentially over time and which people are forced to use is not hard money.
Bullshit jobs are made possible by inflationary money printing. The current crony-capitalist system is only 'Darwinian' for those who are far from the money printers. That's why bullshit office jobs exist mostly in big cities; in close proximity to the largest inflows of newly issued 'capital' into the economy. For those who are close to the inflows of new money, it's a rigged, easy game. No talent involved. It's a game of first in, best dressed. They could throw money out the window and it would come flying back in. In the periphery, the story is completely different. Look up Cantillon effect.
It's easy to devise a scheme whereby you keep borrowing money from a bank to inflate the value of some intangible asset and then use that asset's growing 'value' as collateral against which you can keep borrowing more money and keep inflating that asset's 'value' ad-infinitum. You just keep taking out new, increasingly large loans to make repayments on the old loans. Just like the government does. At any point in time, this zero-sum scheme will always look profitable; you can keep it going so long as the banks allow. Banks will allow it of course, because the collateral 'value' keeps growing. It's only when people start talking about huge numbers like 'quadrillions', 'quintillions' and 'sextillions' that people will start to think something's not right. The game is all about who can feed the banks' own money back to them with as little resistance as possible.
A major reason why Bitcoin is so valuable is that it provides banks with an endless supply of bodies to take out more and increasingly large loans and feed it back to the banks with interest. Bitcoin's growth in value consistently outpaces the growth in interest on loans used to buy that Bitcoin.
Bullshit activities… the new drugs. Love them guys who sustain these mind traps. Nothing new under the sun as King Solomon said, but then again - do not dare claim moral superiority, u will go down sooner than not.
In spite of being presented as the future of work by some venture capitalists, the incentives just don’t make sense. Floors don’t have to be swept in the metaverse unless they’re designed to need sweeping.
They make perfect sense. You probably can't be a King or Queen in the real world, but for a modest outlay you can play one in the virtual world. The product being sold is not the fun of clicking around doing pointless things in a Monarchy Simulator, but the emotional satisfaction of bossing a small army of other people around. Within the game, you can be the sun around whom others revolve.
> … I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism.
It is always worth reminding everyone that we are far from pure free market capitalism. There is a lot of market distortion due to lack of info transparency, regulatory capture, contracts which create inefficiency, intellectual property law, asymmetric application of regulation and law enforcement, etc
> I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism.
This takeaway is odd - especially when the entire point is that these bullshit jobs are a core part of capitalism, because they force people to buy into the system in spite of its obvious problems...
Play-to-earn will die a painful death, but the takeaway here (which this article dodges) is that players should own their in-game assets. This is really where blockchain comes into play. Diablo 3 tried to do this, but they were too early and too greedy. If done correctly, owning your digital items is certainly more preferable than not.
Again, this is touched in half a paragraph, but this is the real revolutionary aspect of NFTs. And, paradoxically, it's nothing new: Steam store "items" are basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are basically NFTs. It's just that without a decentralized marketplace, you can't sell them.
> This is really where blockchain comes into play. Diablo 3 tried to do this, but they were too early and too greedy.
Diablo 3's in-game real-money market wasn't based on a blockchain, and was doomed to failure for game design reasons alone.
> And, paradoxically, it's nothing new: Steam store "items" are basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are basically NFTs. It's just that without a decentralized marketplace, you can't sell them.
You can sell Steam in-game items just fine on the community market (https://steamcommunity.com/market/). You just can't cash that out to real money because Valve, quite sensibly, doesn't want to be classified as a money transmitter.
The article “dodges” the notion players should “own” their in-game items to the same extent you underplay the implications. consider what the article emphasises: the contradiction implied in a live game being rebalanced in real time, affecting “owned” assets.
Do you really own it if the item’s form, function, and even in-game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised authority—the game’s administrators?
> Do you really own it if the item’s form, function, and even in-game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised authority—the game’s administrators?
This happens literally all the time with Magic cards, lol.
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-game currency, gold pieces or GP. It was something like $10 to 1M GP. I could chop enough magic logs in about 4-6 hours to make $10.
I had a breakthrough. What if I wrote a macro to record my cursor and clicks during my route from the 'bank' (where you can deposit any amount of any material) to the nearby respawning magic tree forest?
Weeks went by and I had passive income. Runescape eventually introduced the Grand Exchange, a literal in-game stock market that allowed power users like me to sell much larger quantities of certain items instantly, across all Runescape servers (referred to as Worlds) simultaneously. This required a standardized pricing mechanism, like an order book, where prices of any item would fluctuate based on buy and sell orders.
Suddenly, I now could see a +-10% change on the value of my digital assets, on which my passive income was built.
I could go on; Runescape in fact taught me much about economics. What's extraordinary is selling Runescape gold led me to Bitcoin, and I've watched cryptocurrency for nearly a decade, seeing trends from a MMO propagate throughout the world. It seems human nature to innovate and stagnate, and the more immediate our collective feedback loops, the quicker these cycles are.
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 Runescape was bad; people were willing to pay $10 of real money to remove 4-6 hours of gameplay from the game.
Well frankly, that's 4-6 hours of gameplay should never have been in the game in the first place. Players should not feel bored playing your game for that long, certainly not bored enough to pay money to get out of it.
I have no doubt that learning how to exploit these systems was really fun for people, because learning how to exploit systems and build macros and read economic signals and avoid detection from a company is genuinely really interesting, fascinating work. It's just a shame that the only way Runescape could (inadvertently) enable that experience for people was to make a crappy grind process for an even larger portion of their playerbase.
I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase.
And I think that perspective is worth keeping when we look at play-to-earn games. These are boring games, and some people are doing some fun economics stuff on top of them. That doesn't make the core gameplay any less boring though, and the fun economics stuff only works because a lot of other players are having a miserable time with the intended mechanics. I don't like praising a design ethos that says that a nontrivial portion of your players will be bored and will pay someone else to play the game for them.
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 change names - a lv10 tree, a lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires imagination, development, testing.
So most open world games will have a high grinding/content ratio. 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. And there's pvp and talking to fellow players to keep it fun. So, in the end, I agree with you it sucks to have a game some players pay to not play it and others have fun cheating it, and it's a cheap design choice, but there are some people find it relaxing to watch a little toon chop down a magic tree.
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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. In fact, the harder your life is, the more rewarding it can be.
These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world and life that's more rewarding than reality. The parallels with real life are direct and intentional: "grinding" is like real work that earns you fungible profit that you can then trade to skip other types of work that you don't like to do. This is a proven loop of reward in reality and it works in games too, being consistently "fun" isn't the only way for a game to satisfy players. I can't speak to Axie Infinity which seems like it's not even well developed to that extent, but for other games in the field these grinds aren't exactly a failure of design, they're effective at constructing a life-like reward system that doesn't solely rely on "fun".
Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial, hence the whole article about this being a bullshit job. I personally avoid these types of games (basically all MMOs) for this reason and I don't see how web3 makes any of it better. But I find it hard to criticize it objectively. I think real life is bullshit anyway, so the cheap imitation of life that these games offer isn't always completely worse. I can see why many people willingly buy into it.
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The reason grinding exists is also economic in nature: the "consumer value for money" equation is often reduced to maximizing hours of playtime. This has led to extremely padded gameplay all throughout when we compare to arcade games, which are premised on "operator value of time" and therefore always endeavor to shuttle players in and out of their session in a few minutes.
The other day I visited the local pinball joint and the old EM game I was playing got stuck counting up the 3000 point bonus during gameplay. I cradled the ball on the right flipper, thinking "hmm, how interesting!" One of the staff came over and apoplectically remarked "If you don't continue play I am going to have to turn the game off", and when I did as instructed, showed great distress at how I had managed to roll over the score and accumulate two free credits, but also appreciated that he had gotten a bit closer to the mysterious issue of the game repeatedly ending up with 9 credits.
I see the impact of NFTs as a pendulum swing towards "item value in context", which has no particular relationship to time or even defined scarcity, but would instead favor broad reusability across numerous contexts. P2E is just the early mimicry every new model has to go through before getting to the good parts, in the same way that early console games took a few years to start relaxing the constraints of arcades in earnest.
I think a much more likely early candidate for interesting NFT gaming will be small collectable games, derived from the procedural arts scene. Scarcity sets individual prices within a collectables market, but the value of the collection as a whole is determined by other modes of context. There's no need to squeeze or stretch the gameplay loop or make it addictive or insert monetizing gates; every instance can be exactly designed to be "ideal" on its own. Instead the game has to cater to speculative interests, which is a whole other set of trade-offs and can even favor characteristic flaws. For some reason I have not yet seen the "pay to lose" NFT game, but to me it seems blindingly obvious that being able to lose in an interesting way will command speculative interest.
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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 was worth something) then it wouldn't do its job as a disincentive to cheat the system because you're not actually wasting anything by doing the work.
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Runescape never intended folks to hit that high a level. Two brothers made the game and they just kind of filled the endgame levels never expecting anyone to reach it. Later, they added more and more content to fill those later levels. So it also suprised them I guess.
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
The things that people are willing to spend money on in games are usually interesting for people for the exact reason that those things are scarce. So it is, from my experience, all about showing off.
Saying this as someone who exploited a lot of games and made some large passive income from that, "back in the days". I'd say 95% of -- "end-customers" (as opposed to resellers which you need if you move a lot,) bought stuff just to show off.
So if those things were readily available and didn't require grinding, people wouldn't desire them. It's almost a bit of a paradox, I guess.
It’s a bit disheartening when you look at how many people deal with the numbness ever present in their lives by playing games that mete out little rewards in easily quantifiable bits. This is not what humans need, or, if we’re honest, want.
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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" doesn't become "pay to win", I'd say a game is probably fine, overall, if people are enjoying substantial portions of that game, even if they're not enjoying all of it.
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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.
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I agree with most of this including pay-to-earn, more worryingly there are other types of to-earn being floated like learn-to-earn. It’s almost like people are rushing headlong into dystopia and ignoring all the downsides of extrinsic rewards.
That said a successful game like this will always have a non-trivial part of the player base willing to pay to skip parts of the game. They want the success now not later and aren’t willing to work for it. Even if the journey is actually fun. Most games take this quite seriously though and work against gold farming and cheating as it ruins the experience they set out to make.
Where it becomes evil is when you set out to make it horrible intentionally so a bigger part of the player base has to pay to remove it and continue playing.
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 conversation. As others mentioned, how much of life is the boring, grind-y parts? How many of us on HN find clever ways to circumvent, augment, automate the grind? Is it immoral to create profitable, addictive systems of human engagement? Does 'good' game design have a quantifiable definition?
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That’s a very romantic view of the goals of game design. For a live service game the metrics to hit are mainly retention and monetization. Whether something is subjectively fun doesn’t really come into the picture
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> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
If you're designing a free to play game and want to make money from it, this is not just good, it's a design goal -- as long as the developer is the one making the real world money.
Clash of Clans perfected this model over 10 years ago:
https://gyrovague.com/tag/clash-of-clans/
> I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase.
I can’t stop myself from reading this as an argument about the real world :) The grinding pricess certainly gets boring sometimes so we begin hacking a more exciting game on top of it for sure ;)
I have to say that many of my fondest memories from all kinds of systems; games, work, play, all of my favorite times were when I was finding an unscratched edge in a model. There’s something superlative about finding a hack, a way to obtain something that the designer of the game did not intend. The feeling of “I know your game better than you do” is something I shall never forget.
Those fleeting moments where you have a temporary advantage gained without malfeasance but with pure cunning and skill (or cleverness if we’re being bold), those are the happiest times in my life.
Finding the little edges where things just don’t quite add up, shining a light on them, and wielding them as your own; that’s the stuff from which real hackers are made.
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> … 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?
This was addressed brilliantly in a South Park episode, “Freemium Isn’t Free.” In it, a character, Stan, blows a ton of money advancing a by-design boring game. The game is revealed to be a sham to bleed players of cash. It likens addicted gamers to alcoholics. This mock commercial appears in the ep:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_n5nbx0Z9s
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.
> 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?
From a business perspective, you're allowing for engagement despite different time valuations by player personas. The savvy game designer would not only encourage this, it would develop a way to capture a portion of the proceeds.
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
The difference between now and then is that people had to go to third parties; nowadays the game developer themselves will sell you the skip. Or a chance to gamble at a boost.
Some of these mechanics are "compelling", in a very visceral sense - they compel people to spend time or money, in a way that isn't quite describable as fun. And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular.
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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.
This kind of grinding is probably the part I enjoy most about games. It's almost meditative. I usually play games to kill time anyways. I guess that's why I enjoyed games like FF8, WoW, and Maple Story.
If people care enough to exploit your game or buy items in your game economy, your game is a success. If it was truly boring, they wouldn't bother.
your game should so funny that they cannot give up it, but it is so boring result in they want to pay money for skipping it. this is business model.
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 were fine but easily detected due to the repeated patterns. Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014. Interesting how botting numbers drastically inflated player counts and engagement and the company Jagex became a private equity darling getting bought and sold several times, its almost like they had an incentive to keep the practice going.
> Economics
Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when Microsoft cloud launched.
> 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 + reflection to bind game objects directly, meaning that it allowed full interactivity with the underlying game, rather than just a simple image recognition and mouse control framework.
During this era, Jagex (makers of Runescape) made some big efforts to combat the botting. They started using obfuscators to make reverse engineering the bytecode harder, and reworked the handling of all String objects internally to mask them. There were more efforts, of varying success, but without fail, this one guy would have the botting client (and by extension, the whole botting ecosystem) back online in a week or so.
Flash forward to 2011, and Jacmob starts teasing something big for his RSBot 4.0 release: a “web-walking” API that would allow script writers to input any two positions on the world map, and have the botting client find them a path there, navigating through buildings, portals, teleports along the way. This was going to be an absolute game changer - script writing required insane attention to detail, trial and error, and tedium to navigate the world map in a slightly-randomized/hard-to-detect way. And yet a week or so before the big release… boom, another big effort comes from Jagex to stop the injection clients: the Great Bot Nuke of 2011.
This was different from the prior attempts by Jagex. Radio silence from Jacmob and the RSBot team, which was weird given the pending release. As the dust settled over the following weeks, it comes out that Jacmob, King of the botting community, has become Mod Jacmob, employee of Jagex, with very little fanfare both then and ever since. RSBot 4.0 was not to be.
Jacmob left the company several years later, but led their efforts through 2014 to combat botting, with great success. There’s very little information publicly available, but I strongly suspect he was using the obvious strategies of looking at probability distributions for click positioning on game objects and delays between certain behaviors to spot automation.
Jagex’s operations have grown much sloppier after his departure, but the scene has never returned to its former glory pre-2011. One nerdy, talented, quiet figure was responsible for so much of the Runescape community’s development - and yet you’d never know it without having been there yourself. Quite a world we live in.
(@Jacmob, if happen to read this - can I interview you pls <3?)
Edit: this is all from memory, I’m probably bungling the details in quite a few places.
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>Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when Microsoft cloud launched.
I mined cpuminer cryptocoins on azure free servers about this time. I got banned fast but still made a few 100s of dollars (which is basically a million to a 16 or 17 year old like me).
Delightful, I very nearly stopped my stream of consciousness to check the numbers, I wondered if anyone else would. It seems many of us share nostalgia around RS.
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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 graphics so your PC would not be overloaded due to running too many expensive Java applet graphics processes.
If I recall correctly it had its own intuitive scripting language. Some of these scripts were extremely coordinated: you could have several accounts mine ore, another account transfer it, and another account to manage smithing it in an orchestrated fashion.
If you were into player-versus-player, RS Classic had this unintended concept of "having catch" on someone based on your player ID on the server. Essentially if your player ID on the server was lower than your opponent's, then in a fight it would be significantly easier to chase them until they were dead. Catching a player took some well timed clicks and coordination. AutoRune (and the other bots I'll talk about) exposed this player ID to you so you could log out and in until you received a player ID that was sufficiently advantageous enough for you.
Even more scary was that it had an autocatcher that made it effectively impossible for another player to escape you in PVP so that you didn't need to learn the proper catching technique.
There were also free to use but less powerful bots like IT-bot (scriptable with Java) and Runebot (IIRC only allowed you to autotrain).
Fatigue and CAPTCHAs defeated by crowd sourcing with Sleepwalker -- To deter bots, RuneScape implemented a concept called "fatigue" where your character would supposedly get tired after harvesting items or gaining a certain number of experience points and you would be forced to use your sleeping bag to rest. When you rested, you would have to solve a CAPTCHA to wake up. I am still amazed with the level of coordination that happened here: someone built a tool called SleepWalker where you would write CAPTCHAs for other people and gain points. Each point you wrote for someone else became a word that you were allowed to have someone complete a CAPTCHA for you. You were also able to pay money to avoid writing CAPTCHAs yourself, and Sleepwalker was smart enough to integrate with whatever bot you were using. Eventually the more sophisticated bots like AutoRune and IT-bot implemented their own OCR so SleepWalker became something only used by people who couldn't afford OCR, but I'm still amazed by the community coordination here.
Now, these bots interacted with the RuneScape world by sending server side commands so you would never need to actually click on anything in the world to watch your character do things. The problem here is that these methods were comparatively easy to detect so Jagex would periodically ban players caught cheating. This is where SCAR comes in.
SCAR = Shit Compared to AutoRune -- SCAR was a less sophisticated but extremely effective botting tool that relied only on clicking colors. You wrote scripts in Pascal (of all things!) to do the tasks you wanted like mine ore or kill chickens and it did this by clicking predefined pixel colors with the timings you specified. To do it properly, it calibrated your in-game compass to align properly so the pixel clicking would work. It also implemented its own timing and color jitter so that the simulated clicks would appear to be from a human and not a bot. There were also scripts that would handle cases where a mod would message you and ask if you were a bot and it would respond with 'noope im not a bot, gtg bye!'.
All the characters I automated with the API-based bots ended up banned, but I'm pretty sure the one that I used SCAR on never got banned. The clicking approach became extensible when RS Classic became RS2, and I'm sure AutoRune continued into the future too but this is where I became too busy with school to keep up with all this.
Anyway, RuneScape automation is near and dear to my heart and got me started in CS so I love talking about this haha.
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In my early 20s I played an MMO called Asherons Call. I discovered a vendor in one high level area that would sell bows for less than a specific vendor in a low level area would buy them, netting you a small margin per bow.
Being a programmer I wrote a script that used two different teleport skills (lifestone and portal recall I think?) and a bit of movement and clicking based on pixel (Color) matching to deal with latency, tweaking it over time, and started printing in game money. I would come home from work to a backpack full of D notes (unit of currency I adapted my script to convert).
Then I would sell these D notes on eBay. Did this for a few months. First month I made over 7k USD (I shit you not). 2nd month about 3.5k, maybe 1k third month, so basically the market collapsed and I moved on (to other fun exploits… once you’ve been bitten by the exploit bug…).
In retrospect I regret it.
I’m a total hypocrite saying this, but I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs, and gotten far more advanced and efficient over the years.
The fun I had in AC before I started doing this stuff is something I wish more people could experience, but I suspect has been lost.
> I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs
Once you start allowing (or failing to prevent) real world transactions from altering the play of the game, which is really hard to do while still allowing any sort of item/money transfer between players, some subset of the player base will view their effort as devalued. Some other part of the player base will be delighted that while they don't necessarily have the time to put into the game, they can still get help progressing. There are of course the fringes of those that devote themselves to supporting this market or exploiting the market to support their power fantasies (which of course include flexing that power on other players).
There are valid uses for that market though, such as those aforementioned players that don't have time but would like to not be stuck for inordinate amounts of time at certain power levels. Basically, the same reason some games have difficulty levels. Some people want the challenge, others just want to experience the game.
> In retrospect I regret it.
It's sort of like allowing yourself to use a cheat in a game the first time through. If you take away a significant portion of the challenge when that's one of the things you're there for, the game can become much less fun. Other times, it just becomes a game within a game where you're playing market trader or whatever, which is fun while money/resources are still scarce, but then less fun after they aren't because of your wealth, and then you return to the main game to find it's less fun too.
> and gotten far more advanced
In some cases advanced is debatable . Chinese prisoners forced to farm wow gold...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/chinese-pr...
Similar to your story, I learned how to program by writing Runescape botting scripts.
Fast forward to today, and my hobby tech project for the past few months has been building a OSRS market-intel website for trading on the Grand Exchange. Great toy market that eliminates a lot of the complexity of “real-world” economics. Funny how outsized that damn game’s influence has been on the world.
RS was the perfect game for me and dramatically changed my life. Started when I was 12, played for YEARS slowly getting better.
Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money). Got into botting with some friends, made a little money doing that too.
My experience with RS led me to an interest in economics, and I'm now an accounting PhD student about to graduate. My bro got into coding bots, and is now an SWE doing high level work.
I love the game to pieces, and it isn't because I made money playing.
> Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money)
Do you feel any remorse or regret about scamming people out of thousands of dollars? I am a bit surprised that you are bragging about this sort of unethical\illegal behavior on an account directly tied to your real world identity.
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RuneScape was so famous for player scams it's a miracle anyone was willing to open the trading window at all.
Very similar story here.. I had a few party hats in Runescape which made the whole NFT thing and to a lesser extent Bitcoin so much easier to understand.
I still don't get it. We already sold digital assets so why do we need NFTs or Blockchain? What does it add here?
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Anyone interested in some nostalgia?
Long ago there was an MMO called Ultima Online. At one point gold on there reached the point that it was more expensive than the Italian lira. This was in a kooky time in 1999 when everything was at a peak. Here's the old article.
The NYT just wasn't having it.
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW THE NEW ECONOMY Money for Nothing A new breed of Internet profiteers is spinning virtual gold into hard currency. By JOHN COOK
Fixer-upper w/moat: The real market for imaginary property in Ultima is booming. enjamin Schriefer and Michael Gmeinwieser make money the new-fashioned way: they sell stuff that doesn't exist. And their customers, who pay them in cold, hard cash, don't mind one bit.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine...
I remember castles in Ultima Online going for thousands of dollars around then on eBay. I think an 800pt Grandmaster build character went for a couple hundred dollars to $1k depending on the skill set.
I knew someone at the time who bought a brand new sports car with all the money they made off Ultima Online.
I honestly miss the game, had a blast playing it back in the day.
Here's a story about The Sims Online I posted a few years ago, in which I described making a maze solving bot to quickly and automatically generate millions of Simoleons, and an ad-hoc solution to the delivery problem:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730181
I wrote a bot for The Sims Online that manufactured Simoleons, then repurposed it to catalog and describe objects in the game for you with a speech synthesizer. TSO had some ham-fisted money making multi player games that forced players to interact with each other in exchange for Simoleons.
One of them was a maze solving game for two players, where one player is lost in the maze and can see the local walls around them, and the other player can see an overall map of the maze without the player's position, and has to guide them around and figure out where they are and how to guide them out by asking them what they see and telling them which direction to move.
That required a lot of work for two people to do manually, so there was a big reward, but it was trivial and fun to solve mazes programmatically! (Plus it made cool bleeping and kaching sounds as it solved the mazes and printed money!)
I would run two TSO clients at the same time, logged into different accounts in different windows. The bot attached to both of them, then screen scraped pixels and injected events to repeatedly solve mazes by moving the player around until it identified where they were, solving for the shortest path, and bringing them straight home quickly by machine-gun clicking on the arrow buttons.
My housemate had a good eBay reputation, so as an experiment, we tried selling Simoleons on eBay for real currency via PayPal.
I could generate arbitrarily huge amount of virtual currency quite quickly. The bottleneck was selling it, and the problem was customer service.
The problem was that many of the customers were pouty temperamental 15-year-olds using their parent's eBay accounts, who would give scathing eBay reviews if their order wasn't delivered instantly, or they suffered some imagined slight.
And the other problem was that TSO just wasn't designed to make it easy to transfer large amounts of Simoleons from player to player.
You couldn't just "wire" somebody an arbitrary amount of cash via in-game email -- you had to show up on their lot and meet them at a specific real time, and suspiciously hand it over to them $1000 at a time.
There was another better way to transfer cash more efficiently than handing it over grand by grand, and that was with tip jars: You could fill a tip jar with $5000 using the pie menu with a couple of mouse clicks, and then the user could empty it the same way.
So when I had to deliver our first million Simoleons, I came up with a system where I'd go to the lot of the customer and meet them, then ask them to line up a bunch of tip jars in a row. I would then use bot macros to fill each tip jar one by one with $5000, while the customer would quickly empty them as I filled them up, and then we'd go back to the beginning of the row and start all over again, until we'd transferred the entire million Simoleons, in only 200 $5000 hand=>jar=>hand transactions instead of 1000 $1000 hand=>hand transactions.
One time when we were making a big delivery of cash, running the gauntlet of tip jars in our customer's living room (which I admit looked pretty fishy), and their housemate came home, saw what was happening, and wisely sussed up the situation that there was some kind of deal going down, that she wanted in on.
So she put her own tip jar down at the end of her housemate's row of tip jars, and I blithely deposited $5000 into her tip jar several times, which she immediately snapped up.
When I realized what happened, instead of contracting The Sims Mafia to do a hit on her, I congratulated her for her loose morals and ingenuity. It was such a great hack, and I totally fell for it, and had more Simoleons than I knew what to do with anyway. It's all about good customer service!
It was a fun experiment, but other bots and offshore farmers were starting to work the system too, and customer service and delivery problems made it not worth continuing.
So the unemployed Sims bot wouldn't feel bored, I retrained it into a more practical assistive utility called "Simplifier", which knew how to recognize and navigate the Sims user interface to show, scroll through, and enumerate all the many items, wallpapers, floor tiles, etc, in the catalog.
Simplifier demo starts at 3:15: https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s
It took snapshots of the icons, and read the text off the screen to capture the title, price and description (it was all in a bitmap Comic Sans font, so it was easy for a bot to recognize, if not for your eyes to read), and made a searchable illustrated database of all your built-in and downloaded content.
Simplifier addressed the problem that many players would download thousands of objects from web sites, or make their own custom objects with tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic (shown earlier in the demo video), but it was impossible to search or keep track of them through The Sims interface.
And it was useful for Sims web site publishers to make illustrated catalogs of their own objects.
You could also operate it in manual mode, where you press and hold on an icon in the catalog, and it reads the object description to you with a speech synthesizer.
That was useful for kids learning to read, old farts with bad eyesight, and snobby designers who hate Comic Sans, who would enjoy having the object descriptions read to them.
Schneier on Security: Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia...
Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass: Building Web Reputation Systems: The Dollhouse Mafia, or "Don't Display Negative Karma"
http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse...
Surprised to see you're downvoted. I found this intriguing, and mirrors many of my experiences with the logistics of selling virtual goods.
Yes but games now actively have to fight this or they become a Money transfer agent and then you have to comply with anti money laundering laws.
I think that Bitcoin and Ethereum tie a lot of things together that make them weaker but are great technological achievements. Eventually governments will regulate them properly and the whole environmental impact needs at least a layer two solution.
If you haven't already read it (or, heck, even if you have), I _strongly_ suspect you'd have a blast with Neal Stephenson's _REAMDE_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde
Wow, thanks for the recommendation, I've added it to my reading list!
I wonder if we’ll have politicians and political philosophers in the near future who will credit MMO games for awakening their keen eye on societal issues.
MMO worlds and their economies taught many how the basics of our economy works. As a kid you got exposed to virtual versions of negative aspects of free markets that went against the meritocratic ethos of the game. (Especially if you were one of the kids not permitted to use money to buy virtual currency.)
I wonder the same. Played MMOs growing up. Got scolded a lot for wasting time on video games.
But I look back now and realize a lot of my foundational knowledge on economics, programming, networking, teamwork, came from MMORPGS. They are social games where you deal with people - and that is a valuable experience.
Unfortunately modern MMO’s are very asocial games and I don’t think much can be learned from them.
From https://medium.com/loom-network/blockchain-games-the-biggest...:
> "I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007–2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell.
> I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit."
— Vitalik Buterin, Creator of Ethereum
> It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this [woodcutting] level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum.
[laughs in agility]
Anyway I agree with Runescape teaching some real world skills. Runescape (and some other multiplayer games) also taught me about scams and I think trained me to be skeptical whenever something seems too good to be true. For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago.
> For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago.
Isn't this kind of thing illegal with real assets?
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I traded custom scripts on a IRC channel. People would pay me with party hats and Santa hats which were some of the most ridiculously priced assets in the game.
The macro client even had a captcha queue where other miners could earn credits by filling out the captchas other players were getting and then use the credits to have other people fill out their captcha. This way you could leave it running all night as long as you did your part . You would get a captcha if you did the same thing for too long
I'm hoping the rest of the story was you putting some of your magic tree earnings into a few hundred Bitcoins when they cost pennies, and you are now a Runescape multi-millionaire.
Seems like it taught you a lot about finance, which is different from economics.
how did you find btc via rs?
Others in this thread mentioned similar patterns of acquiring and selling virtual assets. PayPal was a common money transfer platform and eBay was a common marketplace (before they banned the sale of digital items).
I stopped using PayPal for... a number of reasons, and BTC was a functional alternative.
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 least). So I have some perspective in being able to ask myself "Why is this interesting?" without any emotional-financial attachment. I do this little exercise every time I read about some new brain-twisting scheme to move money around and capture some of the XX%/month rise.
Play-to-earn seems to fit the same mold: You can talk all you want about how play-to-earn is "the new new" and how it's helping people out of poverty and changing the dymanics of gaming and yadda yadda yadda. But just ask yourself: If the money music stopped tomorrow, would you play the game?
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?
It sounds like the answer, at least when it comes to Axie Infinity, is no. It doesn't sound fun. It doesn't sound compelling. It DOES sound like an opportunity for people to extract money from the crypto system that's fundamentally based on the assumption that the crypto system will continue rising in value forever.
> 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 buying into the game and entering that system, that sounds more like a pyramid scheme than anything.
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 coming from people looking to make quick money? And when BTC hits 1M/coin, then what? You still need more money coming in to keep it above 1M.
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This is the most crucial question about everything crypto-related.
Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-sum game. If you invest, you are guaranteed to lose on average. If you do happen to win, your gains are coming out of the pocket of someone else who lost even more.
The price of the token in question doesn't enter into this at all. It can rise, fall, anything. It is still a negative-sum game, but some people have not yet realised that they lost.
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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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Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free to use? They all were working to "make the world a better place" and not making money as they were burning billions each year, challenging the traditional and profitable companies. With Amazon prices were amazing, you had unlimited rights and not only buying but also selling was great. Bezos was worth quite a much but his company never made any profit up until a few years back.
The news business was destroyed in the process, just as the retail and once the establishment lost its ground the money began poring in. From 90's up to late 2000's the internet was amazing as everything was paid by people who were about to reap their investment back a decade later.
My point is, following the money is tricky. Maybe we are at the verge of another change where the costs are payed by crypto bros who will be splitting countries and starting wars once they are done growing the landscape.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Probably a Ponzi, not a pyramid, scheme, no?
I did a report on this game for a client a few months back -- the amount of daily earnings a player can expect has crashed significantly over the past few months, and it's only gotten worse ever since.
https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1459191090100244483
That's pretty impressive. What do you know what caused the May 2021 spike? what is your feel of how 'sustainable' the whole eco-system of this game is..
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Agree with this reasoning - NFTs seem like they clearly have little to no real value and I think the people buying them understand that and are just doing speculation (and we know how that ends up). BTC/ETH are a little harder to gauge because they market themselves as alternative currencies rather than a product in-and-of-itself, but I still get the same fear that it's entirely based on sentiment and nothing in the real world. One article (or Elon tweet) could cause it all to drop overnight.
The USD might fall the same way, but it'd be slower and would require real-world change to happen instead of people just deciding not to use something anymore, and it's so tied up in the global currency exchange that we'd have way bigger problems to worry about than "my investment account lost all it's money". I'm pretty risk averse so I get that other people would want to play that game, I'm just not much of a gambler.
Ethereum seems slightly better than Bitcoin for the reasons you stated as well - ETH could drop to almost zero value and smart contracts would still be cool, but ultimately I'm into the tech. Feels a lot like having a lot of reddit karma to me - it's cool to the people that think it's cool, but doesn't mean much outside of that, unless you can convince someone that does think it's cool to take your fake assets and trade them for "real" assets.
> 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?
There are hundreds of ways for that answer to be yes, and this is what is attracting so many builders to the space and why it builds so fast.
Many crypto enthusiasts and the skeptics that surround them are looking at linear bets. Put in X capital, receive X+Y% of capital back, or lose X-Y%. Although very popular approach, it is basically the tip of the iceberg of what's going on.
You can start with no capital and earn the crypto. You can earn lots of it. The price of what you earn can stay flat. The price of what you earn can decrease and you still come out ahead, because you are earning a lot. Not different than earning shares at a FAANG (or NAAAM these days?), except in crypto the earning is is waaaay faster than FAANG vesting periods, and every project has waaaay more upside without wasting decades of your life praying for exit liquidity at a private startup.
So the basis of your question is really project dependent. If I found a way to earn Axie SLP, NFTs, or Axie tokens fast, I wouldn't care about the exchange rate of any of those (unless the dilution outpaced the point of earning) and I think you - and many others - are missing that.
A lot of people stand up smart contract products that accept existing assets as deposit, and take a few basis points of the assets upon deposit or withdrawal, and thats the whole business model. They all do different things thats usually solving an interest or need for the people with the other assets. Completely passive income. I've even seen code that will accept an asset, take the cut, and immediately exchange the cut for a stablevalue asset, all initiated and paid for by the user that made the deposit.
There are many non-linear earning opportunities in this space. Many rival what the largest tech companies offer, even if the exchange rates of the things earned stayed flat. So the calculus is pretty clear: smugly exploit yourself for an ad conglomerate, or directly earn and build in this other even faster moving economy.
> 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 use this yard stick when reviewing all of my tech investments. Providing real value with interesting technological innovations is why ETH outperformed every other alt-coin, just like why Amazon and Google survived the dotcom bust. It seems fundamentally unfair to ask this question specifically of “crypto/NFT/web-3” when it applies equally to all assets and projects.
Bingo. If you couldn't sell at profit, would you ever buy anything crypto-related? That's what I tell any new crypto speculator.
I agree with your point that the operative word here is "earn", and not "play".
To play the devil's advocate: many crypto developers continue to build in the space (or have done it in the past) despite large drawdowns in token prices (denominated in USD). Would that constitute a sufficient signal that "there is something real there", distinct from the question of "is the valuation too high"?
I'd say no.
This might just as well be an "emperor's new clothes" situation, in which a significant number of people are either deluded in thinking there is something of value or heavily invested in making others believe so. Neither of which means there is actually anything "real" there.
Shared delusions are a thing.
Nah, it's just that the target audience ("investors") won't care about the few bucks.
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.
I know that there were many people who stayed interested through 4 years of bear market
If the SP500 stopped going up in value would you still be interested in the project?
Yes. The stocks in the SP500 sometimes go down in value, sometimes in the aggregate for a long time. Individually some of them go down forever.
If a stock goes down in value and it still pays a dividend it becomes more valuable for this. Setting that aside all stocks have a not very senior claim on assets. As the stock goes down sometimes it is worth less than the assets it has a claim to. At that point its better to buy up a controlling interest and sell the assets. Thats what private equity does. So yes I am interested when the value goes down.
I would expect it to pay dividends or do stockbuybacks until no more shares are publicly traded.
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>would you still be interested in the project?
Sure, my fear is that my average peer won't be though. Even if I can see the technical merits...if all my peers are just in it for that quick buck this is going to end badly
Is there any difference why anyone would invest in the stock market? Of course people asset prices to inflate. Isn’t that the whole point of investing in anything?
Actually, originally no; stocks paid dividends.
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But Web3/Crypto/NFT is so much more than the financial incentives. It's much more about culture, belonging, tribalism (the good version) and the endless opportunity space of what I would call a resource. Digital assets that behave as if they are physical.
I have been involved in crypto since the beginning and the least interesting things for me is about the value. It's just a savings account. All the fun stuff is what we build on top of that.
I hope web3/crypto/NFTs are what will finally make us realize that money is essentially meaningless, so that we can forget the concept of monetary value altogether in the long term.
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 at it, i invested so many hours on it and managed to get into top tier guilds and worlds 1st event, and somehow, my character and my items were worth thousands of dollars in the market, and suddenly i went from being a 14 y.o boy sitting in pc, to bringing more money in 1 week to my family, than my entire family together for 1 year.
I could understand that, while all other people on the game were playing for fun, it became my job, a job that actually got me and my family out of poverty...
At the time (2007) there were a lot of chinese "farmers", and people used to make fun of them, not only fun but the rest of the players were blantantly denigrating towards them, at 1st I didnt understand but once that I became a non-chinese farmer, I realized how It was a really good thing to do.
Eventually I started botting, I bought more PCs and had a full army of bots, I kept making more and more money, and it helped me and my family leave the country and pretty much bought a house, a car and paid my family expenses for like 4 years out of lineage 2 adena farming.
Also, scripting the bots pretty much got me to learn programming and english, so what I am now it's pretty much the result of some guy from chicago offering me 20$ in paypal for an item i had in my inventory that i got it while killing a monster, it all started there, that litle forbidden transaction in an MMO, changed my life completely
So, even tho it was like a job for me, I never saw it like a job, even tho it gave me a lot of money, i never got into the game as a way to get money, i was just a young kid trying to have some fun..
But now, I get really sad everytime I see those ponzi NFT games, that only sell the idea of getting rich, and I get even more sad when I see tons of venezuelan youngsters fall for it, honestly, they are just playing with their desperation.
That's an awesome story. While I've never lived in poverty, I got my first taste of making money by making bot for a FaceBook game in 2008 (WarBook, if anyone remembers that). I only made around 2,000 USD but that experience really changed my life.
Esa era la mejor era para ese tipo de juegos, entretenidos y se sacaba un rialero, por aqui haciamos lo mismo, con Silkroad y Mu.
Esos de ahorita son diferente, parece hasta macabro. Dan "becas" para que otros "jueguen" y ganen por ellos prometiendoles una parte de la ganancia, eso si, siempre y cuando el nft no caiga.
De vez en cuando conocidos me preguntan que si es bueno entrar en esos juegos nft a todos les digo que ni locos se metan ahi, da mas plata y es mas estable sembrar.
It seems like a bold statement to claim every NFT game is a ponzi. Some existing games are looking into incorporating NFTs to help facilitate the kind of transactions you previously needed paypal for. It seems a bit dismissive to hand-wave any games that want to incorporate the technology as not being able to operate sustainably.
Wild story, thanks for sharing.
> 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.
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, PR, claims of new revenue sources, etc. It's not working. In the end, it's a classic Ponzi scheme, and it collapsed after only a few months.
[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
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.
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?
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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...
They talk about the economics here and payback time: https://medium.com/coinmonks/axie-infinity-a-developing-worl...
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.
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This is a key thing that a lot of people are missing: most (if not all) of the top PlayToEarn games are literally just disguised ponzi schemes.
The only reason why their tokens have value is that you need those tokens to earn more tokens.
This. Axie Infinity only had traction, because the earned coin had speculative value. The traction was from people "playing-to-earn" as a job. I doubt that there are that many people playing for the fun of it. When the token loses value, there isn't a reason to continue playing.
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.
Thought leadership smeadership.
A16z's goal is to make money, lots of it. Shouldn't confuse its purpose by giving it other goals.
Yes but even an amoral organization could be expected to anticipate damage to their reputation when they're seen to be propping up a sufficiently transparent pyramid scheme, and decide not to cross that line. I'm still not sure they made the right move for their long-term interests, considering there's more reputational damage to come when the pyramid implodes. (They probably won't take financial damage though, as they're likely to sell near the peak.)
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Indeed, the classic line, "Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison," seems apropos here.
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.
Some examples would be appreciated, please.
Oh my god. That podcast with the Axie dude made me recoil with disgust. The way they're selling the pay-to-earn concepts comparing it to mobile games is absolutely vile especially when mobile games are equally predatory
Sometimes I wish I didn't have any scruples so I could mint money from misery like this
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).
> playing produced something of value.
some games manage to do this - EVE Online has a play-to-earn model, and those who grind to earn become gameplay elements for other players (the whole game is PVP non-consensually).
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VCs have to put their monthly influx of FedBux somewhere!
Less sarcastically: cheap money effectively lowers the cost of risk, thus increasing the number of risky investments made. And Axie seems like less of a risky investment than Yo was, at least.
Ponzi schemes are great if you leave early enough.
Thought leadership sounds a lot like mind steering.
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 strategies. On one hand, these strategies can save companies many millions of dollars, but on the other, they really produce nothing of value and are just a product of the complexities of a (human designed) tax system. Lots of regulatory compliance work also goes into this bucket. I wouldn't say all of it, because there are definitely regulations that do actually make companies safer/more transparent/etc., but anyone who has had to fill out a page after page after page "security questionnaire" knows at least half of it is bullshit that nobody is going to read in the first place. Sometimes I've been tempted to just add "Mickey Mouse" answers just to check if anyone sees it. Writing something that nobody ever reads seems like it's hard to believe that's anything else except bullshit.
> On one hand, these strategies can save companies many millions of dollars, but on the other, they really produce nothing of value and are just a product of the complexities of a (human designed) tax system
Businesses that spend less money on taxes can spend more money on expenses, such as payroll and higher quality materials and land, or it can allow them to sell products/services at a lower price, providing a competitive advantage.
But they are a product of a human designed tax system, which may or may not be bullshit. There is no single clear, correct way to implement taxes.
> Businesses that spend less money on taxes can spend more money on expenses...
Does that actually happen? Small businesses, sure. My cousin's restaurant directly ploughs that money back into the business.
But it seems large corporations mostly do executive bonuses and stock buybacks.
I guess my pendant comes down to my objection over treating all "business" as the same, morally and economically. As though megacorps are same as my cousin's restaurant, my uncle's farm.
Whereas I favor excessive generosity for small and young businesses (and farmers), anything less than levying repeated radical cashectomies against large firms is a moral disaster and economic selfown.
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 those value producing activities to minimize the bullshit side-effects and thus increase economic efficiency.
Taxes are an area with a lot of low hanging fruit, unfortunately Intuit and other tax prep companies spend a lot of money lobbying to maximizing the bullshit jobs side effects of taxation because it makes them more money.
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The most boring tax system is a landvalue tax and nothing else.
I just had to produce 10 separate “deliverables” for a single-server internal use web site that is already archived and read-only.
Test plans, migration plans, operations guides, etc…
Most will never be read by another human being. They exist only because they “have to”.
It’s soul-crushing “work”.
> "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally, arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?"
But isn’t this basically every job that doesn’t directly support a human need (like food, clothing, shelter)? Just arbitrarily working to meet some other human’s desires?
Meeting a desire is not a bullshit job, depending on the desire. One example in the book is a receptionist. Some places need receptionists to answer phones or receive packages, but one receptionist was hired at a firm that didn't need her to do any work - but a competing firm in the same building had one, so they wanted one too. Meeting your desire for nice hair, even a desire for a butler to pick up your laundry or whatever, is still meeting a need, but it's less superfluous than "I need you to sit there because someone else has someone who does something similar)
I'm not arguing that it's about meetings some other human's desires. Indeed, jobs that give real pleasure or sense of accomplishment to other people (actors, massage therapists, yoga teachers, personal trainers, artists, language coaches, yada yada) I find incredibly valuable.
I'm talking about when someone, specifically a gatekeeper, creates what is basically a little tedious maze for you to run, not for their own pleasure, not even for someone else's pleasure, but often just to justify their own job, usually in a "CYA" fashion.
I don't know of any arbitrary tasks set up by gatekeepers. I mean, people don't just sit around and think up stupid tasks for fun. These jobs usually arise something like this:
In order to process request X, we need pieces of information A, B, C, D. Users frequently send in incomplete information. So we have to hire someone to check that all the required information is provided and accurate.
Yeah, it's kind of bullshit because it wouldn't be needed if people just did the right thing, but people are people, and they don't. In some cases it can be replaced with a web form with proper validation, but sometimes the information is something you can't verify with Javascript (like checking for a valid driver's license or something), so you need a human. So it goes.
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.
This reminds me of the last time I went to Vegas with my two best buds from college. I was a broke grad student, so I couldn't really do any of the entertainment stuff in the city. I also don't really like gambling, so I had a conundrum of how to spend the daylight hours, before the nightlife started up.
We ended up sitting at the nickel slots, playing just enough to stay busy so we could flag down cocktail waitresses for comped drinks. If you were economical enough with your slots play, not selecting multiple lines or multipliers, it was a cheap way to drink.
Pretty quickly, it occurred to me that I was doing a bullshit job. Why had I come to Vegas to feed a machine that wasn't even entertaining me? I felt like livestock.
Eventually, I cracked to the peer pressure of my buddies and decided to play poker with them. I won about $700 as someone who had played maybe twice before in my life, but that's another story...
Interestingly, one of the friends I was with was one of the first people I ever met to make money selling virtual goods. As a high school kid in 2001 or 2002 (well before the Second Life example the author cites in 2005), he made money selling Diablo II accounts he had beefed up in his spare time.
>>>As a high school kid in 2001 or 2002 (well before the Second Life example the author cites in 2005), he made money selling Diablo II accounts he had beefed up in his spare time.
One of my fraternity brothers paid for a vacation in Europe and a digital camcorder from selling Diablo characters, leveled up via macros, on Ebay. This was also in ~2001-2003.
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.
That sounds great. I'll create a DAO to collect funds so we can create this game. What should we call it? How about Recursion?
Since the name Second Life is taken, how about Third Life?
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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/
Bountysource?
As I was reading Graeber, it's useful to imagine useless job economies of the past. Is a medieval abbey "useless?" Clergy? Servants to the clergy? How about courtiers? Courtiers' dress makers?
These classes represented a small part of most societies in the past, though not always that small. In any case, it's obvious that whatever needs these jobs serve are cultural. Don't underestimate culture. Money is a cultural construct. Power. Politics. Macroeconomics. Etc.
That's what's going on here.
In the book version of his essay, one of the things he talks about is how most of the things people would write to him about being "bullshit jobs" were not his original definition of bullshit jobs.
He gives the example of how a lot of people wrote to him about how useless hairdressers were, since people could just style their own hair. But, to Graeber, these are very much real jobs, because it's easy to see what was exchanged for payment (hair service.) Whether it was worth the money is a different question.
Clergy, in the middle ages, wouldn't be so much a bullshit job, but might be a privileged caste. The servants of the clergy, according to Graeber, are not bullshit jobs, because like the hairdresser, they are doing something for someone (presumably.) Doing laundry or bringing tea or whatever we are imagining they are serving as servants.
I believe in the book, he resigns to include the concept of "different types" of bullshit jobs, since most people seem to be unable to stick to his original definition.
The canonical bullshit job to Graeber would be someone in a large administrative bureaucracy. This is tied, in his original essay, to examining the statistics of increase in jobs in different sectors, cross-referenced with data about the growth in the productivity of a single worker. He shows that while manufacturing and service jobs have remained steady, "administrative" jobs have increased in proportion with productivity, which he says demonstrates the "bullshit job" as purely a way of having more administrators sitting around in meetings while the same number of people do actual stuff.
So... I think a lot of people (not you) missed the fact that graeber writes from what I think is a traditional anthropological perspective, as opposed to other social philosophy traditions.
Bullshit jobs described as such by the worker was a very big part of his definition. I think the definition has to drift, since an anthropologist won't typically want to impose a typology.
In any case, if medieval monks themselves considered monkery bullshit... there are snug places in Graebers' typology for them. In fact, I believe an average monastery could man every type of bullshit job category. It would depend on whether or not they themselves believe in the monastic institutions... and I would not necessarily assume that they did.
Graeber's categories of bullshit jobs is useful: flunkies, goons, duct-tapers, box-ticker, task-master. Here's a quickly found source: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-w...
> how useless hairdressers were
Graeber's notion of "caring work" -- in contrast to "service work", "knowledge work", etc -- really changed my worldview about labor.
> canonical bullshit job to Graeber would be someone in a large administrative bureaucracy
My own archetype is healthcare accounting in the USA. Like "prescription benefits management". Hits all 5 categories of bullshit.
What's the cultural value provided by sitting on Axie and grinding for hours?
I'm not sure "value" is the correct question. Value depends on... values, I guess.
In any case, I suspect Graeber would have advised asking them. The grinders in manilla. The currency buyers, traders, etc. Cultural reasons are hard to extract from their cultural context without resorting to essentialism.
There are differences between a game where money comes from grinding, even if 3rd party and outsourced, and a pay-to-play currency. I suspect the people participating in that economy have a narrative, and that it makes some sort of internal sense. That's culture.
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It's the same cultural value provided by a slot machine.
A way to hack someone else's brain and turn them into a slave zombie.
But I guess a lot of "real" culture is basically trying to do something similar: religions, corporate cults, schools, etc. Those are maybe only superficially less grotesque.
I think the point of Graeber (RIP btw) was to highlight that certain jobs (the bullshit ones) are self-fulfilling promises; specifically jobs "that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones." [1]
What's going on here is people doing work knowing it's actual bullshit. Just like grinding in the game. There are entire sweeps of the economy dedicated to this kind of work and it's a huge waste.
1. https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
By what definition would you consider a medieval abbey useless? I can't follow you.
> Is a medieval abbey "useless?" Clergy? Servants to the clergy? How about courtiers? Courtiers' dress makers?
You're really misinformed. Monks have been producing goods like wine, cheese, keeping society's records for centuries, or even being involved in woodwork or construction work, providing useful services to their communities. What does it have to do with "bullshit jobs"? Nothing.
Your comment sounds like a gratuitous provocation.
Is this different from the phenomenon described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming?
Honestly it seems like a pretty great career -- you get to spend your time indoors, probably somewhere climate controlled with electricity and restrooms. This is way better than the workhouse.
Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically donating their wealth to others, like a kind of privatized welfare. If people are buying these things as a speculative investment, they're participating in a private lottery. That all seems … fine?
It's different inasmuch as it's even stupider.
Gold farming is, at least, based on the premise that there are people who are willing to pay other people money to perform repetitive actions in a video game for them. It's still kind of dumb and it has harmful effects on in-game economies, but at least there's some semblance of money being exchanged for goods and services.
"Play to earn", on the other hand, is based on the premise of cutting out the middleman and having the game developer just straight-up hand players money (or something money-equivalent) for playing their game. How this is even supposed to work from an economic standpoint is a question that I've never seen adequately answered.
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'm very familiar with Gold farming from Eve Online, where selling game currency (ISK) was permitted via exchange of game time cards sold by the game's developer. There was always a secondary market for game time cards sold for real money and that was legal too. The reason it all worked is because playing the game was really fun, but required to grind to get ISK. People with more money than time would prefer to buy themselves new spaceships to get blown up in than grind for them.
It really sounds though like Axie Infinity is not a fun game and no one treats it as one. So it is something new.
> it’s hard to find any reviews on Axie Infinity as a game rather than as an income stream or speculative investment
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Pay-to-earn is such a scam inflicted on the poor though. Imagine you've been trying to get a job for months, your meager savings are dwindling, and a company says that to get the job, you need to pay them $100 to run a "background check". Of course, you don't get the job. but you're still out that money. On the remote chance that you do, it'll take you almost a week at minimum wage to earn back that money, and you're likely to have to wait 2 or 4 weeks until you see it (which you don't have the money for). None of this works from an economic standpoint, it's outright slavery!
Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done. There's no actual economic output to paying people to break rocks.
Exactly. One could make an argument that the work some users put in, once sold, result in value to the buyer, but that value isn’t generated by the worker. The developers created the scheme and could deliver the value directly at no cost to all players, poor and wealthy, but instead chose to create meaningless work by making grinding opportunities.
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I guess it depends on the grind involved. Some streamers are paid to play games. They confess they don't always enjoy it or every game that people want to watch, but it seems better than some alternatives. And a few YouTubers I follow have admitted to less than stellar career prospects otherwise.
Now if it's pure, unfun grind that only pushes numbers around in an MMO then I'd agree it's basically just outsourced cheating. And a net negative both because it compromises a social form of entertainment and doesn't produce anything else of tangible value.
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Imagine there’s a multi-billion dollar industry where some people record sound waves made with their vocal cords, and other people pay _real money_ monthly to have a chance to replay those waves for entertainment only.
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>Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done.
Who decides what work, "needs to be done"? I suppose you could argue that activities that create the necessities needed to survive (food, shelter, clothing), "need to be done", but everything else is simply a matter of choice. Economic output is a subjective, contrived metric.
But there's an economic drain if you fire all the rock breakers, and they end up on the streets.
With automation coming for most jobs, we can either live in a low to no work Utopia or a hypercapitalist hell. Given recent trends, my money is on hypercapitalist hell.
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The original article seems to assert that there are essentially no non-grinder buyers (which would be a key distinction from the gold farming) that in this case the existing grinders are selling the items to the new-potential grinders who are paying an initial investment with the hope of recovering it by grinding - if that's the case, then it is essentially a classic pyramid scheme where you as a newcomer pay so that future newcomers would pay you more afterwards; which works until the stream of new incoming money dries up.
Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically donating their wealth to others
No, donating would be 'here, have a bunch of games resources, enjoy.' People who buy virtual goods are purchasing status - maybe purely social status Veblen goods (eg hats and other rare-but-fundamentally useless items) or maybe strategic status (eg weapons/armor that give you a combat buff in their own right, plus might also indicate that you're tremendously experienced if you earned rather than purchased it, which is often unknown to the other players).
some years ago I got into a Roman Gladiator game that ran on this model, that was both fun and easy (for me, ie I happened to be good at it). So I ground my way to being quite a high level player and winning a number of fancy items, and accepting challenges from other players. In a well balanced game every item buff has some sort of weakness, eg it's vulnerable to particular spam attacks or regular hits from some other specific weapon. I had figured out most of these by grinding my way up, and after a while I noticed that people who had a lot of fancy items got super abusive if they lost a combat to grinding techniques rather than better gear, to the point where multiple players started harassing my platform account rather than just my in-game character. There was a big inverse snobbery against working too hard at it; I was even accused of 'violating the spirit of the game' ¯\(°_o)/¯
The article suggests that the game is currently only played by people hoping to make money. The money paid out to old players comes from new players.
It's just a Ponzi scheme.
I wouldn't call it donating if they're grinding for it.
Imagine you could go to a prison and get paid to break rocks all day for money whenever you want. OK, sure, the people doing it are doing it because they need it. But would you call the person running such an establishment charitable?
It's just dirty, when you take out all the in between and just look at the ends of the process, it's basically paying poor people to waste their time because they need food because you get off on it.
AC costs money, in most of the world they would do without and have extra heat from the PC. Also, limited range of motion plus extremely long workweek quickly results in RSI.
This feels like a "let them eat cake" reply when compared to agrarian labor...
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The problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is similar to this common saying in advertising: "I know I'm wasting 80% of my ad spend. I just don't know which 80%." The same principle likely applies to wages across the economy.
I think it's rather obvious that a huge fraction of employment is worthless. The problem is determining which fraction that is. It's not obvious. Many jobs that look and feel like bullshit may have some hidden function within an organization that is essential (and may not even be the "primary function" of the job as per the job req), and many very important looking jobs may create little to no value. There are probably companies that could knock out the CEO but would have a tougher time without one of their office assistants, but where telling which office assistant this is would be almost impossible without spending months observing the intricate details of operations.
The fact that markets are bad at optimizing out this obvious cost center makes me wonder if it might be "non-computable."
The only way we know of to discover this is to use Darwinian methods, but this is incredibly destructive. Deep recessions take out a lot of good but not-yet-robust businesses along with the bad and the obsolete. The modern practice of pumping economies along forever and not allowing deep recessions probably leads to a ton of dead wood building up but it's also probably why we have progress in quantum computers, electric vehicles, and space flight among other speculative areas that would probably implode in a deep recession (without being specifically subsidized). Forest fires burn the dead wood but they also burn a shitload of trees, especially immature ones who don't have layers of flame retardant bark. Lots of old and injured animals die but so do the babies who can't run fast yet.
Also, many jobs are probably partially bullshit or mostly bullshit, but also have one critical (often undocumented) function wrapped into them that if eliminated, would cause enormous damage.
Companies often barely have any idea of what employees spend the majority of their day doing. They are never going to catch all the little things.
It’s also very “easy” to identify a BS job, especially when you don’t know much about it.
Yup, and it gets worse when you consider that everyone is usually trying to make their job look important regardless of how important it actually is. It's likely that a deliberate attempt to weed out BS jobs would select for good fakers, ass kissers, and con artists and weed out a lot of heads-down productive people.
> 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.
Imagined meaning: work, but fun!
Actual meaning: play, but boring!
Play to make a hamburger to satisfy hunger. :) Maybe print the hamburger via a 3D printer?
I'm a bit of a fan of the whole cryptocurrency thing, the early scope of the concept anyway, replace money, programmatic agreement enforcement, creating financial assets that can't be controlled, incentivizing things that need incentivizing and all that. It's interesting stuff.
But this whole metaverse and play to earn is obvious nonsense.
But then, if you show me a slot machine and explain it to me in plain English, that it pays out less than you put in, that it is designed to addict you, that you sit there sticking quarters in and pulling a handle all day, I'd laugh at you before I stuck a dollar in the thing. But people do. All the time. So I'm not so sure this nonsense is going to crash and burn, but I'm certain it isn't worthwhile in the least.
> replace money
Uh what?
> programmatic agreement enforcement
If writing logic were this easy, we wouldn't need the court system.
> creating financial assets that can't be controlled
I'm quite libertarian but again, not sure this is a feature.
> incentivizing things that need incentivizing and all that
Otherwise broadly known as a "marketplace"
Well the idea behind bitcoin and what not is to use it as money. You might not think it fits the bill but that's the idea, and I think it's a good idea, whether or not execution in it's current state is sufficient.
We have a court system primarily because it was the most efficient way before. It is older than computers, it exists because there was no other way, not because writing logic is hard, although it is. But there's a trade off, if we assume you can never write logic to handle laws then you accept that you will always create a position of power from which law can be abused.
Why isn't it a feature?
Yeah, a marketplace.
After seeing the word "Ponzi" haphazardly misapplied to so many different things in the tech space[1], it's incredibly gratifying to see it used here properly!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698967
Thanks! I share your frustration :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808561
> gameplay designed to be dull enough that rich players will pay to outsource it to poor players
Do I understand it correctly that the point here, and maybe the central point of Bullshit Jobs, is that we tend to structure our economies with built in inefficiencies so that tedium appears where there is no need for it. And the reason for this is that otherwise the organisation or person solving a given problem would immediately remove their own lifeline, their income or their raison d'etre?
So the point of this article is point out how this happens even when there isn't a problem to be solved - which is reason to believe that it happens all around us as well in situations where we're "solving an actual problem".
It's like a machine that endlessly inflates all pockets of human interaction with tedium and labels it as efficiency or "fun". A paper clip maximizer of sorts.
Selling digital goods for real money is pretty well tread. What does web3/crypto add here?
Game assets can't be used in another game. You need full support from the game developer. The devs could much more easily and cheaply sell the assets direct or support trading.
If the game is distributed or has private servers or something that might warrant defi trades, but wouldn't gamers just hack their own items? If they control the server code, surely it's possible.
Seems like a marketing gimmick at best. What am I missing?
I don't think you're missing a ton. Getting game developer buy in is definitely the biggest challenge.
I think "GameFi" is the most compelling use case. Use your in-game items (NFTs) as collateral for a loan, or lend it to other players to use while you retain ownership. Game devs could build all this functionality themselves, but they get it for free if they don't take the walled garden approach.
You say free but they'll need to integrate with the chain for all transactions. Simple loot drops will need to be put on the chain. Seems pretty onerous compared to the normal implementation. Odds are they would need to duplicate all the functionality in game as well.
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It is a marketing gimmick. Like the article says, the addition of NFTs is just a bunch of techno mumbo jumbo to build a facade of credibility and blind people to the fact that these games are digital Ponzi schemes.
> wouldn't gamers just hack their own items?
if the game could be such that this is equivalent of proof-of-work, then it would be fine.
Slightly OT, but for the historical record:
> People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.
I saw it happening at least as far back as ‘98 in DragonRealms, a MUD and (when it moved off of AOL) one of the first online games with a monthly subscription.
Yeah, I sold stuff in Ultima Online much earlier than 2005. Lazy research in this article.
That doesn't come off as "lazy research" to me. The author didn't write "the earliest time this happened was 2005", but rather "at least as far back as ....".
The author's correct in their wording, and the point was simply that getting real money out of games in some way is not novel to this new "play to earn" genre.
The point of the article was to talk about Axie Infinity and Bullshit Jobs in the present, not to spend significant time on historical background.
To be honest, I think using Second Life, or runescape, or such as an example, instead of Ultima Online or such, actually is better writing in that it's more likely to be something the audience is familiar with, or at least can google and read more about. In that sense, using a well known historical example is less lazy writing than finding the oldest possible thing that others are unlikely to relate to for a peripheral comparison which already explicitly was worded as "at least as early as" ("kinda old, but not necessarily the oldest").
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 about how to interact with people going through the security lines.
It dawned on me that the only rationale for this completely useless facade of stress inducing security was simply that these were low-income workers who needed a job, and we're subsidizing it through various types of taxes.
I believe Axie Infinity is dumb, but so are much bigger things around us that we talk much less about. However, Axie Infinity is a good model for a way of creating economies to support people who need jobs. What might help society is if, instead of time wasting games, and meaningless security jobs we paid people to learn valuable skills through a gaming like system.
The TSA was created and Afghanistan was invaded because America felt like it needed a proportionate response to 9/11.
Locking cabin doors was sufficient to prevent it but didnt "feel" like nearly enough.
Afghanistan was invaded because the people in charge of it were tragically unwilling to turn over their unruly house guests and we were tragically unwilling to demand they do so in a contextually appropriate way. I think it is probably one of the biggest tragedies of foreign diplomacy in recent US history.
In hindsight the Taliban probably could have negotiated a "we'd love to get rid of the terrorists but we need your help" deal and then just let us pump them full of military aid on the condition that they add the groups we want to their list of persecuted people. It's not like we hated them out of principal. These were the same guys we armed to kick out the Russians. Taking a page straight out of the South America playbook would not have been that big a stretch.
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Agree with the first part of the comment, but at the end, when you say:
>> "what might help society is if [...] we paid people to learn valuable skills"
We actually have plenty of very qualified people, both with academic titles and without them, but many of them are still doing jobs that don't "make society better". The problem is that we used tech to cut the time and labor required to do most things, but we haven't freed that time for people, we only keep distributing the benefits of those "improvements" unevenly.
And the real problem is that even if you were to redistribute them evenly, when there's low pressure, abundance of resources and an environment that provides more than what you are consuming, any species will start having more offspring, until the pressure increases and you are in trouble again (kinda like a malthusian trap). We could only escape that limit if we were able to create unlimited space habitats or our population growth rates were slower than the time it took us to find and travel to new planets. Some might argue that the systems will self-regulate, but self-regulation only happens in high pressure states, and that means that a lot of people is suffering under them.
The fact is that we don't need much, and we already have it. The problem to solve is not to become better or faster or more efficient at producing and creating more. The problem to solve is to collectively find a compromise on how much we want to have and design mechanisms to keep us in that sustainable lane. Not sure that's possible, but it's the only approach to "help society" that I really believe in.
What were the vile statements?
Some random thoughts
- bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been automated. Jeff Bezos pays a Uber driver to turn a steering wheel until the robot can, and he pays a Amazon Project Manager to make graphs until the Perl Script can.
- such jobs don't exist because the "elite" are scared of proletariat, they exist because organisations are badly designed hurriedly put together and really hard to dismantle.
- it's usually simple to spot the people at work who are solid contributors and those who bullshit. But it's amazingly hard to demonstrate it sufficiently for firing people.
- But imposter syndrome means that if there is not a open transparent process to code the under performers, everyone becomes afraid, destroying the organisation anyway.
- it's hard to fire unproductive people, in short. In fact it's probably easier to build a new company and not hire them.
- this is usually done via Schumpeter- but if a company could be programmed, designed to have fewer people, it can be shutdown more easily and replaced?
Your assumptions about the term "bullshit jobs", as mentioned in the article, are completely wrong.
You should read about Graeber's work, it's interesting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I have read parts of his book all the way through ...
Let's look at two examples I remember - Dog walkers (washers?) and corporate lawyers.
As I understand it Bullshit jobs are those that exist to serve the elite who otherwise "should" do the work themselves (dog washers), or jobs that have no labour-force power and so cannot improve their lot through collective action (which can range from air traffic control to uber drivers and ... dog washers). Finally there is some kind of self-aware bullshit job that is the corporate lawyer.
There are two issues at play here - a moral judgement and a power judgement.
The moral judgement is aimed at dog walkers (or washers?). This is a job that "should" not exist - people should take care of their own pets. Well maybe. They also have a power issue - who has heard of a dog walker strike?
The dog walker fills a space in the ecosystem - mother nature has so many examples of non intuitive niches that we should not leap to claim this one is bad.
Corporate lawyer - this is more likely a bullshit job - it exists because humans created the law, so it exists as the very definition of government regulation and interference.
But most of the bullshit about it is not legal, but the tournament set up to go from newbie lawyer to partner which drives a lot of the soul destroying ness, simply to clear the field. And yes it is soul destroying to have to justify the unjustifiable- something i suspect corporate lawyers spend a lot of time doing.
But that is again a moral judgement- yes it is bad that corporations break the law and people in bullshit jobs have to help them get away with it. But that is a different failure of regulation.
I think his view is extremely negative - that these jobs were created / kept around to serve the implied result rather than an underlying failure. The airline baggage example is a good one. Getting millions of pieces of luggage to the right place at the right time is fundamentally hard - and claiming that the solution is to "fix it" then get rid of stewardesses of whatever is disingenuous.
It's not impossible to remove bullshit jobs - automation promises to remove many, which is I guess Graber point and mine. My view is that the jobs continue to exist not because the elites deem it nice to have flunkies (I mean they do but they employ those directly) it that fixing the ecosystem that supports these bullshit jobs takes a long time to fix. It is likely that smaller new companies will simply not hire to bullshit poisitions. But given that Amazon has now reached what 1M employees I suspect some bullshit has slipped in there.
Plus there seems to be a confluence in your comment between HFT and bullshit jobs. I am sure there are socially net negative or socially net neutral jobs (HFT is arguably positive but whatever), but that's different to bullshit jobs (as I understand it)
A job that is net negative has always been a problem - is the guy making Drones in a factory knowing they will be sold to evil regimes a net negative? It may be but I don't think that sits as a bullshit job.
So there is a difference between jobs that are "created" simply to give the middle class something to do (Graber view, not mine), jobs that exist because they have not been automated yet (my view, maybe Grabers) and jobs that are socially net negative (this depends on your politics as to what is net negative)
In short the psychological harm of bullshit jobs depends much more on the employees perception of its value than some objective measure. Especially as that objective measure is so hard to come by.
In short - net negative jobs are not bullshit because choosing the externality is hard / social decision (ie the boss of shell is unlikely to have a bullshit job, even if it is net negative)
And bullshit jobs are rarely created just to lord it over people - the truly elite just hire someone to loo after their dogs / horses. The sub-elite get it created as part of the market.
Edit: running out of time - this is an interesting area but I have reached th limit for a comment
Bullshit job from the OP is something more like high frequency trading or SEO.
There's not really a service that makes people happy, or a good being created.
It's just shuffling money around in a way that's net-negative for society.
> bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been automated
This is not what the term is intended to mean. "Uber Driver" (or taxi driver) is a job that performs a necessary function but one that may not necessarily need to be done by a human.
A bullshit job is one that does not really need to be done, one that provides no value to society at large and exists because of zero-sum games, ego, tradition, etc...
I don't agree with all the jobs Graeber described with this label, but it is a very useful concept.
By this definition being a soldier is a bullshit job, because the only reason it's needed is because other countries have soldiers as well (i.e. zero sum). But I don't think most people would agree that it can be done away with. Zero sum games are just an unavoidable part of life.
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> bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been automated
Bullshit jobs are jobs that do not produce value
Those are menial jobs, not bullshit jobs.
An uber driver is not a bullshit job as defined by Graeber (and most certainly NOT a term to define a job that has not yet been automated). It's a shit job, but not a bullshit job. Short of reading the book, this is a good primer: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
I did not read the book, but my understanding of "bullshit job" is a job that is useless to the entity paying for it: you could remove that person completely, and everything would continue to work. This seems very different from what is at play here: the game studio very carefully designed the game to attract those grinders, and this is how the studio makes money. The article clearly sees this as well, by labeling the game as a ponzi scheme.
The point is that bullshit jobs don't contribute anything to society (at least my take after reading the book).
If the game studio never existed not much in society would change, let's go even further and say all game developers never existed. Society wouldn't change. Now lets get rid of all the elementary school teachers. Would society drastically changed?
One of the core points in the book is that the "more prestigious" and "higher pay" a job is, the likelihood of it being bullshit is high. While important jobs like janitor, barber, or a retail worker are very important and pay terribly.
I'm a programmer that develops CRM software. If my company cease to existed the world wouldn't even shrug.
The next wave of exploitation in this web3 space will involve lending practices. Kids will pledge their digital assets as collateral to buy other goods on margin. Their assets will lose value in the market and the kids will receive margin calls to restore balances or forfeit everything in the game, including reputation.
I just looked up a youtube video about Axie and it seems this is already happening lol
https://youtu.be/xKgV4V0aq7M?t=328
> In a crypto economy crowded with vapourware and alpha-stage software, Axie Infinity stands out. Not only has it amassed a large base of users, the in-game economy has actually provided a real-world income stream to working-class Filipinos impacted by the pandemic. Some spend hours each day playing the game, and then sell the in-game currency they earn to pay their real-world bills. That’s obviously a good thing for them, but it also appears to be a near-Platonic example of Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job.
That part about the pandemic might be the most important thing in the article. Would something like this have taken off had pandemic restrictions not wrecked the Philippine economy?
A glance at the exchange rate for the Smooth Love Potion token shows a vertical surge right as lockdowns started to be imposed, followed by a 90% crash that started in around July of this year:
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
The start of the crash coincides with the start of noticeably higher CPI in the US and well-known product demand shock. That shock must have put higher upward pressure on demand for labor in the developing world, making Axie less appealing.
I can't help but think of this as a preview into a future world in which automation and economic stagnation renders ever larger parts of the real economy ineffective at supporting a living wage.
This kind of bullshit job offers a wealth transfer mechanism from those who have it to those who don't, with financial speculation being the conduit. Universal Basic Income is another path. Revolution is a third option.
> People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.
So I basically grew up on Second Life, back when "the Metaverse" was just a geek thing no one cared about. The comparison doesn't really work here, because the virtual items people sold on SL were (generally) their original creations: 3D modeled, animated, programmed, etc. Not simply doled out by pre-programmed in-game systems.
Axie Infinity's economy is more like "real-world trading" on MMOs, but officially endorsed by the developers instead of being considered a game-breaking, bannable offense. In fact, the mention of Axie Infinity providing an income stream to people in developing countries who spend their time grinding also parallels the MMO space: you can find plenty of stories about illicit "gold farming" economies surrounding the major online games, going back decades.
> Axie Infinity is novel in two ways, which are worth exploring separately.
> - It elevated the ability to earn an income stream through the game to a core feature, coining play-to-earn as a new game genre.
> - It uses NFTs to represent in-game items, so the economy is (ostensibly) decentralized.
Going back to SL, the virtual economy was always a "core feature". We had a whole digital currency and ecosystem of first- and third-party exchanges and money markets where you could buy and sell Linden dollars for real money, with moving exchange rates and everything. People very much made serious income off of in-world business. The true novelty here is that Axie & friends are built on decentralized technologies, instead of having a company like Linden Lab managing everyone's account balances and virtual item ownership rights.
come to think of it, i wonder why SL has not converted SLL to a cryptocurrency
I have gone down the play-to-earn rabbit hole in an unexpected way.
In 2017 I started learning about Ethereum. Once I understood it as a virtual machine, the idea hit me that one could build a game. About that time, CryptoKitties hit and became an example of what could be built. Shortly late, a tutorial called CryptoZombies helped teach "a way" to build crypto collectable style games on distributed virtual machines like Ethereum.
Like many people, I went through the tutorial and I started working on my own game. A big difference between myself and many others is that many others only slightly deviated from the CryptoKitties formula. The inspiration for my game, Orbiter 8, came from an old BBS game, so I deviated a lot.
I worked on Orbiter 8 for a couple of years and released two demos before I bothered with ERC20/ERC721 interfaces. The game concept has an in-game currency and ownable assets so I created interfaces making those things tradable outside of the game. This was sort of a no-brainer. By using ERC721, I can use open markets like OpenSea to trade my game assets as NFTs. By using ERC20 I can put the in-game currency on SushiSwap and let the public trade the currency as they wish.
I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value higher than the cost of creation. But for all intents and purposes, the emerging model is a pretty decent Play2Earn model.
Most games are about progression. You typically "grind" in any game to acquire better items and stats. The only step to make any of these games P2E is to allow those things to be traded on open markets. So if you build a game natively on one of these networks, P2E is an extremely natural emergence.
P2E F2P and P2W are more loose buckets than categories with hard and fast distinctions.
I don't think that P2E is inherently bad. Indeed, the history of RMT in games that try to prohibit it (WoW, Eve, etc) shows that P2E is a mechanic that is hard to avoid in certain types of grindy mmo games.
What makes Axies a pyramid scheme is not the incorporation of P2E mechanics directly into the game, but that the game requires players to "buy-in" to the economy to start playing and tries to incentivize that initial purchase by promising later earning capacity.
> I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value higher than the cost of creation.
Other than speculators hoping to flip them to someone else, what would give them that value?
Like most crypto games, the value would inherently have to come from new players putting more money into the system to cash out old players. It works as long as hype exists and the users curve continues upward, but it crashes immediately as that stops and everyone wants to extract whatever value they can.
Paying to skip the grind in a game is a pretty common thing. As a commenter in another thread mentioned, this has been happening since Diablo II at least. If a game has content that is gated by tens or hundreds of hours of grinding some people will happily pay to experience that content immediately. Historically this has been viewed as dubious behavior - especially in MMOs - but it's becoming more normal.
EVE Online, for a time, had a monthly subscription. It also had an in-game item called "PLEX" which could be purchased using real money and then used as a substitute for the monthly subscription. Because it was an in-game item PLEX could be bought and sold on the in-game marketplace. I happily bought a few PLEX with real money and sold them in-game so that I could purchase the ships I wanted without having to spend hours "earning" in-game money. On the other hand, I knew people who had set up efficient in-game money-making schemes that let them avoid paying anything to play - each month they'd just exchange some small fraction of their enormous in-game wealth for a PLEX token purchased by a person like me. It was an interesting system, I don't know what their monetization looks like now.
Point being, I think there can be a value to these things outside of speculation. That said, I have a fairly dim view of most of the crypto-enabled games that I've come across. From the start, the developers have always seemed more interested in enriching themselves at the cost of their players than they have in making enjoyable games.
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> Web Two was don’t be evil. Web Three is can’t be evil. You bake it into the code that you can’t be evil.
Yikes. That's a philosophy that really misses the nature of evil. In fact, I think we're doing ourselves up for colossal failure if we assume we can create an unexploitable algorithm that we then cannot modify that can be crafted to be evil-proof.
Sounds reminiscent of when ML scientists were surprised that they built racist systems, assuming that their race-free math meant that the resulting system would also be race-free
According to Graeber, a job is bullshit when the one who does it thinks that the job is bullshit. By this definition, chores, menial tasks don’t count as bullshit. I don’t see any quote from players who call what they are doing bullshit.
I can’t remember exactly but this seems like a mischaracterisation.
I think it was termed more like “it is a bullshit job if the world would run just as well (or even better) if the job didn’t exist”.
Still relies on self-assessment but isn’t quite what you said. More based on some idea of “usefulness”. Play to earn doesn’t seem very useful.
It has been a few years since I read the book. But I recall very clearly that he states that the definition is very narrow and strict in order not to get into subjective arguments on whether a job is necessary or shouldn't exist. For instance, one could argue that the world would be better off without telemarketing, yet the argument doesn't make telemarketing a bullshit job. IIRC, military was another example from the book of such a case.
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You're right mainly. Self-assessment was a filter he used, it wasn't the definition in itself.
Yeah this is a pyramid scheme, not a bullshit job
It's as legit as someone who participates in an mlm . Its not bullshit
Who else immediately ordered the book on Amazon? Lol
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory https://www.amazon.com/dp/0141983477
The first review is lit. Quoting:
""" Manifesto for the Professional Class Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2018 This review was written at the desk of a salaried office job, where I am paid $65,000/yr to do virtually nothing important, so I mostly sit in my chair and listen to podcasts and audiobooks all day. I do this until enough executives and managers above me are gone that I can feel comfortable sneaking out. With my income from this sit, I then outsource all my chores to a slew of below living wage 21st Century gig economy employees--Uber drivers, food delivery, meal kits, laundry.
Having been one of these low paid wage laborers several years ago, it seems like a cruel joke. The higher paying job I find, the less I actually have to work. The higher ranking the position, the less the job is about doing things and contributing to society.
Is this a blessing or immoral sin? Yes. But it turns out, I'm not alone.
This is an entertaining book of anecdotes and statistics on what turns out to be a common phenomena. It is one of the most refreshing reads that a college-educated conscious working professional can have in their library. Put down every other garbage business book that supposedly empowers you. You don't need to practice mindfulness, or rules for life, or launch a lean startup. Breathe in and breathe out, your job is unnecessary and so are most of the other jobs!
Admitting this is the first step of us all solving the collective problem. """
How is this not a Ponzi scheme?
It probably is, but it's a Ponzi scheme with a potentially addictive lower layer in the form of a game, which is going to make previous ponzi scheme architects jealous.
Me giving money to Bernie Madoff via wire transfer hoping for gains isn't really addictive. The graphics and gameplay of a game might be. If you happen to build a ponzi scheme into that game, you benefit from its addictive qualities.
Keeping a healthy population of the lower levels of a ponzi scheme is key to keeping it going.
The claim seems to be that the game will attract people who don't view the game as an income stream, but rather just as a game. They pay the entry fee, and then may also buy assets from other players, thus funding the play-to-earners.
I think there's a slim chance this could be a viable business plan, but probably not in any socially-good way. The mobile games industry reaps a good chunk of its profits from "whales", customers who spend crazy-seeming amounts of money on games. Blockchain-based games may also be especially dangerous to young gamers who get access to a parent's credit card and rack up huge charges. This already happens in games like Fortnite, but whereas Epic Games can be pressured into giving refunds to parents when this happens, a blockchain offers no protection if the rules of the game don't allow for it.
We're probably better off if it _is_ a Ponzi scheme.
I love it.
No one plays the game because it's fun now. But in the future, the game will be fun, and people will pay to play it.
Right now, it's just crypto where you can spend your time AND money to get a return instead of just your money.
Got it.
I agree. To me its a Ponzi scheme in a gold farming disguise. Gold farming only works when the game is fun enough that people will buy gold to play with in it. In this game, everyone playing it is buying in for hundreds of dollars and most likely that is the only source of the payments that are going out.
So a Ponzi scheme works like this:
* You take money from investors
* You then claim that you are making money from some legitimate business
* You return money to earlier investors by just feeding them the money later investors put in
So who are the early investors here, what's the legitimate business, and how are we taking money from later investors to give to early investors?
EDIT: Guys, it's not a zero-sum game. You can breed new axies, etc. By the logic espoused by everyone in the responses, the stock market is a ponzi scheme because later participants buy stock from earlier participants. This may be my fault with the defn lacking some things, but clearly the stock market isn't a ponzi scheme, so something is wrong.
> So who are the early investors here
"Gameplay requires the purchase of three Axies, which currently cost in the hundreds of US dollars each."
> what's the legitimate business
"By blurring the line between “player” and “worker”, the game has effectively built a Ponzi scheme with built-in deniability. Sure, some users will be net gainers and other users will be net losers, but who am I to say the net losers aren’t in it for the joy of the game?"
So I guess the "legitimate business" is making the game interesting for people who.. enjoy it?
> and how are we taking money from later investors to give to early investors
I don't know how the in-game mechanics work but later investors also purchase Axies and somehow that money ends up in the hands of the former investors. Maybe not automatically, I guess it depends on what in-game actions you take, but given that you first have to invest before you can play...
The investors are the players hoping to make money from the game. The players have to buy Axies to play the game.
The "legitimate business" is playing the game to get more Axies that you can then sell.
The later investors then buy Axies that the early investors earned by playing the game.
As soon as exponential growth stops the system collapses.
Early investors: people who “invested” hundreds of dollars to play. Legitimate business: “we’re a game studio.” Later investors: newer players who see the earlier ones making money.
The economy is zero sum. The early investors are the people that bought in early and they cash out by selling to the later investors. The “legitimate business” claim is Axie itself and the claim that it can both reward investors who hold and rent Axies as well as pay people to play the game. An idea that only works if more people keep putting money in. To further this claim Axies developers make an awful lot of noise about how they are going to introduce new mechanics which will supposedly fix this.
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Read TFA. Your questions are all answered in it.
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 overcome that non-technical people gloss over or flat out don't understand. Even if you store all the data in a distributed database, store all static files in distributed file systems, a single user would still need a single point of entry to access this network. It seems like a centralized DNS like system would still be needed.
Even if there were multiple providers of this DNS like service, it would put the onus on the user to figure it out. This has never historically worked well for the average user. Also, internet access itself is still typically controlled by a few providers given a users area.
The reality is web3 and crypto is putting too much responsibility on the user. Everyone uses gmail and google because its easy and effective and no one cares its centralized. iPhones are popular because they are easy and the average user doesn't care that Apple controls the ecosystem.
Thank you.
Generally refers to decentralized technologies that somehow benefit from blockchain-like data structures. For example, you can compost these three technologies to build a decentralized webserver.
- Filecoin & AR Weave: decentralized file storage. Spend tokens to store files, earn tokens by storing others' files.
- ENS (Ethereum Name Service): DNS-like system for addresses.
- Smart Contracts of various sorts (e.g. Ethereum): Similar to perpetual AWS lambda functions. Spend tokens to publish & call functions; earn tokens by executing functions.
The blockchain aspect is merely a way to have verifiable incentives without explicit trust between actors.
> you can compost these three technologies to build a decentralized webserver
I don’t know if you meant “compose” or “compost”, but it works both ways.
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I feel like maybe people watched a little too much Silicon Valley and similar shows and some wires got crossed to make people think this is actually a workable mass market idea. IMHO.
web3 is whatever the newest startup is doing.
But yes, blockchain.
> Gamers have a word, grinding, to describe repetitive tasks undertaken to gain some desired in-game goal, but are not fun in themselves.
Before gamers used “grinding” it was in normal use for hard work. More commonly used as “on the grind.” Looking up the origin it’s “back to the grind” referring to returning to work from break, but also specific to the ancient job of a grinding grain at a mill.
All things being equal, the thing about “crypto,” as the article labels it, is that playing games or being a early adopter of technology was not historically a paid or rewarded activity.
Maybe web3 is exploiting attention spans the same way as web2, but no matter how web2 spins it, token airdrops to web3 users are often 10’s of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands, and even millions in some instances.
Where business has historically been about maximizing shareholder value by exploiting labor, web3 is proving to maximize user value by directly rewarding users. In many cases it is life changing money for young, regular folks who would never have had a shot at that type of financial freedom, in fact likely would have gone in to debt trying to pursue their education for a better financial future.
I think so much of life is already gaming: sports, bowling, football, watching sports on TV/YouTube/cable. Many of these so called time wasters existed outside of the digital world and people have already consumed a lot of time and attention for hundreds of years. In fact empire building and war are probably two of the oldest sports known to humankind
If they can ban players fir cheating how is the game decentralized?
For context, Graeber talking about Bullshit Jobs on BookTV:
https://youtu.be/6eyaDHj5I5g
Play-to-Earn with real world earnings will never be sustainable given the state of the art in reinforcement learning.
The RL game playing agent essentially becomes a form of NFT mining that no human could ever complete against.
> Since Filipinos are the largest growth market for Axie Infinity, they must also be a major source of money flowing into the system. Instead of being a net provider of jobs and capital, it appears to just be redistributing the same wealth between Filipinos, and collecting a 4.25% cut for the service.
It seems that the source of money flowing into the system are individuals with capital to buy the incoming producing PPE-type assets (i.e., Axies).
Guilds pool capital to buy P2E assets and rent it out to scholars for a % of all income earned by the player (known as scholars in the current P2E nomenclature).
I think there are currently two acceptable ways to earn income in our society: 1. Take relatively less risk, get paid a wage. Owner of incoming producing assets bear the risk of deploying capital in such a manner. 2. Take high risk. Deploy capital to acquire assets and pay wages to others who utilize those assets to produce (unguaranteed) income for you.
P2E introduces a third: deploy capital to acquire assets, loan the assets out, and take a cut of income generated.
P2E in its current form has similarities to serfdom. The owners of Axies (and the AXS tokens) are the lords.
Certain jobs sufficiently far from the obvious value creation have a tendency to look useless.
In many cases they are useless and could be bundled into other jobs, but when a job is over loaded there is efficiency to unbundling them. Factor in the communications synchronization overhead and it's no wonder that small organizations can perform incredible work. Large organizations have scale though.
I think there’s something to this comment and the one from zzbzq about Graeber’s “canonical bullshit job.” I’m also drawing some threads from Goedel Escher Bach.
Perhaps the growth in the administrative sector is a new class of job, that results from scale, coordination costs, Metcalfe’s law, and Goodhart’s law.
The job is to combat the diminishing returns on communication decay due to scale by measuring the system as a whole or in part and attempting to optimize that part.
There is no “product” other than the change in metric selected. There is no external or intrinsic value other than whatever 2nd, 3rd, nth order effects the measurement focus has on actual observable inputs and outputs of the system.
The job, in a GEB sense, is just a theorem that references some or all of the system itself, and which may not mean anything whatsoever outside the context of the system.
Scale increasingly becomes constrained by organizational interfaces. At a certain point, trying to add people to an organization actually makes it less productive unless their contributions can be abstracted globally.
At a certain extent, the system must become inhuman: metrics and interface contracts are needed to prevent overhead growth.
One of the interesting things about Graeber's typology is that it includes things that you wouldn't consider to be bullshit jobs. There's an entire category of his typology dedicated to jobs that destroy productive output; like if a business were to hire lawyers to sue the pants off of competing businesses. They get a competitive advantage by increasing everyone else's compliance and legal costs.
I believe this particular categorization could apply to game development in the context of NFT or microtransaction driven gameplay. The economies that these games provide are specifically engineered to increase user spend by targeting "whales". Someone being paid to play a game for someone else is providing a valuable service; but the game doesn't just exist naturally. It's designed. Building a game so that you need to pay to skip the grind is a bullshit job. And if that's a bullshit job, then the people selling their Axies and other game resources have transitively bullshit jobs, even if their own job is not inherently bullshit.
Such games are online games where other players are part of the game challenge. Some players want to play those game so much that they are willing to spend insane amounts of money on this game. But if the only users of the game were those players the game wouldn't be as fun for them. So the game needs to incentivise players that that don't want to play it that much or at all.
Most of the games manage this by offering free version of the game to anyone willing to play. It's not as good as the version paid consumers get but it's something.
The game mentioned in the article went the step further, not only does it offer some entertainment for people for free, but pays them out of profits gained from the paying players.
So basically gamers that earn money in that game provide meaningful service for paying players by working as opponents for them that enhace their entertainment. It's less bulshity job than many real ones.
So many of these conversations can be broken down to the things you find valuable might not be the thing others find valuable and there is no right or wrong. You either get it or you don't. I have zero desire to collect model trains, but I understand some people do and there is probably value there in that community.
Tibia was very popular in my country, I know people that are still playing it, but back when I was younger, like 10 years ago I knew a few guys that were making regular income out of it by selling gold coins and items. Good times, games like Tibia taught me something about the market and demand/supply distribution.
My problem with these Play2Earn games is that it provides a dark motivation for kids to play them.
Previously, you'd play something like Doom or Quake because you enjoyed it and you'd quit after an hour or two because it would rapidly become repetitive and boring. You knew deep down that you were wasting time on recreation and that you should probably do the things you should be doing (e.g. the dishes, reading a book, etc).
Now, there's a small voice for players of these telling them that this time is productive. They're earning money and that's a noble goal to ourselves. Even worse are the games like League of Legends and WoW where there are professional scenes. It's very easy to deceive yourself into thinking you're just practicing those games in order to one day go pro.
I'd be careful telling people what they "should" and "shouldn't" be doing with their time based on your contrived opinions.
Telling other people what they should and shouldn't do is the basis of society
I’m fine with telling them that they shouldn’t.
We already went through all this with bs degrees that leave people in massive debt and without sufficient income to pay it back.
The point that the other person was making, is that if you are arguing that these "games" are actually a good/effective way of making money for kids, you are lying.
That's the problem. The issue is they there could be people who are tricked into believing that this is an effective way of making money, when it is clearly not for most people.
Reading books and maintaining personal cleanliness are controversial activities now? In what clown world should anyone ever be advised to play video games instead of doing those things?
Meanwhile there are legit decentralized, fun, self hosted games whose hosts barely make any money to sustain their servers. But because they are truly decentralized, VCs won't touch them because they can't control them. I swear this web3 thing will die from lack of market fit
Though provoking article. The main problem that play-to-earn games have is that they need to rely on external cash-inflows to reward the players. This makes them very close to Ponzi schemes or Casino's. If the moral product is to earn a livable wage in Web3, that is not the way.
This play to earn title is a particularly annoying dig at the recently blown up phrase where users can play to earn Blockchain tokens in nft based games which has actually enabled young men in the Philippines to quit their jobs as taxi drivers and involved them in an ecosystem which otherwise has exacerbated inequalities and trampled on the rights of humans in their country as historically corrupt government has minimsed the earning potential of the working class not and left the upper class eternally skeptical of their own government.
To make a dig like this and then not even acknowledge it in the content is exactly what I would expect from a white American who has no concept of how certain trends impact anyone other than themselves.
The article's point was to say that these grind games are not actually adding economic value, because it required existing wealth to come into the system to pay out the grind (and the company sucks out some transaction fees).
The game itself may possibly be fun for those that pay (instead of grind), but that's hard to judge.
There is something really wrong about doing something that you know is complete garbage and yields no benefit to anyone else in terms of productivity. But after one level of indirection we see all sorts of tasks around us that people do and also benefit no one, for example when someone destroys a pallet of watermelons or fills up a swimming pool with orbeez that end up in garbage hours later. The person who cultivated the watermelons or the worker that toiled in the orbeez factory to make them saw the fruit of their labor yield no benefit to anyone else in terms on productivity. This type of task happens far too often.
Only difference is, there is no masquerade in the NFT app a16z funded.
It's saddening that folks say Axie is a play-to-earn pioneer. This genre existed for ages and is called gambling. Poker being a prime example of a truly successful game combining luck, fun, and skill. The best part -- no NFTs required.
A dutch economist once estimated that about 50% of a modern economy is bullshit, basically just keeping each other busy.
It's made possible because of the naive belief that markets create supply out of demand, and that this mechanism is ruthlessly efficient.
Right now, somebody is "inventing" potato chips flavor #16,333,132. Nobody asked for it, but a whole bunch of people are involved in its creation. Next, the product is pushed, and if not totally disgusting, you might try it. If the push is large and prolonged, you may even make it a regular buy. Even more so when you see lots of other people eating it.
Did this product meet your demand? No. Do you believe its a good use of labor to make this product? No. Your "demand" was fabricated out of aggressively pushing supply.
Are the top 10 songs in the charts the songs most in demand, the market efficiently selecting the best songs, taking into account all recent music produced? No. The songs are pushed. Supply decides, not demand.
Right now, thousands of engineers are working on the next iOS version, adding hundreds of new features. You'll probably use 2 of them. You'll get all 500 features anyway, regardless of demand, as you will definitely buy the next iPhone.
That's the 50% I'm referring to: artificially created demand that really is just marketing and manipulation.
Another way in which markets aren't efficient is a lack of competition. After all, it's every market player's goal to basically exit the arena, not needing to fight for their continued existence. Several sectors have big industry players that effectively have no competition. The same can be true for businesses where locality is a unique benefit. And it applies to local and federal governments, whom have no competition at all. And there's patents, cartels and other ways to escape market forces.
These non-competitors sustain armies of workers with bullshit jobs.
Ultimately, our economic system doesn't care. When you have a paid job, nobody asks questions about whether it has meaning. Your government will like you and so will your family. Bullshit or not. We have build a system that celebrates meaningless consumption and meaningless work.
Do the players who earn money from the game somehow make the game more entertaining for other players?
I had a friend who was a tennis teacher. He didn't really teach so much as play with other less skillful players and get paid for doing that. That's kind of a similar situation right?
The answer depends on whether the players who get paid are rewarded for a service, something that other players perceive as having value to them. Or is it just a way by the game providers to lure people in to the game?
> Games that maximize property rights (as Axie Infinity wisely hasn’t) are bound to be overrun with cheaters and bots, which in turn will just bring down the value of in-game assets anyway.
This may happen temporarily, but a sufficiently well tested and bullet proof enough game should able to combat that.
This is the same argument people made before BTC: it's just a matter of time before any decentralized currency would get hacked therefore we cannot have a decentralized currency.
Games that aren't fun are work. Axie, from all accounts, looks like work.
On the flipside, there are tons of regulated games that are both fun and allow users to flex their niche knowledge, like FanDuel (sports), BigBrain (trivia), and so on.
Just because Axie is a poorly designed game doesn't necessarily invalidated the larger point that jobs and income are changing, and gamification of skills is an interesting trend that is likely here to stay.
You mean like the people paid to wait in line for other people at US gov hearings?
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18223836/p...
Sounds awfully similar to "completing tasks contrived by a game designer"
Paying for someone to stand in line for you isn't a bullshit job tho - it's generating value because the person paying is obviously otherwise occupied with a better use of their time, and thus can afford to pay someone else to stay in the queue.
Fuck! I didn't know about play-to-earn.
At this point, I'm starting to think our species had a good run, but it's time to replace it with a more evolved one. And just like dinosaurs were wiped by a global catastrofe and left room for mamels, it's time for homo sapiens to leave room for a new species.
The silver lining? We don't really need to do anything, just watch for our self-made catastrophie to unfold.
Popcorn anyone?
Jobs which don' create positive value to the world are not bullshit. Our western economy is mostly based on the meaningless consumption of stupid things. These products have to be marketed and pushed into clients by manufactered believe that they need to buy it. Other part of this are the zero-sum games. Trick people into buying it by introducting artifcial scarcity.
I think we all agree that Axie is not a fun game. There are other games with millions of users that are actually fun and play to earn.
>Games that maximize property rights (as Axie Infinity wisely hasn’t) >are bound to be overrun with cheaters and bots, which in turn will >just bring down the value of in-game assets anyway.
Bitcoin comes to mind as a good example. A the beginning there were geeks mining it on their gaming machines and buying expensive video cards to both play games and mine.
Many historical "bullshit jobs" are basically "reward to the metropole from colonial extraction" (how many of Graeber's "bullshit jobs" exist in colonized vs colonizing nations, hm?)
But for this newest iteration of cryptocurrency bullshit, I'm gonna go with "crisis of capital accumulation".
'Play To Earn' is obviously in a different category of identifiable BS jobs.
If Rich Worlders want to pay Poor Worlders to rank up ahead of time on a game for them, that's weird, but so be it.
'BS Jobs' I think is more a problem with the vast landscape of effete and ineffective White Collar workers.
> Gamers have a word, grinding, to describe repetitive tasks undertaken to gain some desired in-game goal, but are not fun in themselves.
Is this actually true? The linked article doesn't say anything about it being fun or not. I love grinding and think it's fun in itself.
I agree. It's not a gamer word either. Derived from "the daily grind", it's just about lucrative but repetitive tasks. Sometimes they are fun but I also agree the connotation is that it is most likely boring unless specified otherwise.
Most of my gamer friends don't like grinding and usually stay away from "grindy" games.
Just because most people don't like it doesn't make it intrinsically unfun. If the above definition holds true no-one would like it except masochists. Anyway, as a counter-point RuneScape has a great grind with a huge player base and I know a lot of people who love grinding.
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A bit like social media points, right?
Followers, likes, karma, all aren't directly worth anything. But it takes work to get them.
I know a bunch of prominent internet people who don't make much money with this status, because it's not easy to monetize it without compromise yourself.
Charlie Booker had a similar take back in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjGh_lE6EGY
> David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status quo.
Isn't it unavoidable in a world with food surplus and automation?
Our fiat based economy is play to earn with the government that backs your favorite currency as overseer that can “ban” or penalize you. You’re required to participate to gain access to exchangeable currency. And the platform you’re using (your government and their economy) takes a cut in the form of taxes - and inflation when they’re printing money.
You get to choose to team with others in companies or other organizations, or go it alone which is much tougher.
Like Axie, if you choose to work for someone you’re using their subplatform, like Axie is a subplatform within crypto. And the organization you’re part of has rules and quite a lot of power over your future as long as you’re participating.
In a real world org you can choose to exit and liquidate any equity that you’re allowed to turn into cash. Same with Axie assets that you sell in exchange for something else - maybe a cryptocurrency.
As with Axie, there are many bullshit jobs in the real world that exist for silly reasons and can easily be automated away.
I think these bullshit jobs are bugs in real world economies and virtual economies. Sometimes they’re intentional bugs that benefit the owners or controllers of a platform or economy.
I’d caution one about conflating these anomalies with NFTs or crypto as a whole. Blockchain primitives have the potential to free the proletariat from exploitation by large corporate platforms. Creatives, for example, can own and profit from their art for centuries without an intermediary like Spotify, record companies, film studios or publishers keeping the lions share of the return. It has the potential to disintermediate banks, which is a huge deal, which you’ll know if you’ve ever worked for an investment bank or even walked through any major financial district.
Bullshit jobs abound. But these primitives Axie is playing with are not the cause. They have the potential to free us all.
So instead of banning gold farming in their game, they just made it a feature and collect a %?
The point seems to be that the game is nothing but gold farming, and the only money going into the system comes from prospective gold farmers paying a participation fee.
There is such an enormous amount of slack in the system. 2% of the workforce is involved in agriculture, and it used to be 90%. What did the other 88% do with all that free time?
A lot of the Web3 and game economy is just people massively overpaying for entertainment.
It seems that after a few years of relative calm in the crypto scene (bitcoin just used to transact, mine or invest) the easier it got to roll-your-own-crypto the more magical ways we are finding uses for it. I had no idea this existed before.
The next step would be for the company to automate those jobs by replacing the workers with npc characters who can grind for you.
That would make the game "pay to win," which is presumably easier to implement if you do it that way to begin with.
The author makes the point that bullshit jobs shouldn't exist in capitalist systems, since they are inherently Darwinian.
There is a misconception that "Darwinian" is the same as "efficient."
Darwinian simply means "what can be sustained will be sustained until they can't be sustained anymore."
Which is exactly why layoffs happen in economic downturns -- those bullshit jobs just can't be sustained anymore.
I’m getting tired of this Ponzi scheme stuff. Can we have some kind of protests to insist the Fed raise rates and put an end to this? I’m not a big activist by nature, but that’s something I could get behind.
I’m sure there’s something valuable to be done with NFTs, but why is it that it seems that everyone involved in it is only focusing on meaningless applications like pepe frogs and boring games?
>People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.
Excuse me, I sold my Shortsword of the Ykesha for real life money in 1999 on EverQuest via eBay.
A reminder that the Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis at one point in his pre parliamentary career did extensive work on the economics of MMOs for valve, eve online.
Everything old is new again. You could go back and look over the game design discourse about pay-to-win games and microtransactions and see the same discussions about how these systems would influence players and designers. You could go back and look at the discussions around Facebook social games back when they were a big thing. And all of those arguments still hold up today.
Play-to-earn games are the same system, just with a bit of a pyramid scheme glued on top so that players will think they're part of the grift.
What players of these play-to-earn games are hoping is that the grind in the game is so heckin awful and unpleasant that other players will pay someone else in order to skip that. But I don't think I'm unique in saying that I personally like my games to be fun, and I think that maybe something is going wrong with a game design process when a game is so much of a chore that people are paying to skip the game. Imagine making a movie where people didn't give you money to see it, but to stop seeing it :). That's the play-to-earn model, making something so artificially unpleasant and badly designed that players believe there's value in making the game shorter and will literally hire someone else to play it for them.
And this is not a new thing, you can go back to the grinding process in Runescape, to Cow Clickers on Facebook, it's the same grift over and over just in different decorative hats and with different little sparkly jpegs. It's always the same proposition: do something that's been made artificially boring and hopefully you or someone else will think there's value in paying someone real money to skip it.
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Which I guess live your truth if that's what you want out of games, but I personally like games that make me excited to play them or at least give me some kind of meaningful emotion, where I play them because I like feeling that emotion and because the gameplay is fun.
Incredibly, it turns out there are designers who are somehow through some strange magic able to design games that are so fun that they don't even need to bribe players into playing them. Their games are so fun that people actually (get this) pay the designers money to be able to play them more, not less. It's the complete inverse of the play-to-earn model where actually all of the players in the game enjoy what they're doing, and the game isn't just a platform for the company or for a subset of players to make a job out of extracting profit from another part of the playerbase's boredom, because in these games nobody in the playerbase is bored.
If you've never tried one of these games in the "fun" genre before, you've got to check them out, they're really something else.
There is a good way of grinding, but I think it should really be called practice.
At the end, your in game character is just as good as it was at the start, but you're better at using it
Not sure this is the right place for the question but does anyone have a theory as to when the time has come to short it?
Other than a general meltdown in cryptocurrencies, I mean.
>but when I read the book a few years back, I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism.
Well, here's the problem: Darwinian doesn't mean evolution towards something specific (i.e. more efficiency).
In fact, regression (in certain skills, etc.) is just as likely (like cockroaches, not humans, being the fittest in a certain environment).
So, Darwinian, broadly and metaphorically speaking (like the author) just means more fitness for survival.
And this is totally compatible with BS jobs, when it comes to the survival of the overal system.
One specific attribute of capitalism today is also that it's always somebody else's money, what with public companies, and golden parachutes, and bailouts, and such - and the rise of pharaonic middle management.
Axie is built on Ethereum, meaning in-game assets (NFTs) are technically transferrable off-platform.
Vitalik (creator of Ethereum) attributed one of his reasons for creating Ethereum to Blizzard taking away one of his in-game items in World of Warcraft in 2010:
"I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit."
Axie has banned the assets of players who have violated the TOS, so apparently they aren't decentralized enough to prevent Vitalik's origin story from reoccurring. Or is your point that those assets could be used in another game? Why would anybody do that?
Axie may not be the end all be all, just a start towards a new future of digital ownership.
No gameplay balancing by design sounds terrible. Release one bad overpowered item or spell and the game is forever ruined.
Valid criticism.
Pretty sure Axie has its own blockchain
Incorrect
> I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism
But if we take Darwinian evolution as our analogy, there are plenty of strategies that essentially piggy back on other organisms. Cuckoo birds, intestinal worms, a whole coterie of sexual behaviors.
It's also the everyday experience of just about everyone that they perceive certain others to not be contributing anything at all. The surprise is that some people are willing to admit they are one of those people as well. It's not hard to think of how this would work, either. Convince someone to hire you, and then don't contribute, while taking a salary. If it's hard or expensive to detect the non-contributor, there will be NCs in the organization.
Capitalism has very little in common with Darwinism because of the nature of the rules involved. Darwinism has a lot of physical rules which you can't circumvent. Capitalism deals far more in social or soft rules which can be circumvented and give you an advantage if you aren't caught. And if you are caught, the punishment might only be a percentage of the total profits.
I'm not going to stay alive because the universe forgot to enforce the dying part of me being mauled by a bear.
I hate when people refer to our regime of interest-rate intervention as capitalism. The primary feature of capitalism is price discovery, which we have intentionally given up.
EDIT: If there are any economists out there who can point me in the direction of a primary source that elucidates the relationship between price discovery and interest rates in a way that will help me understand contemporary monetary policy as something other than political expediency, I would greatly appreciate it.
The defining feature of capitalism is the private ownership of capital. You can have whatever pricing mechanisms you like as long as the profits go to the owner
> coterie of sexual behaviors
Are you saying we can witness that in people too?
Hmm I think I meant menagerie. But yes, evolution and especially sexual selection creates a lot of interesting behaviors, and some of them a purely win-lose, and yes in people as well. There's a reason cheating on your partner is a trope of soap operas.
NFT Pokémon actually sounds like a cool use of blockchain. However the game seems to focus more on the get rich aspect than the actual gameplay.
I don't get how this is a bullshit job.
Gamer #1 likes to play the game. There are some parts he likes more than others.
Gamer #2 comes along and says, OK I will do the parts you don't like, and I'll sell my output to you for $XXX.
Gamer #1 agrees, the transaction takes place, it is entirely voluntary, and both participants find the outcome to be valuable for them.
How is this bullshit?
This is pretty much the reason we have money.
What sounds like bullshit to me is there is some... quasi-socialist I guess? value framework being imposed by some would-be intellectual who's totally uninvolved in the transaction, but thinks he knows better than the ones who are. Fuck that guy, he has no skin in the game.
I'm not familiar with the game in the article, but I think the author is referring to the inclusion of in-game tasks that have no benefit or reason to exist other than to create an artificial "requirement" for work of some sort.
Honestly though, who cares? Even if it's a "bullshit job", you can perform it from the relative comfort of your home, mostly on your own schedule; so it's better than most BS jobs in the real world. In my opinion, the more opportunities afforded to people to earn money, the better.
I do not know which definition is used here. But I would call this bullshit, because this is artificial scarcity which is controlled by grindy, non-constructive and typically non-fun work. The makers of the game could just sell the NFT directly instead of requiring other people to waste their time.
I don’t mean to be too meta but this site looks amazing on my phone; I’ve not seen a website that is so clean and clear before.
I highly recommend people read David Graeber's latest book, published after his death called The Dawn of Everything.
I disagree entirely with the thesis of "bullshit jobs". Unless it's a government job or mandated by regulations, someone is paying for a task to be done voluntarily. Therefore it isn't bullshit to the payer, even if it might seem like bullshit to the worker. I have never stumbled on a single job that wasn't government-required labor that had no purpose whatsoever, and furthermore the laborer wasn't able to quit.
So if I paid you a salary to dig a hole and fill it up again, ad infinitum, that job would have inherent value just because I'm paying you to do it?
If so, welcome aboard.
Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance officers.
You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist. Unfortunately, that’s also the exact view I often see in tech, where people tend to devalue work of others because its value does not seem to be self-explanatory in the first 60 seconds they spend on analysis of the situation.
In real life your lost baggage experience would suck without the person behind the airline desk, you org won’t be able to scale without middle management, and your business would suffer budget cuts due to legal fines because the only proper way to stay legally compliant today is (surprise!) to hire a compliance officer.
Good luck inventing some imaginary perfect-world systems where those issues do not exist and do not require extra staff you label as “bullshit”. Any kind of system which is designed and managed by people will have flaws and will require extra jobs handling these flaws. These jobs are not bullshit, they are valuable because they allow the system to exist and stay efficient.
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My problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is the "inherent value." There are plenty of jobs that have little societal value, but provide plenty of value to the person employing the person.
For example, plenty of jurisdictions give large tax breaks to farms, so it is reasonably common for developers holding land to turn their land into a "farm." One fellow I heard of put 6 cows on a plot of development land and paid someone to drop hay off for the cows as the land had next to no grass, as it was under development.
No real value is being generated from the cows. The output of 6 poorly fed and housed beef cows is well under the money paid to the cow carer and for the hay and for the damage caused by the cows to the neighbourhood when they escaped.
But the developer saved 80K a year in various property tax after all expenses were considered.
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What company is paying to do this?
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I found his bullshit jobs article to be terrible and unconvincing, and many of the things he said about jobs just inaccurate.
But I think your objection is not very strong and his thesis can be rescued from it.
> it isn't bullshit to the payer, even if it might seem like bullshit to the worker
I think a lot of jobs really are "bullshit jobs," not because they have no value to the payer, but because they have negative value to the economy overall.
For an extreme example, some people are willing to pay to have witnesses murdered so that they can continue committing crimes without legal repercussions.
Or, some people are doing jobs that are purely for positional advantage and that are even "cancelled out" by other people in other companies doing another job. Advertisers seeking to take over market share from competing companies.
Or, some extractive industries may be more beneficially halted because of negative externalities; but those who benefit from the extraction will still hire people.
You can create a job whose only function is to increase your cost and consequently allow you to charge more for your product or service. It doesn’t work if you do it on your own, but it does work if you can get the government to force your competitors to do it too.
If you pay close attention, you will find that most government regulations that affect whole industries are actually the result of lobbying by the industries themselves. This is clearly visible in finance but it happens for almost any industry where there are powerful players.
No one wants to increase their productivity without a corresponding increase in revenue - this includes corporations as well as individuals. Bullshit jobs need to be created to maintain high prices in face of constant downward pressure.
Read excerpts of his book or his essays on the topic. You might be suprised.
I've read his essays, but not his books. Graeber does what every popular nonfiction writer does. He starts with a provocative conclusion, and cherrypicks data to support it. Bullshit Jobs is particularly bad in this aspect.
https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullsh...
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For example?
I read his writing, and I also read his Debt book and found it unimpressive and unconvincing.
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Sure you can quit. But often these “bs jobs” are a form of scope creep so you face the thought that eventually, it may change.
Can you provide an example of a bullshit job?
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Pay hundreds of dollars to earn a few per day? This economy sounds more like Cutco more than any modern NFT thing.
Bullshit jobs? Let me tell you what a bullshit job is: Transcription. It's basically poor, often disabled people w/ 0 other options doing it. For slave-wage. That's right, one of the best way for disabled people in America to make $$ is to spend hours transcribing you next Sex & the City remake at breakneck pace. Excuse my french, but F this. Axie sounds like a lot less bullshit
After that work is done though, the value of the content being transcribed is increased. They are solving the problem that the actual dialog spoken by the actors and audio cues aren't captured in a non-audio format yet. Axie is creating problems when designing the gameplay and allows people to sell solutions to it; they could easily just provide the "value" at the push of a button.
Yeah, that's the basis of my issue with it all. Value created by people who do not benefit from it whatsoever.
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Did the SEC give Axie Infinity a no-action letter? How do they get around the securities laws thing?
By ignoring it until the government catches up, like every other startup does with regulations which should preclude their "disruptive" business model.
I don't see more games utilizing that mechanic, besides some the awful mobile gacha's.
I have been shorting SLP-PERP for a couple of months now and the trade keeps printing.
Product owner, scrum master and everything agile is the essence of a bullshit job.
I prefer it over the mobile microtransaction loot box culture of the last decade.
Have you played the game? Is it actually fun?
I still totally fail to understand this concept. Is there anything here beyond impotent whining? What are they proposing to do? They subjectively call it bullshit but other people choose to play totally free from compulsion.
What should we do? Physically restrain them from playing?
We should raise awareness that it's a scam so that reputable people don't fund and promote it. In particular, I hope they can be stopped from raising a series C, limiting their ability to keep the scam going once they exhaust the $150m A16z gave them.
"Growth-Dependent Economy" is a nice turn of phrase
> system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism
What we have now is not capitalism. Capitalism requires hard money as a foundation. An inflationary currency whose supply compounds exponentially over time and which people are forced to use is not hard money.
Bullshit jobs are made possible by inflationary money printing. The current crony-capitalist system is only 'Darwinian' for those who are far from the money printers. That's why bullshit office jobs exist mostly in big cities; in close proximity to the largest inflows of newly issued 'capital' into the economy. For those who are close to the inflows of new money, it's a rigged, easy game. No talent involved. It's a game of first in, best dressed. They could throw money out the window and it would come flying back in. In the periphery, the story is completely different. Look up Cantillon effect.
It's easy to devise a scheme whereby you keep borrowing money from a bank to inflate the value of some intangible asset and then use that asset's growing 'value' as collateral against which you can keep borrowing more money and keep inflating that asset's 'value' ad-infinitum. You just keep taking out new, increasingly large loans to make repayments on the old loans. Just like the government does. At any point in time, this zero-sum scheme will always look profitable; you can keep it going so long as the banks allow. Banks will allow it of course, because the collateral 'value' keeps growing. It's only when people start talking about huge numbers like 'quadrillions', 'quintillions' and 'sextillions' that people will start to think something's not right. The game is all about who can feed the banks' own money back to them with as little resistance as possible.
A major reason why Bitcoin is so valuable is that it provides banks with an endless supply of bodies to take out more and increasingly large loans and feed it back to the banks with interest. Bitcoin's growth in value consistently outpaces the growth in interest on loans used to buy that Bitcoin.
Bullshit activities… the new drugs. Love them guys who sustain these mind traps. Nothing new under the sun as King Solomon said, but then again - do not dare claim moral superiority, u will go down sooner than not.
In spite of being presented as the future of work by some venture capitalists, the incentives just don’t make sense. Floors don’t have to be swept in the metaverse unless they’re designed to need sweeping.
They make perfect sense. You probably can't be a King or Queen in the real world, but for a modest outlay you can play one in the virtual world. The product being sold is not the fun of clicking around doing pointless things in a Monarchy Simulator, but the emotional satisfaction of bossing a small army of other people around. Within the game, you can be the sun around whom others revolve.
Bullshit Jobs aka jobs that can be automated.
> … I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism.
It is always worth reminding everyone that we are far from pure free market capitalism. There is a lot of market distortion due to lack of info transparency, regulatory capture, contracts which create inefficiency, intellectual property law, asymmetric application of regulation and law enforcement, etc
Just another propaganda spreader… keep reading these kind of books whilst we build a new economy
> I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism.
This takeaway is odd - especially when the entire point is that these bullshit jobs are a core part of capitalism, because they force people to buy into the system in spite of its obvious problems...
TL;DR anyone? Don't have the time to read this highly voted article :|
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Play-to-earn will die a painful death, but the takeaway here (which this article dodges) is that players should own their in-game assets. This is really where blockchain comes into play. Diablo 3 tried to do this, but they were too early and too greedy. If done correctly, owning your digital items is certainly more preferable than not.
Again, this is touched in half a paragraph, but this is the real revolutionary aspect of NFTs. And, paradoxically, it's nothing new: Steam store "items" are basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are basically NFTs. It's just that without a decentralized marketplace, you can't sell them.
> This is really where blockchain comes into play. Diablo 3 tried to do this, but they were too early and too greedy.
Diablo 3's in-game real-money market wasn't based on a blockchain, and was doomed to failure for game design reasons alone.
> And, paradoxically, it's nothing new: Steam store "items" are basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are basically NFTs. It's just that without a decentralized marketplace, you can't sell them.
You can sell Steam in-game items just fine on the community market (https://steamcommunity.com/market/). You just can't cash that out to real money because Valve, quite sensibly, doesn't want to be classified as a money transmitter.
The article “dodges” the notion players should “own” their in-game items to the same extent you underplay the implications. consider what the article emphasises: the contradiction implied in a live game being rebalanced in real time, affecting “owned” assets.
Do you really own it if the item’s form, function, and even in-game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised authority—the game’s administrators?
> Do you really own it if the item’s form, function, and even in-game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised authority—the game’s administrators?
This happens literally all the time with Magic cards, lol.