Comment by mherdeg
4 years ago
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
> It sounds more like a Ponzi scheme in a Gold farming disguise to me.
I would agree with this if the primary income stream came directly from the increase in value of Axies as the game attracted more users. From my understanding, the income comes from acquiring and selling in-game currency rather than from the Axies themselves.
Is this a bullshit job? Maybe. Ponzi scheme? I don't think so.
If people are working this bullshit job, it means that this bullshit job is better than their alternatives. I'm not convinced the existence of these kinds of games is a net-negative.
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The problem with play to earn however is that it encourages people to play the game to earn money instead of fun, which causes inflation to the point where it's not worth the time of a casual player to do the grindy parts of the game and instead just lay people who grind all day. This is why play to earn is terrible, gold farmers will increase currency faucets without increasing currency sinks, and it is terrible for any game with a lot of player trading.
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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.
One could also argue that if the developers did that, the market value of the digital item in question would drop. The value that the buyer receives is grounded in the large time investment required to acquire the item in the game. Even though it is completely artificial, it makes the item more scarce and therefore more desirable to other players. I totally agree that the fact that this power is in the hands of the developers, though, makes these types of NFTs far from the decentralized digital goods they are claimed to be as pointed out by the author.
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I have the feeling that buyers feel they are getting more value if the item was "generated" by grinding than if it was created ab nihilo by the developers. Why, I have no idea.
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.
They aren't paid to play games, they are paid to interact with the audience and tell stories. Looking at view counts of clips with just stories vs clips with gameplay going on will show it. Also, games have been the background in videos or streams for a long long time, people who were on YouTube circa 2010 will remember the YouTubers like WoodysGamerTag or whiteboy7thst who played Call of Duty, but that's never why people watched them. It was the hook but people watched for their personalities.
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.
The difference is that a game company could just sell gold directly. If music creation could be automated so easily we'd probably do that too.
Do you not understand that people find it pleasurable to listen to music, or what?
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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.
People keep claiming that automation is coming for most jobs, and yet we still don't have reliable, affordable robots that can do basic tasks like cooking a decent hamburger or stocking store shelves or snaking a plugged toilet. This belief in major automation advances is more like a religion than something grounded in hard science. Sure automation will gradually increase over time but it's going to be a long, slow grind.
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This fits Graeber's thesis; "The book [..] makes the case that the ruling class stands to lose from the proletariat having extra free time on their hands"
There is no such problem with negative interest rates :)
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...
How much money people make is a separate question, but playing games is likely worse for the body than most forms agrarian labor. Excluding accidents with heavy machinery.
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