timma | ポンプ

I fundamentally don't understand the premise of play-to-earn and the presumption that gamers want to get compensated for their time. I want to compensate YOU, the gamemaker. I want to pay you $500 for: - a console - two copies of Zelda - the right to paraglide down from a floating castle to shoot bomb arrows up the ass of some Moblins And then not only that, I will promote your game FOR FREE. I will literally get onto my college boys signal thread and make memes about Koroks. No referral bonuses, tokenomics, staking rewards necessary. And you know why I want to do that? Because great games inherently give me value. They are funny, engaging, and at their best--transcendent. A few assertions: - happiness is real - I seek it - and one of the sources of real happiness in life is taming a feral horse galloping on the plains of Hyrule With that established, come along with me and let's make a Millsian observation that human happiness can also be priced: I think I get the equivalent of ~$500 in utils from playing Zelda. You know how I know that? Because I literally traded that amount in fiat dollars for the privilege to save the mf kingdom from Ganondorf's darkness. Not only am I not upset that I spent $500 and >100 human hours on this earth playing the original Breath of the Wild, I'm grateful! IF ONLY I could consume art that immersive, detailed, generous, and beautiful all the time. So if I paid for happiness in the case of Zelda: Then the only possible implication with play-to-earn games is that they are unfun. In fact, they must be anti-fun. If I am getting compensated to play a game, then I am PAYING the game in happiness. Why must that be true? Why must play to earn be shit-to-play? Because if the players were willing to accept anything less than getting paid to play--including nothing or in fact paying to play--then the game maker would take it. If a P2E game were so fun and created so much human happiness that players said, "hm, I think I'll actually just buy the license to play with no expectation of return." Then the mechanism would be encouraged to converge to zero reward. "But Jon," you say, "some people like their jobs, but jobs still pay money." And that is true, because jobs belong to the economy as part of a concept called the Value Chain. In the Value Chain, members of society scrap together scarce resources, and like VC's they Add Value until the combination of resources, technology, and labor create a thing that is even more valuable than the sum of its inputs. That is Capitalism. Everyone in the Value Chain gets compensated for the little sprinkle of Value they add to the stone soup that is Goods and Services. I am a capitalist. I believe we can create things of value and also be happy doing so! For instance I am fairly certain the creators of Zelda enjoy making generationally significant forms of media and go home and tell their spouses "Honey...I love my job." But that's not what playing a game does, because the act of playing a game is inherently consumptive! Here are some other fundamentally consumptive or non-productive acts: - eating - sleeping - breathing - reading a book - walking (ahem!) In other words, none of these activities *fall into a value chain whereby doing the activity itself adds economic value to existing inputs.* Oh but if you sleep more, you become a more productive employee, so isn't that valuable and shouldn't you get compensated for it? Yes AND that boost in productivity is already captured in your employment. By virtue of being healthier, smarter, more educated, and alive, you are offering your labor into the market at a HIGHER per-hour output than the next guy. That's your competitive advantage! (and one cynical reason to like, "meditate for mental health" or whatever the guys who love deadlifts and Taleb are recommending these days) So to compensate you AGAIN is a double-count! See what I'm saying? There's no free lunch. Even if you get paid to eat it on the blockchain.