8 Comments

some people's brains break at the concept of not monetising every breath they take. The currently popular game Wordle is not monetised - the developer just did a fun thing. Dig the Hacker News response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916899

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I would change just one thing here, Ed. Our deaths are in fact not "unpredictable" but actually very predictable in how, without exception, "death comes for us all."

Everyone reading this is mortal, thanks to our imperfect bodies; and our lives consist of the time in between a precise beginning point and a precise ending point. This bolsters, I think, your point even more strongly.

Given the finite good health and finite time we have allotted to us - why would any of us waste a second on play-to-earn games??

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THANK YOU. You articulated so well the deep sadness I felt at watching someone I'd previously admired fall into this trap.

Play-to-earn gaming is an incredibly seductive proposition - & it's not the first time this idea has been floated as the "future of gaming."

Funny - after much fanfare, it never really took off in the past... for many of the reasons you outlined here.

Gold-farming is a well-understood dynamic - but it's not something people aspire to, it's a desperate move for poor people and not particularly fun.

Collectable card games are a red herring - collectors don't play to earn-by-grinding, they're into skill-building enabled by collecting & playing.

We'll see in a few years how this all shakes out...

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I don't know if I've ever played a game for leisure purposes. Its always a puzzle or problem I have to solve. The reward is knowing the problem was solved. I think this is an example of concern trolling for money. The gist of this article is "another reason crypto is bad". You could have wrote this article about happy meal toys and it would have read the same. I just don't get why selling your game character with everything you've put into it is so bad? I feel like digital versions of games are ripoffs because you cannot return them if you don't like the game and you cannot sell them to someone who might genuinely like the game or want it enough to pay just slightly below cost. You might also want to clarify that most of these games start with mostly affordable mint prices, not hundreds of dollars... Yeah to buy one now, not when it came out. For instance, you need at least $21 to buy an Axie on their marketplace, then you can start playing. And the token was $0.10 when it launched on Binance. Fortnite's freemium version is what everyone thinks of when Fortnite comes to mind, but the real game costs 39.99 retail, has a better monetization setup but no token. The token being attached to the game is where people lose their marbles. You really need to specify which P2E game is charging hundreds of dollars to start playing. Literally google: "cost to start playing Axie Infinty".

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Feb 23, 2022·edited Feb 23, 2022

A few of your pieces are open on the desktop and half-read, as your writing and embedded links encourage me to go further and further. But then I found this and knew I had to read it the whole way through. Simply beautiful, and speaks volumes to me. This is a highly seductive space for me due to much earlier times in my life. This essay is bookmarked and will be read again when I stumble upon a new way to game my way financial independence. Thank you for taking the time to write this.

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Thank you for that last graf, sir.

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Is it me, or does Ohanian sound very... Trump-y? Like "the greats — the very best people" for example.

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