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Game Studios Are Turning Play into Work

setgree 5y ago
Previous discussion of Axie Infinity & Bullshit jobs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716900 (A bit surprised this article references David Graeber, but not PB's piece)
smoldesu 5y ago
Games as "work" is a fickle thing. Digital items beforehand (CS:GO skins, MMO items, etc.) garnered real-life value because they represented a certain amount of progress or luck required to attain the item. Third-party markets were a weird, but effective workaround for representing these items with real cash. The issue as I see it though, is that you need more than artificial scarcity to build an economy. The reason people spent crazy amounts of real-life money on a Black Lotus card or an AWP Dragon Lore was because they loved their respective games. When I look at Axie Infinity, I have to ask; do people actually love this game? As far as I can tell, the majority of people are playing it because they want to make money. Even the "whales" appear to be in it for the cash too, since once you have enough resources in the game you can "sponsor" poorer players and take a cut of their earnings. The whole thing reeks. I was never that into rare game items as a concept, but this strikes me as outright stupid, NFTs and blockchain aside.
- willis936 5y ago
  Yep. Squeenix really jumped the shark on this one. I have become an expert in disengaging. We're in an attention economy and I have wrestled back control of my attention. If they want a slice then they'll need to abandon dark patterns. I know I'm not alone in this. The noise levels are at all time highs and people naturally have developed a sense of tuning out by default and carefully tuning in.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    Dark Forests and moving castles. You can form a small group, leave big attention platforms and focus on small meaningful communities. It's one of the reasons why games like Minecraft and Stardew still get tons of playtime.
- webkike 5y ago
  Exactly correct. Black Lotus is expensive because MTG is fun and the card is rare. Same for AWPs. It really doesn’t matter what the technology is that’s used to store the transaction of these items, the most important thing continues to be that the game is actually _fun_!!!
mdoms 5y ago
In my opinion one of the worst things to happen to online modern gaming is the tendency towards several different kinds of "rewards" for the player. I don't think I'm unique in this view but I also know a ton of gamers disagree with me. A recent example is Battlefield 2042. The game is massively flawed, but one of the silver linings is the Portal mode, which enables highly customizable games on retro maps. It's fun - a lot more fun than the base game. But almost no one plays it because DICE (the developer) has disabled XP rewards for the mode, meaning people can't "earn" points which enable them to unlock yet more rewards for the main game. If you read the forums or subreddit you'll see people claim to enjoy Portal mode, but also say things like "what's the point in playing Portal if you can't earn XP". It's an attitude I don't understand at all - the point in playing Portal is that it's a lot of fun! But most of the community seems to disagree with me and as a result Portal mode is empty. You can criticize game developers all you want for turning games into work (or skinner boxes) but from what I can tell there's a huge amount of demand for this type of gaming and very much less demand for high-quality, fun experiences without an endless stream of "rewards".
- gowld 5y ago
  That seems like a win-win -- it separates the XP-chasers from the "play for fun" cohort, so they don't annoy each other.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    Maybe it would be a win-win with a big enough player base, but as it is the Portal mode is basically empty now - at least in the Australasia region. BF2042 player numbers have dropped too far to sustain it I'm afraid (for other reasons we shan't get into).
- powersurge360 5y ago
  I have a lot of friends who play almost exclusively shooters and this kind of stuff is what's put me off of the genre. I really miss back when you could get a copy of unreal tournament or half life deathmatch and just drop in w/ all the guns unlocked and available and just rampage. I know it's a different genre completely from the more realistic shooters like Battlefield and Call of Duty, but even still I miss the unfettered drop-in fun in those older games and there seem to be hardly any left.
me_me_mu_mu 5y ago
I miss when games were for fun. Now, games are filled with pay-items which I guess some people enjoy, but it leads to not a lot of fun in some cases. For example, some games sell tokens that you can convert to in-game money. That essentially translates into a boring grind for 100 hours or pay X amount to skip that by getting enough money to buy the items you need to skip that content. I haven't bought a new game since 2016, and I'll never support the *AAA gaming industry ever again :)
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
  The indie world is full of great games with no paid content and if there are expansions, they are worth the money. I'm a gamer and I play on average one AAA every few years, rest of the time is indie only. I agree AAA is not sustainable, especially because the stuff delivered on average has a way worse gameplay than good indie games. And by the way, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind forest (and the will of the wisps) is a slap in the faces of AAA games. Beautiful, amazing to play and in the case of hollow knight, really intriguing story.
- bitcurious 5y ago
  If you’re open to a recommendation from someone who holds a similar outlook towards today’s games, Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch was one of the most fun games I’ve ever played. I recommend coop with a less gaming-inclined partner.
  - throwaway675309 5y ago
    I'd argue to manage your expectations. If you're coming into odyssey with the idea that this is a traditional Mario game, you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's more like a open sandbox scavenger hunt using Mario IP.
  - james-skemp 5y ago
    Who played the hat? Asking because my son is pretty good at games, and we're about to start this one in the next week.
- 5y ago
dandanua 5y ago
The gaming industry with all those tricks that help grow an addiction is way out of control nowadays. The worst type of it, gacha games, are essentially casinos for kids. I think there should be much more regulation of it. A society doesn't need hordes of useless addicts.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  Games with gacha mechanics (i.e. the ability to trade real money for tries at a random reward) should be rated 18+. I hope we get to a point where there's enough outrage that the ESRB is forced to act.
  - nonbirithm 5y ago
    It makes me think that all the controversy around video game violence decades ago was focused on the wrong issue, but there was a glimmer of something else that did ultimately come true. Video games do not motivate violent behavior because they're simply ineffective at motivating violent behavior. Having real-world violence attached to a video game can only damage revenue, so there's no point in designing the game to encourage it. I think the only reason a lot of media does not cause full-blown riots is because the number of human behaviors that you can motivate which also have a profit advantage is very small in practice. But now that we've discovered the profitable method, what the doomsday forseers believed would be a more violent future instead became an attention-destroying future. The general principle is ultimately the same: we can now build games that are more effective at controlling our behavior than ever before.
- tsol 5y ago
  Video games are almost becoming video gaming(as in what they call those places where you play video slots in the closed off section at the back of a restaurant in my area). It is definitely concerning
AlexandrB 5y ago
There was a good reason that early MMOs treated gold-sellers as persona non grata. Allowing the trade of real money for in-game advantage (pay-to-win) strips the value from in-game achievements. Spending $1000 on some gold/items/runs is not particularly impressive or notable. It's just a function of your real life social standing. There's definitely an audience for games where you can perform conspicuous consumption in front of your peers (see any Gacha game), but to me it's far less interesting than the skill/time-based competition it replaces. My impression is that a lot of the competitive, intrinsically-motivated energy in gaming that made old MMOs so addictive to some has moved into e-sports and speed running. Spaces where time investment and skill are still differentiators.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  That's an optimistic take. A more cynical take would be that content is expensive to create, and if players could just buy it, they wouldn't spend time playing the game. And if they stop playing the game, they stop paying for a subscription. Without something to "work" for, players would stop paying. Which makes the title of this article ironic to me. As if game studios didn't invent grind decades ago. They turned "play into work" a long, long time ago. Gold sellers completed the cycle and enabled people to actually live off it.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    I think the key difference is in the motivation of the player. Many people have hobbies that one might call "grindy", consider how much time and effort goes into gardening for example, but because they're not getting paid we don't call this work. For me it becomes work when the motivation to keep playing shifts from intrinsic (sense of achievement, community, completion, etc) to extrinsic (money).
- adamrezich 5y ago
  I'll never forget spending like five bucks on the Real Money Auction House in Diablo III, only for it to completely ruin the enjoyment I was getting out of the game at the time. every weapon I'd find was substantially worse than the sword I spent a few bucks on. these things seem like a good idea at the time, but...
bostonbot 5y ago
This is similar to the new trend of gamified workouts. Liteboxer recently announced rhythm-based boxing workouts on the Quest store. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.tomsguide.com/amp/news/i-just-tried-liteboxer-vr-for-oculus-quest-2-and-it-actually-makes-working-out-fun https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.tomsguide.com/amp/news/i-ju...
- klipt 5y ago
  At least those games give you some exercise rather than grinding you into sedentary ill health.
Animats 5y ago
Look to Vegas to see how grinding for money works out. Especially slot machines. There's a fraction of the population that will play slot machines for long periods. This despite it being a net lose. This is the population that falls for Axie Infinity. Axie Infinity was, at peak, about half the NFT market. It is now a Ponzi in the final stages. Here's the chart for Smooth Love Potion token, the one players grind for.[1] Down from $0.35 to $0.018. How low can it go? That one suckered a lot of poor people in the Philippines. From the discussions on Reddit, it looks like people are wising up about NFTs. For a while, there were two new wannabe NFT metaverses a day. That's stopped. Most NFT comments are now negative. Roblox may get in trouble for using child labor to implement games on their platform.[2] [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-with-roblox-the-video-game-empire-built-on-child-labour https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-wi...
- tsol 5y ago
  That second link is particularly damning. It sounds like the rat race of working for a boss with unrealistic expectations.. but for kids. I'm shocked there isn't a bigger reaction to 12 year olds being set up to be put into positions where they get called an "underage sex doll" and can't say anything. As I hear many repeat nowadays-- I'm glad I'm not growing up in today's world. I may have had to worry about getting scammed on runescape(the biggest social game during my day), but that was about it.
ronyeh 5y ago
Nintendo makes the dumbest/silliest games that are super fun for my entire family. They never feel like work for me. For example, the recent Big Brain Academy for Switch is a great multiplayer game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld9kVptUWcE&t=900s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld9kVptUWcE&t=900s I play with my 8 year old and 5 year old, and we can each set our difficulty level separately (from Sprout for little kids who only want to press A, to Super Elite for gamers who love a challenge). Being able to set our difficulty level separately makes it a challenge for me every time, and it's fun to play against my 5 year old.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  Nintendo is increasingly dipping their toes into gacha-style games on mobile, with Fire Emblem Heroes being the most prominent example. I worry that once they get a taste of the money these games generate the same mechanics will seep into their console offerings.
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  If you haven't tried Overcooked (1 and 2), it is definitely a game to get into. Good fun for the whole family and has only light mechanical elements with mostly puzzle/working together as a team being the focus.
  - ronyeh 5y ago
    My 8 year old and I beat Overcooked 1 and we are currently working on "All You Can Eat" which is the edition with all the DLC. The original game was one of the toughest games we ever beat. It took me, my wife, and our kid multiple tries to beat the Onion King. My 5 year old watched since he would mostly get in our way when we played with 4 players. :-).
    - ronyeh 5y ago
      No one will ever see this comment... But my child reminded me today that the ultimate boss was called the Ever Peckish. The Onion King was on our side.
lowbloodsugar 5y ago
Can't wait for SquareEnix to be sued in California then. He basically made their case for them.
haunter 5y ago
idk I always loved grinding games especially in MMOs and JRPGs. If anything I'd say games are not turning into work, they are just generally much easier than 10-15 years ago. And it's much more noticeable. There is a reason for example FromSoftware games (Souls-series, Bloodborne, Sekiro etc.) are insanely popular because they offer you a great challenge that you rarely find in modern games. On the other hand the "noise" is also much higher so of course more thrash game exist too.
d--b 5y ago
> Players pit their Axies in combat to win cryptocurrency tokens. In 2020, someone paid $130,000 in cryptocurrency for a particularly rare one Wtf is happening? I mean it seriously. How did we get to a point when someone paid $130,000 for a video game pet? Is that what humanity decided it should spend time on? Is it valuable to anyone that someone spends months collecting pokemons? Yet, a guy with money decided that the best way to spend that money was to have people build some exp in a digital game. I don't get it anymore. fuck that.
- beeboop 5y ago
  My guess is most of these big dollar NFT stories are fake. People are making the claims or buying from themselves to attract attention so they can sell NFTs at big amounts to suckers
- Wojtkie 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure that NFTs are just money laundering schemes.
tgbugs 5y ago
"Skyrim dollars" was a concept that my friend group roundly pooh-poohed when I brought it up in a late night rant some time around 2012. Over time it has become something of a meme, but this winter break we were all sitting around and realized that Skyrim dollars have become hot new tech. The primary motivation for the idea was that there are tons of people out grinding in game money in single player games, and all that labor (leisure time?) is trapped in the game (yet somehow not creating disastrous inflation in-game ...). What if there was some way that players could capture that time and (leisure labor)? At the time Valve was already trying to reward people for creating value for others, but what if we could just exchange the Skyrim dollars that we had earned from our single player playthroughs? Well, here we are.
- Talanes 5y ago
  Decent concept, but why Skyrim? I don't think I've ever found myself looking for money in that game. Hell, I mod it to reduce the amount of gold in the game.
  - tgbugs 5y ago
    It was just an example of a game that people sink lots of hours into, and yes, way too much gold, to the point where you are swimming in it even if you aren't trying to grind it. There is also the issue that you can break the crafting system to create single potions that are worth hundreds of thousands of gold and that should probably cause the game universe to be sucked into a black hole, but that is a separate issue.
999900000999 5y ago
This is why the humble bundle is still important. Their Humble choice prioritizes games which are actually a full package. Very rarely there might be some DLC, but normally their isn't. I absolutely love the humble originals, usually these are hour-long bite-size experiences. Experiences. I tend to enjoy a good mix of 80 hour epic RPGs, and games I can finish in one sitting.
brundolf 5y ago
The latest Animal Crossing is one of the clearest examples of this trend (and it doesn’t even have micro-transactions, much less NFTs!) Previous games in the series were famously “there’s nothing to do” games. You could make money, but there were limited things you could spend it on. You could collect items and furniture, but there were limited options each day. You could pick weeds, but there wasn’t much in the way of “rewards” for that; it just made your town more pleasant. Instead of grinding, you spent most of your time just dwelling, hanging out with your neighbors, walking along the river. And then after a little while… you stopped playing the game, and did something else. In many ways, the game wouldn’t let you turn it into work. Contrast that with the latest entry, where you now have a smartphone. On it is a bottomless todo-list of arbitrary, menial tasks. It has a little notification light whenever you get a new task. Completing a task gets you a reward, and then a new task takes its place on the list. There’s crafting in the game; you no longer have to wait for the store to refresh its items, you can grind for resources and then build whatever you want. And then because you can terraform the entire island, there’s a massive source of goals to set and then grind for. And the thing is… most people like this game. It’s brought the most mainstream success the series has ever had, by far. And because it doesn’t have any financial aspects, we can’t call the developers exploitive, really. It’s just this (imo) toxic, demeaning direction the whole industry seems to be taking. Even series like Assassin’s Creed are now stuffed full of resources to collect, loot to hoard, “rewards” for the hundreds of grueling hours you put into mindlessly wading through wave after wave of enemies. More and more games are trading genuine play and affective experience for finely-tuned, dopamine-peddling, addiction. Because that’s what sells. The only saving grace is that the industry is growing so fast, there’s so much diversity, that there are also lots of games that don’t do this. But I worry about how the trend is affecting/will affect people’s mental health, not even getting into the financial side.
- wolpoli 5y ago
  > The only saving grace is that the industry is growing so fast, there’s so much diversity, that there are also lots of games that don’t do this. This brings up a very good point. There are alternate options now. We won't after the industry inevitably consolidates.
betwixthewires 5y ago
Unless someone can find a way to make grinding in games produce a tangible benefit, all this will wind up being is a giant scam. If you're getting paid to perform useless tasks, whatever they are, someone is going to be left holding a bag.
low_tech_love 5y ago
How absolutely disconnected from reality can you be to think that putting money inside games will be a good idea and will actually improve them for the players? I mean, seriously.
- zepto 5y ago
  The goal is not to improve them for players. It is to make money for the publishers.
oneoff786 5y ago
Progression is rewarding. Most peoples lives have 0 sense of progression. Video games are fairly unique in that regard without being a creative outlet.

Previous discussion of Axie Infinity & Bullshit jobs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29716900 (A bit surprised this article references David Graeber, but not PB's piece)

smoldesu 5y ago

Games as "work" is a fickle thing. Digital items beforehand (CS:GO skins, MMO items, etc.) garnered real-life value because they represented a certain amount of progress or luck required to attain the item. Third-party markets were a weird, but effective workaround for representing these items with real cash. The issue as I see it though, is that you need more than artificial scarcity to build an economy. The reason people spent crazy amounts of real-life money on a Black Lotus card or an AWP Dragon Lore was because they loved their respective games. When I look at Axie Infinity, I have to ask; do people actually love this game? As far as I can tell, the majority of people are playing it because they want to make money. Even the "whales" appear to be in it for the cash too, since once you have enough resources in the game you can "sponsor" poorer players and take a cut of their earnings. The whole thing reeks. I was never that into rare game items as a concept, but this strikes me as outright stupid, NFTs and blockchain aside.

willis936 5y ago
Yep. Squeenix really jumped the shark on this one. I have become an expert in disengaging. We're in an attention economy and I have wrestled back control of my attention. If they want a slice then they'll need to abandon dark patterns. I know I'm not alone in this. The noise levels are at all time highs and people naturally have developed a sense of tuning out by default and carefully tuning in.
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  Dark Forests and moving castles. You can form a small group, leave big attention platforms and focus on small meaningful communities. It's one of the reasons why games like Minecraft and Stardew still get tons of playtime.
webkike 5y ago
Exactly correct. Black Lotus is expensive because MTG is fun and the card is rare. Same for AWPs. It really doesn’t matter what the technology is that’s used to store the transaction of these items, the most important thing continues to be that the game is actually _fun_!!!

mdoms 5y ago

In my opinion one of the worst things to happen to online modern gaming is the tendency towards several different kinds of "rewards" for the player. I don't think I'm unique in this view but I also know a ton of gamers disagree with me. A recent example is Battlefield 2042. The game is massively flawed, but one of the silver linings is the Portal mode, which enables highly customizable games on retro maps. It's fun - a lot more fun than the base game. But almost no one plays it because DICE (the developer) has disabled XP rewards for the mode, meaning people can't "earn" points which enable them to unlock yet more rewards for the main game. If you read the forums or subreddit you'll see people claim to enjoy Portal mode, but also say things like "what's the point in playing Portal if you can't earn XP". It's an attitude I don't understand at all - the point in playing Portal is that it's a lot of fun! But most of the community seems to disagree with me and as a result Portal mode is empty. You can criticize game developers all you want for turning games into work (or skinner boxes) but from what I can tell there's a huge amount of demand for this type of gaming and very much less demand for high-quality, fun experiences without an endless stream of "rewards".

gowld 5y ago
That seems like a win-win -- it separates the XP-chasers from the "play for fun" cohort, so they don't annoy each other.
- mdoms 5y ago
  Maybe it would be a win-win with a big enough player base, but as it is the Portal mode is basically empty now - at least in the Australasia region. BF2042 player numbers have dropped too far to sustain it I'm afraid (for other reasons we shan't get into).
powersurge360 5y ago
I have a lot of friends who play almost exclusively shooters and this kind of stuff is what's put me off of the genre. I really miss back when you could get a copy of unreal tournament or half life deathmatch and just drop in w/ all the guns unlocked and available and just rampage. I know it's a different genre completely from the more realistic shooters like Battlefield and Call of Duty, but even still I miss the unfettered drop-in fun in those older games and there seem to be hardly any left.

me_me_mu_mu 5y ago

I miss when games were for fun. Now, games are filled with pay-items which I guess some people enjoy, but it leads to not a lot of fun in some cases. For example, some games sell tokens that you can convert to in-game money. That essentially translates into a boring grind for 100 hours or pay X amount to skip that by getting enough money to buy the items you need to skip that content. I haven't bought a new game since 2016, and I'll never support the *AAA gaming industry ever again :)

Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
The indie world is full of great games with no paid content and if there are expansions, they are worth the money. I'm a gamer and I play on average one AAA every few years, rest of the time is indie only. I agree AAA is not sustainable, especially because the stuff delivered on average has a way worse gameplay than good indie games. And by the way, Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind forest (and the will of the wisps) is a slap in the faces of AAA games. Beautiful, amazing to play and in the case of hollow knight, really intriguing story.
bitcurious 5y ago
If you’re open to a recommendation from someone who holds a similar outlook towards today’s games, Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch was one of the most fun games I’ve ever played. I recommend coop with a less gaming-inclined partner.
- throwaway675309 5y ago
  I'd argue to manage your expectations. If you're coming into odyssey with the idea that this is a traditional Mario game, you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's more like a open sandbox scavenger hunt using Mario IP.
- james-skemp 5y ago
  Who played the hat? Asking because my son is pretty good at games, and we're about to start this one in the next week.
5y ago

dandanua 5y ago

The gaming industry with all those tricks that help grow an addiction is way out of control nowadays. The worst type of it, gacha games, are essentially casinos for kids. I think there should be much more regulation of it. A society doesn't need hordes of useless addicts.

AlexandrB 5y ago
Games with gacha mechanics (i.e. the ability to trade real money for tries at a random reward) should be rated 18+. I hope we get to a point where there's enough outrage that the ESRB is forced to act.
- nonbirithm 5y ago
  It makes me think that all the controversy around video game violence decades ago was focused on the wrong issue, but there was a glimmer of something else that did ultimately come true. Video games do not motivate violent behavior because they're simply ineffective at motivating violent behavior. Having real-world violence attached to a video game can only damage revenue, so there's no point in designing the game to encourage it. I think the only reason a lot of media does not cause full-blown riots is because the number of human behaviors that you can motivate which also have a profit advantage is very small in practice. But now that we've discovered the profitable method, what the doomsday forseers believed would be a more violent future instead became an attention-destroying future. The general principle is ultimately the same: we can now build games that are more effective at controlling our behavior than ever before.
tsol 5y ago
Video games are almost becoming video gaming(as in what they call those places where you play video slots in the closed off section at the back of a restaurant in my area). It is definitely concerning

AlexandrB 5y ago

There was a good reason that early MMOs treated gold-sellers as persona non grata. Allowing the trade of real money for in-game advantage (pay-to-win) strips the value from in-game achievements. Spending $1000 on some gold/items/runs is not particularly impressive or notable. It's just a function of your real life social standing. There's definitely an audience for games where you can perform conspicuous consumption in front of your peers (see any Gacha game), but to me it's far less interesting than the skill/time-based competition it replaces. My impression is that a lot of the competitive, intrinsically-motivated energy in gaming that made old MMOs so addictive to some has moved into e-sports and speed running. Spaces where time investment and skill are still differentiators.

wccrawford 5y ago
That's an optimistic take. A more cynical take would be that content is expensive to create, and if players could just buy it, they wouldn't spend time playing the game. And if they stop playing the game, they stop paying for a subscription. Without something to "work" for, players would stop paying. Which makes the title of this article ironic to me. As if game studios didn't invent grind decades ago. They turned "play into work" a long, long time ago. Gold sellers completed the cycle and enabled people to actually live off it.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  I think the key difference is in the motivation of the player. Many people have hobbies that one might call "grindy", consider how much time and effort goes into gardening for example, but because they're not getting paid we don't call this work. For me it becomes work when the motivation to keep playing shifts from intrinsic (sense of achievement, community, completion, etc) to extrinsic (money).
adamrezich 5y ago
I'll never forget spending like five bucks on the Real Money Auction House in Diablo III, only for it to completely ruin the enjoyment I was getting out of the game at the time. every weapon I'd find was substantially worse than the sword I spent a few bucks on. these things seem like a good idea at the time, but...

bostonbot 5y ago

This is similar to the new trend of gamified workouts. Liteboxer recently announced rhythm-based boxing workouts on the Quest store. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.tomsguide.com/amp/news/i-just-tried-liteboxer-vr-for-oculus-quest-2-and-it-actually-makes-working-out-fun https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.tomsguide.com/amp/news/i-ju...

klipt 5y ago
At least those games give you some exercise rather than grinding you into sedentary ill health.

Animats 5y ago

Look to Vegas to see how grinding for money works out. Especially slot machines. There's a fraction of the population that will play slot machines for long periods. This despite it being a net lose. This is the population that falls for Axie Infinity. Axie Infinity was, at peak, about half the NFT market. It is now a Ponzi in the final stages. Here's the chart for Smooth Love Potion token, the one players grind for.[1] Down from $0.35 to $0.018. How low can it go? That one suckered a lot of poor people in the Philippines. From the discussions on Reddit, it looks like people are wising up about NFTs. For a while, there were two new wannabe NFT metaverses a day. That's stopped. Most NFT comments are now negative. Roblox may get in trouble for using child labor to implement games on their platform.[2] [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-with-roblox-the-video-game-empire-built-on-child-labour https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-wi...

tsol 5y ago
That second link is particularly damning. It sounds like the rat race of working for a boss with unrealistic expectations.. but for kids. I'm shocked there isn't a bigger reaction to 12 year olds being set up to be put into positions where they get called an "underage sex doll" and can't say anything. As I hear many repeat nowadays-- I'm glad I'm not growing up in today's world. I may have had to worry about getting scammed on runescape(the biggest social game during my day), but that was about it.

ronyeh 5y ago

Nintendo makes the dumbest/silliest games that are super fun for my entire family. They never feel like work for me. For example, the recent Big Brain Academy for Switch is a great multiplayer game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld9kVptUWcE&t=900s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld9kVptUWcE&t=900s I play with my 8 year old and 5 year old, and we can each set our difficulty level separately (from Sprout for little kids who only want to press A, to Super Elite for gamers who love a challenge). Being able to set our difficulty level separately makes it a challenge for me every time, and it's fun to play against my 5 year old.

AlexandrB 5y ago
Nintendo is increasingly dipping their toes into gacha-style games on mobile, with Fire Emblem Heroes being the most prominent example. I worry that once they get a taste of the money these games generate the same mechanics will seep into their console offerings.
darkwizard42 5y ago
If you haven't tried Overcooked (1 and 2), it is definitely a game to get into. Good fun for the whole family and has only light mechanical elements with mostly puzzle/working together as a team being the focus.
- ronyeh 5y ago
  My 8 year old and I beat Overcooked 1 and we are currently working on "All You Can Eat" which is the edition with all the DLC. The original game was one of the toughest games we ever beat. It took me, my wife, and our kid multiple tries to beat the Onion King. My 5 year old watched since he would mostly get in our way when we played with 4 players. :-).
  - ronyeh 5y ago
    No one will ever see this comment... But my child reminded me today that the ultimate boss was called the Ever Peckish. The Onion King was on our side.

lowbloodsugar 5y ago

Can't wait for SquareEnix to be sued in California then. He basically made their case for them.

haunter 5y ago

idk I always loved grinding games especially in MMOs and JRPGs. If anything I'd say games are not turning into work, they are just generally much easier than 10-15 years ago. And it's much more noticeable. There is a reason for example FromSoftware games (Souls-series, Bloodborne, Sekiro etc.) are insanely popular because they offer you a great challenge that you rarely find in modern games. On the other hand the "noise" is also much higher so of course more thrash game exist too.

d--b 5y ago

> Players pit their Axies in combat to win cryptocurrency tokens. In 2020, someone paid $130,000 in cryptocurrency for a particularly rare one Wtf is happening? I mean it seriously. How did we get to a point when someone paid $130,000 for a video game pet? Is that what humanity decided it should spend time on? Is it valuable to anyone that someone spends months collecting pokemons? Yet, a guy with money decided that the best way to spend that money was to have people build some exp in a digital game. I don't get it anymore. fuck that.

beeboop 5y ago
My guess is most of these big dollar NFT stories are fake. People are making the claims or buying from themselves to attract attention so they can sell NFTs at big amounts to suckers
Wojtkie 5y ago
I'm pretty sure that NFTs are just money laundering schemes.

tgbugs 5y ago

"Skyrim dollars" was a concept that my friend group roundly pooh-poohed when I brought it up in a late night rant some time around 2012. Over time it has become something of a meme, but this winter break we were all sitting around and realized that Skyrim dollars have become hot new tech. The primary motivation for the idea was that there are tons of people out grinding in game money in single player games, and all that labor (leisure time?) is trapped in the game (yet somehow not creating disastrous inflation in-game ...). What if there was some way that players could capture that time and (leisure labor)? At the time Valve was already trying to reward people for creating value for others, but what if we could just exchange the Skyrim dollars that we had earned from our single player playthroughs? Well, here we are.

Talanes 5y ago
Decent concept, but why Skyrim? I don't think I've ever found myself looking for money in that game. Hell, I mod it to reduce the amount of gold in the game.
- tgbugs 5y ago
  It was just an example of a game that people sink lots of hours into, and yes, way too much gold, to the point where you are swimming in it even if you aren't trying to grind it. There is also the issue that you can break the crafting system to create single potions that are worth hundreds of thousands of gold and that should probably cause the game universe to be sucked into a black hole, but that is a separate issue.

999900000999 5y ago

This is why the humble bundle is still important. Their Humble choice prioritizes games which are actually a full package. Very rarely there might be some DLC, but normally their isn't. I absolutely love the humble originals, usually these are hour-long bite-size experiences. Experiences. I tend to enjoy a good mix of 80 hour epic RPGs, and games I can finish in one sitting.

brundolf 5y ago

The latest Animal Crossing is one of the clearest examples of this trend (and it doesn’t even have micro-transactions, much less NFTs!) Previous games in the series were famously “there’s nothing to do” games. You could make money, but there were limited things you could spend it on. You could collect items and furniture, but there were limited options each day. You could pick weeds, but there wasn’t much in the way of “rewards” for that; it just made your town more pleasant. Instead of grinding, you spent most of your time just dwelling, hanging out with your neighbors, walking along the river. And then after a little while… you stopped playing the game, and did something else. In many ways, the game wouldn’t let you turn it into work. Contrast that with the latest entry, where you now have a smartphone. On it is a bottomless todo-list of arbitrary, menial tasks. It has a little notification light whenever you get a new task. Completing a task gets you a reward, and then a new task takes its place on the list. There’s crafting in the game; you no longer have to wait for the store to refresh its items, you can grind for resources and then build whatever you want. And then because you can terraform the entire island, there’s a massive source of goals to set and then grind for. And the thing is… most people like this game. It’s brought the most mainstream success the series has ever had, by far. And because it doesn’t have any financial aspects, we can’t call the developers exploitive, really. It’s just this (imo) toxic, demeaning direction the whole industry seems to be taking. Even series like Assassin’s Creed are now stuffed full of resources to collect, loot to hoard, “rewards” for the hundreds of grueling hours you put into mindlessly wading through wave after wave of enemies. More and more games are trading genuine play and affective experience for finely-tuned, dopamine-peddling, addiction. Because that’s what sells. The only saving grace is that the industry is growing so fast, there’s so much diversity, that there are also lots of games that don’t do this. But I worry about how the trend is affecting/will affect people’s mental health, not even getting into the financial side.

wolpoli 5y ago
> The only saving grace is that the industry is growing so fast, there’s so much diversity, that there are also lots of games that don’t do this. This brings up a very good point. There are alternate options now. We won't after the industry inevitably consolidates.

betwixthewires 5y ago

Unless someone can find a way to make grinding in games produce a tangible benefit, all this will wind up being is a giant scam. If you're getting paid to perform useless tasks, whatever they are, someone is going to be left holding a bag.

low_tech_love 5y ago

How absolutely disconnected from reality can you be to think that putting money inside games will be a good idea and will actually improve them for the players? I mean, seriously.

zepto 5y ago
The goal is not to improve them for players. It is to make money for the publishers.

oneoff786 5y ago

Progression is rewarding. Most peoples lives have 0 sense of progression. Video games are fairly unique in that regard without being a creative outlet.