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>A Video Game that Pays Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun, not because I made any money from them. While the job or workplace, for the

>A Video Game that Pays Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun, not because I made any money from them. While the job or workplace, for the vast majority of people on this earth, including those in SW development, is mostly an activity done out of necessity of not being homeless and not starving, usually picked on the basis of the highest compensation because that's what pays the bills, not out of which is most fun. It's nice when your job and tasks at work also happen to be an activity that's fun to you but that's super rare, and it's best not to spend your life searching for that magic workplace where that could happen, but simply to learn to separate and containerize work and fun. For example, I went into coding because I liked it as an activity, but almost non of my workplaces had any tasks on the kanban board that I would ever consider fun, nor did I consider the whole Agile/scrum thing fun or the managemnt styles I was subjected to as part of the KPIs, but I stayed in the industry because it pays the bills not because it was very fun.

narinxas 3y ago
I had a work colleage who played games BECAUSE he made money from them... essentially some dumb kid from a real wealthy part of the world would pay my former colleague "peanuts" to upgrade their player and gather other stats.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Sure. There are a lot of opportunities in the developing world to remotely extract wealth (legally or otherwise) from the wealthiest part of the world in exchange for services at starvation wages there, thar are well above minimum wages at home. Levelling up the MMORPG characters of rich western kids in exchange for money is one of them, and telling them to "try turning it off and on again" when they're adults is another.
  - HenryBemis 3y ago
    I remember a friend buying 1000 gold coins on WoW for €20 back in the day. That was the price of 10 coffees at the time. He "spared" me 100 gold coins (I had only 1 at the time) and it made the WoW experience completely different.
    - xnorswap 3y ago
      And in turn harmed the experience for anyone not engaging in buying gold.
      - Lacerda69 3y ago
        probably ruined their own experience as well. wheb I use cheatcodes it usually ruins the game for me (what is the point playing now that i can have everything)
        usrusr 3y ago
        I guess it's safe to assume that $20 in pay to win would be pretty far from having everything. But I share the sentiment, its a huge hit to the suspension of disbelief regarding in-game achievement.
    - Foobar8568 3y ago
      In the heyday of EverQuest, UO or other mud, things were selling for much more than a mere $20 for 1000gp ( I used to play wow and was among the first to hit 60 on my server, and most likely I had some server first, so I do know what represented at that time 1000gp), items could be worth a few hundred, if not thousands. Hell I believe it's still the case on some emulator servers (P99 for EQ)
keiferski 3y ago
I spent most of my teenage years playing the “economy” of EverQuest Online Adventures, mostly by collecting rare items and selling them. I don’t think I ever reached the maximum character level, even after playing the game for half a decade. It’s a shame I couldn’t cash all that digital money into real money, but I guess I did enjoy it anyway. I have the impression that people do similar things in games like Eve Online.
gbalduzzi 3y ago
The article does explain the comparison, and it doesn't mean that it's fun. These are the actual comparisons: > You interact with people from all corners of the world. > You complete tasks on different online platforms (Slack, GitHub, VS Code, Google Docs, etc.). > You have a list of your main quests to complete (you can find them in your journ… Kanban board!) > There are also side-quests to take care of (“Hey Damian, could you take a look at this bug?”). > Sometimes you can gang up with your teammates to slay a big beast (“Hey, I have this nasty bug that I have been working on for the past few days. I know you have better knowledge of this particular part of the repository, could we jump on a pair programming session?”). > And you get to level up once in a while!
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > > You have a list of your main quests to complete (you can find them in your journ… Kanban board!) Wish I've been to a place that gave you only one quest journal. The fewest distinct quest journals I ever got to is four: the mailbox, the blessed Jira/Gitlab Issues/Kanban/Trello/whatever board, the personal list of things to be done that don't belong anywhere else, and the TODO/FIXME comments in the codebase. That's a minimum. In one places I had like 4 distinct issue boards in active use. Point being, there's one other major thing other than fun, that games have and work doesn't: videogame UX doesn't suck, and wants to help you do your quests.
  - wussboy 3y ago
    Sounds like a business opportunity.
    - bonyt 3y ago
      And so a fifth quest journal was born and provided to every employee.
      - inanutshellus 3y ago
        don't forget the "there's an XKCD for that"! https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
tapland 3y ago
Implying video games are fun. Jokes aside, video games are first and foremost things I want to spend time with, which is the opposite of most jobs. Catchy title but yeah =/
xwdv 3y ago
It is a privilege to only have to play video games for fun. In college, I played World of Warcraft just to farm gold, just to get by.
- titanomachy 3y ago
  Doesn’t that pay less than minimum wage?
  - dingnuts 3y ago
    does every country have a minimum wage? WoW is a bit old now but this kind of thing is still happening in eg Venezuela https://www.polygon.com/features/2020/5/27/21265613/runescape-is-helping-venezuelans-survive https://www.polygon.com/features/2020/5/27/21265613/runescap... who knows where the person you're responding to was living when they needed to farm gold to get by
    - titanomachy 3y ago
      Good point. Referring to university as “college” is very American so I assumed USA, but that’s not conclusive evidence.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >In college, I played World of Warcraft just to farm gold, just to get by. Is that also not a privilege? In most developing countries people have to do much more body or mind crushing activities to support themselves.
Supermancho 3y ago
> Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun What is a game? I would say that a game is an abstract system used to understand our reality (or experiences in life), via a series of interactive actions that alter the system. Generally there is a set of goals (usually just to "win"). I develop software because it's a game. I do watch a lot of progress bars. Aside from that, it's one of my favorite games (to my wife's chagrin). It's fun for me and I'm not the only one. Why does it matter that other people don't enjoy what they do?
- Nav_Panel 3y ago
  Agreed 100%. A courtroom trial is also a sort of game, but it's not typically fun for those involved. Much the opposite...
- digging 3y ago
  That's not a bad or incorrect definition of game but it's... also not what people mean when they say "video game" or something like like a video game. The specific language in the article makes it clear that the person is referring to (basically) fantasy MMORPGs.
- mym1990 3y ago
  This seems like an extremely over complicated way of defining a game. If I play chess, or a video game, or tennis, I am not doing those things to 'understand my reality'. I am doing them because it is usually fun and gives me some kind of dopamine(ymmv), you might even say I play games to get away from reality. Some people use games to learn, some use them to accomplish an otherwise mundane task. Some people split games into 'finite and infinite' but typically they are a form of play, governed by a set of rules, that lead to some outcome. Games can be zero sum, or not.
  - Supermancho 3y ago
    > If I play chess, or a video game, or tennis > I am not doing those things to 'understand my reality'. Not to be argumentative, but I am sure you are. You are attempting to control state and then optimizing for a goal. There are constraints on your ability to manage your own mental and physical capabilities (knowledge, limitations, etc).
light_hue_1 3y ago
> usually picked on the basis of the highest compensation because that's what pays the bills, not out of which is most fun. I think you should reconsider some of your life choices then. You're spending a large part of your life working. Why wouldn't you choose a job that's fun? > job and tasks at work also happen to be an activity that's fun to you but that's super rare, and it's best not to spend your life searching for that magic workplace where that could happen, but simply to learn to separate and containerize work and fun. This is some of the worst advice I've ever seen. Those workplaces are not rare at all! So instead of spending your life at a fun job your advice is for people to spend their life at a job they don't like? Jeez. That sounds like a life worth living for sure.
- timeagain 3y ago
  I’m sure they bring this mentality to work and make it miserable for everyone else too
- ferbivore 3y ago
  > Why wouldn't you choose a job that's fun? Most people I know never had a real choice, and those who did had to exercise it around the age of 18, with no real insight into what they were getting into. > Those workplaces are not rare at all! What makes you think that?
- s-lambert 3y ago
  > You're spending a large part of your life working. Why wouldn't you choose a job that's fun? I've picked two jobs that I thought could be fun but both of them ended up being the same tedium as the non-fun jobs. How do you pick a fun job?
  - usrusr 3y ago
    Had an opportunity to turn something I enjoyed a lot in my spare time into a full time job and it was one of the least happy times in my life. There's a certain convenience in spending your working hours on stuff you identify with enough (even if only barely) to enjoy the successes, but not enough to get overly disappointed by failures. How to pick a fun job: my vote would be pick something that isn't excruciating and then stop wondering wether grass might be greener elsewhere.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

narinxas 3y ago

I had a work colleage who played games BECAUSE he made money from them... essentially some dumb kid from a real wealthy part of the world would pay my former colleague "peanuts" to upgrade their player and gather other stats.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Sure. There are a lot of opportunities in the developing world to remotely extract wealth (legally or otherwise) from the wealthiest part of the world in exchange for services at starvation wages there, thar are well above minimum wages at home. Levelling up the MMORPG characters of rich western kids in exchange for money is one of them, and telling them to "try turning it off and on again" when they're adults is another.
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  I remember a friend buying 1000 gold coins on WoW for €20 back in the day. That was the price of 10 coffees at the time. He "spared" me 100 gold coins (I had only 1 at the time) and it made the WoW experience completely different.
  - xnorswap 3y ago
    And in turn harmed the experience for anyone not engaging in buying gold.
    - Lacerda69 3y ago
      probably ruined their own experience as well. wheb I use cheatcodes it usually ruins the game for me (what is the point playing now that i can have everything)
      - usrusr 3y ago
        I guess it's safe to assume that $20 in pay to win would be pretty far from having everything. But I share the sentiment, its a huge hit to the suspension of disbelief regarding in-game achievement.
  - Foobar8568 3y ago
    In the heyday of EverQuest, UO or other mud, things were selling for much more than a mere $20 for 1000gp ( I used to play wow and was among the first to hit 60 on my server, and most likely I had some server first, so I do know what represented at that time 1000gp), items could be worth a few hundred, if not thousands. Hell I believe it's still the case on some emulator servers (P99 for EQ)

keiferski 3y ago

I spent most of my teenage years playing the “economy” of EverQuest Online Adventures, mostly by collecting rare items and selling them. I don’t think I ever reached the maximum character level, even after playing the game for half a decade. It’s a shame I couldn’t cash all that digital money into real money, but I guess I did enjoy it anyway. I have the impression that people do similar things in games like Eve Online.

gbalduzzi 3y ago

The article does explain the comparison, and it doesn't mean that it's fun. These are the actual comparisons: > You interact with people from all corners of the world. > You complete tasks on different online platforms (Slack, GitHub, VS Code, Google Docs, etc.). > You have a list of your main quests to complete (you can find them in your journ… Kanban board!) > There are also side-quests to take care of (“Hey Damian, could you take a look at this bug?”). > Sometimes you can gang up with your teammates to slay a big beast (“Hey, I have this nasty bug that I have been working on for the past few days. I know you have better knowledge of this particular part of the repository, could we jump on a pair programming session?”). > And you get to level up once in a while!

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> > You have a list of your main quests to complete (you can find them in your journ… Kanban board!) Wish I've been to a place that gave you only one quest journal. The fewest distinct quest journals I ever got to is four: the mailbox, the blessed Jira/Gitlab Issues/Kanban/Trello/whatever board, the personal list of things to be done that don't belong anywhere else, and the TODO/FIXME comments in the codebase. That's a minimum. In one places I had like 4 distinct issue boards in active use. Point being, there's one other major thing other than fun, that games have and work doesn't: videogame UX doesn't suck, and wants to help you do your quests.
- wussboy 3y ago
  Sounds like a business opportunity.
  - bonyt 3y ago
    And so a fifth quest journal was born and provided to every employee.
    - inanutshellus 3y ago
      don't forget the "there's an XKCD for that"! https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

tapland 3y ago

Implying video games are fun. Jokes aside, video games are first and foremost things I want to spend time with, which is the opposite of most jobs. Catchy title but yeah =/

xwdv 3y ago

It is a privilege to only have to play video games for fun. In college, I played World of Warcraft just to farm gold, just to get by.

titanomachy 3y ago
Doesn’t that pay less than minimum wage?
- dingnuts 3y ago
  does every country have a minimum wage? WoW is a bit old now but this kind of thing is still happening in eg Venezuela https://www.polygon.com/features/2020/5/27/21265613/runescape-is-helping-venezuelans-survive https://www.polygon.com/features/2020/5/27/21265613/runescap... who knows where the person you're responding to was living when they needed to farm gold to get by
  - titanomachy 3y ago
    Good point. Referring to university as “college” is very American so I assumed USA, but that’s not conclusive evidence.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>In college, I played World of Warcraft just to farm gold, just to get by. Is that also not a privilege? In most developing countries people have to do much more body or mind crushing activities to support themselves.

Supermancho 3y ago

> Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun What is a game? I would say that a game is an abstract system used to understand our reality (or experiences in life), via a series of interactive actions that alter the system. Generally there is a set of goals (usually just to "win"). I develop software because it's a game. I do watch a lot of progress bars. Aside from that, it's one of my favorite games (to my wife's chagrin). It's fun for me and I'm not the only one. Why does it matter that other people don't enjoy what they do?

Nav_Panel 3y ago
Agreed 100%. A courtroom trial is also a sort of game, but it's not typically fun for those involved. Much the opposite...
digging 3y ago
That's not a bad or incorrect definition of game but it's... also not what people mean when they say "video game" or something like like a video game. The specific language in the article makes it clear that the person is referring to (basically) fantasy MMORPGs.
mym1990 3y ago
This seems like an extremely over complicated way of defining a game. If I play chess, or a video game, or tennis, I am not doing those things to 'understand my reality'. I am doing them because it is usually fun and gives me some kind of dopamine(ymmv), you might even say I play games to get away from reality. Some people use games to learn, some use them to accomplish an otherwise mundane task. Some people split games into 'finite and infinite' but typically they are a form of play, governed by a set of rules, that lead to some outcome. Games can be zero sum, or not.
- Supermancho 3y ago
  > If I play chess, or a video game, or tennis > I am not doing those things to 'understand my reality'. Not to be argumentative, but I am sure you are. You are attempting to control state and then optimizing for a goal. There are constraints on your ability to manage your own mental and physical capabilities (knowledge, limitations, etc).

light_hue_1 3y ago

> usually picked on the basis of the highest compensation because that's what pays the bills, not out of which is most fun. I think you should reconsider some of your life choices then. You're spending a large part of your life working. Why wouldn't you choose a job that's fun? > job and tasks at work also happen to be an activity that's fun to you but that's super rare, and it's best not to spend your life searching for that magic workplace where that could happen, but simply to learn to separate and containerize work and fun. This is some of the worst advice I've ever seen. Those workplaces are not rare at all! So instead of spending your life at a fun job your advice is for people to spend their life at a job they don't like? Jeez. That sounds like a life worth living for sure.

timeagain 3y ago
I’m sure they bring this mentality to work and make it miserable for everyone else too
ferbivore 3y ago
> Why wouldn't you choose a job that's fun? Most people I know never had a real choice, and those who did had to exercise it around the age of 18, with no real insight into what they were getting into. > Those workplaces are not rare at all! What makes you think that?
s-lambert 3y ago
> You're spending a large part of your life working. Why wouldn't you choose a job that's fun? I've picked two jobs that I thought could be fun but both of them ended up being the same tedium as the non-fun jobs. How do you pick a fun job?
- usrusr 3y ago
  Had an opportunity to turn something I enjoyed a lot in my spare time into a full time job and it was one of the least happy times in my life. There's a certain convenience in spending your working hours on stuff you identify with enough (even if only barely) to enjoy the successes, but not enough to get overly disappointed by failures. How to pick a fun job: my vote would be pick something that isn't excruciating and then stop wondering wether grass might be greener elsewhere.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]