Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

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Well... I don't really know anymore. I'm with you on the ethics of gambling mechanics. But I'm less certain about the predatory part than I used to be.

I spent some time a few years ago playing some of the multiplayer "strategy" mobile games (FF, GoT, etc). I only ever sunk about $100 into any of them, the fun part for me was the politics and the intrigue on each server and that was roughly the ticket to entry. Got to know some of the whales a little - people who drop $5K-$10K+ on the game without a second thought. No real life names, just some conversations here and there. One was a VC, another a race car driver, lots of people from Kuwait for some reason...

My point is that I'm having trouble applying the "predatory" label when it's high net worth individuals throwing around sums that are ridiculous to me but trivial to them. I probably spend way more on some of my hobbies as a percentage of my income than they do on these games.

Now lower down on the scale, the people spending $100, $200, $500 on these games... that's where I get more uncomfortable.

Do you often enjoy being cannon fodder for people who are already more influential/successful than you IRL?

Enjoy? Not particularly, but isn't that just reality? There's always a bigger fish.

In-game I had no illusions about personally competing or winning given that those games are purely pay-to-win, as I said I just enjoyed watching the server dynamics and the drama. I felt I got enough value out of, say, the $100 spread out over a few months until I got bored with the game.

> Enjoy? Not particularly, but isn't that just reality?

That's kind of the disappointing thing about all this. In retrospect "classic" (as opposed to gacha) games are somewhat egalitarian. It didn't matter how much money you had, if you could master the gameplay and mechanics you could beat anyone else in the world.

It's a shame that the industry is turning so hard towards re-creating real world inequality in these fantasy spaces. This is an ironic reversal of imagined post-scarcity society from sci-fi like Star Trek - instead of creating post-scarcity in the real world we're artificially introducing scarcity to our virtual worlds.

Post scarcity is physically impossible as it assumes infinite energy, infinite space-time, and no entropy generation. Whereas in reality its the opposite, the most energy, resources, and thermodynamic headroom mankind can ever have access to is based on the co-moving light cone centred on Earth.

Not everything imaginable is realizable.

We’re already a post scarcity society by the way an ancient peasant would measure it

We have so much food available that it’s a problem that poor people suffer from eating too much

It’s easier and more convenient to throw electronics, clothing, and furniture away than to bother repairing them

I wouldn’t bend over to pick up a quarter, even though it could buy me a day’s rice or flour

Once we’ve moved industry into space, we could well be ten or a hundred times as wealthy as this. Maybe employment will only be something for overachievers in that distant future

By that standard, we’re already living in a fantastical utopia by the way an ancient peasant would measure it, yet lots of folks in this thread are dissatisfied. Why do you think that is?

I disagree. One of the largest industries right now is creating demand. People being content with what they have is an economic problem. A significant amount of consumption is simply socio-economic signaling and zero-sum games that have little correlation to the finite nature of resources.

There is little the average person truly wants that we cannot provide.

What if more than half the people want to be above average? By definition it’s impossible to fulfill that, now or a billion years in the future. Let alone all the other intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and materialistic desires that will inevitably grow.

You are assuming people have fixed minds, and wants never expand to fill the available resources.

I talked about that. People who want to be above average aren't looking for resources, they're looking for social signifiers. There is zero reason these signifiers have to actually use a lot of resources. It's easy to set it up that way, but it doesn't have to.

I never assumed people have fixed minds. People have complex and ambitious minds. But largely these ambitions are social, and not material. Even "materialistic" desires are rarely about the actual material, they are almost always about the social significance of the material.

‘ It's easy to set it up that way, but it doesn't have to.’

Regardless of how perfect the ‘setup’ the remaining materialistic desires will continue to expand as population and technological capacity grows. There is no known force that can completely extirpate such desires. Since there is no upper limit, all available mass-energy will inevitably be utilized given enough time. You are arguing that such a progression can be delayed, I agree. Perhaps a delay is possible up to millions of years but that’s just shifting the timeframe.

For example, I’m fairly certain I’ve encountered someone that genuinely wants an actual Star Trek like spaceship for their personal use, with a minimal social signalling component.

Even if there’s only 10000 such folks on Earth, that already represents vastly more industrial output than real policy makers can even dream of realizing. Let along the current and future desires of everyone else.

With the rise of professional gaming it's foolish to think you could beat anyone else in the world. Unless you're a professional gamer.

When it comes to those of us with a 9-5 job, there's usually no practical difference between facing off against people being paid to play a game vs people paying to be good in a game.

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