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.
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.
Not everything imaginable is realizable.
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
There is little the average person truly wants that we cannot provide.
You are assuming people have fixed minds, and wants never expand to fill the available resources.
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.
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.
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.