Crypto Konsultant Suggests: Desperately Poor People Could Be NPCs in Video Games | Hacker News Reader

Crypto Konsultant Suggests: Desperately Poor People Could Be NPCs in Video Games

futurism.com

12 pointsArekDymalski9 comments

The article isn't really clear on what's meant by this. I assumed it was people being paid to roleplay characters in games, which isn't a horrid idea per se, except it would only make sense for important characters that benefit from skilled improv acting talent. It would be laughable for random NPCs to try and make a place feel alive.

But the article also seems to refer more to doing labor in pay to earn pyramid scheme games.

Both are pretty stupid. But the former reminds me of the most preposterous part of the Ready Player One movie where it is revealed at the end of the movie that one of the founding developers was secretly the museum curator in the game world the whole time. Which was just... bonkers to try and comprehend that this intelligent, highly skilled person, was roleplaying as a curator in a museum dedicated to his dead friend, catering to teens, and doing non trivial amounts of labor every single day, pretending to not be sentient.

Do these people even hear the words coming out of their mouth? How doesn't this ring some "alarm bells" in their mind... Imagine reducing PLAYERS in a game to NPCs and thinking that's okay.

They're the real NPCs of the world. Probably the generic "Cultist" trash mob you can't even bother to engage in games.

They, don't, care. They're just trying to make a buck. Blockchain cannot add a single damn thing to videogames other than monetization mechanics. These are people who think "fake it till you make it" is an ethos worth looking up to.

How about no and get back to improving AI. To hell with this online everything obsession.

That OC putting aside the sheer absurdity of the idea to begin with!

It's pointless to handwring about something this absurd and unrealistic. The economics of it don't make sense.

Except this has been happening for well over a decade. There are player characters doing (usually very inefficient) moneymaking strategies in most popular MMOs, literally harvesting resources like ore, fish, etc. They then sell this gold online for real money - usually with large overheads like being intermittently banned from the service or having to maintain a subscription for the service.

This is prevalent in South America and Asia as a means to supplement or even make a living, for games like World of Warcraft and Runescape.

The concept proposed is "pay people in the developing world to be a lifelike NPC", which makes no sense - from the game developers' POV you want to automate the NPC because it's not worth even paying 10 cents an hour for what could be free.

Players farming gold or items are fulfilling scarcity for other players, essentially trading on the value differential of labor in the developed versus the developing world. That's something completely different.

Im all for declaring this a terrible dystopian idea but I do think there is sufficient market demand. My points are:

* There is a demand for point and click jobs at extremely low pay rates, whether in developing countries or for aging populations that want employment but are barred from many physical jobs. This provides the supply of workers.

* Games print money, so much so that studios and publishers have become investment vehicles and popular acquisition targets. There's a lot of available capital and interest from adjacent industries.

* Building successful social games is really hard. Companies are chucking billions between mobile, VR, MMO, and other gaming markets. And IMO for the most part they are completely failing outside of standouts like Rockstar and a handful of others. Seriously I've seen nothing out of the Metaverse for all the investment and backing Facebook has put into it - they could really use SOMETHING to standout with.

* Also the activity itself reminds me of renaissance fairs or other re-enactor activities, including Disneyland.

So I think its really possible for a startup to kick this idea around, and its possible its implemented in a game where it is successful and sustainable.

I think the world becomes a worse place if this is normalized, but that really describes most startups these days.

> The concept proposed is "pay people in the developing world to be a lifelike NPC", which makes no sense

Worse: the solution they probably have in mind is to pay those people with cryptocurrency tokens (i.e. worthless company scrip).

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