Virtual Living

Simple living, extreme early retirement, becoming and being wealthy, wisdom, praxis, personal growth,...
User avatar
Jean
Posts: 1890
Joined: Fri Dec 13, 2013 8:49 am
Location: Switzterland

Re: Virtual Living

Post by Jean »

I own this planet, but I do have some trouble controlling what's happening on it.

BRUTE
Posts: 3797
Joined: Sat Dec 26, 2015 5:20 pm

Re: Virtual Living

Post by BRUTE »

that seems contrary to the definition of ownership

P_K
Posts: 44
Joined: Wed May 04, 2016 9:47 pm

Re: Virtual Living

Post by P_K »

@jacob

Runescape is a reasonably(?) popular MMO that I played back in the day. This video goes over the economy of the game from 2016-2017 time frame using data provided by the game's developers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TIiq7_UccM

Some highlights:
10.8T gold pieces (gp) existed in the Runescape economy in 2016
16.5T gp existed in 2017
So the Runescape economy generated 5.7T gp in 1 year. At the time the conversation rate for real world dollars was ~$1USD/1M gp so 5.7T gp => $5.7M real world dollars generated.

In 2017 the value of every item that existed in game was 73.1T gp ($73.1M USD) (inflated a bit due to banned wealth and some rarely traded items at inaccurate prices).

So items ($73.1M) + gp ($16.5M) = $89.6M of real world wealth in the game.


Funnily enough, I actually calculated what $USD/hour I could potentially earn in the real world as a possible "leg" of my post-FIRE income. I ultimately discarded it due to the rate being too low and the risk too high (real world trading is ban-able). I am sure some of the very regular traders could earn enough GP/day to make a livable income, but I am not sure how often wealth is banned to make it worth it or not.

jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15906
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: Virtual Living

Post by jacob »

@P_K - What was the $USD/hr you calculated? Is there a way to figure out GDP/capita? I suppose this is tricky because people don't live there all the time (should someone spending 10 minutes a month playing be counted as a capita). A better measure would be GDP/playertime.

It's interesting that real world trading is banable. What's the reason for this? The game company doesn't want to deal with 1099s?

2Birds1Stone
Posts: 1596
Joined: Thu Nov 19, 2015 11:20 am
Location: Earth

Re: Virtual Living

Post by 2Birds1Stone »

Oh man, I lived a solid year of my life in a game. Not a year of playing, but a year of actual /played time. 24x7x365

I can definitely see it being a reality in the future, hell, people are living more through social media today than the real world, soon the two will blur together.

daylen
Posts: 2528
Joined: Wed Dec 16, 2015 4:17 am
Location: Lawrence, KS

Re: Virtual Living

Post by daylen »

jacob wrote:
Wed Jan 16, 2019 11:43 am
It's interesting that real world trading is banable. What's the reason for this? The game company doesn't want to deal with 1099s?
The players value prestige. There are many status items that signal wealth/playtime/skill. Allowing real world trading undermines this and turns many players off. A split happened a few years ago into Runescape 3 (RS3) and Oldschool Runescape (OSR). RS3 is more mainstream with some pay-to-win features (mostly cosmetic) and a rapid update cycle, and OSR is basically a rollback to how the game use to be.

The game has spawned an underground market where accounts and gold are exchanged. Generally, the digital black-market should add a significant amount of error when estimating certain features of digital markets.

Kriegsspiel
Posts: 952
Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2012 9:05 pm

Re: Virtual Living

Post by Kriegsspiel »

Kriegsspiel wrote:
Tue Jan 15, 2019 3:08 pm
And that brings up what I thought was the coolest part of Ready Player One: where he could have his OASIS immersion rig act like a gym. I originally wrote "while his mind was watching a movie or something else in the virtual world" but I think that was in a different sci-fi story...
It was bothering me, but I remembered, it's from chapter 7 of Manna, by Marshall Brain, where they're talking about the neural implant technology, Vertebrane, in the Australia Project:
"And what were you saying about exercise? How can a computer system help with exercise?" I asked.

"This sounds a little weird, but here's how it works. The biggest problem with strenuous exercise is that it's no fun. It hurts. But strenuous exercise really helps on the health side. People in the Australia Project are now living 30 years longer than people in the U.S., and exercise is a part of that. Athletes are OK with the pain, but most normal people have no desire to be in pain for an hour or more. So... someone figured out a solution. What you do is disconnect your brain from sensory input and watch a movie or talk to people or handle mail or read a book or whatever for an hour. During that time, the Vertebrane system exercises your body for you. It takes your body through a complete aerobic workout that's a lot more strenuous than most people would tolerate on their own. You don't feel a thing, but your body stays in great shape."

"You are kidding me."

"No, I am not kidding. It is fantastic to have a body that is working at peak athletic performance. You've got to feel it to believe it. I am in fantastic shape. Here, feel my arm muscles." She offered me her arm, and she was surprisingly lean and muscular. I'd never really paid any attention to it, but she was in great shape.

"Let me see if I've got this straight. You disconnect your brain, and you -- your brain -- can do whatever you want on the network. Call, read, play games, whatever. Meantime a computer controls your body. So your body is essentially a robot. Is that right?" I asked.

"Yes, that's right. Your Vertebrane system is driving your body. Meanwhile your brain is off doing whatever." She explained.
Manna is another fiction example of people who choose to live in the virtual world (chapter 8)

Salathor
Posts: 394
Joined: Fri Dec 18, 2015 11:49 am
Location: California, USA

Re: Virtual Living

Post by Salathor »

I think that, perhaps, the question here is whether "virtual reality" and the "real world" have any difference when it comes to the concept of possession.

If one has control over an asset, whether that be a house, a virtual space ship, or a brand, that CONTROL is what's valuable. Just because an object doesn't exist in the physical space doesn't make it any less real than a share of stock, piece of IP, etc. Assets can only have two sources of value: others' desire for it and its ability to produce (or reduce the need for future) work. Virtual goods can possess either of these two sources of value, and thus both sources of value exist in the real world.

P_K
Posts: 44
Joined: Wed May 04, 2016 9:47 pm

Re: Virtual Living

Post by P_K »

@daylen

What's RS3? ;)
In seriousness, I should clarify that I was referring to OSR and not RS3 with any of the numbers. I have no experience with RS3.

@jacob

Depending on the item prices at the given moment and what method I was using between $0.50 - $4.00/hour. Some methods required a good deal of setup while some did not (the low barrier to entry meant the latter was not as reliable for money making). This also does not include arbitrage using the Grand Exchange which is what many players with substantial wealth do for money. I haven't verified this from personal experience but from what I read on it you could make a good deal of wealth on little time assuming you had enough starting capital (you tended to make a percentage of whatever money you had sitting in the GE waiting on trades to execute at any one instance, so the more money you had operating trades the more you made).

From what I could actually do I could not earn a whole lot of dollars by US standards; but, you can see the appeal if you are living in a country with much lower cost of living. The appeal is even greater if you use bots to play for you because you could theoretically run dozens of accounts at once - limited only by hardware and how frequently you were banned (more on bots below).

GPD/capita would be pretty difficult to measure. Like you mention, at what point of time spent should a player be counted? If you look at the active account base, how many of those are accounts owned by the same person? How many of those are scripted bots that will be banned? One could make an attempt at calculating this by looking at the active account base in a year, subtracting the number of bots banned in a year times some factor for bots missed, and dividing by some average number of accounts per player.

GPD/playertime would be better but I'm not sure if it would be mucked up by all the time in OSR spent not building wealth and all the time spent actively destroying it (a material amount). GDP/playertime-on-money-making might be best then?

As for real world trading, part of what made Runescape so appealing when it was first released was that the game was playable in a web browser. That made it highly accessible (great for building a large player base which is essential for an MMO) but it also made the game very easy to script. This scripting ease led to many many accounts being created (the video mentioned 2.5M bot accounts were banned in 2017) for the sole purpose of being run by a program to farm gold which would then be sold to richer (IRL) players. RWT was made banable to discourage this practice. Bots were seen as competition for players in farming many items/resources (especially newer players) since they could run 24-7 and a single person could operate many of them. This depressed prices in the items the bots could farm (but of course it did make life easier for players who wanted to buy those items, the parallel between bots and illegal immigration/outsourcing labor is one I've always enjoyed). The gist is that the developers did not want players to compete with bots and no one likes seeing 40 bald, bearded guys with a hatchet clear cut the forest they were hoping to farm for some gp. RWT was made banable to try to cut the demand for the farmed gp.

Daylen makes a good point as well, and I've never liked pay-to-win models. Though nowadays OSR allows you to buy gold directly from the developers in the form of spending real world dollars on membership bonds (an in-game item that can be exchanged for access to the premium version of the game) which one can then sell to players for gold. Real world trading is still banable though.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9369
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: Virtual Living

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I think it depends on the extent to which status in virtual realities transfers to being able to pay for a pizza (or perform the work necessary to grow all necessary ingredients and provide necessary energy) and/or attract sexual partners.

As technology improves, the wage rate for service oriented activities goes up. The manner in which the average 26 year old French female currently spends ( or “wastes”) her time and money might be more revelatory of future world than the way average 26 year old American male “spends.” IOW, if robots are harvesting the crops, then just as likely humans will spend time shopping for exactly the right scarf as collecting virtual tokens.

jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15906
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: Virtual Living

Post by jacob »

It's very interesting that people prefer in-game market systems that are closer in spirit/practice to things like alternative currencies (Ithaca Hours or Berkshares) that promotes local work. There are also massive capital controls and of course a way around it. I suppose if was easy to import your own vorpal sword into the game, we'd see tarriffs as well. In many ways the preferred economies seem to follow some combination of Mercantilism at the high level and Graeber like values on the player level.

This is probably because a) most players being teenagers(?) don't have a lot of disposable money; and b) maximizing revenue is not part of the Bartle matrix ...

In some sense, it's almost as if the real world is an aberration. However, the real world does have one serious constraint: scarcity of capital, labor, and land. In the game-world you can arbitrarily create more of all(*) of it.

(*) Technically not labor ... but a given game world is prob. more like "The New World" in that regard: Massively underpopulated.

prognastat
Posts: 991
Joined: Fri May 04, 2018 8:30 pm
Location: Texas
Contact:

Re: Virtual Living

Post by prognastat »

I think it's mostly because games are a form of escapism from reality and having reality intrude(rich people buying good stuff and beating you despite your hard work) ruins the experience for many. It effectively nullifies some of the escapism by being reminded that there are people way more successful than you in real life and now there is a reminder in-game.

This seems to be more so in online games rather than online worlds as the former are mostly explicitly competitive and thus someone else bringing in their wealth negatively affects your experience. On the flip side this wasn't as big of a deal in online worlds such as Second Life as rich people bringing in money were buying stuff from other players and thus sharing wealth rather than all the money going to the developer.

Finally kind of in-between there are co-op only online games where people seem to mind rich people buying lots with out of game funds as in this case you aren't competing with them and instead if one of them ends up on your team it actually benefits you.

jacob
Site Admin
Posts: 15906
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
Contact:

Re: Virtual Living

Post by jacob »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_e ... tual_crime is an example of what I was wondering about. Apparently some 17yo built a cyber-brothel charging by the minute. Some MMOs run mob-like organizations demanding protection money. In EVE Online, we find industrial espionage and private army retribution.

I'm sure^H^H^H^Hhope there's positive stuff too but that's an example of what I was talking about where someone creates an identity/role in-game that creates or extracts value INSIDE the game. Compare with designing skins and selling them into the game or being an e-sports athlete and performing for people outside the game.

prognastat
Posts: 991
Joined: Fri May 04, 2018 8:30 pm
Location: Texas
Contact:

Re: Virtual Living

Post by prognastat »

As far as virtual brothels go definitely interesting as far as the legality goes. Effectively I would say it counts more like camgirling rather than prostitution so not really criminal, though probably against TOS on most MMOs.

Of course depending on the game/world it can either be seen as a feature or a problem. For example in EVE the crime and espionage etc is part of the fun for many playing.

Salathor
Posts: 394
Joined: Fri Dec 18, 2015 11:49 am
Location: California, USA

Re: Virtual Living

Post by Salathor »

@Jacob

That EVE crime can only exist because of the work performed by the majority of the player base. Mining ore, manufacturing goods from blueprints, supply logistics, etc., are all player-performed activities that convert the base resources in the game into valuable assets.

I would say the big fights/crime get all the attention, just like in real life, but the majority of man hours in EVE are probably spent "working," just like in real life (those thousand+ dollar ships aren't bought from EVE stores, they're made by players).

Stahlmann
Posts: 1121
Joined: Fri Sep 02, 2016 6:05 pm

Re: Virtual Living

Post by Stahlmann »

esports stars?
top20% youtubers in gaming/twitchers?
eckhm hikimoris?

Post Reply