Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

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ertyu
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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by ertyu »

jacob wrote:
Mon Aug 08, 2022 5:03 pm
I think I'm somewhat motivated by considering the "real world" to be a solved problem (WL8). The real world is after all pretty simple ;-) It is not a source of daily motivation to rehash this solution.
Why not get enlightened?

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by jacob »

The typical real world occupation aims at becoming an expert in some occupation or achieve a high position within that occupation. Been there, done that. I'm not looking to become an expert in counterstrike or a starcraft champion. ERE was more interesting in that it focused on building a system of amateur occupations, the various skills and capitals, and questioned the existing [consumer-worker] paradigm. At WL8 one has essentially maxed out [the S-curve] in terms of occupations to add or try or systems to design.

What's interesting now are paradigms. With the resilience aspect being solid---there's only so much to do once it's constructed---I'm looking to explore other paradigms. Spiritual enlightenment could be one such paradigm. Virtual meaning could be another. I do think we're entering (have entered) a clash like Jean describes of a similar significance to the shift into agriculture or the shift into industrialism. Quo vadis? Will the next paradigm be focusing on monasticism (pick enlightenment), pastoralism (go find your inner wild man), agriculture (permaculture is for you), or will it be virtual (make friends with the AI before it makes a friend out of you). I'm looking at all of them but I also know I'm more temperamentally compatible with some of them than others. Paradigms go very deep towards the soul so it's not just something one installs at a 5 week Paradigm Camp; it's more of a lifetime or at least half a lifetime project.

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by sky »

In my current state of boredom, I would like to visit a virtual world, as a time traveler and explorer. It would have to be a full holodeck experience, not just a screen with headphones. Although it could be a synthetic dream, where the experience is all programmed imagination.

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by ertyu »

@jacob: i still think you should get enlightened. all others are in some way about manipulating the physical world - designing yet another system. why not explore the limits of your own experience and perception to see what you will find? this might be the paradigm you're most resistant to because it seems the most foreign - which in my opinion is the actual reason to try it. it will provide the most challenge and growth.

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Jacob, what you are discussing reminds me of the concept of the "metanarrative." That is, the reason humans are successful as a species is that fictions tie social groups together into more complex forms of organization than could be found strictly in biology. That is, the belief that the lion is the guardian spirit of the tribe and must be worshiped is a fiction, but it is a fiction that ties together a larger number of people than pure intimate relations alone could, thus was the evolutionary breakthrough that allowed for more complex societies. You can therefore think of a metanarrative as similar to the paradigm. It is the fiction that ties life and humans together and gives actions there meaning.

One of the problems with postmodernity is that there are an ever growing number of metanarratives such that people can no longer understand what gives followers of a different metanarrative their meaning. Because metanarratives must exist to facilitate communication between groups, too many metanarratives creates a Tower of Babel scenario where people can no longer grok each other. Some branches of postmodern and metamodern philosophy are about bridging this gap between metanarratives or finding new metanarratives that work for are current, very weird, era of history.

Your experiment here seems to be about finding a new metanarrative in the cultural chaos that is postmodernity. Especially if one is looking for a metanarrative that is far more abstract than previous ones. Ie, finding meaning in EVE vs worshiping the lion spirit.

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by zbigi »

jacob wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 6:45 am
Will the next paradigm be focusing on (...) or will it be virtual (make friends with the AI before it makes a friend out of you).
I don't grok this fragment. Current virtual worlds are either about skill (EVE online, Counterstrike, Magic Online) or hanging out (WoW, Minecraft etc.). There are no new paradigms there, as both skill and hanging out are already well-represented in the real world.

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by jacob »

zbigi wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 10:40 am
There are no new paradigms there, as both skill and hanging out are already well-represented in the real world.
The difference is that the virtual activity is literally a bullshit type job in the sense that it produces nothing of tangible value that in any way is necessary for the economy. Of course those jobs also exist in the real world but not to the same degree. Virtually it's literally guaranteed that the activity has to have self-generated meaning, like a hobby.

I think resolving [the meaningfulness] is important as automatization takes over more and more jobs. If people are increasingly no longer needed for work, what can they do instead? Where will they find their meaning [of existence]? Staring at a wall to become enlightened? Staring at a screen being the virtual CEO of an alliance? Starting at a mountain feeling one with the universe?

The new paradigm would not be in how the framework is approached. No matter what the framework is, most will generally just try to become reasonable good within it. The new paradigm would be what the framework is, in this case different from the industrial one where one is a specialized cog producing widgets or services that get sold for money. EVE seems very similar to the industrial paradigm except what gets produced are virtual space ships. It is however also much faster and with fewer rules than IRL, hence interesting to explore. For example, does EVE have players who sit on a virtual asteroid and spend their time meditating on the beauty of the local gas giant rising over the horizon?

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

jacob wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 10:49 am
For example, does EVE have players who sit on a virtual asteroid and spend their time meditating on the beauty of the local gas giant rising over the horizon?
I've seen some online communities that mix fiction and meditative concepts. The end goal is to learn meditative visualization and lucid dreaming so well that you can experience the virtual worlds within your own mind. (See reality shifting and tulpamancy if you want to fall down a very weird rabbit hole of internet strangeness)

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by daylen »

Better yet, meditate upon alternate realities that can then be coded/animated into a game/simulation to share in the virtual commons. Perhaps as open-sourced, team efforts.

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by guitarplayer »

I have not much to add other that, what might be known to most thread participants, Yuval Noah Harari talks about these themes in his 'Sapiens' and 'Homo Deus'. In particular he points to computer games and drugs as the current solutions to the meaninglessness crisis. He is a gifted writer, too.

Upon further reflection, it reminds me of Joscha Bach who claims (probably not as the only one) that we are living a simulation already. He wrote a PhD thesis about it. Haven't read it (yet).

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by Jean »

There are two things.
First ist that if we are far from the norm, it isn't because we are supposed to go online to find similar people, but because the skillset it brings doesn't has to be carried by many individuals in a group. But as today, human groups are much bigger than normal, there are actually to many people far from the norm to give them all a role similar to what they would have had in a tribal setting, and which would have given them meaning.
I am very convinced that the activity that were needed for the group to survive, were making us happy when performed.
I think of hunting a mamoth with your tribe member, or understanding how nature work, or building a complexe irrigation system, or hunt plan that end up working.
As in today's economy, those role are very rare, many people resort to video game to perform activities that are similar to those from the brain perspective.
People whose hapiness is conditioned to brain states that video games cannot recreate tipically find video games boring.
But if video game are able to mimic what makes you happy, they are going to be very satisfying, and it will be very hard to find something to do outside that is more satisfying, unlike you have a huge budget.

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by prudentelo »

OL game "job" entertains other players

More "bullshit" that TV repair man ?

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by jacob »

OutOfTheBlue wrote:
Mon Aug 08, 2022 9:19 am
Eloquently, the text following the above quoted text from "Fuck off, Google" ) reads (my bolds):
The virtue of the hackers has been to base themselves on the materiality of the supposedly virtual world. In the words of a member of Telecomix, a group of hackers famous for helping the Syrians get around the state control of Internet communications, if the hacker is ahead of his time it’s because he “didn’t think of this tool [the Internet] as a separate virtual world but as an extension of physical reality.” This is all the more obvious now that the hacker movement is extending itself outside the screens…
I think the key here is that hackers, by the very definition of hacking, is aware of the man behind the curtain [for whatever level the given curtain exists]. ERE is basically hacking consumer-career culture. Playing a different game but using the existing rules to liberate the individual. Hackers are operating at one level above where most perceive the world. The ability is very useful!

The direction I was going with in this thread, though, was the ability to create different/additional worlds and potentially hack those insofar they're meaningful. For example, in EVE casinos and war-bonds emerged by hacking a space-trading game.

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by Campitor »

I played World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. I was part of a "clan" in both games. I used to host a Teamspeak and then a Ventrilo server so we could use voice communications to conquer high end content. Playing with people online and chatting via headphones was fun - lots of funny people online. Some of the best laughs I ever had was listening to jokes and stories told by people all over the world.

But I never felt that the game was better than the real world. To me gaming was an outlet for my curiosity and problem solving - better than sitting in front of the TV and a lot cheaper than going to the movies.

I loved to explore the open worlds in gaming and find the hidden easter eggs sprinkled in by the developers. For those of you who played "WoW", I was the first person on my server to figure out how to sneak into Mt Hyjal when it was a closed zone. I also played the Auction House and made millions in gold - it was fun for a while but making money became too easy and it became very boring. Find the bottlenecks in crafting and leveling for the most popular classes and professions, and then profit.

And does anyone remember the Greedy Goblin website? At first it was about playing WoW and how to make gold in the WoW economy. And for some reason Jacob reminds me of the Greedy Goblin's view of humanity and how they behave. Some links for the curious: Bad players have skill, good players have doctrines, What took me so long?
(a post about starting EVE online), and his infamous Moron and Slacker post About M&S. He also has a lot of content regarding EVE Online economy. And via his website I was introduced to Sirlin's play to win strategy which does translate to real life scenarios: Sirlin's Play to Win.

I switched to Call of Duty and competing against other clans for ranking. That was fun for a while but it became too "grindy" so I switched to playing puzzle games (my favorite now) such as Myst, Riven, etc. I really like the exploration which requires connecting various answers to solve a major puzzle in order to access additional areas in the worldscape.

And being a gamer was a big help to landing a career in IT. I learned how to debug computer performance, deploy servers, build websites, cooperate with folks online (a huge bonus now), be a patient and persistent debugger, and how to investigate latency over the internet.

While I would agree that the real world is superior to the online world, I see no harm in dabbling in both and taking the best that each has to offer. Just don't let the virtual world dominate your real world responsibilities to family and responsibilities. And nothing beats real world exploration. ;)

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by theanimal »

Is the quest to find an individual or societal solution? If it’s just the individual scale than one will not necessarily need to worry about falling under the averages when it comes to being able to pursue things that are know to provide meaning. For example, Randers suggests that the nature option I s dead and that humans weigh less than wild animals. That may be true on average but I would posit that there are many places in the world where that is not the case and the opposite still holds true. I live in one such place. Off the top of my head there are 4 species that alone as a species weigh more than the human residents that reside here. I would be very surprised if this was the only place where that still held true. Unfortunately it is also a testament to the tremendous decrease in populations in other areas as wild animal population density here is far below that of more moderate and abundant climes. It also highlights that the opposite must be prevalent as well, areas with hardly any mammals except humans, which I suppose would lead one to digital worlds.

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by Lemur »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 11:02 am
I've seen some online communities that mix fiction and meditative concepts. The end goal is to learn meditative visualization and lucid dreaming so well that you can experience the virtual worlds within your own mind. (See reality shifting and tulpamancy if you want to fall down a very weird rabbit hole of internet strangeness)
People seem to do this with Skyrim. Just get lost in the trance of looking at the artwork of the game. The music being quite relaxed. Just walking around hearing wild animals and your character's footsteps.
https://preview.redd.it/qrl0ot7befi31.j ... c10d5436fc

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by jacob »

Using my newly built rig, I've finally been able to test out whether there's meaning to be found in the virtual world via the games I want to play as opposed to the games I can play due to the limits on "my" previous system (borrowing DW's potato-level windows computer).

I have not gone beyond installing EVE but instead focused on two other games that I used to enjoy vicariously on the youtubes. If "Grim Reapers" or "The Mighty Jingles" ring a bell (ha!), you already know what I'm talking about. If not, we're talking "World of Warships" and "Digital Combat Simulator" (also "Falcon BMS").

Fundamentally, the question I was wanted to explore was whether the Randers2052 suggestion of habituating yourself to virtual worlds and electronic entertainment instead of a rapidly declining real world of travel and nature in order to avoid the trend towards grief and disappointment as those get increasingly unavailable, is a good one or at least a viable one?

I think it is but with some unresolved caveats. Specifically these two:
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 10:37 am
One of the problems with postmodernity is that there are an ever growing number of metanarratives such that people can no longer understand what gives followers of a different metanarrative their meaning. Because metanarratives must exist to facilitate communication between groups, too many metanarratives creates a Tower of Babel scenario where people can no longer grok each other. Some branches of postmodern and metamodern philosophy are about bridging this gap between metanarratives or finding new metanarratives that work for are current, very weird, era of history.
jacob wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 10:49 am
The difference is that the virtual activity is literally a bullshit type job in the sense that it produces nothing of tangible value that in any way is necessary for the economy. Of course those jobs also exist in the real world but not to the same degree. Virtually it's literally guaranteed that the activity has to have self-generated meaning, like a hobby.
According to trackers (everything is tracked now, better get used to it), I've spent about 20 hours per week gaming for the past few months. (This is actual active playing time. I log out when I'm not active, so no artificially inflating the numbers.) This is a lot (I think?) and perhaps comparable to a "full time" job---at least the kind where you can finish the actual work in half the time and spend the rest of the time killing time or creating busy-work for yourself.

(A few months doesn't make me an authority on this point, so bare with me. Still ...)

When it comes to the question of meaningfulness, AE's comment definitely hits the mark. The games mentioned above are not your boomer parents' nor your Gen-X cohort's "concept of videogames". Over the past twenty years, some games have moved way past the Pacman or Duke Nukem stage.

WOWs is perhaps better classified like a PvP (player vs player) eSport. To older generations, eSports sounds like ridiculous concept, but compare to chess or poker, which actually does get some respect. Same thing! It takes skill and less skilled people like to watch the best. For most participating enthusiasts it remains at the level of "beer league". Still, it is both hard and challenging. Think tennis and https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tenni ... 0679778314 You get good by practicing. It's a perishable skill. It literally requires ongoing training to get and stay consistently good at it. Internally (intersubjectively) it's now no different than any other amateur sport, activity, or hobby. However, ...

(I think PvP is a difference in kind compared to the traditional PvE (player vs environment) games of olden times. There's a difference between going up against "live players" vs going up against NPCs.)

The intersubjective overlap is extremely narrow, though. You might be one of the best players in the world, but objectively speaking, you're just sitting in front of a computer doing hand2eye coordination (mine has really gotten a lot better to the point where I sometimes amaze myself at how I can now instantly hit whatever I want to click at from the other side of the screen :-P ) and interobjectively speaking (that is, as far as most people are concerned), "you're still just playing video games", which to most people over the age of 30 remains a childish pursuit... unlike say being a passenger on an airplane to an exotic destination or being paid $20 or $40 per hour in a job to transfer numbers from one spreadsheet to another.

In terms of the last example, people might not understand or appreciate clicking on spreadsheets, but they definitely appreciate the indirect validation of someone getting paid by the hour and the job title that comes with it. As far as I've been able to estimate, all gaming efforts at the not-sponsored-rockstar level pay about $0.50/hour on the grey market. This is likely because the competition is global. Also, "program associate" looks better on a resume than "virtual battleship captain" even if the learning curve similarly hard. Likewise, "sports ball coach" sounds better than "virtual squadron leader".

Similarly, interobjectively speaking, most people find it a lot easier to understand how you're out running 10k each day because you're "training for a marathon" than how you're reading procedural manuals for communicating with a virtual air traffic controller or AWACS at a professional level as part of a videogame. I mean, why are you even doing this when the airplane isn't real?

OTOH, why are you even out there running to replicate a long-distance-running-story that was so crazy that it became legendary, when you could just pick up a phone a call in the message instead of killing yourself by running the distance? (if you didn't know, the original marathon runner died of exhaustion after delivering his message)

See my point? If not, welcome to the struggle ;-)

My point is that the virtual/gaming world is still on par with an esoteric hobby that is very hard to explain (narrow intersubjective overlap) to anyone outside the hobby. Therefore, anyone looking for external validation or validation in terms of what they do for a living or even what they do now that they're retiring remain SOL for now insofar they turn towards virtual games.

To be fair, the same also holds for a lot of other retirement activities that are hard for muggles to understand. Ordinary people will be no more impressed with "watching movies", "practicing yoga", or "writing poetry", because in their mind those activities are not associated with the measures of "doing good", "entertaining themselves", or "contributing to charity" which are just about the only frameworks they understand beyond working a job.

OTOH, the current virtual gaming world is materially deeper than your grand-parents' perception of "video games". Indeed, in some cases, a few games are now a lot deeper and more complicated than most jobs. Let me introduce you to DCS or worse, Falcon BMS.

Both of these now simulate real world fighter jets at about a 90-95% accuracy level.

To give you some background, I used to play a lot of fligt-sims back in the 1990s. Back then, sims had some 15 different kinds of input-commands (switching missiles, ECM, chaff, flares, map, target selection, etc.) and that was considered hard. Manuals were about 100 pages long and a lot of that was "goodies" like fictional narratives to get you in the spirit, or long indexes of various payloads.

These days, sims are as true to life as they can be. You're looking at 300 buttons and full-cockpit dials and some 500-1000 pages of tech manuals (often the ones from the real plane). The manual to just turn on the engines and avionics of a modern fighter jet is is 50-100 pages long. (I've still not gotten through a proper ramp start.) It's no longer a "game sim". It's a "study sim" of the real airplane. You have now available what used to cost several million dollars 30 years ago. You can put a competent simpilot into the corresponding plane and they can tell you what 90%+ of the dials mean and what they do ... probably also do a decent job at flying the real plane. Disaster movies where ATC talks someone down by explaining each button are gone. These days, it would be more like "the captain passed out. Is anyone on board familiar with the 737Max on FSX? Yes? Great! Please come to the front..." (probably every sim nerd's hero fantasy).

Overall, I think we're in a transition/liminal space with this [new] world. I now understand why some collect BTC, attach value to NFTs, or spend time (and real money!!!) dressing up their avatars. I'm not there personally, but I do see how both reflect real human effort and how the difference of [intersubjective] opinion might just be generational.

WOWs can definitely feel like a real bullshit kind of job where you log in, do your thing and get your daily rewards in order to rack up points and not lose your streak. (Sound familiar?)

Similarly, DCS---aka the study-sim---can feel like a college education with a ton or reading and practicing including a steep learning curve. BMS's learning curve is practically vertical just to get off the ground. In terms of how real it is ... hmmm .. not sure... but I still get sweaty palms trying to land a jet at 300kph. The simulation feels real enough to make it matter. Then again, after all this work, where's my degree? Where are my job offers? It isn't and there aren't so from that perspective it's the ultimate waste of time.

As far as the Randers2052 suggestions are concerned, this is good news, though. Unlike your local sports club that offers training Mon, Wed, Fri classes from 7pm-8pm, these interobjective gaming communities are 24/7 operations. WOWs, for example, has a player community of 7500 people, so there's always someone on.

The interobjective aspects also allow you to work yourself up from a player to a team-leader or maybe a commentator or a coach. You'll see many of the same roles as IRL equivalents. E.g. PvP games have coaches and commentators. EVE has CEOs and diplomats. Some of these positions actually can pay money (but only directly or indirectly via advertising) but it's mostly either at the rockstar-level (sponsorships and prize money) or as a streamer/commentator. You're not going to make more than the $0.50/above equivalent mining asteroids in your little spaceship even if it costs as much as a real life car. (Just like NFTs can be inflated to insane values, so can rare digital content.)

In short, I'd say that whatever the virtual world is or will become, there's presently enough to keep you occupied in whichever way you desire (whether exploring, achieving, socializing, killing). HOWEVER, you will probably still find it hard to explain what you're doing to most other humans, at least for a good while. Insofar you need to derive meaning, respect, or even understanding from other people, you're SOL. You're basically at the forefront of working fundamentally useless underpaid bullshit-type jobs.

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by daylen »

Before enlightenment: move dirt
After enlightenment: move virtual dirt

:P

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by jacob »

daylen wrote:
Thu Mar 07, 2024 9:45 am
Before enlightenment: move dirt
After enlightenment: move virtual dirt
My perspective might be restricted by choosing games that simulate parts of the real world and therefore lead to roles and functions that are similar to those found in the real world instead of playing glass bead games.

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Re: Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

Post by daylen »

It's not clear to me where real ends and virtual begins. I see it kind of like a spectrum of binding where some activities like cooking tend to be tightly bound to reality and some activities like chess are loosely bound to reality. Though it is always possible to alter binding density through analogy or modeling. As in some sense, the activity of cooking generalizes less well as a model of planetary geopolitics than the activity of chess. Maybe it's the mathematician in me but all the activities along this spectrum are self-similar and have become highly interconnected in my mind. I can pretend to do an activity while doing an entirely unrelated activity just by imagining a different binding (e.g. chess pieces as military mobilizations). Homomorphisms are abound, and I suspect that the virtual world will continue binding to the real world such that actions in games could correspond to actions in reality. Constraints and causes mapped between worlds. This kind of metaversal thinking seems to generally result in more creative outcomes regardless of the activity. Also allows for simulated risky behavior that would otherwise break critical systems, translating into less systemic breakage given an accurate enough simulation.

Sure, it makes sense to bind yourself tightly to reality if that reality lacks good sims, but if your reality is filling up with sims then a loose binding can be more fulfilling.

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