[Release Date: November 22, 2022] Most players think that loot boxes (essentially randomized rewards schemes) are a form of gambling, and many are concerned that they’ll bring the same dangers of gambling to gaming. Some have called for governments to regulate loot boxes in games as they do with other forms of gambling. What have governments done about this? Has any of it worked? Is any of it necessary?
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
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Shlomo Sher: All right. Welcome everybody. We’re here today with the Tom Rogers. Tom Rogers is a sociologist and criminologist working at the University of Sunderland, Uk: He’s interested in the commercial logics of the video game industry. Specifically how the industry has experimented with and ethically justified methods of measurement and monetization, which is what we’re talking about today.
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Shlomo Sher: Um. He’s also published works on how video games offer up ethically exceptional experiences and the British Journal Criminology. Ah, which is, you know, Tom, you’re definitely the first criminologist on this show. You know it’s um. It’s amazing. The range of experts that we’ve had in this show. But criminology is not one. I thought we would.
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Shlomo Sher: You know we would have. Of course you’re a sociologist as well, and you know It’s probably fitting more into the sociology part. But that’s still really cool, because ah! Who would? Who would have thought that a journal of criminology would be talking about video games?
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Tom Rodgers: I mean, I am a primarily a sociologist by trade. But so it’s like for me. Criminology is sort of
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Shlomo Sher: ah subfield of of sociology, really. So I I guess that’s why I sort of say both. But but yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s actually quite a few criminologists I know over here in the Uk. Who read quite a lot about video games, especially ethics of of video games, you know, and things like that. We definitely want to talk afterwards to get more involved. Tom is also the co-founder of the International video games. Research network multiplay
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Shlomo Sher: time. Rogers: Welcome to the show.
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah,
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Tom Rodgers: thanks. Very Much
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Shlomo Sher: It’s great to be here. Yeah, Thanks for inviting me on. And yeah, absolutely. It’s a really interesting topic that we’ve got to go through today,
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Shlomo Sher: and we’ve got a lot on here. Let Let me say to to you listeners that Ah, this is a topic that can get technical. We’re going to try to keep it as minimally technical as we can while getting to the issues the best we can, and I I want to start with this.
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Shlomo Sher: When we decided to do this episode, I posted a call out for this episode on Twitter. Ah, I had, and I really had a misconception about what play to earn men. I’ve heard the name Ah! Thrown around a bunch. I thought it essentially just meant.
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Shlomo Sher: You know um all the different ways that you can make money playing video games right? Um. Besides, officially being like a tester, you know. Let’s let’s say, for for yeah, And from the responses that I got to my posts, a lot of other people also had misconceptions of what we were talking about.
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Shlomo Sher: Um, especially confusing it would pay to win, and things like that. So I essentially
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Shlomo Sher: I thought that it would apply to any um ah! To being paid to play a game in order to populate that game with players to attract other players. One of my students and her family does. That Ah, that it will include playing a game that asks for permission to use your computer’s processing power to mind for cryptocurrency
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Shlomo Sher: in exchange for real-world money, while I thought that was innovative and interesting. Um! Not that I would ever allow my process and power to be used this way. Ah! And that it would include the use of nfts and blockchain technology, which is really what we’re going to talk about in some way that would allow players to to make money. So I guess, Tom, for starters. Can you clarify for us? What is the what is exactly play to Ern? What it? What does it apply to. And
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Shlomo Sher: how are players supposed to make money through playing? And we’re going to get to that last part later on. But just the general, the overall idea.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah, of course. I mean, I think you’ve highlighted something that’s quite important. Actually, to recognize is that play to earn as a general term in video game. It’s been around a really long time. Actually, it’s been. It’s been around a very long time, like whether officially or unofficially, and there is a lot to be said about the unofficial going back even further, you know.
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Tom Rodgers: And so I kind of just going to separate that out into two distinct categories, and we’re obviously going to focus, I think, most incentive on the latter category. But play to earn in general, you know, we we can go all the way back to something like world of Warcraft and the goldfire. That’s a place of what we’re raft, and you know there’s there’s the rumors of you know, there being a very big kind of East and West Service provision of of
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Shlomo Sher: of Chinese players basically playing, you know, twelve, thirteen hours a day, and supposedly in sweatshots and mining this stuff and then selling it, or power leveling, which is a a phenomenon where you can pay someone to level your character for you right off. And so so in that sense, you know,
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Tom Rodgers: playing games in order to earn money, which is the general term that has been around for a very long time in a lot of different forms, you know. And I think in a way, it’s important to recognize that,
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Tom Rodgers: because actually the industry has been very sensitive to the development by people outside of its official industry, remit by paying attention to what they’re doing, and actually starting to try and think of ways of adopting those ideas into the industry’s commercial logic. And then
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Tom Rodgers: that’s something that um I sort of. I did do a little bit of sort of thinking about in my Phd. But the second category, obviously, which we’re talking about today I would call, you know I kind of distinguish and call it key to E, which is kind of the
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Tom Rodgers: That’s the industry term for this new revenue model that’s being touted as kind of like the next key stage in video gaming history. I suppose you know, with all the the hyperbole and stuff that goes along with it. And um that’s that’s play to earn as a business model,
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Tom Rodgers: right? You know where it’s. It’s very specifically a form of business model rather than
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Tom Rodgers: rather than a um.
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Tom Rodgers: Just a generic term for people being able to earn money whilst playing games. So it’s a I guess,
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Tom Rodgers: for me it’s like the deliberate building of a game around Nfts non-fungible tokens. Yes, there’s going to be a lot of acronyms today. But I think we can kind of keep those through a minimum as much as possible or blockchain-based content basically as a form of exchange that the game is built around from the ground up.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah, and that’s that’s what play to earn. It kind of means at this current moment in the video game industry’s history when it’s um, You know, this is being touted as a really big potential development, for. But people are gonna supposedly be taking on board and and developing games like I said from the ground up around.
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Tom Rodgers: I guess the main thing to point out. Sorry. Go ahead. No, please. I didn’t mean I interrupt. Sorry.
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Tom Rodgers: No, it’s okay. I was just going to say that kind of going on to the next point you asked about about it is well, what is it? Is effectively in it in as many ways it’s it’s
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Tom Rodgers: another way or a new way. Really, for players to make money whilst playing games. But in particular
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Tom Rodgers: is
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Tom Rodgers: it’s touted as being able to curtail the problem of ownership that’s been around for a very long time when it comes to this kind of stuff, right?
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Tom Rodgers: The idea of in-game content being always predominantly owned, or you know, absolutely owned by the Game Company is supposedly
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Tom Rodgers: the bottom of that buck. It falls out with this whole new model that’s coming out, which is display to earn Mechanic bill around cryptocurrencies, and the idea is that players will have the autonomy to buy and sell stuff that belongs to them,
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Tom Rodgers: that they that they generate or create or earn within the game, using blockchain technology, which is, you know, a a form of exchange market exchange
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Tom Rodgers: that is completely autonomous and anonymous, You know. That’s the idea is that it’s building on an already existing form of market to introduce it into game mechanics, and that’s, I think that’s where the P two E model sits, you know, overall, So I think.
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Tom Rodgers: But I want to kind of focus on it too much. One thing to bear in mind that this brings about that, I think conceptually, is very interesting
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Tom Rodgers: that this brings up one particular concept about the idea of the player investor
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Tom Rodgers: as as kind of like a new thing that the players are almost being seen as forms of investors. Now in a blockchain technology rather than just like a player producer which you’ve had in the past people that create content within games. Now you have this idea of the player investor, and that’s kind of the significant thing, I think, for for the audience and for for everyone interested in this stuff to think about It’s that what’s new about this is that it? It creates this new relationship between the player and the game, that they are a form of investor in its sort of
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Tom Rodgers: ecosystem of market exchanges, because they’re going to be predominantly trading cryptocurrency. Basically
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Shlomo Sher: But does that kind of yeah? Yeah. Okay. So there’s a lot that Andy, Do you want to go first, or should I? Yeah, Yeah, I just wanted to. There. There was a very minor blip
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Tom Rodgers: before the Nft. Started to show up, and before before blockchain it showed up where there was a Pte. A play to earn a model that was based on a sharing advertising revenue.
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Tom Rodgers: But the advertising revenue dropped so precipitously soon thereafter that that model didn’t really work for it. I mean there wasn’t any profits to share, basically because the revenue for advertising Only, you know, this would be like in mobile games where you’d see papa bads and and that sort of thing. There was a way.
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A Ashcraft: And so I started. I actually started to see that that Pdae play to earn moniker being used in that way before the blockchain stuff came around, so blockchain sort of, and that it sort of came up, and it went away, and then Blockchain came around, and they were like Ooh! We could. We could do this again. We can iterate on this idea.
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Tom Rodgers: I think
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Tom Rodgers: one thing to to speak to that very briefly is that um, this isn’t really entirely new, like there. There’s always continuity with with previous ways in which I think it’s developed, and I think actually, it’ll become clear as we go through a lot of the questions that we’re going to go through that there are a lot of affinities between this current moment,
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Tom Rodgers: and say that the free-to-play moment that happened about ten to twelve-ish years ago and continued for about four to five years, as people argued in, debated over whether this is the way we should be going or not. So on. What’s the moral and ethical implications of this? And so on. So I think it’s really interesting that you point out that there are. You do see these little moves
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Tom Rodgers: where something emerges. Then it might disappear for a while, but then it comes back in a whole new configuration. But it’s still it’s still a form of continuity isn’t it. You know, I think that happens a lot, and it’s important to recognize those moments, I think.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah. And I think it’s really important to to see them as sort of these these iterative things that are. I mean in the game that everybody in the games industry understands that like, in order to make these things work well, we have to iterate. We have to just keep doing the same like like. Take this idea that somebody did, and do it again, but do it better,
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Tom Rodgers: and that’s what we’re seeing.
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Shlomo Sher: Okay, I I want to take you back a bit before we get into all the other questions we have, Right? I want to make sure our listeners understand Number One. This is supposed to be all about kind of a new kind of ownership. Can you explain a little something about what is the
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Shlomo Sher: current? The let’s call it the classic model, the traditional model of ownership in video games. When I get something. When I get a let’s say, a fifa player in in, you know. Fifa, Do I own that player or not?
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Tom Rodgers: Technically not
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Shlomo Sher: like I mean I I I got it from A. From a from a legal perspective. You know the intellectual property rights
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Tom Rodgers: to that content is is owned by the developer or distributor, or whatever it is that has the rights to it. I mean a great example just to give you Is my steam library right? Because I,
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Tom Rodgers: hundreds, if not close to one thousand games in my steam library. I technically don’t own any of them. Actually, if valve was to go bus,
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Tom Rodgers: I I don’t have ownership of those games. I. It’s all integrated into a platform that is completely and totally owned intellectual property, wise by them, and I mean i’m not saying that’s going to happen. But in theory, if it was to happen, I wouldn’t have access to this.
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Tom Rodgers: I’ve made for it as a as a form of service, if you know what I mean
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Shlomo Sher: right? And it should be also clear that steam doesn’t own those rights, either. So these games are they. They have a license from those game publishers to publish on their platform. And so, if one of those publishers goes down
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Shlomo Sher: the chain, the chain starts with the publisher and goes all the way to you, and if the intermediary of valve goes down, then there has to be a whole new way to access those those games which wouldn’t necessarily be there, you know.
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Right
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Shlomo Sher: now, you know this is clearly different than the games. If you had the games on, let’s say Cd Roms, or something right then you would own them. You can sell them. But you know I can take my player from Fifa, and I can. Let’s say, sell that player.
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Shlomo Sher: Okay, Um! How can I sell something? And we’ve had long history of buying and selling in video games. How can I sell things without owning them?
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Shlomo Sher: That’s a very good question, and it’s it’s quite an intricate one as well, because I mentioned already before that the idea of play to earn has been around for a long time, and to be clear things like goldf that took place in world Warcraft were entirely considered by games that used to be clandestine ventures. These weren’t things that they endorse, And actually they were tired by all right, illegal,
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Tom Rodgers: but I mean since then,
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Tom Rodgers: and I mean even even going back a little further. But since then, predominantly that games companies
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Tom Rodgers: have experimented with and really fleshed out, and in many ways like really, really, in some cases really done it very, very well. They have created almost kind of their own markets where they actually
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Tom Rodgers: get around some of that problem by either using an intermediary like like like paypal, where you can use that to purchase in-game content, and then that in game content can be bought and sold for real money within the game
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Tom Rodgers: course, but it’s. But, generally speaking,
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Tom Rodgers: this is only, generally speaking, really a lot of that transactional sort of behavior. Or you know that market of exchange
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Tom Rodgers: usually only really takes place within that game. It’s almost like a It’s a sovereign market in a way, if you think about it that way, like I mean, I used to play a game called War Thunder
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Tom Rodgers: Um, owned by guide and entertainment, and they implemented a marketplace, and it was really interesting to look at, because you pay real money, you can buy and sell tank for planes from other players,
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Tom Rodgers: and you use real money to do it. But once that once those items are in that market. They can’t be taken out of it. They’re still contained within the overall intellectual property, right framework, I suppose, of the game world. If that makes sense.
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Shlomo Sher: So you can’t take that tank, pull it out and put it into another game or anything like that. I mean that doesn’t make sense right. It doesn’t really make sense, so it wouldn’t do anything any other
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Tom Rodgers: exactly, and they they used, for example, with gauge and entertainment. They They created something called guidance coin, which is their
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Tom Rodgers: equivalent currency that you could exchange for real world currency in order to then make exchanges on their marketplace. If you so I mean so it’s a way to bring real world money value into their marketplace, and then it’s expressed in a token form by their currency that you then use to buy and sell games in their game. Economy,
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Shlomo Sher: right? Right? It’s very common in games now to buy. I mean. I can even go to the grocery store and buy cards for like roadblocks. Ten dollars ten dollars. I pay at the grocery store
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Shlomo Sher: and take this card in, and it’s got a a code, and then I get ten dollars worth of coins, robots, coins, whatever their coins that’s like for grow bucks. Yeah.
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Shlomo Sher: And this this is A. This is a really important point, actually, because I think it does clarify one of the other differences with nfts being introduced. It’s that all of these things we’ve just been discussing now are about the creation of almost like a sovereign market with its own
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Tom Rodgers: currency or token of currency within a game world that the Game company have complete control and ownership over,
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Tom Rodgers: whereas with with the introduction of the P. Twe. Or play to earn business model, the idea is that cryptocurrency should
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Tom Rodgers: reconfigure that concept of ownership and the ability to have a market of exchange that can,
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Tom Rodgers: that that can be outside of the game as well that players will be able to in theory trade using cryptocurrency, meaning it doesn’t have to simply just be related to one game. It’s in theory can be related to any games that you can buy and sell this content. How that’ll look in practice is still a question, because I think ultimately actually a practical difficulty. That is, how do you take content from one game and make it valuable outside of that game? Because that’s that’s an issue. I’ve not really seen many people discussing, but and that’s something that they tell me that it doesn’t matter where the experience takes place,
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Shlomo Sher: you can still make money from it. But if the game dies, so does all the content that’s billion that game. So that’s an ethical issue for us to consider. I think right. So So It seems to me that with this ownership thing there there’s two issues. One is the sovereign market issue that you’re talking about where the item only
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Shlomo Sher: exists. Right. Ah, within the game, right? And you really can’t take it out. And that’s certainly a limitations of ownership. And if n ofts can change something about that that’s interesting. The other thing is that, as I understand, as you said early, you don’t legally own the item in the game.
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Shlomo Sher: So let’s say the tanks that you’re talking about Are the planes right? You don’t own them, but rather the game allows you to. If I get the the game allows you to use them, and even though you can buy and sell them right, they’re not really yours in the normal way we think of something being yours. Is That is that right? Yeah,
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Tom Rodgers: In the legal sense of private property ownership.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah, they don’t belong to me. They they are not my sovereign property to do it as I wish. But you know I I can’t. I can’t technically a good example to to kind of ratify that it’s. I can’t. For example, legally speaking, take my walk under account, which has all my vehicles in it, and sell it to somebody else for real world money.
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Shlomo Sher: Right? That’s technically legal. People do do it all time. You know they there are marketplaces for that. You know It’s it’s there. It’s right there. People spy and sell game accounts, but when you, when you technically you you sign a you sign a legal agreement, saying, i’m really just leasing this, and i’m not allowed to sell it to anybody else
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Shlomo Sher: i’ll be the end-user. License agreement with video games is the best way to get a sense of what we’re talking about here. Really, actually, that’s a very point, and like everyone, I’ve read it thoroughly. I definitely read the apple, you know. So Nfts now come, and how do N Ofps change the ownership,
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Tom Rodgers: because I mean n oftes, and are a form of crypto. Well, they’re bound to Cryptocurrency Exchange right, and we we know from all of the herbivorant cryptocurrency in the last few years is that this is supposedly a revolutionary form of currency development, currency exchange,
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Tom Rodgers: because anyone can own a portion of cryptocurrency.
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Tom Rodgers: It’s anonymized, and
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Tom Rodgers: theory it can be exchanged anywhere on the blockchain for anywhere else on the blockchain.
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Tom Rodgers: You know there’s There’s this ability to have
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Shlomo Sher: a form of. I guess it’s It’s It’s not physical. I mean, you can actually buy physical bitcoins. Now, apparently I’ve I’ve I’ve actually done it myself. We know that the Yeah, the the Nfts. Apparently. I don’t know for certain. I’ve heard that you can buy these children that are supposed to represent portions of Bitcoin something like this.
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Tom Rodgers: But But yeah, the the Nft is changing. All of this Is that in-game content in a game that you say, you know you know. Let’s just say Fortnite, for example, becomes fully nft embedded
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Tom Rodgers: a skin or or a weapon that you earn, or that you, in some cases, in some games that you create,
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Tom Rodgers: it becomes
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Tom Rodgers: linked to a ah, a portion of blockchain, you know. It has value on the blockchain, meaning that it can be bought and sold in theory outside of any kind of marketplace within the game itself. So someone could just say, i’ll trade you this amount of money for that
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Tom Rodgers: of cryptocurrency that is bound to your in-game item.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah, there is a specific market that allows you to do this. You have to go to a certain like but there are a handful of them. They’re competing.
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Tom Rodgers: Yes, there are right. I mean It’s like the New York Stock Exchange versus the Mek Stock Exchange.
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah, exactly. The interesting thing for me is when you ask, So how do the How are the game companies still making money from this is, you know they they take a slice of every exchange that takes place. That’s that’s still the same case in every in every example,
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Shlomo Sher: like so and counter strike, go.
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Tom Rodgers: You know people can create their own markets. We actually have a student who who did this. They made a fair bit of money creating a counter-strike go server. That was a marketplace for people to buy and sell counter-strike go skins and weapons and whatnot
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Tom Rodgers: um it’s a self-contained server that he ran Yeah,
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Shlomo Sher: that’s right yeah and he took a piece of the of every sale.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah, there was that went through his marketplace. And did he have to negotiate that with with valve?
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Tom Rodgers: I can’t remember. I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was something that he or whether it’s something that’s part of the general license it could be, or I don’t that that part of it. I don’t know
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Shlomo Sher: that’s pretty interesting to find out,
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Shlomo Sher: but the idea is the same Right? I mean you take a piece of the action as people buy and sell, and with the blockchain you could actually do it outside of the game,
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Shlomo Sher: and that’s supposed to have advantages. So let’s well before we get to the advantages really quick. How widespread is this there’s so much talk about, and and and blockchain and web three point zero is, Is it mostly just hype? Or is this technology being widely adapted by game? Cover
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Tom Rodgers: It’s both.
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Tom Rodgers: And i’ll kind of clarify what I mean by that. I think it’s very interesting to see this particular moment, because there are actually a lot of games that are built on Nfg. Blockchain Exchange.
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Tom Rodgers: I mean you’ve got. You’ve got examples that aren’t necessarily what you could can traditionally call like aaa titles yet made by the really big developers. But you’ve got games like.
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Tom Rodgers: Ah, what’s it called the Guardians Guardians Galaxy of Guardians, or Guild of Guardians, or something like that. We’ve got one called axi Infinity, which is a really interesting case in point, because it actually was. I think
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Tom Rodgers: it was hacked in some way, shape or form, and a a load of the in-game pro currency was taken by a Oh, ah! A hacking group can’t remember their name. You’ve got um other games like gods and chained. These are like but but the interesting thing about them, and the reason why I said both really is because
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Tom Rodgers: a lot of these games that are built on nfts are kind of like.
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Tom Rodgers: We’re almost at like the experimental stage here in the video games industry where you’ve got, you have got these games emerging, and whether they’re the products of subsidiaries of really big games, publishers, or from smaller publishers who are trying to make a names themselves, jumping on a new technology to see if they can have, like another candy crush saga movement, it’s. It’s difficult to say exactly, but the reason why I said both is because
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Tom Rodgers: these games are emerging in smaller forms. But then the really big publishers are keeping a watchful eye. So
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Tom Rodgers: that’s That’s how I can see it at the moment is that you’ve got declarations for companies like Ea that they’re interested, and they are sort of experimenting with the integration of this stuff, but it’s not become a full-blown guaranteed way to take the industry in a new direction. Yet, because, let’s say, the big players are still
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Tom Rodgers: thinking about it, and they’re watching what’s happening, which is a very interesting thing to happen. I think that happened a lot with the free-to-play model, too, in a lot of ways. It did take more time for companies like Ea activision blizzard, to adopt the free to play model fully into their game design from the ground up,
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Tom Rodgers: but because they were looking at the success of the mobile market for a few years. First to see if this really is a good direction to go in, you know. So it is both.
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Shlomo Sher: So that makes sense, though the success with free to play the attraction of Freedom Play is obvious. It’s literally, I mean, you know it’s literally there in the title. It’s Free right, and this will bring in tons. More player players, I guess the same is a,
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Shlomo Sher: and it did right. Um is play to earn. I mean play to earn is also pitched as good for players. Is it also just in the title? You know the people pitching this are, you know.
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Shlomo Sher: Well, actually let’s talk about the sorry I’m interested in getting to the moral panic part of this.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah,
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah. So So so so let me say we. We got kind of three things here right, by the way, and i’m going to ended some of this out we got the how is this making money for the players. How is this supposed to make money for a place which is where was going to go to right now? Ah, how’s this making for the companies. And why are people freaking out about
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Shlomo Sher: right? And so let’s let’s do this one at a time. So you know, this is supposed to be good for players. Right? It’s in the title. But how is this supposed to actually be this revolutionary incredibly enticing? What’s the picture?
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Tom Rodgers: I mean? The pitch is quite simple, and it’s not a new pitch at all in many ways. It’s that everyone can make money from this it’s a win-win right. You as an average everyday player.
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Tom Rodgers: You can just play the game gain items in the game as you play, and you know the more time you spend in the game. The more items you’d accumulate or say the more. Ex-field you you like the the more powerful your character will the term, and have a sort of a malange of things that you can be bought and sold and traded
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Tom Rodgers: um in. In some of them, you know, you can actually create things that could become extremely valuable, given how they would be viewed within the gaming world, whatever um, and that those can be bought and sold for real world cash. If you want to cash out
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Tom Rodgers: um, and that that, in effect, is kind of like the pitch, you know It’s that you can make money from this, and it’s very, very similar, in my opinion. A lot of the the rhetoric and and everything like that is, is very much just echoing a lot of the rhetoric you see around blockchain
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Tom Rodgers: um currencies more generally, which is that everyone can make money from this. So what’s not to like right? Everyone Everyone can get a slice of time.
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Tom Rodgers: That that that to me is is the pitch for for this at the moment that you see in the media, and that’s So it’s so strange because you can already do that
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Tom Rodgers: in games that do not require blockchain
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A Ashcraft: technology,
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Tom Rodgers: you can. What? Yes, What’s new about this?
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Tom Rodgers: I think they’re worse,
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Tom Rodgers: I think. What’s touted as being new is that it’s now basically much more seamless and easy to cash out and get real money for what you’ve been doing in the game rather than having to go through, say, an intermediary market where
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Tom Rodgers: you know, Technically speaking, you know, you, you might not be able to actually get real world cash for this. But you can. You can in a lot of games, still earn in-game currency, and exchange that for other things or pay real-world money, or even get real world money
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Tom Rodgers: bought into the market. Do you see what I mean? It’s supposedly going to make it more seamless for you to cash out. But that that student, that student of ours, was was doing all of this on Cs go.
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Tom Rodgers: Yes,
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Tom Rodgers: and I guess we’re coming and selling things for real money for to other players.
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Tom Rodgers: I guess. I think if we think about that for a second it’s, it’s a matter of scale and a matter of economy, you know this is, if we took what your student did with counter-strike, it’s brilliant ingenious, but doing it that way on a mass mass scale would require a lot
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Tom Rodgers: of of technical architecture, like you know, people managing the market people, maintaining the service and also managing this market of exchange, and actually in a lot of ways having a lot of power over a market of exchange.
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Tom Rodgers: The The touted difference with Nfts is that the blockchain is going to be doing all of this for us, because it’s this amazing new revolutionary technology, you know, in averted commerce that um
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Tom Rodgers: that basically automates exchange and anonymizes it, and it’s completely decentralized. You know there is no one authority to power that supposedly controls cryptocurrencies.
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Shlomo Sher: You know that that’s the idea here right and what What’s the What’s the benefit of not having been so? Not having an authority in charge here, I mean, you know, if i’m, you know, if we’re talking about,
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Shlomo Sher: you know, Fifa, then the authority would be Ea. Let’s say, you know, in a fee for a marketplace right for Csvo. Let’s say it is, it is balanced that makes you. I think it might be
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Shlomo Sher: we. I know each other right. So what’s What’s what’s gonna be here? This big benefit of decentralization.
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Tom Rodgers: I I have difficulty seeing what it is. Actually, I have quite a lot of difficulty, seeing what the real benefit is, because I still have quite a lot of difficulty in seeing
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Tom Rodgers: the real benefit of of what decentralized cryptocurrencies are. More generally I. I I still am skeptical about the idea that there’s no significant, powerful actors here that actually have control over this stuff. Because i’m I am a bit of a cynic, and I do think that where where there’s where there’s sort of a vacuum power fills it, you know, and I so that’s kind of a bit generalized. But um,
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Tom Rodgers: I think someone like Elon Musk, is a very interesting person to keep an eye on, with relation to cryptocurrencies and twitter, and the kind of almost like the manufacturing of sentiment around confidence in this kind of stuff, you know. That’s that’s how stock markets work, I think, in a way. That’s a lot of how currencies go to,
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Tom Rodgers: but the the supposed, you know, benefit to this being decentralized, and not having a power. Authority, like, say fifa, in control of all of it, is that it is more seamless and more easy for you, as a player supposedly to sit down, play the game for a few hours, generate a load of Indian content, and then, without having to go through a a mediating market with Fifa directly, you can just sell it on a blockchain. I need to sell to someone who’s not even interested in the game that you’re playing
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Tom Rodgers: to them. It’s will still apparently have value as a as a portion of cryptocurrency.
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Shlomo Sher: Do you see what I mean, so it’ll it kind of makes. The The idea, I suppose, is that it makes the availability of buying and selling in-game items open to everyone, even if you’re not a gamer which makes it really like appealing to gamers, because it means anyone can buy what i’m generating like, right?
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Tom Rodgers: You know it’s like buying a copy of the Mona Lisa, because apparently it’s unique, because it’s a non-fungible token.
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Tom Rodgers: And I’m just going to have that sitting in my bank account, and at some point the value of that Indian item might go up, and all i’m All I am as a person is just a cryptocurrency Trader, I don’t play this game, but I’ve bought this in game. Item from this person that generated it, and i’m keeping a close eye on that game economy. It’s going up. I’m going to buy a load of nfs from that in game economy, and then sell them later on, you know, like I think that’s I think that that’s one of the ideas. But again,
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Tom Rodgers: you know that’s not necessarily always very clearly communicated to people. I don’t think is it akin to basically the way people invest in the art market,
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Tom Rodgers: like people and people investors buy valuable paintings.
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Tom Rodgers: Well, I I think, and in the hopes that they will become more valuable later on.
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Tom Rodgers: I think that’s a hope that that that is a hope of how it could turn out for it to be a very profitable form of market exchange based around gaming. I think that that analogy I’ve seen used quite a few times as a very sort of like
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Tom Rodgers: hopeful idea that it could become like this, You know, because I mean that the art, industry and the buying and selling of art we’re talking millions, sometimes multi millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. For just one thing. It’s absolutely something that happens at the very
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Shlomo Sher: tip top of our economic spectrum, right? It’s not something that happens for everybody. And this is supposed to be this sort of libertarian dream of. Everybody can be involved, and, as everybody, you know, with with five dollars you can. You can invest, and you can make money this way,
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Shlomo Sher: and I and I will say that as someone who has never used any of these kind of ah exchanges like the Cs Go exchange that you were talking about, Andy. Ah, if it was built into the game that my in-game asset was already in a marketplace that anyone can view, as you know, as actually worth real money. That sounds awesome to me.
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Shlomo Sher: Now I mean having said that, you know. Certainly this seems to be an obvious difference between the art world and the game world in that, as you said earlier, if the game shuts down. This is not worth the damn thing
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Shlomo Sher: where you know the the artwork is can hang on any wall and still be. You know the artwork. Here you’ve got these virtual items that are built into virtual worlds, and i’m Assuming, then ah! The pitch for the company, the gulf of the company here that the company gets to
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Shlomo Sher: get uh.
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Shlomo Sher: So as far as I understand. So you said, the company gets a share of essentially the exchanges again. How is that different than a normal share in a marketplace of exchanges, unless the idea is that
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Shlomo Sher: players will be more motivated to exchange, so the volume will be higher, so the companies will make a little more money because of the volume.
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Shlomo Sher: You’ve absolutely hit the nail on the head there for me. I think I got it all right, but that ultimately, ultimately, for me. I think what this really is, and I think we’ve kind of said it in quite a few different ways already is that this Isn’t actually completely.
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Tom Rodgers: It is, in a sense, a form of bandwagon. It
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Tom Rodgers: in a sense like, and I mean there’s actually quite a few ways that people can see this as a bandwidth. But the way you just sort of suggested there is exactly what I think it is, which is what the the most valuable thing right?
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Tom Rodgers: And I’m. I’m. Predominantly interested in theories of value, and where value comes from right, not just money, but but value more generally like what is the value of a person, and so on. The most valuable thing to any video income is attention.
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Tom Rodgers: It’s attention. It’s people, it’s It’s people not not necessarily. Their wallets straight away, but it’s people and the attention that they can garn from it. That’s why you know some of the key metrics in the video games industry, no matter what game you’re designing the things like retention,
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Tom Rodgers: um player acquisition.
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Tom Rodgers: Um.
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Tom Rodgers: You’ve got things like added value from player activity. You know you’ve got You’ve got lots of quite technical terms, I mean, I’ve I’ve got books on on monetizing games, and you look at it, and it’s just full of these acronyms for for all the kinds of things that I’ve mentioned there. How do you retain players? How do you identify players who are likely to introduce new players to the game and the the metric score, for that is usually referred to as their virality. Like how viral are they as a player to introduce new players to the game and the the metric score, for that is usually referred to as their virality. Like. How viral are they as a player to introduce new players to the game and the the metric score, for that is usually referred to as their virality like, how viral are they as a player to introd?
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Tom Rodgers: But that’s That’s the key point is that it’s attention. And what you said, you know, like the the simple way to see it really ultimately, for me, in a similar way to how cryptocurrencies are talked about is the more people that get involved in this, the more money it will make.
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Tom Rodgers: It’s. It’s about garnering interest, and I think you you hit the second nail on the head straight afterwards as well about This will encourage in a way. If you think about our Macro scale of activity here, it will encourage more people to engage in exchange, and the more people engage in an exchange.
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Tom Rodgers: You know the more of that little slice of every exchange
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Tom Rodgers: that takes place goes back to the Games company. So it is potentially a massive gold bag, you know. I think gold rushes are a good way to think about this. Actually, I think, in a in a way I I mentioned before we start podcasting, but i’m very interested in the concept of of gold rushes going back historically, but the Internet the Internet seems to have a lot of gold rush mechanics built around it in a lot of ways.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah, for sure I will. I want to compare this a little bit with the stock market.
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A Ashcraft: Um, uh! When you buy a share of a company,
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A Ashcraft: you you buy it through a stock market, and that and the stock market gets. You know they make money because people are selling things in their marketplace, and when you, when you buy it in an initial public offering,
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A Ashcraft: you’re buying it from the company, and after that you’re just buying and selling stocks to other people, and the company doesn’t make anything at all from it. They make it indirectly in the sense that
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A Ashcraft: whatever their stock is being purchased at, gives their company value, and the value is what they use when they go to the banks and ask for loans,
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A Ashcraft: and so they they make money indirectly through through borrowing power as they’re as the stuck
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A Ashcraft: price goes up,
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Tom Rodgers: it’s up.
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A Ashcraft: But the way these Nfts seem to work and correct me if i’m wrong, is that when you, when you buy an nft and you have, there’s this contract, and the contract says that when you set when I buy and sell this nft, now that it’s once once, I bought it from the initial company, They’ve made their money that way
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A Ashcraft: Now I can buy and sell it on the open market, but they still get a little portion of that sale
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Tom Rodgers: absolutely. This is varied, and this is different from the stock market.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah, I mean, in a way, in this, in the way that you’ve pointed out there, that is
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Tom Rodgers: but from my understanding, and there may be alternative ways to doing this too. But my understanding of the prevailing way, that this model is being kind of thought about and developed is that that intermediary relation of the original
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Tom Rodgers: sort of platform owners, I suppose, if you want to call it that, you get a little slice of the pie each time the pies move changes hands right. You know we’re thinking about a pie that’s changed hands ten, twenty times. Whatever it doesn’t matter, you know it’s still getting a little slice of that
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Shlomo Sher: is is absolutely how it should, how it will work, and at least as far as my understanding. And so that is quite different to the stock market, like you say right, and and it doesn’t work like that and it’s well there, there’s nothing wrong with it, except that the reason it doesn’t work like that in the stock market is because it is a drag on the amount, because if you think of like, if it’s one percent.
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A Ashcraft: And that means that when I sell it. And I let’s say it’s gone up ten percent.
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Tom Rodgers: I’m: actually only getting nine percent of my of my profits,
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Tom Rodgers: and because i’m giving away a percent to the company every time the stock market doesn’t work that way for a very good reason, because it’s a drag on the stock market. It’s a drag on people actually buying and selling stuff.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah, it creates a drag effect on the the actually the speed and the amount in which things move. And if there’s one thing about the stock market that it relies on it’s stuff moving. It needs to be moving. Yeah, absolutely. I think another thing that plays into that. And and this is a way in which it is, I think going to be similar to the stock market is is all to do with confidence,
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Tom Rodgers: and I mentioned before some of the key metrics that the games industry use to to understand the projected value of their of their game, you know. Think of it like a stock, You know a company that’s put their Ipo on the stock market,
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Tom Rodgers: and they, you know, the amount of players, the retention and all these things go into projected values of of what the game’s going to look like, and how much money it’s potentially going to make,
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Tom Rodgers: but just like with the stock market. And in a way, I think also with cryptocurrencies. Confidence is everything, and when confidence starts to drop, activity starts to drop. You think. Think of the parallels here between people buying and selling on the stock market, and people engaging with each other and playing in a game one.
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Tom Rodgers: The more that activity goes down the worse it gets, and then you reach stagnation. Then you reach crisis, then you each crash. Then you reach liquidation, you know, like gone, and that that therein lies kind of one of the big ethical drugs, I think, for
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Tom Rodgers: for for what we’re talking about today’s this isn’t technically really anything completely new. There are new facets to it, I suppose, but from an ethical point of view. You’ve got to ask questions about. You know. What’s it going to look like for
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Tom Rodgers: first
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Tom Rodgers: the players who have invested great amounts of time and effort in a particular game, and usually, generally speaking, if you want to be one of the really big players, probably as a player earner. You’ve got to get in there early, right, and getting in there early comes with risks, because, as we know, we hear a lot about the success stories of games built on this kind of stuff, and we will do in the coming years one hundred and fifty.
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Tom Rodgers: But we often Don’t get a lot of attention paid to the failures. Unless there’s something spectacular,
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Tom Rodgers: you know, and like It’s It’s It’s going to be risky. It’s going to be very precarious for people trying to get into this as a form of making a living. There’s no employment rights there’s there’s no nothing to to protect you. You You invest a load of money in this, and the game company mismanages the game, and it all crashes.
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Shlomo Sher: The Games Company are going to be liable to to pay you back, you know. So it seems to be so. This is what’s
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Shlomo Sher: I mean. There’s so many. It’s it’s since, because we spent a big chunk of this episodes setting things up.
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Shlomo Sher: Yes, of course. So we understand what we’re talking about, and when we look at it from an ethical perspective, there’s so many different directions. We can go in starting with this idea that you’ve got this, you know, traditional category of
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Shlomo Sher: someone who is a player, and you know a player is something you do from a very young age, and it’s fun, and it’s not serious.
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Shlomo Sher: But now, of a sudden, the same person is an investor. Ah! And an investing is very adult, very serious. There’s a lot at stake. The first thing that i’m really wondering here is, so you know,
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Shlomo Sher: from everything I understand, when Andy’s told me our game design department thinks this is mostly hyped and bullshit.
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Shlomo Sher: I’m i’m in i’m in mostly in agreement. I’m a but but you know, to to be honest, I mean, I’ve heard enough for me to think okay, that there are some pretty interesting stuff out here that that could that could grab me where I do see some and some potential advantages here.
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Shlomo Sher: You know It’s not simple to understand,
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Shlomo Sher: and you know, mind you, um,
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Shlomo Sher: investment is not simple to understand. I mean some of us just invest in the stock market in very kind of broad ways, but most of us don’t jump into the stock market like I did in one thousand nine hundred and ninety nine, when e toys, crafts and Amazon crashed, and I lost all my student loan money,
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Shlomo Sher: you know, which I invested, because the you know the bubble was going up right. Everybody was making money. But you know, I mean that’s Really, when you put that in a video and get context, most players are playing a game, and if it happens that also
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Shlomo Sher: their in-game assets are not worth something that sounds great. But once you kind of turn it into investment, the line between player investors seems to me to me potentially get very blurry, and the potential for
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Shlomo Sher: manipulation, deception, any kind of practices that encourage me to invest without really understanding what i’m doing
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Shlomo Sher: absolutely to be like a real, real, dangerous thing, and you know investors are one population of people. Players are a very different population of people, and i’m not sure how well those two populations makes. I’m. Curious what you guys think about that.
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Tom Rodgers: Think it’s a very interesting way of posing the problem. One of the problems here. Yeah,
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Tom Rodgers: I think it’s really astute to point out this idea that we’re we’re actually starting to. I mean, we’ve talked about all of this stuff, and we haven’t really talked about what it is to play again, and and what games actually are to us, and and and the ethics that were thrown up by the introduction of this
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Tom Rodgers: almost like sort of
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Tom Rodgers: colliding of almost sort of like, you know, Stock Market exchange type, kind of dynamics with regards to investment, and so on, and play as a as a part of our social life, that
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Tom Rodgers: for most people it’s supposed to be about your downtime, or whatever, or in some cases you know, it’s a bit more than that. It’s it’s quite serious, and it’s, and it’s solemn in its own way, you know it’s not just
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Tom Rodgers: tumultuous play, and having a bit of fun. Sometimes it’s actually quite organized and heavily structured. And you’ve got people that rely on you, and that you rely on them. And it’s like a cohesive activity, or something like this, or a competition
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becoming so almost like a
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Tom Rodgers: a part of of playing games, is
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Tom Rodgers: definitely throwing up a lot of questions, and I think it will throw up a lot of questions in the future, too. I think you mentioned this idea of there being almost kind of like deception problems that you know potentially. If you don’t know how a lot of this stuff works, or if there’s a lot of things that go on behind the scenes, that no one is really privy, to
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Tom Rodgers: which I do think happens with cryptocurrency. That’s my opinion. But I do think that that does happen with cryptocurrency, and I think that directly will affect later in gaming if it uses cryptocurrency as its base format. Then yeah, that is very ethically troubling, because,
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Tom Rodgers: you know, I remember a few months ago, when supposedly, and I know it’s supposedly because it’s quite controversial that Elon Musk supposedly endorsed this new
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Tom Rodgers: algorithm or Ai, or a quantum ai. I think it was called, or something like that. It was some new program that anyone can use to make money off Bitcoin, because everyone can make money of Bitcoin, no matter who you that every single person in the world can make money from it. And I mean ultimately, you know the stock market and cryptocurrencies don’t work like that.
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Shlomo Sher: There has to be winners and losers like that that has to be. That’s the whole point of it right. But you know it was very controversial. I mean, I think
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Tom Rodgers: I think he’s publicly said maybe, that that he didn’t endorse it, or there’s some kind of controversy around it. But the simple fact is, what you’ve pointed out is here that someone was trying to exploit the idea that this is a win win for everybody when it clearly isn’t going to be. It’s It’s a bandwagon where they want many people
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Tom Rodgers: just throwing in a few five dollars here five dollars there, twenty dollars, Maybe someone puts in one hundred dollars. But add all of that up.
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Tom Rodgers: And those people aren’t necessarily going to make any serious money off that at all, but at all about that, and that’s a heck of a lot of money that’s going to increase the you know the value of whatever crypto currency is that’s been started with that idea in mind, You know
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Tom Rodgers: I have to say that I have. I have received and taken probably six or seven meetings this summer from the companies wanting to gamify their nft cryptocurrency. Three point zero
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Shlomo Sher: went through. Point out business. So you’re so. You’re saying, not that they want to do a game. Not that they want to add this to their game, but they want to take the business in game of fi it. Well, they want they In some cases they want to create a game.
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Tom Rodgers: In some cases they want to gamify the business. It’s it’s variations of things, and and I haven’t taken any of these jobs. Yet, although the the conversation I had this morning was intriguing
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Shlomo Sher: because I don’t like it, there’s a saying right that that if you don’t know who the Rube is, it’s probably you and I haven’t been able to figure out who the Rube is,
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Tom Rodgers: because because of these promises
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Shlomo Sher: right now, my and you, the designer, is probably not the room, but the
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Shlomo Sher: pay our paycheck, and it’ll be great
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Shlomo Sher: right right. But I also, you know, as a host of a of a podcast called Ethics and video games. I don’t necessarily want to take that paycheck.
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Tom Rodgers: It’s going to lead to some ethical problems.
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Shlomo Sher: You know. In in some cases these Nft based games do require a prior investment before the player can begin playing the game, you know that’s one of the way that an initial offering is made. Yeah, Yeah. And I mean,
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Tom Rodgers: I don’t know how popular that will necessarily become as the the base model for it. But that that is the case, and you know one of the games I mentioned earlier.
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Tom Rodgers: Oh, it’s a hex. No, not apex. It’s um axiom, I think we call it Axiom University, are you? You know I I I think it’s axi infinity. Actually that that that game the one that was hacked. You know there were a lot of player people who had already. I mean, this is sort of in the news, so I don’t know the actual figures.
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Tom Rodgers: Um had invested a lot of time and effort in in building up their Nft base in that game. You know the the the things that they have that are with real world money, and all of the value of those are gone, because that game was hacked. I think, about six hundred and six hundred million odds was
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Tom Rodgers: was. I think I’ve got the article here, so i’m actually about six hundred million dollars. I think a worth of stuff was taken. Where is it
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Tom Rodgers: right? And if this, if this was a real security, there would be giant lawsuits,
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Shlomo Sher: and you know I know it has. Ah, the the Lazarus Hacker group supposedly um packed the ethereum-linked side chain of the blockchain that was linked to the game about six hundred million dollars, which was total, so, and I think, but I mean the result of that, for the game was that the in-game economy just completed that activity went down. Confidence went down. Everything went down. So people’s assets became worthless, you know. So, and you and you don’t get something like this in the stock.
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Shlomo Sher: I’m assuming I mean, you get at least at least nothing direct like this. And you have some legal protections for the stock market.
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Shlomo Sher: Right? Are there any legal protections that players would have right or player investors if we’re all player investors now. Uh, would they be aware of it? You? You know I I have another example uh speaking of kind of coming in uh, I was looking at the one of the games you mentioned before. Uh, I think it was God’s unchain um! And from what I understand, there’s two things there. Uh one was the idea of a fair launch that I wanted. You
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Shlomo Sher: talk about that, but another one. It seemed to me that the whole thing was set up as a sort of a pyramid scheme of some kind, where essentially you were told by land
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Shlomo Sher: in the world, right? It’s going to be worth a lot of money. You want to buy land, and the more land that people buy, the more your land is actually worth something, and the more you can get people to buy more land, it’s worth more. And to me this just seemed like you’re setting yourself up for some sort of a
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Shlomo Sher: ah pyramid scheme, where the value is determined by how many other people have confidence that this has any kind of value, and the minute people decide, you know that. Ah, the people above them, Don’t Aren’t going to have any confidence in the whole bubble burst, and
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Shlomo Sher: you know you’ve really got to not praise all right. Sure that’s too tulip crazy, Sure What? Whatever, whatever kind of you know, bubble you you want to call it, and it, I I think again, it wasn’t clear that
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Shlomo Sher: the investor or the player would understand these sorts of things, and especially in the game context
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Shlomo Sher: is this related by the way, in any way to the fair launch idea.
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Tom Rodgers: I’m not entirely certain what the fail-on tr idea refers to. Actually, if you could clarify that for me. Is it? Is it the idea that when everyone buys into the game or begins to gain that everyone’s on an equal playing field, or
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Shlomo Sher: that’s That’s I. I think So that’s what I understand. So, for example. Ah, your venture capitalists! Ah can’t buy some of those things ahead of time, right? Right? Got you? Okay? So it’s the idea of a sort of the meritocratic ideal of you all start equal first,
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Shlomo Sher: right? We were all equal except some of us have a lot more money than others.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s kind of an attempt to implement that ideal at the launch of a game. I get you. Okay. I mean, that’s interesting in and of itself
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Tom Rodgers: the more sort of significant thing he mentions just now. To me That seems very.
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Tom Rodgers: It goes back to quite a few things that we’ve already said really is that you know There, there’s a lot that players of these games Aren’t going to see or understand, and you mentioned like pyramid schemes and and like you know, the buying of land in. Is it God’s unchained? I think it’s that one right? Yeah,
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Tom Rodgers: you know it it.
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Tom Rodgers: This all goes back to what we were saying before I think about. You know what’s the selling point here. And but what’s the reason behind the selling point? Right? And the reason behind the selling point is going back to something, I said earlier, which is attention.
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Tom Rodgers: It’s about attention. It’s about retention, and it’s about garnering the attention of as many people as possible. So trying to. Basically
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Tom Rodgers: I think of it as you know, it’s a bloating process. Basically, you want to bloat something as much as possible. And in this case you want as many players taking part in this in-game economy as possible, just like you do with with cryptocurrencies. You want as many people investing in it as possible to bloat it and make it really really valuable.
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Tom Rodgers: But at some point I mean, you know, that the bloat stops or flows, or sometimes it diminishes and goes down, you know, so it’s.
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Tom Rodgers: It is all about confidence, I think, at the end of the day with with regard to that, and I do think that there are moral and ethical questions to ask here, not just about nfts and video games, really, but also more generally about how these worlds of financial transactions actually work, and who they benefit most
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Tom Rodgers: right, you know, if the idea here is that this is for everyone to make money, and this is a win-win for everybody.
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Tom Rodgers: You do have to ask the question of, but
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Tom Rodgers: but who, you know, in a world where
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Tom Rodgers: sort of it is implicit in almost everything but that kind of I guess capitalism throws out this is that there are winners and losers right there always will be. That’s how it works.
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Tom Rodgers: That That is how it’s always worked.
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Tom Rodgers: Who are the winners and the losers here, who are going to be the winners and the losers. That to me ultimately is kind of what some of the things you just mentioned. They throw up as a question, and I think there’s the potential for potential
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Tom Rodgers: for a lot of people who invest in this from the bottom up,
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Shlomo Sher: both in terms of time and in terms of money. Because I mean don’t forget like a players, is time. It’s really valuable to to a person, you know, investing a lot of time and effort in something is really significant. You know It’s it’s links to well-being. It’s linked to lifestyle. It’s it’s, you know. I see all these sort of discussions about twitch streamers, for example, who basically work themselves to death for about four or five years. Yeah, and it’s it’s to stay ahead of the game. It’s to be a winner, and they they almost kill themselves doing it. I
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Tom Rodgers: personally think that this whole system of game development
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Tom Rodgers: and monetization. Strategy has the potential to inculcate behind players to the people who want to be on top of the game will will work themselves really hard for this, you know way beyond what we would call sort of, you know, like regulated working hours for earning a living, you know right. And in general, too, there’s a There’s a real psychological issue with taking something that people normally have intrinsic
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Tom Rodgers: motivation to do play a game. It’s intrinsically motivating. It’s fun to do so. I do it,
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Tom Rodgers: and adding an extrinsic motivation to it like money.
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Tom Rodgers: And what happens is, and this has been psychologically proven
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Tom Rodgers: that external, that that that that that reward, that extrinsic thing erodes your intrinsic motivation over time.
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Tom Rodgers: Yes, that’s the thing that you like doing just because you’re getting paid for. It now becomes something over time that you like less and less and less and less to do.
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Shlomo Sher: Hmm. And if this is, should just to add to this. And if this is true, because this gets into something you you mentioned earlier, Tom. Does this mean that
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Shlomo Sher: doing? You know? Um
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Shlomo Sher: adding this to games is essentially also potentially ruining games, and when I think of ruining it and ruining games sounds like this: big, a moral pandemic,
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Shlomo Sher: you know, to go back to this value thing right? You’re taking something that’s of enormous value to billions of people, and you are essentially potentially undermining that value by
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Shlomo Sher: changing the motivation involved in it, so that it’s no longer really enjoyable. And instead, potentially, we have people on A, on a treadmill that is looking for how to, you know, recoup their investment or grow their portfolio instead of you know all the the intrinsic fun of playing games that we have, and that maybe there’s something wrong with just doing that.
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Tom Rodgers: Yeah, I think I think there’s two dimensions to that. That. I want to speak to actually one one from the development side of developers and what their mind is going, and that mindset is going to be, and one from the player side their kind of mindset
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Tom Rodgers: i’ll do the second one first,
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Tom Rodgers: like my personal sort of take is that that is an issue. This idea of kind of you know the almost sort of the decaying of
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Tom Rodgers: of of games as a something that’s fun and interesting in the in the individual’s mind, and and collectively, you know, on a social level in people’s interest. It’s fascinating. And I’ve thought about this. I mean as I get older and I get a bit longer in the tooth year by year, and I look back on my gaming life as a kid. I didn’t really watch Tv much. When I was a kid I was. I had a snares
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Tom Rodgers: that I had a playstation, one vacation two, you know I that that was me. That was that was my childhood right, and I think I I remember in in the twentieth early and mid twenty s picking up my mobile phone trying to download some of these free-to-play games that I was also studying at the time, you know, because I was really interested in actually the moral panic at that time around the free to play model and thinking about. Well, what are the implications of this for me, and also more widely, um sort of from a political, economic, and and a social
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point of view?
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Tom Rodgers: And I just found them so
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Tom Rodgers: sorry
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Tom Rodgers: because I I would play for five, ten minutes, or, you know, a day or so, and be like Actually, this. This is really cool, and then the mechanics would kick in where it becomes incredibly difficult to progress unless you start paying small amounts of money regularly with the thing that I noticed, you know I would ask you to, you know, set up on some of them. I would be asked to to pay ninety nine pence or dollars, you know cents, in order to take another turn, or I have to wait thirty minutes before I can take my next turn, and I think you know it’s sort of these these mechanics, that the game was clearly built
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Tom Rodgers: around from the ground up it wasn’t that it was an amazing gaming experience that had been built. And then these mechanics had been introduced to kind of cordon parts of it.
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Tom Rodgers: Oh, sorry. Someone is phoning me. Give me a second. Yeah, sure. Okay. And Shawna, We’re at about an hour. So the
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Shlomo Sher: Okay,
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Shlomo Sher: Yeah, I you know, Andy, I don’t mind going and going and going with this.
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Uh,
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Shlomo Sher: should I let you? Yeah. Ah, okay. Ah, but but for sure. But you you know, Andy at at the I mean, i’m going to cut some parts of this; but if it if just because there’s so much here, if it goes too long at the worst. Ah, i’ll cut it. I’ll do you know,
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Shlomo Sher: If it goes way too long, i’ll be two episodes.
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Shlomo Sher: It might. Yeah, I might cut it as two, two episodes. Okay, we’ll see how good. But there’s there’s a lot here
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Shlomo Sher: here, and and it’s fascinating. So I kind of want to keep going. We also want to be respectful of your time, though.
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Shlomo Sher: No, I mean i’m outside of my working hours now. So i’m free as a bird. Okay, so much six me. So let’s keep going.
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Tom Rodgers: So what I was saying before is um. You know that I found these mechanics very boring, and and I think a really a really nice word that I can use to describe it is, is from a a German sociologist for a very long time ago. Now, who is observing
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Tom Rodgers: what he thought was kind of one of the main things that modern bureaucracy and and the modern form of capitalism was bringing about is that it was very disenchanting. The enchantment of playing a video game
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Tom Rodgers: for me as a kid when I was playing Mario, or even, even, you know, a bit later on. Even games like dark souls which i’m a massive fan of. By the way, I love those games, but it’s interesting to me. A dark source is a bit of an exception to the norm. Now, actually, and that’s one of the reasons why I was so successful. But to me it tapped into something I remember from when I was a kid. Games are really hard, really rewarding, because they’re hard. And
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Tom Rodgers: you know that there’s a lot to be done and and they’re beautifully crafted, and you can tell that they’re crafted with love. Yeah, you You can. You can tell that whoever sat down to come up with this is a world builder, whether it’s Mario or dark souls right. And I remember thinking that all these mobile games that I was playing
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Tom Rodgers: didn’t feel like they had that, like almost sort of like labor of love put into them to to kind of captivate me as a player into what it is that they’re offering, whether that’s
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Tom Rodgers: candy, crush saga, which is beautiful in its own way, but but the mechanics really impeded a lot for me. Um, you know it. It just didn’t feel like I mean there were some exceptions like I love plants versus zombies. I thought that was a great game. When it first came out. I thought it was actually a really good labor of love. That that game I could tell. The developers had really created this really interesting idea and built it, and it was beautiful.
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Tom Rodgers: But I remember thinking that you know more and more. These kinds of games are very disenchanting for me, and I think that’s in relation to free to play,
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Tom Rodgers: and I. I just have this
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Tom Rodgers: sort of thought in the back of my head when it comes to the introduction of Nfts
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Tom Rodgers: and this cryptocurrency model of introducing the player investor and the you know, the almost like the beefing up and bloating of the ability for players to transaction and exchange real-world money even more with and emerging of that within game items is just
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Tom Rodgers: what’s that going to mean for what it’s like to play one of those games? Because if we flip over to the second dimension of what I was going to see which is developers.
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Shlomo Sher: It’s. It’s clear that it’s. It’s not the case that that new ways of making money are simply just taking something that already exists, and then just turning it into a way to monetize it, because that does happen. But when you have a new model like this, it inevitably in influences game design from the ground up.
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Tom Rodgers: And I think if there’s one thing about video games that, I think you know, in three four hundred years time, if humans are still around, you know, video games will be looked back on from from when I was a kid from the seventies eighty S. By the eighties, and ninety S. In particular for me, but you know even the seventies, as well as
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Tom Rodgers: the birth of almost like an entirely new art form, because they are
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Tom Rodgers: art right. In my opinion, I think there there are a lot of. There are many other things as well. But video games are a full of art, and they, I include in that definition the art of seduction. Video games are are meant to be very seductive. They’re meant to pull you in. They’re meant to make you forget about the real world for a little while
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Tom Rodgers: playing video games.
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Tom Rodgers: Either the free to play, model to, you know, sort of be encountered every five minutes with. You need to pay real money to continue, or whatever whatever that kind of breaks that enchantment for me. I’m sure it does for others to i’m sure for younger people, for younger generations. It might not be the case. But
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Tom Rodgers: I do definitely think that there’s something about the disenchant of this going on, and I I can’t really put my finger on it. Exactly. But disenchantment is the word that i’m kind of sticking with right now, and I and I wonder if also game developments especially. I would be really interested to talk to game developers who have been in the industry for a very long time what their views are on this, and whether they think that it’s actually quite disenchanting, and the you know the kinds of things that they
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01:17:49.980 –> 01:18:04.190
Tom Rodgers: foresee. Game development being is far more sort of overly rationalized into a a monetary logic rather than a logic of key is how you make a beautiful game that that’s an expression of your creative abilities.
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01:18:04.200 –> 01:18:15.580
Tom Rodgers: You know to me that that actually is an ethical issue about the ethics of the value of art and and creative practice. Really, at the end of the day, How rewarding is it going to be in twenty years time
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01:18:15.590 –> 01:18:24.460
Tom Rodgers: to be a game developer, or you know you do a say, an undergraduate university course, first on Games development, where the primary thing that’s drawn into you from the start is
461
01:18:24.490 –> 01:18:45.920
Tom Rodgers: cryptocurrencies. You’ve got to understand those, and you also need to understand how to how to set up a market, and then then you, Then you can build your game around the six right? You know how. How enchanting is it going to be for someone who has the creative impulse to you know a dream of. I want to make the next dark souls. But actually, even their education and games development is going to be framed almost entirely by
462
01:18:46.120 –> 01:18:50.659
Tom Rodgers: commercial logics, first and artistic practice. Second,
463
01:18:50.670 –> 01:18:52.580
Tom Rodgers: that is what happens when
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01:18:53.600 –> 01:18:59.999
Tom Rodgers: this this is kind of what Max labor. You know hundreds of more than a hundred and fifty years ago said, Is that the
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01:19:00.060 –> 01:19:18.740
Tom Rodgers: At some point, you know commerce and commercial logic disenchants the world. You know it. It can come to dominate so much that money no longer becomes like a means to an end. It becomes an end in itself, is is kind of what it gets at, and I almost see that seeping into game design slowly drip by drip. But it’s sort of
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01:19:18.750 –> 01:19:20.689
Tom Rodgers: it becomes a bit too transparent,
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01:19:20.700 –> 01:19:46.400
Shlomo Sher: and that’s the disenchantment that i’m talking about. I mean, I feel like I’ve talked a lot there to that to to the two kind of sites. So I I feel like we need another question of personal comments. We need to hear from you, Andy’s. Ah, so I mean to to partly, and it’s Great Tom, that I I I thought those beautiful said, and I definitely share that and notice we’re talking about for both developers and and players, and you know I would extend it to just beside in our farmers a human experience
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01:19:46.410 –> 01:20:14.859
Shlomo Sher: it has so much value, and there’s risk. There’s some sort of responsibility not undermining that value, and he uh, as as the kind of developer he was talking about. Have you seen like an actual shift in the way that it’s especially since free to play came along, and the possibility came along that that went in this direction. So so first off your your your statement about these these mechanics being built in for the round up is absolutely correct. Um! That is exactly the way
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01:20:14.870 –> 01:20:30.740
Tom Rodgers: that those that those things have to work you when you make a game. It is a commercial endeavor. You You have, you know, a one sheet at the very beginning that says, here’s what we want to make.
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01:20:30.750 –> 01:20:48.169
Tom Rodgers: And here’s how we want to make money on it. Here’s you know. It might include, you know. Here’s the technology we want to use in, you know in the case when I was making games for playstation, it was like, Well, your job is to is to make people excited about buying playstations. Your job is to see.
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01:20:48.260 –> 01:20:50.989
Tom Rodgers: I like that to make people excited.
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01:20:51.000 –> 01:20:53.749
Tom Rodgers: Yeah, and I guess that’s the crox isn’t it.
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01:20:53.890 –> 01:21:10.230
Shlomo Sher: There’s been a shift in. How do you make people excited. And in the case, what are you talking about? What are you making them excited to do? Exactly. In the case of If you didn’t need them to be excited because notice a lot of this stuff. You don’t need to be excited. You just need them to feel frustrated.
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01:21:10.250 –> 01:21:22.489
Shlomo Sher: I want to feel or to feel like they can make money. But frustration without excitement. Just me just means I go to another game because there are millions of games out there, and there’s a lot of competition.
475
01:21:22.600 –> 01:21:27.610
Shlomo Sher: So if i’m frustrated, then i’m not excited, then I will just quit the game, and i’ll never come back
476
01:21:27.910 –> 01:21:36.690
Shlomo Sher: unless I’ve invested tons of money into the game potentially, though maybe the investment is still there. You just stop playing. I guess that’s another else.
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01:21:36.700 –> 01:21:41.840
A Ashcraft: Bill. Yeah, Yeah, they’re going to stop playing you just like there’s another game. There’s always going to be another game.
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01:21:41.920 –> 01:21:54.820
Tom Rodgers: There’s a brand new game that i’m also excited about. I’ll just shift my attention over, and you’re right. It’s all about attention. As for like like i’m trying to wrap my head around.
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01:21:55.280 –> 01:22:11.279
A Ashcraft: This is a as a model, right as a business model. Because I do. I do think that it’s okay for people to make money making games and a business model is just a business model, whether i’m enticing people to put quarters into a slide,
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01:22:11.980 –> 01:22:30.660
A Ashcraft: or whether i’m in but and and making the game extra difficult at certain levels to make make sure enough, people die at that level that they that they want to put another quarter in the slot. That’s not that dissimilar from, you know, like tuning the difficulty of a free-to-play game
481
01:22:31.090 –> 01:22:38.159
A Ashcraft: to, you know. Catch somebody who’s willing to pay me a dollar, you know ninety nine cents for a for a golden eagle.
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01:22:38.370 –> 01:22:40.440
Tom Rodgers: Yeah, absolutely
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01:22:40.500 –> 01:22:48.319
A Ashcraft: right. It’s not that dissimilar to me. And I think that this, these can, These things can be done artfully.
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01:22:48.460 –> 01:22:55.089
Tom Rodgers: They can be done in such a way as as to not be, you know, disenchanting.
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01:22:55.100 –> 01:22:59.460
A Ashcraft: And you know, Sturgeon’s law applies right that ninety percent of everything is shit.
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01:22:59.470 –> 01:23:05.549
Tom Rodgers: Oh, yeah, And you and you know there’s thousands of games. Hundreds of them are very, very good,
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01:23:05.830 –> 01:23:11.890
Shlomo Sher: and thousands of them are very, very bad, and many, many thousands of them are very bad. Absolutely.
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01:23:11.900 –> 01:23:25.889
Tom Rodgers: I agree that you know. I i’m, I I guess i’m not trying to romanticize the idea that all games in the past break, and that all games in the future will crap right. Because I think I think that would be that that would be an absolute miscalculation. I think,
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01:23:25.900 –> 01:23:30.480
Tom Rodgers: on the other hand, though, and I do want to interrupt you here, the
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01:23:30.940 –> 01:23:32.940
A Ashcraft: I feel the moral panic
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01:23:33.130 –> 01:23:36.660
Tom Rodgers: for this eft
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01:23:36.980 –> 01:23:43.630
Tom Rodgers: Nft. Sorry not that ef the n fee web three like I can’t figure out
493
01:23:44.970 –> 01:23:48.410
A Ashcraft: how this works. I don’t understand why
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01:23:48.610 –> 01:24:03.410
Tom Rodgers: people are putting money into this. I can’t understand how they’re expecting to make all of this money back, because there’s a lot of money going in and and and and and and their pitch doesn’t seem to include money coming back out to them.
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01:24:03.820 –> 01:24:17.729
Tom Rodgers: I mean to the companies, so to the company that that makes this decentralized autonomous organization that’s about another one of their acronyms. D ao like, Why would a company build something like that
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01:24:18.260 –> 01:24:21.870
A Ashcraft: to where they give up control and they give up profits?
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01:24:23.060 –> 01:24:33.630
Shlomo Sher: But I. I thought that they still had the control, and they still had the share of the profit. So is it alive? Is all of this promise a lie
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01:24:34.520 –> 01:24:38.189
Tom Rodgers: in a way, I think there is cloak and dagger. Yes,
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01:24:38.200 –> 01:24:47.030
Tom Rodgers: in the sense that, like the the idea that this is autonomous, and the use of words like that are a little bit misleading.
500
01:24:47.040 –> 01:24:58.190
Tom Rodgers: Um, because ultimately, like you pointed out earlier, there is a difference here between the the the way to say the stock market works, and the way this works in that there’s always going to be a small slice
501
01:24:58.200 –> 01:25:21.030
Tom Rodgers: going back to a non-autonomous entity, You know it’s going back to effectively what we could call, you know, a game developer in charge of a particular game world is effectively, I think, the creation of these nfts almost akin to a sovereign State a sovereign nation state who has control over a market but they are allowing that market to interface with other nation-state mines, too, but they’re still taking slices back,
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01:25:21.040 –> 01:25:36.799
Tom Rodgers: you know. So if you think about it like that, I mean the analogy doesn’t work perfectly. But it’s the idea is there. I suppose I could probably hash that out a lot better. But but that that idea of it being still there being this very
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01:25:36.880 –> 01:25:39.969
Tom Rodgers: top-level, powerful entity
504
01:25:39.980 –> 01:25:42.319
Tom Rodgers: that does keep getting
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01:25:42.390 –> 01:25:46.709
Tom Rodgers: slices back. And I think, if you add into the mix this idea that you
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01:25:46.740 –> 01:25:50.489
Tom Rodgers: we’ve talked about already, that the amount of attention
507
01:25:50.500 –> 01:25:53.500
Tom Rodgers: activity that this could generate The
508
01:25:53.530 –> 01:26:10.770
Tom Rodgers: you want to scale that up on a massive level, those little slices being taken from each exchange is potentially worth billions, because they can attract a lot of players to this style of gaming by saying: Everyone makes money here, you know, but but but the simple fact is, is,
509
01:26:10.780 –> 01:26:38.769
Tom Rodgers: i’m the one that’s going to be making the real money you’re going to have to put loads of time and effort in in order to even make that something akin to a living, or even just if it’s a side hustle. You’re going to have to put in a lot of time and effort to learn the game, be the best of the game, and generate a lot of these in-game items that when you sell them we just take a little bit of the cream off the top, you know, like that. That That whole idea is where I think you’re getting at the thing for me. It is a bit of a life. There is a bit of, you know, and they they can’t pass my time enough
510
01:26:39.150 –> 01:26:40.990
A Ashcraft: to make it worth my time.
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01:26:41.000 –> 01:26:47.809
A Ashcraft: Right. I mean I could. I could play a game, or I could get a job at at Mcdonald’s, and which is going to pay better
512
01:26:47.820 –> 01:27:08.470
Shlomo Sher: right? Well, I guess that that question Yeah, Get a job at Mcdonald’s or play The game is is a question not not so much of how much money you could potentially earn from it, because that is misleading. And I think that’s where companies could mislead people by saying, Take a look at Andy. Here he earned twenty five thousand Us. Dollars last month
513
01:27:08.480 –> 01:27:11.640
Tom Rodgers: His nfts from a video game, right?
514
01:27:11.650 –> 01:27:17.249
Shlomo Sher: As a critical political economist, obviously. And they’re asking how much time did he invest
515
01:27:17.260 –> 01:27:35.259
Tom Rodgers: are all of those entities that he sold last month simply only from his activity of the previous month. There, there’s a lot of things that Aren’t being said here in this case, studying that you’re presenting with, whereas go to Mcdonald’s. I know what your hourly salary is. I know that you’re earning enough to make a living,
516
01:27:35.270 –> 01:27:37.269
Tom Rodgers: and I know that also. You know
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01:27:37.480 –> 01:27:41.760
Tom Rodgers: as an entity, even though it’s working for mcdonald’s. It’s still
518
01:27:41.780 –> 01:27:47.820
Tom Rodgers: you’re an employee. Therefore there are certain things about your job that are actually
519
01:27:48.180 –> 01:28:15.529
Shlomo Sher: not necessarily stable. It is quite precarious in a lot of its own ways, but it’s It’s something that’s regular and and actually regulated as well. I I am a little bit of a believer in regulation when it comes to things like people’s working lives, because I think it is absolutely important, and being and trying to sell this kind of stuff, you know, playing games to and money as a way to make a living is quite a dangerous statement to make. Ethically, I think it’s actually quite questionable,
520
01:28:15.540 –> 01:28:30.350
Tom Rodgers: because ultimately you’re trying to sell people the idea of of stability. And Actually, we know that the volatility of cryptocurrencies is a big note that I’ve got on my screen from when I was making some notes on some of the questions you wanted to ask. This is very volatile.
521
01:28:30.360 –> 01:28:41.229
Tom Rodgers: It is very volatile, and you know that the amount of time and effort required to invest in this both investment of time and investment of money could potentially be huge.
522
01:28:41.570 –> 01:28:59.010
Shlomo Sher: You know I I I want to jump back to a couple of the things you said, but ah! Especially this idea, that look on the one hand, it just seems to me that the idea of making money while you play, if you play the same way. Sounds awesome,
523
01:28:59.020 –> 01:28:59.590
Shlomo Sher: right
524
01:28:59.600 –> 01:29:14.950
Shlomo Sher: because it’s and it’s but Money’s a big motivator, and if now that motivator is going to be sold to us, as you know, hey? And you can make more money if you keep doing this and now becomes work
525
01:29:14.960 –> 01:29:33.089
Shlomo Sher: right now. Essentially, you’re you’re working. And now comes a real question of what you’re really getting for your time in your labor. Because I think one thing that was missing from the way you you mentioned it before was that if you’re just playing the game, there’s also the fun part right? What? You’re not getting when you’re working at Mcdonald’s right,
526
01:29:33.100 –> 01:29:46.720
Shlomo Sher: except for the fun of enjoying your coworkers, maybe, or something like that, and that’s really the attraction right? Not as so that you’ll make more, but that you’ll enjoy it right. But but to me the really big issue is
527
01:29:46.730 –> 01:30:00.589
Shlomo Sher: fair enough. That’s possible. But are you deceiving people in how this is going to work? And I thought the example you gave was very good. But my first thing I was thinking as a critical thinking instructor is that’s an anecdote of a sample of one.
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01:30:00.600 –> 01:30:28.489
Shlomo Sher: And you’re right. And you’re definitely right about this additional information that needs to be given about this particular sample, right? It’s really, really, because if you’re giving it without that initial information. You mean the case, study example, like sort of thought up of this person that’s made as much money instrument. Yeah, Exactly. Absolutely right. Yeah. How much do they put in? How much of it came from this month? What do they do? I think all that stuff is super important along with. And what happened to the other one thousand people who try to do something like this?
529
01:30:28.500 –> 01:30:33.099
Tom Rodgers: Exactly. Yeah. And that there there in lies. What I think is the rub is that this
530
01:30:33.350 –> 01:30:36.920
Tom Rodgers: this is being sold as an opportunity for everybody.
531
01:30:36.960 –> 01:30:40.859
Tom Rodgers: Right, that that, but also that it’s win-win for everybody,
532
01:30:40.990 –> 01:30:42.240
Tom Rodgers: and
533
01:30:42.320 –> 01:30:50.990
Tom Rodgers: we know that there are winners and losers always right. So Nobody puts a lot of investment into win-win situations,
534
01:30:51.000 –> 01:30:58.519
Shlomo Sher: No, because there’s there’s no such thing really, can I? Can I ask about that? Because
535
01:30:58.530 –> 01:31:09.270
Shlomo Sher: all right. Ah, you know, I know capitalism is not necessarily popular right now among many people, but Isn’t: the idea of capitalism that increased transactions
536
01:31:09.280 –> 01:31:28.679
Shlomo Sher: essentially increased trade. Ah, yeah, there are going to be some people who are going to make more than others. But overall that this is going to raise everybody up. Isn’t that kind of the idea, I mean, that’s the idea is yes, yeah, but it it requires it requires there to be something to feed off of
537
01:31:28.820 –> 01:31:37.989
Shlomo Sher: right. And in this case what they’re feeding off of is people’s time when they play games. So if you imagine, if you think about it like a commons,
538
01:31:38.120 –> 01:31:46.740
A Ashcraft: the Commons is the this, hey? There’s all this. There’s all this time that people are putting into games. Let’s see if we can make some money off of it,
539
01:31:46.950 –> 01:31:51.869
A Ashcraft: and then we’ll share some of that money with people. Who are. We’re playing the games.
540
01:31:52.140 –> 01:32:01.080
Shlomo Sher: So we have labor that’s not being used, and you know that labor is sometimes creating things that are,
541
01:32:01.270 –> 01:32:11.629
Shlomo Sher: you know, valuable to others right? And there’s But there’s a risk always with with this right. What What is it doing to the Commons? Is it a tragedy?
542
01:32:12.740 –> 01:32:22.440
Shlomo Sher: The tragedy of the Commons idea? Yes, I don’t know if this is a tragedy. Sorry, Tom, you go ahead. I don’t know if this was a tragedy of the But what do you think about this.
543
01:32:22.450 –> 01:32:25.980
Tom Rodgers: It’s a very interesting direction of thought. To be honest, I mean,
544
01:32:26.410 –> 01:32:32.850
Tom Rodgers: first, that you know the main. The main thing about capitalism more generally is, you know, as a social system
545
01:32:33.300 –> 01:32:44.209
Tom Rodgers: in theory, and I and I would argue that this has only ever been in theory, and it’s never been put into practice. Really, It’s that. Yes, the more movement, and the more we allow
546
01:32:44.220 –> 01:33:05.109
Tom Rodgers: success to kind of dominate the the system and failure. Actually, I think it’s always been very important to point out that you know early’s the it’s. It’s absolutely critical that we allow things that don’t work to fail. I think the two thousand and eight financial crisis is a critical moment in history. For that reason, where we didn’t abide by that old sort of axiom of what capitalism is,
547
01:33:05.120 –> 01:33:08.680
Tom Rodgers: anyway beside the point. Um, that,
548
01:33:08.930 –> 01:33:25.549
Tom Rodgers: you know, is it? Does it bring up the base level of everybody? If there are sort of people winning greatly at the top, and people not maybe winning quite as much, I I think, in in theory that Yes, that’s the idea. But I think in practice it’s never turned out that way.
549
01:33:25.560 –> 01:33:29.819
Tom Rodgers: I I do think that there are people who
550
01:33:30.060 –> 01:33:41.759
Tom Rodgers: and get completely lost or completely overlooked, or necessarily people who are, you know, completely marginalized, or even outright exploited in certain cases where one.
551
01:33:41.790 –> 01:34:01.199
Tom Rodgers: There’s no benefit here to them to be in this position, and I think, like you know, I always think of like good example where you talk before about, you know satisfaction in work, right? And it’s a really funny one. Satisfaction of work when you think about the history of, of, say, capitalist development and the on current iteration that we have.
552
01:34:01.210 –> 01:34:06.730
Tom Rodgers: And you think about the the way it’s global now, right? And I think to myself, when you know, where does
553
01:34:06.740 –> 01:34:35.129
Tom Rodgers: a lot of the materials that go into the building of I ever come from, and we we know that child labour in in minds, in Sub-saharan Africa is a real thing, and that there isn’t really much of a benefit to those people to be doing that job because their life expectancy is which you you know to early twenties, mid-thirties at best you know to unto us from the standard and the position we sit in, we think to ourselves. Is that sort of raising everybody up slowly. But you know some people are right at the top of some.
554
01:34:35.140 –> 01:34:47.120
Tom Rodgers: I kind of. You know that there’s more of a polarizing effect happening where there are people who are completely down trouble in some cases, and I mean I haven’t seen it myself first hand, but I know of it.
555
01:34:47.330 –> 01:34:48.410
Tom Rodgers: But
556
01:34:48.610 –> 01:35:00.149
Tom Rodgers: I think sort of taking that and asking ourselves like, is there exploitation necessarily going to be happening here with the nfts and and video gaming.
557
01:35:00.160 –> 01:35:24.959
Tom Rodgers: I think that it, like many things, it has the potential to be. And the the critical thing really ultimately is is coming back to the catch line that we’ve come back to, over and over again. As you know, everybody wins here, which I think, from from an ethical point of view, and and from a sort of a sociological and political point of view. It like I said it, it is a bit cloak and daggery, because ultimately, what’s being sold there is kind of
558
01:35:25.400 –> 01:35:29.389
Tom Rodgers: this this. It’s two things colliding with one another,
559
01:35:29.400 –> 01:35:48.420
Tom Rodgers: the ability to make money. I. You know a a capitalist ideal which a lot of people aspire to like You both said, You know it’s. It’s very powerful. The ability to make money, you know It’s something that a lot of people say. Oh, wait what they are to make money from this, but that’s great, you know, combined with a certain supposed new form of freedom,
560
01:35:48.430 –> 01:36:05.449
Tom Rodgers: you know. And and if if money making and freedom love each other, you know they they’ve been in a love relationship for many hundreds of years. Now the idea that you can freely make money yourself is absolutely central. I mean America is a country built on that idea. You know that that you could go to the Americas, to to the New World
561
01:36:05.460 –> 01:36:23.500
Tom Rodgers: and make your destiny. You know for your destiny that that kind of idea of of frontierism, I guess you could call it I I’m probably going to end up whenever I write stuff about this. I’m going to end up using loads of terms that are derived from my gold. My studies, you know, like frontiers, frontiers.
562
01:36:23.510 –> 01:36:39.790
Shlomo Sher: Um! And if I do promise freedom, I mean that’s absolutely absolutely, but freedom to make your fortune. And it just so happens that in the modern world make your fortune or make your destiny is almost entirely synonymous with, Make a shit of a cash,
563
01:36:39.800 –> 01:36:42.289
right? I mean that that that’s That’s pretty much
564
01:36:42.300 –> 01:36:57.770
Tom Rodgers: What is, you know? I mean, I i’d be really interested if anyone anywhere has done like a historical study of the sort of the the social attitudinal changes towards the meaning of what it means to to be fortunate, and to make a fortune, or to forge your fortune, because I I suspect that
565
01:36:57.780 –> 01:37:12.019
Shlomo Sher: two hundred years ago the word fortune wasn’t quite as monetarily inflicted as it is now. But that’s just me. I would love it if someone was listening to this show, and they can actually point you in the direction of a book or something in that direction. But yeah, it’s just It’s really my goddess for it, too,
566
01:37:12.030 –> 01:37:20.389
Shlomo Sher: or tuna. Yeah, exactly. Which is the Goddess of luck. So we’re in fortune is really what it was really about luck rather than you know.
567
01:37:20.400 –> 01:37:33.589
Shlomo Sher: Ah, voting Well, right? I mean, yeah, that which is, which is kind of interesting. How that word has, you know, Changed? Yeah, as a change along the way, you know, I think the word wealth has as well. The word wealth ranged a lot, I think, too, in that respect. But
568
01:37:33.600 –> 01:37:34.689
Shlomo Sher: sorry. What were you going to say?
569
01:37:34.700 –> 01:37:52.029
Shlomo Sher: You also talked to us earlier about freedom in the context of how this whole thing the play to earn is also um sold as as freeing in another sense right in another sense, where you are ah freeing yourself in the monopoly that games have in terms of ownership. Is that right?
570
01:37:52.040 –> 01:38:01.399
Tom Rodgers: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that’s a really interesting one again, because it’s it. You know the freedom to be able to own
571
01:38:01.550 –> 01:38:16.209
Tom Rodgers: something, and like the you know, the freedom to basically have autonomy Really, at the end of the day. It’s it’s that that’s what it is. You know the freedom to own these assets and autonomously, supposedly through the cryptocurrency, market. Be able to sell, buy, sell, and train them,
572
01:38:16.220 –> 01:38:23.110
Tom Rodgers: you know, and that autonomy autonomy has always been a very powerful motivator for
573
01:38:23.120 –> 01:38:49.300
Tom Rodgers: um, you know, for sort of getting people into action to to be venture capitalists to be people who get involved in a particular market that’s being set up. You know the idea of your freedom to do this is is really really strong. Um. And I think you mentioned earlier the the concept of the car right? That that is what the car is, you know, the social ideology of the car is something that when it came around was effectively
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01:38:49.420 –> 01:39:08.679
Tom Rodgers: a technological device that you could buy to free yourself from the constraints of having to walk everywhere or be in a place where it takes multiple days to get somewhere else, and then eventually, you know it’s. It became a a type of freedom that’s so deeply invented in our everyday lives that we kind of it goes unnoticed. Now, I suppose
575
01:39:09.020 –> 01:39:25.339
Shlomo Sher: you know. Can we talk so? So there is a slight change of subject. But it came off of the idea that you’re that you’re buying this thing. You’re buying this this thing. Um, let’s talk about what you’re actually buying when you buy an nft.
576
01:39:26.830 –> 01:39:35.469
Tom Rodgers: Okay, I mean, my understanding is that you’re not buying much. You’re basically buying. It’s like the akin of buying a locker
577
01:39:36.270 –> 01:39:39.010
A Ashcraft: in a place that has
578
01:39:39.240 –> 01:39:41.160
A Ashcraft: It has a thing in it.
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01:39:41.870 –> 01:39:48.090
Tom Rodgers: But yes, that thing could change. But what what gets put in that locker could be modified?
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01:39:48.340 –> 01:39:52.940
Tom Rodgers: We talking specifically in relation to nfts that are
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01:39:52.950 –> 01:40:10.489
Tom Rodgers: in-game items, or just nfts more generally nfds that are in-game items, right or in general. I think that it’s probably between with ways. I think that the one thing about in-game ones in particular is using your locker analogy is that you’re buying a locker
582
01:40:10.500 –> 01:40:22.709
Tom Rodgers: place. But that place is a very ah definite space. That that locker can only exist in once. You pick that locker and take it up out of the door, or try and say, you know, extract it from your Cd Rom. Drive,
583
01:40:22.790 –> 01:40:41.559
Tom Rodgers: just disappears right. You know It’s It’s It’s a locker with whatever’s inside, and I think it’s a bit of an enigma of what’s inside. Actually, I think a lot of people still trying to figure that out is that it’s not as movable and mutable as people think you know It’s it’s not something that can be
584
01:40:42.140 –> 01:40:59.450
Tom Rodgers: utilized everywhere. I think I think it’s very interesting to think about the the difference between the exchange value of what that locker is, and the use value of what that locker is, and I think actually a really interesting thing that I’ve never thought about until just this point. Now in time is that when you’re thinking about the use value of theseing game items.
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01:41:00.590 –> 01:41:18.890
Tom Rodgers: It’s inherently tied to the game world in which it was created. As far as I can see, I know that there may be developments in networks that might change that where you have a whole ecosystem of games where stuff can move between them. I don’t know whether that will increase the kind of the integrity of these economies, so that they are a bit more
586
01:41:18.900 –> 01:41:31.689
Tom Rodgers: um stable. I don’t know it on the development side. It would take a lot to do like to make developers build to some sort of common common common standards that
587
01:41:31.700 –> 01:41:34.489
Tom Rodgers: I guess I think from one thing I mean another
588
01:41:34.500 –> 01:41:36.290
Tom Rodgers: on a a lot of effort
589
01:41:36.300 –> 01:41:45.290
Tom Rodgers: on a sort of theoretical point of view. For me at least, there’s someone that’s interested in how how capitalist practice works and markets work that would require cooperation between competitors. Right?
590
01:41:45.300 –> 01:41:58.239
Shlomo Sher: Yes, which is something that doesn’t happen often. But but even that I can tell a a a slight story I was working on um with. I was working at Disney as a freelancer, and I was working on trying. I was working on a mobile game for trying,
591
01:41:58.250 –> 01:42:12.219
Tom Rodgers: and and we pitched, and everybody loved the idea that this mobile game could look at the various servers that all the other Tron games, because Disney was making a variety of Tron games, and could, like
592
01:42:12.240 –> 01:42:17.140
A Ashcraft: give you give you things for the mobile game based on how well you did on the other games,
593
01:42:17.880 –> 01:42:24.690
Shlomo Sher: and it wouldn’t take much for these developers to give us access to It’s the same companies.
594
01:42:24.700 –> 01:42:26.890
Shlomo Sher: Yeah, it’s the same company. It’s the same company.
595
01:42:26.900 –> 01:42:41.859
Tom Rodgers: Did they like the idea they loved the idea. I could not make it happen. One. It’s just difficult, this this developmentally hard. Everybody’s under under pressures to get their games out the door. This is one little extra thing that they need to do, and it’s just not going to happen,
596
01:42:42.740 –> 01:42:52.220
Shlomo Sher: unless maybe there’s Ah, unless maybe you know, they’re thinking that this is the sort of thing where a lot of money can be generated,
597
01:42:52.480 –> 01:43:09.470
Shlomo Sher: you know through something, I mean I don’t know I I can see a situation like you had where It’s just a nice, neat thing, something that they had to knew no was going to be required of them.
598
01:43:09.480 –> 01:43:30.440
Shlomo Sher: Yeah, from the very beginning, right? But why can’t you see a company like, you know? Ah, you know actors and Blizzard or ea. Let’s let’s go with E. A. Right? Okay, we’re jumping on this Nft bandwagon, and we’re going to essentially make it. So all our games kind of work in the same way, and you can exchange assets between our games, and that’s right. Robots does it?
599
01:43:31.150 –> 01:43:42.509
Shlomo Sher: Oh, they’re a single! I don’t know what you call that. They’re a single game world with games that all work to. But you’re right, I mean a sense. But they’re the same
600
01:43:42.520 –> 01:44:00.819
Shlomo Sher: right, though. Did they don’t have a bunch of different properties? Exactly. No. But but stuff you build in one can be can be taken into the other two avatars avatars you build in one, and people in the in the Space people sort of point at avatars as being for the main things that people are going to really gravitate towards.
601
01:44:00.830 –> 01:44:06.289
A Ashcraft: Have my avatar from this game take on to moved into this game and play, you know. So
602
01:44:06.300 –> 01:44:09.489
Shlomo Sher: right, I want to come back to your locker metaphor there again,
603
01:44:09.500 –> 01:44:11.429
Tom Rodgers: because I still feel like
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01:44:12.010 –> 01:44:13.519
Tom Rodgers: ultimately
605
01:44:13.860 –> 01:44:28.780
Tom Rodgers: There’s a a bit of a disconnect here between the the freedom that’s kind of sold that this is sort of sold on I mean, part of it is, everyone can make money, but also a part of it. Is you own this, and this is your You can do whatever you like That’s one of the principles of you know modern
606
01:44:28.930 –> 01:44:32.189
Tom Rodgers: notions of private property ownership,
607
01:44:32.200 –> 01:44:34.369
Tom Rodgers: even from the ground up,
608
01:44:34.930 –> 01:44:40.110
Tom Rodgers: but that it’s that it’s like that private property that you own is still
609
01:44:41.700 –> 01:44:43.980
Tom Rodgers: ultimately restricted
610
01:44:44.110 –> 01:44:51.469
Tom Rodgers: by the commercial ownership of a particular space in which that use the use value of it is actually applicable,
611
01:44:51.550 –> 01:45:08.599
Shlomo Sher: whereas I think an earlier film. But you said, You know painting, I can go by a painting. I can hang it in, or I want. I can throw it in a sket. I can take it to my local park and hang it up on the golf. If I really want to, I can. I can reappropriate its use entirely. If I really like. I can
612
01:45:08.610 –> 01:45:20.390
Tom Rodgers: break it down and use the timber to light my fire, or I could, you know, hang it up somewhere there. There are many different things I can do with that right because it’s my private property once I bought it,
613
01:45:21.190 –> 01:45:23.099
Tom Rodgers: but the same isn’t true
614
01:45:23.120 –> 01:45:33.969
Tom Rodgers: for nfts, and I I guess one thing i’m interested in seeing actually is, how is the issue of the use value of something that is an Nft
615
01:45:34.160 –> 01:45:45.889
Tom Rodgers: going to be looked at, thought about and addressed in the industry. That that’s an open question for me, and i’m always interested in how developers are going to think about that kind of thing, because ultimately,
616
01:45:46.130 –> 01:45:49.529
Tom Rodgers: you know, there could be people who are investors
617
01:45:49.740 –> 01:45:54.180
Tom Rodgers: who aren’t game players at all, and they would buy your locker
618
01:45:54.190 –> 01:46:13.190
Tom Rodgers: and say, Oh, i’m going to buy that lock. It belongs to a game world. That’s pretty stable. It’s got a big player base. I’m going to look at all the metrics that have been gathered for these game worlds, and I I do think, as a sort of a corollary statement, that the publicizing and publishing about how healthy games are metrically and in terms of management it’s going to become a really big standard. If this stuff takes off
619
01:46:13.200 –> 01:46:17.539
Tom Rodgers: that they’ll almost be like a cryptocurrency market style, level of
620
01:46:17.550 –> 01:46:46.249
Shlomo Sher: of kind of granular levels of detail that you can go into on game populations, player activity and health and stuff that will be required for people who are outside of those games to actually have the confidence to invest
621
01:46:46.260 –> 01:46:50.550
Shlomo Sher: and their stock, you would have companies do the same thing in game game world,
622
01:46:50.560 –> 01:47:05.259
Tom Rodgers: and therein will come in a little bit of what you said earlier about. You know potential deception. I mean there. There is a lot of sort of various levels of deception that take place on the stock market, especially when you’re trying to boost confidence when you’re trying to do this, and that, you know, like one.
623
01:47:05.700 –> 01:47:21.880
Tom Rodgers: My brother’s really interested in cryptocurrency, and and he knows a lot about it. And what one thing he sort of repeatedly tells me that’s really interesting to see is that you can look at any crypto wallet in the world. Right? You can go away, and you can look up the blockchain, and you can see how much
624
01:47:21.890 –> 01:47:31.229
Tom Rodgers: of a particular cryptocurrency is sitting in a particular wallop. You can never know who owns that wallet, but you can see how much of the cryptocurrencies in that wallet, and
625
01:47:31.240 –> 01:47:43.989
Tom Rodgers: people who are really savvy with cryptocurrency trading keep a very close eye on the wallets that have very large amounts of the cryptocurrency in them, because they know. As soon as crypto in those wallets starts shifting the whole market’s going to change,
626
01:47:44.000 –> 01:47:59.289
Tom Rodgers: which tells us something that that tells us they don’t have. Who but it tells us that that there is a form of power that lies somewhere, and the power is lying with those who have a very large amount of the accumulated value overall, because they have the power to to. Basically,
627
01:48:00.210 –> 01:48:27.449
Shlomo Sher: You know, I guess in a way like manipulate the market if they want, if they still wish. So I mean the question could be for someone who’s really obsessed with it. Who owns these? Because I I would love to know. But but for me, that’s not really the ultimate ethical issue here. The ethical issue here is really, ultimately that someone owns that much, and therefore has the power to a lot more power over others basically and who are in the same market, you know. And I think the other ethical issue is is that
628
01:48:27.460 –> 01:48:36.630
Tom Rodgers: they’re touting this space as being transparent. But here’s this aspect of complete obscurity.
629
01:48:36.640 –> 01:49:05.630
Tom Rodgers: Absolutely. Yep, exactly. You know, and that that to me is all about what we’ve just been saying about the the the freedom that is being sold to you to to do all of these things, to make money, to be able to buy and trade it because it’s your own private property. But then, actually, there are still a lot of forms of control that you are not being told about here that you will be subjected to, and one is. There are powerful players out there who can manipulate the market that you’re going to potentially become a part of. So it’s important to be aware of that.
630
01:49:05.920 –> 01:49:07.890
Tom Rodgers: And the other one is is that
631
01:49:07.900 –> 01:49:28.219
Tom Rodgers: although you have the freedom to buy and sell, this piece of private property as and when you wish. Ultimately the value of that piece of property relies on like almost like a a concatenation of multiple things. Now you know, like multi-level things on top of each other, one of which is the game world being healthy and still usable, and still something that people actually want to go to.
632
01:49:28.370 –> 01:49:32.019
Tom Rodgers: Games are kind of in a way they’re meant to
633
01:49:32.810 –> 01:49:44.999
Tom Rodgers: to to grow and die. That’s what games are. You know that that is what they are meant to do. They’re meant to have a life cycle, at least I think so. Anyway, you know they’re meant to be. We all want our games to become hobbies and become
634
01:49:45.010 –> 01:49:48.089
Tom Rodgers: Yeah, Exactly. But very few do right, of course.
635
01:49:48.100 –> 01:49:48.590
Tom Rodgers: Yeah,
636
01:49:48.600 –> 01:50:02.609
Tom Rodgers: exactly. I mean on, you know, on a on a longer time, scale. Most companies grow, and eventually reach some kind of point where they decline. You know it just it. It kind of happens. It’s a cycle. But I mean i’m not saying that’s always the case, but like
637
01:50:03.210 –> 01:50:04.260
you,
638
01:50:04.460 –> 01:50:14.499
Tom Rodgers: games are games, and I just I kind of i’m kind of getting the sense, and it’s really interesting talking about it for so long, because it’s like It’s making me think about
639
01:50:15.380 –> 01:50:17.399
Tom Rodgers: like, how much
640
01:50:18.400 –> 01:50:20.639
Tom Rodgers: will games still be games
641
01:50:20.810 –> 01:50:38.859
Tom Rodgers: when when this, if this kind of stuff becomes the standard practice is is all I’m asking is like it might in a way it’s going to become a whole, another form of being, because I mean, you’ll have people. Basically I mean, if let’s think about a game where it’s, it’s play to earn. And if If it’s a game that involves any kind of competition,
642
01:50:38.870 –> 01:50:47.389
Tom Rodgers: there’s going to be a whole lot of people who don’t want to get involved in that after it’s been in existence for a few months, you know, like basically people who are just not capable of competing.
643
01:50:47.400 –> 01:50:48.779
And that’s actually quite a common phenomenon.
644
01:50:48.790 –> 01:51:14.550
Tom Rodgers: Now, as well is that there are, but they call it the churn. I think sometimes in in the video games industry, where you do have a small core set of players who are really invested in the game, and they’ve they’ve either developed their skills through the grind or they’ve bought lots of in-game stuff that that makes them quite powerful, whatever Walt under the Iplays, for example. And then there’s a whole lot of players who play it for a little bit. Realize that they don’t stand a chance of competing once they get to a certain point.
645
01:51:15.210 –> 01:51:18.049
Tom Rodgers: It’s always another game
646
01:51:18.060 –> 01:51:27.369
Tom Rodgers: exactly like you said, there’s always another game, so it Just it does make you think about the I mean. I think that’s an ethical question as well. And a moral question about
647
01:51:28.080 –> 01:51:41.670
Tom Rodgers: what are video game companies really trying to offer two players, because when I did my research in the early two thousand and ten S. Early in mid two thousand and three to play one of the standard moral narratives that crops up a lot. And it is that
648
01:51:41.820 –> 01:52:01.610
Tom Rodgers: when, when when asked directly, why are you introducing the free to play model. Is it just to make money one of like the standard narrative you get It’s not just to make money. We want to make money so that we can make a better experience for the players, you know. Ultimately a lot of the ethical onus was was placed on what we’re really doing is providing a great experience here for players.
649
01:52:01.620 –> 01:52:09.889
Tom Rodgers: I wonder how much of that kind of like ethic, or that ethos of well, ultimately making money is to make better games is actually is actually true.
650
01:52:09.900 –> 01:52:24.489
Tom Rodgers: It’s it’s quite hard to It’s quite hard to. I think it’s very true until the company becomes public. My experience is that the that the pressures of being owned by you know, having stock on the stock market, and being owned by by by public
651
01:52:24.500 –> 01:52:25.490
Tom Rodgers: and shareholders,
652
01:52:25.500 –> 01:52:30.829
Tom Rodgers: having a child right and quarterly reports is what distorts all of that.
653
01:52:30.840 –> 01:52:42.890
Tom Rodgers: Um, I having having this, this, this fiscal responsibility to make money for people who don’t necessarily care about games, or even know that they own a game company.
654
01:52:42.900 –> 01:52:58.790
Tom Rodgers: Um, yeah, I really I really don’t like shareholder economics. Actually, by the way, just just as a personal opinion of mine, I think shareholder economics is one of the primary ways that a lot of creativity of what companies do it gets disenchanted. Actually, yeah, I think there’s a lot to be said about that.
655
01:52:58.800 –> 01:53:00.389
Tom Rodgers: That’s been my experience, too.
656
01:53:00.400 –> 01:53:07.589
Shlomo Sher: Yeah, guys. Okay. So I I think we’ve gone a good like the time, and I’m also looking at the clock and thinking that I have class in an hour
657
01:53:07.600 –> 01:53:18.470
Shlomo Sher: that I got to get to, So, Tom, can we wrap it up with the final question, which is, What do you want to live our listeners with
658
01:53:18.540 –> 01:53:25.689
Shlomo Sher: so, and and let’s keep it? Keep it to about a minute or so. So we’re gonna end up using this.
659
01:53:25.700 –> 01:53:28.290
Shlomo Sher: I have a couple of clips I could take from what you’ve already said.
660
01:53:28.300 –> 01:53:37.249
Shlomo Sher: Yeah, yeah, I I’ve got some kind of sum it up in a minute. Let’s do it. I’ve got something. I think it’s It’s nothing academic or nothing intellectual. Really, it’s
661
01:53:37.650 –> 01:53:39.380
Tom Rodgers: play games to join
662
01:53:39.950 –> 01:53:46.309
Tom Rodgers: don’t don’t don’t that don’t let the primary reason to play a game, or to be a player,
663
01:53:46.480 –> 01:53:51.279
Tom Rodgers: something that’s eventually going to become some kind of shackle,
664
01:53:51.320 –> 01:53:54.089
Tom Rodgers: you know, like just play it to enjoy it
665
01:53:54.270 –> 01:54:02.090
Shlomo Sher: ultimately. Everybody that’s my, that’s my take reading to be honest, All right. All right, Tom Rogers. Thank you so much.
666
01:54:02.600 –> 01:54:16.870
Shlomo Sher: You’re most welcome. Thank you for having me on. And um yeah, went on a lot longer than I thought, but I really enjoyed this discussion that i’ll send my over as well. It was fantastic. Yeah, right on, and everybody. It helped me a lot, too. By the way,
667
01:54:16.880 –> 01:54:22.990
Tom Rodgers: um sort of crystallize my ideas about what what I need to do as a game designer when
668
01:54:23.000 –> 01:54:27.399
Shlomo Sher: I mean that’s really interesting.
669
01:54:27.410 –> 01:54:51.070
Tom Rodgers: This is something that i’m planning on doing more research and writing about, and potentially trying to get interviews with developers for their views on this kind of stuff, because I do think that I think the video games industry is interesting because it’s almost like every ten years or so. There’s a new moral panic, I mean, i’m only kind of like basing that off my own observations. Really, it’s not anything seriously
670
01:54:51.080 –> 01:54:52.489
Tom Rodgers: measured, or whatever right.
671
01:54:52.500 –> 01:54:57.710
Tom Rodgers: But But when these moral panics do come about. It’s fascinating because you
672
01:54:57.930 –> 01:55:08.100
Tom Rodgers: and this is one reason why I love your show by the way, it’s because for me, ultimately, ultimately, these aren’t technical issues at all. These are all ethical issues.
673
01:55:08.110 –> 01:55:15.240
Tom Rodgers: Ultimately these are ethical issues about, and I in my in my Phd when I was looking at the free-to-play model,
674
01:55:15.310 –> 01:55:35.010
Tom Rodgers: I coined a term which my examiner loved, by the way, which was so. Um I was really interested in. I I just gathered lots of public statements made by developers about why they are going to adopt for you to play, or why they’re not right. And one thing I noticed when I did like a big discourse analysis of what these people were saying, and there were lots of different things that came up, but one that was really apparent
675
01:55:35.200 –> 01:55:40.239
Tom Rodgers: that there was this: There was this dual problem, what I called the dual problem of profit
676
01:55:40.340 –> 01:55:42.309
Tom Rodgers: right? Which was that
677
01:55:42.860 –> 01:55:56.510
Tom Rodgers: on the one hand, these developers have to say something about how they’re going to make profits in the future, and that whether free to play with the the way everything is going or not, That is this the new way to make money, because, you know, being realist
678
01:55:56.520 –> 01:56:04.900
Tom Rodgers: games, companies have to make money. They can’t make stuff at a loss that just doesn’t work it. It just it. Just doesn’t calculate, you know it does not compute, and
679
01:56:05.000 –> 01:56:22.280
Tom Rodgers: but at the same time. But in a lot of these interviews developers also had to kind of navigate that. And this is the second, like the duality of the problem. Here they had to navigate the ethical question of what it means to be seen as someone that’s doing what they’re doing to make money
680
01:56:22.290 –> 01:56:25.959
Tom Rodgers: right? So they had to almost like, morally or ethically navigate this issue of.
681
01:56:26.090 –> 01:56:27.790
Tom Rodgers: I don’t want to be seen as a money grabber.
682
01:56:27.800 –> 01:56:33.060
Tom Rodgers: I’ve got to say something about why I want to make the money, too, so it and what I call this was
683
01:56:33.140 –> 01:56:51.119
Tom Rodgers: basically they had to say something about kind of the the value as a as a quantity, as a as a quantification. To to say something about how much money we could make from this, you know, so free to play is great. It has the potential to make shit loads more money than the previous, and what we had. It’s all about quantity. But then they also have to qualify
684
01:56:51.130 –> 01:57:02.799
Tom Rodgers: why they were going to make that money too. So there’s like this. I’m: I’m very interested in how sort of quantitative aspects of social life rub up against qualitative aspects, and so that that’s kind of one of my theoretical interests more generally.
685
01:57:02.810 –> 01:57:15.390
Tom Rodgers: Um, And it it was really fascinating reading their statements because a lot of them appeals to really interesting moral ideas about. We have a response, a social or a moral responsibility to the players to make a better experience for them,
686
01:57:15.400 –> 01:57:17.990
Tom Rodgers: or some of them said, You know,
687
01:57:18.000 –> 01:57:41.019
Shlomo Sher: and we have a I think I remember one statement saying something like the salvation of the video games. Industry lies in this book, and therefore the game out would be saved. And I was like, Whoa! Whoa! Who’s getting to theological language about There’s a lot of rationalization going on here. Yeah, exactly. This is what we’re almost getting into, like a yeah, exactly like a a theological rationalization of what the Uk industry needs, because supposedly otherwise, it’s going to
688
01:57:41.030 –> 01:57:50.099
Tom Rodgers: crash and burn. You know the Apocalypse is going to happen that kind of thing. And it was really interesting like reading these statements, and I just remember reading one in particular.
689
01:57:50.200 –> 01:57:58.359
Tom Rodgers: It was a blizzard employee, I think, or it it might have even been a lead developer for Blizzard, and it was about
690
01:57:58.710 –> 01:58:02.680
Tom Rodgers: their player population, and how they view their player population,
691
01:58:02.780 –> 01:58:08.389
Tom Rodgers: and he said something like that. They were developing a new game,
692
01:58:09.100 –> 01:58:28.090
Tom Rodgers: and it was something like, Well, we might as well try and cannibalize our player population, because otherwise someone else is going to come around and cannibalize them instead of us. And he used the word cannibalized openly, and I thought it was really interesting the choice of word, because it’s very telling about how they sort of view what players are,
693
01:58:28.100 –> 01:58:37.680
Tom Rodgers: you know. In some cases i’m not saying. All developers think like that. But i’m just saying it’s. You know it’s. It’s very telling the kind of language that’s being used here to describe effectively a population of people
694
01:58:37.890 –> 01:58:50.589
Tom Rodgers: which, which is what players are now players in many ways are subjected to really almost like census-like levels of population monitoring, you know. It’s like It’s like a government. It’s like a government monitoring. You know
695
01:58:50.600 –> 01:58:52.989
A Ashcraft: well more than the Government ever could.
696
01:58:53.000 –> 01:59:01.850
Tom Rodgers: Yeah, absolutely not of monitoring the the players get in. These in free of my games is well, more than any government could ever hope, except maybe the Chinese.
