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On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Rick wrote:
On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 14:45 -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
But your skills might not have real-world uses and you haven't really
conquered the universe, just the imaginary "virtual" universe.
Compare thiw with the hobby of making furniture or playing a musical
instrument.
Well, I've seen a lot of debate about this, but I think there's an
argument for computer interaction as a substitution for *some* of our
interpersonal interaction. I guess where I'm going with that is that,
barring some sort of electromagnetic cataclysm, computers are pretty
much here to stay, and their intrusion into our daily lives is getting
nothing but larger, so making sure that the next generation are
competent computer users/interactors/etc might be more important than
previously thought. You probably have some interesting insight into that
topic.
Computer skills definitely are important. I wonder how much your computer
skills are helped by playing the game (especially when compared with
studying some sort of computer tutorial). I'm sure we all agree that
there is some vague upper limit on how much time one ought to spend on
this kind of thing. We know it can get out of control for some people.
3. you "build" or "acquire" things that can be lost
But they don't exist. Compare with the hobby of making wooden
furniture.
Isn't that like saying that the results of even a successful day-trader
don't exist? Just because all the effort and result revolves around
electrons doesn't make it not real.
Maybe you can do something in the real world with things you build in the
virtual world. I wouldn't know. With day trading, you can use the
computer get more money that can be held in your hand and then spent on
things like food and cars.
If you read the heist article, the 30 billion that GHSC made off with
was given a real world value of around $16,500. That's a pretty
significant sum to most of us. Granted, that's an exchange rate of
$0.000055 but since it's essentially free energy added to the system,
it's still interesting.
How do they figure out the value? Is it in terms of the amount of real
human effort that it took to generate the $30 billion virtual dollars?
For example, of the effort was worth $5/man-hour and it took 3300
man-hours to accumulate $30 billion, then we might say that the $30
billion was worth $16,500 (or maybe it was more money per hour and fewer
hours). Anyway, that doesn't mean that the virtual money has a real-world
value, just that it had a real-world cost. Value means that someone will
buy it, cost means that it was hard to make. Something could have a great
cost and no value.
4. there will be occasion that I'm right in the middle of something that
walking away from will cause me to be very unhappy
Of coures this is a reason not to play the game -- it interferes with
other things. So you need to be getting something out of the game to
compensate for this loss. Happiness is gained in playing but happiness
also is lost because the game takes you away from other things.
It *could* be a reason not to play. It's more reasonable to say that too
much of *anything* is probably a bad thing. While I'm logged in roughly
12-15 hours per week, it's always after the youngin has gone to bed and
there's still plenty of time to spend watching TV with the wife some
nights.
I agree that too much of nearly anything is bad. If you spend 12-15 hours
per week on a game, think about what you could do with 5 hours per week if
you could cut back to 7-10 hours -- that would be a savings of 260 hours
per year which is equivalent to more than one month of full-time work.
In 8 years, the savings of 5 hours per week would add up to one full year
of full-time work. If you could have someone work for you full-time for
one year, don't you think you could get a lot of value out of his work?
I'm not saying that you shouldn't play it, or even that you shouldn't play
it more than you play it now. I'm just pointing out that what we choose
to spend our time on has major effects in the long term. If you spend 15
hours per week on something, and you do that for 40 years, you've expended
15 years of full-time work on that thing. That is a lot of effort. Will
it be worth it?
So players might learn some economic principles by playing Eve.
Possibly. However, I would have to say that my concern over kids
learning that "pirating is good" probably outweighs any potential
increase in their knowledge of economics. Being a pirate is a perfectly
acceptable method of living in Eve, to the point that "griefing" people
is really really hard to do without exploiting.
So it might be really bad for people to play this game because it
encourages exploitative behavior?
Mike
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