I’ve been playing one of these silly phone games. It’s a zombie survivor game and, predictably, it’s driven by real world money. They call it pay-to-win in the gamer shorthand (P2W), and that means the more you pay, the more advanced you get while you compete with other individuals and alliances for prizes, and battle with them over virtual items of one form or another. It’s all artificial scarcity.
This weekend, we had a war with another server – all, of course, orchestrated by the game developers. They create demand for virtual items to compete in a virtual world for… what, exactly? To ‘beat the other player’, which you could do by simply playing with dice. Effectively, these games are like that.
Why do I play them? Because I find it interesting to see how players go out of their way to pretend that they care about other people. Non-Aggression Pacts generally spring up (NAPs), which generally elevate some and cause the lowest levels to constantly be raided and losing the virtual resources they have gathered. Eventually the lower levels get upset, quit the game, and with a lack of new players, the server eats itself. Every single time.
What’s worse, any act of defiance to the higher levels is met with iron fists, not unlike the real world, but with virtual items.
The game developers then force the servers to battle each other because people spend money for that. And when that stops being the cash cow, they merge the servers, depending on the competitive nature for items you can’t park in front of your house to continue making money. Until that dies.
I play because I enjoy building things, really, and liking to see how the systems are built. For me, it’s a reverse engineering of the game and the players, and it generally leaves me with a particularly cynical view of humanity.
So we won that war, if there is any winning of a war, and I raise up to see that the issues with Israel and the United States and pretty much the entire Middle East, particularly Iran right now, have escalated again. You can have whatever side you want, I don’t care. The net result is the same.
And I think of the game. And I think of this. Because our planet – our capital on the planet – is not stored in banks. Our ability to breath and feed ourselves is our actual capital. That is diminishing.
The server, as it is, is beginning to die. Except we have no server to battle against, and no server to merge with. We’re playing musical chairs with an increasing population and less and less trees to make chairs.
A self-defeating species.
I’ll just toast marshmallows in the flames. We seem to have a surplus of marshmallows, for some reason.
