Valve Hired an Economist

I don't find it worthwhile to have this conversation with you any longer

[grazr]

That's fine by me, i only answered again because you enquired. I didn't even want to reply to your comment before last but your attitude made me bite. You have this simple minded perspective of addiction that irks me mostly because i used to think exactly the same way. Before i experienced it second hand on several occasions and covered it in an academic study. I'm not saying that makes me right, i'm just explaining that if you can't understand why i think what i do, then those are some reasons for it.

[MangyCarface]

Ridiculous to cast judgment on nicotine addicts but not gaming addicts. Smoking is still very much a cool thing to do. Playing WoW 6 hrs+ a day is acknowledged universally as the nerdiest thing to do, and not even in a cool nerdy way, just a life-sapping, boring ass grind way. I can forgive the kid who wants to fit in and starts bumming a smoke once in awhile and then finds themselves addicted, or the single mom who needs her smoke breaks at work because god knows she won't have the time to decompress and have a moment solely for herself when she gets home

I still play some video games, but some of the best advice I've ever got is "are you going to regret not playing X video game in 30 years" It's pretty easy to follow

[grazr]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MangyCarface

I can forgive the kid who wants to fit in and starts bumming a smoke once in awhile and then finds themselves addicted, or the single mom who needs her smoke breaks at work because god knows she won't have the time to decompress and have a moment solely for herself when she gets home.

But nobody really needs a cigerette unless they already smoke. The feel good factor from a cigerette are chemicals that already exist in the body naturally, except that smoking causes the body to stop producing them because there is an outside source (the cigerette) providing those chemicals, so that craving is the body wanting more of the chemical it was already producing, but stopped.

Incidently, the reason i started playing WoW many moons ago was because so many of my friends did, and a girl i was into played it also and actually asked me to join her. A friend gave me a 2 week invite and then i paid for my first 3 month subscription. Is that much different from trying your first cigerette to socially fit in?

In the end i realised they were wasting their lives away on it, 2 of them had ran out of money playing it and could/would never go out, one had lost his job, one had lost his girlfriend over it and several had dropped grades; then when as i got to know my crush a lot better i realised she was a shallow husk of a human being and thought "fuck this shit" and cancelled my subscription. It also helped my decision that most of them resented playing with me as i would actually read the quests, none of them had the patience to wait for me to immerse myself in the narrative so i spent most of level 10-60 playing alone or with a stranger.

As for smoking being cool, i guess that's where you come from and the people around you. A huge portion of my friends smoke (more than 50%) and none of them like the idea of me smoking. They'll share and lend cigerettes/rollies with each other, but if i'm out socially drinking and think i might try one none of them let me, saying "you don't want to, it's unhealthy and expensive and i don't want you to get hooked". None of them really see it as a particularly cool thing to do, it's just something they got from a generation ago. But that's just another of my anecdotes.

Back on topic--there was an update to this.

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/econo...ess-2-economy/

I'm laughing every time he refers (presumably) to earbuds but calls them earmuffs.

It's weird that he at first says TF2 hasn't evolved a currency to replace its barter system, then turns around and says "Let keys act as the currency". Like, no shit? Keys, buds and bills (which he graphs) are very clearly the currency of the TF2 economy. I dunno, am I being an idiot here

[TMP]

The silly thing is that Keys, Buds, Bills, and Refined are actually all really considered as currencies in the game, just differently valued and tiered. Though I don't know anyone who's bought an unusual with Refined.