#mmos

'Cybertown'

[BROWSER] [USA] [MAGAZINE] [2000]

"Colony City was started in 1996 as a showcase project of Blaxxun Interactive. Colony City made use of VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), a standard for displaying 3D content, including virtual worlds and avatars, on the Web. These VRML files became shared virtual worlds using Blaxxun's server technology, enabling people from all over the world to meet and interact in rich-media environments in real-time on the Web. In 1999, Colony City merged with CyberTown which dramatically increased the users to a few thousand. At the time CyberTown was mainly a portal site with categories of links, but Colony City was able to use the ideas from the categories to make 3D worlds and expand CyberTown. To allow this influx of citizens to have homes in CyberTown, new "colonies" - virtual places to live - were created. In 2002, Blaxxun Interactive sold CyberTown to Integrated Virtual Networks. As of February 2012, the CyberTown website was taken offline." ~Wikipedia

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that's not how freezers work

it's not how ice trays work

freezers do not work by passively reducing things in them to a colder temperature; when you're paying for electricity for a freezer, you're not "wasting" the money on that electricity if you're not constantly making ice trays. you're not underutilizing the full potential of your electric bill!

freezers work by pumping heat out. they're not magical ice boxes, but machines, right?

heat moves towards cold areas. to grossly simplify it, the way a freezer works is by using electricity to power a compressor that pumps a colder-than-the-freezer refrigerant liquid into the freezer, which absorbs heat from the inside of the freezer. after that, the compressor pumps it the now-hot refrigerant out into another component, where the heat dissipates into the air outside the freezer.

a freezer isn't passively making things cold. when you pay an electric bill you don't get [a cold freezer] to optimize. instead, a freezer uses electricity on the spot to steal heat from the inside.

every time you open the freezer, every time you put an ice tray in? THAT'S PUTTING HEAT INTO IT. and then the freezer has to steal the heat back out.

every ice tray you put in costs you electricity, which costs you money. freezers are not an MMO subscription service. they're a pay-to-win microtransaction game.

now, the metaphor still works, but ironically for the opposite reason as the original post. you feel like you're compelled to maximize the usage of your [paid money for the MMO], but what you're actually doing is spending your time and energy every time you go back for those daily quests or efficiency tasks.

when you optimize ice trays to Make Full Use Of The Freezer, you've tricked yourself into thinking you're saving money, but actually are spending more resources with every ice tray you make. as the impulse to optimize ice trays takes over your life, you are spending YOURSELF as currency every step of the way, without realizing it.

energy and time is money, whether literal or metaphorical. as someone with a severe chronic illness, i am intimately aware of how much every little action costs me.

and, like, i play service games, i make ice trays, i do my dailies and grinds and such. but every action is one done with intentionality. not because i feel i have to make the most of my purchase or time spent, but because i know that every action i take has an immediate cost. every ice tray i put into my freezer costs me electricity and thus money, money that i wouldn't be spending if i didn't make the ice tray.

and by the same token, every hour, minute, second spent in a game doing busywork costs me energy.

and because my life is a constant stream of cost/benefits analyses, i work to make sure my time is well-spent.

you should approach service games the same way. you should approach anything you feel 'compelled' to do the same way.

when you do dailies in an MMO, are you making ice cubes? and if you are, are you doing so because you want to? or because you've tricked yourself into thinking that you need to keep making ice cubes to get your money's worth?

and like, the original post's metaphor still works fine, taking an MMO farm and using an absurdist comparison to make you go "huh am i feeling compelled to optimize my time?" but i don't think that the implied solution of "stop optimizing your time" is a good one.

because frankly, the issue is that you probably should be optimizing your energy, either consciously or unconsciously.

here's the thing, right?

the big twist of this post is this message, unrelated to the MMO thing (but illustrated using that point):

you will eventually become disabled.

every person does, even if it's when they get old. many people if not most people become disabled before then. when was the last time you stretched before a gaming session? have you ever had a repetitive strain injury? do you consider your posture when you sit?

your body is a machine that slowly breaks down over time as you spend more effort and energy on things. no life is a perfectly optimized chain of healthy actions, and that's okay! but if you want to take your body for the long haul, you should approach things with intentionality. you should choose when you want to spend time and energy doing something. even if it's something you have to do, you should be the one choosing to do it.

so, when you're farming in MMOs, take a moment to think about why you're doing it, and if it's worth it. because maybe it is! but make it a choice, not a compulsion. you have the power to do that.

anyway, having taken some energy from you (you read this post, you have made some ice cubes by doing so, that is how all actions work), here's the followup twist, in the form of a question: have you considered getting a vertical mouse?

getting one of these is a pretty simple change to your computer habits that will generally result in less pain for your wrist in the long term. It works by adjusting how your wrist rests on your mouse (think about how your arms sit when they're lax at your sides. your hand is parallel to your body, not perpendicular. this mouse puts it in that position while using it instead of the normal twist a mouse causes).

do your ankles ever ache at the end of a long day? have you considered getting a cane? if you're in the US (i know i know, this IS a US-centric piece of advice, but i live here and i don't know what canes cost elsewhere), a cheap one will run you like $15-20 and you can get them from pharmacies. they're simple, easy to use, and help reduce the impact of standing and walking. even if you don't feel you "need" a cane, there's no reason not to get one. you're allowed to have a cane! even if you don't think you're disabled! speaking as a cripple, there is no stolen valor for disability like this. if a cane helps you, you can use a cane. abled people using canes makes more canes be made for people to buy via induced demand. this helps everyone, especially disabled people!

#580 Looking Down

How dare you die first and still judge me?