Chimaera’s Player Mining: Paid-to-Play

What’s good, Steemit? In this short post, I’m going to explain the Chimaera blockchain platform, and specifically its unique feature of Player Mining. Chimaera uses the phrase ‘human mining’. I dislike it, both because it's redundant (how else are things mined?) and the unintentionally grotesque imagery of the phrase, a la Leatherface.

Player Mining is a great way to reward players for their labor, labor that would otherwise be wasted in traditional gaming environments like World of Warcraft. Player Mining allows users to get their just reward, not only for the time put into the games, but for the value they imbued in the ecosystem itself.

How?

Let’s start with World of Warcraft. At one time, this game was making a billion dollars a year from monthly subscriptions alone. At its peak in Q4 of 2010, there were 12 million subscribers to the game. Source. Let’s say those 12 million subscribers, for arguments sake, played the game around 10 hours a week. I know, I know, the junkies will put far more energy into the game. But, for arguments sake, 12 million players put in 10 hour weeks, maybe two hours a day, or forty hours a month, or 480 hours a year.

That’s 1.2 billion hours of ‘playing time’ a week. That’s 5.76 billion hours of ‘playing time’ a year.

Now, these people are paying money in subscription to play the game. And Blizzard rolled in the dough from that. But something else is happening that many people don’t get. That ‘playing time’ is work. It’s labor. It’s value imbued into the virtual game world of Azeroth. That labor generates value for the entire ecosystem.

Imagine a company that got people to pay for a commodity. That commodity has a special feature of making value. But here’s the catch, the people that buy the commodity only purchase it for it’s utility of ‘fun’. They don’t purchase it for it’s utility of generating ‘value’.

What’s happening here is 5.76 billion hours of labor being wasted. Wasted for the game developers. And more importantly, wasted for the players.

Now, in the example of World of Warcraft, there were people who caught on to the value possibilities of the game. The Chinese Miners are notorious. But they caught a lot of undeserved flack. I mean, not the bosses exploiting the Chinese workers. But the workers themselves caught underserved flack. They weren’t ruining the game. They were working. Often, for less than a dollar an hour.

Everyone was putting value into the ecosystem simply by putting hours of labor into it. What the miners were doing was recognizing the game for what it was. The miners weren’t exactly making millions of dollars. Many of the operations were small scale, even modest. One of the companies highlighted by the NYT was an $80,000 dollar operation. The same article states:

“At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20.”

So what we have here is wage-labor and exploitation off a digital universe. At the time, WoW had no effective means of fixing this. It likely still doesn’t. Hell, there’s reports of Chinese prisoners being forced to mine digital gold in WoW for nothing.

These two examples show how, yes, value is imbued in a digital ecosystem like WoW. This holds true for all other games that players put time into. There’s value in the organization of players into guilds, into the economies that the players create and maintain on their own, into professionalizations, player-led moderation, finding rare and unique items, constructing player homes, etc.

What is cool about Chimaera is that they recognize this. This is the basis of their idea ‘Human Mining’, or what I call, Player Mining. What Chimaera will allow is players to be rewarded directly for the value, through labor time, they imbue into the digital ecosystem. All the tasks that you originally ‘do for free’, or hell, pay a subscription to do, can be rewarded. It’s a fantastic use-case for blockchain tech. This empowers the player for their own labor.

CHI

Even better, when you put hours into a game to reach a high level, when you stop playing that game, that labor is concretized in that game only. For example, I play DOTA2 and all the items I’ve earned from playing times and battlepasses, that value is lost to me when I stop playing DOTA2. With Chimaera, a player would be able to take that value and play it into another game. They do this by using CHI, which will be the universal coin that all games exchange their in-game currency for.

So I could exchange my DOTA2 items for the DOTA2 currency and then exchange it for CHI, then put that CHI into another game. I’m no longer chained to one game only. I’m able to move to any game I want. This empowers the player.

If Chimaera didn’t utilize Player Mining, it would be a complete scam. This is the nightmare version of gaming. Not to detract from the horrific exploitation of the Chinese prisoners forced to play WoW, but it’s on a similar vein in terms of unpaid labor. Let’s say WoW introduced blockchain tech, but didn’t reward their players with CHI. Then, those 5.76 billion hours a year of labor would go into creating value for the blockchain, and thus, the game company, without the players earning their fair share for their own work.

To conclude, Player Mining is a unique and potentially revolutionary concept. It empowers players to be able to be rewarded for the time and effort they put into video games, time that would otherwise be lost and wasted, or stolen. Chimera is an exciting project, and, I hope, will find methods to avoid the exploitation of its platform (which WoW failed to do). Player Mining, along with CHI, will give power to the players. Perhaps, for the first time, all players will not just earn ‘fun’, but get paid-to-play.

---

This is a submission to the Original Works contest. You can find the contest here: https://steemit.com/blockchain/@originalworks/360-steem-40-bonuses-sponsored-writing-contest-chimaera

chi2018