Online Gaming Bot Use and Its Relevance to the Real World

in #technology7 years ago

If you have ever played an online game, specifically a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, you know how much of a problem bot use can be. Game developers hire teams of people to do nothing other than get rid of people who use bots, short for robots, that will do remedial tasks without needing a break. In addition multiple accounts can be used so an army of fake players will do jobs that are profitable. In my opinion there is much that can be learned from the online bot economy for the real world’s coming automated future.

The primary reason for regular players to use bots in a video game is in order to level their characters and bypass what is perceived as the boring part of a game. Other than that, there are people who use an army of bots to earn in game gold and sell it for real world dollars. These are the people that really cause the biggest impact on the community, because they sell all of the objects they gather or create which puts a massive supply in the market. On the outside this seems bad, but I would argue there is an optimum level of bots that the developers should aim for.

Games that have bots versus games that don’t, have massively different in game economies. In fact I have found that games with a large amount of bots not only have a vast economy, but make the game more enjoyable to play. Most regular people want to just enjoy playing the game and not do mindless tasks for hours at a time. If the costs of the items they want to buy become too expensive they are going to gather the items themselves. If they are cheap, it makes more sense to do more specialized work that bots can’t do and use the money from that activity to pay for materials. This is how bots in an online economy are relevant to our future.

There is no doubt that at some point in the future robots are going to become so advanced that most manual labor jobs won’t exist anymore. Robots will be able to do these manual labor jobs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and make sure that if human beings aren’t doing very specialized labor then they won’t have jobs available to them. With robots working 24/7 at very cheap production costs, the price of goods on the market are going to decrease very heavily. This means that even at a lower salary, someone could purchase what they need.

It’s a real possibility that there will be some sort of universal income that will be given to all citizens if there is mass unemployment. Perhaps the creation of robots that take over manual labor jobs is the equivalent of players not having to worry about the boring parts of a game and just play the fun parts. Rather than spending all our time at work and stressing out, we might just live for pleasure. Those who specialize and still have jobs will be able to live in much better conditions, but the regular person will be taken care of and wont have to worry about the stress that a job carries. I honestly think the parellels are very relevant when you look at them side by side and using an online game as a test bed for future plans might be a good idea.


Thanks to @Elyaque for the badges

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very informative post

we all hated bots, at least they made me stop playing rpg's :)

Those who specialize and still have jobs will be able to live in much better conditions, but the regular person will be taken care of and wont have to worry about the stress that a job carries.

Do you really believe that? If that was true, our population would spiral out of control more than it is now.

We can't keep reproducing the human race at this rate, and have bots support us.

Humans are the complete opposite of an endangered species. We're more plentiful than mosquitos. More plentiful than bees. More plentiful and more ecological damaging than most mammals on this planet.

The regular person who is not contributing to the economy wouldn't be taken care of is a reality that must be faced.

If you look at the movie Solylent Green from 1973, we're getting much closer to that happening and it's becoming a very inherent possibility now.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/

If you haven't seen that 1973 film staring Charlton Heston, it's a movie that every single person should see.

Back then the movie was a psychi-fi (scifi) fantasy of a tale when the human population rate was out of control. Lands were infertile from being overworked, there just wasn't enough food to feed humans, wildlife, or anything anymore except the working class. The rest of the humans were definitely not taken care of... the only way they could be fed was (it would be a movie spoiler, so I won't continue)

I partially believe it, I think people take advantage, but when living conditions rise the birthrates go down. All evidence show that population growth will slowly plateau, if not drop completely. The point is more to think about other alternatives to the current economic system we believe in now because it wont be possible to use Keynesian economics in a world where human life is of little value.

Good, I hope so... we'll all see for sure, won't we? :)

Great movie...wicked twist of an ending at the time.

Likely would'n raise an eyebrow these days though. ✌️

I agree. We're so use to this like this now... it wouldn't shock any of us. That is a real problem we need to be aware of and stop letting it continue. :(

So true...those who jump out before things reach the boiling point should be fine. I think we're seeing natural selection in action. :-/

I wrote a bot to play the boring parts of Hobbits:KOM for all of the reasons you mentioned above. The bot did the boring parts, I played the fun "specialized" parts.

I wrote the bot to have visual recognition of an Android emulator. Then it would perform an action based on the confidence level of the image that was returned.

The funny thing was, I was having more fun working on the bot than I was playing the game. Once I came to that realization, I quit working on the bot and quit playing the game.

did you ever sell the gold or the bot to people who sold the gold? Apparently you can make quite a living doing that.

Nope. I just wrote it for myself so that the hobbits would do their thing while I worked in the real world.

I don't use gaming bots but I'm not really against it. My concern is, if my company is going to implement automation, then probably they will cut down on manpower.

very nice post

upvoted followed
riding on the #friendtrain nice to meet You @nicnicy

Great post mate! upvoted

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