A Man Made A Living Hacking Video Games, And Other Facts
Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: The man who made real money selling pretend money, the women who sell nudes on Patreon and the beans that will save the planet.
The iPhone Ramping Up In Price Is A Good Thing Maybe?
Wired's David Pierce's argument for why the iPhone 8's rumored retail price of $1,200 is a good thing is a simple one: It's trickle-down tech baby! Gone is the populist vision of the iPhone — the great equalizer in consumer technology. Apple bumps up the price of the new iPhone, adds in a bunch of features a hilariously few people will actually use, and cements it as a truly luxury item — much to Jason Chaffetz's glee.
Buried within Pierce's pro-Apple, pro-invisible-hand-of-consumer tech argument, however is a nugget of hope. "It's weird that an ultra-luxe phone market doesn't already exist," he writes. "It's as if the Toyota Camry were the nicest car on the market." Pierce is kinda slamming the Toyota Camry here, but he presents an interesting concept.
You could argue that in terms of sheer value, the Toyota Camry is the nicest car on the market. And what if that same thinking was finally applied to smartphones? At this point, the power of mobile computers has far outstripped the demands of mobile software. It's getting harder for people to sacrifice price for performance — just about every phone can run the essentials all pretty competently. Maybe, finally, we can escape the two-year upgrade cycle. That we can chose to replace our phones when they've become worn, or we're just ready for something new.
Sure the rich jerks can flaunt their thin, lightning-fast bezeless phones. But we can finally have our modestly-priced mid-sized sedan. A respectable, dependable workhorse that gets us from point A to B nearly just as fast as anything else out there, and we won't be terribly broken up or bankrupted if something happens to it.
[Wired]
There Was Money To Be Made In Hacking Video Games
The cool thing about video games is that they can take a fair amount of time to complete. For those looking to extract the maximum amount of entertainment — or more accurately, playtime — out of their hard-earned dollars, video games promise much.
The uncool thing about video games is that most developers are aware of this playtime-per-dollar-spent calculation going on in the minds of players. And in some cases, they'll actively design their games to take a stupendous amount of time to progress through.
This is where Manfred, a hacker Motherboard met with earlier this week who managed to make a living hacking games, comes in. Some two decades ago, Manfred, which is not his real name, realized two important things: He could hack video games to grant him money, rare items and other digital valuables; and that people were more than willing to pay real money for them.
Unlike World of Warcraft's Chinese gold farmers, Manfred isn't spending hours on end trying to sweat-equity his way into a digital fortune. He finds a popular online game, discovers some way to cheese his way to an absurd amount of money and then sells that money to other players.
But game developers are a clever bunch. Instead of trying to squash bugs and those that exploit them, more and more devs are just making it easier for players to trade money for time. Want all those upgrades for your gun right away? That'll be 10 bucks. This rise of microtransactions within games has made it hard for Manfred to compete with. And that's fine. He doesn't really want to anymore.
Patreon Is Creating A New Type Of Internet Nude
Since the dawn of the web, there has been pornography. It's the internet, man. You can get naked pictures of just about anything on this thing. So, on the surface, the Verge's examination of the rise of erotic models on Patreon, shouldn't come as a shock. It's the internet, man.
Sure, it's extremely easy and free to find porn on this thing. But Patreon's lax rules on nudity has fostered this niche NSFW market of patrons who want a close connection to the models they, conceivably, crank it to and the women who are happy to oblige them.
It might be a clumsy comparison, but erotic modeling on Patreon has this feeling of Twitter in its early years. Before, famous people just kinda lived their lives and maybe you'd read about them somewhere. Now they're on Twitter, they've just tweeted about being stuck in traffic or something and you could totally just respond to their tweet. Heck, they might even respond.
The rise of broadband, streaming video and display advertising may have screwed the pooch on trying to get people to pay for online porn. But with Patreon, these models have seemingly found a way to both sell nudes while cutting down on the perverts.
Beans Could Save This Planet
By now you've probably heard that beef is accelerating climate change. It takes an enormous amount of food to feed cattle. This produces greenhouse gasses. The cows fart. This also produces greenhouse gasses. The cows, when slaughtered, don't really produce that much meat in relation to how much we feed them — at least, compared to chickens and pigs. In short, it's all very wasteful.
By now you've also probably heard that climate change is not a problem that you alone can solve. You can do things to personally reduce the amount of carbon dioxide you put into the atmosphere, but we're talking about an entire planet here and you're just one person.
But in the wake of climate doomsaying and icebergs falling off Antarctica, there's hope. The Atlantic's James Hambling highlights a newly released study that suggests if every single American stopped eating beef and started eating beans, we'd make sizable progress to meeting our 2020 emissions goals.
Finally, something tangible and easy that your average person could do that would actually make an impact. From the humble bean. Incredible.
Naturally, getting anywhere close to what the study projects is not going to be easy. Beef is tasty. Americans love beef. It's what's for dinner. At least now, in the face of climate-induced annihilation, we can urge each other to eat more beans. They're no small potatoes.
