Online Gaming Bot Use and Its Relevance to the Real World

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