There’s a very interesting game called Hypixel Skyblock. It’s a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) built on top of the game Minecraft, which is a block-based building and slightly RPG game which is as much a game engine as an actual game itself. MMORPGs, if you don’t know, are games where tens of thousands of people play in the same virtual world and can interact with each other. The ability for players to trade items and in-game currency means that virtual economies will arise, and Hypixel has leaned into this hard with Skyblock.

In addition to the usual NPCs who will buy and sell items, Skyblock features two marketplaces that intermediate transactions between players. The first is the bazaar, which is a commodities marketplace where people put up buy and sell offers (with money or items in escrow, as appropriate) and the ability to immediately sell or buy by fulfilling these standing offers (automatically taking advantage of the most advantageous offers). Supply and demand work themselves out in realtime as the prices fluctuate based on how many sell offers are put up vs. how many of them are fulfilled; if offers exceed purchases then sellers drive down the price in an attempt to get their items sold first. If demand exceeds supply, then the cheap sell offers get used up and prices go up as buyers move on to more expensive sell-offers. (It also works in reverse for sellers who want quick cash and will take less money for it.) The bazaar allows large amounts of trading, so one way that players can make money is by taking advantage of price fluctuations to buy low and sell high. This can make and lose people a lot of money, and as in the real world, it adds liquidity to the market.

The other major marketplace is basically a clone of Ebay called, simply enough, The Auction House. It allows ebay-style non-realtime auctions, as well as ebay-style buy-it-now offers. Prices fluctuate here, too, based on supply and demand, though it is often complicated by the items themselves. Armor with good enchantments on it will sell for more money than the same armor with no enchantments, but it scales with how difficult the relevant enchantments are to get and apply.

It’s a topic for another day, but my children learned some extremely valuable macro-economics lessons from playing skyblock, including the nature of price being governed by supply-and-demand, the time-value of money (e.g. it can be worth it to take a lower price for something because you want the money now), the fact that a lot of people really want to cheat you if you will let them, that day-trading is highly volatile and you can lose a lot of money on it as well as make money, that in order to sell something you need people who actually want to buy it; the list could go on. Playing skyblock, for people who pay attention, would be a pretty reasonable Economics 101 course. That’s not the point of this post, though.

The other half of the economy of Skyblock is the activities which actually fuel the economy—the acquisition of items. Skyblock has a variety of ways of doing this. The main ones are fighting monsters in dungeons, fishing, forestry, farming, mining, and to a limited extent running factories. (The factories are called “minions.” They’re upgradable enchanted automatons who slowly produce resources. This method of producing resources is fairly limited, though, as you can have a maximum of 35 minions. While their effect on an individual player is limited, they add up over the scale of the entire economy, though.) My children’s preference is doing dungeons, and they got me involved in the game because they needed an extra player but also, later on, because, as they discovered, I’ve got a lot more patience for making money in skyblock than they do.

Part of this is just being at a different stage of life. I’ve got a full time job and three children; I don’t long for adventure anymore because I have it. Granted, being a programmer and a father isn’t the kind of adventure they put in movies, but real things ride on my performance and there are constant challenges coming my way, so I sure don’t need to fantasize about having even bigger problems or more stress. What I want in a game is relaxation, and mining in Skyblock provides that. There are very few split-second decisions in mining, but there are plenty of small decision points as you decide which way you’re going to mine. The pretend accomplishments come quickly, helping me to remember the real-life connection between effort and effect. (This is one of the great uses of video games—in real life it’s a three hour project to put a carpet in your daughter’s bedroom, and that only if you spent hours preparing first. In a video game, you can build things in a few seconds, and it reminds you that there does come a payoff at the end of work.) So I progressed in mining and now can make, in terms of in-game currency, ten or twenty times, per hour, what my children can make. So I end up buying them swords and armor to use in the dungeons. It’s satisfying and also a lot cheaper than buying them real swords and I don’t even know where to find real zombies for them to really kill. Or, er, re-kill.)

But as I’ve done this, I’ve noticed discussions people have about making money in Skyblock (people put up a lot of guides, talk to each other in the game, and there are a lot of forums) and there’s a very common theme: people complaining that Skyblock is not fun. I’ve looked into it, and I’ve discovered that they’ve pulled a reverse Mary Poppins: they’ve turned the game into a job. In their quest to make the most money per hour it’s possible to make, they’ve optimized out the fun. This is structurally necessary in the question to maximize coin-per-hour. Fun—when you’re not talking about the pleasure of movement in sports-type games—comes from making decisions. Decisions, however, take time, and time in which you’re not doing the thing you’re deciding to do. That is, the decisions from which the fun comes don’t make you money, and if maximizing the amount of money you make is all that matters, the decisions which produce the fun need to go.

This is almost certainly the wrong way to play a game, since the purpose of the game is to have fun. This is far more defensible in a job, since you do a job because things like feeding your family and putting a roof over their heads is far more satisfying than the fun you’re missing out on by being more efficient.

But.

Even in a job, no one is ever 100% efficient. Often the biggest gains in efficiency don’t even come at the expense of what fun there is to be found in them. When I was making bowstrings (admittedly, as a hobby) I massively improved my productivity by making a small tool out of a dowel to hold the two halves of the string far enough apart that I could wrap serving much faster. This actually improved my enjoyment of making bowstrings because pulling the strings apart over and over was just annoying. This will not always be the case, but it is often enough that it’s worth taking a look at the parts of a job one wants to optimize and seeing if it’s getting rid of what fun there is in the job, and if it is, seeing if there’s someplace else to optimize. Every job requires periods of rest within it, both short periods of rest more frequently and longer ones less frequently. It is often the case that small but fun decisions which are not 100% efficient can be used as the short periods of rest.

The same thing can apply to chores around the house, like sweeping or doing dishes. Mary Poppins’ “You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game” is an exaggeration, but it does have an element of truth to it. While it is possible to throw everything into the trash as if it were a basketball game, I suspect that would actually get tedious quickly because it’s nowhere near as good as real basketball and makes the job takes many times how long it would take normally. The basketball laundry hampers—if they still make them—are probably more on the mark, since it adds very little time to the chore of putting dirty clothes into the laundry basket. At least for people with good aim. Less gimmicky, though, is looking for the decision points which are actually within the task at hand. To take the example of sweeping, each time you place the broom involves the act of aiming, and how you choose to divide the area up into strokes of the broom can be done with creativity so as to minimize the number of strokes. Or to maximize the effectiveness of each stroke. Or to make the dirt collected uniform. These variations may make the job very slightly less efficient, but not much less efficient, and by creating decision points—or just paying attention to the decision points that exist and making them consciously—they do introduce an element of fun. Not great fun, of course, but chores don’t need to be great fun. Making them just a little fun can make them far more endurable.

If you’re in something for the long run, there will always be periods of rest and inactivity. Judiciously and thoughtfully spreading a little bit of them into the practical labor to be done can turn drudgery into simple work.

In conclusion: by all means optimize the work that you’re doing, but don’t do it so much that you optimize the fun out.