A while back I started playing the MMORPG¹ Hypixel Skyblock so that I could play it with my sons. It’s an interesting game because it has a functional economy and (accidentally) teaches some important economics lessons in a way even older children can understand. We ended up dividing the labor, with me specializing in mining in order to earn (pretend) money to buy equipment for dungeon runs we’d go on, and I noticed something very interesting about other players who were earning (pretend) money in the game: they had optimized all the fun out of it.

The game was set up such that there was quite a lot of (pretend) money to earn in order to buy the tip-top best stuff, taking potentially a thousand hours of game play or more. Many people wanted to minimize the time they spent earning the (pretend) money, so they figured out how to absolutely maximize the (pretend) money they earned per hour. The problem with that is that fun comes from making decisions, even if very small decisions such as aiming, and decisions take time. The efficiency-maxers worked hard to eliminate every possible decision point so that every second could be spent earning money. That is, they inadvertently optimized the fun out of the game.

And they complained about how the game was no fun. Quite a lot. It was, perhaps, the most popular subject in the in-game chat in the mining areas.

I took a more laid-back approach, aiming to get to about 90% of the maximum amount of (pretend) money I could earn per hour, while doing a bit of exploring and mining whatever I found, and for me mining was a pleasant and relaxing activity. It wasn’t nearly as fun as playing in the dungeons with my sons, but I enjoyed doing it for what was probably a few hundred hours over the more-than-a-year I did it, while many others burned out.

I think that this lesson generalizes.

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1. Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game ↩︎