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Comment by lanestp | Hacker News Reader

I switched to game development! F2P might be obnoxious but it's not going to take someone's job.

That's not to say that there aren't ethical issues here. My boss wants to automate customer service operations with customer service bots. So I'm not even safe there.

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You could argue that games put a lot of people out of work. After all people playing games might not be interested in other forms of entertainment, thus killing these other industries. Also, people spending a lot of time playing games might not want to go out to meet with other people, which in turns kills the restaurant industry,the oil industry (less miles driven), car industry (less accidents) etc.

And, in fact, games are one of the cheaper forms of entertainment that people partake in, so the destruction of jobs is pretty damn high.

i know people who dropped out of college or otherwise destroyed their lives because of video games.

People make choices every day about how to spend their money, entertainment is no different. People spend time and money gaming now may have spent it bowling, going to movies, bars, baseball games, etc. in the past. En masse, those shifts put people out of work.

The problem happens when it happens so quickly that we can't re-allocate workforce or if it happens at such a scale that we can't find use for masses of low-eductation/low-skill workers.

> So I'm not even safe there.

i think the larger point in this entire discussion is that nobody is safe anywhere, both on the receiving and delivering end of the job-killing.

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