Games People Play

[luka]

i dont think this push and pull is resolvable ultimately. its a theological dispute, in my view. praise god or withhold praise until worthy of praise. or, is satan the hero of the bible

 

[luka]

My lofty answer is to formulate ethical approaches that speak to incentive, rather than ethical approaches that expect other incentives to yield to ethics, however obvious those ethics may be to us.

yes but its easy to fall into a specific trap here which is to assume 'incentive' 'drives' 'needs' are these hard-wired things you cant transcend when really they might have been put there by the big boss man

 

[Clinamenic]

My turn to capitalism was in the spirit of "beating them at their own game"

 

[Clinamenic]

yes but its easy to fall into a specific trap here which is to assume 'incentive' 'drives' 'needs' are these hard-wired things you cant transcend when really they might have been put there by the big boss man

Possible to transcend them, but that requires a psychic expenditure that I would not call ordinary. Like swimming upstream. Sure, these incentives are largely socially defined, the current socially driven, but that doesn't mean it's not hard to resist.

 

[luka]

this is something ive agonised over and grappled with a fair bit. at the moment my thinking is that the task is to unplug yourself from these 'incentives'. but again i go back and forth. im not sure any of these quandries are resolveable

 

[sus]

@Clinamenic "Godrolls" is a great term.

I'm debating between getting a Switch and PS4 right now. Never owned a console before. But wanna start gaming. Have Disco Elysium, RDR2, MassEffect, Soma on my list from friends' recommendations. You have any thoughts or recs? Totally new to gaming.

 

[Clinamenic]

But if we on the left are as smart and creative as we'd like to think we are, we should be able to appropriate financial incentive from single-bottom-line capitalism, and reforge it in a more responsible alternative, rather than insisting on cold-turkey-unto-barbarism anticapitalism.

 

[sus]

My understanding of "grinding" is it began as a term for skill-building, e.g. chopping down yew trees all day in Runescape. Stuff that's boring and repetitive but levels you up. Def another good vocab word/games metaphor

 

[sus]

i suppose you could read barry lyndon has a cautionary tale about trying to beat the house. or about a gamblers luck always running dry
at the end. or indeed about the pitfalls and shortcomings of treating life as a game (one with prizes)

There's this key quote near the end of the film like, "The kinds of skills that lead men to make a fortune are often directly opposed to those which allow him to keep it."

I feel like Barry is really good at games of acquisition, but really poor at games of maintenance. (Many such cases.) Great at wooing the countess, terrible at keeping her satisfied. Great at winning people's money, terrible at hanging on to it. Great at moving up in the world, terrible at maintaining those gains.

 

[luka]

its an odd film. im surprised its woops favourite of all time. its hard for me to imagine it being anyones favourite of all time. craner cant stand kubrick he says hes a fraud but i think he read your essay anyway out of comradeship

 

[sus]

it allows you to cut off the acts from their larger ethical and emotional ramifications. eg you are the Sacklers and you are flooding the world with opiates

I think this is key in understanding why people feel a natural aversion to describing real life, or real life situations, as games.

They take it as, "The only thing that matters is maxing out your points within this narrow set of challenges/agencies"

(Fair enough, it's often used that way, like you say, to cut off all the other potential objects of optimization, e.g. ethical. It's a truncation of the holistic optimization problem that is "life" for some narrower, value-obvious problem)

 

[Clinamenic]

@Clinamenic "Godrolls" is a great term.

I'm debating between getting a Switch and PS4 right now. Never owned a console before. But wanna start gaming. Have Disco Elysium, RDR2, MassEffect, Soma on my list from friends' recommendations. You have any thoughts or recs? Totally new to gaming.

Disco Elysium looks cool. I would need a Windows bootcamp partition for a mac to play it though.

I think someone like you would gain a lot of insight going into gaming with the sort of analysis you do. I more or less grew up with it, so I;m sure you will spot things that I'm too accustomed to to identify properly.

Anyway, I would recommend Bioshock, any of them, as that franchise is probably the one I admire the most. Less addictive in the ways I was describing Borderlands and Fallout, but also a far more interesting world.

Minecraft is among the best games of all time, in my opinion. Marvelously singular and influential, and also conducive to intelligence in ways that most other games are not. You can design logic gates and build elaborate machines in that game.

That is another point in favor of Fallout, Borderlands, etc: they require intelligence to be good at. A ton of stats and numbers to keep track of, stacking various conditional multipliers, etc.

 

[sus]

I would agree with some of those points, but I see right through the dystopian spins on it. This fixation on dystopian outcomes somewhat reminds me of that quote I've seen attributed to Hegel but haven't looked into it, "Evil resides in the eyes of those who see evil everywhere."

One of the reasons I'm opposed to this "cancelled future" standpoint. It seems largely self-fulfilling to me.

Anyway, Minecraft strikes me as an exception, as an experience of more or less pure creation.

Stan!!! 😍 If only there were more people out there who preferred perceiving to judging

 

[sus]

I just listened to a professional dominatrix interviewed as a guest on a podcast (loosely) about architecture, and she painted an interesting picture about her line of work and that sort of milieu. It actually seems profoundly healthy in certain respects, provided the parties involved uphold a mutual respect.

Post highlights/excerpts?

 

[Clinamenic]

I made a couple mods for Fallout New Vegas when I was in high school. Robust and creative communities around the Fallout franchise in that sense. The developers released their production took, G.E.C.K., which the players can use to design mods and port them into the game.

 

[sus]

i think modern life is bad and getting worse and analysing the ways in which it is bad, why it is bad, and what we might want instead all seem fairly useful tasks

I agree, but how far can we go demanding more fulfilling existences that don't comply with capitalism, without kidding ourselves? It seems like the majority of the academic left is kidding itself. My suggestion is that we reforge a notion of capitalism that takes our values into account, i.e. triple-bottom line, circular economy, "passion economy", constellation of niche content producers, etc.

Do you think this about the macro or micro scale? Big difference between "10 years ago may have been better" and "100/500/1000 years ago may have been better"

 

[Clinamenic]

Post highlights/excerpts?

She said there was this one guy who asked her to kick him in the testicles repeatedly, as a sort of joint fetish of feet and pain, two birds with one stone, etc.

Anyway she went right on and did it, only to get little to no reaction out of this man, who then went on to tell her that he had been into this for three decades.

 

[sus]

its an odd film. im surprised its woops favourite of all time. its hard for me to imagine it being anyones favourite of all time. craner cant stand kubrick he says hes a fraud but i think he read your essay anyway out of comradeship

I have it in my top 5 alongside

- New World (or maybe Thin Red Line/Days of Heaven)
- Mulholland Drive
- Punch-Drunk Love
- Nashville (or maybe Short Cuts)

 

[Clinamenic]

Do you think this about the macro or micro scale? Big difference between "10 years ago may have been better" and "100/500/1000 years ago may have been better"

I think things are net improving. Life may have been better [qua less alienating] earlier on, but only for the parochial and enfranchised.

edit: bracket text

 

[Clinamenic]

Still seems like we are in the adolescent stage of capitalism, and I am urging on the transition into adulthood. Not sure what a useful timescale is for this, though.