sus

Well-known member
Really quite a fine film I like it a lot

Great cinematic shots of nature and interior design, the level of narrator sarcasm is perfect
 

sus

Well-known member
I've found some contradictory info out there on the worldwide web which I'm hoping to get to the bottom of

apparently Harold Garfinkel in 1960 wrote a text "Notes on Language Games," that was never published, which basically adapted Wittgenstein's language games frame to cultural events and interpersonal interaction, arguing that there was no difference between a language game, a cultural event, everyday interaction, and chess

but everything I've read about his "Agnes" chapter in Studies in Ethnomethodology holds it up as this giant takedown of the Goffmanian, dramaturgical, "games" frame for social interaction

so I'm like, wait, did he repudiate his earlier belief in social interaction as a game, or was "Agnes" misinterpreted by later scholars?
 

sus

Well-known member
Here's all I think you need for something to be described as a game:

It's got to have some rules

It's got to have at least one player with a goal

So most things are games

As soon as you have an agent, who has goals (he prefers some states of being over others), in a world (which has rules, not everything is possible), you have a game

What we usually call "games" are just artificially constructed worlds and goals, so you enter this little new window-container of context, like on a desktop computer, and in there it has its own fake rules and constraints and things that you wanna accomplish
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
You may have already mentioned this, but one difficulty I've encountered using this term is that people tend to associate the word "game" with leisurely, ludic activity, whereas the way you are describing it, which is similar to but more thought-out than the way I've been using it, is much more serious.

In addition to your last about about games commonly giving a connotation of being primarily artificial, as being a sort of simulation, digital or otherwise.

That said, I think there is a ton to learn here from video games, at least the ones who excel at capturing incentive and motivating players to put in hundreds of hours.

Some things I've noticed about games, particularly video games, that successfully capture incentive:

-There being a discernible pathway of future accomplishments, ever more promising achievements or rewards, things worth "grinding" for.

-Some social aspects of showing off what you have achieved, socially capitalizing upon the status such achievements may convey

-Established rarity of rewards. In addition to the work that goes into earning a reward, which variably translates into value, rarity or preciousness also feeds into that value. Predicated upon there bing some social dynamic, otherwise rarity doesn't seem to work as a mechanism.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Certain video games that involve these combinatorially randomized item drops, like Fallout 76 and Borderlands 3, have really, exponentially rare drops referred to colloquially as "godrolls". Hadn't encountered that term until recently, but I'm sure it has been in use for a while.

For those who are unacquainted with these games in particular, they are essentially sci-fi gun porn, but often in very light-hearted and cartoonish ways, unlike the more realistic Call of Duty which I personally have never taken to. (edit: and with staggering world-building here and there, but the guns are a major draw. The actual stories in the games mentioned are mediocre in my opinion.)

Anyway these games have pretty much been built around the rarity of weaponry. Borderlands 3 probably has on the order of millions of unique weapons, if not an order of magnitude higher.

I have been into these games since I was a teenager, but I can also see how, from an outside perspective, they can make fascinating case studies.

Interesting, trying to abstract the lessons of value and labor motivation from these more or less hermetically contained economies (save for weapon duplication exploits and secondary black markets).

I was explaining this recently to my dad, and mentioned how the value is effectively frozen when the PS4 is turned off, but if there are ways to systematically transduce such value into more real-world expressions, there would be some lucrative opportunities to be exploited in doing so.

These economies are reinforced to some extent by communities forming around these games, socially establishing fashions and best practices, via reddit and the like.

But the primary takeaway for non-gamers is this: these games are what peak gamification looks like, so if you are curious as to how business may be gamified further, perhaps take a look.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
The whole premise of "grinding" is eerily conducive to the gamification of work.

Grinding, in the cases of Borderlands 3 and Fallout 76, involves repetitiously engaging in the same activity for an extended period of time in the hopes of unlocking some rare reward.

In Borderlands, there are bosses that are located in certain areas of the game that, if killed by the player, drop rare "loot". If the player then quits the game and reloads back into it, they can repeat the same boss battle and get a different loot drop, each time potentially getting better guns which make the next kill easier, ad infinitum.

A sort of feedback loop that culminates in the player [eventually having procured the best equipment and] being able to breeze through most of the game, at which point they have little incentive to keep grinding. This is the point that the game developers want to protract in ways that don't feel overly laborious or hollow. It really is fascinating.

And some of the leading games in this area (Fallout, Borderlands, Destiny, etc) all learn from each other's innovation.

As of now this all seems to quaintly evolve within the playful bounds of video games, but just wait until these practices start effecting the workplace. Work may become even more totalizing, but may also be more fun in certain capacities.

It would make perfect sense, speaking as a capitalist.

edit: bracketed text
 
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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
A sort of feedback loop that culminates in the player [eventually having procured the best equipment and] being able to breeze through most of the game, at which point they have little incentive to keep grinding. This is the point that the game developers want to protract in ways that don't feel overly laborious or hollow. It really is fascinating.
There was an interesting-sounding essay on video game addiction I recently came across, which I should read. Anyway, these trends of ever more effective incentive capture, seem to fuel the addictivity.
 

luka

Well-known member

I wrote a whole post on how games play out in Barry Lyndon
another insight into the alien mind-world of Gus! I enjoyed this and as ever with your writing it makes me wonder if this
is something they teach you at school nowadays or if you are just very idiosyncratic.

@craner you should definitely read this.

i liked the point you made about the girl looking at the camera when barry produces the ribbon
 

luka

Well-known member
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)
 
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luka

Well-known member
Barry is a cheat and prospers for a while until management finds out and issues the customary beating.
 
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luka

Well-known member
more generally the difference with life and games or why life is the ultimate game that includes all games is that the rules themeslves are constantly under dispute and the struggle over the rules is perhaps the ultimate objective.
 

luka

Well-known member
Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Life Time and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Now they will give it all back? Did they ever give anything away for nothing? Did they ever give any more than they had to give? Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was? Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer—
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
You may have already mentioned this, but one difficulty I've encountered using this term is that people tend to associate the word "game" with leisurely, ludic activity, whereas the way you are describing it, which is similar to but more thought-out than the way I've been using it, is much more serious.
It's interesting now I think about it how much people use "game" to refer to things that are anything but leisurely and ludic - like "rap game hard but the dope game easy" or Omar in The Wire - "it's all in the game, yo." Emphasising your cool, nihilistic detachment, like the drugs money and death don't mean anything to you.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Climbers and mountaineers love to talk about what they're doing as a game or as "play", too, even if they're actually doing very serious stuff. One of the first really coherent attempts to define climbing style was called "the games climbers play":

The word game seems to imply a sort of artificiality which is foreign to what we actually feel on a climb. The attraction of the great walls, above all, is surely that when one is climbing them he is playing 'for keeps'. Unlike the player in a bridge game, the climber cannot simply lay down his cards and go home. But this does not mean that climbing is any less a game. Although the player's actions have real and lasting consequences, the decision to start playing is just as gratuitous and unnecessary as the decision to start a game of chess. In fact, it is precisely because there is no necessity to climb that we can describe climbing as a game activity.

 
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