Because games are fun!
Why everything is becoming a game
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#22I felt like the stuff about Kaczynski, while interesting, was a diversion. The meat is the beginning and the end: Skinner, how conditioning led to gamification which led to the addiction economy, and then strategies for turning the tables and take charge by choosing what games to play and how to play them. An evolved and condensed version of the closing with practical examples and practice exercises should be taught…
I agree. I stopped at the Kaczynski worship.
I don’t understand why people are so fascinated with talking about the ideals of insane serial killers.
There are plenty of other highly intelligent individuals with the same ideologies to discuss. Why glorify a murderer?
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#23I felt like the stuff about Kaczynski, while interesting, was a diversion. The meat is the beginning and the end: Skinner, how conditioning led to gamification which led to the addiction economy, and then strategies for turning the tables and take charge by choosing what games to play and how to play them. An evolved and condensed version of the closing with practical examples and practice exercises should be taught…
I agree. I stopped at the Kaczynski worship. I don’t understand why people are so fascinated with talking about the ideals of insane serial killers. There are plenty of other highly intelligent individuals with the same ideologies to discuss. Why glorify a murderer?
I read Kaczynski long ago and saw a huge hole immediately.
So surrogate activities replace the authentic struggle for survival. I can get that. But why is the struggle for survival better? Isn’t it just another game?
Kaczynski like many other romantics rails against the system, but isn’t nature just another system? It’s an older one that we didn’t design, but didn’t we learn in the end that the matrix was inside an even older matrix which was inside an even older one…?
What would it even mean to escape the “system?” How can you do that except death? If you are breathing you are playing some kind of game.
Instead the question is: can we exercise some choice over what systems we give our energy to and can we influence these systems? I do think we give our energy to a lot of dumb pointless or even evil systems today, so how do we turn our attention elsewhere?
For the natural system of subsistence hunting and gathering or farming the answers to these questions are “no” (little choice, play or die) and “no” (the system is billions of years old and isn’t even ours). We have more choice today in our complicated mesh of systems, or at least we have the potential of choice.
This is ultimately a big part of why I am not a primitivist, reactionary, or traditionalist. Sure what we have sucks sometimes. Are we sure it was better back then? Or was it just different? I always want to ask “trads” of various types if they are sure they would be happy in the traditional state they imagine.
Maybe the people who railed against nature and sought to command it with science to escape its constraints were malcontents not entirely different from Kaczynski in their emotional and personality structure. Send Ted back to 1400 and you might have an enlightenment radical materialist.
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#24https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification has citations for that word and trend as early as 2013.
It was a big thing even before that.
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#25I don't agree with the positive feedback loop being THE thing about games. It's the fact that games offer a sense of progress that life does not. The skinner box implies animalistic pleasure associations that we just want to keep hitting. The progress wanting is simply desiring structure and context to your effort. They're similar but not the same.
I think it's really about some of our biological processes which helps keep us alive. I mean, our brains are hardwired to try and keep us alive. Seeking out old information you already know is not beneficial to improving your survival. New, particularly beneficial information can be. Thus, in order to help us survive, our brains evolved a reward system to motivate us to seek new information... to learn essentially. In other words, our brains motivate us to learn, as learning helps us to survive. Thus, novelty = fun and repetition = boring.
But the brain is obviously imperfect. Games and many addicting things in modern life, can hijack and play on this particular process (even harmful things).
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#26I felt like the stuff about Kaczynski, while interesting, was a diversion. The meat is the beginning and the end: Skinner, how conditioning led to gamification which led to the addiction economy, and then strategies for turning the tables and take charge by choosing what games to play and how to play them. An evolved and condensed version of the closing with practical examples and practice exercises should be taught…
> which led to the addiction economy... If people had fulfilling lives, consumed by work, family, community, and culture, there'd be little room for such addiction. The real story is a loss of meaning; it's a crisis of nihilism, more than gamification.
All these attention traps aren’t the only cause but they don’t help. They suck up a lot of time and time is precious.
At the very least once people get into them it makes it less likely that they will do… anything else.
Some of the stories I hear about younger peoples’ addiction to Instagram and TikTok are incredible. We’re talking many hours per day.
It’s easily worse than TV especially since the latter is frequently a social experience. People like to watch shows together. Social media, ironically, is usually consumed alone, making it possibly less social than TV.
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#27Interesting piece! I’m co-creator of Zombies, Run! so I’m glad to see it mentioned here - we designed it to be in the best interests of players, which is why it doesn’t feature streaks or leaderboards or other ways to manipulate you into overexercising or playing more than you want to. That said, I’m more sanguine about gamification than the author. There are indeed many games to choose from, but the ones that are mo…
Hey Adrian, I read your book a couple weeks ago and thought it was great!
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#28I don't agree with the positive feedback loop being THE thing about games. It's the fact that games offer a sense of progress that life does not. The skinner box implies animalistic pleasure associations that we just want to keep hitting. The progress wanting is simply desiring structure and context to your effort. They're similar but not the same.
I don't think life has no sense of progress. I've been fiddling with motor vehicles on and off over my lifetime (mid fifties now) and progressed from simple tune ups to now re-building engines. It took a long time to get the "feel" of what's right and one outright failure. But I can see the progress I've made over that relatively long space of time in that I understand much better what I'm doing and why, what is OK a…
I feel similarly with gardening. Try growing a food forest -- it expands your mind's time horizon to try picturing your six inch tall hazelnut seedling as a 20 foot tall tree. Each year is a new feeling of progress as everything starts to bear fruit!
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#29I think conditioned reinforcers can actually be beneficial for pursing long-term goals. Let's say someone's purpose in life is to have a positive impact on the world, metrics such as audience reached provide a tangible interface for this abstract goal. Similar to using your credit card, gamification mechanisms like chasing metrics lets you experience the rewards of your efforts prematurely, which motivates you to work harder to achieve more.
And this whole loop can be part of a positive-sum game too. Metrics is a straightforward way to demonstrate how you can achieve your sense of purpose. When you share your strategy on maximizing those metrics, you incentivize and guide others to start their own journeys. If what you did inspire even one person to start acting, you've already added value to the system.
Re: Why everything is becoming a game
#30>First: choose long-term goals over short-term ones.
>Second: choose hard games over easy ones.
>Third: choose positive-sum games over zero-sum or negative-sum ones.
>Fourth: choose atelic games over telic ones.
>Finally, the fifth rule is to choose immeasurable rewards over measurable ones.
I am afraid these are as effective as telling obese people not to overeat.
These are situations where people cannot help themselves and that's precisely why gamification works.