I have a problem with this essay. One of my least favorite authors of all time is Aldo Leopold. We had to read Axe-in-hand in 10th grade, which is supposedly an environmental parable illustrating the necessity of conservation. Okay, yeah, maybe, but it also argues that shovels are inherently good and axes are inherently evil. As if one couldn't perform evil with a shovel or good with an axe! It reflects a simplistic worldview with a manichean bent and I have little patience for it. This essay makes the same mistake, in my opinion - it argues there are "good" achievements and "bad" achievements. A "good" achievement is one of intrinsic worth while a "bad" achievement is one that requires no skill, apparently. PROBLEM 1) Animals play games. It's a Skinner Box experiment outlined at length in Dan Ariely's "The Upside of Irrationality." Take a critter. Put it in a box. Give it a task to get to its food, let it get used to it. Then, give it two sources of food - one with the task, one without. The only critter that doesn't is the house cat. It starts on pp 61 if you're interested. So given our druthers, we'll waste time on pointless tasks because that's what vertebrates do. PROBLEM 2) Value judgements are transitory. Someone looking at Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1977 might argue they were wasting their time with those foolish computers. Someone looking at David Bowie in 1968 would argue he was wasting his time lollygagging around with all those musicians. Ray Manzarek "mashed a bunch of buttons", too - so the fact that he was the keyboardist for The Doors somehow makes his mashing more valuable than those guys that go career at Starcraft? PROBLEM 3) There are compelling arguments to be made that "gamifying" our lives actually improves them, rather than detracting from them. So adding entirely meaningless "points" to mundane tasks like "taking out the trash" improves our enjoyment of them and increases our likelihood of doing them, at least in the near term (things get hazy past the halo effect). Jane McGonigal's book "Reality is Broken" covers this pretty well. Did you know there was a NYT bestselling author whose book was about his months-long quest to beat Pong? I once argued with a friend of mine that video games were a "fake" achievement, and isolating compared to movies and television. He argued back that video games are immersive and quite possibly our next art form. Meanwhile, I've yet to sell a screenplay and he's the head of the video game division at a major agency. If it's fun, it isn't a waste. Don't let someone else's value judgements rule your life.
Meanwhile, I've yet to sell a screenplay and he's the head of the video game division at a major agency. I tend to think that gaming with someone (mostly -- depends on the game) is a much better "non-isolating" way to hang out than watching a movie. But that doesn't mean it's an argument that the proliferation of video games is necessarily positive. One problem is that most video games are designed to be addictive in much the same way that snack foods are. Easy to consume, always one more step to take. Very fun, sure, but a lot of fun things are bad for you. Coming up on heroin is fun but I wouldn't recommend it as a lifestyle. Getting immersed in a video game is also fun but I wouldn't recommend that either. --and there's your signature flagamuffin tentative-at-best analogy of the evening. Interesting. Can't immediately think of a counter-argument to this. Maybe: there's still a difference between virtual achievement and actual achievement. That is, what does "gamifying" our lives have to do with "playing video games"?I once argued with a friend of mine that video games were a "fake" achievement, and isolating compared to movies and television. He argued back that video games are immersive and quite possibly our next art form.
There are compelling arguments to be made that "gamifying" our lives actually improves them, rather than detracting from them. So adding entirely meaningless "points" to mundane tasks like "taking out the trash" improves our enjoyment of them and increases our likelihood of doing them, at least in the near term (things get hazy past the halo effect).
Video game design can take addictiveness into account. It isn't always a factor. Everything Zynga makes? Absolutely. Designed like heroin. Starcraft actually curbs the points you get depending on how long you've been playing - the goal is to keep you hooked, but not so hooked that you can't make it into work the next day so that you get fired so that you can't keep paying for Starcraft. "Virtual" achievement and "Actual" achievement are pretty easy to delineate - a virtual achievement is one that only matters inside the game. However, if that virtual achievement makes you happy, it matters outside the game, too. It doesn't even need to get you laid. "Gamifying" our lives is an acknowledgement that the risk/reward mechanism evolved during hunter-gatherer society has become removed in our current society. Used to be you'd spend all day gathering berries and you'd come home with berries. Now you spend all day typing TPS reports and in two weeks there will be an abstract number deposited in your abstract bank account that can be abstractly exchanged for goods and services that you abstractly order online. Even the act of paying someone in cash at the end of the day and going and buying apples with that cash is a better somatic experience than what we have now. That's one reason "brick layer" consistently rises to the top of "satisfying professions." People like to be rewarded for their struggle, and they do like the struggle - the sweet spot for success/failure in video games is actually 80% (as in, "you fuck up 4 out of 5 times you try something"). So - contrary to the essay, humans are mired in a tedious web of pointless struggle by choice because the little successes we encounter along the way are a fundamental part of our make-up.
Didn't know that about Starcraft, because I picked it up in 8th grade and correctly realized it would suck me in so I never played it again. Which I sometimes regret because it does look interesting. Oh well. (Mental tangent: I wonder if it's more rewarding to play Starcraft than it is to play football, because most Starcraft players can at least approximate some of the things they see professional Starcraft players doing at tournaments, whereas none of us will ever get too close to the NFL standard. --same reason golf is so popular, it's the one sport where all of us will hit a shot worthy of Tiger at least once in our lives if we play enough.) Your last paragraph makes sense. Just -- the problem is, you spend all day playing video games and you may be happy or satisfied, but you won't have anything (unless you happen to be an elite Starcraft player). Happiness is great, but it's the TPS reports that pay the bills. I completely get what you're saying, but taken to extremes ... I could spend all day on hubski because it satisfies me to have conversations like this with smart people but it won't get me too far. Someone who spends all day farming in Diablo II -- you get the point. It comes down to having a balance, and a lot of video games (take the only one I'm currently involved with, Borderlands 2, which needs something like 60-80 hours to beat) require an amount of time not commensurate with the happiness reward they may give you. In my opinion. Caveat: I didn't actually read this article because I loathe internet articles that seem to emit the stink of self-help books.
For the record, I can play a video game 3-4 hours a night until I get stuck, I beat it, or something else interests me. Then I'll go months without turning the console on. I'm one of those annoying shits that can wait for Steam to get its shit together before deciding between The Big 3. And I think you're right - there's a little bit of "amateur hour" to it. Turntables have outsold guitars at Guitar Center for more than 20 years… although now I'll bet it's all Serato. For one thing, you need two of them while you only need guitar. But notably, it takes half a year to get mediocre on guitar. It takes half an hour to get mediocre on the tables. Back when it was "Warcraft" and you got the first chapter for free with an Ensoniq Soundscape sound card, I played Warcraft for 12 hours straight. And I beat the first chapter. And I was all set to run out and buy the full game when I realized that was twelve hours I'd never get back. I write. Some years I write a lot. And when I have a lot to write and it's hard and I'm stuck, there's nothing I want to do so much as play The Sims. Which I have wisely never purchased nor played. I can create worlds, so I do that instead.
Well as far as that goes I'm probably the last person on the planet to play Borderlands 2, and it's probably the only reason I bothered to reset my Steam account when I got a new laptop. When I was ten I could never figure out if I was going to be playing video games when I was 20, 30, 40. Now I'm pretty sure I know the answer for all of those.For the record, I can play a video game 3-4 hours a night until I get stuck, I beat it, or something else interests me. Then I'll go months without turning the console on. I'm one of those annoying shits that can wait for Steam to get its shit together before deciding between The Big 3.