4 ms·
I think both the original article's and your points are valid. Especially when you start to see games/virtual items as a "thing" (which probably started with UO
by ethbro 11y ago
I think both the original article's and your points are valid. Especially when you start to see games/virtual items as a "thing" (which probably started with UO/WoW) as opposed to a "fake thing". That said, as a thought experiment, I disagree with the fact that government and regulation have no place in the way a society consumes things like this.
If you accept that our knowledge of psychology, biochemistry, and neuroscience are improving and likely to continue doing so, and that calibrated external actions are capable of influencing our behavior, and that progress in the former begets progress in the latter, then either:
a) We will reach a point where we will stop making progress in those fields
b) We overturn the majority of our current social psychology knowledge and realize that yes, people actually do have absolute free will
c) We will develop techniques so sophisticated and reliable to influence behavior that it becomes unreasonable to expect an average person to resist them
As I (and the original article seems to) see it, the current free-for-all that is "freemium"/casual gaming basically targets all of capitalism's motivation and resources on arriving at (c) as quickly as possible. And... we're getting pretty damn good at it.
PS: Positech Games makes great stuff, btw! GSB had several free expansions just because Cliff Harris is cool [he == Positech]. He absolutely could have charged for the content if he'd felt like milking more money out of his users.
- WalterBright 11y ago> we're getting pretty damn good at it I'm not so sure. I play a video game, and invariably get bored to tears within 30 seconds or so. It might have something to do with when I was a student, I had a job that involved play testing video games. It's also true that my old game Empire was well known to be addictive. I'd play it myself, but would rarely get too far into a game before I'd go back to tweaking the AI, which was where the real fun was.
- ethbro 11y agoIronic username, given the conversation topic. ;) While yours may be a true experience: statistics. I'm not sure a personal experience poll on an entrepreneurial technology news site is the best place for a representative sample of people with low willpower. And social psych findings have born out that are a lot of easily manipulated levers to reliably influence people's behavior in an intentional way. To me, it's not about the people with Fort Knox reserves of willpower. Say instead I'm born into the genetic/epigenetic/life lottery with a crappy ticket, what's fair? (And if you don't agree that that's possible, try volunteering at your local homeless shelter a few times) Is it fair that everyone else gets to leverage my vices to transfer my wealth and the profits of my work to themselves? Or is there something morally not right about that scenario? I agree it's easy to go overboard with regulation, but just because it's possible to addict babies to cocaine in utero doesn't mean that's the society we should build.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Pyxl101 11y agoWhat's ironic about his username? His name's Walter Bright.
- ethbro 11y agoIronic in the context of a discussion of vices and addiction, though now understandable (apologies for my lack of knowledge of 70s games & compiler names!) echo "WalterBright" | sed 's/Bright/White/'
- WalterBright 11y ago> my lack of knowledge of 70s games Prepare for enlightenment: http://www.classicempire.com http://www.classicempire.com
- ethbro 11y agoAnd source available too! Thanks for the link.
- hackuser 11y agoSpeaking of destructive social manipulation, your game destroyed my grade in LISP (or was it C++?) when I discovered Empire on a (Sun?) workstation in the computer lab. But you probably already know all that from on the extensive profile you built on me. Thank you. :)
- WalterBright 11y ago>people with Fort Knox reserves of willpower In my case, it has nothing whatsoever to do with willpower. It's that video games bore me.
- _nedR 11y ago
- stephentmcm 11y ago>b) We overturn the majority of our current social psychology knowledge and realize that yes, people actually do have absolute free will Err... All current research suggests that you have almost no free will and are little more than a complex set of reactions to external stimulus.
- noobermin 11y agoHence his comment. He's replying to people who claim all/most transactions in capitalism are willful actions by free, rational actors.
- Paradigma11 11y agoSo there is no unexplained variance in behaviour and we have models that explain and predict it as good as let's say classical mechanics? Free will is just a conceptual mistake based on metaphysics.