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Caveat: it's very easy to extend the criticism of WoW to life itself. Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To d

Caveat: it's very easy to extend the criticism of WoW to life itself. Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless! What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW." But this isn't necessarily true for everyone. Having said all that, I think WOW is more dangerous than heroin.

oemera 16y ago
OH Come on! Life is not meaningless and maybe those people will NOT die anyway. Maybe it's just because you didn't found out by now, what is important for you in live. One example what changes life for ever is having kids. Seeing them grow, laugh and learn things is just amazing. I dunno if this is cry for help, if yes I would like to help. Edit: Why study to become a paramedic? Cause you want to. Cause it is your dream. Cause you ever wanted to work as paramedic. Cause it makes you feel better when you help people. Cause it makes you happy helping people. Cause it makes you happy to work with people.
- smanek 16y ago
  Everyone will eventually die anyway. And your reasons can just as easily be turned around. Why work hard to win at WoW? Cause you want to. Cause it is your dream. Cause you ever [sic] wanted to be lvl 80. etc. If your 'argument' applies equally well to any position it is completely meaningless.
  - loup-vaillant 16y ago
    > Everyone will eventually die anyway. Oddly enough, not everyone agrees with that. Some of them are even working on that problem.
    - shadowfox 16y ago
      Not very successfully though
    - forensic 16y ago
      But what's the point of immortality anyway? Life is just a meaningless sequence of cause-effect relationships. Immortality would mean being trapped by life, eventually you'll explore everything there is to explore in life and be drawn to explore death. The experience of death is more meaningful than life - it is true adventure. Taking a peek for yourself, seeing what's more. Life is pain, so immortality is an infinity of pain. I can make these arguments all day. Immortality is not inherently meaningful.
      - loup-vaillant 16y ago
        You believe we have souls. I we do, the death problem has already been solved by Mother Nature, God, or what have you. However, current evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the non existence of souls. therefore, death isn't the next adventure, it's nothing. About the meaning of immortality, you may want to read the Fun Theory sequence at http://lesswrong.com http://lesswrong.com
      - forensic 16y ago
        loup-vaillant said: "You believe we have souls. In that case, the death problem has already been solved by Mother Nature, God, or what have you. Current evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the non existence of souls. therefore, death isn't a possible adventure, it's nothing. About the meaning of immortality, I recommend the Fun Theory sequence at lesswrong.com" No I don't believe in souls. You are assuming beliefs that I don't have. Nihilism does not require a belief in anything supernatural. I do believe that death is real, and therefore I believe that dying is something that happens to people. The point is that you can't prove in any objective way that death is less meaningful than life. This is not really due to the nature of life and death, it is due to the nature of meaning itself.
        loup-vaillant 16y ago
        OK, I was confused by the word "adventure". I assumed that if you said this, then "death" must be… something. I thought we were disagreeing on facts. And of course I can't prove that death is less "meaningful" than life: that's a moral judgement, not a factual belief.
JanezStupar 16y ago
There is a substantial difference between improving your physical life and your Avatar. The illusion of success is there and almost tangible - if you didn't have to "wake up" to your neglected real body and nonexistent/handicapped real life. And most people I know don't play WOW due to nihilism or at least not initially. They play it just for opposite reasons - it makes it easier for them to achieve something. Disclaimer: I have played UO and got severely addicted by it. I also played WOW and EVE, I'm very competitive but in the end I figured that to reach the level of performance I wanted to - It would take me 8+ hours (rather 12+) of work a day. So I just quit the damn thing and focused on building my real person - no regrets. I saw WOW at a friend some months ago - and I instantly felt sick, the sounds, the animations... It just made me want to throw up.
- access_denied 16y ago
  > I instantly felt sick ... It just made me want to throw up. Interestingly I have the same torwards tobacco. There seems to be something, maybe in your sub-consciousness that wants to prevent you from going back there and it is so strong that it evokes reactions on a physical level.
- scotty79 16y ago
  If you are leveling in real life sometimes you wake up and see emptiness of this all. Sure, what you achieved in life provides comfort for your body but body is relatively easy to comfort if mind is happy. If you are playing game all the time there is not much time you have to be "awake" and you may even never be fully "awake" to notice and appreciate your handicapped life. People can have handicapped life even when they don't play games. They just stay for years in the same place despite their apparent efforts.
  - JanezStupar 16y ago
    Indeed - human mind is capable of creating many elaborate delusions. Nihilism being the worst of them all. One has to recognize that indeed, there are no supreme values, that there is no guaranteed path to salvation. And that in spite of this terrible truth one must form his own set of values that guide him on a journey that doesn't really lead anywhere specific, but one must travel the journey else he becomes damned.
davidk0101 16y ago
Why the fuck are you getting upvotes? Your hijacking of the points and arguments he makes doesn't even warrant a response.
- Fargren 16y ago
  He is showing the flaws in the argument of the OP, which at the very least help concider that myabe the argument is flawed and thus the conclusion is wrong. That leads to valuable discussion, so it's getting upvoted. Asking why "the fuck" he's getting upvotes, however, only leads to discussion about the discussion, which is a lot less interesting.
- joeguilmette 16y ago
  http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
javert 16y ago
Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless! Life isn't meaningless. Life is its own goal; doing well in life allows you to achieve happiness.
- henrikschroder 16y ago
  World of Warcraft isn't meaningless. WoW is its own goal; doing well in WoW allows you to achieve happiness. I think you have to make a more convincing case for why life has meaning and wow hasn't, you can't just spout platitudes and call it a day.
  - DougBTX 16y ago
    I've not played WoW, but I'm guessing that the arguments from this article apply: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-play-farmville http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-p... The gist is that Farmville isn't fun. Perhaps the problem is that WoW doesn't allow you to achieve happiness.
    - mfukar 16y ago
      If it didn't, it wouldn't have upwards of 6 million subscribers.
      - henrikschroder 16y ago
        They're over 11 million active subscribers right now.
        mfukar 16y ago
        Oh! Well, I suppose one can guess when I quit.. ;-)
  - javert 16y ago
rsheridan6 16y ago
>What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW." That's probably true of the vast majority of people, including addicted WoW players.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  Evidently not.
  - rsheridan6 16y ago
    Why? The fact that they play WoW obsessively could mean that they find more meaning in it than in real-life activity, or it could also mean that they're addicts who regret the time they spend playing WoW, but feel a compulsion to play it anyway. It's not evident to me whether WoW addicts fall in the former or latter category.
Hoff 16y ago
Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless! Ayup. But then I've brought a few of those folks back, too. Folks that were dead from respiratory or cardiac arrest, or were dying of anaphylaxis or severe asthma, or recognizing an impending fatal condition and just talking somebody into one of those drives into medical care. Pushing a med or defibrillating or whatever, and having them survive. Sometimes just helping somebody get back into their chair, and having a nice chat. That helps offset the ugly parts. As for heroin, medical-grade opiates tend to be something folks can maintain and can tolerate, it's the random weird stuff and the wildly different purities that can be a problem. Nalaxone can help there, but if I was pushing that, that patient was in compromise or in respiratory arrest from a likely opiate overdose, and usually headed for dead. And yes, mental issues in real life can extend to and can involve WoW, paramedicine or heroin abuse. Or worse. edit: fixed some wording
- forensic 16y ago
  What's the point of saving someone's life when they are just going to get old and die? ("Meaning" is not something that you can prove to others. Many people would find your job meaningless, while you may find it highly meaningful. The point is that each person's search for meaning is very individual.)
  - Hoff 16y ago
    Meaning? There's an existential discussion or two buried in there somewhere. Which leads into existence, and whether all of us are merely a figment of the viewer's imagination. And the point of saving someone's life? That discussion can go anywhere from existential to darwinian to whether you'll choose bluepill or redpill. As for one trigger of these sorts of introspections, burnout can happen in EMS and medicine in general, and other environments that cope with chaos and death, too. Getting burnt is not fun, regardless of whether EMS was the trigger, or working in a high-stress startup, or whatever.
robryan 16y ago
I wasted a heap of time on WoW as a teenager, certainly I could't seen myself doing that now but looking back I can't say I have bad memories of those years. Could have I been doing something more productive? Probably. But would have it gave me the same level of enjoyment? Questionable.
dasil003 16y ago
It's easy to extend to life at a macro level, but it breaks down pretty quickly. First, it's a bit more akin to life if you were a serf in medieval times where your whole life is a repetitive task to serve the local landowner (ie. Blizzard). More importantly, WoW reduces rewards to regular, metered system which I believe is damaging to self-motivation. There are no experiences in WoW that are unique, there is no unexplored territory, and no accomplishment you can achieve that wasn't predetermined by a designer. It's tempting to make a philosophical analogy, but there's a major difference. If we are brains in vats we have no choice in the matter; but choosing WoW means choosing an experience in a constrained world, completely devoid of any of the nuance of the physical world, despite the quantity of shiny objects.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  There are no experiences in WoW that are unique, there is no unexplored territory, and no accomplishment you can achieve that wasn't predetermined by a designer. I propose this: a space game where you are encouraged to write bots. Place the space game in an ungodly huge procedurally generated universe. The base economic activity is based on mining. Give users a custom scripting language and API to write their own bots. The number of bots and the amount of CPU time they can have is constrained by tokens in the game. (As in StarCraft.) Players can write scripts and license running copies for in-game money. What will result? Macro-miners. Then pirates who raid the macro-miners. Then fleets of Macro-miner protection drones supervised by highly motivated Chinese professional gamers. Voila! Emergent user-generated content! For the coup -- base the procedural generation on interesting mathematics. Perhaps some macro-miner outfit can be motivated to find a pattern in prime numbers or pi!
BrandonM 16y ago
I agree with your general sentiment. I think the distinction should not be between WoW and real life, but between real skills and fake skills, between real progression and fake progression, and who is controlling the experience. In WoW, your character has several skills, stats, and abilities that define it. You choose which ones to work on, how to shape your character, and then you put in the time to make that happen. But what about your skills? You are not getting stronger or better at wielding a two-handed weapon. You are getting better at playing WoW, you are improving your hand-eye coordination, you are bettering your combat-driven teamwork abilities, and you are getting better at determination: being patient and working towards a goal. The problem comes in the illusion of progression. Your character improves almost continuously, building its skills to a point where it is better than all the other characters. Eventually your character reaches a ceiling, but you can always create another character with different skills and do it all again. But you stop progressing much sooner. Early on, your ability to play WoW tapers off to a suitably-high level such that the real gain is in improving your character. You master the conventions of in-game communication. You develop a routine and diligently set to work improving your characters without question. You stop progressing. But what happens when you reach that ceiling, when you become the best? In WoW and many other video games, the game ceases to be fun when you are as powerful as possible. Since someone else owns the experience, you are stuck waiting for them to tell you what to do with your newfound abilities. This is why I regret the time I sank into becoming an Expert guitar player on Rock Band. When your playing abilities max out, the game becomes a chore, even if you don't realize it. The best rhythm game players spend their time playing the same songs over and over again in an effort to play them flawlessly. The game ceases to be a game. In "real life," if you manage to "max out" a "real skill," you can actually do something else, anything you want, with it. Rather than hope that song that I love comes out on Rock Band so that I can put my hundreds of hours to work playing it, I could have spent hundreds of hours playing real guitar and be able to play any song. If I sink a lot of time into becoming a great comedian, I can hit the road, make people all of the place laugh, and make money doing it. If I spend time improving my health and fitness, I can run marathons, play competitive sports, or become a vigilante hero. The choice is entirely up to me. That's what it boils down to. Is your leveling work tying you to a system where you can't control the direction you're heading in? In play, in art, in work, and in life, make sure that the skills you're improving are flexible in a way that allows you to apply them in any way you wish. Otherwise, you're just playing someone else's game. Note: I used quotes around "real life" and "real skill" because I'm cheating by defining them somewhat circularly. A "real skill" is a skill that can be applied in many different ways, limited only by creativity. "Real life" is the arena in which you practice and execute those real skills.
klipt 16y ago
> What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW." > But this isn't necessarily true for everyone. Sure, some people prefer the blue pill. But the real world is a strict superset of WoW, and thus (to me) much more interesting.
- forensic 16y ago
  You're just telling us what you personally find meaningful. But this doesn't extend to others. Your argument is about subjective values - you value the superset - but this is wholly subjective as well. Death is a superset of life, therefore I value death more than life, therefore you should kill yourself to find true meaning. By staying alive you're choosing the blue pill. (I can make these arguments all day. You're never going to be able to prove to others that your form of meaning is somehow rational or logical. All of your arguments are back rationalization - postdiction.) "I find the red pill more meaningful because it is redder than the blue pill and red is the colour of the sunset and the sun is really big." <-- This argument is no less arbitrary than your "superset" argument.
  - klipt 16y ago
    > Death is a superset of life Um, no. It's pretty well established that one can start or stop playing WoW at will from real life. There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death. Of course there are some belief systems that claim that death leads to an unimaginably wonderful heaven, but even those belief systems tend to discourage suicide.
    - forensic 16y ago
      >There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death. What about all the dead people who come back to life thanks to medical intervention? This is an outdated perspective. Loads of people now living were once dead. Scientific evidence indicates: Matter starts out dead, becomes alive, then becomes dead again, then rots into the ground and eventually becomes alive again. After your corpse rots it becomes dirt, the dirt is eaten by plants and insects, who are eaten by animals, and the animals are eaten by humans, and that matter is then used by humans to create babies, and then babies are alive. This is a fact. Dead things become alive through natural processes. But to be alive you first have to be dead. Your superset theorem of meaning is probably a rationalization of some deep emotional bias that has roots in your genes and early childhood environment.

oemera 16y ago

OH Come on! Life is not meaningless and maybe those people will NOT die anyway. Maybe it's just because you didn't found out by now, what is important for you in live. One example what changes life for ever is having kids. Seeing them grow, laugh and learn things is just amazing. I dunno if this is cry for help, if yes I would like to help. Edit: Why study to become a paramedic? Cause you want to. Cause it is your dream. Cause you ever wanted to work as paramedic. Cause it makes you feel better when you help people. Cause it makes you happy helping people. Cause it makes you happy to work with people.

smanek 16y ago
Everyone will eventually die anyway. And your reasons can just as easily be turned around. Why work hard to win at WoW? Cause you want to. Cause it is your dream. Cause you ever [sic] wanted to be lvl 80. etc. If your 'argument' applies equally well to any position it is completely meaningless.
- loup-vaillant 16y ago
  > Everyone will eventually die anyway. Oddly enough, not everyone agrees with that. Some of them are even working on that problem.
  - shadowfox 16y ago
    Not very successfully though
  - forensic 16y ago
    But what's the point of immortality anyway? Life is just a meaningless sequence of cause-effect relationships. Immortality would mean being trapped by life, eventually you'll explore everything there is to explore in life and be drawn to explore death. The experience of death is more meaningful than life - it is true adventure. Taking a peek for yourself, seeing what's more. Life is pain, so immortality is an infinity of pain. I can make these arguments all day. Immortality is not inherently meaningful.
    - loup-vaillant 16y ago
      You believe we have souls. I we do, the death problem has already been solved by Mother Nature, God, or what have you. However, current evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the non existence of souls. therefore, death isn't the next adventure, it's nothing. About the meaning of immortality, you may want to read the Fun Theory sequence at http://lesswrong.com http://lesswrong.com
    - forensic 16y ago
      loup-vaillant said: "You believe we have souls. In that case, the death problem has already been solved by Mother Nature, God, or what have you. Current evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the non existence of souls. therefore, death isn't a possible adventure, it's nothing. About the meaning of immortality, I recommend the Fun Theory sequence at lesswrong.com" No I don't believe in souls. You are assuming beliefs that I don't have. Nihilism does not require a belief in anything supernatural. I do believe that death is real, and therefore I believe that dying is something that happens to people. The point is that you can't prove in any objective way that death is less meaningful than life. This is not really due to the nature of life and death, it is due to the nature of meaning itself.
      - loup-vaillant 16y ago
        OK, I was confused by the word "adventure". I assumed that if you said this, then "death" must be… something. I thought we were disagreeing on facts. And of course I can't prove that death is less "meaningful" than life: that's a moral judgement, not a factual belief.

JanezStupar 16y ago

There is a substantial difference between improving your physical life and your Avatar. The illusion of success is there and almost tangible - if you didn't have to "wake up" to your neglected real body and nonexistent/handicapped real life. And most people I know don't play WOW due to nihilism or at least not initially. They play it just for opposite reasons - it makes it easier for them to achieve something. Disclaimer: I have played UO and got severely addicted by it. I also played WOW and EVE, I'm very competitive but in the end I figured that to reach the level of performance I wanted to - It would take me 8+ hours (rather 12+) of work a day. So I just quit the damn thing and focused on building my real person - no regrets. I saw WOW at a friend some months ago - and I instantly felt sick, the sounds, the animations... It just made me want to throw up.

access_denied 16y ago
> I instantly felt sick ... It just made me want to throw up. Interestingly I have the same torwards tobacco. There seems to be something, maybe in your sub-consciousness that wants to prevent you from going back there and it is so strong that it evokes reactions on a physical level.
scotty79 16y ago
If you are leveling in real life sometimes you wake up and see emptiness of this all. Sure, what you achieved in life provides comfort for your body but body is relatively easy to comfort if mind is happy. If you are playing game all the time there is not much time you have to be "awake" and you may even never be fully "awake" to notice and appreciate your handicapped life. People can have handicapped life even when they don't play games. They just stay for years in the same place despite their apparent efforts.
- JanezStupar 16y ago
  Indeed - human mind is capable of creating many elaborate delusions. Nihilism being the worst of them all. One has to recognize that indeed, there are no supreme values, that there is no guaranteed path to salvation. And that in spite of this terrible truth one must form his own set of values that guide him on a journey that doesn't really lead anywhere specific, but one must travel the journey else he becomes damned.

davidk0101 16y ago

Why the fuck are you getting upvotes? Your hijacking of the points and arguments he makes doesn't even warrant a response.

Fargren 16y ago
He is showing the flaws in the argument of the OP, which at the very least help concider that myabe the argument is flawed and thus the conclusion is wrong. That leads to valuable discussion, so it's getting upvoted. Asking why "the fuck" he's getting upvotes, however, only leads to discussion about the discussion, which is a lot less interesting.
joeguilmette 16y ago
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

javert 16y ago

Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless! Life isn't meaningless. Life is its own goal; doing well in life allows you to achieve happiness.

henrikschroder 16y ago
World of Warcraft isn't meaningless. WoW is its own goal; doing well in WoW allows you to achieve happiness. I think you have to make a more convincing case for why life has meaning and wow hasn't, you can't just spout platitudes and call it a day.
- DougBTX 16y ago
  I've not played WoW, but I'm guessing that the arguments from this article apply: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-play-farmville http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-p... The gist is that Farmville isn't fun. Perhaps the problem is that WoW doesn't allow you to achieve happiness.
  - mfukar 16y ago
    If it didn't, it wouldn't have upwards of 6 million subscribers.
    - henrikschroder 16y ago
      They're over 11 million active subscribers right now.
      - mfukar 16y ago
        Oh! Well, I suppose one can guess when I quit.. ;-)
- javert 16y ago

rsheridan6 16y ago

>What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW." That's probably true of the vast majority of people, including addicted WoW players.

randallsquared 16y ago
Evidently not.
- rsheridan6 16y ago
  Why? The fact that they play WoW obsessively could mean that they find more meaning in it than in real-life activity, or it could also mean that they're addicts who regret the time they spend playing WoW, but feel a compulsion to play it anyway. It's not evident to me whether WoW addicts fall in the former or latter category.

Hoff 16y ago

Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless! Ayup. But then I've brought a few of those folks back, too. Folks that were dead from respiratory or cardiac arrest, or were dying of anaphylaxis or severe asthma, or recognizing an impending fatal condition and just talking somebody into one of those drives into medical care. Pushing a med or defibrillating or whatever, and having them survive. Sometimes just helping somebody get back into their chair, and having a nice chat. That helps offset the ugly parts. As for heroin, medical-grade opiates tend to be something folks can maintain and can tolerate, it's the random weird stuff and the wildly different purities that can be a problem. Nalaxone can help there, but if I was pushing that, that patient was in compromise or in respiratory arrest from a likely opiate overdose, and usually headed for dead. And yes, mental issues in real life can extend to and can involve WoW, paramedicine or heroin abuse. Or worse. edit: fixed some wording

forensic 16y ago
What's the point of saving someone's life when they are just going to get old and die? ("Meaning" is not something that you can prove to others. Many people would find your job meaningless, while you may find it highly meaningful. The point is that each person's search for meaning is very individual.)
- Hoff 16y ago
  Meaning? There's an existential discussion or two buried in there somewhere. Which leads into existence, and whether all of us are merely a figment of the viewer's imagination. And the point of saving someone's life? That discussion can go anywhere from existential to darwinian to whether you'll choose bluepill or redpill. As for one trigger of these sorts of introspections, burnout can happen in EMS and medicine in general, and other environments that cope with chaos and death, too. Getting burnt is not fun, regardless of whether EMS was the trigger, or working in a high-stress startup, or whatever.

robryan 16y ago

I wasted a heap of time on WoW as a teenager, certainly I could't seen myself doing that now but looking back I can't say I have bad memories of those years. Could have I been doing something more productive? Probably. But would have it gave me the same level of enjoyment? Questionable.

dasil003 16y ago

It's easy to extend to life at a macro level, but it breaks down pretty quickly. First, it's a bit more akin to life if you were a serf in medieval times where your whole life is a repetitive task to serve the local landowner (ie. Blizzard). More importantly, WoW reduces rewards to regular, metered system which I believe is damaging to self-motivation. There are no experiences in WoW that are unique, there is no unexplored territory, and no accomplishment you can achieve that wasn't predetermined by a designer. It's tempting to make a philosophical analogy, but there's a major difference. If we are brains in vats we have no choice in the matter; but choosing WoW means choosing an experience in a constrained world, completely devoid of any of the nuance of the physical world, despite the quantity of shiny objects.

stcredzero 16y ago
There are no experiences in WoW that are unique, there is no unexplored territory, and no accomplishment you can achieve that wasn't predetermined by a designer. I propose this: a space game where you are encouraged to write bots. Place the space game in an ungodly huge procedurally generated universe. The base economic activity is based on mining. Give users a custom scripting language and API to write their own bots. The number of bots and the amount of CPU time they can have is constrained by tokens in the game. (As in StarCraft.) Players can write scripts and license running copies for in-game money. What will result? Macro-miners. Then pirates who raid the macro-miners. Then fleets of Macro-miner protection drones supervised by highly motivated Chinese professional gamers. Voila! Emergent user-generated content! For the coup -- base the procedural generation on interesting mathematics. Perhaps some macro-miner outfit can be motivated to find a pattern in prime numbers or pi!

BrandonM 16y ago

I agree with your general sentiment. I think the distinction should not be between WoW and real life, but between real skills and fake skills, between real progression and fake progression, and who is controlling the experience. In WoW, your character has several skills, stats, and abilities that define it. You choose which ones to work on, how to shape your character, and then you put in the time to make that happen. But what about your skills? You are not getting stronger or better at wielding a two-handed weapon. You are getting better at playing WoW, you are improving your hand-eye coordination, you are bettering your combat-driven teamwork abilities, and you are getting better at determination: being patient and working towards a goal. The problem comes in the illusion of progression. Your character improves almost continuously, building its skills to a point where it is better than all the other characters. Eventually your character reaches a ceiling, but you can always create another character with different skills and do it all again. But you stop progressing much sooner. Early on, your ability to play WoW tapers off to a suitably-high level such that the real gain is in improving your character. You master the conventions of in-game communication. You develop a routine and diligently set to work improving your characters without question. You stop progressing. But what happens when you reach that ceiling, when you become the best? In WoW and many other video games, the game ceases to be fun when you are as powerful as possible. Since someone else owns the experience, you are stuck waiting for them to tell you what to do with your newfound abilities. This is why I regret the time I sank into becoming an Expert guitar player on Rock Band. When your playing abilities max out, the game becomes a chore, even if you don't realize it. The best rhythm game players spend their time playing the same songs over and over again in an effort to play them flawlessly. The game ceases to be a game. In "real life," if you manage to "max out" a "real skill," you can actually do something else, anything you want, with it. Rather than hope that song that I love comes out on Rock Band so that I can put my hundreds of hours to work playing it, I could have spent hundreds of hours playing real guitar and be able to play any song. If I sink a lot of time into becoming a great comedian, I can hit the road, make people all of the place laugh, and make money doing it. If I spend time improving my health and fitness, I can run marathons, play competitive sports, or become a vigilante hero. The choice is entirely up to me. That's what it boils down to. Is your leveling work tying you to a system where you can't control the direction you're heading in? In play, in art, in work, and in life, make sure that the skills you're improving are flexible in a way that allows you to apply them in any way you wish. Otherwise, you're just playing someone else's game. Note: I used quotes around "real life" and "real skill" because I'm cheating by defining them somewhat circularly. A "real skill" is a skill that can be applied in many different ways, limited only by creativity. "Real life" is the arena in which you practice and execute those real skills.

klipt 16y ago

> What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW." > But this isn't necessarily true for everyone. Sure, some people prefer the blue pill. But the real world is a strict superset of WoW, and thus (to me) much more interesting.

forensic 16y ago
You're just telling us what you personally find meaningful. But this doesn't extend to others. Your argument is about subjective values - you value the superset - but this is wholly subjective as well. Death is a superset of life, therefore I value death more than life, therefore you should kill yourself to find true meaning. By staying alive you're choosing the blue pill. (I can make these arguments all day. You're never going to be able to prove to others that your form of meaning is somehow rational or logical. All of your arguments are back rationalization - postdiction.) "I find the red pill more meaningful because it is redder than the blue pill and red is the colour of the sunset and the sun is really big." <-- This argument is no less arbitrary than your "superset" argument.
- klipt 16y ago
  > Death is a superset of life Um, no. It's pretty well established that one can start or stop playing WoW at will from real life. There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death. Of course there are some belief systems that claim that death leads to an unimaginably wonderful heaven, but even those belief systems tend to discourage suicide.
  - forensic 16y ago
    >There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death. What about all the dead people who come back to life thanks to medical intervention? This is an outdated perspective. Loads of people now living were once dead. Scientific evidence indicates: Matter starts out dead, becomes alive, then becomes dead again, then rots into the ground and eventually becomes alive again. After your corpse rots it becomes dirt, the dirt is eaten by plants and insects, who are eaten by animals, and the animals are eaten by humans, and that matter is then used by humans to create babies, and then babies are alive. This is a fact. Dead things become alive through natural processes. But to be alive you first have to be dead. Your superset theorem of meaning is probably a rationalization of some deep emotional bias that has roots in your genes and early childhood environment.