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I see from the comments that many here don't get what he is talking about. I think he sums it up nicely in the end: > I’ve said this before, but it bears repea

I see from the comments that many here don't get what he is talking about. I think he sums it up nicely in the end: > I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: we see in the concept of games —here it comes again— a double mouvement, and indeed something approaching an autoantonymy. The concept in question can signify both a free play of the imaginative faculty, a Schillerian Spieltrieb; and it can signify a situation in which one is bound by formal constraints on one’s motions, and is therefore compelled to respond to one’s existence fundamentally through coming up with strategies. The gamification of our social life, which was honed and perfected on social media before it jumped the fence to affectivity, labor, and who knows what’s next, forces us to sacrifice free play to strategic play, and the leisurely flight of the imagination to narrow problem-solving. > On the face of it, the gamification of reality looks like fun. But when everything becomes a game, it turns out, that game ends up dissolving into its merely apparent opposite: work. The dupes of the new ideology, underlain by the metaphor of the game, think they’re giving us life in an arcade —a child’s dream!— but what we’re really getting is life in a global warehouse, monitored and metricized, forced at every turn to devise strategies that maximize engagement with whatever it is we’re putting out there… all in the name of scraping by.

bsenftner 5y ago
Blows my mind how people can't read anymore. The essay is excellent.
- mvonballmo 5y ago
  It's impossible for me not to think of this (Idiocracy, 90s, 2 clips): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py37IFuKxYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py37IFuKxYw
- Nebasuke 5y ago
  I had a great time reading the essay. The information and concept density of this essay is higher, and reading this essay reminded me of reading a good book. I think the author advertised their book honestly in the sense that the essay likely reflects the reading experience of their book, but it's probably too honest if their goal was improving sales. About the actual content: I resonated with the concerns of games becoming work, as it matches what I've heard from most of the YouTube creators I follow. YouTubers having to create strategies that maximize engagement makes video creation more work and less "game"/fun than it used to be. I agree that a lot of the web can be seen to be following this trend.
- snikeris 5y ago
  I'm just here for the karma points.
- golergka 5y ago
  People don't read because most authors can't write as well. Most of longreads I come across could be summed up in a single paragraph, so nowadays I usually read the HN comments first to figure out if the text itself is worth it.
mattgreenrocks 5y ago
This is a great insight. Social media is just World of Warcraft but less fun. Blue check marks signify elite guild membership, and follower counts are your gear score. The only difference nowadays is how deadly serious everyone takes these metrics. It is absurd.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  Funnily enough, MMORPGs represent the start of gamified work (before we even called it that) back-contaminating videogames. Remember how in the early days of WoW, people complained about how MMORPGs were more like work you paid to do? MMOs have organic social structures such as guilds where it's members are required to play at specific times in groups and do specific jobs to guarantee success at getting loot drops in an entirely artificial, centrally-planned economy. And then you had games like EVE Online or Entropia, which were entirely designed around being a second job you paid to play. At some point, this was contained to games which were trying to provide a living world to play in. And the most approachable MMOs (again, like WoW) tried to keep the "second job" aspect optional. But then game developers realized that they could deliberately engineer their games this way, and then sell players cheat codes that cost real-world money to skip the grind and get to the supposedly good bits. So now every game tries to be a second job, so they can justify selling microtransactions to people who have a first job to ostensibly get to the "good bits" of the game.
  - mattmanser 5y ago
    There's a certain irony too as it was a bit of a quick hack because they needed to create a lot of content. If it was possible to generate interesting and meaningful quests and content I'm sure they would have.
  - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    While I shouldn't be surprised, it feels like the snake eating its own tail is more recursive than I ever imagined it could be. Such is art and life.
- Tao331 5y ago
flakyfilibuster 5y ago
some great author, can't even spell 'movement'...
- ImprobableTruth 5y ago
  I can't tell if you're joking, but the author previously explains that "double mouvement" is a french expression.
ldd 5y ago
this is pretty dense (in a good way). I have read a little bit of Schiller, so I was somewhat aware of the "play drive" idea (Spieltrieb) but I really don't recall what it means anymore. All that to say that there are concepts that are not completely easy to understand here.
- ex3xu 5y ago
  My internal picture of Schillerian Spieltrieb is basically a bunch of 1960s pie-in-the-sky Woodstock hippies making art, music, and free love all day in a post-work, self-governing society. The OP is juxtaposing this utopic vision of games and play against the reality of the dystopic, positivist, Skinner's box-style internet spawned by Zuckerberg/Schmidt/Bezos that is currently in the process of devouring us all. Schiller's concept of Spieltrieb is from his 1794 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, which describes a sort of idealistic, post-work state of man when given the liberty to merge his innate "Sinestrieb", the urge towards sensual and material gratification, and his "Formtrieb", the urge to establish moral order upon the world. Schiller, alongside of Goethe and other Weimar Classicists, built on Kant's transcendental idealism to perform a sort of epistemological revalorization of the Greek concept of aesthetics, in contrast to previous enlightenment thinking which primarily focused on reason without regard for sentiment. Writing against the backdrop of the French Revolution, which Schiller felt had been co-opted by violent radicals and ultimately failed to achieve its lofty ideological goals, Schiller (being a playwright and novelist himself) believed that an appreciation for the arts could help develop the moral character necessary for a society to act as unified harmonious beings. This concept has persisted as the pursuit of the aesthetic condition, a sort of post-revolution endgame to aspire towards where everyone, upon reaching some threshhold of education and appreciation for art, becomes happy and aspires to play and create works of art all day long. This aspirational outcome is referenced by political theorists like Marcuse, Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt school whose work criticized what they saw as the inevitable unpleasant consequences of modernity and capitalism, e.g. commodification, the alienation of labor, and the devaluation of man. Stanford encyclopedia on Schiller: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schiller/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schiller/

bsenftner 5y ago

Blows my mind how people can't read anymore. The essay is excellent.

mvonballmo 5y ago
It's impossible for me not to think of this (Idiocracy, 90s, 2 clips): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py37IFuKxYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py37IFuKxYw
Nebasuke 5y ago
I had a great time reading the essay. The information and concept density of this essay is higher, and reading this essay reminded me of reading a good book. I think the author advertised their book honestly in the sense that the essay likely reflects the reading experience of their book, but it's probably too honest if their goal was improving sales. About the actual content: I resonated with the concerns of games becoming work, as it matches what I've heard from most of the YouTube creators I follow. YouTubers having to create strategies that maximize engagement makes video creation more work and less "game"/fun than it used to be. I agree that a lot of the web can be seen to be following this trend.
snikeris 5y ago
I'm just here for the karma points.
golergka 5y ago
People don't read because most authors can't write as well. Most of longreads I come across could be summed up in a single paragraph, so nowadays I usually read the HN comments first to figure out if the text itself is worth it.

mattgreenrocks 5y ago

This is a great insight. Social media is just World of Warcraft but less fun. Blue check marks signify elite guild membership, and follower counts are your gear score. The only difference nowadays is how deadly serious everyone takes these metrics. It is absurd.

kmeisthax 5y ago
Funnily enough, MMORPGs represent the start of gamified work (before we even called it that) back-contaminating videogames. Remember how in the early days of WoW, people complained about how MMORPGs were more like work you paid to do? MMOs have organic social structures such as guilds where it's members are required to play at specific times in groups and do specific jobs to guarantee success at getting loot drops in an entirely artificial, centrally-planned economy. And then you had games like EVE Online or Entropia, which were entirely designed around being a second job you paid to play. At some point, this was contained to games which were trying to provide a living world to play in. And the most approachable MMOs (again, like WoW) tried to keep the "second job" aspect optional. But then game developers realized that they could deliberately engineer their games this way, and then sell players cheat codes that cost real-world money to skip the grind and get to the supposedly good bits. So now every game tries to be a second job, so they can justify selling microtransactions to people who have a first job to ostensibly get to the "good bits" of the game.
- mattmanser 5y ago
  There's a certain irony too as it was a bit of a quick hack because they needed to create a lot of content. If it was possible to generate interesting and meaningful quests and content I'm sure they would have.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  While I shouldn't be surprised, it feels like the snake eating its own tail is more recursive than I ever imagined it could be. Such is art and life.
Tao331 5y ago

flakyfilibuster 5y ago

some great author, can't even spell 'movement'...

ImprobableTruth 5y ago
I can't tell if you're joking, but the author previously explains that "double mouvement" is a french expression.

ldd 5y ago

this is pretty dense (in a good way). I have read a little bit of Schiller, so I was somewhat aware of the "play drive" idea (Spieltrieb) but I really don't recall what it means anymore. All that to say that there are concepts that are not completely easy to understand here.

ex3xu 5y ago
My internal picture of Schillerian Spieltrieb is basically a bunch of 1960s pie-in-the-sky Woodstock hippies making art, music, and free love all day in a post-work, self-governing society. The OP is juxtaposing this utopic vision of games and play against the reality of the dystopic, positivist, Skinner's box-style internet spawned by Zuckerberg/Schmidt/Bezos that is currently in the process of devouring us all. Schiller's concept of Spieltrieb is from his 1794 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, which describes a sort of idealistic, post-work state of man when given the liberty to merge his innate "Sinestrieb", the urge towards sensual and material gratification, and his "Formtrieb", the urge to establish moral order upon the world. Schiller, alongside of Goethe and other Weimar Classicists, built on Kant's transcendental idealism to perform a sort of epistemological revalorization of the Greek concept of aesthetics, in contrast to previous enlightenment thinking which primarily focused on reason without regard for sentiment. Writing against the backdrop of the French Revolution, which Schiller felt had been co-opted by violent radicals and ultimately failed to achieve its lofty ideological goals, Schiller (being a playwright and novelist himself) believed that an appreciation for the arts could help develop the moral character necessary for a society to act as unified harmonious beings. This concept has persisted as the pursuit of the aesthetic condition, a sort of post-revolution endgame to aspire towards where everyone, upon reaching some threshhold of education and appreciation for art, becomes happy and aspires to play and create works of art all day long. This aspirational outcome is referenced by political theorists like Marcuse, Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt school whose work criticized what they saw as the inevitable unpleasant consequences of modernity and capitalism, e.g. commodification, the alienation of labor, and the devaluation of man. Stanford encyclopedia on Schiller: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schiller/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schiller/