15 ms·

Silicon Valley doesn't understand the concept of fun

297 points by mariuz 3y ago

Mistletoe 3y ago
I don’t buy that the metaverse is a new invention. My brothers and I lived in one many years ago, it was called World of Warcraft around the Burning Crusade era and it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. This was before Blizzard enabled cross server play and destroyed the socialization aspect of the game. Then you lived on one server and were forced to socialize with the same players every day and make a whole world and society that existed on that one server. You had cities and factions and your guild doing raids and recruiting new players and it was another life. It was wonderful and I’m sure it will happen again someday from some other company and in some other format. I’m always amazed to look at the servers and imagine all the lives and stories that came from that one piece of hardware. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/97tudn/one_of_world_of_warcrafts_original_blade_servers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/97tudn/one_of_world...
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Such experience still exists in Tibia, 1997 MMORPG.
- glimshe 3y ago
  Reminds me a lot of BBSs. It's hard to develop lasting and deep relationships with random people on the Internet. Just as old WoW, many BBSs had a small group of people who hung out virtually together and you got to know them. It's the closest you can get to lifelong high school and college friendships after leaving school.
  - bladegash 3y ago
    Funny enough, BBSs were the way many of the players on WoW servers pre-cross realm would communicate/flame each other outside the actual game. When I started online gaming with an old multiplayer tank game called Tanarus, we used Usenet. With EverQuest we used EZBoard, then with WoW it was many times the server’s board on the official WoW forums. While I’m sure there’s a bit of nostalgia shading the memories, I made a lot of friends and great memories!
    - glimshe 3y ago
      I think we lost something with demise of BBSs that the Internet was never able to replace. It's one of those things where one technology is better in almost every way, but something gets permanently lost in the transition. One analogy would be the upgrade from vinyl to CD/Digital music.
    - notpachet 3y ago
      Minor nitpick: while Usenet closely resembled the older BBS's, it wasn't an actual BBS per se. Ditto the other forum sites.
      - bladegash 3y ago
        I guess I was more including Usenet as a part of the progression, not necessarily categorizing as a BBS. Fair enough on the notice two, but I think people (or at least I) more generically use “BBS” to describe message boards/forums. Anyways, appreciate the correction regardless, as after looking the actual definition, I was definitely wrong =)!
- blockhead9988 3y ago
  I had a similar experience on a Minecraft server circa 2011-2015. Most fun I've ever had online, it was magical.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    I mean, you are essentially playing small village in those games. I believe there is something fundamentally perverse about neighbourhood "attrition" for the human mind. Like, you want to know people and have some sameness in your neighborhood. Nowadays people move so much. Especially in big cities.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  The Metaverse concept has basically existed fully-formed, and even with that exact name, since at least Snow Crash (1992). The wider idea was clearly floating around in the zeitgeist as the Red Dwarf episode where they get stuck in a game called Better Than Life aired in March that year, a few months before Snow Crash was published.
  - dash2 3y ago
    Or Neuromancer. (Any advance on Neuromancer?)
    - AndrewDucker 3y ago
      I think that Neuromancer was about as early as it went, fiction-wise. But VR was about from the 70s (NASA's JPL had one), and the metaverse is basically VR + chatroom. Popularisation certainly happened by the early 80s, which is presumably where Neuromancer got it from.
    - layer8 3y ago
      Burning Chrome precedes Neuromancer by two years and first used "cyberspace" in the sense of a VR-like network.
    - twic 3y ago
      True Names, 1981. Which, IMHO, is a far better story than Neuromancer, but also much less stylish, and hence less influential.
  - cb321 3y ago
    And don't forget Lawnmower Man in March 1992 [1] (Snow Crash was June 1992). I think the "VR headsets" of the day were popular for a few years before both, driving said particular zeitgeist. As mentioned in a sibling, William Gibson { and probably Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem } presaged all this stuff decade(s) earlier. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)
- Fluorescence 3y ago
  I enjoyed Jumpgate back in the day - a space sim MMORPG. There was quite a funny effect that at a certain level, you tended not to leave the space stations at all. The world was dangerous and losing your ship was a pain in the butt so seasoned players rarely launched and instead socialised and played each other in the training simulation that was inside the game. I felt the hint of a general principle: if you create a realistic world with risks, chores, costs etc. it has no value. It's not what people seek. People will need to create games within the virtual world to find leisure. The virtual world becomes an irrelevant shell of indirection you need to escape just as you want to escape the real world.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Isn't Eve Online a counterexample to this? From anyone I hear talking about it, it's the reality of it all that makes it compelling.
    - rini17 3y ago
      How it is a counterexample? Doing anything fun in eve requires a group that talks through headsets. That's exactly the leisurely socialization aspect of it. I am hard of hearing and left eve because I can't do that. Playing torn.com[1] instead. That unlike jumpgate you often leave space station (or safe space) is just a detail cuz death/loss of a ship isn't a big issue. [1]https://www.torn.com/2658150 https://www.torn.com/2658150
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    - verve_rat 3y ago
      You could argue that Eve's attraction is the lack of regulation, the lack of protection from scams, the lack of a police force. All things you get in the real world, more or less. Eve has just the right mix of reality and unreality to hook its audience.
- PennRobotics 3y ago
  I know multiple people who have long-lasting IRL relationships because of Asheron's Call, preceding WoW by a few years. Same stuff... Get-togethers, group quests, level-up ceremonies, taking care of each other's characters and stuff (until houses came along)
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Yeah; the innovative bit in the recent 'metaverse' bubble was getting VCs to shovel money in, not the actual concept.
- Sophira 3y ago
  It absolutely isn't a new invention. The only thing new that everybody completely latched onto was that Facebook changed its name to Meta. People thought that meant the beginning of something new, and Meta themselves certainly didn't want to disprove that notion.
makeitdouble 3y ago
The metaverse part as a whole feels completely unneeded and misguided (spending so much time on declaring it dead, with 0 mention of VRChat or RecRooms is odd), but the dive on how much SV loves productivity apps was interesting. This reminds me of Hello Internet (rest in hiatus) with the more US minded CGP Grey spending so much time on productivity tricks, to the point he's now part of a company making productivity goods. And in contrast Brady getting bored to death by the productivity gurus, just delivering project after project without the weird and random systems, while enjoying resort beaches, also building legos, also going to parties etc. and just seemingly enjoying life so much more.
- m463 3y ago
  because of who is trying to start it, I can't think of any product that would be less successful except maybe "meta connected underwear"™. The more someone wants to own it, to control it, surveil, the less people will buy in.
  - mcny 3y ago
    > The more someone wants to own it, to control it, surveil, the less people will buy in. I remember when I first got into Android, the open handset alliance was such a big thing. The goal, at least what I thought was the goal, was to bring together all the manufacturers, software developers, telco operators, and users on a single platform so they could avoid duplicating effort. I think you’re right. The platform succeeded because google refused to suck up too much of the oxygen in the room in the project’s infancy. Funny enough though as a user it was maddening to see basic apps that could get bug fixes and updates because they were part of aosp and couldn’t update from android market. I actually wanted those to be on an App Store because manufacturers didn’t have regular updates
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    As "metaverse" was not capitalized I assumed the generic term. Otherwise I don't think Horizon getting sunset would mean Meta giving up, they've shown willingness to go down that road as far as they need to. That could include buying up any service that gets ahead in the Occulus ecosystem, though I'm definitely not thrilled by that perspective.
mojo74 3y ago
The mention of Decentraland in this article reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q The comment one viewer seems to sum it up: They made a virtual world so boring that you can't even find weird perverts in it.
- rtkwe 3y ago
  There's already a place for weird pervs and that's vr chat where there's no corporate overlords desperately trying to sanitize any weirdness out of their product.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Whomsoever wins the furries will win the metaverse. (But also, the furries are about the only people who _want_ a metaverse, as far as I can see. I'm fairly certain this is why Second Life still clings on stubbornly.)
  - postsantum 3y ago
    Furries are the canaries of metaverses. As long as they are present, you can be sure corporates and HR haven't touched this world with their fingers of death
  - noirscape 3y ago
    To be fair, furries are kinda the baseline of what you want to distinguish "the metaverse" from the real world. I can have meetings from home just as easily in the real world with a webcam and a Zoom call. The metaverse doesn't enhance that if all I'm doing is placing a 3D model that looks like me on a map and look at other 3D models of other people. (Plus, arguably strapping a VR brick to your face probably means it's worse than that Zoom call for physical health reasons.) Otoh the premise of "you can use a furry avatar to represent yourself" isn't one that appeals to me, but it does show that the people making it are thinking of "how can we make this different from the real world" instead of the lazy "let's move this real world thing to digital and make it as boring as reality can be".
thecupisblue 3y ago
First, the metaverse - Meta's "vision" is a bleak, dystopian colored world without much fun except a few mini-games. It's core idea was/is implemented in way better ways - Dreams was a great step, Fortnite & Roblox are currently trying to do the same thing, and hell, even old GTA San Andreas and Garry's mod were more of a metaverse than Horizon Worlds ever came to be. On the concept of fun - of course it doesn't understand it. The tech scene has move from the fun, hacker ways into the dark pit of standardisation, processes, bureaucracy and average. Creativity gets sapped out of it to conform to a kafkaesque mind of your average stakeholder. Designer's and developer's opinions get overridden by glorified paper pushers. You can see it happen in every startup, and the valley is the same - to conform to the largest possible market, as it grows, everything has to be averaged out and greyed out - making stuff colorful might exclude a market and we don't want that. Especially if the market is a trillion dollar enterprise-ridden bureaucratic hellhole, since those hellholes are where the easy money is.
- imgabe 3y ago
  Second Life is probably the most successful metaverse to date. Probably in large part because people could do things like create flocks of flying dicks.
  - willis936 3y ago
    I think the best thing Facebook has done for the world has been to not take over Second Life. It's a move that makes perfect business sense but it would destroy an interesting piece of culture.
    - mcny 3y ago
      It might make sense depending on how they structure it? For example, from what I understand when Walmart e-commerce bought jet, they actually gave meaningful autonomy to the acquired jet team. I watched a talk by a guy who seemed genuinely enthusiastic about reading existing code and rewriting it for scalability. I guess my point is if Facebook could give second life money and not exert control / strangle second life people it might work but knowing facebook, that’s not possible.
atemerev 3y ago
It is telling that all comments here are focused on the merits or faults of metaverse, instead of focusing on the actual message: Silicon Valley does not understand the concept of fun, games, and leisure time. It can be seen everywhere.
- indymike 3y ago
  Not really, I can't think of a better product to highlight everything that is no fun about Silicon Valley than the Metaverse.
aogaili 3y ago
I think they underestimated the attachment of people to their bodies not misunderstood fun. Most of people in Silicon Valley are in their heads. The rest of the people are busy living life with their bodiesnin real life. Instagram works because people can market their real faces and bodies, which is not the case for the metaverse.
sethammons 3y ago
TL:DR: SV likes and loves "productivity" and games are kind of the opposite. Good for calendar or pomodoro apps that others will try to leverage to be more productive, not good for fun. The best games don't fit the SV model.
- randomdata 3y ago
  The best game is Silicon Valley itself. SV loves "productivity" like Mario loves gold coins – it's what is needed to further your score in the game.
jlpcsl 3y ago
I'm much more concerned because they don't understand the concepts of privacy, ethics, freedom, openness...
seydor 3y ago
Old-time TV used to have ads for alcohol, cigarettes. Late-night shows, sometimes risky in europe (i.e. tits) had ads, lots of them. Google + Facebook, like the puritanest of the puritan americans have made that a no-go. It's not clear who decided it first, but basically anything that the local church might frown upon has become unmonetizable and unadvertisable. Of course you won't have fun things when you do that. The article is not correct about metaverse. There 's still games like second-life and others (thousands of users roam in open and distributed worlds in opensimulator - see https://opensimworld.com https://opensimworld.com) . Facebook's leg-less (convenient alias for genital-less) avatars are of course not fun. When you kill all that's fun about virtual worlds (the ability to transcend this world and let imagination be truly free) then what do you expect people to do? simulate the misery of the office in 3d form? I seriously would like to hear what they expected to have
- deleted 3y ago
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jaimebuelta 3y ago
Anyone else reminding the Men in Grey from Momo while reading the article? Only this time in hoodies…
andreygrehov 3y ago
Let’s be honest, when it comes to fun and entertainment, Silicon Valley is the most boring place on Earth.
- eddtries 3y ago
  Yeah... lived in the Bay Area, it's almost like a giant suburb with some large industrial parks that just so happen to be tech companies. It's a bit better if you're in San Jose or San Francisco, but good lord living in Palo Alto/Mountain View is boring. This video is literally 100% correct https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7KSTZttWXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7KSTZttWXM, especially about downtown life
  - theoldlove 3y ago
    Love the video but it is 100% about life on the Peninsula. Dude clearly never made it to Oakland or he wouldn’t be talking about how clean the Bay Area is.
yankaf 3y ago
Well people prefer to live in natural world I guess.
littlelady 3y ago
I mean... yeah. Remember when microdosing on LSD to boost productivity became a thing in SV? I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley suffer from the "grind" mentality, which doesn't allow for fun. It should be optimized fun, like watching your films at 2.5 speed! [1]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lsd-microdosing-drugs-silicon-valley https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lsd-microdosing-drugs-silico...
fidotron 3y ago
I've worked at both and between both the games industry and SV. Given the presence of Roblox, EA and the Playstation unit in SV it is a bit odd to consider them such outsiders, but in a real sense they are. Broadly though, the problem is SV in a business culture sense conflates fun with role playing, expressing yourself, generating and consuming UGC, and feeding the beast. Play in the sense of discovery without any external side effects confuses it. If you are in games you see more and more of this tendency infesting western games production too, and it's largely down to those versions of fun being far easier to monetize. The blind spot of this article is a huge amount of the "productivity" users are larping as PMs and using Notion etc. in a manner completely consistent with their sense of play, while acting seriously about it in order to maintain their ludic circle. To say they are not gamers is false; their entire lifestyle is the game. The huge reason the games industry hasn't been completely overwhelmed by SV types is it contains a critical mass of idealists that genuinely care about the player and player experiences, even in the most cynical companies.
- mablopoule 3y ago
  UGC ?
  - fidotron 3y ago
    User generated content
- automatic6131 3y ago
  That's... a really interesting thought. These mid-brained people that indulge in the endless productivity treadmill (the most appropriate word for it - working hard to end up where you started) are... actually role playing someone productive. I love this idea.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    This is the "bullshit jobs" thesis. It's very common in rat races. You can find recognizable forms of it in the ancient history of Imperial China or Rome. Job #1 is producing the appearance of usefulness, importance and status. Job #2 is doing enough actually useful things that the appearance and system is maintained.
jgalt212 3y ago
> Reddit cofounder, venture capitalist and play-to-earn evangelist Alexis Ohanian predicted that by 2027, “ninety percent of people will not play a game unless they are being valued properly for that time,” a position he restated in May of this year. I've yet to hear something thoughtful or smart come from Ohanian's mouth.
- Sophira 3y ago
  I hate to say it, but I actually think that part of the statement is correct - just not in the way he wants people to imagine it. To be clear, I'm not saying that people want to be paid to play games. That's an incredibly easily disproven notion. I'm talking about feeling like they're valued by a game. Games respecting the players' time in ways that don't equate to "here's stuff for playing our game" but are more "here's why you'll enjoy this game and why it's not crap"? Yeah, I can see that being a major factor in people playing them. Did Ohanian mean that? Obviously not, and I hate that I have to deliberately misinterpret him in order to get something out of this. But the core idea as stated isn't wrong.
- Eumenes 3y ago
  I disagree. He named his VC firm, Das Kapital, thats very cute! http://daskapitalcapital.com/ http://daskapitalcapital.com/
- dotnet00 3y ago
  To an extent that's right, although maybe not in the way it was intended. I've played and developed a hatred for games which are blatantly disrespectful of my time. This isn't about some weird productivity thing, but more of adding large numbers of time-based barriers which give no benefits but have to be gotten through to access the "fun", i.e. grinding without a sufficient reward. Games like that make me feel like they aren't valuing my time properly in the sense that it feels like they're taking their audience for granted and assuming that they'll always stick around regardless of what they do to the game.
- btbuildem 3y ago
  His statement really betrays the single-mindedness and inhumanity of wealth hoarders. Everything seen through the lens of profit-making, money as the only valid measure of value. What a desolate mindscape that must be.
Tade0 3y ago
I think the take out here is that different people find different things fun and SV has a very specific notion of that, which is incompatible with most of the world. I see it in my circle of long-time friends, where one of them is left out of our gaming sessions because he's busy all the time - typically with his productivity app side project no less. He did some amazing things in his youth, but I can't help but think it took a toll on him. It's contagious and for a while I felt pressured to adopt the same lifestyle, but at one point I noticed that it's a way to fast track oneself to depression, since the productivity demon is never really satisfied.
- tivert 3y ago
  > I think the take out here is that different people find different things fun and SV has a very specific notion of that, which is incompatible with most of the world. I think it's good to always keep in mind that software engineers don't understand a great many things, and perhaps SV software engineers understand even less. That attitude at least partially counters that exceedingly biased bullshit that reckons software engineers are smarter and better than everyone else and will "fix" everything. They fix very little, it's just that some of them have figured out how to force their bullshit on everyone else.
- hn8305823 3y ago
  SV's idea of fun is purely transactional - do this to get that. The genius of GTA III was the open sandbox. You weren't required to progress in the story, you could do WTF you wanted, even (and most importantly) nothing!
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Silicon valley has a history of producing things that initially don't have a lot of restrictions that get a lot of traction that then turn all corporate and sterile as soon as big money gets involved. Lack of fun is one reason. User generated content is risky. It needs moderation. Somebody might express themselves in ways that are inappropriate for the widest possible meaning of that word. And that might lead to legal consequences. Which adds cost. Fun and edgy things are typically bordering on inappropriate; or flat out inappropriate if you have no sense of humor. The difference is not relevant. If somebody might get offended, it's risky. Which makes the lawyers nervous. Another reason is the obsession with building walled gardens and claiming full ownership of everything inside those walls. It leads to locked down experiences where creativity is basically not welcome unless sanctioned from the top down. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. used to have APIs and an ecosystem of people building stuff on top of that. As they grew, all of that went away. Facebook is a good example as something that started out to enable some wildly inappropriate and immature behavior. Mark Zuckerberg actually started out building a platform for rating girls called facemash. Controversial, even at the time and it got him in trouble. Facebook is what he did next.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
  The first point isn’t an argument for fun but for individualism, almost to an extremist extent. If you want to publish your thoughts for others to see you’re going to have to accept the fact that some people are just going to take it differently because it human experiences are diverse, and you must be mature enough to be accountable for what you say. It’s people’s problem that they see conflict with others as an inherent negative when the disagreement with others is what itself brews creativity, because it challenges your point of view. People criticize the media for being “biased” but then crave echo chambers of their own.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    On Twitter it's not merely that you get a "different" interpretation, you have to deal with the most hostile interpretation possible of both your words and what you "didn't say". A little bit of disagreement is interesting; constant spurious repetitive negativity is exhausting and un-fun. Which is why people are leaving Twitter.
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layer8 3y ago
The way desktop and other UIs are getting worse, I sometimes think SV also doesn't understand productivity. A lot of the productivity hype is just productivity theater, a mere illusion of productiveness.
- shmeeed 3y ago
  Seen in this context, it all makes a lot of sense. This kind of productivity seems like a cult to me. Maybe those who don't understand recreation are doomed to also not understand why their productivity is not very efficient.
- rockskon 3y ago
  I always assumed the goal wasn't to minimize the time you spend in a UI but to find the maximum amount of time users will tolerate using a UI. At least for UIs that feature ads that is. The longer you're on the ad-spewing platform the more ads you're shown etc etc. Partly explains why Google search results are unnecessarily bad these days.
pjc50 3y ago
They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs. -- G.K. Chesterton
glimshe 3y ago
It was not always like that. Atari was a Silicon Valley company, they practically invented the concept of fun workplace.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  True, but that was a very different SV. It bears no resemblance to SV now.
  - datpiff 3y ago
    I've read Atari was very different under Tramiel as well.
jboggan 3y ago
Silicon Valley doesn't understand The Story of the Eye. Never thought I'd be reading Bataille quotes on HN before I had my coffee.
noirscape 3y ago
The difference between say, VRChat (but also non-VR equivalents like second life, MUDs and certain MMOs) and whatever the Silicon Valley metaverse thing was very much visible in how they envisioned it. Silicon Valleys approach was literally "put a bunch of 3D models that are meant to look like you + things you know from the real world and then transport as many real world bureaucracies and ideas as possible into it" (and throw making money on top because that's clearly what people want to do more than anything else[0]). It was doomed from the outset because it fundamentally restricted user creativity and expression as much as possible to try and mimic the real world. VRChat from what I can tell instead stapled a basic interface together for making a "metaverse" (map, player objects and basic scripting) and then set players loose on the field with all the creation tools to customize it (iirc the only hardcap in VRChat is the polygon count on any individual model). The result is that VRChat is a. incomprehensible to outsiders and b. undeniably creative. Most other examples don't offer the freedom VRChat does (closest to VRC is probably something like Garrys Mod? Second Life still tries to go for a realistic aesthetic, although it allows user creations), but if you place VRChat as one extreme and Facebooks anemic "metaverse" at the other, you'll find that most succesful metaverses lean closer to the VRChat degree of freedom than they do to Facebooks version of where creativity doesn't exist beyond what Facebook pre-approved of (and what a users wallet could afford, nothing for free, of course). Or if you just want the crass answer: VRChat let weirdos be weird and express themselves however weird they wanted to be. Silicon Valley saw that weirdness as a problem to be solved away and tried to make everyone fit an "acceptable", pre-approved mold. The reality is that most people do not like being made to fit in existing molds, even if what they do fit into isn't too different from those molds in the first place. [0]: I hope the sarcasm is obvious.
- internet101010 3y ago
  I think you really hit the nail on the head. How large of a role self-expression plays in the "fun" determines how important it is. VRChat, Minecraft, and GTA Online have been successful because the entire point is to let people be creative with very few guardrails. The old days of Counter-strike were filled with people using shock photos as sprays. Yet when Valve nixed the ability to use custom sprays it didn't impact the popularity of the game at all because that isn't the point of the game.
strus 3y ago
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dale_glass 3y ago
The issue with the "metaverse" is that it's kind of horrifying and no company wants to build it. I say that as somebody building something of the sort! Second Life was the big one, and it was as I understand an accident. So it formed organically and became this weird mess of weird subcultures and porn. Now some companies saw a lot of people logging in and wanted to replicate that, but they missed the very point of it. A sterile imitation of SL is pointless. Grandma doesn't want to put a VR headset or to navigate a 3D space to share cat photos with her friends. It's a lot of effort and nothing to gain. Metaverses seem to mostly cater to unusual, fringe audiences. The furry fandom is a popular one for instance, because if you want to look like an anthro cat, well, in real life that's kind of difficult, and that's something that gives a reason to put up with the challenges. The people who are into this kind of thing tend to be not quite average in one way or another. But this absolutely doesn't mix with the SV model of "let's get the entire planet in here". The general area is in my opinion inherently a niche.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  "Making Snow Crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired."[1] -John Carmack in 1999 (!!) and it looks like programmers are still trying to do it. 1: https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/john-carmack-answers https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/john-carma...
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    Yeah, why wouldn't we? I don't think making virtual worlds is inherently a bad idea. It's just like a niche, like writing a chess engine. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to be interested, it's the kind of software that's very interesting to a small segment of the population, while everyone else fails to get the point. Which is why it's weird for somebody like Facebook to try to do it. I think chess is actually a pretty apt comparison. Imagine Facebook for some reason got this idea that everyone must play their chess game. I think obviously the end result would be bad, because they'd try to spice things up and water down the game to make it more palatable to a general audience. But the end result would be that the general audience quickly gets bored, and the actual purists don't find what they're looking for.
joby_surge 3y ago
Sooo silicon valley is a metaverse where the game is to create productivity apps.
jerf 3y ago
What makes the "metaverse"'s failure particularly amusing to me is that it isn't even a matter of understanding fun. Yeah, SV doesn't 100% get that. It's not really their domain and it's not a surprise they don't get it very well. But the metaverse can be dismissed on grounds that SV and its investor class is supposed to be among the best at, which is, I've never heard a description of the metaverse that makes any business sense as a whole. Yes, the metaverse as a business proposition made sense to Facebook specifically, but I've never heard a sensible, old-school SV-style "win-win" business analysis that gave an explanation for why anybody else would participate in Facebook's metaverse, and, in particular, why it wouldn't fragment into a whole bunch of irreconcilably different metaverses. Then again, my objection is sort of a layer too high in the stack, as the metaverse as a concept never even got close to that being its biggest problem; its biggest problem was that in the end they couldn't even figure out why anyone would use it at all. Lacking fun is a 100% valid criticism but even more deeply it seems to have lacked any utility whatsoever, to anyone. But even more generally, the whole Ready Player One vision is such an IP nightmare, such a compatibility nightmare, such a mismash of conflicting monetary interests that in the real world would never come to the table together. The only way to create such a thing would be to radically rewrite the legal system to enforce massive compatibility requirements, mandatory licensing, mandatory compatibility, and in the end there isn't anyone in the real world who is going to push for that. Company's natural inclinations are to demand more power to control when the only way to the metaverse is to strip them of it. And that's just not going to happen. You're never going to be able to buy a Mickey Mouse avatar and use it in WB's space. You're never going to be able to find a sword in Blizzard's World of Warcraft and use it in Super Mario RPG. (Such a thing is hardly even definable in terms of how that would work!) In the end, the value proposition of "owning" the metaverse is clear, but I've never seen a clear, sensible value proposition for anyone being willing to jump into someone else's owned "metaverse" on their own terms. So the metaverse is a mirage. It turns out that science fiction is not obligated to be something that can be turned into a real thing. (And it doesn't matter. Things will continue to proceed anyhow. The final result won't be "the metaverse" but it'll be its own thing and it'll happen anyhow.)
hasbot 3y ago
It's interesting how often the author mentions "wasting time" as in "The gamers assign meaning to wasted time by viewing it as an end in itself to which other means are directed..." Decades ago baseball was called America's favorite pastime. I think if you talk to a gamer, they wouldn't say they were wasting time but would agree to passing time. As a retiree that often just sits on the patio and watches the wildlife, I take some offense to the idea that I'm wasting time.
- arpyzo 3y ago
  I agree, and I wonder if we all "wasted" more time, if we would be healthier and happier. Perhaps that would make us more productive during the time we weren't "wasting". Paradoxically, it might even be a net gain in aggregate productivity.
vonwoodson 3y ago
This article praises the game community too much. A very good reason to avoid gave development is to avoid the gamers themselves. You really are taking a chance when you dump millions of dollars into a AAA title, just to have it shat-on by everyone, and forever tarnish your brand. Think, Cyberpunk 2077, Stadia, No Man’s Sky; now you may say, “but those all sucked, especially at release!” satisfied Mmm-Hmm Meanwhile, tools like Jira or SAP may be equally hated or “suck”, but, there are not online magazines dedicated to rating, ranking, and criticizing tools like them… or at least not popular ones. And, Jira is going to be in use for years, where even a praised game, say Stray, isn’t nearly as long lived or profitable. Also, it’s no secret that Horizons, Roblox, Fortnite is full of screaming 8-year-olds, CoD is a recruiting tool for Neo-Nazis, and online communities are generally awful. What reasonable adult wants to get into that cesspool? I appreciate the point of the article, but I feel like it focuses too much on Productivity VS Fun… ignoring that video games may not actually be fun. That computers may be for productivity and that fun should happen outside of Big Tech corporate production software.
- rockskon 3y ago
  The hunt for and branding of toxic behavior in online communities has long since felt like the secular version of religious fundamentalists claiming games encourage youth to become Satanists and engage in violent behavior. Many of those who hunt for online toxic behavior present day are not impartial observers and analysts. Similar to their evangelical counterparts from the 80's, 90's, and 00's, they have their own biases rooted in axioms that are not widely held in society.
  - vonwoodson 3y ago
    So, the problem isn’t that people are toxic, it’s that people point it out? Classic.
    - rockskon 3y ago
      The problem is that the hecklers use self-defined criteria of toxicity that isn't representative of broader society's views on what is toxic. Many assertions of toxicity in the modern era have as much relevance as assertions of Satanism did in decades past. The accusers define the criteria they then diagnose. What they diagnose often has little relevance to actual societal ills and oftentimes just serves to further stigmatize social outcasts to no productive end.
trey-jones 3y ago
"The gamers assign meaning to wasted time by viewing it as an end in itself to which other means are directed, and naturally orienting all activities toward the maximization of that waste. The productivity app cohort forces itself into an infinite cycle of waste minimization, in which surplus time must be continuously reinvested for further saving, and the means become the ends themselves. The perfectly ordered Google calendar does not facilitate other goals — it is the goal." This was what stuck out to me. Looking at my own goals, I can see the idea of using productivity tools to make my "productive time" more productive, so that I can have more free time (to "waste" on whatever hobby strikes my fancy). But it definitely is a slippery slope, especially in the hacker culture where everyone seems to be looking for small efficiencies through digitization. Looking back over the last ten years I can see that there were times that I was in this trap: the period of time that I spent trying to use org-mode as a time-tracker/todo list/everything (your life in plain text) comes to mind. Now I just use it for note taking and general writing. Additionally, I enjoy optimizing things. It was fun for a period of time. Eventually I just got exhausted. Indeed, I'm still exhausted, but I am spending less time at work than I used to, and I can feel OK taking a day where I don't have to rush,rush,rush and minimize downtime, but rather just say "This day is for whitewater paddling, and it's going to take all day, and a lot of that will just be driving, and that's fine. It will be fun." Another idea is that you actually don't have to make all the money. Just some of the money is OK. Money becoming the end-goal is almost the same as this "productivity as end-goal" idea. Like the panda, how much excess can you reasonably make use of?
- hgomersall 3y ago
  During philosophical moments, I like to ponder whether the meaning of life is about churning out as much entropy as we can over all time. Obviously, in that frame, environmentalism is important because if we all die off, the total entropy over all time is reduced. Not really directly related to your post, but it got me thinking. It just struck me that efficiency needs a bigger context. Specifically, it makes us better at being inefficient.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > I can see the idea of using productivity tools to make my "productive time" more productive, so that I can have more free time (to "waste" on whatever hobby strikes my fancy). I actually view working to earn a living as "wasting time" and my "recreational" activities as my non-wasted time. Money is a tool I need in order to enable me to live a life I find fulfilling, and I have to work in order to have access to that tool. The meaningful part of life is the part that I am working to enable, it's not the working in and of itself. Work to live, don't live to work.
rchaud 3y ago
I'm glad the article mentions "Play to Earn" games, that's truly the only example needed to show how out of touch the average VC is. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the author is too generous in his interpretation of Ohanian's quotes. > Ohanian makes the mistake of evaluating all activities through the lens of restricted economy, in which every activity serves some future utilitarian activity, ignoring the possibility that the value of games is precisely in their ability to be meaningfully, entertainingly useless. Or maybe Ohanian is just another rich insider parroting the same nonsense as Andreessen and the others who've sunk money into these shams.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Introducing a profit motive is a powerful way to destroy fun.
- bratbag 3y ago
  Play to earn is straight up the initial twitch business model for streamers. And it has been immensely fun for people who watch them.
  - nameless912 3y ago
    Right, because it's the streamer's JOB to be an entertainer. There's no misaligned incentives here, it's just like how people playing pickup basketball aren't "playing to earn" and can still enjoy an NBA game.
    - mwhitfield 3y ago
      Not to mention the "Earning" medium is independent of the "Playing" medium. The conflicting incentives don't come into play (as much), i.e. the game can still actually be fun.
rgavuliak 3y ago
It's interesting that a lot of the posts in this thread focus on the product outcomes of the SV culture, but ignore the point of the article, how the endless quest to squeeze out the 1 % marginal productivity creates this kind of outcomes. I would bet most of HN subscribes to the same philosophy (and I can't help myself at times too).
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
Well, EA is in SV.
JohnFen 3y ago
One of the reasons why I dislike going to SV is exactly this -- the place has a serious lack of the sense of fun.
- indymike 3y ago
  The issue, I think is SV has lost touch with its inner kid. A few years back, before covid, I spend two weeks in SV. I saw one kid. And she was in a stroller that mom was pulling into a dispensary.
- P_I_Staker 3y ago
  How so? Isn't this a city like any other with pubs and shows and town squares, etc.
aaron695 3y ago
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Def_Os 3y ago
This is a well-written article, and I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. But when you compare how much $$$ mediocre but heavily marketed games, and "casino mechanics" games still make, it's hard to blame VCs and executives for it. I'd be very interested in learning how you could encourage people to become more discerning consumers.
irrational 3y ago
> he considered the various ways that cultures have spent it throughout time, including on “games, spectacles, arts, and perverse [non-reproductive] sexual activity,” I guess I'm a pervert. Is considering non-reproductive sexual activity to be perverted a common belief among economists?
- rsynnott 3y ago
  I mean, for economists born in 1897, probably not unusual, yeah. For modern ones, a lot rarer, I would think. Though: > he often used pseudonyms to sign certain writings (such as erotic stories): Troppmann, Lord Auch, Pierre Angélique, Louis Trente and Dianus. He apparently wasn't above a bit of the ol' perversion himself.
TesterVetter 3y ago
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nameless912 3y ago
Literally exactly this is what I keep trying to tell my (mostly former at this point) friends who are super into blockchain gaming. The fact that some silicon valley suit put $x million into a project doesn't mean that it has any viability to gamers, who are the most fun-seeking users in the universe. No one wants to "play to earn", no one wants to "invest in their game", they just want to play and have fun. I think Decentraland is a great microcosm of this problem, as TFA states, but there are a thousand other examples of blockchain gaming where the blockchain integration is the main selling point, not the fun of the actual game. And when you talk to these weirdos, their understanding of gamers and the gaming industry is completely detached from reality. Most of the games in Decentraland are at best idle clickers that would have taken normal game developers a weekend of $SUBSTANCE-induced haze to develop, and yet they're getting millions of dollars of investment from two sources: ghoulish VCs who think that gamers can be reduced to skinner box robots, and crypto speculators who know equally little about gaming but a lot more about the human behavior of other crypto speculators. The whole thing just makes me sad, because gaming is a fascinating industry that I am privileged to be a part of, and I believe there is still a lot of innovation to be had in the space. But VC-driven nonsense like this is not it.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"But its failure is more than the fin de siecle of one of the most rapid and spectacular hype eras in modern business history."
zubairq 3y ago
Yes, I think about this all the time and try to make sure that I produce stuff that is fun, and not optimised for profit.
scrubs 3y ago
I've had the opposite take. What's not fun? East coast nyc/CT financial tech. It's run top down like the GOP. Gotta be on the same talking points. The important aspects of creativity, honest criticism are avoided and tainted as immature or hostile. Silicon valley likes those aspects I think better. I've done a couple of startups in silicon Valley and they were fun!! And money making and full of learning. Plus silicon valley has great toys: cnc machines, lasers, photo plotters, pick-n-place machine lines etc. I had the good luck to spend my senior year of high school in Marin County. One day the chemistry teacher comes in says: field trip to Stanford SLAC! We all got on the yellow bus and headed down the 101. 80s rock was blasting all the way down. When we pulled up to the parking lot and I walked off the bus to Robert Palmer's refrain: "you might as well face it you're addicted to love" was echoing loudly off the bus walls. The slac itself was cool as hell. We walked by the computer lab on the way to the detectors which was running a large job of some kind .. computers and printers were sucking 1000s of pages of 132 column green bar paper out of boxes printing something cool about mother nature. The particle detectors were two stories tall to detect sub atomic particles. For me that's silicon valley at its best. Alas large human organizations eventually take the fun out but maybe we're all one startup or love song away from rejuvenation.

297 points by mariuz 3y ago

I don’t buy that the metaverse is a new invention. My brothers and I lived in one many years ago, it was called World of Warcraft around the Burning Crusade era and it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. This was before Blizzard enabled cross server play and destroyed the socialization aspect of the game. Then you lived on one server and were forced to socialize with the same players every day and make a whole world and society that existed on that one server. You had cities and factions and your guild doing raids and recruiting new players and it was another life. It was wonderful and I’m sure it will happen again someday from some other company and in some other format. I’m always amazed to look at the servers and imagine all the lives and stories that came from that one piece of hardware. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/97tudn/one_of_world_of_warcrafts_original_blade_servers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/97tudn/one_of_world...

hardware2win 3y ago
Such experience still exists in Tibia, 1997 MMORPG.
glimshe 3y ago
Reminds me a lot of BBSs. It's hard to develop lasting and deep relationships with random people on the Internet. Just as old WoW, many BBSs had a small group of people who hung out virtually together and you got to know them. It's the closest you can get to lifelong high school and college friendships after leaving school.
- bladegash 3y ago
  Funny enough, BBSs were the way many of the players on WoW servers pre-cross realm would communicate/flame each other outside the actual game. When I started online gaming with an old multiplayer tank game called Tanarus, we used Usenet. With EverQuest we used EZBoard, then with WoW it was many times the server’s board on the official WoW forums. While I’m sure there’s a bit of nostalgia shading the memories, I made a lot of friends and great memories!
  - glimshe 3y ago
    I think we lost something with demise of BBSs that the Internet was never able to replace. It's one of those things where one technology is better in almost every way, but something gets permanently lost in the transition. One analogy would be the upgrade from vinyl to CD/Digital music.
  - notpachet 3y ago
    Minor nitpick: while Usenet closely resembled the older BBS's, it wasn't an actual BBS per se. Ditto the other forum sites.
    - bladegash 3y ago
      I guess I was more including Usenet as a part of the progression, not necessarily categorizing as a BBS. Fair enough on the notice two, but I think people (or at least I) more generically use “BBS” to describe message boards/forums. Anyways, appreciate the correction regardless, as after looking the actual definition, I was definitely wrong =)!
blockhead9988 3y ago
I had a similar experience on a Minecraft server circa 2011-2015. Most fun I've ever had online, it was magical.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  I mean, you are essentially playing small village in those games. I believe there is something fundamentally perverse about neighbourhood "attrition" for the human mind. Like, you want to know people and have some sameness in your neighborhood. Nowadays people move so much. Especially in big cities.
adhesive_wombat 3y ago
The Metaverse concept has basically existed fully-formed, and even with that exact name, since at least Snow Crash (1992). The wider idea was clearly floating around in the zeitgeist as the Red Dwarf episode where they get stuck in a game called Better Than Life aired in March that year, a few months before Snow Crash was published.
- dash2 3y ago
  Or Neuromancer. (Any advance on Neuromancer?)
  - AndrewDucker 3y ago
    I think that Neuromancer was about as early as it went, fiction-wise. But VR was about from the 70s (NASA's JPL had one), and the metaverse is basically VR + chatroom. Popularisation certainly happened by the early 80s, which is presumably where Neuromancer got it from.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Burning Chrome precedes Neuromancer by two years and first used "cyberspace" in the sense of a VR-like network.
  - twic 3y ago
    True Names, 1981. Which, IMHO, is a far better story than Neuromancer, but also much less stylish, and hence less influential.
- cb321 3y ago
  And don't forget Lawnmower Man in March 1992 [1] (Snow Crash was June 1992). I think the "VR headsets" of the day were popular for a few years before both, driving said particular zeitgeist. As mentioned in a sibling, William Gibson { and probably Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem } presaged all this stuff decade(s) earlier. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)
Fluorescence 3y ago
I enjoyed Jumpgate back in the day - a space sim MMORPG. There was quite a funny effect that at a certain level, you tended not to leave the space stations at all. The world was dangerous and losing your ship was a pain in the butt so seasoned players rarely launched and instead socialised and played each other in the training simulation that was inside the game. I felt the hint of a general principle: if you create a realistic world with risks, chores, costs etc. it has no value. It's not what people seek. People will need to create games within the virtual world to find leisure. The virtual world becomes an irrelevant shell of indirection you need to escape just as you want to escape the real world.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Isn't Eve Online a counterexample to this? From anyone I hear talking about it, it's the reality of it all that makes it compelling.
  - rini17 3y ago
    How it is a counterexample? Doing anything fun in eve requires a group that talks through headsets. That's exactly the leisurely socialization aspect of it. I am hard of hearing and left eve because I can't do that. Playing torn.com[1] instead. That unlike jumpgate you often leave space station (or safe space) is just a detail cuz death/loss of a ship isn't a big issue. [1]https://www.torn.com/2658150 https://www.torn.com/2658150
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  - verve_rat 3y ago
    You could argue that Eve's attraction is the lack of regulation, the lack of protection from scams, the lack of a police force. All things you get in the real world, more or less. Eve has just the right mix of reality and unreality to hook its audience.
PennRobotics 3y ago
I know multiple people who have long-lasting IRL relationships because of Asheron's Call, preceding WoW by a few years. Same stuff... Get-togethers, group quests, level-up ceremonies, taking care of each other's characters and stuff (until houses came along)
rsynnott 3y ago
Yeah; the innovative bit in the recent 'metaverse' bubble was getting VCs to shovel money in, not the actual concept.
Sophira 3y ago
It absolutely isn't a new invention. The only thing new that everybody completely latched onto was that Facebook changed its name to Meta. People thought that meant the beginning of something new, and Meta themselves certainly didn't want to disprove that notion.

makeitdouble 3y ago

The metaverse part as a whole feels completely unneeded and misguided (spending so much time on declaring it dead, with 0 mention of VRChat or RecRooms is odd), but the dive on how much SV loves productivity apps was interesting. This reminds me of Hello Internet (rest in hiatus) with the more US minded CGP Grey spending so much time on productivity tricks, to the point he's now part of a company making productivity goods. And in contrast Brady getting bored to death by the productivity gurus, just delivering project after project without the weird and random systems, while enjoying resort beaches, also building legos, also going to parties etc. and just seemingly enjoying life so much more.

m463 3y ago
because of who is trying to start it, I can't think of any product that would be less successful except maybe "meta connected underwear"™. The more someone wants to own it, to control it, surveil, the less people will buy in.
- mcny 3y ago
  > The more someone wants to own it, to control it, surveil, the less people will buy in. I remember when I first got into Android, the open handset alliance was such a big thing. The goal, at least what I thought was the goal, was to bring together all the manufacturers, software developers, telco operators, and users on a single platform so they could avoid duplicating effort. I think you’re right. The platform succeeded because google refused to suck up too much of the oxygen in the room in the project’s infancy. Funny enough though as a user it was maddening to see basic apps that could get bug fixes and updates because they were part of aosp and couldn’t update from android market. I actually wanted those to be on an App Store because manufacturers didn’t have regular updates
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  As "metaverse" was not capitalized I assumed the generic term. Otherwise I don't think Horizon getting sunset would mean Meta giving up, they've shown willingness to go down that road as far as they need to. That could include buying up any service that gets ahead in the Occulus ecosystem, though I'm definitely not thrilled by that perspective.

mojo74 3y ago

The mention of Decentraland in this article reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q The comment one viewer seems to sum it up: They made a virtual world so boring that you can't even find weird perverts in it.

rtkwe 3y ago
There's already a place for weird pervs and that's vr chat where there's no corporate overlords desperately trying to sanitize any weirdness out of their product.
rsynnott 3y ago
Whomsoever wins the furries will win the metaverse. (But also, the furries are about the only people who _want_ a metaverse, as far as I can see. I'm fairly certain this is why Second Life still clings on stubbornly.)
- postsantum 3y ago
  Furries are the canaries of metaverses. As long as they are present, you can be sure corporates and HR haven't touched this world with their fingers of death
- noirscape 3y ago
  To be fair, furries are kinda the baseline of what you want to distinguish "the metaverse" from the real world. I can have meetings from home just as easily in the real world with a webcam and a Zoom call. The metaverse doesn't enhance that if all I'm doing is placing a 3D model that looks like me on a map and look at other 3D models of other people. (Plus, arguably strapping a VR brick to your face probably means it's worse than that Zoom call for physical health reasons.) Otoh the premise of "you can use a furry avatar to represent yourself" isn't one that appeals to me, but it does show that the people making it are thinking of "how can we make this different from the real world" instead of the lazy "let's move this real world thing to digital and make it as boring as reality can be".

thecupisblue 3y ago

First, the metaverse - Meta's "vision" is a bleak, dystopian colored world without much fun except a few mini-games. It's core idea was/is implemented in way better ways - Dreams was a great step, Fortnite & Roblox are currently trying to do the same thing, and hell, even old GTA San Andreas and Garry's mod were more of a metaverse than Horizon Worlds ever came to be. On the concept of fun - of course it doesn't understand it. The tech scene has move from the fun, hacker ways into the dark pit of standardisation, processes, bureaucracy and average. Creativity gets sapped out of it to conform to a kafkaesque mind of your average stakeholder. Designer's and developer's opinions get overridden by glorified paper pushers. You can see it happen in every startup, and the valley is the same - to conform to the largest possible market, as it grows, everything has to be averaged out and greyed out - making stuff colorful might exclude a market and we don't want that. Especially if the market is a trillion dollar enterprise-ridden bureaucratic hellhole, since those hellholes are where the easy money is.

imgabe 3y ago
Second Life is probably the most successful metaverse to date. Probably in large part because people could do things like create flocks of flying dicks.
- willis936 3y ago
  I think the best thing Facebook has done for the world has been to not take over Second Life. It's a move that makes perfect business sense but it would destroy an interesting piece of culture.
  - mcny 3y ago
    It might make sense depending on how they structure it? For example, from what I understand when Walmart e-commerce bought jet, they actually gave meaningful autonomy to the acquired jet team. I watched a talk by a guy who seemed genuinely enthusiastic about reading existing code and rewriting it for scalability. I guess my point is if Facebook could give second life money and not exert control / strangle second life people it might work but knowing facebook, that’s not possible.

atemerev 3y ago

It is telling that all comments here are focused on the merits or faults of metaverse, instead of focusing on the actual message: Silicon Valley does not understand the concept of fun, games, and leisure time. It can be seen everywhere.

indymike 3y ago
Not really, I can't think of a better product to highlight everything that is no fun about Silicon Valley than the Metaverse.

aogaili 3y ago

I think they underestimated the attachment of people to their bodies not misunderstood fun. Most of people in Silicon Valley are in their heads. The rest of the people are busy living life with their bodiesnin real life. Instagram works because people can market their real faces and bodies, which is not the case for the metaverse.

sethammons 3y ago

TL:DR: SV likes and loves "productivity" and games are kind of the opposite. Good for calendar or pomodoro apps that others will try to leverage to be more productive, not good for fun. The best games don't fit the SV model.

randomdata 3y ago
The best game is Silicon Valley itself. SV loves "productivity" like Mario loves gold coins – it's what is needed to further your score in the game.

jlpcsl 3y ago

I'm much more concerned because they don't understand the concepts of privacy, ethics, freedom, openness...

seydor 3y ago

Old-time TV used to have ads for alcohol, cigarettes. Late-night shows, sometimes risky in europe (i.e. tits) had ads, lots of them. Google + Facebook, like the puritanest of the puritan americans have made that a no-go. It's not clear who decided it first, but basically anything that the local church might frown upon has become unmonetizable and unadvertisable. Of course you won't have fun things when you do that. The article is not correct about metaverse. There 's still games like second-life and others (thousands of users roam in open and distributed worlds in opensimulator - see https://opensimworld.com https://opensimworld.com) . Facebook's leg-less (convenient alias for genital-less) avatars are of course not fun. When you kill all that's fun about virtual worlds (the ability to transcend this world and let imagination be truly free) then what do you expect people to do? simulate the misery of the office in 3d form? I seriously would like to hear what they expected to have

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jaimebuelta 3y ago

Anyone else reminding the Men in Grey from Momo while reading the article? Only this time in hoodies…

andreygrehov 3y ago

Let’s be honest, when it comes to fun and entertainment, Silicon Valley is the most boring place on Earth.

eddtries 3y ago
Yeah... lived in the Bay Area, it's almost like a giant suburb with some large industrial parks that just so happen to be tech companies. It's a bit better if you're in San Jose or San Francisco, but good lord living in Palo Alto/Mountain View is boring. This video is literally 100% correct https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7KSTZttWXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7KSTZttWXM, especially about downtown life
- theoldlove 3y ago
  Love the video but it is 100% about life on the Peninsula. Dude clearly never made it to Oakland or he wouldn’t be talking about how clean the Bay Area is.

yankaf 3y ago

Well people prefer to live in natural world I guess.

littlelady 3y ago

I mean... yeah. Remember when microdosing on LSD to boost productivity became a thing in SV? I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley suffer from the "grind" mentality, which doesn't allow for fun. It should be optimized fun, like watching your films at 2.5 speed! [1]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lsd-microdosing-drugs-silicon-valley https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lsd-microdosing-drugs-silico...

fidotron 3y ago

I've worked at both and between both the games industry and SV. Given the presence of Roblox, EA and the Playstation unit in SV it is a bit odd to consider them such outsiders, but in a real sense they are. Broadly though, the problem is SV in a business culture sense conflates fun with role playing, expressing yourself, generating and consuming UGC, and feeding the beast. Play in the sense of discovery without any external side effects confuses it. If you are in games you see more and more of this tendency infesting western games production too, and it's largely down to those versions of fun being far easier to monetize. The blind spot of this article is a huge amount of the "productivity" users are larping as PMs and using Notion etc. in a manner completely consistent with their sense of play, while acting seriously about it in order to maintain their ludic circle. To say they are not gamers is false; their entire lifestyle is the game. The huge reason the games industry hasn't been completely overwhelmed by SV types is it contains a critical mass of idealists that genuinely care about the player and player experiences, even in the most cynical companies.

mablopoule 3y ago
UGC ?
- fidotron 3y ago
  User generated content
automatic6131 3y ago
That's... a really interesting thought. These mid-brained people that indulge in the endless productivity treadmill (the most appropriate word for it - working hard to end up where you started) are... actually role playing someone productive. I love this idea.
- pjc50 3y ago
  This is the "bullshit jobs" thesis. It's very common in rat races. You can find recognizable forms of it in the ancient history of Imperial China or Rome. Job #1 is producing the appearance of usefulness, importance and status. Job #2 is doing enough actually useful things that the appearance and system is maintained.

jgalt212 3y ago

> Reddit cofounder, venture capitalist and play-to-earn evangelist Alexis Ohanian predicted that by 2027, “ninety percent of people will not play a game unless they are being valued properly for that time,” a position he restated in May of this year. I've yet to hear something thoughtful or smart come from Ohanian's mouth.

Sophira 3y ago
I hate to say it, but I actually think that part of the statement is correct - just not in the way he wants people to imagine it. To be clear, I'm not saying that people want to be paid to play games. That's an incredibly easily disproven notion. I'm talking about feeling like they're valued by a game. Games respecting the players' time in ways that don't equate to "here's stuff for playing our game" but are more "here's why you'll enjoy this game and why it's not crap"? Yeah, I can see that being a major factor in people playing them. Did Ohanian mean that? Obviously not, and I hate that I have to deliberately misinterpret him in order to get something out of this. But the core idea as stated isn't wrong.
Eumenes 3y ago
I disagree. He named his VC firm, Das Kapital, thats very cute! http://daskapitalcapital.com/ http://daskapitalcapital.com/
dotnet00 3y ago
To an extent that's right, although maybe not in the way it was intended. I've played and developed a hatred for games which are blatantly disrespectful of my time. This isn't about some weird productivity thing, but more of adding large numbers of time-based barriers which give no benefits but have to be gotten through to access the "fun", i.e. grinding without a sufficient reward. Games like that make me feel like they aren't valuing my time properly in the sense that it feels like they're taking their audience for granted and assuming that they'll always stick around regardless of what they do to the game.
btbuildem 3y ago
His statement really betrays the single-mindedness and inhumanity of wealth hoarders. Everything seen through the lens of profit-making, money as the only valid measure of value. What a desolate mindscape that must be.

Tade0 3y ago

I think the take out here is that different people find different things fun and SV has a very specific notion of that, which is incompatible with most of the world. I see it in my circle of long-time friends, where one of them is left out of our gaming sessions because he's busy all the time - typically with his productivity app side project no less. He did some amazing things in his youth, but I can't help but think it took a toll on him. It's contagious and for a while I felt pressured to adopt the same lifestyle, but at one point I noticed that it's a way to fast track oneself to depression, since the productivity demon is never really satisfied.

tivert 3y ago
> I think the take out here is that different people find different things fun and SV has a very specific notion of that, which is incompatible with most of the world. I think it's good to always keep in mind that software engineers don't understand a great many things, and perhaps SV software engineers understand even less. That attitude at least partially counters that exceedingly biased bullshit that reckons software engineers are smarter and better than everyone else and will "fix" everything. They fix very little, it's just that some of them have figured out how to force their bullshit on everyone else.
hn8305823 3y ago
SV's idea of fun is purely transactional - do this to get that. The genius of GTA III was the open sandbox. You weren't required to progress in the story, you could do WTF you wanted, even (and most importantly) nothing!

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Silicon valley has a history of producing things that initially don't have a lot of restrictions that get a lot of traction that then turn all corporate and sterile as soon as big money gets involved. Lack of fun is one reason. User generated content is risky. It needs moderation. Somebody might express themselves in ways that are inappropriate for the widest possible meaning of that word. And that might lead to legal consequences. Which adds cost. Fun and edgy things are typically bordering on inappropriate; or flat out inappropriate if you have no sense of humor. The difference is not relevant. If somebody might get offended, it's risky. Which makes the lawyers nervous. Another reason is the obsession with building walled gardens and claiming full ownership of everything inside those walls. It leads to locked down experiences where creativity is basically not welcome unless sanctioned from the top down. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. used to have APIs and an ecosystem of people building stuff on top of that. As they grew, all of that went away. Facebook is a good example as something that started out to enable some wildly inappropriate and immature behavior. Mark Zuckerberg actually started out building a platform for rating girls called facemash. Controversial, even at the time and it got him in trouble. Facebook is what he did next.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
The first point isn’t an argument for fun but for individualism, almost to an extremist extent. If you want to publish your thoughts for others to see you’re going to have to accept the fact that some people are just going to take it differently because it human experiences are diverse, and you must be mature enough to be accountable for what you say. It’s people’s problem that they see conflict with others as an inherent negative when the disagreement with others is what itself brews creativity, because it challenges your point of view. People criticize the media for being “biased” but then crave echo chambers of their own.
- pjc50 3y ago
  On Twitter it's not merely that you get a "different" interpretation, you have to deal with the most hostile interpretation possible of both your words and what you "didn't say". A little bit of disagreement is interesting; constant spurious repetitive negativity is exhausting and un-fun. Which is why people are leaving Twitter.

deleted 3y ago

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layer8 3y ago

The way desktop and other UIs are getting worse, I sometimes think SV also doesn't understand productivity. A lot of the productivity hype is just productivity theater, a mere illusion of productiveness.

shmeeed 3y ago
Seen in this context, it all makes a lot of sense. This kind of productivity seems like a cult to me. Maybe those who don't understand recreation are doomed to also not understand why their productivity is not very efficient.
rockskon 3y ago
I always assumed the goal wasn't to minimize the time you spend in a UI but to find the maximum amount of time users will tolerate using a UI. At least for UIs that feature ads that is. The longer you're on the ad-spewing platform the more ads you're shown etc etc. Partly explains why Google search results are unnecessarily bad these days.

pjc50 3y ago

They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs. -- G.K. Chesterton

glimshe 3y ago

It was not always like that. Atari was a Silicon Valley company, they practically invented the concept of fun workplace.

JohnFen 3y ago
True, but that was a very different SV. It bears no resemblance to SV now.
- datpiff 3y ago
  I've read Atari was very different under Tramiel as well.

jboggan 3y ago

Silicon Valley doesn't understand The Story of the Eye. Never thought I'd be reading Bataille quotes on HN before I had my coffee.

noirscape 3y ago

The difference between say, VRChat (but also non-VR equivalents like second life, MUDs and certain MMOs) and whatever the Silicon Valley metaverse thing was very much visible in how they envisioned it. Silicon Valleys approach was literally "put a bunch of 3D models that are meant to look like you + things you know from the real world and then transport as many real world bureaucracies and ideas as possible into it" (and throw making money on top because that's clearly what people want to do more than anything else[0]). It was doomed from the outset because it fundamentally restricted user creativity and expression as much as possible to try and mimic the real world. VRChat from what I can tell instead stapled a basic interface together for making a "metaverse" (map, player objects and basic scripting) and then set players loose on the field with all the creation tools to customize it (iirc the only hardcap in VRChat is the polygon count on any individual model). The result is that VRChat is a. incomprehensible to outsiders and b. undeniably creative. Most other examples don't offer the freedom VRChat does (closest to VRC is probably something like Garrys Mod? Second Life still tries to go for a realistic aesthetic, although it allows user creations), but if you place VRChat as one extreme and Facebooks anemic "metaverse" at the other, you'll find that most succesful metaverses lean closer to the VRChat degree of freedom than they do to Facebooks version of where creativity doesn't exist beyond what Facebook pre-approved of (and what a users wallet could afford, nothing for free, of course). Or if you just want the crass answer: VRChat let weirdos be weird and express themselves however weird they wanted to be. Silicon Valley saw that weirdness as a problem to be solved away and tried to make everyone fit an "acceptable", pre-approved mold. The reality is that most people do not like being made to fit in existing molds, even if what they do fit into isn't too different from those molds in the first place. [0]: I hope the sarcasm is obvious.

internet101010 3y ago
I think you really hit the nail on the head. How large of a role self-expression plays in the "fun" determines how important it is. VRChat, Minecraft, and GTA Online have been successful because the entire point is to let people be creative with very few guardrails. The old days of Counter-strike were filled with people using shock photos as sprays. Yet when Valve nixed the ability to use custom sprays it didn't impact the popularity of the game at all because that isn't the point of the game.

strus 3y ago

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dale_glass 3y ago

The issue with the "metaverse" is that it's kind of horrifying and no company wants to build it. I say that as somebody building something of the sort! Second Life was the big one, and it was as I understand an accident. So it formed organically and became this weird mess of weird subcultures and porn. Now some companies saw a lot of people logging in and wanted to replicate that, but they missed the very point of it. A sterile imitation of SL is pointless. Grandma doesn't want to put a VR headset or to navigate a 3D space to share cat photos with her friends. It's a lot of effort and nothing to gain. Metaverses seem to mostly cater to unusual, fringe audiences. The furry fandom is a popular one for instance, because if you want to look like an anthro cat, well, in real life that's kind of difficult, and that's something that gives a reason to put up with the challenges. The people who are into this kind of thing tend to be not quite average in one way or another. But this absolutely doesn't mix with the SV model of "let's get the entire planet in here". The general area is in my opinion inherently a niche.

ryandrake 3y ago
"Making Snow Crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired."[1] -John Carmack in 1999 (!!) and it looks like programmers are still trying to do it. 1: https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/john-carmack-answers https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/john-carma...
- dale_glass 3y ago
  Yeah, why wouldn't we? I don't think making virtual worlds is inherently a bad idea. It's just like a niche, like writing a chess engine. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to be interested, it's the kind of software that's very interesting to a small segment of the population, while everyone else fails to get the point. Which is why it's weird for somebody like Facebook to try to do it. I think chess is actually a pretty apt comparison. Imagine Facebook for some reason got this idea that everyone must play their chess game. I think obviously the end result would be bad, because they'd try to spice things up and water down the game to make it more palatable to a general audience. But the end result would be that the general audience quickly gets bored, and the actual purists don't find what they're looking for.

joby_surge 3y ago

Sooo silicon valley is a metaverse where the game is to create productivity apps.

jerf 3y ago

What makes the "metaverse"'s failure particularly amusing to me is that it isn't even a matter of understanding fun. Yeah, SV doesn't 100% get that. It's not really their domain and it's not a surprise they don't get it very well. But the metaverse can be dismissed on grounds that SV and its investor class is supposed to be among the best at, which is, I've never heard a description of the metaverse that makes any business sense as a whole. Yes, the metaverse as a business proposition made sense to Facebook specifically, but I've never heard a sensible, old-school SV-style "win-win" business analysis that gave an explanation for why anybody else would participate in Facebook's metaverse, and, in particular, why it wouldn't fragment into a whole bunch of irreconcilably different metaverses. Then again, my objection is sort of a layer too high in the stack, as the metaverse as a concept never even got close to that being its biggest problem; its biggest problem was that in the end they couldn't even figure out why anyone would use it at all. Lacking fun is a 100% valid criticism but even more deeply it seems to have lacked any utility whatsoever, to anyone. But even more generally, the whole Ready Player One vision is such an IP nightmare, such a compatibility nightmare, such a mismash of conflicting monetary interests that in the real world would never come to the table together. The only way to create such a thing would be to radically rewrite the legal system to enforce massive compatibility requirements, mandatory licensing, mandatory compatibility, and in the end there isn't anyone in the real world who is going to push for that. Company's natural inclinations are to demand more power to control when the only way to the metaverse is to strip them of it. And that's just not going to happen. You're never going to be able to buy a Mickey Mouse avatar and use it in WB's space. You're never going to be able to find a sword in Blizzard's World of Warcraft and use it in Super Mario RPG. (Such a thing is hardly even definable in terms of how that would work!) In the end, the value proposition of "owning" the metaverse is clear, but I've never seen a clear, sensible value proposition for anyone being willing to jump into someone else's owned "metaverse" on their own terms. So the metaverse is a mirage. It turns out that science fiction is not obligated to be something that can be turned into a real thing. (And it doesn't matter. Things will continue to proceed anyhow. The final result won't be "the metaverse" but it'll be its own thing and it'll happen anyhow.)

hasbot 3y ago

It's interesting how often the author mentions "wasting time" as in "The gamers assign meaning to wasted time by viewing it as an end in itself to which other means are directed..." Decades ago baseball was called America's favorite pastime. I think if you talk to a gamer, they wouldn't say they were wasting time but would agree to passing time. As a retiree that often just sits on the patio and watches the wildlife, I take some offense to the idea that I'm wasting time.

arpyzo 3y ago
I agree, and I wonder if we all "wasted" more time, if we would be healthier and happier. Perhaps that would make us more productive during the time we weren't "wasting". Paradoxically, it might even be a net gain in aggregate productivity.

vonwoodson 3y ago

This article praises the game community too much. A very good reason to avoid gave development is to avoid the gamers themselves. You really are taking a chance when you dump millions of dollars into a AAA title, just to have it shat-on by everyone, and forever tarnish your brand. Think, Cyberpunk 2077, Stadia, No Man’s Sky; now you may say, “but those all sucked, especially at release!” satisfied Mmm-Hmm Meanwhile, tools like Jira or SAP may be equally hated or “suck”, but, there are not online magazines dedicated to rating, ranking, and criticizing tools like them… or at least not popular ones. And, Jira is going to be in use for years, where even a praised game, say Stray, isn’t nearly as long lived or profitable. Also, it’s no secret that Horizons, Roblox, Fortnite is full of screaming 8-year-olds, CoD is a recruiting tool for Neo-Nazis, and online communities are generally awful. What reasonable adult wants to get into that cesspool? I appreciate the point of the article, but I feel like it focuses too much on Productivity VS Fun… ignoring that video games may not actually be fun. That computers may be for productivity and that fun should happen outside of Big Tech corporate production software.

rockskon 3y ago
The hunt for and branding of toxic behavior in online communities has long since felt like the secular version of religious fundamentalists claiming games encourage youth to become Satanists and engage in violent behavior. Many of those who hunt for online toxic behavior present day are not impartial observers and analysts. Similar to their evangelical counterparts from the 80's, 90's, and 00's, they have their own biases rooted in axioms that are not widely held in society.
- vonwoodson 3y ago
  So, the problem isn’t that people are toxic, it’s that people point it out? Classic.
  - rockskon 3y ago
    The problem is that the hecklers use self-defined criteria of toxicity that isn't representative of broader society's views on what is toxic. Many assertions of toxicity in the modern era have as much relevance as assertions of Satanism did in decades past. The accusers define the criteria they then diagnose. What they diagnose often has little relevance to actual societal ills and oftentimes just serves to further stigmatize social outcasts to no productive end.

trey-jones 3y ago

"The gamers assign meaning to wasted time by viewing it as an end in itself to which other means are directed, and naturally orienting all activities toward the maximization of that waste. The productivity app cohort forces itself into an infinite cycle of waste minimization, in which surplus time must be continuously reinvested for further saving, and the means become the ends themselves. The perfectly ordered Google calendar does not facilitate other goals — it is the goal." This was what stuck out to me. Looking at my own goals, I can see the idea of using productivity tools to make my "productive time" more productive, so that I can have more free time (to "waste" on whatever hobby strikes my fancy). But it definitely is a slippery slope, especially in the hacker culture where everyone seems to be looking for small efficiencies through digitization. Looking back over the last ten years I can see that there were times that I was in this trap: the period of time that I spent trying to use org-mode as a time-tracker/todo list/everything (your life in plain text) comes to mind. Now I just use it for note taking and general writing. Additionally, I enjoy optimizing things. It was fun for a period of time. Eventually I just got exhausted. Indeed, I'm still exhausted, but I am spending less time at work than I used to, and I can feel OK taking a day where I don't have to rush,rush,rush and minimize downtime, but rather just say "This day is for whitewater paddling, and it's going to take all day, and a lot of that will just be driving, and that's fine. It will be fun." Another idea is that you actually don't have to make all the money. Just some of the money is OK. Money becoming the end-goal is almost the same as this "productivity as end-goal" idea. Like the panda, how much excess can you reasonably make use of?

hgomersall 3y ago
During philosophical moments, I like to ponder whether the meaning of life is about churning out as much entropy as we can over all time. Obviously, in that frame, environmentalism is important because if we all die off, the total entropy over all time is reduced. Not really directly related to your post, but it got me thinking. It just struck me that efficiency needs a bigger context. Specifically, it makes us better at being inefficient.
JohnFen 3y ago
> I can see the idea of using productivity tools to make my "productive time" more productive, so that I can have more free time (to "waste" on whatever hobby strikes my fancy). I actually view working to earn a living as "wasting time" and my "recreational" activities as my non-wasted time. Money is a tool I need in order to enable me to live a life I find fulfilling, and I have to work in order to have access to that tool. The meaningful part of life is the part that I am working to enable, it's not the working in and of itself. Work to live, don't live to work.

rchaud 3y ago

I'm glad the article mentions "Play to Earn" games, that's truly the only example needed to show how out of touch the average VC is. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the author is too generous in his interpretation of Ohanian's quotes. > Ohanian makes the mistake of evaluating all activities through the lens of restricted economy, in which every activity serves some future utilitarian activity, ignoring the possibility that the value of games is precisely in their ability to be meaningfully, entertainingly useless. Or maybe Ohanian is just another rich insider parroting the same nonsense as Andreessen and the others who've sunk money into these shams.

JohnFen 3y ago
Introducing a profit motive is a powerful way to destroy fun.
bratbag 3y ago
Play to earn is straight up the initial twitch business model for streamers. And it has been immensely fun for people who watch them.
- nameless912 3y ago
  Right, because it's the streamer's JOB to be an entertainer. There's no misaligned incentives here, it's just like how people playing pickup basketball aren't "playing to earn" and can still enjoy an NBA game.
  - mwhitfield 3y ago
    Not to mention the "Earning" medium is independent of the "Playing" medium. The conflicting incentives don't come into play (as much), i.e. the game can still actually be fun.

rgavuliak 3y ago

It's interesting that a lot of the posts in this thread focus on the product outcomes of the SV culture, but ignore the point of the article, how the endless quest to squeeze out the 1 % marginal productivity creates this kind of outcomes. I would bet most of HN subscribes to the same philosophy (and I can't help myself at times too).

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

Well, EA is in SV.

JohnFen 3y ago

One of the reasons why I dislike going to SV is exactly this -- the place has a serious lack of the sense of fun.

indymike 3y ago
The issue, I think is SV has lost touch with its inner kid. A few years back, before covid, I spend two weeks in SV. I saw one kid. And she was in a stroller that mom was pulling into a dispensary.
P_I_Staker 3y ago
How so? Isn't this a city like any other with pubs and shows and town squares, etc.

aaron695 3y ago

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Def_Os 3y ago

This is a well-written article, and I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. But when you compare how much $$$ mediocre but heavily marketed games, and "casino mechanics" games still make, it's hard to blame VCs and executives for it. I'd be very interested in learning how you could encourage people to become more discerning consumers.

irrational 3y ago

> he considered the various ways that cultures have spent it throughout time, including on “games, spectacles, arts, and perverse [non-reproductive] sexual activity,” I guess I'm a pervert. Is considering non-reproductive sexual activity to be perverted a common belief among economists?

rsynnott 3y ago
I mean, for economists born in 1897, probably not unusual, yeah. For modern ones, a lot rarer, I would think. Though: > he often used pseudonyms to sign certain writings (such as erotic stories): Troppmann, Lord Auch, Pierre Angélique, Louis Trente and Dianus. He apparently wasn't above a bit of the ol' perversion himself.

TesterVetter 3y ago

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nameless912 3y ago

Literally exactly this is what I keep trying to tell my (mostly former at this point) friends who are super into blockchain gaming. The fact that some silicon valley suit put $x million into a project doesn't mean that it has any viability to gamers, who are the most fun-seeking users in the universe. No one wants to "play to earn", no one wants to "invest in their game", they just want to play and have fun. I think Decentraland is a great microcosm of this problem, as TFA states, but there are a thousand other examples of blockchain gaming where the blockchain integration is the main selling point, not the fun of the actual game. And when you talk to these weirdos, their understanding of gamers and the gaming industry is completely detached from reality. Most of the games in Decentraland are at best idle clickers that would have taken normal game developers a weekend of $SUBSTANCE-induced haze to develop, and yet they're getting millions of dollars of investment from two sources: ghoulish VCs who think that gamers can be reduced to skinner box robots, and crypto speculators who know equally little about gaming but a lot more about the human behavior of other crypto speculators. The whole thing just makes me sad, because gaming is a fascinating industry that I am privileged to be a part of, and I believe there is still a lot of innovation to be had in the space. But VC-driven nonsense like this is not it.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"But its failure is more than the fin de siecle of one of the most rapid and spectacular hype eras in modern business history."

zubairq 3y ago

Yes, I think about this all the time and try to make sure that I produce stuff that is fun, and not optimised for profit.

scrubs 3y ago

I've had the opposite take. What's not fun? East coast nyc/CT financial tech. It's run top down like the GOP. Gotta be on the same talking points. The important aspects of creativity, honest criticism are avoided and tainted as immature or hostile. Silicon valley likes those aspects I think better. I've done a couple of startups in silicon Valley and they were fun!! And money making and full of learning. Plus silicon valley has great toys: cnc machines, lasers, photo plotters, pick-n-place machine lines etc. I had the good luck to spend my senior year of high school in Marin County. One day the chemistry teacher comes in says: field trip to Stanford SLAC! We all got on the yellow bus and headed down the 101. 80s rock was blasting all the way down. When we pulled up to the parking lot and I walked off the bus to Robert Palmer's refrain: "you might as well face it you're addicted to love" was echoing loudly off the bus walls. The slac itself was cool as hell. We walked by the computer lab on the way to the detectors which was running a large job of some kind .. computers and printers were sucking 1000s of pages of 132 column green bar paper out of boxes printing something cool about mother nature. The particle detectors were two stories tall to detect sub atomic particles. For me that's silicon valley at its best. Alas large human organizations eventually take the fun out but maybe we're all one startup or love song away from rejuvenation.