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Capitalism and Cozy Games

58 points by earthboundkid 3y ago

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AlbertCory 3y ago
> Cozy games are therefore a centrist1 critique of capitalism. They present a world with the prosperity, but without the cruelty. More importantly though, by virtue of the fact that people actually play them in large numbers, they demonstrate that the cruelty is actually unnecessary. No, they demonstrate that games are not real life. And the people who play Animal Crossings are just a subset of real people.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Indeed. In animal crossing, the player doesn't feel the characters cold, hunger, head aches, sleep deprivation or flue. The player doesn't really experience the dreadful responsibility for a kid not to die, the requirement to fill forms, queue with irritated people, be stuck in traffic or the sub every day, etc. And above that, the interactions are in this context. Nobody tries to hit on your girlfriend who you built your life with, no divorce can take half of your house, no firing send you back to your country because your visa depend on it. You don't have an asshole boss, an entitled customer, an asshole clerk or a depressed librarian. Prosperity is easier when things are predictable, you have low risk and people are homogeneous. E.G: it's easier to live as a Swiss in your own country than as Tunisian refugee in china.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    You don’t get dirty when you plant a tree in Animal Crossing and have to do a bunch of extra laundry. No grit under your nails that sticks around for a couple days and sometimes ends up in your food. You don’t pull a muscle and spend a whole week miserable. You don’t get blisters. You don’t want to go plant a tree but then you can’t for real-life days on end because the weather is bad. You don’t get mosquito bites, or worry about ticks maybe giving you a debilitating illness. You don’t have to go find the shovels, mulch, scrap cardboard, whatever. Maybe craft a shovel, but that may take less time than walking to the garage. It’s a minute or less to reach the spot you want to plant it. You will not dig and hit a big rock and have to relocate, or have to worry about hitting utilities. The tree’s roots will not trash your sidewalk if you plant it in the wrong place. The tree will not fail to grow. “Work” in video games is rarely anything at all like real life “work”, even before you layer on workplace bureaucracy and regulations and stuff. There’s no mess, no danger, (generally) no actual costs, and usually you can’t really screw it up, and if you do, there are no actual consequences. Stuff like travel times or how long it takes to do boring tasks are usually compressed.
- goatlover 3y ago
  This. And laziness certainly exists in varying forms. Some people don't want to be part of the social contract at all.
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    > Some people don't want to be part of the social contract at all Don't these people either have much less or work much harder (alone) by opting out? By my significant other's standards, I was very lazy in Animal Crossing... all I wanted to do was plant flowers. They wanted to build a neighborhood and collect all the furniture. I didn't grind as much, but I also wanted less.
no_wizard 3y ago
I resonate with this alot. I too, am a centrist. We can have capitalism without the cruelty (and the tragedy of commons and external costs on the environment) where markets exist but have limits that don't allow it to lead into exploitation, that is the idea anyway. Here in the USA, there seems to be a big red flag on the idea of implementing social good programs[0] like universal healthcare, UBI and many other programs. They're not panaceas, but they're a big net good increase on society at large. Funnily enough, once Americans have these programs and they manage to seed themselves in society, they fight like dogs to keep them. Look at the protests around Republicans trying to roll back major provisions in the Affordable Care Act. Their own base shut it down, because a sizable Republican voting block is lower middle class and receive more government assistance then you might get the impression of as an outsider. [0]: Often called social welfare, but the term welfare in US politics is heavily tainted. I didn't want to trigger preconceived notions.
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- lasfter 3y ago
  You cannot have capitalism without the bad stuff unless capital's interests are best served in abstaining from bad stuff. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to set up a system that aligns the world's interests with capital's, because our lawmakers are predominantly capitalists and act in their own best interests at the expense of everything else. When money is the name of the game in elections, the legislature, and even the justice system, how is it even theoretically possible to implement capitalism without the bad stuff? The best you can do is hope the capitalists are nice.
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Despite having capitalism, we still have many good social programs that help many people. There is lots of bad stuff too, but the social programs can (theoretically) minimize the negative impacts of capitalism. If everyone has access to food, shelter, transportation, health care, and mental health care (regardless of whether it's gourmet food or luxury shelter), people as a whole are going to be much better off than they currently are, and it will very much weaken the ability of capital to compel people to do things they'd rather not. I'd argue there would still be problems with such a system, but it's leagues better than what we have now.
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jay_kyburz 3y ago
>What cozy games are showing us is that a world with tons of “free stuff” — universal basic income, universal health care, free education, free housing — will not result in a breakdown of our society because “no one wants to work”. People love to work. This is dumb and wrong. People love to work, as long as the work is not smelly, or painful, or difficult. And as long as you can quit when you want, and do it in your own time, and you have no boss giving you feedback. I'm all for universal healthcare, education, housing, and disability and unemployment benefits. But a basic income, if large enough for somebody to live comfortably _will_ result in huge numbers of people dropping out of the work force. They will just play these cosy games rather than go out in the world and do hard things. But I don't believe we could ever make a basic income comfortable because I think inflation will instantly gobble up any increases we make. If you increase the ubi by $50 bucks a month, the cost of beer and rent will increase $50 in the same month.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  We can easily produce a surplus of all the beer we need. We have to tax it to limit consumption. We have a surplus of labour. That is the problem. We need some people to work, but we really don't need everyone to. If you need proof look at all the people doing bullshit jobs and working at startups that just burn cash before dying. Nobody has starved to death because Flooz failed to turn a profit.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  >But a basic income, if large enough for somebody to live comfortably _will_ result in huge numbers of people dropping out of the work force. They will just play these cosy games rather than go out in the world and do hard things. Few things here I want to point out that I find problematic with this. One is, perhaps we should let go of the idea that everyone needs to work. There will, simply put, be a % of people who given the choice, would rather opt out of this and do something else with that time. It may be playing games and doing other things that generally aren't considered productive. Perhaps forcing these types of people into the workforce isn't good for the workforce in the first place. Perhaps there is a reason these people feel demotivated to participate in the labor market. Its worth considering the idea that perhaps these are not people who are generally going to be value add, and perhaps serves everyone better by allowing them to opt out of the workforce in the first place. Second, its not all that binary. People may well be that they opt to do something that at the time doesn't have a lot of traditional monetary value but instead social value, like murals, public art etc. It may be something else entirely that does manage to move society forward, it just wasn't obvious at the time, who knows. Its not binary, like everyone who opts out of the traditional workforce in this paradigm will only engage in self gratifying behavior. Humans are complicated, and all of us respond to new paradigms differently. Third: by guaranteeing a "floor" of failure to which someone can fall back on, it becomes infinitely easier for the "little guy" to take more risks without requiring someone to seek outside capital in the beginning (or perhaps at all), or otherwise take on debt (such as a business loan). We know in software that businesses can start small, but often pressures of needing funding force businesses that perhaps should have grown more organically to seek VC funding, dooming them to the VC treadmill that could just as well kill the business due to outside pressures. By having a livable floor you reduce alot of personal risk when you gotta think about your family and health insurance over starting a business, because starting a business is the bigger risk. Fourth: Human nature isn't this binary at all. Lots of people would still choose to participate in higher rungs of society. We are talking about a minimum here, and if human nature has proven anything, its that people will always be striving to be above the minimum of anything. Smaller scale studies in Canada where they implement UBI in a whole town as an experiment have proven this to be true: The overwhelming majority of participants still kept working, even though they explicitly had the option not to. Many used it to improve themselves through education, investing leftover portions for the future etc. People still want to be rich, if you will. Five: Ultimately, the labor market will simply have to evolve to be more palatable in attracting people to do the work. What that looks like would vary, but it would have to happen, and I think this is a good thing. And finally, those with disabilities and other things that prevent them from participating in the labor market as it exists today would be able to live more comfortably, and that shouldn't be overlooked. >But I don't believe we could ever make a basic income comfortable because I think inflation will instantly gobble up any increases we make We'd need to try it on some scale to see if that assumption is true. Given the scope of social programs in Western Europe, I don't think its this simple.
gnarlouse 3y ago
> People love to work. Maybe software folks are a different breed (perhaps because code and computers are like Adult Legos) but I can’t agree more. I love what I do, and I often struggle with “my employer is clearly exploiting my desire to work late this weekend” with my literal desire to work late this weekend. I can’t imagine a world where code is written by computers, that’s maximum cruelty to me.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Given that we still have today people crafting leather belt by hand and sell them for a premium, I assume there will always be a niche market for craftmanship-type software. And only people that really love it will be able to work in that.
  - sgu999 3y ago
    I'm not that hopeful. It does look like we will eventually get code of the quality of a good SWE. Usually that's not the case for craftsmanship-type items... shoes, knives, teapots, etc. I'm a sucker for this kind of objects but I can't see myself care about a handmade iOS app. Most people don't understand what coding entails anyway, whereas everyone has a rough idea that you need to hammer hot metal a lot to make a knife. Software written by a human may feel more like hand woven cotton than hand made shoes.
    - nemomarx 3y ago
      It would be interesting to have an iOS app where you're in a discord with the developer and can make feature requests really directly, or say that a font or some UI thing needs changing and get that patched in a week. Small game dev communities are close to this, but I can't think of other software that's really similar.
      - wizardwes 3y ago
        There's a discord for worldbuilding software that's like this, though, due to the main dev's health issues and the original architecture being relatively weak, such changes have been very delayed, buy it is picking up again now
CooCooCaCha 3y ago
This is a powerful article and something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. As an on-topic tangent, I saw a post on social media recently where a guy showed off his incredibly accurate controller setup for a trucking simulator game. A realistic truck dashboard, steering wheel, chair and 180 degrees of screens. You could say this is just a hobby and his way of relaxing. But it felt deeper than that, like maybe this guy would actually enjoy driving a real truck without all the soul-sucking BS that comes with a trucker job. Another quick example is another social media post where a young woman got bored, dressed up as a Target employee, and actually did some work that an employee might do. Reading this article, I really do agree that people want to work. They just don’t want to deal with the soul-sucking stuff. Modern capitalism has a way of ruining any potential enjoyment a job might have.
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> What cozy games are showing us is that a world with tons of “free stuff” — universal basic income, universal health care, free education, free housing — will not result in a breakdown of our society because “no one wants to work”. People love to work. And Grand Theft Auto shows us that there is a bunch of people who would run around stealing cars, beating up and shooting people for the fun of it. Or else maybe there is very limited information you can take from a computer game people play for enjoyment and generalize to society at large.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  >And Grand Theft Auto shows us that there is a bunch of people who would run around stealing cars, beating up and shooting people for the fun of it I caution over-saturating the metaphor[0]. I think the author (and majority of readers) are smart enough to know that video games aren't 100% accurate representations of reality. They're games after all. However, as a medium, much like fiction novels, it can be used to explain ideas and get points across in a way that people can relate to. [0]: Not that I sanction such behavior but there is an entire criminal element that more or less does exactly this in society no? There in fact, are people that want to do this on some level. At any rate, you can take any metaphor, and over-saturate its meaning to the point of being meaningless.
- CooCooCaCha 3y ago
  This analysis is too surface level IMO. I think you can take away different conclusions from drastically different contexts, even if they’re both video games.
- sshtml 3y ago
  It seems Grand Theft Auto fits the author's definition of a "cozy game" quite well. Particularly the open world wandering aspect of the game, where people spend significant amounts of their real-world time completing side quests and accumulating resources and buying fancy houses and cars without any real end goal. Perhaps for some degree of real-world social status among their peers. It's simply fun to participate in the markets of GTA and Animal Crossing - where the article's metaphor holds up regardless of whether time is spent stealing cars or catching butterflies.
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mminer237 3y ago
I'm one of the lucky few who actually enjoys my job, but still, if you asked me if I want to go to work or play Animal Crossing, I'm choosing Animal Crossing. Its minigames and exploration isn't really work. People genuinely find it fun. Sure, the capitalist progress is fun too, but it would not be a best seller if you had to provide technical support to people who got locked out of their accounts for 8 hours to earn bells instead of literally picking money off trees. It's a video game. People love to work when it's literally playing a video game yes (see the initial demand for game testers), but most people do not want to work an actual job (see the turnover rate for game testers). I think you would be hard-pressed to find people willing to collect garbage if you didn't pay them well for it. Some things in life are just flat-out not enjoyable but need done, so society needs a method of motivating people to do unfun jobs.
- kozd 3y ago
  Not agreeing or disagreeing with your larger point but garbage picking is an interesting example. Aren't there folks who volunteer to pick up trash/litter on the side of the road and in parks? There's definitely an incentive (maintaining your community and other emotional/less-tangible benefits of volunteering) but it's not quite being payed to do it.
  - mminer237 3y ago
    I've seen groups "sponsor" roads where they pick up the trash for a sign of appreciation/advertisement from the state. But pickup up a few discarded cups in nature is a lot different than picking up residential or commercial garbage, especially on the scale of a city.
slg 3y ago
The author is right that the cruelty of capitalism is absent from cozy games, but doesn't actually consider why that is the case. It is easy to just hand wave that away as a design choice, but I think it is fundamentally because cozy games are traditionally single player. The developers can design Tom Nook to not be cruel because he is an NPC that was designed not to be cruel. Imagine if Animal Crossing was an MMO and Tom Nook was actually another human player. Do you think he would be as kind and forgiving or would some of that cruelty slip back into the world due simply to that Nook character maximizing their own experience of the game? And that isn't necessarily any fault of Nook. They are just viewing the world through a different viewpoint. From their viewpoint, someone occupying their property while not paying is likely going to be viewed as cruel too. Because that is the fundamental trait of capitalism, competition. Any type of zero-sum game is going to have winners and losers and the losers will feel that as cruelty. There is a reason that most multiplayer games in which you play with the open internet are harsh and unfriendly places, because the average player cares about their own experience and fun infinitely more than they care about yours. That is a better simulation of the real world than a single player game in which everything can be designed for the enjoyment of a single person because that is what happens in the real world too. My landlord cares about their own financial wellbeing infinitely more than they care about mine and therefore their behavior towards me feels cruel.
- abetusk 3y ago
  > Imagine if Animal Crossing was an MMO and Tom Nook was actually another human player. I don't agree with your sentiment but I think it's an interesting question. As a counterpoint, consider "One Hour, One Life" by Jason Rohrer [0]. It's an MMO where you spend an hour, or less, living out the life of a player character, starting off as a baby then progressing on through old age. The dynamics of the game are such that you are necessarily completely dependent on other player characters for your survival during the first few minutes of your session. > There is a reason that most multiplayer games in which you play with the open internet are harsh and unfriendly places, ... I would guess that this is because they're designed that way. Combat and antagonism are what's customarily used for game play mechanics, so it's no wonder they end up being combative and antagonistic towards players. Different game mechanics lead to different styles of play. Note that the games I most enjoy playing with friends are co-op, not vs. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/595690/One_Hour_One_Life/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/595690/One_Hour_One_Life/
from-nibly 3y ago
Offering a different view in the idealistic capitalism camp. I don't think using starvation as a cattle prick even works to do what people think it does. People need psychological safety in order to want to work. They need to believe they will get something from the work they put in, not just the threat of starvation. However, _taxes_ are, at the end of the day, taking money from individuals, via the implicit (and sometimes explicit) threat of violence. Taxes (as in money collected with the threat of violence) are immoral. Capitalism in it's idealistic state seeks to give everyone agency in what they do, and let the market reward or punish those actions. However, of course, while communism requires the creation of "the state" (and therefore taxes) to enforce the state of things, capitalism encourages the creation of "the state", so in the end it doesn't really matter. I guess capitalism gives you a few minutes before "the state" is created. Social programs are good, in fact, great! Having safety nets lets people take risks they otherwise would not, and it's those risks that can advance society. However when you knock on my door and say pay for this social program or I will xyz, it's not a social program anymore it's social order at the threat of violence. The "or else" with social programs needs to be "or else the place that you live will be a terrible place to live"
- xaellison 3y ago
  forgive me for not engaging with your core ideas, but as far as I know the vernacular term is "cattle prod" and "cattle prick" sounds rather like something else
  - from-nibly 3y ago
    No cattle prod is something that a person weilds. A cattle prick is attached to a load like a wagon behind the animals to poke the animal to get it to keep moving faster than the load. Edit: I guess formally it's called a goad https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goad https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goad The phrase I'm pulling this from is "don't kick against the pricks"
- satellite2 3y ago
  It's a view that's created by a very orthodox approach of the economy. If you look at more modern school of thought the government don't really need taxes to do anything. So for instance according to MMT taxes create an ongoing demand for currency and are a tool to take money out of an economy that is getting overheated. This goes against the conventional idea that taxes are primarily meant to provide the government with money to spend to build infrastructure, fund social welfare programs, etc. It's a bit the same idea with another modern approach FTPL but in that case with a more cautious and critical look, saying that low taxes allow high inflation and prevents the government from the need to pay its debt. In any case the real question all those systems try to solve is how to best allocate resources, maximize innovation, growth, employment and limit poverty and inequalities. Be careful that thinking that poor people are stealing your resources with taxes don't become a shortcut for you to accept the tough idea that you have more resources than you need and some people should have less than what they need to support you.
djur 3y ago
Animal Crossing is also a game where natural resources are infinite and not rivalrous, alienation of labor is impossible, the labor theory of value dominates, and comparative advantage doesn't exist. You make money by personally extracting resources from land and (optionally) creating finished goods with your own labor. Demand is constant (other than the daily 'hot items'). You cannot saturate the market or run out of supplies. So it's not just that it's a world where you won't starve in a ditch for not working hard enough, but a world where your reward is reliably and indefinitely proportionate to your labor investment. If you work hard, you will succeed; the harder you work, the more you will succeed. Who wouldn't want to live and work in that world?
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  I think there's also an aspect of not being able to work too much because what can be done in a single day is very limited. I believe this was intentionally designed into Animal Crossing; you work a little every day and that's it. Without cheating you've got to be patient and intentional.
- negativez 3y ago
  Plus, only a small fraction of Animal Crossing players, even lifelong series fans, will still be playing the game daily even one year later. In the real world, we need jobs done ~forever, regardless of how novel and fun they are. Game design is fundamentally about feeding a steady flow of novelty to players. Too little and the game gets boring immediately, too much and the development team can't produce new content fast enough, or the game is too short. I can imagine someone arguing that we could rotate people through jobs as their interest fades, but we should be skeptical that we can maintain our standard of living when most jobs are being done by people whose professional experience includes novelty at the rate even a dull game offers.
  - dbingham 3y ago
    Many (most?) people don't need novelty to want to keep working. Many people find fulfillment and enjoyment in the routine of their work. Think about it, how many people are cheerfully running shops because the shop is also their community? People need to feel useful. They need to feel valued. They need community. Work provides all these things. Also, many jobs do provide many forms of novelty as one can seek to continually improve at them.
abvdasker 3y ago
It always strikes me as a little confused when criticism of Marxism focuses on the utility of markets and not the existence of private capital (only the latter is incompatible with socialism). A common Marxist critique of social democracy is that it allows for the accumulation of incredible wealth in the hands of a small number of people who invariably use that wealth to try and end social democracy.
- lasfter 3y ago
  The confusion is the system working as intended I think. It is taught from a young age that Marxism/socialism is about annihilating freedom and personal property, while capitalism rewards hard work etc etc. So you get these well-meaning posts about how maybe life would be better if we could keep personal property and freedom and progress as a species, but lose the alienation from labour, coercive pressure, and basically everything else that literally defines capitalism and perpetuates what is bad about our system. I had the same blind spot for most of my life, but at some point it dawned on me that everything I like about the current system is compatible with socialism, but the changes I would like to see are incompatible with capitalism.
  - euroderf 3y ago
    > at some point it dawned on me that everything I like about the current system is compatible with socialism, but the changes I would like to see are incompatible with capitalism. That, sir, is a political platform with some level of appeal.
Jasper_ 3y ago
> It’s fun to gather resources, to improve one’s skills, to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges, to collect things, to decorate. It's fun to chop down a tree when it's a button press and a few seconds of waiting, and not when you actually need to swing your axe for a half hour before a single tree comes down. And then realize that you need to split the logs in half and do about 10 more to make enough firewood to last tonight's snowstorm. It's fun to sit fish when it's a rhythm game, timing button presses, but real fish aren't predictable timing patterns for you to master, they're living beings scared of dying, trying to fight the predator that's going to kill them. It's not fun to that feeding your family tonight means getting enough fish to survive. It's not fun to realize you've run a lake dry of fish and have to move to find new food. Animal Crossing isn't work, it's play. It's an advanced form of playing house with dolls. Of course people want to do that.
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legitster 3y ago
> What cozy games are showing us is that a world with tons of “free stuff” — universal basic income, universal health care, free education, free housing — will not result in a breakdown of our society because “no one wants to work”. People love to work. The difference is that Dark Souls and Factorio can synthesize the mental feeling of work and success without anything being provided to others. I could work on a construction site all day and still count down the hours until I can get home and play Powerwashing Simulator. A lot of our hobbies have become pornographic versions of work. I'm not morally opposed to a world of "free stuff", but while we still need bread and cars and QC on airplane door plugs we still need people who are motivated to do menial and boring jobs.
- tivert 3y ago
  > The difference is that Dark Souls and Factorio can synthesize the mental feeling of work and success without anything being provided to others. ... A lot of our hobbies have become pornographic versions of work. Or pornographic versions of skill or learning. The entire point of Guitar Hero was to provide a simulated feeling of competence and skill. You set the difficulty level, spend a small amount of time learning to mash some buttons just so, and all the sudden you're a guitar god, perfectly playing some famous rock song. It felt awesome. I think it's super suspect to try to determine how people could behave in the real world based on how they behave in twisted-to-be-fun worlds of video games. So while I agree with the OP's criticism of the "hardcore capitalist bootstrap grindset ideologues," I don't think that observations from cozy games can be applied without literally making the real world a cozy game, which would require a lot of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" shit.
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    >The entire point of Guitar Hero was to provide a simulated feeling of competence and skill. You set the difficulty level, spend a small amount of time learning to mash some buttons just so, and all the sudden you're a guitar god, perfectly playing some famous rock song. It felt awesome. I vividly recall how some percentage of people who were excellent at Guitar Hero went on to try and learn the real guitar, buying them and everything, to be completely deflated quite quickly. I sometimes wonder if the height of Guitar Hero had any real impact on guitar sales, as I can only provide anecdotes but I don't think I'm alone in witnessing this phenomenon
hscontinuity 3y ago
Curious if a system like this is plausible: Why must the market be purely capitalistic? Rather, why any market must bare the mark of others is curious to me; similar as they may be some should not be equal. Hypothetically - why not make raw materials in the traditional market(s) while also giving it a credit rating (valued in the market based on sustainability) - one that is transferable only against those same credits. So if a public need requires (x) and gains (theoretical) democratic support, credits can be used in place of monetary requirement to build these required needs.
akoboldfrying 3y ago
>What cozy games are showing us is that a world with tons of “free stuff” — universal basic income, universal health care, free education, free housing — will not result in a breakdown of our society because “no one wants to work”. Who provides the health care, education and housing? Actually providing (a large part of) all these things, and many other goods and services that we expect to exist at reasonable prices, is much more tiring, and much less dopamine-inducing, than clicking a mouse while seated comfortably at your desk. The concrete example I favour is cleaning toilets. Every city-dwelling person uses a toilet regularly; toilets need to be cleaned periodically, and there's a lower bound on how much time and effort that takes. Thus some constant fraction of all human effort must be devoted to cleaning toilets. I can imagine a janitor simulation game, in which people click a few times to "clean", becoming popular. But I can't imagine anyone cleaning toilets for free in their spare time.

58 points by earthboundkid 3y ago

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> Cozy games are therefore a centrist1 critique of capitalism. They present a world with the prosperity, but without the cruelty. More importantly though, by virtue of the fact that people actually play them in large numbers, they demonstrate that the cruelty is actually unnecessary. No, they demonstrate that games are not real life. And the people who play Animal Crossings are just a subset of real people.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Indeed. In animal crossing, the player doesn't feel the characters cold, hunger, head aches, sleep deprivation or flue. The player doesn't really experience the dreadful responsibility for a kid not to die, the requirement to fill forms, queue with irritated people, be stuck in traffic or the sub every day, etc. And above that, the interactions are in this context. Nobody tries to hit on your girlfriend who you built your life with, no divorce can take half of your house, no firing send you back to your country because your visa depend on it. You don't have an asshole boss, an entitled customer, an asshole clerk or a depressed librarian. Prosperity is easier when things are predictable, you have low risk and people are homogeneous. E.G: it's easier to live as a Swiss in your own country than as Tunisian refugee in china.
- wharvle 3y ago
  You don’t get dirty when you plant a tree in Animal Crossing and have to do a bunch of extra laundry. No grit under your nails that sticks around for a couple days and sometimes ends up in your food. You don’t pull a muscle and spend a whole week miserable. You don’t get blisters. You don’t want to go plant a tree but then you can’t for real-life days on end because the weather is bad. You don’t get mosquito bites, or worry about ticks maybe giving you a debilitating illness. You don’t have to go find the shovels, mulch, scrap cardboard, whatever. Maybe craft a shovel, but that may take less time than walking to the garage. It’s a minute or less to reach the spot you want to plant it. You will not dig and hit a big rock and have to relocate, or have to worry about hitting utilities. The tree’s roots will not trash your sidewalk if you plant it in the wrong place. The tree will not fail to grow. “Work” in video games is rarely anything at all like real life “work”, even before you layer on workplace bureaucracy and regulations and stuff. There’s no mess, no danger, (generally) no actual costs, and usually you can’t really screw it up, and if you do, there are no actual consequences. Stuff like travel times or how long it takes to do boring tasks are usually compressed.
goatlover 3y ago
This. And laziness certainly exists in varying forms. Some people don't want to be part of the social contract at all.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  > Some people don't want to be part of the social contract at all Don't these people either have much less or work much harder (alone) by opting out? By my significant other's standards, I was very lazy in Animal Crossing... all I wanted to do was plant flowers. They wanted to build a neighborhood and collect all the furniture. I didn't grind as much, but I also wanted less.

no_wizard 3y ago

I resonate with this alot. I too, am a centrist. We can have capitalism without the cruelty (and the tragedy of commons and external costs on the environment) where markets exist but have limits that don't allow it to lead into exploitation, that is the idea anyway. Here in the USA, there seems to be a big red flag on the idea of implementing social good programs[0] like universal healthcare, UBI and many other programs. They're not panaceas, but they're a big net good increase on society at large. Funnily enough, once Americans have these programs and they manage to seed themselves in society, they fight like dogs to keep them. Look at the protests around Republicans trying to roll back major provisions in the Affordable Care Act. Their own base shut it down, because a sizable Republican voting block is lower middle class and receive more government assistance then you might get the impression of as an outsider. [0]: Often called social welfare, but the term welfare in US politics is heavily tainted. I didn't want to trigger preconceived notions.

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lasfter 3y ago
You cannot have capitalism without the bad stuff unless capital's interests are best served in abstaining from bad stuff. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to set up a system that aligns the world's interests with capital's, because our lawmakers are predominantly capitalists and act in their own best interests at the expense of everything else. When money is the name of the game in elections, the legislature, and even the justice system, how is it even theoretically possible to implement capitalism without the bad stuff? The best you can do is hope the capitalists are nice.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Despite having capitalism, we still have many good social programs that help many people. There is lots of bad stuff too, but the social programs can (theoretically) minimize the negative impacts of capitalism. If everyone has access to food, shelter, transportation, health care, and mental health care (regardless of whether it's gourmet food or luxury shelter), people as a whole are going to be much better off than they currently are, and it will very much weaken the ability of capital to compel people to do things they'd rather not. I'd argue there would still be problems with such a system, but it's leagues better than what we have now.

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jay_kyburz 3y ago

>What cozy games are showing us is that a world with tons of “free stuff” — universal basic income, universal health care, free education, free housing — will not result in a breakdown of our society because “no one wants to work”. People love to work. This is dumb and wrong. People love to work, as long as the work is not smelly, or painful, or difficult. And as long as you can quit when you want, and do it in your own time, and you have no boss giving you feedback. I'm all for universal healthcare, education, housing, and disability and unemployment benefits. But a basic income, if large enough for somebody to live comfortably _will_ result in huge numbers of people dropping out of the work force. They will just play these cosy games rather than go out in the world and do hard things. But I don't believe we could ever make a basic income comfortable because I think inflation will instantly gobble up any increases we make. If you increase the ubi by $50 bucks a month, the cost of beer and rent will increase $50 in the same month.

Pet_Ant 3y ago
We can easily produce a surplus of all the beer we need. We have to tax it to limit consumption. We have a surplus of labour. That is the problem. We need some people to work, but we really don't need everyone to. If you need proof look at all the people doing bullshit jobs and working at startups that just burn cash before dying. Nobody has starved to death because Flooz failed to turn a profit.
no_wizard 3y ago
>But a basic income, if large enough for somebody to live comfortably _will_ result in huge numbers of people dropping out of the work force. They will just play these cosy games rather than go out in the world and do hard things. Few things here I want to point out that I find problematic with this. One is, perhaps we should let go of the idea that everyone needs to work. There will, simply put, be a % of people who given the choice, would rather opt out of this and do something else with that time. It may be playing games and doing other things that generally aren't considered productive. Perhaps forcing these types of people into the workforce isn't good for the workforce in the first place. Perhaps there is a reason these people feel demotivated to participate in the labor market. Its worth considering the idea that perhaps these are not people who are generally going to be value add, and perhaps serves everyone better by allowing them to opt out of the workforce in the first place. Second, its not all that binary. People may well be that they opt to do something that at the time doesn't have a lot of traditional monetary value but instead social value, like murals, public art etc. It may be something else entirely that does manage to move society forward, it just wasn't obvious at the time, who knows. Its not binary, like everyone who opts out of the traditional workforce in this paradigm will only engage in self gratifying behavior. Humans are complicated, and all of us respond to new paradigms differently. Third: by guaranteeing a "floor" of failure to which someone can fall back on, it becomes infinitely easier for the "little guy" to take more risks without requiring someone to seek outside capital in the beginning (or perhaps at all), or otherwise take on debt (such as a business loan). We know in software that businesses can start small, but often pressures of needing funding force businesses that perhaps should have grown more organically to seek VC funding, dooming them to the VC treadmill that could just as well kill the business due to outside pressures. By having a livable floor you reduce alot of personal risk when you gotta think about your family and health insurance over starting a business, because starting a business is the bigger risk. Fourth: Human nature isn't this binary at all. Lots of people would still choose to participate in higher rungs of society. We are talking about a minimum here, and if human nature has proven anything, its that people will always be striving to be above the minimum of anything. Smaller scale studies in Canada where they implement UBI in a whole town as an experiment have proven this to be true: The overwhelming majority of participants still kept working, even though they explicitly had the option not to. Many used it to improve themselves through education, investing leftover portions for the future etc. People still want to be rich, if you will. Five: Ultimately, the labor market will simply have to evolve to be more palatable in attracting people to do the work. What that looks like would vary, but it would have to happen, and I think this is a good thing. And finally, those with disabilities and other things that prevent them from participating in the labor market as it exists today would be able to live more comfortably, and that shouldn't be overlooked. >But I don't believe we could ever make a basic income comfortable because I think inflation will instantly gobble up any increases we make We'd need to try it on some scale to see if that assumption is true. Given the scope of social programs in Western Europe, I don't think its this simple.

gnarlouse 3y ago

> People love to work. Maybe software folks are a different breed (perhaps because code and computers are like Adult Legos) but I can’t agree more. I love what I do, and I often struggle with “my employer is clearly exploiting my desire to work late this weekend” with my literal desire to work late this weekend. I can’t imagine a world where code is written by computers, that’s maximum cruelty to me.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Given that we still have today people crafting leather belt by hand and sell them for a premium, I assume there will always be a niche market for craftmanship-type software. And only people that really love it will be able to work in that.
- sgu999 3y ago
  I'm not that hopeful. It does look like we will eventually get code of the quality of a good SWE. Usually that's not the case for craftsmanship-type items... shoes, knives, teapots, etc. I'm a sucker for this kind of objects but I can't see myself care about a handmade iOS app. Most people don't understand what coding entails anyway, whereas everyone has a rough idea that you need to hammer hot metal a lot to make a knife. Software written by a human may feel more like hand woven cotton than hand made shoes.
  - nemomarx 3y ago
    It would be interesting to have an iOS app where you're in a discord with the developer and can make feature requests really directly, or say that a font or some UI thing needs changing and get that patched in a week. Small game dev communities are close to this, but I can't think of other software that's really similar.
    - wizardwes 3y ago
      There's a discord for worldbuilding software that's like this, though, due to the main dev's health issues and the original architecture being relatively weak, such changes have been very delayed, buy it is picking up again now

CooCooCaCha 3y ago

This is a powerful article and something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. As an on-topic tangent, I saw a post on social media recently where a guy showed off his incredibly accurate controller setup for a trucking simulator game. A realistic truck dashboard, steering wheel, chair and 180 degrees of screens. You could say this is just a hobby and his way of relaxing. But it felt deeper than that, like maybe this guy would actually enjoy driving a real truck without all the soul-sucking BS that comes with a trucker job. Another quick example is another social media post where a young woman got bored, dressed up as a Target employee, and actually did some work that an employee might do. Reading this article, I really do agree that people want to work. They just don’t want to deal with the soul-sucking stuff. Modern capitalism has a way of ruining any potential enjoyment a job might have.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> What cozy games are showing us is that a world with tons of “free stuff” — universal basic income, universal health care, free education, free housing — will not result in a breakdown of our society because “no one wants to work”. People love to work. And Grand Theft Auto shows us that there is a bunch of people who would run around stealing cars, beating up and shooting people for the fun of it. Or else maybe there is very limited information you can take from a computer game people play for enjoyment and generalize to society at large.

no_wizard 3y ago
>And Grand Theft Auto shows us that there is a bunch of people who would run around stealing cars, beating up and shooting people for the fun of it I caution over-saturating the metaphor[0]. I think the author (and majority of readers) are smart enough to know that video games aren't 100% accurate representations of reality. They're games after all. However, as a medium, much like fiction novels, it can be used to explain ideas and get points across in a way that people can relate to. [0]: Not that I sanction such behavior but there is an entire criminal element that more or less does exactly this in society no? There in fact, are people that want to do this on some level. At any rate, you can take any metaphor, and over-saturate its meaning to the point of being meaningless.
CooCooCaCha 3y ago
This analysis is too surface level IMO. I think you can take away different conclusions from drastically different contexts, even if they’re both video games.
sshtml 3y ago
It seems Grand Theft Auto fits the author's definition of a "cozy game" quite well. Particularly the open world wandering aspect of the game, where people spend significant amounts of their real-world time completing side quests and accumulating resources and buying fancy houses and cars without any real end goal. Perhaps for some degree of real-world social status among their peers. It's simply fun to participate in the markets of GTA and Animal Crossing - where the article's metaphor holds up regardless of whether time is spent stealing cars or catching butterflies.

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mminer237 3y ago

I'm one of the lucky few who actually enjoys my job, but still, if you asked me if I want to go to work or play Animal Crossing, I'm choosing Animal Crossing. Its minigames and exploration isn't really work. People genuinely find it fun. Sure, the capitalist progress is fun too, but it would not be a best seller if you had to provide technical support to people who got locked out of their accounts for 8 hours to earn bells instead of literally picking money off trees. It's a video game. People love to work when it's literally playing a video game yes (see the initial demand for game testers), but most people do not want to work an actual job (see the turnover rate for game testers). I think you would be hard-pressed to find people willing to collect garbage if you didn't pay them well for it. Some things in life are just flat-out not enjoyable but need done, so society needs a method of motivating people to do unfun jobs.

kozd 3y ago
Not agreeing or disagreeing with your larger point but garbage picking is an interesting example. Aren't there folks who volunteer to pick up trash/litter on the side of the road and in parks? There's definitely an incentive (maintaining your community and other emotional/less-tangible benefits of volunteering) but it's not quite being payed to do it.
- mminer237 3y ago
  I've seen groups "sponsor" roads where they pick up the trash for a sign of appreciation/advertisement from the state. But pickup up a few discarded cups in nature is a lot different than picking up residential or commercial garbage, especially on the scale of a city.

slg 3y ago

The author is right that the cruelty of capitalism is absent from cozy games, but doesn't actually consider why that is the case. It is easy to just hand wave that away as a design choice, but I think it is fundamentally because cozy games are traditionally single player. The developers can design Tom Nook to not be cruel because he is an NPC that was designed not to be cruel. Imagine if Animal Crossing was an MMO and Tom Nook was actually another human player. Do you think he would be as kind and forgiving or would some of that cruelty slip back into the world due simply to that Nook character maximizing their own experience of the game? And that isn't necessarily any fault of Nook. They are just viewing the world through a different viewpoint. From their viewpoint, someone occupying their property while not paying is likely going to be viewed as cruel too. Because that is the fundamental trait of capitalism, competition. Any type of zero-sum game is going to have winners and losers and the losers will feel that as cruelty. There is a reason that most multiplayer games in which you play with the open internet are harsh and unfriendly places, because the average player cares about their own experience and fun infinitely more than they care about yours. That is a better simulation of the real world than a single player game in which everything can be designed for the enjoyment of a single person because that is what happens in the real world too. My landlord cares about their own financial wellbeing infinitely more than they care about mine and therefore their behavior towards me feels cruel.

abetusk 3y ago
> Imagine if Animal Crossing was an MMO and Tom Nook was actually another human player. I don't agree with your sentiment but I think it's an interesting question. As a counterpoint, consider "One Hour, One Life" by Jason Rohrer [0]. It's an MMO where you spend an hour, or less, living out the life of a player character, starting off as a baby then progressing on through old age. The dynamics of the game are such that you are necessarily completely dependent on other player characters for your survival during the first few minutes of your session. > There is a reason that most multiplayer games in which you play with the open internet are harsh and unfriendly places, ... I would guess that this is because they're designed that way. Combat and antagonism are what's customarily used for game play mechanics, so it's no wonder they end up being combative and antagonistic towards players. Different game mechanics lead to different styles of play. Note that the games I most enjoy playing with friends are co-op, not vs. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/595690/One_Hour_One_Life/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/595690/One_Hour_One_Life/

from-nibly 3y ago

Offering a different view in the idealistic capitalism camp. I don't think using starvation as a cattle prick even works to do what people think it does. People need psychological safety in order to want to work. They need to believe they will get something from the work they put in, not just the threat of starvation. However, _taxes_ are, at the end of the day, taking money from individuals, via the implicit (and sometimes explicit) threat of violence. Taxes (as in money collected with the threat of violence) are immoral. Capitalism in it's idealistic state seeks to give everyone agency in what they do, and let the market reward or punish those actions. However, of course, while communism requires the creation of "the state" (and therefore taxes) to enforce the state of things, capitalism encourages the creation of "the state", so in the end it doesn't really matter. I guess capitalism gives you a few minutes before "the state" is created. Social programs are good, in fact, great! Having safety nets lets people take risks they otherwise would not, and it's those risks that can advance society. However when you knock on my door and say pay for this social program or I will xyz, it's not a social program anymore it's social order at the threat of violence. The "or else" with social programs needs to be "or else the place that you live will be a terrible place to live"

xaellison 3y ago
forgive me for not engaging with your core ideas, but as far as I know the vernacular term is "cattle prod" and "cattle prick" sounds rather like something else
- from-nibly 3y ago
  No cattle prod is something that a person weilds. A cattle prick is attached to a load like a wagon behind the animals to poke the animal to get it to keep moving faster than the load. Edit: I guess formally it's called a goad https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goad https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goad The phrase I'm pulling this from is "don't kick against the pricks"
satellite2 3y ago
It's a view that's created by a very orthodox approach of the economy. If you look at more modern school of thought the government don't really need taxes to do anything. So for instance according to MMT taxes create an ongoing demand for currency and are a tool to take money out of an economy that is getting overheated. This goes against the conventional idea that taxes are primarily meant to provide the government with money to spend to build infrastructure, fund social welfare programs, etc. It's a bit the same idea with another modern approach FTPL but in that case with a more cautious and critical look, saying that low taxes allow high inflation and prevents the government from the need to pay its debt. In any case the real question all those systems try to solve is how to best allocate resources, maximize innovation, growth, employment and limit poverty and inequalities. Be careful that thinking that poor people are stealing your resources with taxes don't become a shortcut for you to accept the tough idea that you have more resources than you need and some people should have less than what they need to support you.

djur 3y ago

Animal Crossing is also a game where natural resources are infinite and not rivalrous, alienation of labor is impossible, the labor theory of value dominates, and comparative advantage doesn't exist. You make money by personally extracting resources from land and (optionally) creating finished goods with your own labor. Demand is constant (other than the daily 'hot items'). You cannot saturate the market or run out of supplies. So it's not just that it's a world where you won't starve in a ditch for not working hard enough, but a world where your reward is reliably and indefinitely proportionate to your labor investment. If you work hard, you will succeed; the harder you work, the more you will succeed. Who wouldn't want to live and work in that world?

micromacrofoot 3y ago
I think there's also an aspect of not being able to work too much because what can be done in a single day is very limited. I believe this was intentionally designed into Animal Crossing; you work a little every day and that's it. Without cheating you've got to be patient and intentional.
negativez 3y ago
Plus, only a small fraction of Animal Crossing players, even lifelong series fans, will still be playing the game daily even one year later. In the real world, we need jobs done ~forever, regardless of how novel and fun they are. Game design is fundamentally about feeding a steady flow of novelty to players. Too little and the game gets boring immediately, too much and the development team can't produce new content fast enough, or the game is too short. I can imagine someone arguing that we could rotate people through jobs as their interest fades, but we should be skeptical that we can maintain our standard of living when most jobs are being done by people whose professional experience includes novelty at the rate even a dull game offers.
- dbingham 3y ago
  Many (most?) people don't need novelty to want to keep working. Many people find fulfillment and enjoyment in the routine of their work. Think about it, how many people are cheerfully running shops because the shop is also their community? People need to feel useful. They need to feel valued. They need community. Work provides all these things. Also, many jobs do provide many forms of novelty as one can seek to continually improve at them.

abvdasker 3y ago

It always strikes me as a little confused when criticism of Marxism focuses on the utility of markets and not the existence of private capital (only the latter is incompatible with socialism). A common Marxist critique of social democracy is that it allows for the accumulation of incredible wealth in the hands of a small number of people who invariably use that wealth to try and end social democracy.

lasfter 3y ago
The confusion is the system working as intended I think. It is taught from a young age that Marxism/socialism is about annihilating freedom and personal property, while capitalism rewards hard work etc etc. So you get these well-meaning posts about how maybe life would be better if we could keep personal property and freedom and progress as a species, but lose the alienation from labour, coercive pressure, and basically everything else that literally defines capitalism and perpetuates what is bad about our system. I had the same blind spot for most of my life, but at some point it dawned on me that everything I like about the current system is compatible with socialism, but the changes I would like to see are incompatible with capitalism.
- euroderf 3y ago
  > at some point it dawned on me that everything I like about the current system is compatible with socialism, but the changes I would like to see are incompatible with capitalism. That, sir, is a political platform with some level of appeal.

Jasper_ 3y ago

> It’s fun to gather resources, to improve one’s skills, to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges, to collect things, to decorate. It's fun to chop down a tree when it's a button press and a few seconds of waiting, and not when you actually need to swing your axe for a half hour before a single tree comes down. And then realize that you need to split the logs in half and do about 10 more to make enough firewood to last tonight's snowstorm. It's fun to sit fish when it's a rhythm game, timing button presses, but real fish aren't predictable timing patterns for you to master, they're living beings scared of dying, trying to fight the predator that's going to kill them. It's not fun to that feeding your family tonight means getting enough fish to survive. It's not fun to realize you've run a lake dry of fish and have to move to find new food. Animal Crossing isn't work, it's play. It's an advanced form of playing house with dolls. Of course people want to do that.

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legitster 3y ago

> What cozy games are showing us is that a world with tons of “free stuff” — universal basic income, universal health care, free education, free housing — will not result in a breakdown of our society because “no one wants to work”. People love to work. The difference is that Dark Souls and Factorio can synthesize the mental feeling of work and success without anything being provided to others. I could work on a construction site all day and still count down the hours until I can get home and play Powerwashing Simulator. A lot of our hobbies have become pornographic versions of work. I'm not morally opposed to a world of "free stuff", but while we still need bread and cars and QC on airplane door plugs we still need people who are motivated to do menial and boring jobs.

tivert 3y ago
> The difference is that Dark Souls and Factorio can synthesize the mental feeling of work and success without anything being provided to others. ... A lot of our hobbies have become pornographic versions of work. Or pornographic versions of skill or learning. The entire point of Guitar Hero was to provide a simulated feeling of competence and skill. You set the difficulty level, spend a small amount of time learning to mash some buttons just so, and all the sudden you're a guitar god, perfectly playing some famous rock song. It felt awesome. I think it's super suspect to try to determine how people could behave in the real world based on how they behave in twisted-to-be-fun worlds of video games. So while I agree with the OP's criticism of the "hardcore capitalist bootstrap grindset ideologues," I don't think that observations from cozy games can be applied without literally making the real world a cozy game, which would require a lot of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" shit.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  >The entire point of Guitar Hero was to provide a simulated feeling of competence and skill. You set the difficulty level, spend a small amount of time learning to mash some buttons just so, and all the sudden you're a guitar god, perfectly playing some famous rock song. It felt awesome. I vividly recall how some percentage of people who were excellent at Guitar Hero went on to try and learn the real guitar, buying them and everything, to be completely deflated quite quickly. I sometimes wonder if the height of Guitar Hero had any real impact on guitar sales, as I can only provide anecdotes but I don't think I'm alone in witnessing this phenomenon

hscontinuity 3y ago

Curious if a system like this is plausible: Why must the market be purely capitalistic? Rather, why any market must bare the mark of others is curious to me; similar as they may be some should not be equal. Hypothetically - why not make raw materials in the traditional market(s) while also giving it a credit rating (valued in the market based on sustainability) - one that is transferable only against those same credits. So if a public need requires (x) and gains (theoretical) democratic support, credits can be used in place of monetary requirement to build these required needs.

akoboldfrying 3y ago

>What cozy games are showing us is that a world with tons of “free stuff” — universal basic income, universal health care, free education, free housing — will not result in a breakdown of our society because “no one wants to work”. Who provides the health care, education and housing? Actually providing (a large part of) all these things, and many other goods and services that we expect to exist at reasonable prices, is much more tiring, and much less dopamine-inducing, than clicking a mouse while seated comfortably at your desk. The concrete example I favour is cleaning toilets. Every city-dwelling person uses a toilet regularly; toilets need to be cleaned periodically, and there's a lower bound on how much time and effort that takes. Thus some constant fraction of all human effort must be devoted to cleaning toilets. I can imagine a janitor simulation game, in which people click a few times to "clean", becoming popular. But I can't imagine anyone cleaning toilets for free in their spare time.