2023-02-06
Thi Nguyen’s life:
- so many games have become fixed storyline
- goal: take what game designers and players were saying and give it a language
Discussion
- everything is trying to “gamify” us now, how do we deal with this?
- "there's a wrong way to play a game" by pursuing the outcomes given without any reason or purpose around it.
- striving activity only makes sense if the pursuit of them / process is rich and valuable and meaningful
- journey not the destination
- this can be wrong with free-to-play games where
- “free-to-play” games are evil because they have to addict to you to the end goal and you have to pay to skip play
- outcome-oriented things (clarified point system) shuts out your quiet voice that tells you what you really want -> how do you make it easier for you to actually listen to this quiet voice?
- world is getting better at generating value systems
- “manufactured value sugar” — what have we lost? it’s not about what we lost, it’s us being manipulated?
- addiction by design - the UIs in diff social apps are derived directly from Las Vegas machine industry
- we start off with nuance values and then we latch onto some kind of legible system that is more narrow and we become less
- game-ification is legibility manipulation for our soul
- problem with effective altruism: often you have one thing that is measurable and another thing that is intangible so we prefer the legible thing and forget about the other stuff
- a single metric to see swamps everything. Very hard to get it to be unilaterally good (lives saved, lifespan)
- real values are plural, rich, conflicting
- very simple notion of agency: “something that acts for reasons”
- e.g. lawyer, literary agent.
- Doesn’t contain notion of free will
- we are always acting for various reasons (e.g. teaching turn off friendliness reason)
- agency is a construct that is responding to specific stimuli. Games hyper-clarify that and push it forward
- agency as a "way of seeing" not an intrinsic property of a thing
- agency and “perspective” are almost the same
- e.g. rock climbing, sees rocks for friction not beauty
- practical attitude vs aesthetic attitude
- shifting agents lets you have diff views of the world
- games force you to try on different ways of seeing and attitudes
- you as a reader have to take a reflective journey through the medium
- fictions encode different emotional perspectives
- you have to get exposed to different kinds
- before the 50s you didn’t go to “a movie” you went to “the movie”
- people identified as specific genre fans
- medium of film changes with the social background, same thing with games
- if you play magic the gathering by yourself without the larger meta, you haven’t played anything like the full game
- “Lost” was made for people to puzzle about on online forums afterwards
- a lot of games are being designed now knowing the social context of things
- e.g. zelda - so many nooks and crannies that are beyond what a single person can explore, they’re for a collective exploration (speedrunning community?)
- breath of the wild speedruns, something really interesting about the game design that is enabling this complex group activity
- two best examples of games being designed for groups like this are CCGs (magic) and large open-world games with so many things to explore
- meaning of life is doing things that you like: games are things that you choose to do just for itself
- recipe is lifeless, dish is a living, evolving organism. Step instructions vs. containers?
- recipes are more accessible
- dish is
- shift in conceptions of rules
- first as principles, not follow mechanically but look for exceptions “show don’t tell” and use experience to find the exceptions
- 2nd as models: “St. Benedict” follow them
- 3rd as algorithms: mechanically followable without looking for exceptions, reason is to cheapen the labor force
- people can be doing the same thing but only some see it as a game
- why are we not making more things that are artful?
- is technology a genre or trend or aesthetic?
- games are less like a movie and more like an art city or art government
- agency requires deleting other agency
- focusing naturally makes you lose periphery of others
- its useful to delete, to prune, and clean
- but what if we’re deleting the wrong things?
- device paradigm: a device is something that gets you the outcome while skipping you past all the things you need to do to get that outcome
- without a device, you get to train different ways of seeing and agency
- wood fires create zones of heat which create zones of intimacy
- a device is central air — heat appears wherever you want
- a lot of whats valuable comes from these skilled activity, observations, etc. that become obviated by devices
- if what was valuable was the process, then technology is bad