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Notes -
How much are video games about social validation? My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots, even bots designed as a perfect challenge, and if there were no rankings. Do you think that’s the case?
For others? Probably quite a bit. The non-autistic millenials that I used to play with often had a very competitive streak to them and seemd to be genuinely invested in how they ranked relative to others.
The zoomers...oh man. The zoomers keep talking to themselves. It seems to me they all imagine themselves to be the next big streamer. Or maybe it's not even conscious, and they just naturally adopted the monologuing from watching too much Twitch and Let's Play.
The autists are just fine playing against bots. They seem to prefer it, even, for predictability.
As for myself, where multiplayer is an option I strictly prefer it to playing against bots. Not really for the social aspects, those are rather tiresome, but because playing against bots invariably becomes an exercise in exploiting the AI's predictability, which feels like a waste of time. In playing against humans, I can at least semi-credibly tell myself that I'm exercising my mind a little bit rather than just consuming product.
Yesterday I spent 30 minutes before going to bed playing a round of Nebulous: Fleet Command, and I rammed my Beam Battleship into the enemy Cruiser formation just right. It was pure dumb luck, of course, and a game at a fairly low average skill level, but still. Against bots that would have been meaningless. Against humans...it was still just dumb luck, but infinitely more exciting - they could have countered this! Nobody on either side knew what to expect! And so it was a lot more satisfying.
The speed of strategic evolution in multiplayer vs single player games is amazing. There's a bunch of autistic shipbuilding simulators out there (aurora, coade, etc.) where everyone has just been larping at strategy the same way for decades, whereas the nubulous meta looks different every time I check on it.
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