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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30554 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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I wish they made video games that leverage all that engagement and addiction to better the consumer. Teach them useful skills, like the video gaming advocates always claimed games could! If you can make them stare at a screen for hours on end, at least make them come out of it improved rather than impoverished!

I wish. I wish.

At risk of coping, I would actually contend that video games do in fact teach useful skills, just not all games do, and the skills are very narrowly applicable. MMOs are the obvious outlier here, since the social aspect plays a large part, and e.g organizing raids is quite literally management work even if low-ish-stakes (and even then people certainly get mad just like IRL), my Classic WoW-playing friends regale me with tales of literal Excel spreadsheets for loot distribution.

On another note, autism simulators like Factorio or Path of Exile are very good at teaching soulless optimization systematic thinking, "seeing through" the immediate picture and user-facing things in general to the complex tangle of underlying systems beneath, which I think is a generally useful skill in life, besides a part of my literal job description right now as a mid-tier IT monkey. I'm plenty stupid for a nerd and definitely starting to feel the IQ gate required to advance further in the field, so I wouldn't say I'm the kind of gifted person who would naturally grok such things either, my interests absolutely made a tangible difference. This is definitely not the best course my life could've taken, but it's certainly far from the worst, even just mitigating the NEET attractor and throwing myself into wageslavery already averted a lot of the worse outcomes even if I'm not always happy about it.

(Tangential and somewhat edgy but my pet theory is the "systematic thinking" part is largely why gamers are so infamously Based - as "seeing through" visual/verbal veneers to the core beneath becomes ingrained and reflexive, you start to second-guess your lying eyes and Nootice an awful lot. Unfortunately the skill at keeping your Nooticing to yourself is purchased separately.)

mitigating the NEET attractor

What does this mean?

Avoiding the tendency of the hobby to suck you in and make you more and more devoted to the game at the expense of work or social life.

It's not so easy. You can't actually gamify boring things to make them fun. You can make kind-of-fun things funner, fun things very fun, etc. That's why most games are themed around things humans already find enjoyable and biologically rewarding: exploring, destroying stuff, killing people, operating machinery. And gamification works best on things like running or weightlifting.

Yeah, I know. I'm fully aware of it being wishful thinking.

I just really, really hope that "we" (humanity?) find a way to save ourselves from wireheading ourselves to death. It's just such a profoundly unaesthetic way of going out. But then again, I guess natural selection will handle it.

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