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Notes -
One of those things does not seem like the other. How is slice of life the same stripping down of meaningfullness as cutting gameplay out of games, in your opinion?
Thanks for engaging! Meaning is very similar to value, and the value requires scarcity or victories (that something is fought for). Slice of life is the victory without the fight. In videogame terms, it's starting at maximum level. All the recent "I was reborn with a cheat skill" anime is similar (because, unlike traditional power fantasies, the cheat skill is used for relaxation rather than conquering. One-Punch-Man is in-between these two categories).
The category of menial relaxation in general (truck simulator, farming simulator, walking-simulator games, power-washing simulator, stardew valley, heartopia) too betrays a lack of ambition, and therefore exhaustion/dejection, not unlike applying for early retirement as a result of chronic depression or burnout. Most of the categories I've listed so far are in the opposite direction of "fighting spirit". The kind of people who always play on hard mode (or hardcode mode) tend to be more mentally healthy than those who prefer easy or creative modes. Nietzsche, in trying to breed the overman into existence, advocated for militarism, and claimed that the corruption of morals was downstream of weakness of will (this fits slice-of-life) and the need for strong stimuli (this fits with all the porn games, and the general trend of exaggeration in media due to the hedonic treadmill, e.g. power-levels in dragonball, or the modern category of incremental games which must now use arbitrary-precision floating-point libraries)
Slice of life is also just an image of a good life, an idea. And one uses this idea to warm themselves, rather than attempting to create it in reality. Cutting gameplay out of games is when players want to skip tedius mechanics by collapsing them into abstractions of themselves (e.g. fast-travel), and the two feels similar in the desire to skip ahead. They're the intolerance of effort, the desire for novelty after one has gotten sick of what is. You may find that people who are mentally unwell change one or more of these often: The layout of their home, their online profile picture/avatar, their online username/identity, the place where they hang out, their image. Ones general lack of well-being blend into their every day life, so that everything in their every day life reminds them of negative things, and I believe this is one of the causes of escapism/the need to be distracted (the latter is often a result of getting sick of ones own thought-loops)
The things I'm tying together may only seem close on higher levels of abstraction, or the similarities may only exist in their up-stream causes, but hopefully I'm making sense
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