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I have a post I want to make, but I don't want to effort-post it, thought I probably should.
I was just browsing for games on Steam, and it's 90% trash. Some of the listed games didn't include the very tag I explicitly searched for. And this made me think of how other content is also turning into trash. And it's a very specific kind of trash.
The problem is not solely incentives but also a sort of degeneration or insanity in which one prefers the symbol of substance over actual substance. There's a sort of simulacraic collapse going on, and it's not dissimilar to drug-use, but it's happening in dimensions which previously had no drug equivalent.
"Relatable content" and "ASMR" are two new categories of needs-fulfilling content. But the collapse I'm complaining about is the concequence of collapsing a process into a reward, or into a symbolic process. In some older RPG games, you could go on expeditions. In the current Genshin Impact, "Go on an expedition" is a button. It just starts a timer. The process doesn't exist, the game just uses your understanding of expeditions as a macro and tells you to simulate its occurrence.
What bothers me is not that we're one step closer to the experience machine, but that the wireheaders behind it don't understand how the brain handles value and meaning. These are all lacking: Sincerity, realness, risk, skin-in-the-game, effort, depth, pain, realism.
Artistic taste is the ability to make a skinner's box not feel like one. This skill is being lost over time because degenerate creators lack it, and because degenerate consumers need less of it. Gatcha games like blue archive are incredibly simple. It's solely the art which makes it feel like a game or experience rather than an arcade demo. The reason it's so popular in the first place is because Asia has a higher baseline of artistic sense (e.g. less degeneracy) than the west.
Notice how MMORPGs have less and less PVP, That's degeneracy. Notice the increase in slice-of-life/slow-life animations, that's degeneracy too. Video games getting easier? You guessed it, degeneracy. When games becomes more arcade-like, it's because of degeneration (Diablo 2 (good), Diablo 3 (meh), Diablo Immortal (trash)). A very strong identifier is "mixing things which does not belong". A medival RPG game starts giving players bunny ear vanity items? The degeneration has started. Magic the gathering collabs with modern media? Again, degeneration (exact same degeneration as Fortnite). This form usually mirrors enshittification, as this kind of value extraction speeds up the demise of said media. Most degeneration may be downstream of short-term optimization.
Nietzsches complaints of "last men" as a category, and the auto-domestication of the modern man belong to the same categories that I've listed above. Religious descriptions of degeneracy overlap as well (Kali Yuga, Christian categories of sin, etc).
Even the ratio of "Creator/Engager/Lurker" is changing online, and that this mirrors consumer culture is no coincidence. An online community will feel massively better when the ratio is 3/17/80 than when it's 2/12/86, and the 2000s internet felt better because the ratio of creators was higher.
Anyone felt how online memes went from funny to relatable? And then people started fabricating things (lying) when they ran out of reality to draw from. And then they they started using examples from fiction. And then they gave up on that too, and just started sharing whatever wishful thinking came to them (usually as a subversion (i.e. the opposite) of reality or fiction. Comics in which hot girls are interested in the viewer for no good reason, or in which demons are kind, or in which succubi are loyal, etc). This progression is not much unlike how an actual loser would day dream and lie to themselves as their life falls apart. Suffering from X? Just imagine the opposite of X, have the two balance out, and enjoy the results. Lazy and crude manipulation of the human reward system. And don't get me started on irony and the psychology which leads to it.
This might look like a whole mess of unrelated things. It's not. The minimum set of things you need to counter all form of degeneracy is {Taste, standards, beauty over utility, enjoying life over trying to endure it}, and these things even overlap. If I were to turn this into a question, it would be "Does anyone else notice this, and how may we slow it down?"
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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