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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?"
I can relate.
I think it's nostalgia: creators have trouble finding new ideas, so reuse old ones, but since consumers are desensitized, less exciting parts are cut. Hence Genshin's rewards without the quest, slice of life's wholesome moments without pain, etc.
I don't think putting back the less exciting parts would work, even though they're important (particularly the delayed gratification that yields longer-lasting satisfaction). If that's all it takes, there are already more than a lifetime's worth of old RPGs and niche animes/movies. I think we need "breakthroughs" that create new genres (or popularize previously niche genres), and that requires (most visible) creators to regain their creativity.
Why aren't (most visible) creators creative anymore? I suspect it's partly because of centralization of distribution: there are creative artists that you don't see, or potential creative artists that give up (or don't start) because they don't expect to be seen. Also because of LLMs, modern tools/techniques and asset packs: they help creation but not original creation, and creators that start relying on them become too lazy to stop. Also because of homogenized culture, and people too embarrassed to express themselves. Ultimately, these are all speculation.
You make a good point about us running out of ideas. Novelty might be needed because all consumption makes us tolerant to all similar consumption. If there's only so much enjoyment to be made from each kind of stimuli (because one builds tolerance), then socities general competition in making new content will cause mass desensitization over time.
I consider densitization a cause of degeneracy. People who always want more and more sooner or later end up doing or engaging in weird things. Stronger stimuli being created also means that other people build tolerance more quickly. I think the set of new things which can be created is quite limited, since it appeals to a limited set of things which the brain sees value in. But I did think of another solution - and that's hindering the process which builds tolerance. It's hard to explain how one would do this, but when a person says "Let that sink in", they're essentially saying "feel the weight of this stimuli instead of reducing it".
I agree on centralization. It's harder for "small players" to create, just like it's hard for new companies to get started. So everything ends up getting ran by a few giants, and these giants do not experiment much, and they only appeal to the average consumer.
As tools become standardized, the things you can create using them become standard as well. If I make a game, I will likely use pre-existing libraries, game engines, and design principles. Everything becomes building blocks to build 'new' things from, but creating novel building blocks is difficult. Essentially, I'm saying the same things as you, just in slightly different ways. I find it difficult to add further insight. It merely annoys me that these dynamics exist, and that many are blind to the limits imposed by them. They only see that "technology is getting better", and then they assume that this means everything new is better than everything old, and that going further in the same direction is pure improvement (that no tradeoffs exist)
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