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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?"
You know, I'm doing the most "real" gaming I've done in years, I downloaded World of Warcraft TBC Classic Anniversary, 20 years after playing the original. And mostly I'm loving it and realizing that it's just the game for me. But Blizzard has made tons of little QoL changes, little things to make the game smoother and easier, and it's not that they ruin things, it's the way that the original was so intricately designed that even small changes throw things off.
Leveling is I think someone said around 30% easier in classic than it was in the original. Which itself is good, and for what it's worth I'm not sure that I'd play as much if I were grinding out one level at a time rather than blazing through, I'm not a bored bone idle teenager with no friends anymore I'm a busy adult who wants to relax for an hour or so. I'm not trying to prove anything or be better than anyone, so there's no reason for me to care. Except, and especially if you park your toon in an inn when you log out and get the 2x rested xp bonus, leveling faster makes questlines and areas all wrong. Especially if, like me, you love doing a PUG 5 man dungeon as basically the highest expression of WoW as a game; with rested XP you can basically gain a level running an instance, plus sometimes ending up on the wrong side of the world, and as a result you level right past the questing area you were in the middle of, and what was a pretty good storyline is ruined or cut short, because by the time I get to the final bit I'm 2-3 levels too high and not getting XP for it.
Another example: you get your mount much earlier. Which is good, nobody likes toddling along slowly to get to the summons in the southern barrens when your nearest fight point is ashenvale, but it also throws off the rhythm because at that level you have less time to save the gold up, especially with faster leveling, and I had to go back and power level herbalism to catch it up to my current zones and raise auction house cash, because otherwise I'd find myself unable to earn the gold necessary. Which, I could just not get the mount until the traditional level 40 (iirc) but what's the fun of playing poverty spec?
And that's the rub, strictly speaking I could choose to play differently but I won't. Rather than making sure to park in an inn or city for the rested XP bonus, I could make sure to leave my character outside to prevent it. I could do the quests anyway even though they deliver zero or minimal XP, to finish the story. Etc. But I'm not going to do those things, I want to play the game according to the incentives. Which means at least a little intuitive min-maxing.
I do think a big part of it is the shift in the audience. TBC Classic is being played by 34 year old me, I have a hundred other things to do, I want a mild distraction not a new avocation. Which I think is a growing market over time in gaming, I would guess that every year after 1998 the total market share of video games occupied by 13-25 year old boys, the core hardcore gamer constituency, has gotten smaller. The market for video games has gotten older, more feminine, and consequently less competitive, less dedicated to the craft, more casual, every single year. Eventually Video Games as a category have become something that middle aged moms engage in just as often as 16 year olds fueled by Mountain Dew and thwarted hormones.
I only model the decrease in vitality - it could be because of the average age increasing, rather than many of the other causes I'm worried about (nihilism, decreasing T-levels, worsening attention spans, softening of humanity). I don't just think younger people have more time, I think they have different attitudes towards life, and that these make them seek out resistance/challenge more often. But I only noticed this decrease, you've made me question if I've gotten the cause right.
You make a good point, but I cannot tell for certain that these changes aren't a bad sign. Maybe we cannot tolerate slowness anymore because we're less used to waiting (and inconvenience in general)? I personally watch English Youtube videos on x2 speed because it feels like they take forever to get to the point, but how do I know this is not a form of brainrot, rather than a sign of high processing speed (the lie I tell myself)?
To normalize my metrics - I'm worried that people increasingly prefer Easy Mode over Hard Mode adjusted for their own ability. This would mean that people increasingly dislike challenging themselves, because all effort has started feeling like a chore. This could be because of the rat race, which makes people prefer more objective rewards (e.g. money) than subjective rewards. In short, people could care less about their own experience, because their brain recognizes that having a good experience doesn't put food on the table. One may become the sort of person who doesn't understand why anyone would enjoy listening to the birds chirping. They'd be genuinely confused about the point/purpose/reward.
In any case, I feel quite confident about the recent decrease in quality across the board. It feels as if quantity is replacing quality.
When guys brag to me about the speed they listen to podcasts and youtube videos, I think of the Woody Allen joke: I took a course in speed reading and I got so good I read War and Peace in two hours. It's about Russia.
When you say that you are confident that quality is down across the board, have you tried watching some real trash from the past? Marathon The Nanny or Yes, Dear (as a very tired and pregnant Mrs. FiveHour has recently), listen to the top-40 straight through from a few random weeks in the 80s and 90s, drive a Ford Taurus and a Chevy Cavalier from 1998, and tell me again how everything is getting worse.
I think what's breaking down is less that things are worse, as that the selection channels and mechanisms we used to use are getting worse. You talk about Steam search being useless, I think that's become a problem across domains. Quality clothing has never been cheaper or easier to find, but it's also the case that you can't just rely on spending money anymore, buying high cost brands does not guarantee anything anymore. Netflix and HBO used to exclusively produce good stuff, every time they made an original it was something I wanted to watch, now they mostly make trash.
There was lots of trash in the past, but it used to be easier to find the good stuff. Or maybe I've lost the plot and can't find it.
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