
Playing with Toys While People Are Dying - madradavid
https://medium.com/@mode7games/playing-with-toys-while-people-are-dying-f8ed35ef8b25
======
leoedin
There's a school of thought[1] that suggests that video games are a
contributing factor in the steady fall of crime in the West. Crime is
overwhelmingly perpetrated by young men, who also happen to be the main
consumers of video games.

[1]: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/04/19/as-video-
gam...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/04/19/as-video-game-sales-
climb-year-over-year-violent-crime-continues-to-fall/)

~~~
dukeluke
It could also be because of lower lead levels, a less competitive culture,
greater empathy due to mass media, or a side effect of mens' generally lower
testosterone levels. We don't really have a clue what really is causing the
drop.

~~~
DougN7
I'm curious how/why we have a less competitive culture. With globalization and
automation it seems like at least the job market is more competitive.

~~~
dukeluke
It seems like most men in general are less masculine and more defensive,
considerate, and anxious. Very few men have close guy friends anymore, and
most men in the media and news nowadays are androgenous. I think men and boys
nowadays are really chastised in school for being masculine, and it carries
over into their adult lives. With the loss of masculinity, male
competitiveness goes with it.

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tehwalrus
Computer games, and the stock market, initially look pointless.

Games are, as the article puts it, frivolous toys, and the second-by-second
stock market is a zero sum game casino. (Buying stocks is emphatically _not_
investing in a company, except tangentially. It is principally a speculation
on the price of an asset, and no money actually goes to the company when you
buy stock through a broker).

In fact, they both do have some economic outputs, although their value is
quite hard to measure:

Games are entertainment. They provide escapism and fun when we are bored or
sad. This improves our wellbeing.

The stock market's output is difficult to see, but it is there: they compute
the value of stock. Why we need to know the value of stock to such fine
resolution in time, I do not know. But we're spending all those quants' brains
finding it.

~~~
mozumder
> Games are entertainment. They provide escapism and fun when we are bored or
> sad. This improves our wellbeing.

Does it?

I think sheer boredom improves our well-being.

As usual "What doesn't kill you makes you tougher". Escapism and fun leaves
you vulnerable to the brutal real-world.

~~~
iopq
Yeah, we shouldn't have books, games, websites, sports, arts, music, etc.
because fun is bad

~~~
mozumder
Lots of those are work or productivity related. Actual fun things are already
banned.

If it's fun, it's most likely already illegal.

~~~
iopq
Starcraft is productivity related?

~~~
VLM
Micromanaging a zerg rush isn't productive management?

Some of the better minecraft mods require some exercising of your 3-d design
abilities and budgeting skills and navigation of dependency trees. There is a
certain lower cognitive limit to make a cobbleworks in modded minecraft and
above that there's a lot of engineering going to time/space tradeoffs and
energy budgets and various design criteria. Not to mention making it look nice
and troubleshoot-able.

There are also secondary effects such as you can make a great pile of economic
activity by shoving kids thru schools to give them skills that are not
economically useful in general or if you have X economically useful job slots
opening per year you can make twice the tuition revenue by graduating 2X the
number of kids and blaming the individual for individual failings when the
macro effect of 2x supply impacts 1x demand. Or the school produces grads
ignoring the effects of ageism, racism, sexism, but the employers are
certainly under no illusion they need to be as color blind as the schools.
Then when the only work they can find is as baristas or maybe nothing at all,
perhaps a lively home life as a minecraft player will tranquilize them to the
point of society lasting a little longer, squeezing blood out of a couple more
rocks, getting that national aggregate student loan debt to a higher score
than ever, before the great reboot that rights all wrongs.

~~~
iopq
I have a lot of managing experience. Can I send you my resume? I'm a C Zerg
user on the iccup server.

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grabcocque
Composing music while people are dying

Writing novels while people are dying

Making movies while people are dying

Growing plants while people are dying

Going on road trips to Mexico while people are dying

Making tea and donuts while people are dying

...

What?

~~~
ominous
Making more people while people are dying, for that matter.

Cursing future generations with death by giving birth to your children. You
monster.

~~~
gspetr
That's the biggest problem I have with life itself.

I never asked for this.

And yes, my vision is augmented.

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chha
Nothing new. During WW2 (and probably other wars) gambling houses, racetracks,
pubs, hotels and many other similarly frivolous services had lots of traffic
and customers. People simply needed to escape from reality every now and then
and enjoy themselves.

Sure, we can do more to help the world. But if we're unable to live ourselves
we can't do sh*t.

~~~
NumberCruncher
Some people consider human consciousness as a singularity in the human
evolution which shouldn't have evolved at all. Human consciousness, as a
powerfull problem solving tool, helped us to climb to the top of the food
chain and to conquer the whole planet. We can sustain human life under water,
in the arctic, even in space. The most of us in the developed world have no
existential problems any more, don't starve or freeze to death, don't get
eaten by wolves. But human consciousness has a big drawback. It can not be
turned off, even if all of the problems needing a solution are gone. So why
not work on [put a big burning issue here] to feel occupied and having a
meaningful life?

There come video games and other drugs helping us turning our consciousness
off, at least for a couple of hours.

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casion
I read the article, and I still feel like I need a tl;dr. Seems very
disjointed with no thesis.

What is the point here?

~~~
moonshinefe
Yeah, I don't get it either. It reads like someone who smoked a bunch of pot
and is spouting off various, insanely vaguely related points but with no clear
thesis whatsoever.

~~~
VLM
aka social media. I think thats the style they're intentionally aiming for.
Come here instead of facebook.

Interestingly you can make a good comparison between "competitive like
collectors" on social media and gaming.

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itg
On the other hand, thanks in part to gaming, the proliferation of gpu's has
helped out in reducing the cost and putting r&d money into making them better,
so now we have inexpensive ways to use them for machine learning models.

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partycoder
If the people with the highest impact on the environment (people from
developed countries that are more likely to play video games) get distracted
from eating, going out using motorized vehicles, procreating, etc... it is not
necessarily bad.

Our lifestyle is not sustainable and we haven't figured out a solution yet.
Maybe electronic entertainment helps mitigating the sustainability problem.

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closed
It sounds like a lot of the top level comments are missing the point,and think
this article is simply about how video games are not useful. I didn't get that
at all (the first few paragraphs are confusing imo, though), and the paragraph
below seems to highlight his relationship with games.

> Working in games has given me so much, and I know that’s true of many others
> as well. I can’t wait to help finish and release Tokyo 42 with the brilliant
> duo at SMAC Games: it’s such a vibrant thing that I can see it causing a big
> stir. I’m looking forward to getting stuck into Frozen Synapse 2 and
> assisting Ian in fulfilling his vision for it, then moving on to a new
> creative collaboration we’ve started to discuss. Games allow me to use all
> of my slightly weird collection of half-abilities at once: I don’t think
> anything else would do that. They’re a way that I can work on things which
> really exist, which don’t just evaporate into the air.

~~~
majewsky
How does this assess the utility of video games?

~~~
closed
The article or that specific quote from the article? The article seems to be
directed toward people developing video games, from a developer of video
games. That video games have utility in a general sense seems to be a given in
the article.

(although he may feel some have more utility than others.)

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Paul_S
This article is all over the place. I'll ignore the games are "frivolous"
angle as they obviously are and that's not a bad thing - you can say that
about any sort of entertainment.

With my gamer hat on I want to comment on the eye-catching section with all
the negative reviews of modern non-games.

The author is being passive aggressive about it but I think it's safe to
assume he's upset that people who buy games expect to receive games for the
money they pay. This is good advice for any product: deliver on what the
product promises. If you sell a car with comfortable seats but no engine maybe
what you should've made was a novelty sofa instead. The fault is with your
product not with the "stupid consumer" who doesn't appreciate the super comfy
seats. I'm sorry I'm making this obvious point but somehow the author managed
to miss it.

~~~
jedimastert
I'm pretty sure the author is being ironic

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smoyer
Most of our entertainment in the western world world could also be classified
as frivolous ... how are video games any different than movies, books or even
art? Those who spend an excessive amount of time doing any of those things may
have a problem but human creativity shouldn't need arbitrary constraints. I
would argue that the military-industrial complex is far more detrimental to
society both in wasted engineering talent and in directly contributing to
suffering.

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tim333
People have been dying since people existed and keep doing so. (See The Onion
for details [http://www.theonion.com/article/world-death-rate-holding-
ste...](http://www.theonion.com/article/world-death-rate-holding-steady-
at-100-percent-1670))

The best hope to fix it is to move to computer simulation so games developers
may be our saviours.

------
DaveSapien
Games can, and mostly do, have shamanic value the same as any art (music,
film, literature, etc). Even the "dumb" ones. They help people connect and
bond and relieve stress. They tell meaningful stories and connect with
archetypes guiding people through tough times. They help people find moments
of focus (zen?) and release...and much more.

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Kenji
The relentless and smug moralising in this article makes me feel nauseous.
This kind of simplistic worldview is highly toxic. Art inspires. Without any
doubt, computer games have inspired a large number of people to get into
programming or even mathematics, and this in turn could lead to significant
technological progress that may not have happened otherwise. Etc.

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DrScump
There _are_ games that do good, like Fold-It[0] and Mozak.

That is, they are manual research aids packaged as games; playing them fills a
genuine need.

[0] [http://fold.it/portal/](http://fold.it/portal/)

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sergiotapia
I'm gonna quote my favorite TV show:

> Ah, no, no, no. But, Dennis, look. "Plutonium smuggled into Syria."

> That's gonna change my life drastically.

> That's gonna change everyone's lives!

> No one can go to Syria anymore for vacation!

\---

Life's too short and my monkeysphere is too small to worry about people have
way around the world.

~~~
Udik
And yet, from this quick humorous exchange, you've absorbed the notion that
Syria is an evil country where bad people might be accumulating material for
weapons of mass destruction.

~~~
sergiotapia
Not at all, how exactly did I put that across to you.

~~~
Udik
Of course I don't know anything about you, you might actually be from Syria,
or be an expert in Syria and the Middle East, or have anyway a good knowledge
of the country and its situation and people. I only wanted to point out that
the fragment of dialogue you reported, with its casual piece of negative
information regarding a foreign country, is in fact a good example of how
political propaganda works, be it intentional or (most likely, in this case)
not. Repeat that enough in enough different forms, and millions of people will
be perfectly sure that Syria is a threat to world peace.

The dialogue appears to be from 2007, just four years later the USA started
getting involved and taking sides in the Syrian civil war.

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kozak
I think the same argument applies to movies and any kind of fiction in
general.

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ousta
can we pleas downvote this garbage. people didn't need videogames not to care
about others. if not video games greatly contributed , as a form of art, to
help people live better lives

