I don’t think we’ll ever be able to eliminate friction from “real” work and therein lies the reason why these games are popular. Real work requires sacrifice, sweat, disappointment and all the rest. These games allow you some semblance of the gratification without the friction.
You can reach 20 woodcutting in Runescape in < 1 hour as a complete noob to the game. The equivalent irl skill would take months or years of training. Video games artificially speed up the process of skill acquisition with a satisfactory level of dopamine release such that you will keep going.
Indeed and this time reduction is present in a great many forms. Imagine if a growing season in Stardew Valley took actual months instead of minutes, or if crossing a mid-sized kingdom on horseback took several weeks instead of the 20 minutes or so in most video games.
Counterpoint: Sailaway does model real-world travel time and distance, although in that case it's the whole point. I actually kind of wish there was a Euro Truck Simulator mod or something that would make the distances realistic too.
We won't eliminate all friction. But I'm not satisfied with any answer that neglects finding out what we can eliminate.
Cooking for your family feels very different than cooking at a corporate canteen, yet both are forms of useful work, and both involve some friction. The game makers know it - Euro Truck Simulator is full of both challenges (deadlines) and boredom (traffic jams), and I wouldn't call it frictionless.
So, again, which friction can stay and which needs to go?
I see what you’re saying. And I agree it would be nice to remove friction where possible but I think it would happen in very specific, local contexts instead of some revolution around work itself. In some ways work is in and of itself a process of trying to remove friction and what can and should be removed is mostly dependent on the person or org and their goals. I also think it will just be whack-a-mole and removing some friction will just uncover another form of friction. So to me the question of what can stay and what can go just sounds like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.
I think that's a pessimistic view. You posit that humanity will never be able to extract more than a tiny bit of the satisfaction lots of people feel when they are useful to the community.
On the other side, a lot of anarchist thought has been proposing that smaller communities make people more satisfied, by removing emotional friction.
Still from another direction, not all work needs to be tightly economically controlled, or justified, yet finances permeate work as pure overhead.
Dismissing the idea that work can be better than it is today seems like a passive surrender.
> You posit that humanity will never be able to extract more than a tiny bit of the satisfaction lots of people feel when they are useful to the community.
The abilities to feel satisfaction and be useful are not directly linked to eliminating friction.
I don't know anything about anarchist perspectives on smaller communities but I would actually hazard a guess that smaller communities would increase emotional friction but also the quality and sense of fulfillment that come from being deeply emotionally linked to others.
I don't dismiss the idea that work can be better but I think there's an average amount of friction in work that can't be reduced. And from my perspective it makes me feel like I gain strength, courage, and skill from working at something that is always going to be difficult in some way and to some degree.
To answer your original question as directly as possible: I think if an instance of friction disadvantages or oppresses someone or a group of people then we should seek to eliminate it.
Yes. That’s what makes it work. I think we sometimes have a perspective that we can optimize the struggle out of everything but that’s simply not true. It’s okay for life and the things we do with our life to be difficult and mundane. They’re not always so but it’s not a problem or out of the natural order of things when they are.
