"Cast off the crutch that kills the pain
The red flag waving never meant the same
The kids of tomorrow don't need today
When they live in the sins of yesterday"
Billy Talent - Red Flag
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Peterson: "if you fail a few times at attaining something of importance because you see that you have no discipline, then a logical response to that is to cease positing goals."
Farrell: "Absolutely. And that's exactly what happens, but we have, through technology, sort of, a perfect escape, and that escape is into video games, where you can identify with a hero, and you can lose the game as often as you wish to with nobody noticing, and then as you begin to get better with certain manipulations, you can play that game with certain types of people and increase your skillset at the game, but you're never able to translate that into everyday life, and so you start becoming addicted to the game, which are designed to increase your dopamine, without achieving anything."
Peterson: "[...] the thing about video games is that they do require the development of skill. But the immediate reward is built in along with the delayed reward, because otherwise the game wouldn't be fun for someone who's learning. So, the problem is that a lot of real-life games aren't necessarily fun while you're learning them, because you have to attain a certain level of mastery and that requires discipline. [...] Many highly skilled endeavors [...] requires an apprenticeship where there's a lot of grinding, there's a lot of just disciplined repetition."
(normally I'd transcribe their hemming and hawing for poots and giggles, but in this case it proved excessive)
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"Suffers from a large case of pay to win."
TVTropes going all post-ironic on reality's ass.
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One of my early posts here addressed a growing concern that mobile games were threatening to overtake PC games in popularity, and due to their addictive and accessible simplemindedness might kill PC gaming altogether. I dissented, pointing out that
1) PC games had already been fighting this battle to a draw with consoles for the previous thirty years and
2) shifting the mass market's buying power away from PCs as a platform would leave more room for quality as opposed to sheer mass appeal, would leave PC games to capitalize on their strengths of depth and complexity instead of constantly struggling to outdo Mortal Kombat in mindless button-mashing.
Eight years later, phone games have not only overtaken but doubled computer games' market share, raking in over half while PCs and consoles split the remainder evenly. Further validating my predictions, not only have mobile games cut into the growth of the console market more heavily than PCs', but the past eight years saw the cRPG revival (now undone by Microsoft) and a steady proliferation of TBS, puzzle games, managerial games, survival horror and other genres which had been more or less ignored from 2000-2015.
I can never listen to Warren Farrell for long without his sotto voce headshrinker demeanor grating but I can't deny the great debt owed to his work toward men's rights. I've also said before that I can't entirely hate Jordan Peterson because while I usually disagree with some step of his reasoning, his prima facie observations about modern society hit their mark. However, the moment these two venerable pates started nodding in the direction of electronic games, I braced myself for the inevitable Magoo moment.
Because they're old. That was the joke.
At least I got a good hearty guffaw out of the adorable notion that video games lack grinding. Sure, sure, Peterson wasn't entirely wrong in that the EXP / gold / rep "grinding" in video games is reinforced by a trickle of rewards, contrariwise in the real world nobody's standing by to hand you a lollipop every time you install a spark plug while leveling up your car repair skill. Both of them nonetheless make two unwarranted assumptions: that games can be represented by Pac-Man, and that real-life games are worth endeavoring in the first place.
Let's quickly knock down that first assumption. Even back in 2014, another one of my posts pointed out that games like Europa Universalis or Mount&Blade, which did not dangle constant preset rewards before players but let them choose and pace their own goals and plan of action within a larger system, boasted a smaller but highly appreciative following. Hell, I've ranted for at least a hundred pages about the
need for players to posit their own virtual goals instead of merely reacting to reward stimuli. I even dragged Aristotle into it! So as soon as Farrell and Peterson start talking about men playing video games I'd have to ask - which men and which games?
Second, as to getting one's dopamine fix "without achieving anything" I'd have to question the unwarranted assumption that highly skilled endeavors in the real world are worth endeavoring in the first place. This came up as I was trying to wrap my head around the target audience of a real virtual world (pun both intended and defied) a true MMO, and realized that paradoxically, the life built in a game can be more thoroughly one's own, can more meaningfully reflect personal intent and effort, than the depersonalized labor of industrial society. Even with a doctorate, what exactly do you achieve in the real world? Manufacturing ten million more Pokemon plushies to stuff landfills? A 5% less toxic motor oil to justify 500% more unnecessary automobiles? A hundred million more Coca-Cola bottles? A 3% fluffier breed of poodle? Ten thousand more skyscrapers and private jets for the Trumps of the world? Realistically, what gets so laughably puffed up as "gainful employment" boils down to sacrificing your life in service of megacorporations cannibalizing each other. The vast majority of people, rich or poor, smart or stupid, will never have a chance to do anythng meaningful or productive; if you ever do, it'll be by sheer dumb luck. You will never be more than a henchman for Goldfinger in his struggle to destroy his competition, not to build, create, invent. Real-life endeavors have predominantly been endeavored by people raised
in a society which "tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years, then they expect you to pick a career", under the false assumption that if
you just rise high enough in social rank you will escape being stepped
on, that by stepping on others you will ease the pain on your own back - the cruelest lie, as mass media treat us to endless examples of the wealthy and ultra-wealthy still haunted by insecurity and the myriad psychoses of social betterment.
And so I sublimate my productivity into lotophagy, and will continue to don, as often as I can, that despised skin I hide under a rock.
Serial Experiments Lain's end credits were obviously designed to teeter between menacing and serene, panning out from the vulnerable waif, embryonic, sinking into the visceral tangle of electronics increasingly consuming her life. Such themes are at least as old as microchips. I could easily achieve the same effect by tracking Case's obsession in Neuromancer, but a picture's worth a thousand words and Lain, that gender-flipped autopoietic anima gestating in that post-human ravel, has always struck me as the ideal illustration of electronic escapism.
The phrase "identify with a hero" misses the mark so widely as to veer into open insult, and here we need to return to the question of which boys / men and which games our luminaries are addressing. The vast majority of gamers are now thumbing phone games, crushing candies and angrying birds, or at most calling duties on an eksbawks. Pocket computers rule the market. To me and quite a few others, however, a computer, a computer game, a virtual world, is something you plug yourself into, not something you carry in your pocket. It is a portal, an all-encompassing second skin, not a pocket talisman you rub for dopamine. TV, alcohol, sports and religion provided escape to stupid men long before electronic games, but the fruit ninjas are not the ones you hoped would be "attaining something of importance" are they? Your fight's with me, the unproductive geek decades running. You'd rather have this blog be a thousand pages on boosting sewage system efficiency instead of a thousand pages on the finer points of goblin-slaying, no matter how astute my observations on goblin-slaying.
Games allow identification not just with "the hero" on screen, but more importantly with a persona or playstyle of one's own devising. For all that complaints like Farrell's and Peterson's (and many others) are worded as toward the populace at large, their true issue is not with the 90+% of the game market which is a mere stand-in for previous decades' movies and sports, which relies only on passive reaction to stimuli. The new factor these past few decades has come in the form of truly complex games allowing one to become both the lotus-eater and the lotus eaten, to mold a borrowed fantasy for personal consumption, and that addresses a very different segment of the population.
You might complain about Call of Duty but you're really scared of Dwarf Fortress and Kerbal Space Program. The true worry is that the small minority of intelligent, creative young boys can finally access escapist activities complex enough to occupy even their attentions, and may not grow up into the unshrugging Atlases on whom the system depends to continue functioning. To continue cannibalizing. To continue enslaving. Because so much of our world depends on the most intelligent young men finding no outlet for their desire to challenge themselves except in stepping on others' necks on the wage slave ladder.
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