"Imagine that a new language form came into being at the turn of the 20th century - an audiovisual language form that first took the shape of cinema and then became, in time, the common currency of modern television. Imagine that because making statements in this language depends on an expensive industrial process, only a handful of elite specialists are trained to use it. Imagine that, although there was public anxiety about the potentially corrupting influence of the new language at its birth, it was perceived not as a language at all but as a medium of popular entertainment, and in this guise, the language has gradually colonized us as if it were the vernacular speech of some conquering foreign power. Finally, imagine waking up one day to discover that we had mistaken the language for a mode of dreaming, and in the process have become massively illiterate in what has turned into the primary language form, one that not only surrounds us materially but that, as language forms tend to do, also invades our minds. What would we do if that happened?" - David Cook, History of Narrative Film. written in 2003.
"Television shows are ads for ads." - Victor Vazquez of Das Racist interviewed in 2010
By the early 90s America was fluent in narrative television, a language with entire grammatical structures in service of commercial spots. Since then, the form of television has shifted and expanded to accommodate new modes of addiction. "Reality television," on the ideological front, advanced a capitalist party line that episodic television and its relationships with consumption are what actually happens in real life. Huge production budgets and new technology led to cinema-quality narrative sustained for, using Mad Men as an example, 92 hours. Netflix is now valued more than three times as much as HBO. The proliferation of tolls extends beyond subscription channels to VPN subscriptions and mindless copyright litigation at all levels. Even Youtube channels, and the thousands of minor sites willing to host what Youtube won't, present new possibilities for "must see" TV that can be produced by "anybody." So we can call some of the above hypotheses plausible.
I bring up television first, as the industry has evolved and crystallized for so long that the horrible side effects sound trite now - "TV rots your brain? No shit? It's formulaic? Here's my boy Joseph Campbell to explain why formulaic is actuall, Good. Memes" might say an irony-minded liberal of the modern day. "They show McDonalds commercials in the maternity ward? Those fries are delicious tho owO" and so forth. But television has also had to jostle against and blend with a newer language that penetrates more of our daily life - the language of the game.
My (25f) fiance (25m) of 3 years lost his entire savings betting on the NCAA tournament (about $30000). This isn't "my" money but I have to leave him right? Relationships (self.relationships)
submitted 2 hours ago by ...
Spoiler!
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house." Robert Heinlein in "Time Enough for Love" written in 1973
If you are the kind of psychopath who is able to live in bourgeois Amerika without freaking the fuck out every day and just smashing everything you see, until, whether by smashing or your own death, the nation disappears from your sight, you might give the above ex boyfriend the benefit of the doubt for a second. Maybe the odds were way in his favor and he only had a 1% chance of not doubling his money, and this was like a meteorite or a punishment from G-d. Sorry. no. He stood to win $1500 initially and his logic was that first-seeded NCAA teams don't lose.
What's "disgusting" here? His innumeracy. And we should be clear that innumeracy is a natural human state. Our basic mathematical sense is logarithmic and considers orders of magnitude (one, a few, many). Fine arithmetic distinction is demanded of us to cooperate with capital - to mind the time, manage wages, and understand property. And people who can't even play the numbers, who hit on 18, activate our highly trained senses of distaste and are called "degenerate." Gambling's power to spark addiction is a crude exploitation of innumeracy. It is mammalian to seek patterns in randomness, so a system that spits out rewards randomly will seem highly ordered, functioning according to a hidden algorithm. It's when there is just a percent chance of a reward that the game is most addictive. When the pattern is obvious, the addictive potential plummets.
This is where the union between gambling and video games becomes obvious. Just as the television industry has evolved from the simple act-break cliffhanger in order to wrangle new flows of capital generated by higher rates of addictive behavior, video games no longer rely on the slap of the Game Over to keep players hooked. The creators of phone apps, especially, have made no secret of the goal to manipulate players, and some of the larger MMOs have brought strange parapsychiatrists called "economists" in to write about their experiments in mass manipulation. Notice the new normal of constant, active "development" of game software that is as much about changing the rules (to make the game more addictive) as bugfixes.
Most interesting to me is how the RPG has been stripped down to its rotten core. The formula of the RPG is, "You can be measured. Increase these measurements so that you can..." These measurements can be boolean / categorical (I have the Sword of Ass Fart, or I don't) but are most commonly numbers. STR CON DEX INT WIS CHA define you, and the bigger those numbers, the more likely you can achieve... Well, at some point, somebody rightly said that the "achievement" part is clearly not why people are playing these games. They're playing them because... the numbers get bigger. You don't have to have the "so that you can" bit. The measurements are a task in themselves. So now we have the Clicker genre where the measurement is the face of the game. Make it bigger because... it's satisfying. To have a predictable system where you can succeed, feels kind of good actually, even if the reward is just the word "success."
This is one core unit of the grammar of the game. The need to increase a value or measurement. It relates directly back to the capitalist-idealist conception that reality, and what matters, is what you choose to perceive and value. It reinforces that conception, because increasing that value is pleasurable, even when it's irrelevant, on its face, to ones well-being, the quality of the environment, the ppm of co2 in the atmosphere, anything at all. As long as it's a measurement of you.
Now I look across the range of interactions with the digitized world and I see only games. Social networks ask us to speak the language of the game in a place where numbers would never have mattered before. "How many friends do you have?" was once one of those half-clever questions, "food for thought" or whatever. Route mapping software provides an idealized view of a world of interconnected arrows, warping travel into a Taylorist sprint from one intersection to the next. You can equip yourself with the restaurant with the greatest +delivery speed, and then force deliverymen into competition with the might of your online ratings. The normal walking around you do as a human can be counted, and when you squint at that number, it looks a lot like exercise. Even television is now written alongside the language of the game, where your personalized algorithms - your digital 'traits' - are responsible for whether you get possibly hundreds of minutes of distraction. Catching myself scrolling endlessly through an online video catalog, I realize what I've learned - the mouse wheel will summon a great film if rolled down enough times. The machine of addiction wants to bring entertainment to every act in bourgeois life - an involved entertainment where you are the hero and the measurements you shepherd are personal to you. The end
cars posted:basket ate my balls
Well, at some point, somebody rightly said that the "achievement" part is clearly not why people are playing these games. They're playing them because... the numbers get bigger. You don't have to have the "so that you can" bit. The measurements are a task in themselves. So now we have the Clicker genre where the measurement is the face of the game. Make it bigger because... it's satisfying. To have a predictable system where you can succeed, feels kind of good actually, even if the reward is just the word "success."
i still remember when i first played it, i was an orc who was semi skilled in some kind of weapon, but i had an different one. so to kill a few rats, i had to use my racial power to be able to hit anything, kill one rat, than wait 24 hours till it recharged, then kill another one, ad naseum.
they released a walkthrough-type book, it was a fucking tome! i think i still have it, they put a lot of love into making a whole world.
edit: and you could be an abolitionist, freeing the slaves!
Edited by odobenidae ()
Petrol posted:rpgs are crap except snes zelda and chrono trigger and also switch zelda.
3 downvotes for insulting the good name of video games lol
odobenidae posted:
interesting how economic crises get ideological answers
kotaku posted:
"I never thought I'd see a guide on how to efficiently kill poor people," read one response. "Literal humanitarian crisis going on there. People starving to death. The guide's author thinks it's a good plan to not only kill them but to taunt them in their own language and teabag them on return... That's some pretty arsehole shit right there,"
Others, however, argued that... "This fucks the game's economy and breaks the rules," said one player responding to the guide. "I understand that Venezuela is fucked up, but jesus shit dude, there are better things to do with your goddamn time than farming gold. Things like learning something new or anything that can help your country get out of the bad situation."
...
"Runescape has always been dealing with enormous gold farming companies in China and other parts of the world," a Venezuelan player who goes by the handle Glow_Party claimed in a DM, "so what I can extrapolate from this is that the community seized the moment to blame one set of individuals even though they know these people will not make a difference in the market for Runescape gold."
poor runescape just can't catch a break
Apparently there was a virtual riot/nazi rally on runescape earlier because jagex (the developer) released an LGBT awareness update pic.twitter.com/NcfzEnPjIy
— Tiffany (@immortaltiff) April 5, 2018
surredner yourself to my posts...
toyotathon posted:planescape and new vegas, anything w chris avellone's prints
