I also really like to watch this oddball who cleans storm drains and culverts in his spare time. Yes, the word 'hydrology' may be imposing and latinate, but hydrology is what he does, equipped with gumboots and a rake. The culture and economy does not support him in this, wasting hours and hours of road work and concrete+steel etc to neglected preventative maintenance. Sometimes people call the cops on him, motorists splash him etc. My goddamn hero, though.
There are probably a dozen mobile games that provide this kind of 'ASMR'; unclogging a drain looks really fun. It's simple labor that most are capable of, yet it remains undone. The one lunatic who actually bothers to do it as a hobby racks up millions of views!
Edited by Belphegor ()
tears posted:what if the best video games ever made sucked complete ass
nice try but tetris does not suck ass
Belphegor posted:Some of these people are genuinely talented people with a lot to contribute to society but their labor-power is left to rot in these trivial pursuits.
...
Is it really so inconceivable that some of the people obsessively researching Mario Kart might have something to contribute to real science?
some of them do have technical jobs, and in a number of cases their professional talents are feeding into their hobby. (i gather this is more common than the converse of the hobby becoming a gateway to a profession.) though then we're left to think about what those jobs might be, and how ultimately even someone wildly skilled is still going to be deploying their labor in a way that's if not outright decided then at least channeled by the world market as it currently exists. i think it's a far bigger waste that someone skilled should ultimately find themselves designing gacha games for mobile phones than that they should happen to also deploy technical skills in their hobbies. and i think hobbies are probably okay to have, overall.
i also suspect that those consuming feelings that I Should Be Using Every Second Productively are probably more a cultural design of capital than a healthy channeling of the impulse to contribute positively to the world. like if you feel a sense of guilt because you blew all that time designing a D&D campaign for a handful of friends instead of better maximizing your time and writing that novel that you can commodify for the consumption of millions (or, realistically, dozens), that's probably capital's logic talking. i say, let the speedrunners have their pastime. hell, if you work at Raytheon or whatever, maybe even skip work for a bit while you shave another tenth of a second off a world record — a more productive use of your time.
ed: i'm really just kinda running with a thought moreso than directly responding, since i agree with your overall point
Edited by Constantignoble ()
A sort of obscure writer I like has been discussing this lately
( a post and some commments ...)
I do understand the powerful urge to redeem video games—but I think they are completely irredeemable in every way. They do give us an false version of the needs we need to fulfill as humans, but only at the expense of removing the natural desire to interact with reality. As with television and smartphones, they were not something found and then captured: they were produced at great expense to serve exactly the purpose we then complain about.
(the rest of this comment)
shots fired
Belphegor posted:Edit: sniped myself, dangit
I also really like to watch this oddball who cleans storm drains and culverts in his spare time. Yes, the word 'hydrology' may be imposing and latinate, but hydrology is what he does, equipped with gumboots and a rake. The culture and economy does not support him in this, wasting hours and hours of road work and concrete+steel etc to neglected preventative maintenance. Sometimes people call the cops on him, motorists splash him etc. My goddamn hero, though.
There are probably a dozen mobile games that provide this kind of 'ASMR'; unclogging a drain looks really fun. It's simple labor that most are capable of, yet it remains undone. The one lunatic who actually bothers to do it as a hobby racks up millions of views!
okay this guy is epic
shriekingviolet posted:i think the fantasy that you can just take blocks of time "wasted" on Leisure, seamlessly reallocate them to Labour, and boom Good Productivity happens is a piss bad idea trickling into our brains from amazon executives who want humanity to be their servile ant colony and should be opposed whenever it shows up
Yes, I can see your point, and I think it completes the contradiction: on the one hand, transforming the world to meet our needs is part of our species-being, a vital part of the good life. Yet the grind/hustle ethos of productivity is a sort of hybrid stick/carrot for us donkeys.
Then consider play: even our primate cousins revel in it; dice and balls and games are cultural universals, apparently. W.H. Auden said that though the poet may spend the evenings writing verses, and the peasant may spend them playing cards, both would be equally prepared to fight to the death for the right to play.
Yet I can't help but feel we are living in a time where 'play' is incredibly debased. This was Adorno's critique of the culture industry. Leisure time ought not to drug us into cheerfulness or 'kill time', but to be productive of stronger relationships and expanded imaginations.
Belphegor posted:Yet I can't help but feel we are living in a time where 'play' is incredibly debased. This was Adorno's critique of the culture industry. Leisure time ought not to drug us into cheerfulness or 'kill time', but to be productive of stronger relationships and expanded imaginations.
this reminds me of both christopher lasch and huizinga who wrote tracts about the debasement of play which have some superficial legitimacy, but which are immediately unsatisfying in some sense (primarily, because the idea of 'debasement' is lazy and carries with it the idealizing implication of nostalgia). in any case, huizinga's treatment of play was interesting because he completely rejected the productive rationalizations of play but still put together a theory where play is both inevitable and necessary (his argument was that play isn't a social institution among others but that all institutions develop from a more general play-instinct).
my thinking is that play has been co-opted in our culture in the same way all cultural products have been since the destruction of 'aesthetic' institutions which once informed them, namely for the valorization of capital. i think the bizarre thing in this modern incarnation is that the valorization of capital is also 'aesthetic' (in the sense of not having any utility in itself, its goal being not the enrichment of human life but of the reappropriation of surplus for generating surplus for its own sake) but with a perverse veneer of self-justifying pseudo-rationality. this completely separates it from other belief systems that worked through play, a profoundly aesthetic activity as huizinga says, in the past. more than the debasement of play as such, it seems like a co-opting of games and other forms of aesthetic activity towards the flattening and totalizing activity of profit accumulation around which these are only more specific parts; it just so happens that this form of activity grinds up human beings for production
as a secondary point i'd also say that there is some difficulty in analyzing play because the definition is so nebulous and vague. i dont think its a stretch, for example, to say that a game as a product and the user-side production of content for the game constitute two completely separate kinds, or dimensions, of play-activity, with a different relation to the social system in which they're situated
tears posted:maybe i'm naive but in the absence of material insecurity and without labour alienation im sure that peer support, welcoming attitudes to entry to fields, recognition of achievement and effort, encouragement, success, societal benefits of work and achievement, and self fulfillment are enough to get most things done to a similar level that someone holding a gun labeled "starvation" achieves currently
I think all of those changes would necessarily cause a fundamental shift in what people want to achieve and try to achieve and, even more fundamentally, what qualifies as "achievement"
tears posted:sorry, that post was aimed more at the "culvert management" crowd rather than the "when will someone make a decent video game" crowd
i accept this and instead direct My Posting universally, as Karl Marx would do.
damoj posted:Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:i got that disco elysium after all. haven't played much yet but it's pretty charming (or at least it is now i turned the narrator voice off). reminds me of an old lucasarts point and click adventure game more than anything.
won't spoil the ending but it does some amazing things with male loneliness/alienation/sexual frustration, so much so that i have a very "art as saviour" liberal idea that if only sad incels played the game they might not murder women or whatever. just a fleeting bit of liberalism. sorry about it
i finished the game. you were right. maybe not about the potential to save incels. i think this wouldn't resonate with men who haven't had a serious relationship already. but for all the talk about this game's politics i'm surprised how little i've heard about its real themes
Native American Confederation defeats USA rump states army.
Constantignoble posted:here's a product that's been out for about 10 years, including numerous rereleases and deployments to new platforms, and it's still dependent on large and fundamentally constrained community mod efforts to fix its issues because at no time has it ever added shareholder value to actually improve the thing beyond 64-bit refactoring
update: bethesda just announced that they unwrapped the mummy of skyrim and dug their tire pump out of the garage to re-re-re-re-reinflate it for the 10th anniversary — now with fishing
anyway after replaying it for a week or two (done now), i have all my complaints about this bundle of shareholder-friendly missed opportunities in one availability-heuristic-accessible bundle. between this and looking over their oeuvre overall from the last two decades i think i can finally conclude that morrowind was a fluke
i have no expectations for starfield and probably won't bother with it, but at the very least i can suppose that there's no way it could be as much of a trainwreck as fallout 76. this is a good position to take because even if i'm wrong, i'm wildly entertained
Constantignoble posted:morrowind was a fluke
damoj posted:
no recall or intervention can work in this place
the end of the last DLC let me nuke all of America on either side of the game map though so i did that. for some reason that got me the Evil ending, even after i stabbed the head cosplay guy and my robots disintegrated the head army guy. Also i walked out of my hotel room on the way to the last mission and on a whim, i put a .50 rifle round into the head of the Troop sniper “companion” at point blank range, the last enemy i killed in the open world. so overall 2 out of 5 for Fallout Las Vegas game.
gay_swimmer posted:I also shot Kaisar with my laser gun for not understanding Hegelian dialectic
i ended up doing this with the giant sky laser from the satellite. Caesar came charging out after that to hit me with his nintendo power glove while he was still on fire, so i killed him with the machete carried by the guy who takes your weapons away and was supposed to take the orbital-laser-aimer-gun when I came to the camp but didn't, because all the cosplayers wanted me dead for nuking their entire country the previous day and for some reason, that glitched out the mandatory part where they take your weapons away even when you're in disguise. It also made it so no one wanted to kill me at all so I just killed all of them and walked into Caesar's tent and pointed a giant death-ray gun at him while it beeped loudly and a bunch of targeting lasers came down out of the sky and slowly converged on his big stupid caesar chair. rip in pax
a bunch of people online have decided that this man, actor Brett Goldstein, is a computer-generated animation created for a popular TV show. many other people are making fun of them but what no one seems to understand is that those people think that because he looks like the default Video Game protagonist for the last 20 years.
BEIJING, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) -- Chinese authorities on Wednesday summoned leading online game enterprises and platforms, including Tencent and NetEase, for talks.
These authorities include the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA), the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
Online game companies and platforms for trading game accounts and game streaming were asked to profoundly understand the importance and urgency of preventing minors from online game addiction. They should implement relative regulations aimed at boosting youth development.
They were required to fully and faithfully impose the time limit on underage gamers and banned from providing online game account trading services for minors.
The authorities ordered the enterprises and platforms to tighten examination of the contents of their games. Obscene and violent content and those breeding unhealthy tendencies, such as money-worship and effeminacy, should be removed.
Xi is cancelled