LessWrong gaming community
Many of us enjoy expressing ourselves through electronic games. As such, I feel that this aspect of our lives should be shared among our fellow gamers in the LessWrong community.
Video games are a great way to reduce compartmentalization and learn real-world rationality skills. Indeed, what brings us together at LessWrong can often be our love of games; someone in the LessWrong community without this advantage might find learning rationality difficult. In this light, outreach into the transhumanist/rationalist community to promote gaming is low-hanging fruit for serving the future of humanity.
Please consider this post a unique opportunity to begin discussion of this important issue and facilitate further debate in the near future.
I forbid myself access to certain classes of video games that I know to be more addictive than I can handle. I also forbid myself from joining any group—clan, team, club, or anything else—which would create a social pressure to play video games.
I encourage everyone to do the same. Avoid video games, for they are devourers of life’s potential.
I got hooked on Everquest when it was still new, until I made a series of spectacularly bad business transactions that resulted in my having the same items, but less money, at which point I was finally able to pick up the motivation to quit, and counted myself well out of it.
My father, on the other hand, developed a long term addiction to the game (he still plays it today) and it took a considerable toll on our family life.
Do you mind going into detail about why you think video games devour life’s potential?
Sure. The main thing is that, empirically, they tend to hijack peoples’ motivational systems by providing fake utility functions and a constant stream of well-tuned rewards, to make them play for many hours. Those are usually hours that could’ve been spent on something much better. Some formerly-well-adjusted people end up spending a large fraction of their waking hours this way, particularly people who got suckered into setting up social reinforcement for their gaming habits (MMORPG players who meet friends they can only interact with through the game, and Facebook/Zynga game players who constantly receive and generate notifications to and from their friends about the games.) Even if you’re only losing a small number of hours, though, video games are dangerous as a procrastination activity because they’re immediately available and more tempting than most other procrastination activities, and they’re hard to transition back from.
Yet not all video games are like this. A new story-centered game, for instance, often requires some amount of time and mental effort to get into the story, so it’s not trivially available. It also won’t keep you hooked forever—you might not ever return to it after you’ve beaten it once.
I note that your original comment started off as reasonable, mentioning that you avoid certain classes of video games. Yet at the end, you seemed to be saying that all video games are “devourer’s of life’s potential”, which is overstating the case quite a bit.
I think Facebook and their ilk are much greater time-sinks and motivation-system-hijackers, and try to make the effort to consciously disengage myself from them in order to subject myself to some quality entertainment instead, if that’s what my brain seems to crave at the time. I maintain that the right games qualify as such a substitute, though I admit that I haven’t played very many video games in several years. (Mostly I haven’t had the energy to look for good ones.)
I can say that the ‘reward system’ is laughably easy to defeat as long as you are aware of it’s existence. Hint: the winning move is not to play.
Your typical game based on a reward system will cater to those who are playing the game for the lever, while other games will cater to other other audiences. They are pretty easy to spot.
I consider the primary use of video games to be a kind of virtual sport, with rules for victory, guidelines for possible and impossible actions, etc. Other wonderful uses are as a storytelling medium, a virtual world to explore or exploit, or three dimensional puzzles.
A fairly obvious heuristic, and one that tends to distinguish both Zynga “games” and MMORPGs from more traditional video games, is that the traditional game has a relatively high but fixed upfront cost, whereas the Zynga and MMORPG offerings tend to be cheap to start but require constant infusions of additional funds. The differing incentives for game design are readily apparent.
If you offered me a new shiny game that I would want to spend a lot of time playing if I start, I would refuse to start playing it, because I know that then I would spend a lot of time playing it, and I don’t want my time to be spent that way.
(Note, while this post starts off with evidence, A fair amount of this post is rambly/anecdotal. Please don’t take those parts as evidence. I realized I started simply adding my personal experiences about gaming, but I didn’t want to delete it, because it did seem relevant to the question.)
Jimrandomh also mentioned specific classes of video games, and to expound on his point, there are certainly some videogames which are substantially more devouring of life’s potential then others.
First of all, there are those cases where people actually die from video games. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction#Notable_deaths
Those are rare, but they do happen, and certainly are a very literal example of Jimrandomh’s point.
Also, there is a class of videogames that are designed, not primarily to be fun, but primarily as an engine to keep you online and spending money. As an excellent example of this, almost anything made by the company Zynga. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zynga
To be more specific, there are consequences if you don’t play. Take Farmville. If you don’t play, you’ll experience disutility. Not just from “I could have leveled up if I had another hour to finish that quest.” that you might see in any videogame, but an additional crushing of resources when all your crops rot.
Or in Zynga’s cooking game, you have to cook at least once a day for 7 days to earn specific prizes. Played 6 days in a row and want to take a break on the 7th? No best prize for you, back to the beginning of the week.
Another characteristic of Zynga games is the way they guide you to the payment screen. “No Energy? Want to buy an energy drink for 8 coins?” “No Coins? Want to buy more for real money?”
Also want to get the best bonuses? Better get your friends hooked on the game to, you need their help to build your super stove. Well, unless you want to buy super stove parts with real money, we do that to.
This is not to say that Zynga is the only company that does this. But they make such a very, very good example of a video game that you should avoid.
Now, I don’t want to give the impression that all games are this bad either. I remember having fun on Sundays playing Heroes of Might and Magic IV with my dad. It’s hot seat, so only one of us could play at a time. My Mom would frequently take advantage of this to get whoever wasn’t playing to do the dishes, and my Dad and I would switch off. This helped break up a boring task with a fun stimuli, while allowing me to enjoy interacting with my Family.
However, recently I was playing Dungeons and Dragons Online. I was feeling bored (and more then just a little sleepy), and I actually ended up being so bored/sleepy that I was dying and didn’t even notice it (I had the sound off.) I actually had more fun cleaning up the house for my Inlaws then I did playing that game, In this case, the game had gotten so boring that the cleaning was the fun stimuli, and playing the game was the boring task.
In a twist, I had more fun playing through that exact same level again the next day, when I was freshly woken up, and thinking to myself “Alright, THIS TIME, I’m not going to let the boss kill me through sleepy inattentiveness.” I then crushed the level by setting almost everything that wasn’t me on fire. And it was fun.
Which brings up another excellent point: Games can be fun. But games can also make you lose sleep. This is not a generally not a good tradeoff. I specifically deleted my accounts on one game (Pardus) when I was bothered by the amount of sleep I was losing over it.
I think another reason that I stopped playing it is that my best friend had stopped playing it. This is something about games: If a substantial amount of your friends are playing a game, then playing the game is socially inclusive: It gives you something to interact with your friends about during times where you are socializing. This isn’t limited to just video games either. People do the same thing with sports when they say things like “Did you watch the game last night?” and then talk about home runs and touch downs. If none of your friends are playing a game, then the game is exclusive. You feel more distant from people and no one really cares when you are talking about it. In my case, Pardus was being socially exclusive, which is another reason I stopped playing.
Another perspective on devouring lifes potential is that games essentially delete substantial amount of time where you are bored. If you didn’t have games, you might think to yourself “I’m bored. Let me go write that story.” or “Let me go smash that rotting bookcase into pieces small enough to fit in a trash bag.” But if you are a gamer, you might instead think “Let me play some games.” and then the more productive work doesn’t get done.
Of course, this isn’t necessarily the case. If you were to replace video games with rereading TVTropes, then it doesn’t really matter: You weren’t going to spend that time doing productive work just because you removed video games from the equation. I’ve been in both cases, although I haven’t tried to gather statistics.
I suppose one factor which is likely to bias my opinion in favor of video games is that I met the first woman who I seriously dated, and who later became my wife, when she thrashed me in a video game tournament. That was Soul Calibur 2, specifically. But comparing Soul Calibur 2 with something like Farmville seems bizarre to me. I mean, yes, they’re both games, and yes, they’re both played on video screens, but they have so many large differences.
The set of people who have died due to video games seems to be so small as to not be at all relevant.
The set of people who’ve died due to video games is a very small portion of the set who lose large amounts of time from them that would be be better spent on something else.
Sure. No disagreement. My statement was only about Michaelos’s remark about people who have died from playing them.
I may have felt obligated to post it because I myself game. I was trying to to think of anything I could think of that seemed to related to the concept “Do Videogames devour life’s potential?” And I wouldn’t want to discard something which may indicate the conclusion that I should abandon my hobby even if it seemed like it might be irrelevant because that would be a source of bias.
Although, that is probably simply a rationalization. My ACTUAL thought process was probably something like “I have been typing this post for an hour and I need to get back to work. I don’t want to save it on Google Docs as a Cached post and not get back to it, because I already have an enormous number of partial thoughts backlogged there, some from years ago. I’ll just post what I have at the moment and stop thinking about it.”
Similarly, my response to you would be “Yes, I would probably agree with you, but I’m worried I would simply be agreeing with you because that’s what I WANT to think.” Because I prefer a convenient world in which my hobby doesn’t cause deaths that I have to care about.
But, that doesn’t let me off the hook either. Just because I have biases which would lead me to believe that it is irrelevant, doesn’t actually mean I can simply bring it up as relevant and think “And now I’m NOT being biased.” That actually doesn’t work at all and is still too convenient.
I could start a side conservation about how many deaths something would have to have to be relevant, but that seems odd because it’s really past the scope of the original topic and I nominally agree with you, so it would just be arguing for the sake of arguing as opposed to actually trying to prove a point.
Although, this entire conversation, taking one step back, could be an indicator that I’m entirely to self conscious and wordy for what are one line comments and I don’t need to write books on every answer. Certainly my Wife has pointed out similar flaws in my speech style.
Regardless of any of that, thank you for your thought provoking critique.
If it helps you calibrate at all, I used to play a lot of games, consider them to be a massive waste of time, and have elsewhere on this thread argued that they are a massive waste. And I still think the deaths are so rare at to be irrelevant. So I don’t think you need to worry about biases in this context impacting your judgement if I’m reading you correctly.
Who are you and what did you do with my son?!!!
Okay, this discussion is very quickly degrading into complete nonsense. So, I’ll try to correct and address the mistakes that I can spot.
First, to everyone that says that everyone should avoid videogames because of X (X = games are addicting / too much fun / whatever): typical mind fallacy. There is nothing inherently wrong with the concept of games. There are people that can play games in a reasonable manner, even with friends.
Which brings me to my second point: Zynga and Facebook. When I think ‘games’, those are the types of games that come last. Everyone who attacks them is attacking a straw-man. Consider real games like Dreamfall for those who love stories and adventure, Dance Dance Revolution for those who like active/physical games, and The Incredible Machine for those who like puzzles and lego-like games. And I am not even going into the more mainstream games that have a lot of positive features of their own. If you find that a game isn’t fun/educational/interesting enough for you, don’t play it.
Point three: if you pick a game that you want to play, then having a community and friends who play it too is very beneficial. If you want to play DDR to stay fit, then having other people who play DDR and compete/play with you is great.
Point four: games are a time-sink/Skinner box and don’t offer anything in return. Again, not all games. Figure out what you want from games, and then find games that offer it. It’s possible that what you want can’t be fulfilled by games, and that’s fine; then games are just not the right tool for the job. But if you want to relax, if you want to spend some time with friends, if you want to have a fun shared experience, games offer a pretty good way to do so. And the fact that they are virtual is not a detriment. People still read science fiction (or HP:MoR), see movies based on fiction, etc...
Point five: a thousand times more people can die from video games, and you are still astronomically more likely to die while driving your car. Stop this line of thought. “Those are rare, but they do happen” is rationalizing. People die from pretty much everything you can think of.
Seconded. As someone who plays a fair amount of First Person Shooter games, I can tell you that there are all types of games and all types of players. The popular Call of Duty games are pretty good examples of life-wasting time sinks. They require little skill and less strategy. However, the recently released Halo: Reach is a deep game with satisfying multiplayer combat that continues to surprise me as I progress in skill. Anyone who is interested in competition and outside the box thinking should definitely take up playing games online. They require speed, accuracy, strategy, teamwork and most of all creativity.
This seems like a bad idea. Electronic games are optimized to be really shiny, and many of them use social connections to reinforce the need to play. They function as a massive timesink. Having them connected with the community in any way seems like a potentially bad idea, on the rough order of having a link to TVTropes on the righthand sidebar.
On the other hand, people do need to relax somehow, and video games are a good way of doing that. The fact that they’re a timesink isn’t necessarily a problem. Most people need an enjoyable timesink or two to function properly.
Citation needed. Beware superstimuli!
I guess there might be considerable variation between people and games, but I personally don’t actually relax through games, even though I thought I did. I paid attention to my happiness, level of concentration and general focus over the last two years and tracked them while playing games, and I found that games feel like they relax me, but they actually drain me. Especially my mood goes way down afterwards and needs at least as long as I played to recover, regardless of game played.
The only exception to that, I suspect, are purely creative / exploration-based games like Minecraft or puzzle games.
I do agree that many games end up being more tiring than relaxing, but there are also many that don’t. In my experience, games involving monotonous grinding make a game more tiring, while strong story elements or just the right level of challenge (not too easy, not too frustrating) are relaxing.
I view a good story-based game essentially as a form of storytelling, no different from reading a good book or watching a good movie. (I take it you don’t require a cite for the claim that those are relaxing?) With the capacity to blend movie-like visuals and unmatched immersion, games have the potential to be the ultimate form of storytelling, better than any movie or book.
LW Minecraft server anyone?
I’ve just gotten into that one! Though I mainly just goof off on creative mode.
Yes!
My understanding is that the expertise research and other lines of research suggest that, at least in ordinary games like chess & go, the benefits from playing the game rapidly diminish and any additional gains are solely untransferrable gains in playing the game itself. Do you have any reason to believe otherwise?
SAID principle is the one that garners the most acceptance in my circles. I go back and forth on this. I was encouraged to play chess and advised chess practice would increase my general thinking power. I invested a lot of work into this and I have no idea how much I got out of it, beyond getting better at playing chess.
It seems most prominent in exercise and fitness circles and my opinion is that it is not valid in that domain. My most valuable tennis coach told me jumping rope was the best training for tennis and I am 80% certain that in my case a lot of jumping rope made me a better tennis player. It is rather daunting to me to consider how to design a research study to determine if chess playing or go playing could be beneficial (in proportion to its cost) for young mathematicians or physicists or engineers.
It’s especially daunting because it’s so unlikely. One of the things that has impressed me researching my DNB FAQ is how rarely psychology tasks/games ‘transfer’ to anything we care about besides those tasks/games, and those are pretty precisely focused, carefully designed, and tested.
Agree. To me this raises a question of where and whence this idea got its mojo. When people told me to play chess to grow my brainpower, they gave me this message with a lot of conviction.
Doesn’t seem that odd to me. Lots of correlation/causation there, and there’s truth to it—smart people do well and learn faster, one makes genuine progress (in the game), one learns heuristics which one will try to apply elsewhere (of questionable value; Tetris effect), early on the mental exertion may be helpful and one can imagine that some kids don’t care enough about ‘regular’ intellectual activities but will about chess, then you have the usual biases and Hawthorn effects.
In order to determine whether they were beneficial we’d first have to be more precise in what we mean by ‘making you smarter’ and then test that skill in tasks unrelated to the training that use the same faculty.
For example, if we hypothesise Chess benefits working memory we would do a series of unrelated working memory tests on a sample of individuals and look for correlations with their chess ability (for ease of testing, the same individuals as they progress across time would be best). Similarly, if we hypothesise Poker contribute to probability estimation ability we would test them on non-poker related statistics questions.
I’m reasonably sure none of what you write in this post would be different if you deleted the words “expressing ourselves through” in the first sentence. Nevertheless, I think it might be worthwhile to think about why you chose to couch your enjoyment of video games in the language of “self-expression” and what, if anything, you mean by that. Is it just a prestige-grab for an activity that is more properly classed as entertainment? In any case, it’s an implicit claim of worthwhileness for video games that I would encourage you to make much more explicit in your own thinking in order to see if you still agree with it—at the very least by tabooing “self-expression” and similar terms.
It’s possible to limit the level of time sink involved in playing video games; you just have to pick the right game and the right play schedule.
My best example: Civilization IV multiplayer. Since there’s a limited number of things you can do on any given turn, and since the multiplayer can be done asynchronously, everyone can simply agree to a rule like “we play one turn each morning and one each night”, and then (after a single synchronous night getting past all the ultra-short initial turns) there’s no way to spend more than 30 minutes or so a day on the game. Granted, each game takes a few months...
And Civ IV is at least as interesting and instructive as the Prisoners’ Dilemma simulations investigated here recently. It’s been years since I played, and I still have fond memories of teaching a friend that “Let’s all gang up on the guy in first place” is not a safe strategy to share with someone who’s in second place but who’s thinking more than one step ahead.
I’d also say that multiplayer games are a good way to socialize, which is important, but there is the caveat that you have to learn to separate your impressions of someone as a person from your impressions of them as a player. I’m far more trustworthy in real life than as a player in games where “betrayal” is a possible strategy, for example, and I’ve known people for whom the opposite was tragically true.
What’d you do?
Well, when I heard “Let’s all gang up on the guy in first place”, my thought process continued in his voice with “and then you’ll be in first place, and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!” So agreeing to the strategy would have meant dozens of turns of ganging up 4-against-1, which would be too easy, followed by being ganged up on 1-against-3, which would be too hard. Being ganged up on 2-against-3, on the other hand, sounded fun, given that we were already ahead and would have the element of surprise.
So instead of agreeing to the strategy, I feigned agreement, then warned the 1st place player what to prepare for and teamed up with him instead. After everybody built up their militaries, Mr. 3rd Place launched the attack on Mr. 1st Place, then I immediately launched the attack on Mr. 3P, whose army was now mostly bogged down behind enemy lines. The war basically broke in two, with a near-stalemate between 1P vs. 4P+5P in the south, while I made major gains against 3P in the north. By the time 3P was defeated I was far in the lead, decently defended against any possible betrayal by 2P, and had just successfully made a large amphibious assault on the wealthy-but-underdefended rear of 4P and 5P, so they all conceded.
Hmm… that first paragraph makes me sound brilliantly Machiavellian in hindsight, but that’s not true. I did have those strategic thoughts at the time, but my “true rejection” was more along the lines of “1P showed mercy when he could have smashed me (perhaps profitably) much earlier in the game” and (despite my pro-gaming-betrayal stance above) I couldn’t bring myself to violate our peace agreement after that.
Awesome.
This is the purpose of Freeciv’s variant Longturn. (Freeciv being the open-source game inspired—mostly—by civilization 2.)
I don’t know Civ, but for practising the kind of strategizing you’re describing I’d recommend Neptune’s Pride.
Heh. I’m one of those people. I practically fell in love with my first ally. I’m lucky they were really nice when they broke my lines, essentially throwing me a sword and telling me to defend myself before starting the invasion. I’d have been heartbroken otherwise. I guess to an extent I thought they were damning us both to death by zombie bot rush by breaking our alliance, but their judgement was apt, after crippling me they proceeded to conquer the galaxy, barely worse for wear.
It was from this game that I learned the reason I have an intermittent habit of falling head over heels in love with friends probably has more to do with diplomacy than anything else. I can rapidly build unreasonably strong alliances from nothing this way, at the cost of forming a few confusing, inconvenient bonds when I hit the wrong target. It’s always nice to learn that the quirks of your mechanism serve a purpose.
I am a college student, so avoiding time sinks when playing games (which I do not have time to play often anymore) is a major issue. I did find that Vindictus fills that requirement for me. Each dungeon is about 10-15 minutes long, and a person can solo-play pretty easily. The bosses involve a real challenge, and the whole game basically relies on your reflexes (it’s a slash-and-hack type game).
Why not create a Steam group for LW?
Hm… so who else plays Go and is familiar with the KGS server?
I’ve not played in a while, and I never was good, but I wouldn’t mind meeting some Lesswrongians and having them trounce me (and maybe teach me something useful).
Also, is there some place Lesswrongians go for real-time chat?
You might be interested in this thread
I’m currenty wobbling between 4k and 5k at KGS.
Yup, thank you.
IRC channel, #lesswrong on irc.freenode.net