there are a lot of video games (and to a lesser extent movies, books, etc) that give the player an escapist fantasy of being hypercompetent. It’s certainly an alluring promise: with only a few dozen hours of practice, you too could become a world class fighter or hacker or musician! But because becoming hypercompetent at anything is a lot of work, the game has to put its finger on the scale to deliver on this promise. Maybe flatter the user a bit, or let the player do cool things without the skill you’d actually need in real life.
It’s easy to dismiss this kind of media as inaccurate escapism that distorts people’s views of how complex these endeavors of skill really are. But it’s actually a shockingly accurate simulation of what it feels like to actually be really good at something. As they say, being competent doesn’t feel like being competent, it feels like the thing just being really easy.
“power fantasies” are actually a pretty mundane phenomenon given how human genetic diversity shook out; most people intuitively gravitate towards anyone who looks and acts like a tribal chief, or towards the possibility that you yourself or someone you meet could become (or already be) a tribal chief, via constructing some abstract route that requires forging a novel path instead of following other people’s.
Also a mundane outcome of human genetic diversity is how division of labor shakes out; people noticing they were born with savant-level skills and that they can sink thousands of hours into skills like musical instruments, programming, data science, sleight of hand party tricks, social/organizational modelling, painting, or psychological manipulation. I expect the pool to be much larger for power-seeking-adjacent skills than art, and that some proportion of that larger pool of people managed to get their skills’s mental muscle memory sufficiently intensely honed that everyone should feel uncomfortable sharing a planet with them.
The alternative is to pit people against each other in some competitive games, 1 on 1 or in teams. I don’t think the feeling you get from such games is consistent with “being competent doesn’t feel like being competent, it feels like the thing just being really easy”, probably mainly because there is skill level matching, there are always opponents who pose you a real challenge.
Hmm maybe such games need some more long tail probabilistic matching, to sometimes feel the difference. Or maybe variable team sizes, with many incompetent people versus few competent, to get a more “doomguy” feeling.
Some games do put their finger on the scale, for example you have a first-person shooter where you learn to aim better but you also now have a gun that deals 200 damage per hit, as opposed to your starting gun that dealt 10.
But puzzle-solving games are usually fair, I think.
there are a lot of video games (and to a lesser extent movies, books, etc) that give the player an escapist fantasy of being hypercompetent. It’s certainly an alluring promise: with only a few dozen hours of practice, you too could become a world class fighter or hacker or musician! But because becoming hypercompetent at anything is a lot of work, the game has to put its finger on the scale to deliver on this promise. Maybe flatter the user a bit, or let the player do cool things without the skill you’d actually need in real life.
It’s easy to dismiss this kind of media as inaccurate escapism that distorts people’s views of how complex these endeavors of skill really are. But it’s actually a shockingly accurate simulation of what it feels like to actually be really good at something. As they say, being competent doesn’t feel like being competent, it feels like the thing just being really easy.
“power fantasies” are actually a pretty mundane phenomenon given how human genetic diversity shook out; most people intuitively gravitate towards anyone who looks and acts like a tribal chief, or towards the possibility that you yourself or someone you meet could become (or already be) a tribal chief, via constructing some abstract route that requires forging a novel path instead of following other people’s.
Also a mundane outcome of human genetic diversity is how division of labor shakes out; people noticing they were born with savant-level skills and that they can sink thousands of hours into skills like musical instruments, programming, data science, sleight of hand party tricks, social/organizational modelling, painting, or psychological manipulation. I expect the pool to be much larger for power-seeking-adjacent skills than art, and that some proportion of that larger pool of people managed to get their skills’s mental muscle memory sufficiently intensely honed that everyone should feel uncomfortable sharing a planet with them.
The alternative is to pit people against each other in some competitive games, 1 on 1 or in teams. I don’t think the feeling you get from such games is consistent with “being competent doesn’t feel like being competent, it feels like the thing just being really easy”, probably mainly because there is skill level matching, there are always opponents who pose you a real challenge.
Hmm maybe such games need some more long tail probabilistic matching, to sometimes feel the difference. Or maybe variable team sizes, with many incompetent people versus few competent, to get a more “doomguy” feeling.
Some games do put their finger on the scale, for example you have a first-person shooter where you learn to aim better but you also now have a gun that deals 200 damage per hit, as opposed to your starting gun that dealt 10.
But puzzle-solving games are usually fair, I think.