I think you’ve hit upon something here. One of my many akrasia-enabling habits is a free game called League of Legends. Each game is a team game where players control a single champion (picked before the match starts). You acquire gold in the game by killion minions, monsters and other champions, and you use that gold to buy items which increase your champion’s stats. The game ends when one team destroys the other team’s base.
This game follows the DOTA format, and if you’ve ever played DOTA you know that the games can sometimes be quite engaging. Unlike the original DOTA, however, in League you can level up your account. You have to play a couple hundred games to get your account to the maximum level, where the full range of runes and mastery points become available to you. Also at level 30, ranked games become available to you, which is an entirely new tier of competitiveness. Each game is typically around 30 minutes, but they sometimes go an hour or longer.
With all this in mind, you might wonder why anyone with interests in anything other than gaming would take the time to play this game. The answer is that sometimes the games are genuinely riveting, back and forth battles of wits and strategy. There are over 60 different champions with many unique abilities each, so games are often quite different, and by combinatorics alone it’s difficult to exhaust all the possible games.
However, even that last paragraph of glowing description shows that my reference point is currently optimized for time-wasting. Genuinely fun games are rare because people sometimes leave the match, making it 4v5 in favor of your team or the other. This often results in a boring or frustrating game, because it’s no fun to crush another team 5v4 and it’s certainly no fun to lose 4v5. Even when people don’t leave, sometimes your teammates or opponents are just bad: their item build sucks, or they don’t know how to use their abilities effectively, etc. No one finds it fun to lose because of bad players on your team, and I personally don’t find it fun to mercilessly crush unskilled or inexperienced opponents.
By changing my reference point to think explicitly about how often League of Legends games are genuinely boring or frustrating and not thinking about the rare times the game is fun, I should be to curtail some of my game playing. I hope anyways.
Edit: A quote because it seems to be relevant to the notion of changing your reference point:
+1 - please, please post that to the Rationality Quotes thread.
Getting the right reference point is what I use to make up my IQ deficiencies (a mere moderately bright 130ish as opposed to the typical LessWrong levels) so I know roughly what I’m talking about around people smarter than me. Fortunately, it is in fact one of my aptitudes, and people smarter than me seem to like hanging out with me. And I’m not even that pretty.
I think you’ve hit upon something here. One of my many akrasia-enabling habits is a free game called League of Legends. Each game is a team game where players control a single champion (picked before the match starts). You acquire gold in the game by killion minions, monsters and other champions, and you use that gold to buy items which increase your champion’s stats. The game ends when one team destroys the other team’s base.
This game follows the DOTA format, and if you’ve ever played DOTA you know that the games can sometimes be quite engaging. Unlike the original DOTA, however, in League you can level up your account. You have to play a couple hundred games to get your account to the maximum level, where the full range of runes and mastery points become available to you. Also at level 30, ranked games become available to you, which is an entirely new tier of competitiveness. Each game is typically around 30 minutes, but they sometimes go an hour or longer.
With all this in mind, you might wonder why anyone with interests in anything other than gaming would take the time to play this game. The answer is that sometimes the games are genuinely riveting, back and forth battles of wits and strategy. There are over 60 different champions with many unique abilities each, so games are often quite different, and by combinatorics alone it’s difficult to exhaust all the possible games.
However, even that last paragraph of glowing description shows that my reference point is currently optimized for time-wasting. Genuinely fun games are rare because people sometimes leave the match, making it 4v5 in favor of your team or the other. This often results in a boring or frustrating game, because it’s no fun to crush another team 5v4 and it’s certainly no fun to lose 4v5. Even when people don’t leave, sometimes your teammates or opponents are just bad: their item build sucks, or they don’t know how to use their abilities effectively, etc. No one finds it fun to lose because of bad players on your team, and I personally don’t find it fun to mercilessly crush unskilled or inexperienced opponents.
By changing my reference point to think explicitly about how often League of Legends games are genuinely boring or frustrating and not thinking about the rare times the game is fun, I should be to curtail some of my game playing. I hope anyways.
Edit: A quote because it seems to be relevant to the notion of changing your reference point:
-- Alan Kay
+1 - please, please post that to the Rationality Quotes thread.
Getting the right reference point is what I use to make up my IQ deficiencies (a mere moderately bright 130ish as opposed to the typical LessWrong levels) so I know roughly what I’m talking about around people smarter than me. Fortunately, it is in fact one of my aptitudes, and people smarter than me seem to like hanging out with me. And I’m not even that pretty.