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Toys
No
The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.
— How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick
Ignorance Is Strength
One of the first rules of business is to protect your investment. Once we have decided what’s right, irrelevant of whether we are right or wrong, the more energy we will invest to protect that. Which is basically how conmen work. They get you to invest a little bit, then a bit more. They never tell you to buy something, just take a look. Even looking’s an investment. Once you’ve contributed some of your energy to looking - appraising a certain article - then a small investment has been made. From a small investment comes a larger investment, from a larger investment comes a greater investment until eventually you’ve invested so much that you can’t be wrong. Because if you are wrong, it must mean you’re stupid and nobody can admit that they’re stupid.
Make Work
As I watched her poke around on the screen, managing inventory, calculating points, staying within her range, it hit me: Weight Watchers is an RPG. Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers’ points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you’ve used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren’t apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I’ll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!
— Fun Way to Lose Weight: Turn Dieting Into an RPG by Clive Thompson
Given that MMORPGs are creating environments where complex work is becoming seductively fun, how difficult would it be for MMORPG developers to embed real work into these environments? … because we know that users are willing to perform complex, tedious tasks in these environments. In fact, they have been trained to have fun performing these tasks. Consider the fact that cancer screening is routinely out-sourced to India because it is relatively cheap to train a lay-person to identify suspicious patterns on a diagnostic scan, and it is cheaper for several dozen of these workers to look at a single scan than it is to have a doctor in the US look at the same scan. Moreover, the accuracy rates are actually better because the redundancy lowers the rate of misclassifications. MMORPG environments could easily tap into their free labor pool of dedicated users by embedding real world tasks into the “game”. What is clear is that there are many different ways in which real work can be embedded into MMORPGs – different ways in which game developers can seduce users to pay to perform free labor.
— Embedding Real Work into MMORPGs by Nicholas Yee
I can see a great many ways that current MMOGs could be better, richer, more capacious even given their limitations. But they can never contain the desires that they invoke, and that may always make the genre both fascinating and tragic. Fascinating because it is a palimpsest, a Rosetta’s Stone, to the desires that fiction itself awakes and fails to satisfy, a revelation that books and moving images have only been the weakest gruel to try and feed that hunger. Tragic because to feed a starving man just enough to waken him to the fact of his starvation is to let loose on the world a scouring, devouring appetite that searches desperately for satisfaction without knowing why it cannot find more than a moment’s rest from its cravings.
— MMOG of My Dreams by Timothy Burke
“They thought of it as something they really enjoy and like to do, but now they do it in order to get money, and they think of the task as an instrument to get money and not an activity that has value in its own right,” Deci said. “Human beings both want to — and, in a deeper way, need to — feel a sense of being autonomous. When someone else begins to seduce you into behaving with an offer of a reward, it takes away your sense of being autonomous. Now you are doing it for someone else… rewards and punishments are not always counterproductive, Benabou said. He drew a distinction between mundane tasks and those that carry meaning for people. In the first case, Benabou argued, rewards and punishments work exactly the way economists predict: They get people to do things… External rewards and punishments are counterproductive when it comes to activities that are meaningful — tasks that telegraph something about a person’s intellectual abilities, generosity, courage or values. People will voluntarily perform intellectually arduous work, for example, because it gives them pleasure to solve a puzzle or win a game of wits… So why are rewards and punishments employed so liberally? “People like it because it is easy,” Deci said. “It is easy to offer a reward, but it is not easy to help people find their own motivation.”
— When Play Becomes Work by Shankar Vedantam
We love grinding. We cannot get enough of it. Why? Because there’s something enormously comforting about grinding. It offers a completely straightforward relationship between work and reward. When you log into WoW, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you just plant your ass in that chair for long enough, you’ll level up. It doesn’t require skill. It just requires putting in the time. Play 10 hours, you’ll do better; play 50, you’ll do better yet; and yet more so with 500 hours. The thing is, almost no arenas of human endeavor work like this. Many are precisely the opposite, in fact. When you go to your job at the office, there’s little or no linkage between effort and achievement: You slave like a madman all year long, only to watch the glad-handing frat guy hired two months ago get promoted above you. And if you’re a really serious nerd, the logic that governs interpersonal relationships — marriage, kids, your parents — is even more abstruse: Things can actually get worse the more time and effort you put into them. But grinding? Grinding always works. Always. You get a gold star just for showing up. This is a quietly joyful experience. It feeds our souls, as well as our sense of justice and fair play. We grind because we can’t believe what a totally awesome deal we’re getting handed here, often the first time in our entire suck-ass put-upon lives.
— Back to the Grind in WoW—and Loving Every Tedious Minute by Clive Thompson
Take a moment now to pause, step back, and consider just what was going on here: Every day, month after month, a man was coming home from a full day of bone-jarringly repetitive work with hammer and nails to put in a full night of finger-numbingly repetitive work with “hammer” and “anvil” - and paying $9.95 per month for the privilege. Ask Stolle to make sense of this, and he has a ready answer: “Well, it’s not work if you enjoy it.” Which, of course, begs the question: Why would anyone enjoy it? But people do. And that’s a curious thing. Throughout history, whenever human beings have tried to imagine the best of all possible worlds, they’ve pictured some version of paradise: a place of abundance and ease. Not too long ago, people insisted the Internet was just such an environment, with its effortlessly reproducible wealth of data and light-speed transcendence of geography and time. In the emerging online universe, it was said, scarcity had no place. And what’s not to like about that? Yet scarcity has turned out to be a feature, not a bug. Sure, people like the big, graphics-based chat arenas such as the Palace, where talk was the only real commodity, and that commodity was, as usual, cheap. But the worlds they actually want to be in - bad enough to pay an entrance fee - are the ones that make the digital goods hard to get to and even harder to copy. The addictive appeal of online role-playing games suggests that people will choose the constraining and challenging world over the one that sets them free.
— The Unreal Estate Boom by Julian Dibbell
More:
Production Is Melting Into Play
I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.
Identity Replaces Experience
“Identity” replaces “experience” as the next big concept in design and media thinking. People create their own identities interacting with products and services. The notion of a consumer experience is a more passive way of thinking. It’s so 20th century.
— Innovation Predictions For 2008
Neotribal Connectedness
Social Technology satisfies our immensely powerful desire for community bonds and allows us to build groups and gather globally around the things we identify with. The footprint of our daily civilization is no longer bounded by geography or structural doctrine. Our population isn’t identified through demographics or easily targetable through traditional avenues. Neotribal networks are connected, co-operating tribes that cut through great distance, spiritual and national boundaries to rapidly unite desired interaction.
Via: @Armano
“I can’t live two hours without my ID!”
… the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves.
— How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick
Safe When Used As Directed
I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it.
— How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick
Random Acts Of Unpredictability
Whatever happened to playing a hunch, Scully? The element of surprise, random acts of unpredictability? If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen or expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilities, we may find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized or easily referenced.
— Fox Mulder in The X-Files
X
… any attempts to present ideas to the public all take on commercial overtones. If they are not directly sponsored, their presentation mirrors forms familiar as advertising. Branding leaves no interstitial space in the culture for alternative conceptions of public communication, for non-commercial expressions of social meanings. All such attempts are quickly assimilated to the mode of branding. Habits become lifestyles, which become reified into branded products. We conceive of ourselves as brands, we brand our work, we present ourselves in quasi-logo form on internet social networks, while twittering slogans for ourselves throughout the day. With more and more of our social existence taking place in a fully quantifiable space online, all forms of social recognition are collapsed into the metrics appropriate to monitoring business. This undermines the possibility of integrity, which may perhaps be defined precisely as that which can’t be measured but only practiced.
— Advertising as creative destruction by Rob Horning
*sigh* It’s all a bit shit, really.
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