Gaming/virtual economies (EVE online)

[jacob]

It's not clear to me where real ends and virtual begins.

Sociocentric conventions provide a good benchmark. For example, as far as the present range of humanity is concerned, BTC is somewhere between bull-shit and the next new and best thing. I'm aware that much of this is convention. I know that fiat money is also but a convention but one that everybody accepts. However, whereas everybody accepts[fiat money] as meaningful, BTC is still niche. The same difference holds in terms of what people spend their time on. Working a real-work job for fiat money is commonly accepted. Working a virtual job for virtual money is only accepted within the niche where it happens. There's no common market as far as all these niches are concerned. You're not valued for what you do outside your niche.

[daylen]

I lean in the direction of sociocentric conventions being bull-shit . Though mostly I try to respect them.

[7Wannabe5]

Chris Guillebeau writes about making money in the virtual/gaming economy in his new book "Gonzo Capitalism: How to Make Money in an Economy That Hates You." This is actually one of my skillathon topics for this month, because I am attempting to bind my old knowledge/skill as an internet-based rare book dealer to the new knowledge/skill I am acquiring through my grad program in data science.

From my personal perspective, the video game divide seems more gender-based than generational. The majority of the men in my social circle, up to currently around age 70, play video games on a regular basis, and one of my 60-something poly partners plays games around 20 hours/week in addition to his full-time career and working on a permaculture/prepper project. The younger women/girls I know do play video games more than the older women/girls I know, but still much less than the boys/men of their own peer groups. I've always considered the fact that I just can't seem to get into video games to be a significant demotivation in terms of gaining more intrinsic interest in gaining tech skillz. IOW, I've known forever that video game "addiction" is the gateway drug to desire to "build your own rig", but the "drug" doesn't interest/work very well for me. In a weird way, for me, watching one of my partner's play video games is kind of like watching porn with one of my partners; I can't become fully engaged just through my visual cortex. It's a known thing that men can become very locked in just eyes to penis sexually, and I think maybe it's the same thing with video games, except eyes to hand. Of course, it's also possible that I simply haven't yet found the video game or virtual world most likely to seduce me. The virtual predictions market is kind of fascinating to me, but it is currently illegal to gamble on predictions in the U.S.

OTOH, I am also not personally feeling Randers' "death of nature" prediction since I currently live in a recently depopulated realm where nature is inching back in on "civilization", and my hobby of gardening/permaculture is the art/science of the balance of nature and civilization. Also, there is so much to explore in the real world that doesn't require international travel if/when you have scavenger or beginner eyes, especially if you are okay with breaking some rules or conventions. Just mapping the world within walking distance of wherever you are could take a lifetime. It would feel off-kilter to me to take on a two hour/day video game hobby prior/preferential to re-booting a two hour/day Scavenger Walking hobby. Also, I think Scavenger Walking on average yields more than 50 cents per hour, I'd guesstimate it at around $2.50 hour at least, depending on location, and give or take for "processing of loot/information" time, and also, obviously, provides some physical exercise. Raccoon jumping out at me from a dumpster, munching berries I found on the trail, yup, much more engaging than a video game for me.

[daylen]

Just mapping the world within walking distance of wherever you are could take a lifetime.

There is also a gender divide in spatial mapping skills. Living in the relatively small town of Lawrence most my life and walking several days of the week I have 90%+ of it mapped. Not as big of a gamer as when I was a kid but gaming is still a very reliable way to "get lost" and keep navigation skills sharp. I have known a couple of older women, including my mom, that enjoy chill mmorpg's.

I imagine you might like an augmented permaculture reality game that helps identify, track, and catalyze natural cycles. I think perhaps civilization and nature can be compatible or even symbiotic given some sufficiently advanced technology that is used with maturity (we aren't quite there yet).

[jacob]

I imagine you might like an augmented permaculture reality game that helps identify, track, and catalyze natural cycles. I think perhaps civilization and nature can be compatible or even symbiotic given some sufficiently advanced technology that is used with maturity (we aren't quite there yet).

Genderwise, the main stereotype I've heard is that girls like to build things (together) and boys like to blow (each other) up. Not really different than the typical playground. It does reflect my own observations. DW overwhelmingly prefers merge-type games. I prefer to take things apart, with cannons.

People keep raving about https://store.steampowered.com/app/4131 ... ew_Valley/ ... much to my surprise from some. "I don't know who you are anymore! "

More generally Players who suit muds likely explains some of the difference preferences. For games, I find myself leaning strongly towards Achiever and Killer-type games. I think this is because I do enough Exploring and problem-solving in real life, so I'd rather not do it virtually as well. I was once invited to one of those escape-room experiences. Hard pass! I spend enough time solving problems elsewhere, so I don't need to pile a bunch of made-up ones on top of it. I'm not sure there are games that are specifically built for the Socializer. They would ultimately end up looking more like chat channels or forums like this.

It may be that people prefer games as a way to restore some balance in their activities. I don't really have any data whether people generally prefer the same type of activity as they do in IRL or whether they avoid it.

[7Wannabe5]

Living in the relatively small town of Lawrence most my life and walking several days of the week I have 90%+ of it mapped.

Inclusive of water flow, species identification, microscopic world, dumpster contents, manufacturing hubs, historical context, and social relationships? Do you know where the bakery on the corner gets it's flour, what business was on that site in 1948, and who the girl who works there on Saturday mornings is currently dating? Do you know the three primary yields/purposes of the species of tree located in the northwest corner of the park three blocks away from you? Do you know the topic of the book which is located three from the left on the second shelf of the New Non-fiction rack at your nearest library? Etc. etc. etc.

I imagine you might like an augmented permaculture reality game that helps identify, track, and catalyze natural cycles. I think perhaps civilization and nature can be compatible or even symbiotic given some sufficiently advanced technology that is used with maturity (we aren't quite there yet).

I agree. My permaculture reality game is already augmented. I have a species identification app on my phone, and much of my stored knowledge base is in digital form, and I've successfully accomplished some experiments with hydroponic growing. Solar-powered garden weeding AI robot should be the seductive lure to acquiring more tech skillz for me. Although, I also like the concept of a robotic ruminant with fermentation chamber.

@jacob:

I agree that personality type and real world occupation(s) are also relevant. That Stardew Valley game seems absolutely pointless to me as somebody who has actually gardened and attempted real-world permaculture projects. What next? Perhaps, a game where I teach math to virtual entities rather than actual children? I've attempted playing some games that are supposed to appeal to women, but for me they seem like the same worst of both worlds often produced in female-friendly porn oriented towards the "couples" market or those 1980s pink power suits for female executives. The tech-based activity which is actually more like gardening for me would be something like creating an AI image with prompts, because it's more like planting 3 types of plants/seeds in a bed and then observing a somewhat randomized result.

Based on my experience busting the current youngest generation of kids for doing something else on their phones/tablets while they are supposed to be doing schoolwork, girls are more likely to be on shopping or social sites than gaming sites, and for both genders music video clips are quite popular.

[daylen]

That's an interesting line of research. I definitely lean explorer both in real life and in games, but I also do some achieving and killing in games to get a taste. It doesn't seem to me that exploring in reality versus virtuality is a trade-off. Doing both seems to be positive sum as internalizing virtualized world models often results in different approaches to exploring the real world. I think some gaming can go a long way towards the development of multi-perspectival thinking if properly integrated into education. The integration of some exploration, achievement, and killing into what would otherwise be a chatroom can give socializers something to talk about.

@7w5 I do pay attention to that kind of stuff, but I find it more interesting to zoom out to the current state of the world and explore broad societal patterns that contextualize the little patch of earth I call home. There is a whole universe to explore, so I try not to get attached to particulars in flux. I believe that virtualization is universal and so in some very real since I can explore more of the universe inclusive of possible future and alien civilizations that very well might engage with similar virtualizations as we currently have access to. Virtualization is basically an extension of mathematics grounded in compute.

[jacob]

Doing both seems to be positive sum as internalizing virtualized world models often results in different approaches to exploring the real world. I think some gaming can go a long way towards the development of multi-perspectival thinking if properly integrated into education.

One of the biggest new lenses I've acquired in recent years was actually from eu3 and its focus on sliders. This has made it possible to see domestic/international politics in a new/deeper light as the "sliders" determine what's possible and impossible (or at least much harder). I agree that this could easily be rolled into education. OTOH, I'd also be very careful about this. Consider the substantial fraction of people under 30 who no longer believe that democracy is necessarily the best (or least worst) form of government. It's very easy to draw such a conclusion if one's main experience is based on crushing other nations as a "despotic monarchist" while blissfully ignoring that what might be great for the king is not great for the peasants who no longer have any say in their lives. I've also noted earlier how the option to rage-quit in with almost no consequences in online games lead some to believe that they can do it without consequences in real life too. "Properly integrated" is definitely key here. It's funny, though, that almost every attempt to make an "educational"-game has failed. It's apparently not fun when it's educational.

[daylen]

True. The key is to make games educational without vibing educational. A big part of this is not forcing facts on people but rather immerse them into a world or system with subtle curiosity trails aligning with truth, goodness, and beauty. Realism is building up in competitive game lineages with time (along with less realistic yet still mathematically interesting variants). Think civilization sims, city sims, factory sims, engineering sims, farming sims, etc. (e.g. Civilization series, Cities skylines, Factorio, Gary's Mod, Farming Simulator, Car Mechanic Simulator, Poly Bridge, Mini Metro)

The hard-core killer domination type games will likely always be around but a more fleshed out space of game lineages with smooth [social] transitions may facilitate more generalized student learning by virtual doing.

[7Wannabe5]

I do pay attention to that kind of stuff, but I find it more interesting to zoom out to the current state of the world and explore broad societal patterns that contextualize the little patch of earth I call home. There is a whole universe to explore, so I try not to get attached to particulars in flux. I believe that virtualization is universal and so in some very real since I can explore more of the universe inclusive of possible future and alien civilizations that very well might engage with similar virtualizations as we currently have access to. Virtualization is basically an extension of mathematics grounded in compute.

Gotcha. Interesting. Very akin to what I get from reading novels as opposed to engaging in local gossip. Novels being an extension of human consciousness and social interaction grounded in the printed word.

[zbigi]

The tech-based activity which is actually more like gardening for me would be something like creating an AI image with prompts, because it's more like planting 3 types of plants/seeds in a bed and then observing a somewhat randomized result.

You could enjoy the data science then! That's how it felt to me - trying different algorithms on the data set, seeing which one did best and sticking to it from there on - but often with little understanding why it won out. Perhaps that's one of the reasons I was never that fond of growing plants - it seems too opaque.

[zbigi]

More generally Players who suit muds likely explains some of the difference preferences. For games, I find myself leaning strongly towards Achiever and Killer-type games.

There are also games where achieving cannot be accomplished without a ton of exploring. I wrote on this forum before how being a serious Magic: the Gathering player is akin to being a competetive inventor. (However, in theory, you if you really hate exploring, you could just copy whatever the top strategies seem to be at the moment - but it will only take you so far.)

[7Wannabe5]

You could enjoy the data science then!

Yup, data science isn't a terrible match for one of the quadrants of my personality. Just too dry and cold to spend 40 hrs/wk on.

I remembered that my kids used to tease me about a "video game" that I did like. I designed a few gardens using a 3-D garden design software program that included 3-D humans who would slowly walk through the 3-D garden design, lending their perspective. So, it cracked my kids up that my "speed" of video game required about 40 hours of design to produce 4 minutes of "action."

I just finished John Michael Greer's "The Retro Future" in which he hypotheisizes that a lack of exposure to nature may inhibit or alter human mental development, because "the city" does not provide enough negative feedback to the sort of abstractions the human brain is likely to form, such as "rectangles" or "good/evil." When I shifted from more conventional forms of gardening to permaculture, my 3-D garden design software program became less useful for me, because even though it came pre-loaded with the 5000 most common plants used in gardens/landscapes, these were not adequate for permaculture design. Sometimes I'll see a few clumps of Stella D'Oro daylillies in the litter-strewn rubble of a strip-mall parking lot planting bed, and I now recognize it as a variety that humans domesticated towards best fitting into nature as can be imagined in alignment with our sort of abstractions rendered virtually through algorithms. No apple. No snake. Just rectangularized plastic rendered slightly warm to the touch.

[daylen]

That take seems a bit retro. Have you seen what unreal engine 5 can do with triangles?

[jacob]

I just finished John Michael Greer's "The Retro Future" in which he hypotheisizes that a lack of exposure to nature may inhibit or alter human mental development, because "the city" does not provide enough negative feedback to the sort of abstractions the human brain is likely to form, such as "rectangles" or "good/evil."

Yes, and? I hypothesize that a lack of exposure to "city" may inhibit or alter human mental development, because "nature" does not provide enough positive feedback to the sort of abstractions the human brain is likely to form, such as "rectangles" or "good/evil" #nomopomo

In other words, the human brain develops around the environment it grows up in. It is also partially capable of changing later in life but perhaps not as easily as one that was "primed" compatibly.

It's hard to find someone over 60 who doesn't lament how things were better in the old days with landlines, mail boxes, cash, and check books. "And now everybody uses their smartphone for everything ... and I don't wanna learn that new stuff, wah wah wah!" Often this is followed by an argument that "it's easier for young people". I think they're partially right, but mostly because younglings don't have a collection of rapidly expiring lessons that they need to unlearn.

This ties into the Randers2052 argument that it is strategically preferred to focus on [technological-type] abstraction, which is predictably and eventually going to end up comprising most of the world within a few decades (as increasing number of affluent humans take over the last vestiges of natural places), over developing the brain structures, both intellectually and emotionally, that tie into and depend on a rapidly vanishing nature. The alternative seems to be to flee to one of the remaining pockets of nature.

In some sense, I've been running this experiment most of my life. I was allergic to pretty much everything as a kid (eventually grew out of much of it, except cats) so thanks to operand conditioning I came to see nature as an awful place to be. I spent most of my time with books and screens. The highest level of abstraction available. Perhaps this explains my above average ability to appreciate abstractions and ideas ... and my below average ability to appreciate experiences of individual instantations like this flower or that flower or this food or that food. (This is likely a nature/nurture argument. I don't know how much is due to which. Add: Likely we're born with certain talents (call them Ne, Ni, Te, Ti, Fe, Fi, Se, Si; our natural temperament) which are then strengthened or weakened according to how much nurture stimulates them; this in turn forms our personality.)

[Jean]

It may be that the percieved lack of positive feedback in nature is caused by a lack of ability to percieve it. A little bit like we learn as baby to learn differentiate the different phonemes in our own language, and other languages sound like random sound without a lot of effort, it might be that the patterns outside of what we grew up with look random until one learn to differientate them.
I'm learning to differentiate birds and plants now, and it's impressive to see how they went from all looking the same, to be easily differentiables.

[AxelHeyst]

This ties into the Randers2052 argument that it is strategically preferred to focus on [technological-type] abstraction, which is predictably and eventually going to end up comprising most of the world within a few decades (as increasing number of affluent humans take over the last vestiges of natural places), over developing the brain structures, both intellectually and emotionally, that tie into and depend on a rapidly vanishing nature. The alternative seems to be to flee to one of the remaining pockets of nature.

I bolded, just to repeat the point (that we've covered before) for posterity that there's no such thing as rapidly vanishing nature or pockets of nature. I don't see utility in dichotomizing cities and nature. I think it's the sort of thinking that lead to the polycrisis in the first place - 'othering' the natural world cognitively empowered us to do things like broadscale capital T Take, pollute, use words like "conquer" and "win" to define our relationship with it, etc.

That said, I've gotten over my initial aversion to Randers' basic point and am curious about how these experiments and approaches work out, so I'm following with interest.

[daylen]

I think it is worth noting that if you take the perspective that the universe is natural then our collective conception of what counts at nature is expanding as the light from distant galaxies catches up with us! With technology we have been able to sense more of the universe both on the macro level and on the micro level. In the grand scheme of what is observable we are but an energic blimp that has the potential to expand into a relatively larger energetic blimp.

Even if you limit nature to biochemical reactions then the smaller creatures inclusive of single-celled organisms may hardly notice our blimp unless Earth goes full on Mars or Venus sooner than it otherwise might. Gaia is extraordinarily resilient and there is still time for humans' figure their shit out both literally and figuratively.

[jacob]

For the purpose of [Randers2012], nature is everything in the world---but especially the plants and animals---that is not made by people. There's increasingly less of that kind of nature and increasingly more humans and human-constructed stuff. I'm aware that a construct in which nature includes everything in the universe will solve the problem of the former losing out to the latter---hey, we're on team moonscape and slimy beach now---but I'm not sure the nature-lovers (in the definition of the above) will be happy replacing forests and valleys with landfills and subdivisions; nor find the same joy looking at mold in a microscope as they do looking at frogs and butterflies; or through a space telescope. The actual problem is that most humans will experience this loss over their own lifetime. The Randers strategy to avoid losing is to not play the game. Usually, the objection from the nature-lovers is that the loss will simply accelerate if people stop caring. Seeing e.g. a subdivision as an equally valid part of an all-inclusive nature is a pretty rare position to take.

(The Integral people have better definition in terms of 'nature', 'Nature', and 'NATURE'. It remains ungoogleable to me. @daylen has previously shared a picture of the appropriate page.)

[Jean]

I think the opposition to stop "caring" exists because if you draw the reasoning to the end, you should just kill yourself to avoid suffering from the loss of your own life.
Which take away every meaning life has.
And we crave meaning.