Tag Archives: video games

Work and video games

March 22, 2017 By in ideas, Links Tags: , , 6 Comments

I was reading “Escape to Another World” (highly recommended) and this part made me realize something:

How could society ever value time spent at games as it does time spent on “real” pursuits, on holidays with families or working in the back garden, to say nothing of time on the job? Yet it is possible that just as past generations did not simply normalise the ideal of time off but imbued it with virtue – barbecuing in the garden on weekends or piling the family into the car for a holiday – future generations might make hours spent each day on games something of an institution.

I think part of the challenge is that, historically, many of us pursue hobbies and other activities that are also related to craftsmanship. The world of full of people who, in their spare time, rebuild bikes or cars, or sew quilts, or bind books, or write open-source software, or pursue other kinds of hobbies that have virtues beyond the pleasure of the hobby itself (I am thinking of a book like Shop Class as Soul Craft, though if I recall correctly the idea of craftsmanship as a virtue of its own goes back to Plato). A friend of mine, for example, started up pottery classes; while she enjoys the process, she also gets bowls and mugs out of it. Video games seem have few or none of those secondary effects.

To be sure, a lot of playing video games has likely replaced watching TV, and watching TV has none of those salutary effects either. Still, one has to wonder if video games are also usurping more active forms of activity that also build other kinds of skills (as well as useful objects).

I say this as someone who wasted a fantastic amount of time on video games from ages 12 – 15 or so. Those are years I should’ve been building real skills and abilities (or even having real fun), and instead I spent a lot of them slaying imaginary monsters as a way of avoiding the real world. I can’t imagine being an adult and spending all that time on video games. We can never get back the time we waste, and wasted time compounds—as does invested time.

In my own life, the hobby time I’ve spent reading feeds directly into my professional life. The hobby time I spent working on newspapers in high school and college does too. Many people won’t have so direct a connection—but many do, and will.

To be sure, lots of people play recreational video games that don’t interfere with the rest of their lives. Playing video games as a way of consciously wasting time is fine, but when wasting time becomes a primary activity instead of a secondary or tertiary one it becomes a problem over time. It’s possible to waste a single day mucking around or playing a game or whatever—I have and chances are very high that so have you—but the pervasiveness of them seems new, as Avent writes.

It’s probably better to be the person writing the games than playing the games (and writing them can at times take on some game-like qualities). When you’re otherwise stuck, build skills. No one wants skills in video game playing, but lots of people want other skills that aren’t being built by battling digital orcs. The realest worry may be that many people who start the video game spiral won’t be able to get out.

Exploring the limits in art, writing, and science

August 4, 2013 By in Critics, Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

In the poorly-titled but otherwise interesting essay “The Disquiet of Ziggy Zeitgeist: Unsettled by the sense that reality itself is dwindling, fading like sunstruck wallpaper,” Henry Allen says that “For the first time in my 72 years, I have no idea what’s going on,” because a lot of culture has splintered, for lack of a better term, and as a result “I don’t know what’s going on. I doubt that anyone does.”

That sense is a result of reaching boundaries or borders in many if not most artistic fields. In music, for example, John Cage famously “recorded” a track that is entirely silent. Composers have created songs or symphonies or whatever that seem indistinguishable from noise. Popular music’s last major style shift was the early 90s, with rap and grunge; since then, we’ve mostly heard dance-disco-hip-hop variations.

In the fine arts, the avant-garde is probably dead, as Camille Paglia has argued in various places for, what is perhaps not surprisingly, twenty years. What people call concept art or non-art or art from life appears indistinguishable from noise or pranks. Or, as Allen says, “Now I go to New York and look at a work of art in Chelsea and say: ‘Oh, that’s one of those.’ (Dripping, elephant dung, monochrome, squalor, scribbling.)”

Literature in some ways “got there” first, with Joyce (Finnegans Wake) and Beckett (whose novels are the whole of boredom) about which I wrote more in “Martin Amis, the essay, the novel, and how to have fun in fiction.” If you’re trying to write a novel that truly pushes the boundaries of the novel, you’re going to have a very hard time doing so while being comprehensible to readers.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASex mores have fallen too: this weekend I’ve been reading Katherine Frank’s book Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through the World of Group Sex, she describes gang bangs involving hundreds of participants, along with BDSM and assorted other sex adventures. Most people in developed countries have nothing between them and that, provided they want it. As a side note, she describes swingers who were featured on a TV show called Swing, and the swingers talked to the show’s crew, who said in this rendition that “We don’t know how you’ve done it but most people would kill to have this life.” But you don’t have to kill for that life: you only have to love for it, and most people probably could have it, or a version of it, if they want it. No murder necessary!

Porn has also reached limits or gotten asymptotically. The market has devolved from the monolithic Playboy to innumerable small, online outlets, some commercial and some not, and porn faces the same availability issues that any information does: perpetual availability. Although I’m not an expert, porn videos or pictures from, say, 2005 are still being passed around and viewed in 2013 and may continue to be in 2023. There is already more out there than a single person can digest and the amount is growing over time. Curating, searching, and sorting become the problem amid what is effectively infinite. If you want it, you can probably already find it, and if you don’t like what you find, you can probably make it for a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars.

Video games are an intriguing exception to the trends described above. They’re a young medium, since they’ve only been popular in the last 30 to 40 years and have consequently seen a tremendous explosion in sophistication: compare Pong to a modern game versus a novel published in 1980 to a novel published in 2012. Video games also piggyback on growing computational capabilities. Video games, like the Internet, are still in relative infancy, and they appear to be very far from technical or comprehensibility limits.

I’m not saying that art or artists or culture is dead, but I am saying that the boundaries of comprehensibility have been reached in many fields. If I were more of a blowhard I would also pontificate about the role of the Internet in this—Allen picks 1993 by coincidence, perhaps, but 1993 was also just before the Internet reached the masses in the developed world. Within the next decade or two more than half of the people on the planet will probably get access, and that may further splinter culture. Already it’s possible for people with weird, niche interests to easily explore those interests, like Borgen, in the absence of social feedback.

Some fields, like math, appear inexhaustible. Others, like delivering things people want (which goes by the otherwise dull name “business”) appear if not inexhaustible then nearly so, since material desires keep expanding with GDP. I also doubt that art per se will ever be exhausted; the limits of comprehensibility don’t mean people will stop making art, only that we have to find ways to make it meaningful without being able to push constantly against a conservative establishment, which has been the animating force since Romanticism and now makes little sense.

Philip Zimbardo and the ever-changing dynamics of sexual politics

August 16, 2011 By in Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

A friend sent me a link to Philip Zimbardo’s talk, “The demise of guys?“, which recapitulates and shortens Hanna Rosen’s long Atlantic article, “The End of Men.” Based on the video and reading lots of material on similar subjects recently (like: Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?, although I do not find all of it compelling), I replied to my (female) friend:

1) There is still a very strong preference for males in much of the developing world, including India and China.

2) Barring unpredictable improvements in reproductive technology that bring us closer to Brave New World, I do not see substantial numbers of women wanting to live without men. There are some, have always been some, and will always be some, but they’re in the minority and probably will be for a long time.

3) I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s actually happening is that we’re seeing an increasing bifurcation in male behavior, as we’re seeing in many aspects of society, where the winners win more and the losers lose more than they once did. I suspect you can see more guys getting a larger number of women—a la Strauss in The Game, guys in frats, and guys who want to play the field in major cities—but also more guys who substitute video games and porn for real women, or who are incarcerated, or otherwise unable to enter / compete in mating markets. This makes women unhappy because they have to compete for a smaller number of “eligible” guys, the word “eligible” being one women love to use without wanting to define it. Women on average aren’t punishing men as much as one might expect for playing the field—see, e.g., this Slate article. Notice how Baumeister is cited there too.

4) Guys are more likely to drop out of high school, but they’re also more likely to be in the top 1% of the income distribution. They’re overrepresented in software, engineering, novel writing, and lots of other high-octane fields. They’re also overrepresented in prisons, special ed classes, and so forth. If you concentrate on the far reaches of either end of the bell curve, you’ll find guys disproportionately represented. Feminists like to focus on the right side, Zimbardo is focusing on the left. Both might be right, and we’re just seeing or noticing more extreme variation than we used to.

5) I’m not convinced the conclusions drawn by Zimbardo follow from the research, although it’s hard to tell without citations.

6) If guys are playing 10,000 hours of video games before age 21, no wonder they’re not great at attracting women and women are on average less attracted to them. This may reinforce the dynamic in number 3, in which those guys who are “eligible” can more easily find available women.

7) Most women under the age of 30 will not answer phone calls any more and will only communicate with men via text. If I were on the market, I would find this profoundly annoying, but it’s true. Many women, at least in college, make themselves chiefly available for sex after drinking heavily at parties; this contributes to perceived problems noted by Zimbardo, instead of alleviating them. If women will mostly sleep with guys after drinking and at parties, that’s what guys will do, and guys who follow alternate strategies will not succeed as well. Despite this behavior, many women also say they want more than just a “hookup,” but their stated and revealed preferences diverge (in many instances, but not all). In other words, I’m not sure males are uniquely more anti-social, at least from my perspective. When stated and revealed preferences diverge, I tend to accept evidence of revealed preferences.

EDIT: At the gym, I was telling a friend about this post, and our conversation reminded me of a student who was a sorority girl. The student and I were talking and she mentioned how her sorority was holding an early morning event with a frat, but a lot of the girls didn’t want to go if there wasn’t going to be alcohol because they didn’t know how to talk to boys without it. Point is, atrophied social skills are not limited to one sex.

8) For more on number 7, see Bogle, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus; I read the interviews and thought, “A lot of these people, especially the women, must experience extreme cognitive dissonance.” But people on average do not appear to care much about consistency and hypocrisy, at least in themselves.

9) In “Marry Him!“, Lori Gottlieb argues that women are too picky about long-term partners and can drive themselves out of the reproductive market altogether by waiting too long. This conflicts somewhat with Zimbardo’s claims; maybe we’re all too picky and not picky enough at the same time? She’s also mostly addressing women in their 30s and 40s, while Zimbardo appears to be dealing with people in their teens and 20s.

10) If Zimbardo wrote an entire book the subject, I would read it, although very skeptically.

Video Games Live — concert review

July 21, 2010 By in Critics, Culture Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

A friend and I saw Video Games Live, the concert featuring primarily music from video games; the show was emphatically so-so, mostly because the music kept being interrupted for banal reasons, chiefly related to defending the idea of video games as an art form. The structure of the concert went like this: the musicians would play for five to ten minutes, then a guy would show up to declare that video games are ART, DAMNIT! or run a contest, or show a video game, or pick his nose, or whatever. Then the music would resume. But is a show devoted to music of games really an ideal venue for the purpose of trying to show video games are art? In other concerts I’ve been to, no one comes out to defend Beethoven or The Offspring as art: it’s merely assumed. You’ll know video games are art when people stop claiming they are and merely assume that they are.

I feel the worst for the musicians themselves, who presumably haven’t spent more than 10,000 hours of practice time for underdeveloped pieces that, to highly trained ears, probably sound bombastic or manipulative, like bad romances seem to literary critics. You could see them looking at one another when the conductor / showman stopped to extol the virtues of video games and drench himself in glory for putting the show together.

You may notice that I haven’t mentioned much about the music: that’s because the show wasn’t really about music. Some video game music is interesting and deserves serious attention; Final Fantasy is particularly famous for its soundtracks. The Mario theme music has become a pop culture cliche. But you won’t find attention to music at Video Games Live: look elsewhere for that.

Without being able to discuss much of the music, someone dealing with the concert is left to discuss what the nominal concert really engages. Like a dizzying array of phenomena, Tyler Cowen has asked similar questions about the status of video games and art, which he engages a little bit here regarding a New York Times piece and also here. Salon.com is asking the same questions, but is more rah-rah about video games. I don’t think anyone has argued that video games don’t “matter,” whatever that means in the context. It seems unlikely to me that games will have a strong claim to art until they can deal with sexuality in a mature way—which paintings, novels, poetry, and movies have all accomplished.

We’ll know video games are art when their defenders stop saying that video games are art and merely assume they are while going about their business. This change happened in earnest with novels around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Mark McGurl argues in The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Maybe it’s happening now with video games. If so, I don’t think Video Games Live is helping.

One good thing: my friend won tickets. So the only cost of the show was opportunity, not money.

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