Playing with Toys While People Are Dying | Hacker News Reader

Playing with Toys While People Are Dying

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43 pointsmadradavid67 comments

There's a school of thought[1] that suggests that video games are a contributing factor in the steady fall of crime in the West. Crime is overwhelmingly perpetrated by young men, who also happen to be the main consumers of video games.

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/04/19/as-video-gam...

It could also be because of lower lead levels, a less competitive culture, greater empathy due to mass media, or a side effect of mens' generally lower testosterone levels. We don't really have a clue what really is causing the drop.

I'm curious how/why we have a less competitive culture. With globalization and automation it seems like at least the job market is more competitive.

It seems like most men in general are less masculine and more defensive, considerate, and anxious. Very few men have close guy friends anymore, and most men in the media and news nowadays are androgenous. I think men and boys nowadays are really chastised in school for being masculine, and it carries over into their adult lives. With the loss of masculinity, male competitiveness goes with it.

None of those things are mutually exclusive. It's likely a combination of some or all.

Don't forget the weed.

In the 90's, the crime was even given the label "The Crack Wars". It was anywhere from 2 to 5 times higher than it is today depending on where you lived.

Fast forward to today and the drug of choice is different. It's marijuana, which I don't believe is an "upper". Whereas crack was an "upper".

So a lot of factors go into it. Trayvon Martin, for instance, most likely lived in a cleaner environment with respect to lead...

was definitely high on pot...

but was trolling for snacks and probably on his way home to finish playing some video game.

There are a LOT of Trayvon Martins out there. So all those factors, and more, have lead to a lower VIOLENT crime rate overall.

Computer games, and the stock market, initially look pointless.

Games are, as the article puts it, frivolous toys, and the second-by-second stock market is a zero sum game casino. (Buying stocks is emphatically not investing in a company, except tangentially. It is principally a speculation on the price of an asset, and no money actually goes to the company when you buy stock through a broker).

In fact, they both do have some economic outputs, although their value is quite hard to measure:

Games are entertainment. They provide escapism and fun when we are bored or sad. This improves our wellbeing.

The stock market's output is difficult to see, but it is there: they compute the value of stock. Why we need to know the value of stock to such fine resolution in time, I do not know. But we're spending all those quants' brains finding it.

> Games are entertainment. They provide escapism and fun when we are bored or sad. This improves our wellbeing.

Does it?

I think sheer boredom improves our well-being.

As usual "What doesn't kill you makes you tougher". Escapism and fun leaves you vulnerable to the brutal real-world.

Yeah, we shouldn't have books, games, websites, sports, arts, music, etc. because fun is bad

Lots of those are work or productivity related. Actual fun things are already banned.

If it's fun, it's most likely already illegal.

Starcraft is productivity related?

Micromanaging a zerg rush isn't productive management?

Some of the better minecraft mods require some exercising of your 3-d design abilities and budgeting skills and navigation of dependency trees. There is a certain lower cognitive limit to make a cobbleworks in modded minecraft and above that there's a lot of engineering going to time/space tradeoffs and energy budgets and various design criteria. Not to mention making it look nice and troubleshoot-able.

There are also secondary effects such as you can make a great pile of economic activity by shoving kids thru schools to give them skills that are not economically useful in general or if you have X economically useful job slots opening per year you can make twice the tuition revenue by graduating 2X the number of kids and blaming the individual for individual failings when the macro effect of 2x supply impacts 1x demand. Or the school produces grads ignoring the effects of ageism, racism, sexism, but the employers are certainly under no illusion they need to be as color blind as the schools. Then when the only work they can find is as baristas or maybe nothing at all, perhaps a lively home life as a minecraft player will tranquilize them to the point of society lasting a little longer, squeezing blood out of a couple more rocks, getting that national aggregate student loan debt to a higher score than ever, before the great reboot that rights all wrongs.

I have a lot of managing experience. Can I send you my resume? I'm a C Zerg user on the iccup server.

No, since it decreases productivity and well-being.

Never trust the well-being of anyone that can't be bored. They are broken people.

If that were true, people with really boring jobs would have higher wellbeing, all other things being equal.

Actually, there might be some truth in that.

> The stock market's output is difficult to see, but it is there: they compute the value of stock. Why we need to know the value of stock to such fine resolution in time, I do not know.

The bigger benefit of the stock market is that it provides liquidity, which is one of the major appeals of owning listed stock - that you can liquidate it quickly/easily/cheaply.

The benefit you mentioned - pricing stock - enables companies to issue new stock at a fair market valuation. But that's secondary to letting people buy/sell stock easily.

> This improves our wellbeing.

Which improves productivity.

But since productivity (GDP) includes stuff like making games and gambling on stocks, I'm not sure it's a number worth maximising. Wellbeing is a number worth maximising though.

There's a country already doing this. In The Kingdom of Bhutan they measure GNH, Gross National Happiness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness

As an result of this the economist Med Jones later developed the concept into what's called GNW, Gross National Well Being

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Well-being

However such measurements are rarely used and the concept have been subject for criticism even within Buthan. To the best of my knowledge Buthan is still the closest we've come to maximizing well-being nor have I heard of more effective and successful attempts.

If anyone have firsthand experience of the subject I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I saw a documentary on Bhutan the other day. A German journalist travelled through the country to see how that Gross National Happiness actually looks in practice. His summary was that Bhutan is a third-world country by any measure that we commonly use (life expectation, GDP, etc.), but overall, people indeed seem very happy. Of course, you can only go so far wrt understanding a group of people when you look at them for a week only.

Slightly related: My favorite part was when he interviewed the leader of the opposition party. "It didn't become clear what policies he's actually opposing." :)

Interesting, would you happen to know the name of this documentary?

Composing music while people are dying

Writing novels while people are dying

Making movies while people are dying

Growing plants while people are dying

Going on road trips to Mexico while people are dying

Making tea and donuts while people are dying

...

What?

>What?

Fyi for readers who might get the wrong impression about the article based on grabcocque's criticism: The author is actually explaining why he continues to play with video games even though people are dying. It's a long essay (4500 words) and it takes Paul Kilduff-Taylor a while to build up to his justifications of pursuing the activities he finds meaningful even though people are suffering in the world.

Making more people while people are dying, for that matter.

Cursing future generations with death by giving birth to your children. You monster.

That's the biggest problem I have with life itself.

I never asked for this.

And yes, my vision is augmented.

Pondering nihilism while people are dying.

Do you remember when Medium was tanking? I do, in fact it's happening right now.

Reading Hacker News while people are dying.

Close this page, you heartless bastard. Go save African children* NOW!

* Or whatever the current trendy humanitarian tragedy is, I can't keep track.

Nothing new. During WW2 (and probably other wars) gambling houses, racetracks, pubs, hotels and many other similarly frivolous services had lots of traffic and customers. People simply needed to escape from reality every now and then and enjoy themselves.

Sure, we can do more to help the world. But if we're unable to live ourselves we can't do sh*t.

Some people consider human consciousness as a singularity in the human evolution which shouldn't have evolved at all. Human consciousness, as a powerfull problem solving tool, helped us to climb to the top of the food chain and to conquer the whole planet. We can sustain human life under water, in the arctic, even in space. The most of us in the developed world have no existential problems any more, don't starve or freeze to death, don't get eaten by wolves. But human consciousness has a big drawback. It can not be turned off, even if all of the problems needing a solution are gone. So why not work on [put a big burning issue here] to feel occupied and having a meaningful life?

There come video games and other drugs helping us turning our consciousness off, at least for a couple of hours.

I read the article, and I still feel like I need a tl;dr. Seems very disjointed with no thesis.

What is the point here?

He is having an existential crisis about finding self worth while working in an entertainment industry. He then blames everyone else for not having the exact same values as him.

I agree, it sounds like the author is arguing that the direction games take needs to change, in order to promote a positive cultural shift.

He sounds like he's thought a lot about what he's writing about, but it seemed like he sometimes spent several paragraphs speaking from the opposite perspective of his own, in a way that was a bit jarring.

Yeah, I don't get it either. It reads like someone who smoked a bunch of pot and is spouting off various, insanely vaguely related points but with no clear thesis whatsoever.

aka social media. I think thats the style they're intentionally aiming for. Come here instead of facebook.

Interestingly you can make a good comparison between "competitive like collectors" on social media and gaming.

The point is alluded to in the article. He is writing to elicit emotion in order to subtly market his two brand new games.

I swear to god this article is harder read than Nietzsche

On the other hand, thanks in part to gaming, the proliferation of gpu's has helped out in reducing the cost and putting r&d money into making them better, so now we have inexpensive ways to use them for machine learning models.

If the people with the highest impact on the environment (people from developed countries that are more likely to play video games) get distracted from eating, going out using motorized vehicles, procreating, etc... it is not necessarily bad.

Our lifestyle is not sustainable and we haven't figured out a solution yet. Maybe electronic entertainment helps mitigating the sustainability problem.

It sounds like a lot of the top level comments are missing the point,and think this article is simply about how video games are not useful. I didn't get that at all (the first few paragraphs are confusing imo, though), and the paragraph below seems to highlight his relationship with games.

> Working in games has given me so much, and I know that’s true of many others as well. I can’t wait to help finish and release Tokyo 42 with the brilliant duo at SMAC Games: it’s such a vibrant thing that I can see it causing a big stir. I’m looking forward to getting stuck into Frozen Synapse 2 and assisting Ian in fulfilling his vision for it, then moving on to a new creative collaboration we’ve started to discuss. Games allow me to use all of my slightly weird collection of half-abilities at once: I don’t think anything else would do that. They’re a way that I can work on things which really exist, which don’t just evaporate into the air.

How does this assess the utility of video games?

The article or that specific quote from the article? The article seems to be directed toward people developing video games, from a developer of video games. That video games have utility in a general sense seems to be a given in the article.

(although he may feel some have more utility than others.)

This article is all over the place. I'll ignore the games are "frivolous" angle as they obviously are and that's not a bad thing - you can say that about any sort of entertainment.

With my gamer hat on I want to comment on the eye-catching section with all the negative reviews of modern non-games.

The author is being passive aggressive about it but I think it's safe to assume he's upset that people who buy games expect to receive games for the money they pay. This is good advice for any product: deliver on what the product promises. If you sell a car with comfortable seats but no engine maybe what you should've made was a novelty sofa instead. The fault is with your product not with the "stupid consumer" who doesn't appreciate the super comfy seats. I'm sorry I'm making this obvious point but somehow the author managed to miss it.

I'm pretty sure the author is being ironic

Most of our entertainment in the western world world could also be classified as frivolous ... how are video games any different than movies, books or even art? Those who spend an excessive amount of time doing any of those things may have a problem but human creativity shouldn't need arbitrary constraints. I would argue that the military-industrial complex is far more detrimental to society both in wasted engineering talent and in directly contributing to suffering.

People have been dying since people existed and keep doing so. (See The Onion for details http://www.theonion.com/article/world-death-rate-holding-ste...)

The best hope to fix it is to move to computer simulation so games developers may be our saviours.

Games can, and mostly do, have shamanic value the same as any art (music, film, literature, etc). Even the "dumb" ones. They help people connect and bond and relieve stress. They tell meaningful stories and connect with archetypes guiding people through tough times. They help people find moments of focus (zen?) and release...and much more.

The relentless and smug moralising in this article makes me feel nauseous. This kind of simplistic worldview is highly toxic. Art inspires. Without any doubt, computer games have inspired a large number of people to get into programming or even mathematics, and this in turn could lead to significant technological progress that may not have happened otherwise. Etc.

There are games that do good, like Fold-It[0] and Mozak.

That is, they are manual research aids packaged as games; playing them fills a genuine need.

[0] http://fold.it/portal/

I'm gonna quote my favorite TV show:

> Ah, no, no, no. But, Dennis, look. "Plutonium smuggled into Syria."

> That's gonna change my life drastically.

> That's gonna change everyone's lives!

> No one can go to Syria anymore for vacation!

---

Life's too short and my monkeysphere is too small to worry about people have way around the world.

And yet, from this quick humorous exchange, you've absorbed the notion that Syria is an evil country where bad people might be accumulating material for weapons of mass destruction.

Not at all, how exactly did I put that across to you.

Of course I don't know anything about you, you might actually be from Syria, or be an expert in Syria and the Middle East, or have anyway a good knowledge of the country and its situation and people. I only wanted to point out that the fragment of dialogue you reported, with its casual piece of negative information regarding a foreign country, is in fact a good example of how political propaganda works, be it intentional or (most likely, in this case) not. Repeat that enough in enough different forms, and millions of people will be perfectly sure that Syria is a threat to world peace.

The dialogue appears to be from 2007, just four years later the USA started getting involved and taking sides in the Syrian civil war.

I think the same argument applies to movies and any kind of fiction in general.

can we pleas downvote this garbage. people didn't need videogames not to care about others. if not video games greatly contributed , as a form of art, to help people live better lives

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