Digital Capitalism’s War on Leisure | Hacker News Reader

Digital Capitalism’s War on Leisure

democracyjournal.org

190 pointsraleighm155 comments

I'm currently going through a phase of setting up a games room, and acquiring a bunch of slightly older video game consoles and games to populate it. I've settled on PS2 and PS3, and Xbox/360 as the sweet spot for this. Partly due to price (they're not old enough to be worth much, but not new enough to be hawked at retail prices).

But a factor just as big as price is how, from about mid-360 and PS3 onwards, gaming stopped being a case of 'buy a disc and play the game' and became 'register online, tie to a service which will be withdrawn at some point, and pay extra for bits of the game that would previously have been free'. All of that stuff transformed gaming media from about 2007 onwards from something that you could put on a shelf and return to at your leisure, into this ephemeral thing that you must buy into at the peak of the hype cycle, or it won't exist in proper form (if at all) when you do get around to it.

That said, this phenomenon is mostly limited to commercial games. There's an incredible grassroots movement of indie, modding, and retro gaming that everyone is free to immerse and engage in, where this issue just doesn't exist. My reaction to cutting-edge gaming for the past decade or so has been largely to turn away from commercial games and find entertainment via other gaming channels.

It's indeed sad. My only consolations are (i) like you said, indie games are still an oasis of bubbling creativity in a desert of insipid money-makers, and (ii) there are more brilliant old games I'm still yet to play than I could complete in many many years.

I’m also put off by the fact you can’t just turn on and play a game, you need to download a 5gb game update, platform updates and are spammed with notifications, especially if you don’t play for a few weeks.

People bring this up a lot, but forget that the alternative was the game gets released with bugs that never get fixed.

Maybe another alternative could be a game in which developers are given more time and resources to develop and test instead of shortstaffing, overworking, and rushing to market? More of a waterfall than an agile approach perhaps

The alternative is the user is given the choice to update, not forced to. This was normal for PC games a decade ago, you'd go online and download a patch. At least with the games I played, bugfix and even small feature updates were usually free.

I agree, and it’s nice to have new content/fixes, it just creates anxiety/frustration and leads to not turning it on, which defeats the purpose of having it. Circular rant, first world problem I know

For those interested in some cool indie games (on Steam), check out these for a start: Not A Hero, Mother Russia Bleeds, Death Road to Canada, Streets of Rogue, SPACEPLAN, Cluster Truck, Stick Fight by Landfall.

There are so many!

Current Xbox One mainstream games are pretty much all available on plastic discs, and all work without an internet connection (obviously without patches or online multiplayer). You don't need to sign up for any services. There's a trend for multiplayer-only FPS games but that's a relatively small part of gaming as a whole.

What do you think are the best games for modding? Of course Minecraft. What else? I'm thinking especially in terms of modding as a way to get into programming.

I'm not super up to date but if you're willing to look at older games with active modding communities, the Elder scrolls, Fallout, and Stalker series' stand out as having very active modding communities.

ModDB is also a great resource (was, not sure if still the best), you can figure out where the crowds are at based on levels of submission and discussion activity there.

PS Minecraft modding is an interesting example of where those commercial revenue-focused practices have bled into the modding scene. Never have I seen so much adfly, patreon, and general money-making motivation within a modding community. I doubt it's the only one that suffers from the issue, but it's notable.

The entire Arma series has a huge modding community, along with good documentation on the internals, it's one of the main selling points of the game. Their last competition spawned hundreds of entries and awarded €500,000 in prizes to content creators.

https://arma3.com/features/content-creation

Factorio has to my knowledge a pretty neat modding API internally.

It does, Factorio is an impressive software project anyway you look at it.

Skyrim VR on PC is absurdly beautiful fully modded. The vortex mod manager along with the nexus mods community are great.

Edit: In terms of getting into programming, you can create mods with custom scripts you write to change the behavior of the game.

This is a good read, but I question this line:

> Video games, at their best, offer everyone an equal chance to overcome the same challenges on an equal playing field. “Pac-Man,” after all, didn’t let you add extra quarters to purchase immunity from the ghosts.

I mean, in a way they did. If you had more quarters to spare in Pac-Man, you'd be more likely to make it further than your cash-strapped compatriot.

But then again arcades peddled these types of "pay to win" mechanics long before the App Store, and so probably aren't the best example to use in an article like this. NES era games would be more appropriate I think.

That's not pay per win. Yes, you could spend more quarters and put more time in front of the screen, but in the end it was your own personal skill that determined how far you went in many games. Just putting in money and time alone wasn't enough. The harder games you'd hit the wall anyways; Sinistar or Robotron 2084 are good examples of how you really needed skill in games.

Pay to win means putting more money in to the game will give you a direct advantage no matter your skill level. It might be possible to compensate for it, many times its not. Reddit had a thread where they talked about that, and an example was one person in Black Desert or Archeage killing an entire guild of players.

Edit: the main pay to win aspect in arcade games were continuing and energy or timer systems. Continuing is, but the player's goal always was to reduce the amount of continues by skillful play. Very few games i feel were impossible to do so with.

Timers are hit points counting down to eventually end the game. Gauntlet was the first big game to use it, as was Rampage.Nintendo's playchoice 10 used a literal timer, where once it counted down, the game stopped letting you play. Usually though these weren't considered pay to win...the term we used was "quarter munchers" and many of those games were co-operative so pay to win aspects didn't harm other players.

Yeah, the irony is the article talks about Pay to Win games, which a good percentage of gamers don't bother with at all because you can have very good (arguably much better) experiences with a fixed price, several year old games that run on your ordinary computer, and yet harks back to an era when people did have a choice of pay per play or relatively expensive specialised hardware. No, really the decline of hardware as a proportion of gaming spend isn't bad news for people with a lot of time to play games and no money.

It's similarly lacking in awareness when it advocates one route to levelling playing fields being a model where everybody receives micropayments from any commercial entity that uses their data (interesting in theory) apparently without realising that data regarding people with money is usually a lot more valuable than data on people without it (before we even start to consider other issues like implications for deanonymisation). That's after moaning that Twitch separates people into "haves and have nots" because some people earn considerably more money from their streams than others based mainly on things other than their spending power.

And anyone that thinks "government employed Twitch stars tasked with building communities for the marginalised and estranged" is going to equal things out has never been through a process where government bodies evaluate who to fund...

You don't get to enter your initials into the machine based on how far you get. Only your score matters, and your score resets when you continue.

You don't "beat" Pac-Man when you get to the kill screen, you beat Pac-Man when you get a perfect score.

...and how does one practice to "beat" Pac-Man with a perfect score?

Practicing the game is not pay-to-win, is pay-to-practice. It still requires skill to win.

Getting to the kill screen seems like it should count as a victory. Getting your initials on the top of the high score screen counts too, if perhaps only briefly. The idea that you can't say you've won unless you've played a completely perfect game is a mindset for insane people who will never be happy.

I think GP's point was, if every practice run costs a quarter, there's likely a correlation between wealth/resources and practice/skill.

that's if you're stuck on the idea of beating a game of skill. if you need that idea, then you have to be able to beat pacman, and so you feed quarters to get to the game ending bug. if you dispense with that idea then you play for your best score, and feeding quarters to get to the kill screen becomes a waste of time.

True! And I forgot that aspect of the scoring system.

High score resets whenever the machine is unplugged.

Score isn't the only measure of success in Pac-man or other arcade games.

what difference does it make if the high score table is reset? if you got that score you got that score, that's your achievement, the record just commemorates it.

score very much is the measure of success in pacman and its contempiraries. what else is there?

If you consider the high score list as you would a city wall where local graffiti writers put their tags as a territorial guestbook it makes more sense IMO :-)

Sure, you know that you "won" - but there is also something to the idea of bragging about it!

It’s like a metaphor saying only literal outcomes and shape of the world mean much. Whereas our ephemeral emotions which require us to stay “plugged into” an increasingly demanding cultural tradition despite the diminishing ROI most people are seeing (cause they’re ignoring the literal outcomes and shape for emotional feitishism)

NES-era games juiced the difficulty so you couldn't beat them on rental. Not quite the same but if I were going to pick a "golden age" of relatively not-exploitative gaming it might go from SNES-PS2 or so.

NES era developers knew that many of their customers could only afford a few games a year but also didn't have enough memory on the carts for extremely large games. The only way to prevent kids from blowing through the content in a weekend was to crank the difficulty up or figure out some way to offer endless replayability (ala Tetris).

It's really incredible when you see printed out maps of old NES games just how small the levels were. You could put an entire game in a 4 or 5 page spread in Nintendo Power if you wanted.

It was at least in some cases explicitly about rentals. That's why the difficulty was jacked up for US releases -- Nintendo was successful at getting game rentals legally banned in Japan, but not the US.

Weird that the internet opinion is that the Japanese release is the harder one because Americans don't have the patience for super hard games. Examples include Final Fantasy (that simplified the item system) or the "Lost Levels" of Super Mario Brothers.

Many games, not just the original SMB2.

Rock Man 2 (Mega Man 2 in North America) had one only difficulty in the Japanese release. In North America, Mega Man 2 offered a "Difficult" option, which was the original Japanese difficulty. "Normal" was the default difficulty for the North America release toned things down quite a bit, as Capcom felt the game would be considered too difficult by the North American market.

There's well documented lists of games that were significantly easier for the North American release, with only a few harder for North America.

In fact, the difficulty tuning was usually harder within the first release of the game(regardless of location). So games that saw a US release first were hard there, while games released in Japan first were hard in that version. And since the majority of the NES library derives from Japan-first releases you get the "Japan version is harder" effect.

There are some exceptions to the rule of course, but it usually holds that the later localizations get the more polished product.

Games adjusted to be harder for the US can have really punishing levels of difficulty though. Like the US Hard Corps release is excessively hard.

A counterexample: Resident Evil was actually harder in the US because they removed the auto aim feature, specifically so US game renters would have a hard time beating it. I'm sure there are more examples of both kinds of modifications for the US market.

You're not in any danger of finishing Final Fantasy in a few hours. The Lost Levels is not really a very good game.

If that's what Nintendo were trying to do they did a piss-poor job at it. I beat Super Mario World over a single weekend's rental.

Ahhh, those were the days. You knew you had 72 hours from the moment you left the store and goddamnit you would spend that time effectively :-)

It didn't happen to every game, but compare, for instance, the US and Japan releases for Contra 3 or Contra: Hard Corps.

Nintendo hard described the NES era, not the SNES.

It happened with sixteen-bit games too.

PS1 was the golden era IMO. It was slow enough for good graphics, so gameplay came first. But it was fast enough for rather good physics and AI.

I find it hard to go back and play early 3D games. But on the "exploitation" front there is no pay-to-win stuff.

Yeah, Wipe Out!

Isn't the golden age now, where difficulty is customizable?

Absolutely not. Difficulty is customisable, but we still live in a world where massive AAA titles lock things which in previous generations were relatively easily attainable behind grinding measured in weeks, not days, with no regard for any difficulty setting you might have, while constantly suggesting both explicitly and by implication that you could skip the grind by just giving them more money.

I think a lot of the indie and AA space is still very good, though.

The reason the golden age is now is specifically because you have all those options. Just because AAA games exist doesn't invalidate the fact that if you are looking for a specific type of more traditional game experience, you can find it much easier then ever before.

The "Golden Age" usually refers to when the great works were produced; otherwise we'd always simultaneously be in every golden age that ever occurred (barring the works in question being destroyed), making the term kind of meaningless.

Well, no, because the axis we're looking at isn't difficulty. And customizable difficult is not a recent idea.

Difficulty levels have been a thing for over 20 years.

This is slightly off topic, but are modern arcade games more extortionate than they used to be? If you play e.g. Mario Kart you have to keep putting in coins after each race. Maybe if you come first it lets you continue but it seems a total rip off.

Atari aimed for a playtime per quarter of 2-3 minutes back in the day

Wow, maybe not that different then when you account for inflation (though I might be way off). Who were these kids then who had rolls of quarters to throw into machines?

Sadly, sometimes they were the kids who stole money and possessions from their siblings to convert to play time.

Maybe not Pac-Man, but a lot of the arcade games in the mall from my generation (40yr old) had the "Continue" option and there was no way to win the game on one quarter. It was cheap to play but expensive to win.

Remind me, I don't remember if you could continue or if you had to Start again from the beginning when you died in Pac-Man. I know later Arcade Games allowed you to continue but I'm not sure about Pac-Man

I believe the arcade Pac-Man fell into the camp of "when you die, your current game is over".

I believe the "you have 30 seconds to add more money to continue your game from where you just died" came about much later in the arcades than the date of Pac-Man's reign.

But it also allowed skill with the game to shine by getting further on a single quarter.

But skill with the game doesn't come from nowhere. You build skill by playing, and with arcade games, you have to pay to play.

Granted, paying for a chance to test and improve your skill sounds a lot more fair than paying to win.

Yea, I recall fondly playing Mortal Kombat in the arcade for literally hours with one quarter vs. a line of people each putting their own quarters in. As long as you won the match it let the winner continue playing without adding more money. An afternoon of entertainment could be had for <$1.

> If you had more quarters to spare in Pac-Man,

Definitely. And just to dilute simplistic points of view, there were also books published designed to teach the secrets to beating these games in part to spend less money on them. [1] One was even published by Consumer Reports..

[1] http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2012/12/golden-age...

But the author has already bought into the frame that playing the game according to implicit rules and achieving progress is the dominant form of the game. This overlooks many other social aspects of the game, such as roles like watching, reviewing, finding secret levels, using games as a social space to meet others, etc.

In short, the author is caught by surprise by the fact that humans will project their social relations into the video game world which they have imagined to be hyper-egalitarian.

In fact, the mere invention of the games was an extension of our social relations into the digital field, so as soon as they appeared it was too late to sustain the author's idealistic viewpoint.

Perhaps the author would have made a stronger point arguing for the emergence of a hypercapitalist congeries of video games which are actually a precession of Baudrillardian simulacra. In the first stage, the dynamics of human experience are projected digitally into a virtual, lithographic field, e.g. instead of battles in space, we use electronic computers to simulate game play

In the second stage, e.g. games on disks and CDs from the 80s-2000, capital was used to design a product which must be recovered through sales of the game software.

In the third stage, it is the simulacra of a game which is sold. It must be so technically dazzling that the capital required to produce it can not be recovered from the sales of the game itself. The game must be reconfigured so that it is not merely a game any more, but an addictive object whose main purpose is no longer leisure, but to recover the hypercapital outlay to reproduce it through gacha.

> passive consumption over leisure

This is the money quote for me. We somehow managed to convince an entire generation of people who were skeptical of the passive consumption of television that 'Hey wait, this other form of manufactured entertainment is entirely different and not at all bad for you because we're the tech industry and we aren't the people in suits."

Were they skeptical at all though? Or did they just want more control over the content? Whenever I talk to people who would very much be in that category, they don't hate TV at all, in fact they love it and sub to Netflix and Prime (or whatever else), they just hated the bombard of ads and not being able to watch what you want when you want.

So this hypocritical behavior you're trying to highlight just doesn't exist at all IMO, people wanted more control and they got it.

Was it not a commonly held opinion with your friends/family in high school and college that television was a pretty rotten form of media? I don't think that this is a universal phenomenon, but it definitely exists.

Pretty sure this only existed (and exists) on one side of a class divide. TV as entertainment for the "lower class" and thus if you want to be rich and snobby you avoid it for "higher pursuits". Then Netflix comes out and its hip, and gives people an excuse to participate in TV. Once the poor all have Netflix, there is suddenly a gap for a new cultural differentiator built around it.

Nope, far from common. Most people liked The Simpsons and/or various other such things.

There were a few "I don't even own a TV!" folks but they mostly turned into "I don't even own a Facebook!" types, in any case.

There were very few who wouldn't watch any television or film. And as TV production and writing quality went up, television took up more of their time.

No, not really. Most people in my high school liked watching TV and what not. They may not have liked aspects of the format (like ads or being stuck finding repeats into the times when a show wasn't on video yet), but they certainly liked watching TV.

Where the heck did you go to school/college anyway? Never seen that sort of attitude before.

And when did they goto school :-)

> We somehow managed to convince

We did? I though people just switched from TV to Internet because Internet is more fun or more faddy or just cheaper.

One can't skip the "cheaper" aspect. Computer games (well at least not the freemium play2win types) are generally much better deals than being a sports buff, as you can spend a lot more time playing/watching replays of games for less than a cable subscription.

The MMOG and freemium types that require subscription fees or have an in-game economy are a different story. I truly hope legislation prevents those types of games from destroying the existing landscape of "buy-once play-many" vs. constantly buying "gold/credits" for upgrades (that you need to even stay competitive).

Even most of those seem to subsist more on pulling in a small percentage of "whales" (who spend thousands and likely have gambling addictions) and people who buy the occasional hat.

Even then on an entertainment/hour basis video games are a remarkably cheap form of entertainment.

Yeah, people switched from cable TV to on-demand niche content, but it's the same kind of passive entertainment.

Is it? people get involved with both film and tv - when BAB5 was firing on all cylinders you'd end watching some episodes pysced up.

And a defy anyone not to watch Theodreds funerial scene in Two Towers and not be moved.

Not at all a representative sample, but the majority of my friends and their families growing up watched very little television outside of the occasional sporting event. Those same people are now enthusiastic social media users.

I grew up with videogames. My whole life, my mais sources of entertainment were books and video games.

I find that whant attracts me to them is the control I have of my experience. Specially the pacing.

With books and game I can take a breather, explore/reread a portion and progress as fast as I want. In the television, cinema and music media I don't have that control. Therefore I don't like those media as much.

I'm also _really_ picky about the pacing in a movie. It's not that I don't like slow movies. I get antsy if they're not progressing as I think they should and when I'm presented with scenes that have no purpose.

Re: the last paragraph; judging something for what you want it to be rather than for what it is defeats the purpose of engaging with those media.

Oh so you mean the snobbery of the "hyacinth bucket" type those have always existed hardline puritans though that chess playing was a sin as you where not spending time thinking about the bible.

The argument essentially seems to be this:

Some people are making substantial amounts of money from activities that we traditionally associate with leisure, in the example given, videogames. This devalues gaming as a leisure activity for the rest of society. This is a bad thing. This is an indicator of a broader trend of the monetization of all forms of leisure. This is bad. Consequently we should find ways to redistribute wealth so that everyone can benefit from having leisure time and using it in non-wealth producing ways.

I think this is a fair summary of the argument (but I don't want to misrepresent the argument so correct me if I got something wrong), though I've tried to phrase it in more neutral terms rather than the ideologically loaded ones the author uses.

I agree with some aspects of the argument. I think it's true that people are finding more ways to make money from things that would previously be described as hobbies through the advent of platforms like Patreon, Twitch, and YouTube. I also think it's undesirable for everyone to view their hobby as a means of making more money, but I don't think it's likely everyone will move to this for a simple reason: these are winner-takes-all fields. The most popular streamers are going to create the vast majority of revenue and reap the vast majority of profit.

Further, money serves a useful purpose: allocating labor to things people otherwise wouldn't do on their own. Sure, it'd be great if everyone could play videogames more without worrying about providing for their needs. Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way. We aren't at a point where we can produce everything that people want at a small amount of labor time and use the rest for leisure. Plus a fundamental fact about people is this: we're never satisfied. We always want more. Access to money mediates our desire for more by limiting what we can have. It also helps integrate us into broader society by making us do things that at least someone finds valuable enough to pay for.

In short, I think the article is weak because it is dealing with what would be nice (from the perspective of the author, not necessarily my perspective), rather than what is realistically achievable.

The article is weak from clickbaity title to eventual conclusion that only UBI will save us from a dark dystopian future of a huge slave class of gamers forced to allocate their meager incomes to buy in-game powerups by a shadowy cabal of Silicon Valley overlords.

It always sounds cool to derive these kinds of arguments when there is a new delivery model that is Paradigm Shifting Everything. In fact, as pointed out by a bunch of other commenters, this model isn't intrinsically much different from the console arcade game model of whenever it was the first pinball machine came out.

As for the "monetization of leisure" this is basically as old as leisure time itself, as is the idea of restricting access to this leisure activity to those with the wherewithal. The classic model here is - golf. To play a "better course" you need to pay large fees, and in many clubs need to pass some kind of vetting. Golf nonetheless created a class of professional players, who are paid based on how well their play (and possibly antics) entertain a population of passive fans.

I don't see how "monetized gaming" and "e-sports" is at all different from the vast class of professional gaming or sporting activities from poker to football. Civilization has not collapsed because there are millions of lowly duffers who feel compelled to spend money to knock little white balls around a field. I feel confident we will survive "Clash of Clans" as well.

I don't know... Clash of Clans strikes me as an early alpha of Skynet

Furthermore, the author ever addresses other forms of leisure where people are paid to participate, such as sports. Does the NBA devalue the pickup game played solely for bragging rights?

The other problem I have with this argument is the fallacy that leisure activities were not class based in the past. Polo would seem to be a fairly obvious example, very few people can afford the horses required.

I'll point out that there's always been a big class of hobbies where average people make a few bucks here and there, but money is not the focus and doesn't really detract from the enjoyment of it as leisure.

For example, everyone that likes DIY/fixing things/tinkering. Will I fix something little for my buddy for a case of beer? Sure. Will I do the brakes on his little sports car for a few bucks, him providing the parts, and letting me take it for a drive up in the hills? Sure. Will I work on his daily driver with him needing it for work on Monday? Nope. It's a hobby, not a job. It's enjoyable to do in my spare time, relaxed and with a beer in hand, the moment it becomes a source of stress I'm not interested.

This article definitely isn't written by a gamer. Most gamers HATE pay-for-powerup. There was a huge rebellion against EA's ingame purchase model for Starwars Battlefront for example.

Many games allow in game purchases, but only for cosmetic changes (e.g. "skins") like Counter Strike, TF2, Overwatch, etc, not to allow you to buy skills no one else can acquire.

And while it's a concern that there are games that are going that route, the gaming community does push back.

>Most gamers

Most gamers that voice their opinion online, but not in the actual market. Otherwise we wouldn't have as many microtransaction-laden games as we currently have. The Battlefront 2 debacle was something that was quickly forgotten after a couple weeks. EA even said they weren't worried about it to shareholders. I'm sure if you look at earnings reports, the "boycott" did almost nothing to them.

Enough voiced their opinion that EA changed the Battlefront system. But Battlefront also failed as a francise game, hardly anyone plays it.

League of Legends is probably the most long lasting multiplayer game that has skill based micro purchases, but it's not as egregious, because the game has been around for a long time, and the amount of pure avarice isn't anywhere need the obvious money grab that EA tried to pull off.

Take Fortnite, the game which is printing cash faster than Epic can spent it. Their entire loot system, like Counter Strike and Team Fortress, is cosmetic only and grants no extra ability.

It remains to be seen, but I bet Fortnite has longevity far in excess of the pay-for-skill titles.

The past decade of 0% interest rates has had a really bad effect on the economy.

It seems that most of the money in the world is flowing around in circles from one useless company to another and everyone has a useless office job to match.

The people who get paid the most are those who do the most useless work of all; pitching silly ideas to foolish investors and trying to predict the next hot useless trend in an economy that is founded on complete randomness.

...all in the hope that they too will one day acquire enough capital so that they can afford to start making their own random investment decisions about random trends in the economy and create more useless jobs in the process.

This reads like it was written by someone who doesnt play or appreciate games, or even know much about the artform.

The point that is brought up several times, that they are classist due to their cost.. If you cant afford a game, or dont want to support its publisher or business model, but still want to play it. Just pirate it. Most games are readily available to pirate.

Games have simply become as film, and novels and all other art forms these days. You have the good stuff, which is cheap and indie and obscure, and innovative.. And you have the bad commercial stuff, which is very homogeneous and repetitive and 'safe' and is heavily marketed and designed to have the broadest and most shallow appeal. Its simply another business where X investment yields X*Y return (where Y is positive)

So, the equivalent of blockbuster Hollywood films, or airport novels. If you have an interest in a particular medium you will quickly learn to avoid the bad stuff and learn where to find the good stuff.

To be fair, like with any art form, there are good and bad works at all levels of commercial activity. There are fantastic indie projects no one has heard of, fantastic triple A/blockbuster titles that make millions and great games from every level of obscurity in between. Same with the terrible stuff.

But as you mentioned, if you're interested in a particular medium, you'll soon realise what's good and what isn't. And there's always enough to fit pretty much anyone's tastes too.

>This reads like it was written by someone who doesnt play or appreciate games, or even know much about the artform.

So, like a proper adult?

Your snarky comment belies your thin implication that you yourself are a mature adult for not liking games.

My implication wasn't that I am mature for not liking games.

Only that liking games is immature -- which doesn't imply that not liking games automatically qualifies one for maturity (it's a necessary, but not sufficient condition).

Nor does it imply that I and those who share my opinion consider themselves mature (a non-X person can still make claims about what constitutes being X, and those claims can even be perfectly correct -- doubly so in a subjective, non-well defined, topic, like what constitutes maturity).

One of the solutions to the problem of pay-to-win is to eliminate all laws making it illegal to hack these games. This position seems very problematic and will rub a lot of people the wrong way, but we should have the freedom to hack the code running on our devices. If that breaks someone's business model, then maybe it's the business model that's broken.

Most people don't have any ethical issues with hacking single-player games, but the morality does get hazier when you talk about hacks that unlock otherwise paid upgrades. I'll be honest, I don't know how to feel about it. I want game designers to get paid and don't want to "cheat" them out of payment, but I also feel strongly that I should be able to open the hood of my car and do whatever I want up to the limit of endangering others (whether through exceeding emissions limits or general "physical" safety).

Or you could just not buy garbage games.

This article unravels at this line- " In industrial and post-industrial societies, work tends to be necessarily hierarchical. But leisure has always held out the promise of equality. "

I don't think this has ever really been true.

Yeah, you need only look at traditional sports to see that. A leisurely game of amateurs/hobbyists will still have a hierarchy in terms of individuals and what aspect of the game they are proficient in.

Games are, and won't be a "consumer luxury good", as the article states, unless we're getting into bespoke CAVE systems or Westworld-like theme parks. Consoles have achieved that point of ubiquity that they're a common household appliance, and it isn't unusual to see one. A "normal" good in other words.

The games themselves are content from a production culture standpoint, which is why we so little innovation (and lots of duplication) within the market. EGP coming out of the pipeline.

There is a salient point about the capture of leisure time, but it was written 40 years ago. Seeing as it ties into the Facebook ad policy reveal of a month ago, maybe it's worth bringing up in it's own thread.

I really didn't understand that point at all. Were they talking about price? Because adjusted for inflation, computers consoles and games have never been cheaper.

This article has such a condescending tone- how is paying for a video game subscription any more harmful to "leisure" than paying for a trip to the beach? Pure clickbait.

The beach just exists. You might live near it or not, there are economics involved, but nobody set you up to go to the beach and designed it to be addictive.

Subscription video-games that were being criticized were those specifically framed to get people hooked and buy more and more special stuff etc.

What's harmful is pushing people into patterns of spending money on leisure when there's lots of ways to have great leisure without the cost. In that sense, marketers who tell people they have to travel to the beach for vacation are also pushing for people to spend on their leisure.

Incidentally, the beach is better than video games.

I don't understand why there is an issue with markets entering the domain of "leisure", and I certainly do not think that this is something new. Is a hobby shop immoral?

Micro-transactions in freemium video games have proven to be a great way to make money for games that are deemed worthy by their users. No one is being forced to buy the new skin in Fortnite.

You can't stop market forces. If you choose not to partake, good on you. But applying your own personal moral concept of what leisure should be onto the entire country is worse than Fortnite making me pay $10 for the new skin.

>You can't stop market forces

“Market forces” are not natural phenomenon, they’re political impositions on human interaction in places where and to the extent which they’re useful. It’s fully within our power to prevent their intrusion into domains where this application is wreckless, destructive, or immoral. Many more sane developed countries than the US, for example, have done this with healthcare.

Amen

> You can't stop market forces.

Surely you can, we do it all the time. That's why we have subsidies on American sugar and tariffs on Chinese steel and higher taxes on cigarettes than on milk and... We have entire government agencies who spend all day thinking up ways to affect market forces.

"As a result, gaming has come to privilege haves over have-nots, work and passive consumption over leisure, and the economic over the social."

I can't parse this. And my eyes glazed over once I kept trying to get past it and keep reading.

It is horribly written.

>gaming has come to privilege haves over the have-nots

Extrapolated, I take it to mean: People with money to spend now have an advantage over poor people when it comes to video gaming

Even then, it's unclear what this means. An advantage acquiring games to play because it's more expensive to get into? In success within the games themselves? Something only rich people have the time to engage in?

Yeah, I can sorta figure out what was meant by that line. I think he's saying that in-game purchases have turned gaming into something you need to have money to be able to do. I'm not sure I agree with that, though. Casual gaming is apparently more popular than ever, and plenty of good games can be played without 'buying up'.

I have to caveat that with a few statements. For one, I am a silicon valley 'have'. Secondly, I'm not a gamer.

But I distinctly remember how long it took me to save up $65.99 1990 dollars ($130 today!!!) for Super Mario 3. To say nothing of the costs of the consoles.

Smartphones aren't free, but today you can play free- or nearly-free games on hardware you already own.

I know I usually don't see gifs on this website but this completely sums it up.

https://i.imgur.com/5lKYfh6.gifv

It's questionable to see the article's focus on males in gaming when females have been established as a >=40% constituency over the last decade. [1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/232383/gender-split-of-u...

Might be because I just finished reading it the other night but kinda reminds me of "Brave New World."

I find it odd that PCs are getting bigger and have Windows on the side, and lots of LEDs lighting up various things like fans...

Gaming is more akin to sports than to leisure. So i think the article is trying to make a lot of false analogies.

There's something I never understand about bits like this. The main point of this article basically entails greatly expanding the role of government in our economic system. But how happy are you with our government? It's a rhetorical question as the statistics make the answer abundantly clear. Congress' approval rating is currently resting at a whopping 18%, with a 78% disapproval rate. And our president certainly inspires a wide array of emotions across the population.

The reason for this displeasure varies, but among the reasons would be corruption, ineptitude, graft, greed, pandering to special interests, and so on. In a world where government was some post-humanistic benevolent and impartial entity, I think this article would have some reasonable points. However, people tend to be self absorbed, ignorant of whatever lays outside their own interests, and driven by bias. And government is little more than a collection of us, biased to those who share mostly the same skill set as con men.

I'm certainly not anarchistic, but I think we need to consider the fact that government is us. And so where is the logic that massively expanding the role and power of our government would solve more problems than create? My favorite example of good intentions gone awry is passports. Many wish we had a more open and free world, and at one time we did. Mandatory usage of passports was little more than a "temporary war measure" during WW1. But once we'd granted governments such tremendous power and control, it was predictably never relinquished.

Digital capitalism is "attacking" leisure but per the articles first source the decline in young male labor participation is supposed to be due to advances in leisure technology... and the people taking advantage of this are self-reportedly happier because of it.

But because of "commodification" and a perceived social inequality in the leisure sphere this is supposed to be inherently bad for reasons not stated.

Then they shift to talking about UBI.

This is probably the best argument for socialism I’ve ever heard. We must, must, give up the abundance that capitalism provides for the vast majority of people so kids can...play more video games?

This is Poe’s law at its finest. I really can’t tell if the author is trolling.

That hypothesis offended the sensibilities of anyone who believes that all those who are able to work should do so.

From each according to his ability, Comrade.

> From each according to his ability, Comrade.

Soviet Communism is, indeed, terrible.

But a UBI is basically the opposite of politburos and bread lines.

And when the supply of unskilled labor exceeds the demand to such an extent that it no longer commands a living wage in a free market, what's your solution?

Has anyone run the numbers of how UBI would be financed? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to attack the idea. My impression is that people are more positive on UBI than they should be because they think it will enable a higher standard of living than it actually will. I would be more in favor of a jobs guarantee since I think people find working meaningful, but this isn't an area I've researched very much so I'm definitely open to changing my opinions if I learn more.

Has anyone run the numbers of how UBI would be financed?

For the cost of the current welfare system in the UK we could give every man, woman and child £3000/year, approx. This assumes that the cost of administration is basically zero, so it would involve sacking all the employees of the DWP or whatever it’s called now. Well, they would be entitled to UBI too... it has to be “universal” and “basic” or the numbers don’t work

> Has anyone run the numbers of how UBI would be financed?

There are different ways to do the accounting here. The opponents like to just add up the sum of everyone's UBI and call that the cost. But if someone pays $12,000 to fund the UBI and then receives a $10,000 UBI, the net cost to them is obviously $2000 rather than $12,000.

Calculating the overall net cost is also not very useful, because it's effectively zero outside of some minimal administrative costs -- payments in equal payments out.

Probably the sensible way to do it is to calculate the net loss to people who pay more than they receive, e.g. $2000 to someone who pays $12,000 and receives $10,000 but $0 (rather than -$2000) for someone who pays $8000 and receives $10,000.

Using those numbers you end up somewhere in the ballpark of 25% of the cost calculated using the first method, because you take the total cost and subtract out the UBI the top half of the population is paying themselves, and then half the remainder for the bottom half, because people in the bottom half would be net recipients but would still on average be paying half as much as they receive.

Whether this is exactly 25% depends on the income distribution within the population. It gets higher the more inequality there is. If everyone had exactly the same income it would be 0%. If there is great inequality it would be higher, i.e. more dollars transferred from richer to poorer. But that's kind of what you want.

The most important factor in the cost is obviously the amount of the UBI. It can be made arbitrarily more or less expensive by changing that.

> I would be more in favor of a jobs guarantee since I think people find working meaningful

There are reasons to think that would be a bad idea, e.g.:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic-...

Moreover, half the point of a UBI is that it doesn't impose costs on working, unlike means-tested programs where earning money from working causes the loss of benefits.

It's one of the things that allow it to operate productively even at below-subsistence payment levels. The highest paying job you're qualified to do may not pay enough to subsist on but becomes enough when combined with a modest UBI.

And for someone who genuinely can't find full-time work, they're more likely to find meaning -- or a lead on gainful employment -- by volunteering somewhere of their choosing rather than being forced to dig holes and fill them back in with insufficient free time to improve themselves and get out of that situation.

I’m not sure why you’re doing mental gymnastics on this one. There is a simple answer.

300,000,000 - US population

$12,000 - Your UBI amount

Total cost: 3.6 trillion dollars.

Projected US tax collection for 2019: 3.4 trillion. That’s not the US budget, just the amount not borrowed to pay for the budget.

Cost of social programs that UBI would replace (in theory): 2.3 trillion. (SS, Medicare, other). I don’t think UBI could replace SS though.

So you need to increase tax revenues about 33% if you look at it in the most favorable way.

Then, when the bottom falls out for those who needed the full benifit of the programs you replaced, you will either bring those programs back or increase the UBI payment for everyone, which is easy to do because we’d just vote ourselves more money, because money is free.

> There is a simple answer.

Only if you want to count the dollar you pay but not the dollar you get back in order to claim that it's too expensive.

It ignores all of the misleading accounting that occurs in the existing system and wouldn't be there anymore.

Suppose we used to provide $1000/year value in assistance with a 10% phase out rate and then we had a 15% tax rate up to $10,000 and 25% thereafter. We switch that to $1000/year in unconditional assistance with no phase out and pay for it by changing to a flat 25% tax rate. If your accounting method is telling you that this change has caused everyone who makes more than $10,000/year to have to pay an extra $1000/year in taxes, you've missed a term. Neither the marginal nor effective tax rates have changed for anyone.

This is why many economists prefer the "negative income tax" formulation of a UBI where the UBI is a tax credit and it's possible for low income people to pay a negative amount in taxes.

I suppose we’re starting with two different assumptions.

My assumption is UBI is tax free OR UBI is taxable income but the first $12,000 of income is tax free. Same difference, different language.

Your assumption would be that UBI is taxible...like SS is now. That’s a garbage policy.

If I recall, Rand Paul’s tax plan was that a person filing singly would not be taxed on their first 40K of income. Just about double that for filing jointly. Then there’s a 16% flat tax, no deductions. I personally liked that plan.

> Your assumption would be that UBI is taxible...like SS is now.

Not at all. What I'm saying is that the additional tax to fund the universality of the UBI would go in approximately the same place as the phase outs go for existing benefits, and they cancel out.

The advantage of putting the phase out on the tax side is that it's easier to see what's happening, so you don't accidentally create one income range where the marginal tax rate is 10% and an adjacent one where it's 110% because five independent programs all phase out at the same income level. Or impose higher marginal rates on lower income people than higher income people.

>how can the market exploitation of civic, social, and leisure spaces possibly be averted

What? The ominous "market" isn't forcing its way into any of these spaces. You let it in. You bought that game with micro-transactions, you signed up for that "free" social media app that was "secretly stealing your data".

What shall we do? Our economic system isn't doing what we think it should! Could it be that we don't understand it and we should educate people so that they can't be taken advantage of? No! It's the system that's wrong!

Towards the end of the article the author starts talking about UBI and just after that mentioning a scheme for the government to employ all workers. I should have guessed that would be the endgame. Two completely unproven ideas suggested as the panacea to market forces the author doesn't understand.

Why does it that every time I see someone refer to something as "Social Democracy" they are merely using it as a euphemism for Socialism or Communism?

Are you not concerned that while some of these costs may not be entirely hidden - they are very often intentionally obfuscated?

It's not exactly analogous to "people should know to avoid credit cards with 20% interest rates" as that interest rate must be openly communicated to the consumer while the collection and sale of my personal data has no such requirement.

I would argue that with the prevalence of reviews on steam /youtube/etc that it is far easier than ever to avoid undesirable games. In fact, it's stupidly easy to avoid even bad games, I don't think I've bought a game I didn't enjoy in several years. Sure, not everyone will read & comprehend a credit card agreement, but surely it's fairly easy to Google a game review before purchase.

What? If I sign up for a new credit card I won't come across the interest rate at all until I get to the fine-print legal contract. Sure, maybe it's in bold or something there, but it's still not upfront and obvious in the signup flow like the perks are.

Similarly, the ways in which a site will use your data is hidden within the thousands of words of fine print in their privacy policy.

Seems exactly the same to me.

> If I sign up for a new credit card I won't come across the interest rate at all until I get to the fine-print legal contract.

my experience has been different (in TX, USA).

having modestly improved my credit score (at least, i assume this is the reason), as well as registering a LLC, i've been getting a deluge of offers for personal and business cards.

every distinct one i've looked at was pretty clear about the apr and fees. i mean, i suppose you could miss these things if you really don't care too look, but i haven't seen anything be obfuscated at all (at least wrt to apr). doesn't really seem fine-printy.

Hidden terms in a credit card agreement are not the same concept as voluntarily confirming and paying for a video game in-game purchase. Or what is it that you're saying is hidden in video games?

Micro transactions allow some "video games" (I use quotes as it seems to mostly be mobile apps) to play nearly identically to machines you'd find within a casino. We regulate those casinos due to the known addiction of gambling - some applications employ the same psychological tactics that result in gambling addiction, and they sit right there on your phone; a phone that is constantly with you, and constantly sending push notifications to convince you to take another hit.

This perspective isn't wrong but it isn't complete.

Blaming the user is common, and so is blaming the purchaser. From that individual's perspective, sure, they could exercise more control by being more careful. Who could be against personal responsibility?

But what it leaves out is systemic effects and power imbalances. For example, if I were running a Ponzi scheme I could plow a lot of "investment" money back into marketing, having many skilled professionals create the appearance of respectability, of safety. I could create entire front organizations, or bribe trusted recommenders.

Would my investors still be responsible for losing money? Sure. But the fact that I can use power to manipulate my investors' decisions means that it isn't a fair fight. So I would still be responsible for taking their money. And society would be responsible for permitting a fraud to continue deceiving individuals.

Responsibility isn't zero sum.

Agreed. If we (humans) had reliable personal responsibility, grocery stores wouldn't put candy bars and tabloids near the checkout lanes and advertising would be much less effective.

At its simplest, if there is still private property it is not and cannot be socialism or communism. Scandinavian countries are social democracies - UBI, universal healthcare, guaranteed labor, etc are social democratic ideals. Please don't criticize the author for lacking understanding you also lack.

> we should educate people so that they can't be taken advantage of? No! It's the system that's wrong!

We are a capitalist country. Education is a part of 'the system.'

You just doubled down on "criticizing for the lack of understanding you also lack"!

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