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Comment by clubm8 | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think the issue is, and I struggled for a long time to articulate this... escape.

I have always struggled with a cluster of issues... too much tv, too much internet, for a period in college binge drinking, overeating... the big "aha!" was that I was engaging in these behaviors to escape reality.

We live in a unique time where if you don't like the reality you're in, you can step into another. Society has rightfully developed stigmas against other harmful behaviors. But the issue is a level deeper.

For the first time in history, we can "escape" or "drop out" or whatever you wish to call it without chemicals. It's a powerful urge... after all, if you have a limited time on earth, and the world's information at your fingertips, it becomes extremely tempting to just tune out... everything.

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Books were an escape vehicle before TV, movies, and games.

Sure, but doesn't it work pretty differently? With books, you're just given words and your brain has to fill in the gaps and actually do some work. With video games and movies, your brain is directly stimulated; shown what to see and hear.

I know this is the common argument, but I'm not entirely convinced. when I was a kid, the graphics were quite primitive by today's standards, but playing the games at that age felt like stepping into a vivid other world. playing as an adult, I just see a bunch of geometry with shitty lighting while I run around clicking on HP sponges.

I wouldn't say that video games are quite as stimulating as reading a good book, but I think we underestimate how much our imagination works to "fill in the gaps" to make games feel real and rewarding.

And how we used to think whatever the latest in graphics was, was oh so realistic and amazing!

I played MUD’s for a few years when I was younger and in hindsight it was amazing: while the writing wasn’t typically as good as a book, you still filled in the world and characters with your imagination and it was both interactive and social. I still have some vivid memories of it that are as clear as if it had been a modern game or movie, despite that in reality I was reading text.

It's interesting, but I think games have taken a significant backstep over the past few years in terms of RPG's in many ways.

The issue for me nowadays is that AAA studios seem to demand certain things. One of which, is fully voiced dialogue.

This sounds good, people talking lines to me is great right? But the problem is, each of those lines costs time and money, and adds rigidity around what can be changed as you need to get voice actors in and pay money, take time to record the lines, sequence the lips, etc. etc.

Having a purely text based experience (see the character, but have the conversation be purely in text) allows for better variability, imagination on your behalf and way more dialogue because they aren't constrained by time and money as much.

I can't remember who said it, but It puts me in mind of the concept that sometimes the most creative things happen when given the least tools to work with - if you give an artist all the tools to work with in the world, they can often find it harder to focus. Give constraints and creativity is given bounds and scope to work with. It's a bit counter-intuitive but I really think it can be true.

> fully voiced dialogue

Yeah, I 99% hate this[1]. Doubly if it's from the person I'm supposed to be playing - let me have my own thoughts about what's going on!

[1] There are some games which have excellent voiced dialogue as part of the world building, e.g. Albino Lullaby

There is a school of though that the character you're playing should not be voiced (or not even respond textually), precisely because the player cannot then imprint their own thoughts on the character, because the voice/actions/emotions/whatever don't match with that of the human player.

I love fully voiced dialogue in some games, if it’s done well it can really help with telling a story, but in more freeform roleplaying games it definitely detracts from the fantasy that’s playing out in my imagination as it means I can’t imprint my own feelings of what characters are feeling. MUDs were definitely the pinnacle of that for me, especially when you played with people who took their fictitious roles seriously and added freeform scenarios that weren’t hard coded into the game, through a shared acknowledgement that what other players invented became a real part of the fiction even though it wasn’t recognised by the software simulation.

imo, the Witcher 3 is an example of very well done fully voiced dialogue. I almost never wanted to skip through it. I think it fits in this game because you are playing as an already fleshed out character, Geralt. like you said though, sometimes the player character is meant to be more of a blank slate that you fill in yourself. in KOTOR, the player character is essentially a blank slate, as you literally have no memory of who you are and an important part of the story is that you decide who you will be (villain or savior). in this game, the unvoiced player dialogue was the right design choice.

I agree. Like you are saying, I find voices dialogue similar to preset player characters. If the game is telling a story about a specific character (and, super importantly, spends a great deal of effort on deep and meaningful character building), then having a voiced or preset player character can really make the experience great. Geralt is such a character, he has a lot of depth and a lot of history and it’s a great experience to get to explore that.

If, on the other hand, the game has little or weak character building around the player character then please let me create my own character (let me choose gender, looks and name) and don’t have the character voiced at all — let me play the character I like to imagine they are instead.

You can make it work, but it's crammed into absolutely everything now just because you CAN.

Some MUDs back in the day had combat and skill systems as complex as any modern MMOs. They were the precursor to MMORPG.

We're off topic here, but there are still plenty of MUDs around, and they're still as good or better.

Check out https://www.mudconnect.com/index.html

Absolutely. They were mechanically quite advanced in some cases and the roleplay heavy ones had some of the most immersive experiences I’ve had in any game.

Games used to need your mind to fill in gaps too. Crude limited capabilities of pre 16 bit era made it somehow impressionist and symbolic. Today it's all faux-reality. Amazing technically really.. but not so on the other side of the paddle.

Also the pacing. There are games that weren't action based, and required contemplation (shadow of colossus for instance, there were a few others). There were also sim city like games, or flight simulators that required some focus.

Even games like Resident Evil, they did capture your mind like a book a bit. That said a book requires a lot more than a game.

A book makes you use your own imagination. Video games take the bulk of that work away from you so it's easier initially but imagination can easily outdo the games in the medium to long term (if you persevere)

This reminds me of the very typical discussion about the value of mathematics and the "descendants": physics, chemistry etc. :-)

If the ultimate purpose is to "do some work", movies and videogames definitely do:

- movies require (in theory) around 90 minutes of undivided attention, which is definitely "work" (how many people can watch an entire movie without peeking at the phone?); additionally, they can be intellectually and/or emotionally stimulating - videogames are essentially, in general, structured challenges, which is "work" again: analytical, creative, reactive...

I'd say that quality of an escape, if we want to set this concept, could be better defined by the human experience added by it.

Alcohol doesn't really add any valuable experience (assuming one even remembers it).

Books, in average, may give the most valuable experience because they may be the most selective medium (due to the attention required).

TV, in average, may give the least, for the opposite reason.

Movies are definitely an infinite human capital. There's lots of garbage, of course.

I find hard to make any generalization about video games, as it's a very diverse medium. Farmville and co. "fare" in the ranks of trash TV, however, games like "Papers, Please" make a very significant experience.

Where do games like Screeps, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, Factorio, or Minecraft feature? Leveraging (or demanding) the user's creativity and construction to meaningfully drive gameplay (though how meaningfully varies) is like opening an extra dimension compared to games where you're only meant to respond to stimuli relatively simply, like Papers, Please.

Dwarf Fortress is a helluva thing, good reference. I'd argue that's just as demanding as any IRL project and it requires planning, forethought, and myriad other detail and macro oriented skills.

"Papers, Please" has a significant intellectual (/moral) meaning; it's extremely reductive to characterize it as a game "where you're only meant to respond to stimuli relatively simply".

I pretty much my ability to easily navigate arbitrary rule sets to games of all types played as a child. And it's a very nice skill to have. After all, code and APIs are just some arbitrary rules...

I think it’s more a question of in which direction you do the work.

Reading a book is a bottom up process. A movie/comic is top bottom: from visual/sound info you parse what’s happening, characters motives, what direction everything is going.

People argue the top-> down approach is “lazier”, but hearig from viewers who couldn’t understand the point of even simple movies, I don’t think it’s true, it’s just that people who don’t “get it” are left on their own as there is a forced timeline.

In that sense, video games bring two major mechanics to the table:

- interactivity: you need to understand what’s going on and take action to move forward. Also you can assume your choices.

- retryability: you can redo any part you didn’t get, the mechanic is baked into the game where for a movie it’s a PITA. I see my kid playing RPG and asking again and again NPC for info, because he didn’t get it the first time. It’s a very powerful mechanism.

This is true, it takes effort to visualize, but it becomes automatic over time. You don't think about everyday language. You just use it. Same with books.

Take the time to develop this skill when you aren't in need of escapism and you can reap the benefit when you are in dire need.

There are other benefits as well. Developing your visualization skill is one that benefits pretty much everything in life. Visualization greatly aids learning and understanding.

With video games you at least develop hand-held coordination, and in some, tactical skills. As for movies I'm not so sure, but for people who critique or study them it's at least beneficial.

hand-eye

Crucially, books are non-interactive, they don't give you feedback.
Books are in the same class as movies and TV. Games are a different class.

I agree with you entirely - books are escapism. But there are levels of escapism - you would agree that a book is better than heroin, right? If so, you agree that there is a hierarchy. Reading teaches a lot of useful skills, such as, you know, reading.
Then there is the fact that both video games and books can teach, but there are diminishing returns. When I first read Snow Crash and Neuromancer, they taught me a lot of things. Now there is virtually nothing I can draw from most sci-fi.

Rationally, fictional evidence is useless.
Imaginatively, fiction and imagination are the only things that stimulate to push the boundaries in science and tech.

Fiction isn't evidence (except, perhaps, of basic plausibility, which is a pretty low standard). It does, however, contribute to hypothesis generation; the hypotheses thus inspired by fictional sources can then be tested out in the real world.

Books are so low on addiction and very high on interesting stimuli.
for some reason, solid matter full of glyphs in our hands captivate the mind differently than other medium / formats.
I tried a lot of things, every time I get a book I feel different and most importantly better. Coming from a not avid reader.
#2cents

Do reading books on e-readers, tablets, and phones have the same effect? How about static websites with long-form text?

That's what I cryptically meant by 'lots of things'. As an ex-abstractophile-nerd I used to think that information is information, whether it's on paper, lcd or e-ink.... I read GNU manuals in emacs or in terminal so I'm not craving for aesthetics or high res.
Turns out all mediums have subtle contexts that change the experience (at least personally [thus anecdotally]).
LCD: fatigue, luminosity, potential for distraction because you're using a machine, battery, other apps
Tablet: similar to above although maybe less so (bought a kindle 7, sadly the sub-HD resolution was another flaw)
e-ink: never tried, I wish I could but never did so far. I expect it to be a bit better than the rest
A book is dead. It requires nothing beside a bit of light. Maybe the physicality of pages make my brain focus differently, maybe touching, maybe the fact that it's dead and it won't move weirdly, change. The very high resolution helps.
All of this is super fluffy, but I value my opinion (I was surprised by it too) just enough to say it out loud. It doesn't imply you can't enjoy and learn efficiently with a digital machine but I'm sure it won't be the same as reading a book.

I'm not the parent, but I agree with him completely and for me books on a screen and web articles don't have the same effect, even if it's great writing. For me nothing can beat a paperback.

Yup and I frequently used them as such. Of course these days that seems tame, but there was a time when the printed word probably spelled the downfall of society for some group too.

As was poetry. All storytelling can be viewed as an escape. But it can also be viewed as a powerful way to reimagine the world.

It is the dose, not the substance, that makes the poison.

It's actually both. And also whether intake is repeated.
The platitude is completely wrong.

Fine. But we're both saying the person I was responding to is wrong. Which was the actual point.

This is my exact feeling. The problem is upstream: the world that needs escaping.

Society has been slowly but surely working at decoupling everything. Every problem gets a ~solution. You don't need to depend on people directly, it's easier than having to deal with them. You don't have to deal with physics, put VR goggles and enjoy unlimited retries at shooting preys.
I think it's a bit sad.

Very well put, and I agree with your general analysis.
The question is: how exactly is this a "bad thing"?

Specifically, the philosophical belief of dependent origination indicates practicing one thing here may lead to "things" happening there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da
The argument goes that "dropping out" may be linked to a causal effect of which of which we are not yet aware.
For example: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/08/why-young...

Thank you for the link to the Wikipedia page. Makes for good Sunday reading :)
If am tracking everything right, then an (albeit simple) description of dependent origination is that we can't necessarily predict the unknown-unknowns of our actions. If so, I don't see how dropping out (in the Timothy Leary sense) is any different from other phenomena that cause unforeseen consequences?
Using your example as my example, that Politico piece presupposes that increased sex ala the sexual revolution is itself an altogether "good" thing, and that the effects of Netflix et al is impacting that previously held ideal in a negative manner. At the risk of sounding contemptuous, I quite frankly don't see what the big deal is, and it reads more akin to vacuous hand-wringing.
Do you have another example of what you are trying to describe? Perhaps I missed the forest for the trees in your above link and haven't approached the topic in good faith.

Sorry for the delay.
It's sorta like "equal and opposite reaction". Push and pull. Up and down. Without "up", there is no "down".
When we do new things, we aren't really sure what the effects or the reach of the correlated/opposite/related effects will be. Going "up" and elevator has simple ramifications. You will need to go "down" again. This is a type of "karma", when your decision making process gets involved. I think of karma as more "work you do" than "shit you've brought upon yourself". It can be good or bad.
With something more complicated, many things may occur all at once and not necessarily be obvious in their origins. Polar vortexes, for example, may be caused by the Earth heating up and disrupting the magnetic field which keeps the cold contained. At least that's what Faraday thought.
You are right about pointing to challenges in predicting unknown-unknowns. In science, we typically avoid those discussions. In other philosophical approaches, we identify them with something beyond our conscious awareness.
Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism have been dealing with these concepts for a long time. It's interesting to see how technology and those thoughts are converging.

Did you fix that behaviour? I'm in the same boat currently.

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