Comment by teraku | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teraku | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Why can't a joke be a joke? In the original thread mentioned by _obviouslynotme_ [0] it starts out with saying they hate how mobile gamers are always the target of mockery. This note does not target mobile gamers as target of mockery, but as victims of engagement strategies to make you addicted. And then it fails to understand the sarcasm of the overall text.

What is humor allowed to do? It's a big question of our time, and I'd say everything that is immoral, but nothing that is unethical.

Should humor be kept out of _professional setting projects_. My take: No. If we do that, we humans are just machines.

David Graeber said in Bullshit Jobs (p. 213 of the German version; sentence-by-sentence translation by me):

> You can call this mockery of justice. It exists in many forms. The right-leaning version judges those that believe the world owes them [...] equality before the law. But there also exists a version of the left-wing: It consists of telling people that they should check their privileges, if they had the impression they had the right to anything that poor or more opressed people don't have. With this benchmark even the person receiving a beating by the police and is imprisoned without reason can only then complain about injustice after naming every other category of men that is more likely to be a victim of it.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26338268

Because people have gotten hypersensitive in a world devoid of true challenges. These people are routinely bored and have learned that the easiest way for them to get attention, is to place themselves as an underprivileged special case, or as a "hero" to those who are underprivileged. Paradoxically, they are also unwilling to admit personal weaknesses while strutting around socially acknowledged weaknesses or something (e.g. feeling offended when someone calls them out on being overly sensitive, meanwhile strutting around a mental disorder because it gets them brownie points with the big public. It is hard to explain, can't quite put my finger on it).

Anyone not out to be offended could've told the piece was obvious tongue-in-cheek about mobile gamers falling victim to predatory behavior from big companies seeking the few whales they could milk for all their profits. If there was anything to be offended about, it would be that practice. The thread that helped cancel this piece was very in-line with the whole body-positive movement: let's not look at the obvious problem (people weak to sugar getting fat off a western diet loaded with sugar at every corner), instead, let's look at the people rightfully calling out the practice and the result (oligarchs rebranding, renaming and smuggling sugar into almost any produced good, getting people fat and unhealthy).

If you want to see hypersensitive people just look at this thread.

> If there was anything to be offended about, it would be that practice.

Yes, not the category of people typically playing them.

Let's write a variant of the joke to put it in perspective.

"Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is found in basements. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, their mom, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class (if they have a job). These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is by playing expensive video games and virtual-reality porn.

But what if someone were to find a way to pass a copy of the game to their friends (or, if they lack friends, other random people on the internet)? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content without paying. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.

No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order."

And that, in a way, would be correct. Did the piece fit inside the documentation or the topic at all? Nope. They already put up a source and mentioned themselves that the anecdote doesn't really hold. But why pointing out the obvious predatory practices is such a sin, is beyond me, let alone writing multiple tweets about it. Can we just admit there are loads of dark patterns out there taking advantage of people? Or must we instead continue burying it, trying to deny it or worse, praise their outcomes as if they were some sort of medal to carry? I don't believe so. And we should be making the gamer community healthier in that regard, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com