Do games like Factorio or Eve Online sap the intellectual potential of humanity?
reddit.com
reddit.com
Just let people do whatever they want with their free time. Nerdy hobbies are treated uniquely unfairly in this respect.
Few of us particularly like how much time we spend on HN/Reddit or go “yeah really glad I’m spending my precious time in this way!” yet we do tend to feel fulfillment from activities like reading a novel or trying to write one or many of the activities we pretend are just the same as playing World or Warcraft and watching Netflix.
I'm a bit snide here; I object to the "hustle" culture where people are guilted or self-flagellating for having downtime. I've seen too many of my excitable colleagues go too far there and end up with burnout, relationship problems, depression, etc.
Me, I've been chooching along nicely for the past decade and will need to do so for another three decades in all likelihood, and I'm enjoying my downtime (including playing Factorio) while doing so, instead of postponing it until the magical After.
And regardless of your personal opinion on the reliability of Wikipedia, I think we can all agree that the ability to quickly find a brief overview of any subject is insanely valuable to society.
On the other hand, I know if I weren't wasting time on HN right now, I wouldn't be doing anything productive.
In my personal experience, reddit/HN has never been the reason I didn't do something useful. The reason was that I just didn't want to do it, and if HN didn't exist I'd just stare at the ceiling.
Do ceilings sap the intellectual potential of humanity?
At least those that already have a drive to know use reddit to sharpen their knowledge. As a research tool itself reddit is pretty invaluable.
So, for me at least, HN provides a fertile place to be productive, but mostly as a place to play around and sharpen my skill.
Reddit, however, I find draining. There's always a risk of getting sea lioned by a particularly toxic user. Conversation tends to be very one-sided also.
I mean I played around in ZZT and ended up a software engineer.
https://erikmcclure.com/blog/factorio-is-best-interview-we-h...
arguably, yes. it's a closed universe which at best provides entertainment for outsiders, unlike writing fiction which can inspire even revolutions, to say nothing of enriching minds and widening the emotional and intellectual horizons of individual readers. not sure if you were being serious about higher mathematics.
More realistically, for the elite in charge of their communities.
Its a practical problem for employment. No company complains about smart people not making their coworkers lives better; its all about "stealing from the company" by doing projects at home on their own time using their own materials, that may or may not be the feudal property of their owner/employers depending on their state of residence's attitude toward modern slavery.
No, it doesn't. A conclusion that something is a drag on society is not necessarily (and frequently not) an argument for banning it. The implication only exists in a pure form if one assumes a "government knows best" sort of politics. Label it what you like, I'm not going to pick fights.
I am a bit worried about this line of reasoning, though -- basically saying it isn't a line of thought that can lead to good policy, so it probably shouldn't be investigated or argued.
frankly, I think we should not care so much about what people do with their leisure time, as long it isn't actively harming anyone (ie, not in a "what could have been" sense). if we want smart people to do more useful stuff, we should figure out how to pay them for it.
Also, I think we can represent the problem in a different way to make it more desirable to be solved. Instead of being entitled, we can represent it as incentivizing trade. So rephrase it into "Can society incentivize particularly smart people to trade brain cycles."
I think this one has an decently agreeable answer of yes. Having now answered it, we can then approach optimizing the market for our society which would include having more particularly smart people to trade with (especially since I suspect brain cycles are somewhat unique per person). And is allowing people to sharpen their minds using thought intensive play one method of achieving that goal? Sure, it may lead to those people being less willing to trade their brain cycles (because they now can use them on Factorio instead), but it also means that more people now have brain cycles to trade.
to be verbose: since smart people are a limited resource it is imho correct to note that an intellectually, emotionally, and life-focus demanding activity, such as chess, that has not (and can not) ever transfer knowledge gains in that closed system to other domains of concern to our species, is in fact, as a matter of simple math, sapping a precious resource.
(but i'm open to the suggestion that maybe chess is keeping society safe from otherwise unoccupied mad geniuses -- calling B.F. .. :)
First off, everyone needs fun hobbies to distract them from their day to day. While many gravitate to hobbies similar to their career, it should never be a requirement. Its whatever recharges your batteries. However you achieve that, whether chess, reading, woodworking or nature walks, it doesn't matter. Again, as a fiction writer, the academic elitism of it really pisses me off. Not all entertainment needs to broaden your horizons. It first has to entertain and make you lose track of the miserable real world. Teaching you something is second on the list. Not first. Shoving the "it must enrich you or it's not art" is the most heinous elitist gatekeeping there is. This is the exact reason people dont like reading. Being told, "you're not reading the right books" turns people off, thus will never read said books.
I'm not sure he said that it must enrich you or it isn't art. His point was whether or not the effort one puts into a particular thing saps or uses up intellectual intelligence of a person. Is the task a hamster wheel where no benefits are experienced by anyone other than the hamster or is the hamster wheel connected to a capacitor and providing electricity to the other hamsters. I don't see a reason to get into the elitist arguments. All of these activities fall somewhere on the spectrum of the amount of good provided to humanity. Closed loop activities that only recharge one's battery provide less benefit to humanity and can be said to sap or use up our intellectual intelligence. There is no elitism about this argument, it's just a 30k foot view of us hamsters and which ones use more or less intelligence that benefits the rest of the hamsters.
Get off your Silicon Valley, always got to hustle hamster wheel. Go watch a sunset.
I don't see him saying that, or even implying it. Rather, he seems to be indicating that is a valid vector by which the activity can be rated. It is not the only thing it can be rated on, nor is it even necessarily _worth_ rating it on that. But it is a thing that can be discussed.
Fiction can have the potential to broaden knowledge if only by making writers doing some research.
I would guess "dorky", "nerdy" are more mildly self-deprecating than pejorative nowadays. But this could change wildly from one area to another.
Non nerds and non dorks have hobbies, always had. Having hobbies is quite normal and used to be normal. And frankly, playing computer games was popular among popular young boys for whole generations now.
"Dorky", "nerdy" never really described average gamer. It described small groups of people who had social issues regardless what they did - including sport.
Also, there's Football Manager, which takes the 'playing football' game out of the game.
But I do find something attractive about games that keep someone's brain active. Never played factorio though my colleagues wax lyrical about it ad nauseum.
Think I've completed that circle by suggesting to a friend working on accounting SaaS that he look at FM as UX inspiration...
As a kid I said I played Secret of Mana on a weekend (SNES) and for the rest of that school year I was taunted and called "Secret Banana", haha. How far we've come. Or have we.
These kinds of games are the most uniquely intellectual outside of puzzle games, programming games, and even more difficult strategy games.
We exist. We generally are not motivated to provide proof that we exist, especially because many requests for proof are expected in the form of "SEND NUDES". That was not implied in your comment, but your experience likely consists of this exchange and mine reflects a universe of incredulity and harassment.
If you gain insight from reading this, great. But that's not why I'm replying. Somewhere reading this thread is a girl in high school or a woman in college who's into grand strategy, or programming, or something else that's "uniquely intellectual". She's heard messages all her life that girls and women aren't the kinds of people who do this stuff. I know this because I've been that girl - going back decades to where I would read "I'm pretty sure there are no 12 year old girls using Linux", at age 12, from my dual boot Fedora/Debian machine.
Sis, you matter, even if you're just starting to get into this. If we only look at gaming, I've had thousands of hours across Factorio, Paradox games, Zachtronics games, and study sims (not to mention - gasp - mass market tactics games), but you can't get to hour #1000 without hour #1. Whether you choose to keep a low profile in nerd spaces or you choose to be a Girl Gamer (TM) lightning rod, I'm glad you're here, and I hope you pay more attention to comments like mine than the one above mine.
There is very little harm in considering this question open-mindedly, and yet the defensiveness is so reflexively strong -- even as a bunch of the people who play them will very frequently themselves step back and joke about how much time some of these suck out of their lives.
So yes, we actually SHOULD encourage people to reexamine their patterns and consider if some (not all, some) of these hours could be put to a different or better use.
1) the value, learning, and art generated by games 2) the cost, judged according to each individual player's own value system.
And then weighing the strength of each effect. Note that I am judging according to the individual's values, not my own. Example: the rate at which people say "I wish I could stop playing game X" or the rate they suffer regret after a play session, or a year after quitting playing. I personally am really glad I found factorio, but not very happy about my time playing diablo 2.
Surely there are hypothetical examples of games which could be created, or addictions conscious beings could be vulnerable to, which would force defenders of freedom to admit that it's at least conceivable that there are situations where "bad" things exist, which we'd be better off without. Not saying we are in that state now, or what we should do if it happened. Just pointing out that acting as if there are no costs at all isn't addressing the opponent's position, even though we know there are lots of people who claim otherwise.
If you want to educate people on alternatives, or offer treatment systems, or whatever, that's fine. But ultimately and finally you need to let people do what they want. Anything else is a consent violation.
There is no inherent incompatibility between "very strongly challenging peoples' ideas and practices" and "violating consent."
It's hard not to get defensive because this reddit post is basically flamebait:
>use of words like sapping and deadend
>"there's little to no payoff for the rest of humanity"
Like you said we can probably discuss this question without getting defensive but it's impossible thanks to the way it's worded.
A question worth asking is what a 'better use' is to that person and to what extent (and why) that differs from your idea of a 'better use'. For example, I personally don't think chess is much better than a game like Starcraft or Factorio. I don't think billiards is any better than chess. I don't think English literature is better than philosophy. I don't think science is as good as maths.
Not everyone wants to be an intellectual; many people (due to other factors in life) can barely find the time to care enough (with either depression or work sapping thir creative energies). "Reexamining patterns" is good. Saying that someone is a bad person (in a moral sense, as some have done) is not. It doesn't take into account individual situations. Philosophers have argued we 'should' reexamine all kinds of things, from our political conceptions to who we decide to date.
what if it does ?
What's the most significant intellectual contribution of any athlete? I can't think of one without really stretching. It's not like tennis players are making great intellectual contributions and football players are the only athletes who are absent.
If you're talking about the opportunity cost of watching college football instead of doing something more productive, then maybe, but most (virtually all) of the extremely smart people I know do not spend much time watching sports.
[0]: I'm not saying they're dumb, they're just not geniuses
How many people do you know that don't work a job, are 25 and able bodied, and live at home with their parents to play chess?
How many people do you know that work a dead-end factory job, and come home and put all of their effort into chess over advancing their career?
I know of 0 for any of those for chess, but I can think of at least 100 people that this applies for video games.
Video games are great! I get it. But when it starts to be the purpose of life, it seems a very sad life.
I don't live with my parents so I can post on hacker news.
Maybe majority of gamers would been the type who would waste themself in a pub or on some other meaningless thing otherwise? I don't think it's so easy to answer those aspects without hard numbers.
Are gamers just a holding pattern for society, because we have passed peak employment - and just need to keep a chunk of society busy doing "nothing" ?
Then again, they are making money with their Twitch streams and walkthroughs simply by being Souls experts. So who am I to say they are wasting anything?
But just blindly dismissing that kind of reasoning is not wise in my opinion. Casinos eat money from victims and they are regulated. Computer games eat time from some victims and time is quite important asset as well.
Of course just like some people can reasonably spend some little money to get some enjoyment in casino, other people can reasonably spend some free time in computer games without compromising on more important activities. But not everyone have iron will and iron grip over himself.
But realistically would it be better spent?
I banned myself from games to write my master thesis.
There was some mild improvement in pace of work, but I'm not sure if I should attribute it to not gaming or simply to approaching deadline.
On the other hand I watched all 10 seasons of "Friends" during that time. And I didn't even like "Friends" to begin with.
There is no authority higher for the appropriate use of one's time than oneself.
Does D&D do the same? The amount of time spent on thinking about games, writing the story, etc is non-trivial.
The thing that all games share is that "losing" isn't gonna hurt your life. I'm not gonna lose my house because I blew up my factorio factory. I don't have to finish it. I don't have to play it every day.
Personally I hate games that make me build and design, I already overload on that at work, so for me a lot of my game time is more action-based games. Things I don't get to do during my work time. Does that mean I want to go learn how to shoot an arrow off a running horse? No. Does it mean I want to learn how to fly a helicopter? Nooooot that much. But I sure as hell enjoy flying a helicopter without the fear of death in a game.
I have been helping one kid with a programming class and one thing I've noticed is that they often lack a certain approach to problem solving that I personally developed by playing video games. They also played video games but far fewer and definitely less of the harder problem solving ones. It is entirely possible I liked the games because I already had the talent and the games didn't build the talent, but until we get a definite study on the correlation and causation my bet is going to be on them sharpening the skill.
After a certain point it does begin to sap. This is the nature of all entertainment. A few good books can enlighten a mind but too many books can result in someone who reads but never does anything with the knowledge. Even one doing math for fun can end up spending all their time solving math puzzles that are created just to be math puzzles and which don't tie into any greater discoveries.
I think this is fine. First, the system is far too hard to control so I don't see any way to improve it that wouldn't wreck the system. Maybe minor suggestions to diversify entertainment a bit and to be sure to share your experiences with a like minded community, but these are small tweaks and not massive overhauls.
I also don't think we can predict when something will produce the best results. Even if 9 of every 10 kids who get heavily drawn into math problem solving end up just wasting time solving math problems that exist just for the sake of math problems, that last 1 might get into applying the problem solving to novel fields of math that expand the total knowledge of humanity. If one is too heavy handed in optimizing that they'll risk destroying the ability for that 1 who goes further. I doubt we can be sure that trade off is worth while.
What does that consist of?
The same applies to handling a programming problem. Larger problems can involve many smaller problems that are mostly unrelated, but students new to programming can be overwhelmed and mentally shut down because they can't solve the entire problem at once.
Once a student learns to break it down into much smaller problems, they can find the ones they know or can easily solve and separate it from the parts of the problem that requires googling around. If a teacher tells them to use a certain library, knowing how to break down the problem into smaller ones helps arrive at the problems that need the library and the ones that don't. Maybe you need to visualize the data, so knowing if it is possible generate and store the data while ignoring the entire visualization until you are ready, knowing how to handle visualizing sample data you create on the spot while ignoring how it should be created, and knowing how to merge these two partial solutions into a larger one can make a daunting problem much more manageable.
This is a skill you can learn many ways. Just doing sudoku puzzles can teach a methodology approach to problem solving of solving the bits you know and seeing how that opens up more options. Board games are another great tool that can teach similar approaches.
Even a game like Final Fantasy 12 where you can build basic programs your allies follow when fighting can help reinforce concepts like handling edge cases and the computer doing exactly what you specified. Do you keep wiping because you set heals to only happen <20% hp when the boss does 25% hp damage an attack?
Numberphile had a good take on 'recreational maths' with their video on the loops and strings in pi. Dr. Crawford has a good bit near the end (~12:30 mark) on how these techniques lead to bigger discoveries. The 'playing' around and the methods generated often lead to much deeper truths in math, and serve as very good practice for new mathematicians.
How much extra money will the people at the top centrally controlling everything make if, for example, your plumber is a more intellectually well rounded individual? Possibly a negative amount of money. So the plumber plays modded minecraft.
Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics. If political demographic membership is more important than programming skill, such that a skilled programmer cannot be hired, that person should grind survival rations at walmart and play factorio for recreation.
There's the optimistic view that maximizing intellectual potential means curing cancer and living on mars. But the people currently at the top make a lot of money off cancer, and won't make any money off mars, but we do know "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." so in that pessimistic sense I'm glad our propaganda driven prison is not as optimized as it could be. Unleashing autonomous walking AI robots to randomly kill people in the middle east to make oil cheaper would require amazing intellectual potential but is a negative outcome, and frankly it would make the people in charge a lot more money than positive stuff like curing cancer.
People are already educated beyond the economies means to employ them. Having them pretend to work while remaining unable to employ them sounds like too much of a free lunch. Who benefits, follow the money, it won't be us. We already have too much intelligence and education to apply to our current economy, making even more structural underemployment isn't going to help. If under the current system there's 20 postdocs living in poverty trying to apply for that one paying job to cure cancer, creating a "fairer" system where 2000 people intellectually capable of being postdocs all living in poverty applying to that one paying job to cure cancer isn't going to provide statistically better results for the cancer curing program although it will make 1980 people highly dis-satisfied with life. Is it worth making 1980 people suffer if the overall program isn't more successful? Even if the program is more successful, which I find unlikely, how much torture of how many people is acceptable in exchange?
I couldn't agree more, and I couldn't write it better myself.
Thank you
I spent a lot of time in Minecraft and Factorio, managing my virtual house/factory to perfection, while completely forgetting that I could (and in some sense, would love to) learn skills to maintain my apartment (and my parent's house).
I often wonder why is that, and I doubt that it is because somebody (or the capitalist system itself) would actively prevent me from engaging in the hobbies that are more grounded to the real world.
Lot of it has to do with the perception of freedom, and some of the perception comes from the fact you're not serious about something, and you don't have to deal with other people.
So I suspect some (if not most) people are more productive in games precisely because they do not take them too seriously. Maybe in a different economic system, if we take the stress out (and have something like basic income), we could somewhat resolve that problem, but perhaps some component of it would still stay.
Also, when you write "achieving their potential", I always remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r, who showed that we might be educating our children very much under their potential. However, his method is extremely time consuming - you would have to be a really dedicated parent to go for it (although understandably economic system might prevent it here as well). Most parents, I believe, do not have the patience for this, so they do not believe it.
And many successful computer games (like Minecraft or Factorio) are really environments that are optimized for learning via immersion. So it is somewhat understandable that in the absence of direction for the real world, kids do gravitate towards such environments.
I've thought about this and have since I was a kid who enjoyed Harvest Moon while not enjoying growing plants in the garden, something my parents didn't hesitate to call attention to.
Speaking for myself (but expecting at least some of this to generalize to others) I think there are quite a few factors.
* The immediate turn around between work and result. If I want to grow strawberries, I have to wait months from start to finish. In Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley I get results in under an hour.
* The ratio between input and output. Strawberries can take many hours of labor over those months, and while I do get strawberries (or money if I sell them) in exchange for it, the overall enjoyment per hour spent is much lower than with virtual strawberries.
* The clarity and simplicity of the rules of 'the game'. If I grow real life strawberries, there are many things that can destroy them that I have little knowledge about or that I can stop. Industrial farmers might be able to control for most of these, but as a kid with a family garden I'm at the mercy of these factors. In a game the rules are much simpler and the risks much easier to understand and account for. A game with too many risks for the reward ends up being an unfun game and I can pick a better one, but we are stuck with a single instance of reality.
* Ability to avoid what I don't like. Expanding upon the freedom that games offers, I can avoid content I don't like. For example, I don't like spiders. In real life gardening, I can't avoid them. In a game, I can either avoid them or settle for a compromise involving virtual spiders that are simplified to the point they don't activate my phobia. This can even expand to avoiding laws of man (building things virtually that would never pass legal building code) and even laws of nature (building things that would collapse in reality).
I don't think economic system plays a major role in these factors. Sure, it is related in a few areas, but even if were to pick the most optimal legal and economic systems I think the end result would still not be as good as a game because of the systems beyond our control which can't be changed.
We are in this spot where there is really very, very little work that needs to happen to keep society rolling along, and a glut of educated people wanting to do that work. More education, more up-skilling, and more self-improvement is not going to fix this.
Further, it seems obvious to me that hunting money is a fools game. If money made people happy, at some point, then why do billionaires push for tax cuts, and more power and wealth? As research is starting to show, wealth is an emotional hunger that you can never sate.
The required crushing level of debt closes more doors than it opens.
Half true. Knowledge workers yeah, but there's actually a shortage of skilled blue-collar workers.
That spirit of the game was the 'Dos Equi's guy' [0]. You had all these different skills (mining, woodcutting, farming, etc.) and the purpose of the game was to have the highest level in them all, while accumulating gold and items. As I started hating the changes that where going on within the game, I slowly started to feel a sense of waste as i spent time into the game. I started to think of how i could spend my time better and it turns out this vision for what time spent valuable is directly shaped from my experiences with runescape. If you replaced those 'Skills' in-game, with real life skills and tracked your progress, you could theoretically gamify life. Take for instance cooking. It is a skill in runescape that you can perform in real life. The goal of runescape is to gain more experience and you 'Unlock' the ability to 'Cook' a certain fish or item. In real life there is no barrier to entry or immediate feedback, but you can 'learn' these skills. Turns out they aren't as fun because you can't show off to your friends that you have level 40 flute playing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Interesting_Man_in_th...
I do have some areas of hope.
> Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics.
The current status quo is that technology is a system for building products that consumers consume. Social media is another consumer device, another ready-made provided thing.
We don't have a very good established front for pro-humanistic technologism. Even though these social platforms are about content creation, they're through the narrow windows of what the tools provide, engagement is even more un-liberal, more constrained. The environments are artificial, we have only a small provided window of them that we can participate in, and our participation is prescriptive, via the defined channels of the software.
But that is not an inherent vice of technology nor information technology. This reliance upon adoption adoption adoption adoption, on onboarding as many as possible, as the means of measuring success has suppressed the other forms of technology that are available for us to explore: holistic technologies. Technologies that embrace all of our potential, that always leave the door open to examination & modification. Yes, this is a Free Software rant!! To quote Programming is Hard[1][2],
> No other science is as accessible as computer science, and most of its proceeds happen out in the open - computer science thrives on the internet, and although there are corners that do actual gatekeeping, most of content is freely accessible and thrives on this accessibility.
Science & code are replicable & experimental, always, it's just a question of how accessible science & creativity are. Software faces so few material constraints, so few connectivity limitations- software is malleable, and vast, and forever willing to let us explore our potential, to develop ourselves & grow ourselves. To ongoingly experiment with will & creation, all from a phone and bluetooth keyboard. If and when we are given access to participate, to find our potential!
The current facts on the ground are not nearly so sunny. The iron hold of big platform feels a prison, and virtually is, except that we can escape at any moment. Free Software missed the jump to the internet entirely. Instead Open Source became the underpinnings for great vast monoliths, huge corporate properties to emerge, that dictate digital spaces we might use, but which give us none of the libre liberty that software might so deeply let us enrich ourselves with.
So yeah, I think you're over-doing it, but sure, I think IT is playing a really crap role right now, and I think being trapped on these content-farms has made the natives do some really weird shit. Humankind can deploy none of their amazing perceptual skills, has only abstract potential on these limited, controlled, finite systems, and we never get to see the greater game as it's played: we only have what glimpses the platforms give us. "purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics" are not what trouble me, I am way way way more progressive, but I think there are all manners of cultural loops that society becomes bound up in, and our inability to see the knots stems from the consumeristic nature of these systems, from there not being an honest, potential-respecting, augmentative free technological basis from which to perceive, operate, & advance from, in a distributed decentralized pro-human manner.
It's not clear to me where we need to go to start changing things. Free software, not necessarily copyleft, but software made by people for people not for developers, needs to become internet relevant. It missed the connectivity revolution entirely. Social Media/Web Protocols[3] like ActivityPub give me hope, but there still feels like a great missing, that we're still on a too application-ized view of the world, trying to provide experiences, not seed the ground to allow us each to find & discover our own experiences, our own activities: too mechanistic, not computational enough. Systems like Yahoo Pipes were built more upon will & volition & watching & experimentation with computing itself, and I think that sort of componentry is key to starting to unravel some of the built up anti-humanity IT has become shrouded in.
In all, it's really down to Ursala Franklin's Prescriptive vs Holistic technologies[4]. The first, prescriptive, categorizes all technology which is definitive, which has well defined mechanisms that enact processes. These are used to control & process. For example, the control & process of gathering to a central place & then syndicating out posts people make to each other: that's a prescriptive technology. Holistic technologies are those in which the human has total control over means & materials to shape & create an outcome. In short, holistic technologies are technologies built with Free Software ethos, if not necessarily their hard copyleft politics. When humankind can share & exchange & experiment with the world about it, & learn, & form knowing exploring peers, humanity goes places: we explore our potentials, we find new things to get up to. Technology ought be a hotbed for this, for exploring our potentials, & it has gaps but it is already very far along de-pyramidizing the material/monetary order that pervades & so powerfully persists in our world, but this idea of free/pro-human software needs new initiatives & envigorated direction to maintain relevance amid our rising communicative capitalism.
[1] https://dorinlazar.ro/2021-02-programming-is-hard/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26711862
[3] https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
As intros to complex concepts, I think these kinds of games have long term intellectual value. As long as you understand you only have a cartoon understanding that creates a decent jumping off point to learning the real thing.
For some cultural reason we don't teach kids how, for example, in the long run, income statements interact with balance statements until at least their 20s and even then we limit the knowledge to a small elite, although I was an expert on reading financial reports by age 10 due to playing RRT. Certainly the math and logical concepts are not difficult for kids to learn.
Why do we intentionally limit "the masses" ability to understand how businesses are financed? Because knowledge is power... Ability to read financial reports is not much knowledge and not much power but its greedily guarded...
Someone in online forum (reddit iirc) said that even if they teach it, not many will follow. So I guess that demand isn't that high to begin with.
However if game or interactive actions can somehow teach it, it will reach many more people than lessons.
Years of physics, and yet I had no intuitive understanding of what was going on till I'd sunk about 40 hours into KSP - sure, I couldn't plan a real solar transfer trajectory, but I certainly have a much deeper appreciation for why things are the way they are, why rockets have launch windows and the like. There's a difference between sort of seeing an explanation written down, and realizing why you're time accelerating on the launch pad to get the Mun into the right position...
The difference between knowing something and having a intuition is so LARGE it can not be overstated. That is also one of the reasons why I love 3b1b [1]. It just clicks for me on some of his videos.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw
Not anymore, alas (though I seem to recall there was still a process of players explaining to him how certain game mechanics impacted the economy, like the fixed insurance prices for ships making an artificial price floor for the minerals used to make them, as well as producing inflation because of the currency appearing out of thin air during this process).
There is more to life than a feverish march of scientific progress. There's value in wasted time, boredom, and frivolity.
Furthermore, I'm certain that current/historic systemic oppression of large swathes of humanity contributes more to "wasted intellectual potential of humanity". And in those cases, it is actually detrimental to the person, whereas a game is usually provides benefit to a person in happiness, relaxation, or challenge.
There are time that I decided I don't want to work more in th evening and spend my time intentionally just watching youtube instead. That wasn't procrastination.
A game like factorio, I would like to ideally spend maybe 3-4 hours per week. But if I spent like 10,000 hours cumulatively, that might be too much for me. If I spent way too much time on video games, that start to become procrastination.
I bring this up because I think a person's ability (intellectual or otherwise) is usually nurtured by a passion. People with a passion put extra effort into developing the skills required to fulfill that passion. People with no passion simply don't invest the same level of effort and so are sometimes perceived as "dumb" in comparison.
One of the ways in which my wife tries to help her students is by helping them find something to be passionate about. She talks to parents/guardians to help discover their passions and often references the Occupational Outlook Handbook to help the students and their guardians figure out what they can do with that passion economically and what to invest the most in academically.
I think a person's "intellectual potential" is linked to their passion for a particular academic subject. I also think that intelligence is not a finite resource, but passion is.
So when analyzing the opportunity cost of games like Factorio or Eve Online, I think you must consider their effect on a person's passion. If I stopped playing games like Factorio altogether and forced myself to invest all that time into improving my software development skills, I'm confident I would quickly "burn out" - or exhaust my passion for the subject. Rather than "sapping my intellectual potential", I think relaxing with games such as Factorio from time to time allows me to replenish my passion which fuels my intellectual potential. Everything should be enjoyed in moderation of course, but I certainly don't think the existence of games like those is a net negative for humanity.
I think that we shouldn't judge others' hobbies on some intellectual basis and that people need some downtime and rest. It's fine to play chess, or improvise on a musical instrument or go clubbing without thinking whether it benefits the humanity.
Also I don't think it has to be restricted to 'obsessive tinkerer' games. You can make something cool in the 'real world' or learn more without being an engineer. Arguably tinkerer games or even chess are not any better in this respect than, say, call of duty, or some casual platformer.
If I was asking the same question, I'd ask "how can we make 'real word' activities as entertaining and rewarding as games".
To elaborate: I program a lot in my free time, I love building stuff, it's very rewarding when you reach milestones and do progress. On the other hand very often it's kinda meh. You know what you need to do, but then you spend massive amounts of time actually achieving it. You can easily spend hours and days debugging some crap, which results in a one-liner fix. This is not fun at all, it completely sucks!
Compare this to a dopamine train while playing Minecraft or SimCity or Civilisation where you're doing steady progress all the time. I can completely understand people who prefer video games to building things. But at least I know that I'm doing something that has never been done before, it will be useful for me later and other people so it wasn't all for nothing. In comparison, after playing video games all I feel is regret is that I'll never get this time back.
I'd imagine it's similar with many other 'real world' things. It's hard to push the boundaries of what you know or capable of, so brains resist it.. in comparison playing a video game is usually fun and easy since you know the drill.
Games have very tightly designed feedback loop that makes thing fun, while the real world has none of that.
I have been trying and failing to cultivate an electrical engineering hobbies various time. Thankfully, I can 'save' my progress in Anki, in so far that I engaged in study. Perhaps this is wrong the approach. I want to be an electronic hobbyist, not possess the knowledge of an electrical engineer, although that is essential.
Start by looking up schematics for basic fun stuff like DIY audio amplifiers or start even simpler with a joule thief. Read the schematic, translate the symbology into a bill of materials, figure out how to buy your bill of materials from digikey/mouser/amazon and then get to work stitching the pattern together on a solder-able protoboard. It will look like crap at first and probably sound like crap if you made an amp, but at least it will work.
Keep doing this and you will gradually build up a stash of 'homie knowledge' similar to 'but if I plug this circuit into this circuit, something cool happens'. Eventually you will have enough knowledge that you can solve some basic problems by building familiar circuit patterns from schematic/memory and tying them together in useful ways. As you practice more, your soldering and protoboard construction will get cleaner and your wire routing will likely improve. This is generally works by the magic of OCD.
Eventually, you will get frustrated by the limitations of protoboards and jumper wires. You will want your wiring to be perfect. At this point, you should start messing around with PCB layouts. This is basically just etching wires on a non-conductive substrate. I would recommend starting simple and using a copper sticker and craft knife. Once you get the idea from practical experience, you can find a free PCB layout software tool and start laying out your wires in CAD and having the result fabricated via OSHpark or someone similar.
Congratulations, you are now a level 4+ electronics hobbyist.
Yes there is a huge economic incentive for these individuals to pursue this work, but I don't think its a stretch to say it cant be benefitting humanity overall in any real useful way.
Unfortunately our current system is optimized to create suffering and then sell something to damp it down a little. We create extreme stress by attaching huge consequences to the smallest actions. We start with the kids by constantly grading them. Then once they become adults we slam them with financial pressures and advertisements. We give them jobs where if they make a mistake they will end up out on their ear and destitute. We then give them credit so they can feel anxious about not having enough to pay the credit card bill. Then when they eat the crud from the advertisements to feel better they get fat and anxious about that too!
Factorio and Eve Online are a small balm for those people who haven't found a way out of that spiral of suffering we call western society. If you want to find the Intellectual Potential of a human being we're going to reach that limit not because of Factorio. Instead it will be because we have forced our children and friends to constantly run on a metaphorical treadmill.
The popularity of games like Factorio says more about how much intellect and creativity has nowhere to go.
It may well be that when we amuse ourselves in new ways, the other activities get less attention. But ultimately our creativity will bring scientific papers about Factorio and Eve Online, just like there are interesting papers about number theory, optimal strategies in Chess, or AI for StarCraft.
It uses some. It develops some. The net effect is unclear, but even if there was more available to use without it, the people indulging in it probably wouldn’t be using it in ways the author approves of more even if it wasn’t available, just as is the case with the author’s use of intellectual potential on this question instead of something less futile and more useful to humanity.
In factorio, there is alway something to do to increase the efficiency of the project. No boss to tell you that your ideas were not selected for mysterious reasons, that you you should not be thinking about processes but only about your todolist, no favoritism or special privileges. You are in control.
Being convinced that all workplaces were the same and that efforts in the real world were useless, launching that rocket was my redemption. It was a way to send my excess brainpower somewhere.
The real life is often structured in such a way that there's little reward for (more) work. And your official position and environment matters so, so much. It's quite hard to get into many academic/industrial places where something actually happens, especially if you didn't spend your whole life checking the specific boxes expected by hiring committees for that particular domain. I would say this is the biggest block, when we raise that OP question.
I'd also say it may be good, if you can, to spend some time detaching your mind from your local environment. Then you may be in a better mental state to make larger decisions about where to direct your time and effort. In my experience (and also my friends') there is a big threshold when you finally exit academia and your decisions suddenly start to matter, you aren't dependent on one bureaucracy etc. Although I'd advise to milk your studies for the credentials you can get.
Maybe I've learned some resource management (it's brutal in NetHack) and such from games, but in truth I don't know.
What I’m trying to say is that a fulfilling life is something that changes per individual. Perhaps a less-scientific and more art-driven society is preferable and would result in a much more enjoyable life for specific individuals. Others might prefer the complete opposite. For instance I want to go to the stars and conquer different worlds because I feel that a life worth living means exploring the unknown. But I also understand that using our resources to reach for the stars might also exploit some other parts of society in a negative way.
So who’s to say that playing a video game that fulfils your needs is less valuable than doing anything else? Life is beautiful because it’s diverse. Let the billions of variables coalesce and generate an existence that fulfils the needs of the people that live it. Sure you can push the needle in a specific direction (like scientific research) but the variables are so many and the individuals so diverse that it’s hard to contemplate a formula that would work at scale for everyone.
Instead of concentrating on the intellectual potential I would argue that “diversity” is a much more important variable. Life thrives in diverse conditions - we see this in how important biodiversity is for ecosystems (like plants). I think the same concept also applies for intellect.
I suppose it’s difficult to step back and analyze things beyond their purely productive economic utility and appropriately judge its value in the grand scheme.
Playing a single video game obsessively is bad for both. If you dabbled in many different creative and technical pursuits, you'd probably be happier than spending 10 hours reoptimizing your factorio line if you learned to speak spanish, play the sax and knew how to code in python. Learning in real life, without the immediate feedback of a game is harder for sure, but more rewarding in the end. However, you should never look at your time spent in the lens of economic fecundity for 'Others'. that never ends well.
> What's Newton's modern equivalent doing right now? Probably perfecting a build order in Stellaris.
Newton's modern equivalent is right now doing one of the following: science, technology, programming. Something of that sort.
Based on their insights, I think that if we're privileged enough to live without worry of the basics needs of human life, and make our livelihoods on intellect alone, then that comes at the expense of humanity's potential for equality. If this is what is happening, then engaging some of our time in bread-labour becomes a concrete way to combat inequality.
But lately I try to avoid games that require too mich thinking and invest my time in work instead.
Coding feels like playing a game anyway, so why not getting paid for it.
Considering the general waste of human ressources worldwide, I don't think she herself thinks she is in dire need of a higher intellectual potential.
That may change at the moment of 'peak human'. With shrinking population, the then existing unused intellectual potential and others may be higher valued.
Of course, just in case artificial intelligence and creativity are not more cost effective and profitable than the human one.
The great art, and artists, are in our video games. Physical art and architecture is sclerotic and adversarial, so the true creative geniuses have been funnelled into the digital.
This question assumes people who play a lot of hours of Factorio are somehow more likely to drive innovation than a person who plays hours and hours of Call of Duty.
The game of building games is the last revolution.
All other potential has been discovered and most of it has been or will be discarded because of thermodynamics.
What about: Do video games like those impact the potential intelligence of a person? the shopify CEO is famous for saying Factorio counts as a business expense.
Social life saps the intellectual potential of humanity. Imagine what we could accomplish if our "best and brightest" weren't weighed down by thousands of hours in churches, concerts, funerals, bars, and birthday parties.
etc, etc
The original comment lamented the fact that among the most lucrative positions within mathematics and computer science is ultimately tuning models for the purpose of spying on consumers. Be it an phd at Google trying to better categorize target demographics for advertisements or a high level engineer at Amazon trying to figure out what other products to recommend you.
It can be argued that sleep and social life are productivity drains. It can also be argued that it is part of a well-rounded life which is key to happiness. A happy individual is likely productive. Even so, it is besides the point. People sleep and socialize because they enjoy it. People don't waste decades of education and experience on gaming consumer behvaiour because its enjoyable however. They do it because it is lucrative.
My take on the original comment is that it encourages one to imagine a world where we instead incentivise the best and brightest of our generation to pursue nobler goals than consumer surveillance. It is also a natural response to the top level post. Why worry about video games as a productivity drain when there are far greater structural obstacles to building a better world.
I don't like surveillance capitalism either, but my argument was that this line of reasoning is silly because you can use it to conclude that literally anything is a waste of time or resources.
We shouldn't do surveillance capitalism because it sucks, not because everyone has some vague obligation to work on what you think is most important to society.
We're agreeing with each other, kind of.