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Comment by rhn_mk1 | Hacker News Reader

This makes it clear that people just want to do something useful in their lives. Why isn't real life building on this? What are the remaining differences?

Is it the extra bureaucracy involved in earning money? Is it the feeling of being exploited when working for someone else? Is it the pressure to economically justify anything we might want to do?

How much friction can we eliminate in work? What is essential, and what is not?

I feel that humanity would be better served if the feeling of achievement was coupled with meatspace usefulness, and not just virtual creation.

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The article already mentions this:

> The concept recognises that working without the bother of deadlines or micromanagement can be a lot of fun.

And they're right: building things is indeed fun, it's the pressure of deadlines and handling your boss/clients/etc that can make it stressful. But I don't think you can take that out of a "job" situation; other people paying for your work is the entire point of jobs.

If you are just doing things because you like it without anyone paying you for it, that's called a hobby even if you do the exact same things that you can also get paid for. (There is an obvious parallel here with the "getting paid for FOSS" discussion that pops up regularly on HN)

Until there's decisive evidence all the pressure, lack of transparency and politics is in fact necessary, there is no reason to believe it is. We've made impressive things and done impressive things without them for the entire history of our species.

Most people really just want "do X, get Y" type of deals. Those deals are becoming increasingly more rare except for minimum wage jobs working you to the bone. Not having to deal with politics has become a luxury instead of rewarding a few individuals to deal with all the politics. Even something as simple as getting a salary indication is already a hassle for Average Joe.

The job market can learn a lot from game design and gamification, but the guys at the top seem insistent on believing they know better than decades of research.

It seems relevant that all the "chore" games mentioned seem to be single player games where at most you compete against a few computer players that don't mind losing. In almost every job you will be playing multiplayer, and competing for scarce resources like promotions, money and power. The pressure, lack of transparency and politics stem from the fact that people in the workplace are usually interested in furthering their career over time and (except for the most rockety of rocket ships) can only get that if some of their colleagues don't.

Even "do X, get Y" type of deals are a threat, since the amount of Y is finite and the more that goes to others, the less that goes to you. It gets even worse when you take into account that people can lie. Someone might only be pretending to be happy "doing X" for the rest of their lives and will actually stab their coworkers in the back for a promotion. The guys at the top are definitely not unaware of this dynamic.

I'm skeptical of evolutionary psychology in general but if we think about prehistory a lot of work was doing stuff that had deadlines but you could easily understand what needed to be done. You have to go out and collect a bunch of nuts and berries, and there's a deadline because you'll starve if you don't get the food, but you know the food is out there and it's just a matter of getting it. Your ancestors have lived off food from this land for thousands of years, you know you will too. Similarly for simple crafting, you need to make the clothing or the clay pot but there's no barrier to doing it, you just have to do it. In these cases you could also have a boss, that is, some person with authority directing and judging you, but it's someone you know and someone whose role you will inevitably fill.

I think the key difference in the modern world is that success is not guaranteed, for reasons that may be well out of your control, and failure is scary with unknown consequences. We can imagine a world with pretty much the same jobs and the same work, but with more security removing the intense stress people feel.

Success wasn't guaranteed in the ancient world either. Even if you were cultivating crops, a drought you couldn't control could wipe out your crops. Or baddies could invade and steal your stuff and kill your people en masse.

Overall, we have way more security than the ancient world did. Droughts are still a problem as the western US has been seeing, but at least we're at a point today where it just means food prices go up rather than food vanishing entirely and requiring migration to other countries or something.

As for stress, largely European workers don't seem to feel the pressures that American workers do, which probably boils down to in part a mix of higher taxes leading to better safety nets as well as generally much more vacation time from work. Also politics in European countries generally isn't as polarized, though by no means is it perfect.

Farming as a necessity didn't happen until late prehistory and early history. Before that people hunted, fished or foraged for their daily food. They had nothing worth stealing or killing for or that couldn't be rebuilt quickly after an earthquake or other disaster. In the worst case they could just move a few miles away. Dying from a drought wiping out your crops or from being attacked by raiders from the mountains or from a warlord or pharaoh that claimed to rule over you didn't happen until later. Even then your own life was still simple to understand: being a farmer or shepherd or what have you.

I don't mean to say this was all perfect, but instead that when we talk about the stress of modern jobs, we should go beyond saying no one likes deadlines or bosses, because the real problem is the, for some people literally daily, uncertainty.

Oh, you might notice that I never mentioned a "job", only "work". Perhaps the concept of "job" is the friction that needs to be eliminated.

As someone who has put too many hours into EVE online to count. I do mundane things in video games because of two different reasons.

1) The reward for doing the mundane thing is usually very direct and actually pretty decent if you commit to it. For example with enough grinding in EVE you can afford some very fancy spaceships. Or with hours of code raiding in Rust you can steal all of someones stuff by just typing in 4 digit codes for hours.

2) Doing the mundane thing in the game is still a form of escapism from doing the mundane thing in the real world. Except usually the video game isn't hardcore mode. If I don't do it and a die I just respawn. Meatspace doesn't have this luxury. In this case the video game is an escape from existential dread.

Haha, I used to do Planetary Interaction in wormhole space, to chill out. It was peaceful, setting up my extractors, harvesting raw materials, then running through various factories to obtain upgrades or finished products.

Of course, loading up my cargo and bringing to market was tense... but I never was attacked, probably because I only went to wormholes from hisec space. (The wormhole farming corp I was in maintained various stations but I went with the not-as-lucrative ones accessible from hisec and skipped the low/no sec ones. As I recall, I stopped a few years ago.)

I would second this sentiment. As a teen I loved the action of Privateer and RPGs but found some of the grind tedious. Later as an adult I found certain kinds of grind kind of fun, to a point. Reaching the pay off is key. Things that feel too out of reach or have pay-to-win shortcuts just completely deflate the reward and destroy my motivation.

Cheating in MP also ruined it for me. Now I mostly do SP and occasionally cheat there when it feels like the game is getting too grindy or unfair.

Well, there is liability, safety, and practicality. I have no desire for a career change, but trying a forklift or city bus or train in a simulator is a fun afternoon. I don't think the city is gonna let me joyride in their equipment, anyways.

You can go over to r/powerwashingporn and see a lot of homeowners renting some equipment for an afternoon, but you don't want them going out to public land and cleaning whatever they want because they might just damage stuff with the wrong chemicals or techniques. I know beaurocracy isn't very fun but nobody wakes up with the sole desire to manufacture red tape for no reason.

> This makes it clear that people just want to do something useful in their lives.

People want to do something with obvious, tangible impact in their lives. Most of these games have a very clear impact on the virtual world; that wall is clean, and I cleaned it. That house got built and I built it. Those shelves got stocked, and I did it. So on.

In meatspace, most jobs are either heavily removed from a tangible benefit, or have bad pay and working conditions. You can be in HR or accounting or IT, and several steps removed from any kind of tangible end-product, or you can be a berry picker working in the heat for $7/hr.

With the advent of the assembly line and exacerbated by offshoring, the high-value part of the production chain has become managing production rather than the production itself.

Well, there is gamification, whether you give a gold start to yourself or use an app like Habitica.

Personally, I struggle with cleaning because it's truly Sisyphean work. Always the same, never done, even if you do it the results don't last.

Games can be played whenever I feel like it, cleaning doesn't always work this way. A visit from the in-laws make it a chore, and my brain can't really let go of that label for some reason.

Some work comes with physical discomfort: I don't think I'll ever feel like picking strawberries in the burning sun for too long.

When I call clean, I use the time to listen to audiobooks, podcasts, attentively to music (versus just being something in the background while focus is elsewhere), etc. And focusing on the peace/serenity I feel when my area is tidy also helps.

Hth

I'm an avid player of these mundane "chore" games and I play them because they are fun.

I don't want to be a truck driver, but I want to play Euro Truck Simulator with a complete racing wheel setup. The way I see it, driving a truck across Europe while trying to follow all of the rules to minimize cost is not that much different mentally than driving a race car around a race track trying to minimize lap time. But it is less physically fatiguing.

Even though these games seem dumb (I get poked fun at a lot for playing them), most of the time, their game loops are tight enough that you feel the same fulfillment as if you were playing the latest Mario. They are always adding another challenge to the game with each level, so that by the end, you've developed a repertoire of skills that you can use to tackle a variety of complicated situations.

I don’t think we’ll ever be able to eliminate friction from “real” work and therein lies the reason why these games are popular. Real work requires sacrifice, sweat, disappointment and all the rest. These games allow you some semblance of the gratification without the friction.

You can reach 20 woodcutting in Runescape in < 1 hour as a complete noob to the game. The equivalent irl skill would take months or years of training. Video games artificially speed up the process of skill acquisition with a satisfactory level of dopamine release such that you will keep going.

Indeed and this time reduction is present in a great many forms. Imagine if a growing season in Stardew Valley took actual months instead of minutes, or if crossing a mid-sized kingdom on horseback took several weeks instead of the 20 minutes or so in most video games.

Counterpoint: Sailaway does model real-world travel time and distance, although in that case it's the whole point. I actually kind of wish there was a Euro Truck Simulator mod or something that would make the distances realistic too.

We won't eliminate all friction. But I'm not satisfied with any answer that neglects finding out what we can eliminate.

Cooking for your family feels very different than cooking at a corporate canteen, yet both are forms of useful work, and both involve some friction. The game makers know it - Euro Truck Simulator is full of both challenges (deadlines) and boredom (traffic jams), and I wouldn't call it frictionless.

So, again, which friction can stay and which needs to go?

I see what you’re saying. And I agree it would be nice to remove friction where possible but I think it would happen in very specific, local contexts instead of some revolution around work itself. In some ways work is in and of itself a process of trying to remove friction and what can and should be removed is mostly dependent on the person or org and their goals. I also think it will just be whack-a-mole and removing some friction will just uncover another form of friction. So to me the question of what can stay and what can go just sounds like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

> rearranging deck chairs on the titanic

I think that's a pessimistic view. You posit that humanity will never be able to extract more than a tiny bit of the satisfaction lots of people feel when they are useful to the community.

On the other side, a lot of anarchist thought has been proposing that smaller communities make people more satisfied, by removing emotional friction.

Still from another direction, not all work needs to be tightly economically controlled, or justified, yet finances permeate work as pure overhead.

Dismissing the idea that work can be better than it is today seems like a passive surrender.

> You posit that humanity will never be able to extract more than a tiny bit of the satisfaction lots of people feel when they are useful to the community.

The abilities to feel satisfaction and be useful are not directly linked to eliminating friction.

I don't know anything about anarchist perspectives on smaller communities but I would actually hazard a guess that smaller communities would increase emotional friction but also the quality and sense of fulfillment that come from being deeply emotionally linked to others.

I don't dismiss the idea that work can be better but I think there's an average amount of friction in work that can't be reduced. And from my perspective it makes me feel like I gain strength, courage, and skill from working at something that is always going to be difficult in some way and to some degree.

To answer your original question as directly as possible: I think if an instance of friction disadvantages or oppresses someone or a group of people then we should seek to eliminate it.

Yeah I think it’s scratching the innate human desire for progress. The rewarding feeling of progress without the friction of the real world.

> Real work requires sacrifice, sweat, disappointment and all the rest.

But does it have to be like this?

Yes. That’s what makes it work. I think we sometimes have a perspective that we can optimize the struggle out of everything but that’s simply not true. It’s okay for life and the things we do with our life to be difficult and mundane. They’re not always so but it’s not a problem or out of the natural order of things when they are.

Not really a direct example, but the friction of accounting for and paying tax strikes me as quite insane in most places. I pay a bookkeeper and an accountant thousands a year, plus deal with loads of hassle on top of that. I can't imagine that if you designed an enjoyable working lifestyle from scratch, you'd decide the whole tax rigmarole as we know it was essential.

we are just here to consoom product and get excite for next product.

What you're describing is Fully Automated Luxury Communism‚ where most parts of work are automated, and people work under non-alienated conditions simply for that feeling of achievement. Or in the words of Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity”

People need to feel useful; these chore simulators are parasitic on that natural impulse.

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