Apology for Video Games Research | Hacker News Reader

Apology for Video Games Research

togelius.blogspot.com

40 pointshomarp14 comments

I think video games are massively under-studied, particularly in the realm of behavioral Economics.

One of my favorite seminal pieces is Zachary Booth Simpson's paper 1999 paper on the Economics of Ultima Online:

https://mobiledevmemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/The-In-...

In my own field, I keep finding more and more instances of MMO's and online virtual worlds that reproduce the real-world housing crisis.

https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-value-tax-in-...

Now that you mentioned that, I remember World of Warcraft having a pandemic event that spurred some discussion in epidemiology circles.

Yup. There was also an economics paper by someone who abused the in game market (auction house).

Zero Punctuation did a hilarious and informative video on this topic in one of his "Lets all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee" series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB3jOD2wjUc

It is funny you mention that and I definitely agree about it not being studied enough ( especially given how much players are being watched today you would think there is enough data ). My first real encounter with inflation was in an MMO. It was fascinating how quickly player-base did what people in RL did ( moved to assets other than currency ).

Even outside of MMOs you had things like Stones of Jordan - often the "currency" would be something compact that had some value inherently, but became much more valuable as the money.

And you want something that doesn't hit game limits, and doesn't get messed with by the developers much (both of which do NOT apply to "WoW gold" for example).

I am perplexed why games (video or otherwise) are so looked down upon by general news media (reflecting received societal “norms”). Before video games it was Dungeons & Dragons. Now there are extremes where people get addicted to it in unhealthy ways (at the cost of relationships, income, etc), but we don’t judge other forms of entertainment or industry by the extreme bad outcomes. It also seems to be a strange whipping boy for “it causes your kids to be violent” despite research pretty clearly showing it decreases violence (likely providing an outlet).

Games exist even outside humanity. It’s literally instinctual for wolves and a part of learning to hunt and all social animals AFAIK engage in similar forms of play as a way to learn skills / connect with others.

It actually saddens me that the vast majority of people completely write-off gaming, especially when there are modern, compelling games with very solid stories. Things like Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption I and II, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc. Or even character driven stuff like GTA V. These titles deserve to be revered by a broad set of people like any IMDB-topping movie.

Last of Us is an experiment in how much torture porn you can make your game employees watch when they’re making it. (I furthermore claim that no video game about or containing zombies is worth any respect.)

GTA has historically been an experiment in how many slurs you can get your Scottish employees to fit in one line while customers still think they might realistically be spoken by a black person. Though, apparently one reason the next one has taken so long is they’re trying to modernize that.

For anyone interested there is a good podcast on the Psychology of Video Games :

https://www.psychologyofgames.com/podcast/

Jamie Madigan, the host, has also spoken at GDC and whatnot and gets a good variety of guests including quite a few academics who work in the area.

I wonder how much of this is because of the giant time-suck people experienced fulfilling SAGE contracts, and the "cost" to 1950s computing power running those archaic displays and "guns" for Radar processing?

I also think this is partly over sold. The GiGi existed. People loved it. Tektronix vector graphics consoles existed. People loved them.

What had to happen is pixels, and density, and GPU. That happened and graphics moved from niche to mainstream very quickly.

Not related to the content of the article, but I really dislike how the images are mixed with the text. 3 words per line is not effective for reading.

Scaling to images up to go the full width of the column, centering the images and leaving space on the edge, or putting the images in the empty space on the side would all be much better.

On mobile it is nowhere near as bad because only like 2 words are put to the side of image.

The popular posts column also has a weird `text-indent: -15px`.

Wait... there are people who still think video games are a fad?!?

While we're at it, I'm not so sure this internet thing is really going to last.

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