Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion:

Why do we push games on society instead of work? Why is chess and MMOs fun, but not sewing a shirt or building a new app?

I would disagree, I find sewing shirts and making apps fun, MMOs can be grindy and chess is basically just studying.

I'm sure there are some relatively minor things like reward rate, physical exertion, etc... but I have to imagine much of it is cultural. Lets not take this to logical extremes, but rather, why don't we value group volunteer work more than playing chess? You have your social aspect, you have rewards, its often different and unique each time.

As I've gotten older, its a bit apparent to me that 'beating Zelda' is more akin to work, than it is to getting fulfillment. (However, then there are games like Divinity Original Sin(2) that feel extremely fulfilling, can't deny that.) You wonder how many people are playing Call of Duty because a leader of a friend group saw the advertisement, bought the game, and pushed their friends to do the same. Instead of playing football, they play COD.

I'm not sure whether you're making a comment about prison society or society in general. Penal labour sounds like a pretty bad idea to me. But I can see a few reasons that chess might be good for rehabilitation (some referred to in article):

* Simple, indisputable demonstration of intelligence. People from deprived background often have low self-esteem and very little evidence to show for their smarts, even if they are in fact intelligent.

* It's traditionally a slow, thoughtful game, in stark contrast to the stress and demands of the outside world.

* It provides escapism by totally focusing your mental faculties onto the world of the board.

* There are few external expectations. No one will be upset if you make a silly move, like they would if you make some bad stitches.

Prison forced labour might not be a good idea. Prison labour as an optional thing is definitely a good idea, and most prisons give prisoners the option to contribute, at least to the running of the prison, in exchange for certain privileges. The jobs include working in the laundry room or serving food. These are not intensely engaging occupations, but they are an improvement over the monotony of prison life, and give people the opportunity to excercise certain skills useful in the real world like teamwork, diligence, etc.

I disagree with those who claim that only people from a certain social setting can comment on certain issues, but I have to admit that it provokes my ire a bit seeing HN commentators who likely have pretty much no experience with inner-city cycles of schooling/imprisonment/poverty suggesting more penal labor as some sort of solution and drawing on their experience of how 'beating Zelda' is akin to work.

Chess specifically helps practice complex multi-step thinking and grokking multiple component systems.

Prove it with science.

Skills from one area do not necessarily transfer over.

The whole point of the game is multi-step thinking.

If I make a move, I need to prepare for the inevitable response, which might or might not be obvious to my opponent. The game is inherently more and more complex after each move.

While things might not carry over directly in a provable way, there's a reason chess has survived as a game for hundreds of years - because there's definitely ways the game improves your thinking processes, pattern recognition, and abstract decision making skills.

>While things might not carry over directly in a provable way, there's a reason chess has survived as a game for hundreds of years - because there's definitely ways the game improves your thinking processes, pattern recognition, and abstract decision making skills.

No, you need science. This is Appeal to Tradition fallacy.

Chess was the 'in' game for the upper class/nobility through history. That is the reason it survived.

Wouldn't great chess players be fantastic outside of the chess world? Wouldn't kingdoms who had chess beat regional powers that didn't have the technology? Wouldn't chess players defeat their political rivals?

If any of this was true, we'd see evidence of it.

Science is not a good tool to win an argument with. Are you trying to argue that abstract logic games like chess have no impact on how people otherwise live? This is a crazy stance, I hope you agree.

>. Are you trying to argue that abstract logic games like chess have no impact on how people otherwise live?

Yes, they don't have an impact from everything I've read.

Again, it should be easy to prove. Why not see how the best chess players in the world do outside of chess?

You'd think with all those abstract logic skills we'd have them running companies, universities, and being secretary of state. Instead all seem to be stuck as chess players.

>Science is not a good tool to win an argument with.

Feelings are better? No bud. It sounds like you just really want Chess to be useful.

>You'd think with all those abstract logic skills we'd have them running companies, universities, and being secretary of state. Instead all seem to be stuck as chess players.

Sounds like you're not familiar with what Kasparov (undisputed #1 player in the 80s-early 2000s) does outside of Chess.

Guy has told off Putin to his face, and has been a champion of human rights and democracy - getting arrested in his native Russia several times while protesting the one-party state Putin has built to enrich himself. He's also written books on geopolitics.

Magnus Carlson has done alright for himself too. He's won a few poker tournaments, and last season was the best fantasy soccer player on the planet.

>Guy has told off Putin to his face, and has been a champion of human rights and democracy - getting arrested in his native Russia several times while protesting the one-party state Putin has built to enrich himself.

Seems like all of his hard work paid off /s. Weird that he can beat Putin in chess but not IRL

>Magnus Carlson

"At two years, he could solve 500-piece jigsaw puzzles; at four, he enjoyed assembling Lego sets with instructions intended for children aged 10–14.[10]"

Doesnt seem like a chess thing though. I'd hate if someone attributed my success to playing runescape. But at least runescape teaches you economics.

>* Weird that he can beat Putin in chess but not IRL*

Hope this was /s as well. Intelligence doesn't matter when you're up against the Don of the Russian Mafia, a former KGB boss who happens to be worth some $200-300 billion and has outright and undisputed control of the Russian state, which includes a powerful propaganda network and a nuclear-armed military.

>* But at least runescape teaches you economics.*

Need this to be confirmed with science. A computer game based around PvP combat probably teaches you less about economics than a game like chess teaches you about abstract logical thinking and planning.

n=1 shrug

I play quite a bit of chess. I also develop software, so theoretically I practice complex multi-step thinking and hopefully I grok multi-component systems.

Unfortunately I think chess does not help me at all in my job. I wish it did!

Chess is highly specific. Most players tend to learn and improve on those specifics. I know that bishops are more valuable than knights in an open position. I know several openings to a depth of ~30 ply. I know many theoretical endgames. These things do not help me at all in any arena besides chess.

At least with chess (and plenty of other games) it’s a structured way of participating in cooperative competition/competitive cooperation. Your peers are your adversaries when you’re actually playing, but they’re also the people helping you get better. Work doesn’t teach that, or at least not explicitly, but the ability to navigate social spaces where you’re both cooperating and competing is critical to getting anything done.

The difference between "work" and "games" is how easily monetizable the activity is, not how useful the output of the activity is.

“Fun” is subjective. I love programming for example but most people would find it to be somewhere between dry and mind numbingly boring, which isn’t good or bad, it just is. Same for MMOs or sewing or chess or what have you.

Games are better because you can choose who you play with rather than having to pretend to like some asshole. In a similar vein you don't have to submit to some bullshit boss and his bullshit rules.

Because reading Harry Potter is more fun than reading an economics textbook. And eating pizza is more fun than chicken + broccoli.

tl;dr FUN!!

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