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Comment by Lariscus | Hacker News Reader

This might be one of the reasons why some competitive gaming communities seem so joyless after a while.

I suspect that another reason might be that the mechanics of competitive gaming focus on maximizing players' control over whether they win rather than on maximizing joy.

It's like the difference between backyard football and professional football. In backyard football most people play with house rules that make the game more fun but less competitive. On the other hand, in professional football the rules are designed to help ensure that the better team wins.

>win

>feel nothing

>lose

>day ruined

why is "greentext" such an expressive and iconic way of communicating in online text?

win: feel nothing

lose: day ruined

communicates the same idea but feels less emotionally punchy somehow.

Often the game mechanics themselves aren't actually fun (at least after the novelty wears off) but players keep playing because they enjoy the sensation of winning. The player can't have fun unless they win because the game is not intrinsically fun.

You know it's a good game when you can reflect back on a match you lost and think "yeah that was worth it, I had fun."

Treating "losing is fun" as an explicit design goal and not merely an observation about some games is something I haven't seen, but it makes a lot of sense.

They're joyless because they become increasingly toxic the higher you get. At least in mainstream games. Do something outside of meta and you're enemy number one.

It's the fact that the games are geared towards sexed up number crunching. Anything that can't be quantified into a number is ignored by the developers.

I don't know why people like this stuff. Isn't real life already filled with number crunching?

When I became a full time developer, I lost any sense of adventure or accomplishment with regard to video games.

VR still has some sense of wonder or competitiveness that I used to feel playing WoW as a kid.

Just slowly embracing my inner old man yelling at clouds I suppose, a lot of kids see eSports as a viable future career now.

For WoW specifically, the appeal melted away as it increasingly pushed instanced competitive endgame (raids, M+, arenas) as the the central pillars of the game. What pulled me in back in 2005 was its world which was not only vast and beautiful, but shared with numerous other players, as well as the more tabletop adventure feel that casual play (and even entry level raiding) entailed back then. Things that are prioritized now like leaderboard chasing and increasingly convoluted boss encounters are not what I logged on for.

> I don't know why people like this stuff.

Maybe because they don't have it enough in their life? I used to enjoy MMORPGs when I was younger, nowadays I understand that it's spreadsheet-assisted grind.

> Isn't real life already filled with number crunching?

Precisely, the moment I entered "real life" I lost all drive for any online games, because I "saw through" their gameplay.

Even in more casual online games these days, not adhering to the meta will bring trouble. Maximum optimization is the default expectation, and if you play to unwind rather than to compete or have a playstyle that’s more driven by whim or enjoyment you’ll be labeled a bad player.

This has driven me away from online games, even though they were one of my primary hobbies back in the 2000s. The ambient attitude has changed so much since then.

Or because all of those popular games are manipulative and their goal is not to make you happy or fulfilled, but to frustrate you so you play more.

Those games are frustrating on purpose.

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