The culture where play is shameful (2012)

Anyway - best everybody make up their own mind, and remember that EVERYBODY has an agenda. Even the good people on reddit. Specifically, perhaps historians don't like it if somebody advances on their territory with a different approach (combining different disciplines). Their agenda is to push their methodology so that they get more funding for their research.

Nobody can experience happiness by giving in to whims and random urges without considering the long term.

However, the good for a human being does consist in enjoying life and experiencing good emotion.

So, this was a false dichotomy:

> I'm not arguing that we should completely give ourselves over to our base urges, but acknowledging they exist, that everyone has them, and that they can be a wonderful thing would be a great start.

To be specific, the options are not: deny pleasure on the one hand, or give in to short-term base urges on the other hand with no thought to the consequences.

That is a false dichotomy.

You think you understand??

Submitted by Ngorana of Sinivit, South Coast Baining, Papua New Guinea on August 7, 2012 - 7:49pm

I agree that some cultures and child rearing and discipline can be restrictive, but brought up in a similar manner does not mean that we do not value our upbringing - and i do not see it as 'dull' or 'boring' or 'wrong'! From what I think, in the western society, perception of play and the correct form of discipline to be practiced on children is very different from the most cultures in the east.

I must say, that in the previous works stated in the essay, of the Baining people saying little or nothing in interviews is due to the fact, that if you are not a member (specifically foreigner) of the concerned society amongst the Bainings, than you do not necessarily need to acquire knowledge of their cultural or philosophical way of life - except if you are 'married' into the society, adopted or asked to be part of the society. Baining people are very careful with what they say, and to who, especially about cultural practices - it is a taboo to inform foreigners about this. We are people of little talk. We believe more in actions, and that people must read and interpret them correctly. Something of which our children are taught.

For Baining's of Sinivit of the south coast for example, play is accepted and taken as time-out. However, adults instill in children that working such as chopping fire wood, diving for fish, gardening, building houses, hunting and gathering is crucial in sustaining your self and your land - especially for males at a later age. Children are taught to be independent and self sufficient and less dependent on their parents or elders at a very young age. This whole concept of not allowing play in our daily lives to me is WRONG. The notion of them becoming young women or men one day is embedded into our thoughts by our elders, and that how we are brought up by them will determine what type of adults we will become. In return, the very existence and state of our land (our heritage) and its affairs depend greatly on our actions. We are taught to become hard workers and very private about our cultural affairs.

You see, before the colonial era, we the Baining's inhabited the whole of the land of East New Britain. Invasion by a neighboring cultural group - the 'Tolai' people, forced us into the jungles and coastal area due south of the province. Our forefathers lost most of our valuable land, and people to cannibalism, practiced amongst these invaders. Then during the colonial area, the Germans enslaved them, forcing them into mining our alluvial gold and carrying them hundreds of kilometers inland and storing them away, in what was considered as sacred land - biding us against our cultural beliefs. Stories of these past events have further created a sense of secrecy in protecting our cultural ways (specifically the fire dance), and our land especially.

Baining people do not depend on other related societies to survive out in the natural environment, and land and sea is seen as a commodity of which is treasured and priceless. 'You reap what you sow', is highly emphasized in our cultural society - something of which may be deemed archaic in biblical times....

And so, in my opinion the essay composed by Dr Grey based on some the works of Fajan's is quite biased if you ask me. People do not have the right to be 'frustrated' when studying foreign cultures - you simply have to endure it, or stop wasting your time. Culture is not just something you record, observe and interpret over time, its how well you integrate yourself into the traditions, beliefs and practices of the people of that particular heritage and understand it and its people. Most importantly, you must respect these aspects, as not one culture no matter how much you see it as perfect, is seen as perfect or the correct practice for different cultural societies.

You can have great game experiences on a phone! You can build good, fun games, either in-depth or casual, for mobile, just like you can build them for consoles. In fact, just because a game is "casual" doesn't make it bad! Some of my favorite games have been casual few-minutes-at-a-time pick-up-and-put-down things; non-time-based puzzle games (e.g. KAMI[1]) work especially well for this—they're functionally equivalent to doing a crossword puzzle—but even action games like Tiny Wings[2] can work if they're self-contained.

Then, of course, you can also have things like RPGs and action-adventure games, of just the same quality you'd see from a console.

The most important difference, I think, is that people don't tend to play the good games in the middle of a conversation. The good games are actually engrossing, and therefore can only be played as an exclusive action—you might see someone playing them on the bus, but never just fiddling with them while hanging out with friends. It's only the games with no fun-value at all that are capable of the "empty addiction" you see on people stuck pulling a slot-machine arm all day.

[1] http://www.stateofplaygames.com/work/kami/

[2] http://www.andreasilliger.com/

I think what sets games like chess, and to a greater extent go, apart from trivial addictive games, is that they teach concentration, executive function, pattern recognition, and in some cases jumping up and down abstraction hierarchies, in a way that probably extends beyond the game's domain into life.

I don't know what to do about the morass of addictive games that are taking over human mindshare. There have always been some; even crossword puzzles are arguably the pre-computer version. They strengthen recall and concept association but how useful is that, since most of what's required is trivia? Scrabble at least is social (with the benefits that entails) in addition to strengthening recall of uncommon words.

The "Protestant work ethic" is what you get when social mores are mostly decided by people who are unable to get bored. Given that America was founded by such people, the gene pool experienced a heavy selection effect toward hypomanic tendencies and hasn't recovered since. (America's immigration policies only accepting what amount to extremely hard workers continue this trend.)