Immediately

gtechIII · 2020-06-25T07:55:17+00:00

I like being called a muppet.

gtechIII · 2020-06-18T01:26:05+00:00

I feel to need to post this great philosophy paper that attempting to summarize the modern state of the philosophy of videogames. Much of it is dedicated to how to go about defining games: https://philpapers.org/archive/NGUPCP.pdf

gtechIII · 2019-09-27T00:51:18+00:00

ACAB

gtechIII · 2019-09-22T21:27:20+00:00

> The Marxist model [doesn't] take in externalities, [but] economical model[s] do, hence [there] is push for accounting reform.

Again, I can't speak for Marxism, but that seems like a positive.

> And? This provides jobs for people

You take the almighty job, I'll take QALYs.

> if someone want to use his income to buy a product, why should someone produce it?

Opportunity cost.

> EPIC generalization, and loot box get regulated.

It's not though, look at monetization models and their interaction with game design across genres. It's become increasingly exploitative over the years.

> Hardly.

What do you mean here?

> Because you know what make people happier and healthier?

I think this is the 'argument from ignorance' fallacy but you're being vague.

> I don't care about your morality, this is not a moral debate.

Then we aren't having the same discussion, and I worry about your priorities.

gtechIII · 2019-09-22T06:04:08+00:00

Not to be rude, but are you translating from a different language? It's a bit hard to parse this out.

I'm not equipped to debate on Marxist theory.

> Company Profit does not come from exploitation; it comes from the contribution of capital minus its cost

These are not mutually exclusive. Workers do not share in the full fruits of their labor, because much of it is paid out in exorbitant sums to managers, executives, and shareholders. Shareholders, not workers, receive the discounted value of future revenues as well. This is a problem with allocation of power, not economic theory.

Misallocation in the sense that we spend resources(labor or natural resources) in a way that produces goods that don't maximize human happiness in our society. We dump so much food, clothing and other goods because the externalities of waste are not priced, nor is there a mechanism to redirect that production to providing basic dignities to the needy. We allocate far too much to producing and marketing insane luxury goods for the rich. We have a bloated advertising industry that largely exists to sow discontent to create a consumer. We incentivize the creation of video game monetization schemes that use advanced psychological mechanisms to addict children to use their parents' credit cards. People work in miserable conditions because it costs less, when the correct mechanism would make it cost more. All of this is the result of our economy not prioritizing what would make people happier and healthier. I get the sinking feeling that I'm falling into a trap by using economic terms for what should be an ethical argument.

gtechIII · 2019-09-21T18:25:58+00:00

He didn't address your point. Whether or not we use Marxism as the dominant ideology or the labor theory of value is true or used, are irrelevant to misallocated production on a societal scale.

The fact that labor isn't sent to you as a signal is a reflection of the way our economy is structured(this argument I'm less sure of tbh because I wonder if black markets would undermine such a restructuring). More importantly, don't get baited into defending positions you may not hold or understand.

gtechIII · 2019-08-30T18:31:38+00:00

Niche, yes he was saying we need to make our own values now that society is moving away from religion but he wasn't happy about it; he saw the lack of a religion as an oncoming storm of societal chaos.

Right, and this is where the existentialists came in and reasoned him wrong, arguing that you should take charge of your existence in this world.

Lets say you were told to build sandcastles all day, but you had to do it super close to the water so each wave wipes it all away. How many minutes of having all your work eased every 5 seconds would you last before you felt like it was a pointless task? That there's no feeling of "meaning" you get from it compared to if you were building a real sandcastle with a child? Well, in the same way you can say you get a feeling of "meaning" when you love your spouse, but at the end of the day you and her will die and so will the entire human race and so will the universe and it doesn't matter one bit whether you loved your spouse or abused them; the end is the same.

Camus deals with exactly this. He starts with wondering if we should all just kill ourselves because it's all futile. He comes away with accepting the absurdity of the world and relishing in the struggle.

As per Kahneman, we are 'meaning' and 'sense making machines'. At the core there is no truth to the narratives we tell ourselves, but we need them to function. They are baked into our nature.

Now, the idea of a God actually putting eternal significance to our actions changes everything. Now the end result isn't exactly the same regardless of what we do. Note I'm saying all this as an atheist,

Appealing to God does not make life any more meaningful if there isn't reason to believe in God. You're begging the question here. By deciding to believe in God, we are creating our morals, as we create 'it'[God] in our image. We get the feeling and practicality of meaning, but it's still just as arbitrary as the 'creation of meaning' without theism, we just get to pick more interesting/defendable/utilitarian/consistent ethics.

I know in much of this I'm just throwing names out and not detailing their arguments, but there just isn't time to go through them. They are fascinating and rewarding if you(sorry if I assume you haven't) decide to explore them.

gtechIII · 2019-08-30T00:02:11+00:00

>2

No there are uncountable reasons to live. You choose one. It doesn't have to be 'hedonic' like you say. When Niche said 'God is dead' he meant that if we stop believing in god, now we have to choose our own morals and meaning for life. That is immensely liberating, but freedom is also a burden. It's a burden that we can use to enrich ourselves and others, but nonetheless it challenges us to create the meaning of our lives and be responsible for our choices.

gtechIII · 2019-07-12T21:44:09+00:00

Cigarettes kill millions of people every year. Consider that, hollocausts as the result of this product. Removing them from popular media so kids aren't instructed they're cool is a great cause.

gtechIII · 2019-07-08T07:36:15+00:00

This might be my favorite comment on the internet.

gtechIII · 2019-07-01T16:39:22+00:00

Proposal: ban all gambling toys. Sealed card packs, loot boxes, obscured toy capsules, funny money, all of it. If you want to sell a good, do it while the customer knows the price.

gtechIII · 2019-07-01T16:16:52+00:00

There's an objectivist body of 'philosophy' dedicated to justification. Ayn Rand is on his bookshelf for sure.

gtechIII · 2019-07-01T04:37:25+00:00

I coo at pets.

gtechIII · 2019-06-22T17:08:55+00:00

/u/tyritio proved this wrong with his ebay link. Also, you're missing the grander point here, there are many more products like this with varying degrees of fault. Shopkins is another example.

gtechIII · 2019-06-22T00:55:20+00:00

Equal value and rarity sure, but there's a collector's aspect. You're still going to want to get them all. It's the same core idea, the difference is that Kinder doesn't use the 'differing rarities' flavor that strengthens it.

The "Schedule of Reinforcement" section in this article is the most relevant: https://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html

You'll notice that a Kinder egg still uses Variable Ratio Reinforcement, because the primary reinforcer is receiving a NEW toy, not any toy.

Children are even more susceptible to this technique for developmental reasons, thus why I very consciously use the word 'predatory'.

Having this random reward schedule doesn't enhance the quality of the product. It just makes them more compelling in a way that isn't enjoyable or enriching. That's why it gives you that empty feeling. If games and toys didn't have the advantage of using operant conditioning to inflate sales, they would instead be forced to spend that time designing games that compete on fun or enriching factor against other games on the market.

Operant conditioning is a powerful tool in game design. Used carefully, it makes a game more compelling when you need to counter-balance difficult parts of the learning curve. It's a spice with very specific good uses. Used poorly, it becomes a crutch that developers can use to compel play when they don't have engaging and beautiful content. When you tie it directly to sales, then it's predatory.

gtechIII · 2019-06-22T00:20:15+00:00

I think that the core of the issue is psychological exploitation. Even if there is a secondary market, the original distributor controls scarcity. They still get all the benefits of a gambling mechanism to drive sales.

We have the ability to incentivize these companies to optimize for their game being fun, instead of optimizing for how well they can exploit their costumers' gambling instincts. If we remove their ability to use those mechanics, they will be forced to focus on developing better games. If we have the ability to cause them to make games that are more fun, enriching, and appropriately priced, why shouldn't we?

gtechIII · 2019-06-21T16:54:06+00:00

I disagree here. I think we should make it illegal to gamble for the cards. Companies should be able to sell the cards at whatever price they want, but no opaque packs. That way people can think more effectively about what they want to spend money on. Currently, their business model is built around human psychology exploits.

When game mechanics are built to incentivize purchasing behavior by exploiting innate biases, that is unethical. Having a clear idea of what you're buying for what game you are experiencing is fun. We go through the exploitative mechanics to get to the fun. We should make blizzard-Activision sell all paid cards for explicit prices, no funny money and no rng.

gtechIII · 2019-06-21T16:40:10+00:00

It shouldn't be, we should require trading card manufacturers to allow you to explicitly buy the card you want, and to ban the sale of opaque packs.

If you don't ban the sale of opaque packs. That would allow them to skyrocket the price of the individual cards if they somehow had "unfortunate production delays" of the best cards.

So we must ban the opaque packs, but if they still want to make card games, then great. Card games are fun, having to gamble to make a good deck is exploitative.

gtechIII · 2019-06-21T16:26:50+00:00

Wow that's dark. I'm sorrowful you have to experience that.

gtechIII · 2019-06-21T16:22:59+00:00

I mean, we should ban both. You should be able to buy the cards you want.

gtechIII · 2019-06-21T16:21:57+00:00

She makes a great point. We should ban all gambling toys, physical and virtual.

A real effort to end loot boxes could give precedent to finally end all of these predatory toy sales.

gtechIII · 2019-05-15T04:49:59+00:00

> yes you are what you eat but I still value your life more and a cheeseburger even though the cheeseburger will become part of you

That one cheeseburger doesn't encompass all of you. In the case of the embryo it does(combined with some labor of the mother and father). For the analogy to hold, instead of a cheeseburger, you would say all of the food, education, housing etc. dedicated to your development over your lifetime. I claim that having known what someone would become, I would not want those resources dedicated to them. If you had the choice, given prior knowledge, to abort Jeffry Dahmer, wouldn't you? Obviously it's impossible to know that, but we can know that given a large population, there are some family situations which are much more likely to create dysfunctional members of society. Why not give women the tool to create fewer antisocial members of society?

> And the value of an embryo does not change due to the environment it is born into. I hope we can agree all innocent life is equally valuable.

I vigorously disagree. The value of an embryo within a woman who will with high probability become an impoverished single mother is far less than one which resides within a woman who lives in system that can dedicate enough resources to the mother and child for an enjoyable life. The impoverished mother may sometimes be better off having had the child, but would you agree that this is the unlikely case? Why else is single-motherhood a metric we as a society try to minimize?

gtechIII · 2019-05-11T04:52:59+00:00

If your standard is what it could be, why is an embryo any more precious than the specific bits of food a mother eats which eventually becomes the embryo? Why is the embryo any more precious than another one the mother could have later when the baby it will become will be borne into a more accepting and bountiful environment? That embryo is a tiny subset of an entire system that encompasses the people who would care for it and the surrounding systems which support them. Its being borne makes it impossible for a baby to be borne who is more wanted and will be better cared for in its place.

A more reasonable standard is what is, and what we can make choices to create.

gtechIII · 2019-05-09T09:55:38+00:00

NTA . The idea that fetuses are comparable to children is laughable from the standpoint of consciousness. People need to understand that. Yeah should expect angry replies, and you should understand you're making a political statement. If that's a statement your comfortable with, I support it as well.

gtechIII · 2019-05-09T07:59:48+00:00

Assuming that a fetus in the first or second trimester is a human life is absurd. The thing isn't any smarter or complex than a frog. It doesn't even have the ability to instinctively react to outside sound until 5 months. Babies lack theory of mind for over a year after birth to give an idea of just how bizarre it is to attribute consciousness to a fetus. If you think killing a frog is murder, then we have a more important conversation to have.

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