Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games

Re:Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games by btown on Friday February 24, 2017 @02:43PM (#13727018)

I feel like a lot of people desire validation and achievement as short-term feedback. When we go through middle and high school, you can find achievement in short-term feedback on academic assignments, or in extracurricular activities where competitive matchups are rather frequent. (The American focus on short-term "A for Effort" grading is debatable, in this context.) Then you go to college or the real world, and suddenly the goalposts become much further away, all eggs in a nebulous basket: academic research that takes years to gain the next level of credentials, career progression, dating, financial stability. Learning requires you to subconsciously justify self-designed goalposts - you have to set your own goals for when you can be happy with what you've learned - and that's just as nebulous as the real world.

I think many gamers would envy, and aspire to, your ability to have confidence in self-set learning goalposts. But rather than despair at not being able to do so, if they can sit down on their couch and be spoon-fed goals, a process to get there, and Steam Trophies when they do... and they are truly legitimately happy (a local rather than global maximum, to be sure, but who ever achieves the global maximum of happiness anyways?)... who's to argue against that?

Efforts like Khan Academy and Duolingo understand this dynamic; they break things down into achievable interim goals, with flashy rewards as you progress. But it's hard for serious learning apps to reach the mental intensity and dopamine release of, say, a successful boss fight. A company that can figure that out would do a lot of good for humanity... but why wouldn't they just be a game studio instead?

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Re:Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games by hinkley on Friday February 24, 2017 @07:52PM (#13729341)

See also Jane McGonigal, who has done some work specifically around those self-defined goal posts.

One reason why AI is being employed for some problems is based on what we know about human problem solving. For instance, a human could come up with a near-optimal solution to the Traveling Salesman problem in under a minute. Long before a computer could get even close. How is that happening? What are we doing that's so special?

Which makes me wonder if we could gamify NP-complete problems and use gamers to come up with better solutions. Like a game to lay out circuit traces, route delivery trucks, or organize a warehouse.

Random reinforcement (giving out not just merit based rewards but also random rewards) keeps people coming back but it's a higher goal than beating a raid boss in a game that 95% of the human population has never heard of.

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Re:Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games by homarp on Friday February 24, 2017 @09:23PM (#13729622)

>Which makes me wonder if we could gamify NP-complete problems and use gamers to come up with better solutions. Like a game to lay out circuit traces, route delivery trucks, or organize a warehouse.

see "How online gamers are solving science's biggest problems" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/25/online-ga...

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815917

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Re:Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games by Debugreality on Friday February 24, 2017 @08:57PM (#13729533)

I've struggled so much with video games over the years. I have probably spent a significant percentage of my life playing a huge variation of games. By far the most destructive was MMORPG (Dofus) because it meets so many desires at once and can be engaging for so many years (reaching max level on this game was a multi year journey). Others can be finished or played enough to satisfy and allow me to come up for air, like a good book or TV series they all eventually finish no matter how engaged you might be for a short period.

I've also found different games appeal at different times, I think they each answer different desires and I can often guess what I'm lacking by the kind of game I want to play - achievement, confidence, socialising, artistic outlet, aggressive outlet etc..

Perhaps in this way we can use games to realise things that we are lacking in our life so to find more constructive outlets or better life balance - or perhaps games are a beneficial occasional outlet for things like aggression.

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