Comment by adnzzzzZ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adnzzzzZ | Hacker News Reader

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>though I don't know how you want to argue that the world isn't mostly run by capitalist forces. Again, if this is something you want to question I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere.

I believe that the world is primarily run by academia and journalists, and this is best described as a clerical oligarchy. In 1890 the US was definitely a capitalist/commercial oligarchy, in 2020 the US is definitely not one and is instead a clerical oligarchy where institutions with most power are intellectual ones rather than commercial ones. There are reasonable and well thought out arguments for this being the case https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution....

>The factoid in the piece is that a lot of mobile games are built with the intent of being addictive and getting people to spend a bunch of money on micro transactions. Is this another thing that doesn't fit in your view of reality?

I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.

>Most importantly though, if they added your joke instead I still wouldn't rally to have them take it down. I'd just think it's awkward and embarrasing.

Yes, that's exactly what I think of the original joke.

I'll skip right over the conversation about how the world is run. I read some of the article you sent (it's quite long), and let's just say that so far I'm not convinced.

> I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.

If your biggest issue with the statement is that it unfairly focuses on mobile game devs, feel free to extrapolate the sentiment to all game devs who do this, I think most people do this extrapolation.

I re-read the rest of your responses to this thread, seems like your only issue is with how appropriate a joke is in technical documentation.

I am interested, given your world view, to know why you think a tutorial on encrypting saved game states isn't also inappropriate? In fact, isn't the technical documentation inappropriate in its entirety? Why should I be told how to use the game engine? Just because these "elitist" developers built the engine, doesn't mean they can tell me how I should use it?

>If your biggest issue with the statement is that it unfairly focuses on mobile game devs, feel free to extrapolate the sentiment to all game devs who do this, I think most people do this extrapolation.

I'm a game developer. I don't believe that games are inherently immoral otherwise I wouldn't make them. If you're a game developer and you believe that using psychological techniques to make people play games is wrong then you should probably not be making games, otherwise you're consistently engaging in immoral behavior yourself.

The singling out of mobile games is just a reflection of the bias that game developers have to think some kinds of games are morally wrong because it offends their sensibilities.

You can't conflate games that try to create a fun experience, and engage people through feelings of discovery, fun, achievement, and games that use manipulative techniques to create frustration and exploit psychological feedback loops to extract a steady stream of money from people. Its just not the same thing at all. Like comparing a novel to a lottery ticket. Both are written on paper but the comparison stops here.

> I don't believe that games are inherently immoral otherwise I wouldn't make them.

Neither do I, maybe you read my reply incorrectly. I said, feel free to extrapolate the criticism to all game devs who explicitly try to make the games addictive and hook people with micro-transactions. So your whole line of reasoning there kind of falls flat.

There's no criticism. Making a game addictive is making a game addictive. If you're doing it with micro-transactions or with RNG-gating it's the same thing.

> I believe that the world is primarily run by academia and journalists

I think that world would look something like this: We take immediate and severe measures to curb global warming, don't spend the last decade imposing austerity measures on the European populace, de-escalate the war on drugs, develop a deep understanding of the cultural intricacies of countries we consider invading, avoid publishing clickbait inflammatory anecdotes in our newspapers in consideration for the long term public interest, not the benefit of the shareholders, and drive policy by the nuanced understanding of scientific study, not emotion, intuition, or anecdote.

How does the contrast between the last 40 years of ruthless neoliberalism vs. the very leftist academia and democratic-liberal leaning MSM, fit in your belief that academia and the press are somehow running the show?

(edit: typo)

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