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Comment by davidivadavid | Hacker News Reader

That reminded me of an interesting Yudkowsky article [1] about how a utopia requires "high challenge" :

"So this is the ultimate end of the prophecy of technological progress—just staring at a screen that says "YOU WIN", forever."

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29vqqmGNxNRGzffEj/high-chall...

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He suddenly jumps from "making games easier for people who find them too hard" to "making games trivially easy for everyone" like its a natural conclusion. To me the natural conclusion is maximizing flow: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Is flow something intractable from the connection-forming complexity of an experience, or just a biochemical reaction to an experience the brain considers complex, immersive and valuable? As such, could the subjective experience of flow be simulated via a mixture of hormones/chemicals? If so, is any aim for a human just a task of simulating what seems a sufficiently valuable, non-hedonistic but ultimately some sort of balanced-nice-sounding-definition-of-happiness maximizing experience?

This seems intentionally naïve about game design? Game designers aren't idiots, games are designed to give you a pleasant challenge that ramps up at a satisfying level and feels fair and rewarding to the participants as they become more and more expert. It's actually a great set of ideas to reference if you're constructing a society.

That's the point of the article — the quote is supposed to be a kind of reductio ad absurdum of a simplistic view of game (or utopia) design.

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