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Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

Design looks and feels rewarding, but the players just sit there and do almost nothing for hours on end. No thinking required other than reading rewards coming at you that the game graciously pauses to let you read.

That said, higher order thinking about this thread makes me sad. Not judging anyone here, just sad for everyone who wants to sit there and remove hours of their life and attention for sound pings and moving pixels. I got into programming to make the machine do work for people while they use their brain on better things, not to be hypnotized into zombie mode till days, months, or years are lost. Especially years of peak brain time from really smart people. Does this happen when people lose purpose?

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"Not judging anyone here," then proceeds to list off every reason they are judging people who enjoy something they do not enjoy. Why is this always so predictable? "Not judging, but if you like this game you're a slack-jawed zombie who is wasting their life." Okay.

> got into programming

just sad for everyone who wants to sit there and remove hours of their life and attention for increasing shareholder value and moving bits in enterprise cloud environments

See it works both ways.

Seems to be working in one direction in two ways

> just sad for everyone who wants to sit there and remove hours of their life and attention for sound pings and moving pixels

you mean the gamer public?

Wow, I'm not sure "not judging anyone here" is really working out that well ;), but different people live differently and have different needs & priorities.

Note that for a lot of people, a period of emotional regulation with repetitive, low-intensity activity is literally what the doctor ordered. If you're not one of those people, you may not fully understand or have the empathy, so take it on a rational level then. While ab-so-lutely any activity can be used and abused, I don't think this is a strictly black & white binary proposition. And as something built on a lark (presumably heavily AI assisted), it's kinda cool and quite a bit more sophisticated than it has ANY right to be :-). I'm also shocker there are not cease & desist letters yet :(

Is it possibile that the emotional dis-regulation comes from the stimulus of games/social media? That after the brain is used to the fast dopamine rewards not present anywhere in real life, everything else becomes boring/disbalancing? Drug withdrawal has similar effects.

Certainly possible to induce it, but I do not believe it's the only path. I do believe current consensus is that e.g. autistic people find need for emotional regulation as a baseline as well - but as with everything in sociology/psychology, it's hard to control the variables.

(FWIW, I personally think of it analogous to psychosomatic side effect of allergies - I can be induced into sniffles by convincing me my pillow is stuffed with cat hair, and there's a legitimate underlying physiological thing :).

(and to clarify, I personally had about 2 runs of the above game before my brain caused stress/anxiety that I'm wasting my time and life is limited and I'm not using it productively and I'm not accomplishing anything meaningful aaaaaaack; not sure if that's ultimately healthier or not - clearly, spending time on hacker news doesn't trigger the same reflex :-)

Meh, this is just the game you play in line while you're waiting for your coffee, it's not someone's life pursuit to be a hypno zombie.

Are we really so terrified of being alone with our thoughts for 30 seconds these days that playing ultra short games while waiting in line at a cafe is said without shame?

> All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

-Blaise Pascal, 1670

> All of humanity's problems stem from a man's inability to stop a 4-pool.

—Arcturus Mengsk, 2495

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