Comment by pohl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pohl | Hacker News Reader

Somehow people who play games a lot get some kind of shame and then label it a crazy addiction. I’m not sure I really understand or care to understand the cultural elitism.

I don't understand; I don't care to understand; I just want to rant about it.

Addiction is intentionally built into games. Klondike Solitaire probably hit on it by accident, but Everquest, WoW, and Farmville were built to intentionally exploit the pleasure system to secure hours upon hours of attention. Other games do this to a lesser extent, but there is always a payoff for some interval of play.

Contrast this with comics, which are designed to, at worst, exploit the human tendency to fetishize particular reappearing characters. The latest issue of Captain Amazing may hold your attention for a while, but there is no built-in active mechanism triggering dopamine hits in a regular basis. Television would come the closest, and that is similarly maligned by elitists who want the whole world to know that they don't even own a TV.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this aspect of games, but it definitely puts games in a different category than the other forms of entertainment that Nabeel is holding up for comparison. I'm surprised this isn't obvious.

Games, especially MMO's and Social Gaming exploit their addictiveness to keep people paying them.

Certain TV shows exploit similar addictiveness. CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Trial by Jury . . . all still supplying ~24 new episodes a year during prime time slots. To put it roughly, 9 days worth of programming that is essentially identical. Then there's the more unique (to some degree) procedurals (IE NUMB3RS, Castle, etc. Incidentally, the only procedurals I like, I can't stand the CSI crap as my mind is violently raped by unscience almost every other episode I watch) that appear.

I personally did stop watching TV for a prolonged period, but for no elitist reason as I love TV . . . perhaps too much. However, I'm satisfied watching only the show, so I'm more a DVD person.

Movies, again, strike at this addictiveness with the 'unnecessary sequels' market. It's one thing when a movie plans multiple parts, a la the Borne trilogy. However, then there are the Bond series that maybe only hit a good movie every 3rd or 4th produced, but still take in millions. Then there are the totally unnecessary sequels that appear because the studios dangled hundreds of millions of dollars off an ACME sized mousetrap to bag a producer.

Books similarly can get into this trouble of unnecessary sequels. I believe Agatha Christie inadvertently suffered this problem as her publishers forbid her from killing off Poirot, it took her 40 years for the novel that killed him off to be published.

Ironically, the most addictive TV shows and books appear to be detective dramas. This is easily illustrated by the fact that Mystery/Crime novels is the biggest market in literature, and by the fact there are over 9 procedurals routinely running during prime time slots, year after year for almost a decade.

Yeah, just venting frustration, I obviously do care - it bothers me.

And the idea that games have some kind of special power that other things don't have is exactly the kind of bogus thinking I was trying to talk about. Almost EVERY piece of entertainment, especially mass entertainment, is designed to make you love it/spend your money/come back/buy the tshirt/tell your friends/get the happy meal.

Sports are built, and largely exploit, the innate sense of tribalism that our brains have developed. Fiction, whether comics or movies, is designed to make us feel a stronger and purer set of emotions (whether sexuality or comedy or power) than we can readily get at the drop of a hat on a Thursday at 7:30pm. It's a crack shot of an emotion that we want to feel.

It's just no one talks about it that way. Because it's okay to say, "I want to laugh, I'm going to a comedy instead of actually talking with my friends and engaging with them and telling jokes." Whereas doing the same with a game is somehow horrific.

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