One topic I'd like to cover today is life games. My thoughts on this are not fully clear yet and so this is a preview of what I might write more about later.
The train of thought started when I surprised myself thinking about Nethack, completely unprompted, more specifically the conduct feature of the game. Nethack is a role-playing game where you drive your character through a quest. While you play, you may choose to abide by additional rules regarding your character's conduct without being asked to do so by the game itself. For example, you can choose to have your character never kill a monster, i.e. play as a “pacifist”. Some conducts are recognized by the game code at the end of a gameplay (e.g. pacifist, atheist, illiterate); whereas some conducts are purely a player choice without in-game reward, for example being “survivor” (i.e. never being saved by an amulet).
Choosing a conduct in this game makes its playthrough genuinely more difficult. Given that most conducts are not particularly rewarded, one may wonder: why would a player even choose to follow a conduct?
On a tangentially related note, a year or two ago I had a conversation with a friend on the nature of competition, for example in sports. During that conversation, my friend was asking if I would ever be interested to practice as much as necessary that I could compete in a championship. I pointed out that I do not find it particularly pleasant or interesting to compete on any public activity with the aim to become “the best” in that competition (e.g. achieve the top 10% of outcomes); not because I lack a competitive instinct, but because I know that there are always people who are choosing to focus most of their life on becoming the best at that one thing, and I can never expect to reasonably compete with them because I am choosing to also prioritize other things in my life. Because, generally, I care about having more of my needs being met simultaneously.
Incidentally, this point is also made in the following interview, which I thought was enlightening. It's relatively short and the point is well-made. I encourage you to give it ten minutes of your life.
I felt that Nethack conducts and life priorities relating to competition are connected somehow. This feeling was further strengthened by this lecture:
The main point here is that Minecraft is not a game, insofar a game can be characterized as a playground combined with:
- a set of rules.
- one or more paths to success defined in-game.
- in-game friction that defines a skill progression to achieve the game's success criteria.
In the author's words, you can recognize that something is a game if you can cheat in it: taking a shortcut to achieve the in-game success while bypassing either the rules or the skill progression. Within this definition, Minecraft is not really a game: using “creative mode” and mods to bypass the rules or remove the friction is a valid modality to interact with it - people don't consider this cheating.
However, we can also choose to abide by arbitrary rules or progress friction within a Minecraft session. For example, we can choose to eschew creative mode and mods and race a Minecraft parkour map, aiming for personal skill development (better times against one's own previous runs) or in a competition (against other players). Once that choice is made, it becomes possible to cheat, and we have created a game inside the Minecraft playground.
With this perspective, we can recognize that adopting a conduct inside Nethack (as explained above) is really choosing to “play another game inside the game.”
After watching this lecture, I was left wondering: to the extent that real life is a playground, what are the rules, success criteria and skill ladders we can choose personally, outside of social norms and expectations? What are some worthy “conducts” that result in a life that's dignified, albeit perhaps not conventionally rewarded?
Conversely, within the games that society has us play, are there shortcuts one can take that are both ethical and legal? Can we effectively “cheat” society's rules for the game of life?
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References:
- Wikipedia, NetHack.
- NetHackWiki, Conduct.
- Wikipedia, Minecraft.
- Angelo Somers, Psychotic Ambition Is A Mental Illness We Applaud, YouTube.
- Fractal Philosophy, Minecraft Is Not A Game, YouTube.