- Jun 2024
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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What is the difference between a game and something that simply has a point system?
I take this to mean that with games, we have control. However, I don't understand how other art forms lack agency. Unless I have the definition of 'agency' wrong. I believed art to be fully in the hands of the artist and they can send whatever message they wish. What does this line mean? Or does it mean that the control is given fully to the observer/ audience?
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And they— you can see them just stand up straight and get intensely, brutally excited. I care about that. And that matters. And I can feel that it matters because they’re there in the room with them.
This reminds me of something I read a while ago online, about likes on an Instagram post. If you were to go out one day and one person complements you or your outfit, that one compliment would probably make your day. If you post something on Instagram and it gets 10 likes, you probably would be upset. At least most people would be.
Nowadays, people including myself, just randomly like posts on Instagram. Especially if they are posted by people I follow, I will like it without really paying attention to it. I despise snakes and if a celebrity I follow were to post their pet snake, I would probably like it and scroll away really quickly. But in real life if a friend were to show me a their snake, I would very obviously show that I do not like their snake.
Sometimes people online like things to just like things. Sometimes a post moved them, sometimes it did not. I think one sure way to tell is if they comment. I only comment if a post really moves me. Unless it is a friend's post on instagram in which case I will comment "so beautiful heart eyes emoji". 99.999% of the time, I do mean it but there are times when I don't.
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Our goals are messy. They’re strange and complex and multifaceted, but then they are collapsed down to scoring systems. And the thing that can happen here is we lose sight of what we wanted and we begin to want what the point system wants. We don’t play the game. The game plays us.
This is something we discussed in the first day of lecture. A lot of the time in college, even if we take a class because we find it interesting, instead of actually learning from the class, we treat it like a game of some sort. Just trying to earn the highest score possible by looking up answers for homework instead of working on the problems. In a math class, our goal may be to become a mathematician by learning and improving our math skills, but when deadlines approach, we opt for looking up answers to the homework questions designed to help us learn. Which might give us the highest score/grade, but now our goals are "collapsed down to scoring systems".
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