Video games universal basic income for the soul.

Games
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I found this article on video games by Reason magazines Peter Suderman to be very interesting.

Left unanswered is the question of what happens after one’s basic needs are provided for. Individuals vary, but virtually everyone seeks more out of life than low-level material subsistence. People whose survival needs are met seek power and growth, status and social connection—benefits even the most generous imaginable basic income cannot provide.

What, in other words, would people do with their time?

Hurst’s research suggests that many people, or at least many low-skilled young men, would use it to play video games. Those living with and off of their parents are, in effect, already receiving a kind of basic income, administered privately at the family level. That is enough to survive, but for most people it is not enough to feel content.

That’s where games come in. They don’t put food on the table. But they do provide, at least in the short to medium term, a sense of focus and success, structure and direction, skill development and accomplishment. Spend any time reading video game reviews, and you’ll find that two of the most common terms of praise are that a game made the reviewer “feel powerful” and that it provided a “sense of achievement.” Games, with their endless task lists and character-leveling systems, their choice architectures and mission checklists, are purpose generators. They bring order to gamers’ lives.

Even the most open-ended games tend to offer a sense of progress and direction, completion and commitment. In other words, they make people happy—or at least happier, serving as a buffer between the player and despair. Video games, you might say, offer a sort of universal basic income for the soul.

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For those who are data based the whole article is based on one economists rough polls and non peer reviewed papers which he freely admits maybe utterly wrong

The rest of the article is the author shooting the shit about playing games and accepting the false premise that there is a link between games and unemployment which as I mentioned is a speculation by a Chicago economist.

So yeah, I would wait a few years until there is some actual data to support the speculation before worrying about it.

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Didn’t we do this one? I might be remembering the headline from Google News. There was a similar article in The Economist that we covered, without the UBI-soul pull quote.

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They are a lot of people worrying about lower labor participation among men in their 20s, include members of the Fed.
The author isn’t worry about, just the opposite he is saying it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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Yeah there’s been a few articles like this. I am of the opinion that where there’s smoke, there is fire.

Weird thing is videogames used to be kind of this nerd pastime, but has become quite mainstream as consoles got more modern and more prevalent. I think that’s also why gamergate was so traumatic… it’s not difficult to draw a line straight from gamergate to Trump. There’s something there.

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Perhaps, I don’t remember seeing it. It is a brand new article.

7

Rod and Tim are right in that we’ve talked about the weak research behind those articles.

However, I think what Strollen is focusing on here is the part that’s interesting about the Reason article. The idea that video games are sort of a universal basic income.

I know that I’ve been feeling that lately myself. If I was single, then no question, the job I’m in now would be all I need, with video games providing me with all the entertainment I need in my off hours. It provides me with the ability to be a virtual tourist, a virtual historian, and yet feel like I’m participating and achieving, and striving for things.

As it is, since my wife stopped working to have our child, and plans to be a stay-at-home mom, I find my income to be woefully inadequate, especially if I’m going to be able to afford health insurance for all of us as well. And yet… when I get home most evenings, instead of using the extra hour or two of spare time to brush up on my programming skills for technical interviews, or using the to learn a new programming language, I find myself drawn to video games. I’ve got a backlog to get through right? Didn’t I just work a full day? Don’t I deserve a rest? To unwind?

Universal basic income for the soul. It’s hard to resist. Hard to fight against, internally.

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Counterpoint: videogames tap into our lizard brains, and animals don’t have souls!

Also, wasn’t UBI supposed to free us to become entrepreneurs and artists? [muffled laughter]

Ahem, I see this is in the Games category. I’ve failed on both P&R counts.

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The Economist article from earlier in the year is probably what everyone is thinking of. It starts wit the same premise; that young males are playing games instead of growing up.

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/escape-to-another-world8

[quote]Many gamers (Guillaume among them) report that they are happy with the decision to work less and game more. Yet economists like Hurst fret about the long-run consequences. Although digital-enter­tainment experiences are both amazingly enjoyable and relatively cheap, other important consumer goods – like houses and medical care, furniture and food – still cost money, sometimes quite a lot of it. People’s tastes change as they age. Young men content to remain outside the labour force and play video games – while their parents provide food, shelter and health insurance – may begin to desire something else as the years pass. But, having been out of employment during a crucial period of life – early adulthood, when friendships and contacts are made, experience and skills cultivated – such gamers may find themselves unable to build the lives they come to realise they want.

One hears this regret in talking to older gamers. “Of course gaming has interfered with any attempt to look for or do any serious work,” says Arturo, 29, who reckons he has spent 600 hours playing Kerbal Space Program, a space-flight simulator, and possibly more at Starcraft II, a strategy game. He doesn’t just miss the forgone income and opportunities; he could have been reading, he laments. But those hours are gone for ever. Between the game reviews and player tips, online forums for gamers are thick with discussions among those who worry their lives are passing them by but cannot find the will to put down their controllers.[/quote]

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I am just too old to worry about the speculation tbh. I have seen young mens hobbies attacked every single year since I was politically aware. Punk rock, raves, D&D, computer games, going to the pub, football, skateboarding.

Pretty much anything young men enjoy there is always some twat in academia or the press who try and demonize it.

I just tune it out until the evidence shows up (it never does).

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I found two things noteworthy. That games provide a sense of structure and earned accomplishment (remember Tom’s and others complaints about Fallout 4, that fast travel felt like cheating). This structure is similar to work. Second, the UBI component increasing happiness.

When I was a teenager, we played board games, and a small amount of poker. This was mostly because they were fun, but also because none of us were good at sports (nerds) and every other form of entertainment was either less interesting (watching network sitcoms) or way more expensive, going to movies, beach, concert, theme parks etc.

Even as “good” kids we engaged in more petty vandalism that today would have likely got us caught and been expelled, e.g. planted smoke bombs in school bathrooms, egging and teeping folks houses,

I always laughed at the video games causes violence folks. First, the data clearly showed violent crime, was decreasing at the same time video game playing increase and the greatest decrease was in young men from 13-25.

I’m agnostic if playing a shooter, or GTA desensitizes you to violence or not. I just know for a fact you have a hell of less time to commit crimes if you are finishing a GTA (I never did). I know I’d have been a lot less bored in high school and probably happier if computer games existed.

The Economist article is way more negative on computer games than Peters. I’ve definitely wasted time playing stupid mindless games, but I don’t regret a minute of the 600 hours I’ve spent on Kerbal. Besides re-reading my college physics text and picking up a book on rocket design like Elon did, I’m hard press to imagine a better way of adding to my knowledge of a subject (Space ) that’s fascinated me since I was 7.

Another interesting question is at what point will society value skills learned from computer games. (I’m sure Kerbal has come up in SpaceX interviews on several occasions.). Let’s take two 20-year-olds, applying for a management internship at Amazon/WholeFools One has dutifully shown up for her shifts as a cashier, and fry cook, and was promoted to shift lead at McDonald’s. The other has spent the last year as guild leader for the top guild on his server He has made money selling virtual items and lately has made a small amount on twitch. Now, I’ve never worked at McDonald’s, or as a guild leader, but it seems to me that you get a lot more management skills as a guild leader.

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It is also worth mentioning that gaming is a gateway drug to programming… if you do it right. Minecraft is revelatory in this regard.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/game-player-game-programmer/

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What about modding? I’d think that especially if you do scripting stuff that would be also be a decent intro to programming? It is been years since I’ve done anything more complicated than change a few values in a file as far as modding goes.

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Sure, six of one, half dozen of the other… all cut from the same cloth.

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RIP XNA :(

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The Man should be glad for video games, otherwise all these young unemployed people would be planning to bomb Wall Street.

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I am a 80’s kid. I remember we where more free back them, and also more incorrect. Political correct was a derogative term and nobody would take a political correct person seriously, everyone would mock them, ridicule them.
Male values where worth something. Violence was glorified in movies. Macho was a positive description.

I would not say that feminism have won the culture war, because (sadly) theres a lot of machismo around and womens are still not threaten properly in many places; but the female culture, the female idea of beauty has won. Representation of violence are seen has negative in any context except perhaps nation states actions (if bodies are not show). So is ok if you show a copter dropping a explosive barrel, but is wrong if you show a severed leg.

Only in videogames violence still reign. And the reason is because is easy to make a game about violence, and very hard to impossible to make games without violence. Like you need people talking in theater and would be hard to make a theater piece withouth people, and is hard to make Opera withouth people singing. And so on.

A recent development of this is that gamers are turning self-aware. “Is God of War too violent? why are we burning this slave alive when only a few minutes ago I was doing a epic aventure to save one”.

Violence is not a bad thing. Of course dropping a barrel of explosives over a urban area is not the right type of violence, but shooting at that copter with a self-propelled grenade will be the right type of violence. I am convinced that violence to save lives is good. And if somebody disagree will have to convince me. This making violence a bad thing, no matter the context, is bad. Context matter. And you can always excuse violence in videogames saying that is fictional violence. Like a theater actor killing other actor. Is not real violence.

Anyway one effect of videogames is teenagers are less time on the streets. They get in gangs less. They meet drugs less. They are involved less in teenager pregnancy. But they are less in the world, they are in their virtual world, and one day their virtual world will be the world, and the alien one is the one of the people that use to play soccer in the street and stop to let cars pass. Is not a good thing that teenagers have their parents a room away. Parents are a bad influence for childrens, parents give too much protection, so kids don’t have opportunity to make mistakes and learn from these mistakes.

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fuckin A teiman

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This sounded so familiar, like we’d already had this conversation and then I remembered we kind of did.

which Tom covered here:

So yeah, sort of.