Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[TechnicalBarbarity]

Your big homie Mort that brought you to this forum?

 

[CiG]

Bingo.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

You should start spending more time with your kid instead of trying to impress people on this forum man. He might actually end up forgiving you for walking out on his mom when she was pregnant.

 

[CiG]

You should start spending more time with your kid instead of trying to impress people on this forum man. He might actually end up forgiving you for walking out on his mom when she was pregnant.

You're just mad because you're a childless sociopath.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

are you going to spend any time with him this holiday season? Oh what am i saying, he probably calls someone else daddy right now. Did your father also walk out on you?

 

[Einherjar86]

Absolutely. Of course, future pleasure is discounted by many people in many cases, if even seen.

Right, that's what I'm saying. I imagine gamers living with their parents aren't thinking about their futures all that much.

So perhaps I just took issue with the categorization that men preferring video games to working means they find the working world too easy. I often find crossword puzzles more intellectually stimulating than proofreading for journal submissions, but that's not because the latter is easier. I'd argue that it's harder specifically because it demands my attention for less immediate intellectual reward.

Likewise, I wouldn't say that women don't play video games specifically because they're less interested than men in the stimulation that accompanies playing video games. Giving up game-playing for committing to real-world work seems like a harder choice to make, and doesn't mean someone isn't interested in game-playing.

 

[CiG]

are you going to spend any time with him this holiday season? Oh what am i saying, he probably calls someone else daddy right now. Did your father also walk out on you?

 

[Dak]

Right, that's what I'm saying. I imagine gamers living with their parents aren't thinking about their futures all that much.

So perhaps I just took issue with the categorization that men preferring video games to working means they find the working world too easy. I often find crossword puzzles more intellectually stimulating than proofreading for journal submissions, but that's not because the latter is easier. I'd argue that it's harder specifically because it demands my attention for less immediate intellectual reward.

Yeah I definitely wouldn't say it's too easy, but it's not stimulating/immediately challenging, and I think most importantly the potential time or nature of the payoff for your work isn't clear. I'll admit one thing I like about the military and even school to some degree now is that you have regular positive feedback and clearish goals to work towards, with predictable rewards. Most places of business are not like that. Games define the goals for you and generally are structured to drip-drip-drip reward.

Likewise, I wouldn't say that women don't play video games specifically because they're less interested than men in the stimulation that accompanies playing video games. Giving up game-playing for committing to real-world work seems like a harder choice to make, and doesn't mean someone isn't interested in game-playing.

Women lean much more towards mobile games, which allows playing while at work. So they aren't really picking one over the other, they just aren't following PC Master Race and invested in Steam/XBOX/PS.

https://hypebeast.com/2018/4/females-are-dominating-mobile-games-according-to-new-study

 

[Einherjar86]

I didn't know that about women and mobile games.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

I didn't know that about women and mobile games.

... you seem to not know a lot of things when it comes to women.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

TechBarb, knower of women

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

indeed i am. Unlike Ein who constantly acts as if he's the mouthpiece for the "womens movement" or that he himself has a vagina or something. Or you, the "knower of little boys".

 

[Einherjar86]

 

[rms]

Women lean much more towards mobile games, which allows playing while at work. So they aren't really picking one over the other, they just aren't following PC Master Race and invested in Steam/XBOX/PS.

which i think points to the lack of competitive nature -- since that's the major difference (since a phone costs as much as a fine desktop pc these days)

The article was about post-grads, which is the time that most people should be entering into the early phases of their careers.

read to me like an 18-24 demographic, which I wouldn't say is the heavy focus on career for the average "lost" worker in our society

Apparently they don't if they can't extrapolate present boredom into future success. Playing video games isn't actually harder than working a 9-to-5 job at Jimmy John's, although it might be more actively stimulating.

sure, maintaining sanity in garbage situations is difficult, but killing time at the pizza shop isn't setting you up for future success either. doesn't seem like the article is talking about those working shit jobs to pay off college expenses while still in school, for instance. more like the less skilled, less materialistic of the bunch.

I think you're confusing excitement and stimulation with difficulty. It's much harder to work a 9-to-5 job that you find dreadfully boring than it is to play a video game that's actively exciting.

yes, but I am leaning towards more of the competitive side and I'm guessing you never got exposed to that (not meaning to be condescending)

 

[Einherjar86]

read to me like an 18-24 demographic, which I wouldn't say is the heavy focus on career for the average "lost" worker in our society

I think it could be if they went to college, and I believe the article specified post-bachelor's males; but I'm not sure, it could have been dropouts.

sure, maintaining sanity in garbage situations is difficult, but killing time at the pizza shop isn't setting you up for future success either. doesn't seem like the article is talking about those working shit jobs to pay off college expenses while still in school, for instance. more like the less skilled, less materialistic of the bunch.

I'm not really sure whom it's talking about, to be honest. Clearly if it's focusing on men who prefer playing video games to getting a 9-to-5 job, then we're talking about less driven when it comes to earning money; but "less materialistic" is a charitable way to describe them, I think.

yes, but I am leaning towards more of the competitive side and I'm guessing you never got exposed to that (not meaning to be condescending)

At all, or in my job...? I mean, I played sports as a middle-/high-schooler, and I consider academia to be fairly competitive. I see my track record for presentations and publications are more valuable (competitively speaking) than beating other men at a video game. But maybe I'm not understanding your point.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

Ein all day every day...

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm Stephen Fry?!?

 

[Dak]

which i think points to the lack of competitive nature -- since that's the major difference (since a phone costs as much as a fine desktop pc these days)

I don't mobile game, so not really sure how competitive that is. What competition there could be is probably indirect (IE high scores on candy crush or whatever). There's definitely heavy on the directly competitive side for all the esports type games and the sports titles (nba/madden), which are pretty male dominated. Thrown in CoD/CS:GO and stuff too. Might be a point there regarding the competition aspect.

Edit: Regarding education, it's without bach degrees:

As of last year, 22 percent of men between the ages of 21 and 30 in the U.S. with less than a bachelor’s degree reported not working at all in the previous year—up from only 9.5 percent in 2000. And there’s evidence that video games are a big reason why. According to a recent study based on the Census Bureau’s time-use surveys, young men without college degrees have replaced 75 percent of the time they used to spend working with time on the computer, mostly playing video games. From 2004 to 2007, young, unemployed men without college degrees were spending 3.4 hours per week playing video games. By 2011 to 2014, the average time spent per week had more than doubled to 8.6 hours.

 

[CiG]

I wonder how it breaks down by age in regards to what games men play vs what games women play. I have a feeling if you look at the mobile game players, a decent chunk of the women are middle-aged and older. My mother plays mobile games more than I play any kind of game, especially Tetris (and Tetris derivatives) and any kind of gambling game available. She's even won hundreds of dollars playing the latter.

 

[Einherjar86]

I don't follow Nick Land like I used to, and I haven't visited his blog in over a year. But I came across this interview recently. It's long, but I actually really enjoyed it. I obviously have personal ethical problems with his philosophy, but I appreciated his critique of where he feels right- and left-wing "emancipation" (and he's specific about this word) go wrong concerning accelerationism (spoiler: it's humanism).

https://vastabrupt.com/2018/08/15/ideology-intelligence-and-capital-nick-land/

Here's a little snippet:

Nick Land: I think the terminology of left and right, for anyone like you who is fascinated by the question of ideology, it’s completely indispensable. I totally see why people get dissatisfied with that language and say “We have to move beyond this” or “This terminology ceases to be useful” but I have a sense of its kind of extreme resilience. I don’t see us ever stopping talking about the left and the right. It’s always going to come back in, I call it the prime political dimension, there is a basic dimension with left and right polarities that everyone returns to, after their wanderings and complications. And all kinds of ideological currents themselves have a strategic interest in either muddying the water or trying to get people to rethink what they mean.

But in the end, people come back to this basic dimension of ideological possibility and I think it is the one that captures the accelerationist tendency most clearly. On the right end of that is the extreme laissez faire, Manchester liberal, anarcho-capitalism kind of commitment to the maximum deregulation of the technological and economic process. And on the opposite extreme is a set of constituencies that seek in various ways to — polemically, I would say words like “impede” and “obstruct” and “constrain” and whatever, but I realize that’s just my rightism on display. And there are other ways of saying that, to regulate it or control it or to humanize it, I wouldn’t try and do a sufficiently sophisticated ideological Turing test on myself to try and get that right you know?

But I don’t think there’s any real … It’s not really questionable, which of those impulses is in play and I think that it’s on that dimension that so-called left-accelerationism is left, I mean, it’s left because it is basically in a position of deep skepticism about the capitalist process. It’s accelerationist only insofar as it thinks there is some other — I would say magical — source of acceleration that is going to be located somewhere outside that basic motor of modernity. They gesture towards the fact that things will somehow still be accelerating when you just chuck the actual motor of acceleration in the scrap. And I think that is the left.

Left-accelerationism is left in a way that is robust, that everyone will recognize, they definitely are in fact genuine leftists, they’re not playing games like that, and they catalyze, obviously, a right opposition as soon as they do that because they’re already [inaudible] the prime political dimension. They’re on the left pole of it, they’re in antagonism to, then, what is defining the right pole of that same spectrum.

Justin Murphy: So it sounds like you would basically say that Deleuze and Guattari are not really leftists. They might be writing from a kind of leftist milieu, and they might have some, sort of, leftist connotations, but the core of their project is not leftist because … you think leftism is basically the position of trying to slow down the accelerator?

Nick Land: Yes, I think that project is anti-leftist but smuggled-in — this insidious thing of subverting the Marxist tradition from inside. I think the Marxist tradition is easy to subvert from inside because the Marxist tradition is based upon an analysis of capitalism that has many very valuable aspects. And as soon as you’re doing that, then you are describing the motor of acceleration, and once you then make the further move that Deleuze and Guattari do — and Marx obviously at times does, too — of actually embracing the kind of propulsion that that motor is is generating, then you’re there. I mean, you’ve already crossed the line.

He's clearly more sympathetic to the right (that's no surprise) but I think his assessment of both sides is quite evenly balanced and largely functional in nature--which is also no surprise, given his cybernetic proclivities. He's really an anti-humanist right-winger, to the degree that he favors machinic production over human livelihood; and I think that's where my ethical objections come into play.