Category: Audio&Games

Lex says:

It just takes you to another world, and when you’re not in that world, you miss not being there… And then you kind of want to stay there forever cuz life’s… Shitty.

John answers by saying:

VR should be better inside the headset than outside; it’s the world as you want it.

While I understand his point of view, I dislike this take so much because it alleviates our accountability about life in the real world.

It makes it as if life was this static thing, that is shitty and can’t only be shitty, and that you’d better immerse yourself into a fictional 3D world rather than use your accountability, your presence to change the real world.

People will argue that you can do both, to which I’d answer that looking at our current metaverses —social media for the past ten years, the answer is no, we can’t do both at all: our brains will prioritize the version of our environment that is easier aka, the digital one (no accountability, baby!). And that’s when things (in the physical world) go wrong, unnoticed and unwanted.

John goes on examples:

There’s plenty of things that we just can’t do for everyone in the real world; everybody can’t have Richard Branson’s private island but everyone can get a private VR island.

John, it’s a fallacy to think owning things is the ultimate goal. It varies. Owning your toothbrush, sure. Your house, not that necessary. Your private island? Fuck no. No one needs that. Besides, everyone owning expensive shit knows that it’s stressful; therefore, why would you think a virtual version of that would be interesting? It’s not. It’s empty value. We’ve seen that countless of times since Second Life, Habbo Hotel or Roblox.

But the bigger argument to me, is Time. It’s the real currency here. If you spend 1,000 hours in VR and virtual worlds, it’s 1,000 hours you do not invest in the gravity-based world. It will backfire in a myriad of ways that we don’t know.

It is thanks to thousands of people waiting for hours and hours to vote in Georgia that we avoided some stuff, recently. All the close calls on polls and elections. Kansas showed up more than virtually and that was effective. Yeah.

It’s fair to say that the not so subtle rise of fascism and authoritarian stuff these days comes also from the fact that people are distracted in online worlds, 24/7. Twitter, fantasy football, Tinder, Elden Ring, whatever. The time invested there, is not invested over here.

One perfect example of weird disconnect between people and high tech, is housing. In terms of engineering, it’s a done deal! We know how to make the most efficient, clean and healthy housing possible, under every climates. But instead of having engineers and designers work out the details of scaling this up to the world to solve a real, worldwide issue, homelessness, engineers want us to go to freaking Mars or live in virtual worlds to spend virtual money.

No. I do not want that. Focus on the physical world and healthy human needs, please.

There Are Too Many Video Games. And too much entertainment.

Over 30 new games per day, just on Steam. Around 60,000 new songs on Spotify per day. What is happening? The usual: bottom 90% scraps around and the top 1% swims in wealth to the point of finding amusing and interesting to create artificial scarcity.

The huge problems with games is that they’re the worst work/profit ratio of any creative endeavor: you can compose a great song in one hour. You can’t produce a good game in a year.

This leads me to the good old Systems VS Narrative debate. It’s an old debate in video games, but it’s starting to describe a lot what’s going on in the economy at large: we live in systems and people want to force narratives on them. Which doesn’t work. The solution is to modify those systems and make them work for a better output.

Example: people love the narrative of unions protecting employees and love to push the idea in tech: “get unions!” they will yell. But the system we are in, 2000s capitalism, doesn’t allow unions. It’s a done deal. For unions to work you need leverage to bargain, you need tangibles. The world of tech and game development are full of intangibles, from which tech to use to which market to aim. It’s bet over gamble over “I hope this works out”, times a random amount of luck. This is not a situation where you can call for unions! Yet people love the idea that we are still in 1912, working for Henry Ford. Just form a union, and you will be fine! Sadly, this is not reality.

Interestingly, the same people who want unions will –in CA, a relatively chill state- vote against Uber drivers becoming Uber employees because they don’t want their Uber costs to skyrocket. Because that’s how the system (capitalism) works: it delivers value, spits out profit, and churns out bodies. Even when voters have the option to change the lives of thousands, they vote in favor of the system that allows them to get cheap(er) Uber trips. To hell with unions and decent compensation right? I don’t think people are horrible, they just don’t want to be accountable because the systems are complex and you can always find a way to think about a problem to make you feel like it’s not yours (“Uber has to be a side gig, I don’t care!”). Which I always find funny because well, we are indeed in this together. More now than ever before.

Anyway would you write stories, build video games, compose music, edit movies, skate and do all kinds of creative stuff that makes you feel alive, you need a support system. The more you do, the steadier the support has to be. Obviously to make great games, which takes years, the support needs to be very resilient.

Universal Basic Income, y’all. That’s not a narrative. That’s a system fix that would work. 100%.