> The difference is that Dark Souls and Factorio can synthesize the mental feeling of work and success without anything being provided to others. ... A lot of our hobbies have become pornographic versions of work.
Or pornographic versions of skill or learning. The entire point of Guitar Hero was to provide a simulated feeling of competence and skill. You set the difficulty level, spend a small amount of time learning to mash some buttons just so, and all the sudden you're a guitar god, perfectly playing some famous rock song. It felt awesome.
I think it's super suspect to try to determine how people could behave in the real world based on how they behave in twisted-to-be-fun worlds of video games. So while I agree with the OP's criticism of the "hardcore capitalist bootstrap grindset ideologues," I don't think that observations from cozy games can be applied without literally making the real world a cozy game, which would require a lot of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" shit.
>The entire point of Guitar Hero was to provide a simulated feeling of competence and skill. You set the difficulty level, spend a small amount of time learning to mash some buttons just so, and all the sudden you're a guitar god, perfectly playing some famous rock song. It felt awesome.
I vividly recall how some percentage of people who were excellent at Guitar Hero went on to try and learn the real guitar, buying them and everything, to be completely deflated quite quickly.
I sometimes wonder if the height of Guitar Hero had any real impact on guitar sales, as I can only provide anecdotes but I don't think I'm alone in witnessing this phenomenon
Or pornographic versions of skill or learning. The entire point of Guitar Hero was to provide a simulated feeling of competence and skill. You set the difficulty level, spend a small amount of time learning to mash some buttons just so, and all the sudden you're a guitar god, perfectly playing some famous rock song. It felt awesome.
I think it's super suspect to try to determine how people could behave in the real world based on how they behave in twisted-to-be-fun worlds of video games. So while I agree with the OP's criticism of the "hardcore capitalist bootstrap grindset ideologues," I don't think that observations from cozy games can be applied without literally making the real world a cozy game, which would require a lot of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" shit.