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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2960 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 26, 2025

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How much are video games about social validation? My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots, even bots designed as a perfect challenge, and if there were no rankings. Do you think that’s the case?

Not really. “Player vs. Environment” games are reasonably common. Fortnite actually started out as one before they realized most people wanted to do the competitive thing.

Most people try league (or overwatch, or an MMO, or whatever) to share a social experience with their friends. Once they’re in, the competitive mindset does the heavy lifting and keeps them playing. That doesn’t mean chasing a ranking—it means competing with other players. Most people don’t even play ranked mode!

Sometimes it doesn’t even require other players, because League does have popular PvE modes. There’s a decent contingent of players who only play those modes and never face other players. It takes all sorts.

Most of the common PvE games have features that introduce artificial social validation, RPGs being the most obvious, but even survival games have elements of accomplishing things whose value in real life is socially-mediated (“I built a base, farm, house; I found gold.”). Halo is single-player, but takes you through a guided story of social validation. It’s quite hard to think of one that doesn’t. You might consider that a skateboarding game could be fun without including social validation, but the interest surely lies in being able to do things which you know (intuitively or through skateboarding literacy) are impressive in real life. Civilization games, well, you are the leader of a civilization and future global hegemon.

Others have mentioned online chess, and that people used to (?) play against bots. But these bot-players have surely been acculturated to believe that winning a chess game is socially validating, and they may also play challenging bots if it means training against playing a real life friend in a week. Even a game like Heroes of the Storm, okay, if someone plays it offline they are still the hero who is killing people and destroying a base.

Actually, Halo has quite prominently featured multiplayer since its inception!

How does this theory handle abstract puzzlers like Baba is You? Or even pure math puzzles like Sudoku? Obviously, demonstrating clever puzzle-solving is worth some social status, but that’s not why people do these things. No, they do them because they’re fun.

I suspect curiosity, attention, and the little thrill one gets from a solved puzzle are embedded pretty deeply in our evolutionary history. Probably deeper than socially-mediated value.

I’m familiar with the Halo franchise. People played the solo campaign as the key feature of the game. There was also a split screen mode. But the campaign was enjoyable as a social validation simulator.

sudoku

This was huge during the sudoku craze around 2004, reinforced by “sudoku is good for your brain”, but I don’t know how popular it still is. It has been squarely defeated (pun intended) by the much more social NYT games. I wonder if any kids play it. Perhaps even sudoku was socially-mediated: news says solving it means you are smart, also it’s popular, you feel smart and popular when you play and win.

curiosity, attention, and the little thrill one gets from a solved puzzle

I used to think this, and it falls in line with the Flow theory, but I’m starting to doubt it. Curiosity and attention seem to be profoundly shaped by social forces. Do crows solve puzzles for fun or do they do it for food?

But these bot-players have surely been acculturated to believe that winning a chess game is socially validating

If this is enough to make the experience of playing a private chess game against a bot as being "about social validation," then wouldn't the playing of any game with a win condition be "about social validation?" You could even stretch the argument to something like Tetris, which has no win condition, by positing that players have been acculturated to believe that accumulating more points or surviving for longer time than before is socially validating, and therefore any time someone plays Tetris in private is about social validation.

The phenomena are different. Someone who has played chess for a decade socially, but who can’t when alone, will play against a bot to increase his skill for his next social game. The win, as a mental phenomenon, is also saturated in the social memories of previous wins. (Imagine a kid practicing a soccer shot and who images cheers as he makes it.) Additionally, chess is a game with uniquely salient social validation, being the “smart persons game”. Tetris as a single-player game doesn’t have any of this.

What I’m wondering is if a game truly devoid of social validation and valuation will be played. So imagine that only you have access to the game, only you will ever play it, and you can’t share anything about the game with anyone. I suppose Tetris and snake are the closest thing? But then I do really wonder if anyone would play this if they had no way of making their experiences social. Historically people shared their high scores.

You had to add on a whole lot of details to the chess example, though. What about someone who has only ever played chess in private against bots and continues to do so indefinitely? Do such people exist? How would we know? I certainly know that I play some single player computer games like that, in ways that literally no other human being on Earth knows that I've played that game, which means that I leave behind no evidence that I played these games regardless of social validation. And my stating that I play games like that could serve as a proof-by-construction that I actually played those games out of a desire for social validation, as a way to have something like this in my back pocket to bring up as an example in a social interaction with someone else.

To me, your analysis seems isomorphic to those who claim that literally everything is political, on the basis that, no matter what topic they're given, they're able to use some chain of logic to connect it to some form of politics. If the bar to cross for being "political" is that someone can make a logical chain that connects it to politics, then the term "political" becomes vapid. Likewise, if all that takes for someone playing some game to be "about social validation" is that you can create some logical chain that explains how that person could be influenced by social validation in some indirect way connected to the game, then "being about social validation" becomes vapid.

What an alien perspective for me. The one time I had my experience socially validated only underlines how little I cared for it. I used to be very good at Minesweeper. The design of the game forces you to guess a couple of times per game, but otherwise I used to be able to move as quickly as my mouse would let me. It was kind of meditative to me. And that one time I mention was when I was playing it while waiting for a practical class in college to start, gathering a few spectators including the person who was teaching that class. I can swear to you, hand to my heart, that before that I had never had even one thought where I had imagined anybody impressed by that ultimately lame display.

This is definitely evidence against the theory. Did you find it minesweeper peaceful?

I feel like the 'solo queue' experience in a 5v5 game is almost perfectly calibrated to give the right ratio of controlling your own destiny and being able to blame your teammates in order to be addictive. If it's 1v1 and you suck, you suck and you get handled and you likely drop the game (Common issue for fighting games). If it's large team v team, it's hard to really get attached to the win/loss element since you're likely not capable of doing enough to single-handedly swing things.

For others? Probably quite a bit. The non-autistic millenials that I used to play with often had a very competitive streak to them and seemd to be genuinely invested in how they ranked relative to others.

The zoomers...oh man. The zoomers keep talking to themselves. It seems to me they all imagine themselves to be the next big streamer. Or maybe it's not even conscious, and they just naturally adopted the monologuing from watching too much Twitch and Let's Play.

The autists are just fine playing against bots. They seem to prefer it, even, for predictability.

As for myself, where multiplayer is an option I strictly prefer it to playing against bots. Not really for the social aspects, those are rather tiresome, but because playing against bots invariably becomes an exercise in exploiting the AI's predictability, which feels like a waste of time. In playing against humans, I can at least semi-credibly tell myself that I'm exercising my mind a little bit rather than just consuming product.

Yesterday I spent 30 minutes before going to bed playing a round of Nebulous: Fleet Command, and I rammed my Beam Battleship into the enemy Cruiser formation just right. It was pure dumb luck, of course, and a game at a fairly low average skill level, but still. Against bots that would have been meaningless. Against humans...it was still just dumb luck, but infinitely more exciting - they could have countered this! Nobody on either side knew what to expect! And so it was a lot more satisfying.

Hello, fellow ANS enthusiast!

I don’t know how to play OSP, and I don’t need to when the Vauxhall is right here.

Hello, fellow ANS enthusiast!

Damn right I am. The German soul cannot truly embrace the OSP ethos. Also I just love using beams. That said, sometimes the ANS team is full, so I do my best to be somewhat competent with the OSP also.

I don’t know how to play OSP, and I don’t need to when the Vauxhall is right here.

The Vauxhall is, in my opinion, the most difficult ship to play. Too big to hide, not enough firepower to take on the big guys, too expensive to be a an effective torpedo carrier, not durable enough to skirmish for long. The only thing it's good at is going fast, and when I play all it does is sail very quickly to its doom. In the one round I played yesterday (as a carrier / cap OSP fleet), a formation of Vauxhalls was mildly annoying, not really a threat, and a giant target for everyone in the vicinity.

So, master of the Light Cruiser, teach me your ways.

I wish I could. I just think it’s neat!

My old torpedo fleet was thoroughly overcome by updates, so that’s out. It was one CL and a slew of spotting and sig-scramble corvettes and frigates. Haven’t made a new one yet since the missile designer intimidates me.

I’ve tinkered with a CL Wolfpack intended to sneak up on carriers. Now that the update frenzy has died down, I’m not sure it’s a remotely good investment. As you observed, “sneaking” is awfully tricky when you’re huge and everyone brings sundials.

The other niches that come to mind are “torpedo boat destroyer,” existing to screen CA or BB, and “counter cap,” intended to slaughter shuttles. I have yet to run either.

But it’s just too pretty to ignore.

The speed of strategic evolution in multiplayer vs single player games is amazing. There's a bunch of autistic shipbuilding simulators out there (aurora, coade, etc.) where everyone has just been larping at strategy the same way for decades, whereas the nubulous meta looks different every time I check on it.

Nebulous: Fleet Command

Interesting, but apparently they canceled the single player plans? What’s going on there, any way to get that back?

They worked really hard on a strategic game mode, but ended up having to give up on it for various reasons in order to focus on the core tactical gameplay. Very recently they released an update that significantly improved the tactical AI so that you can get a meaningful single-player skirmish experience, and they announced the development of a single-player classically scripted campaign mode.

As it stands, you can actually go and play the strategic mode they worked on, as they left it in an opt-in branch on steam, in just the state they aborted development in. I haven't tried it yet. IMO it was a very interesting concept, and I do kind of hope they revisit it eventually, but I somewhat doubt it'll happen.

That said, the multiplayer is great and I invite you to come play. Or we can just skirmish against bots, if you're dead-set against competitive MP.

and they announced the development of a single-player classically scripted campaign mode.

So they will have a single player campaign? That’s what I thought was cancelled. Neat if so.

I will probably pick it up… someday. I still need to complete the original two Homeworlds.

Speaking of bots and team-based PvP games, the recent hero shooter hit Marvel Rivals has an open secret regarding the quick game mode. Whenever you lose a few times in a row, your next game will contain 6 bots on the enemy side and up to 2 on your own (presumably to fill out the bot lobby and provide you with at least 2 allies who pick tank/healer).

Of those who discuss the feature on Reddit, most are extremely unhappy, stating that they'd rather pick the "vs AI" mode themselves if they wanted a faceroll-tier easy match. But how large is the portion of QP players who know compared to those that don't?

Bot mode basically is the game acknowledging that you suck, and the game gives a few wins to keep the player presumably happy and not frustrated at sucking so hard. Bad for griefers who suck for the sake of sucking, or failsons with an overinflated sense of their own power level, but great for normies who feel emotionally satisfied enough to continue playing and provide free meme points once they return to Jeffs suckhole.

Does the normie not care that the sudden increase in performance is due to the opponent being a toaster designed to throw the game, and not due to the normie doing better/being luckier, in your opinion?

I think normies dont recognize the botting, or at least are ok with it as a brief respite. I certainly don't play enough to recognize meta compositions or optimal states of play, and getting botted only marginally affects my already poor performance because I'm just jumping around and spinning the camera to get the best shots of ass.

I played LoL against bots almost exclusively. I found PvP stressful and other players rude/aggressive which wasn't what I was going for when I wanted to chill after work. The people who played against bots were always way more laid back. I recognize that PvP is supposed to be the main appeal of the game, just thought I'd share a different perspective.

Gotta disagree. I played DOTA2 for a while and I would have kept playing if I could have the same challenge without having to interact with actual strangers. So that'd mean either running with a regular crew or playing only with bots.

I play a bit of fighting games too, and to me the ideal with them is the challenge of multiplayer with none of the social interaction.

In some sense this proves the point though. You stopped playing. It's not that social validation is the only thing these games could provide in theory, but that due to selection effects people who like the social validation and the joy of destroying someone who was just trash talking you are the people who play obsessively play these games, while people who find it toxic and unenjoyable stop.

I guess it's true that people who insist on interactions have run me out of MOBAs, but that's just because effective teamwork requires more interaction than I'm comfortable with, but that doesn't address the point with fighting games, another competitive genre, which I still do play online as long as I can disable text/voice chat.

The problem is that in team games, you can't destroy the teammate who was just trash talking you without throwing the game.

My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots, even bots designed as a perfect challenge, and if there were no rankings.

I played Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's League equivalent, for a few years and I actually played entirely against bots: I really enjoyed the mechanics of MOBA games and the minute-to-minute gameplay, but I didn't want to deal with the toxicity that seems an inevitable part of those games and I didn't want to be in the endless "gotta get better" spiral that comes with skill-based matchmaking.

On the broader point, there are loads of games that are made entirely for single-player experiences, and while sometimes you get into a community discussing it there's no need to do that. I actually quit the Factorio subreddit around the time the expansion came out because I didn't want the game solved for me, and now only dip back when I'm in the mood to collect a set of random tips, I certainly don't post there for my own social validation. And while I do have friends that play Factorio now, that wasn't the case for many years.

My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots...

Your intuition is wrong. Chess games have existed since computers, pretty much, and were single player by necessity back in the day. They still were quite popular. LoL is an offshoot from the RTS genre, which again started as single player and even to this day is pretty common to play single player.

Single player strategy games (of a pretty wide variety from 4X stuff all the way to strategy rpgs like Fire Emblem) are not quite as popular as chess or mobas but still very popular.

For those kind of games, a lot? But they are multiplayer games: They have short, repetitive gameplay loops, and the fun is derived from competition with others.

It's true these types of videogames dominate nowadays, but part of that is that they're the most profitable kind of game (because, if successful, they get a lot more play-hours with (relatively) very little new development).

Yeah, the gaming industry over the past 10-15 years has been about finding new and more addictive ways to extract more value for less cost. I have my concerns about Hollywood, publishing, and the music industry, but at least there seems to be a sense that they want to create something that people enjoy or see value in, even if they are bad at it. But it's really, really hard to read the ways gaming CEOs and business publications talk about their customers, their products, and their strategies, and not come away with the conclusion that they're just as evil, twisted, and morally bankrupt as a casino operator. Gaming as a business seems fundamentally at-odds with gaming as a hobby or creative endeavor in a way that's not true for other creative industries.

I play video games sometimes, but the oxygen of gaming has been so saturated by multiplayer competitive grindfests and e-"sports" that I find it hard to even identify with gaming any more. Sometimes it feels like it's as unhealthy and toxic today as everyone's dad thought it was in the 90s. And everyone has the kid in their family who's kicked a hole in their wall because they lost an online match.

gaming industry over the past 10-15 years

That’s the market for you, isn’t it? Games are getting commoditized in a way they weren’t before the Internet, before personal computing. A team of 200 outscales a team of 20 outscales 2 guys with an Apple ][, but by commanding so many resources, they are forced to be more conservative. The shareholders demand it!

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