Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link