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?
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Notes -
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.
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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?
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