Digital Darwinism (Literally Clickbait!)

A while ago I posted a roughly hour long segment from a podcast about the dwindling attention capacity of our society. Not surprisingly nobody jumped at that. Now there is a much more concise video about the topic that I would ask you to (at least for the first part - you'll know what I mean) listen to:

Crossquoting @Kiwasi from another thread:

Does that sound familiar to anyone else? I've heard of many people who can't watch a movie anymore without doing something on their smartphone. A good while ago (months, years maybe) I noticed how I gravitate towards games that are "podcast compatible", because just gaming alone was getting kind of stale and I liked e.g. playing Dark Souls 2 while listening to a podcast. It's a great game for that because it has very little dialog to focus on. I was mildly concerned at the time, but didn't fully hear the wakeup call yet.

Now with the context of that video above, and seeing how even people already on a "low information diet" like Grey (he doesn't watch/read any regular news) experience negative side effects of the way we interact with digital media nowadays, I thought "maybe it's time for some change in that department for me too".

He mentions one very interesting concept in his video: all these media things we still use, "evolved" much like an organism does under selective pressure. The clickbait cancer we see everywhere now has spread and prevailed so successfully because it was "most fit" to survive in the constant competition and fight for our attention. (I think I used "literally" incorrectly in the title, I'm not a native speaker - just trying to be slightly facetious)

Now with that in mind, lets look at games - aren't they evolving in much the same way on a big-picture scale? The big AAA franchises are like a slightly mutated new generation of the same species with every new release within a franchise. They gain minor new features, lose some old ones, look prettier, have more microtransactions, and most have a fairly regular annual "procreation cycle" where a new AAA game is born into the wild, every new one possibly the last of the series, under constant threat of death by "loss of attention from the gamers".

My question to you all is: if this struck a nerve and you are planning to reclaim some of your lost attention capacity, how are you planning to do this?
And do you think there is anything we can realistically do to "tweak the system" to change the selective pressures in a way that makes the "better" games prevail instead of the "more attention grabbing"? How do you think the gaming landscape will look in 30 years if we just let this all go its own course without interference? My best guess is: "very shiny and flashy, but in a more metaphorical sense 'not pretty at all'."

 

I threw out my personal phone over a year ago. It felt crazy forever, but now it starts really making sense. I need the internet, but I do feel enjoyment when I limit my time. I basically stopped using Facebook, which was easier said than done. S*** turns you into a zombie, before you know it you're scrolling through an arbitrary 2-way chute of bile and excrement, none of it has any consequence yet it will devour hours from under your nose. I only use it now to communicate to some people, since I don't have a phone. My attention increased a lot.

Human life is organic. It will naturally fight back. Like a plague or an infectious curse, the equilibrium in life will find a way. This land of opposites and opiates will reverse what they revere. Anyways, at the very least, I believe we are being very light with the actuality of what even the medium of gaming entertainment will be in the future. They will probably challenge our brains in different ways than we thought conventionally possible, and we will be enriched in a whole new way. The future is bright, and people are always thinking of new ways to make it better.

Edit: Superfluous edit to say I want a dog now.

 

I don't have a mobile phone and I don't use social media except one way - I post on twitter to keep the account warm. Social media and phones are simply using you, nobody needs them, nor do they really use the phone. The phone uses them, dictates what they see, and ultimately primes them for spending in multiple ways.

Forums are fantastic - 2 way dialogue. Ideas. Arguments. I dig forums

With the amount of fake news (some are correct about it regardless if you like them or not, and no don't get political!) - nobody digests any more.

On topic:

It's become a stream of bullshit programming that people swim along with people that echo similar sentiments (an echo chamber) and it's dangerous because there is no counter stream to create a perspective (unless it's twitter). If you are slightly not with the program, you're subject to being outcast - similar to some religions. I guess it's a digital religion now.

Now that does not mean we should embrace nazis or other fringe ideas or alt-right hatred (please don't get political, these are examples) but it does mean in the context of digital darwinism, that people will gradually only sing one narrative because of digital shunning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning

This makes it really easy to manipulate people.

And when evolution stops evolving or stops having more than one narrative, it dies. So if the narrative and mob mentality requests say, a change to democracy and other dangerous precedents, nobody has a way of knowing any more what the source of that is. You'd think it's people who like your narrative but you would never know as there's no discussion allowed.

NOTE:

It's a potentially-politically charged discussion but so long as nobody focuses on a single demographic element or name, we should be fine to talk about the digital impact.

 

This is THE problem of our age.

Fortunately... we have formatting.

And grammatical flexibility.

Sadly, we don't have great writers crafting educational materials.

That, alone, could turn many strugglers and stragglers from finding to doing.

Tools need to become enjoyable, not infuriating, undiscoverable, unintuitive and unrewarding. The love of the experience of doing needs to be put into the tools that make it possible.

Take, for instance, shift+tab not working in Unity. No instant backtracking through input fields. That's hateful undesign and disregard for the user experience, productivity and the craftsmanship of those honing their ideas.



In Short:

The DOING of everything (and anything) needs to improve as much as consuming, collecting and curating have through inspired refinement and evolution.

Instagram did it for photography, slide shows, and sharing.

Unity, if serious about democratising game development, needs to bring the kinds of massive change that instagram brought to photographic editing and publishing.

 

This is true. The truth is also, that game developers are on the bleeding edge of mental manipulation.

A wide range of games are little more than thin facades built over dopamine release systems. Many of those are then wrapped around monetization strategies. The recent "loot box controversy" is a straight example.

Even games that aren't quite as overt still work to manipulate the player. Admittedly, all communication in any form is manipulative, but a lot of game design really pushes the limit.

 

I've heard of studies that found the sudden loss of a smartphone (for a typical phone addict) is roughly as traumatic for the brain as the loss of a limb.

I agree that the upside for forums is much bigger. They are an invaluable place to share knowledge and I have formed friendships over forums that long outlasted our activities on that forum.
But I would say in terms of the attention fracturing and addictive qualities forums are at least as bad as 9gag, maybe even worse because it's less anonymous and the replies you get mean more to you than random people in comment sections below some cat pics.

I don't think that's true because people love to be in groups that are opposed to other groups. A more detailed explanation is here in the video that @Gigiwoo shared in 2016:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/im-a-good-germ-vector-relevance-to-games.389400/

The video was made over 3 years ago by the same CGPGrey that made the video in my OP. One has to wonder, if someone so aware of all the mechanisms surrounding the "attention economy" can't escape the negative side-effects, how can anyone else?

You mean Unity should contribute to an endless flood of poorly thought out, amateurish works, with little to no substance, that drown the few diamonds within the medium with sheer numbers, leading to huge discoverability problems for the artists and devaluing the entire medium in the minds of consumers by making it ubiquitous? Oh, wait... /sarcasm

True. And on the other hand I think this kind of attention drain probably has killed more projects than any technical shortcomings in current-gen game-engines...

 

True democracy means everyone gets to vote.

Regardless of property ownership, wealth, intellect, education, race, gender, etc.

So yes, in answer to your question.

Instagram doesn't drown out talent. It does put a large dent in the ability of established, old media to use artificial scarcity and contrived monopolisation on broadcasting to tell us what we should determine to be good things.

This shouldn't even need to be considered in gaming. Gaming media has already demonstrated how corrupted it is, how much it desires to be a gatekeeper and how susceptible it is to ever more ways of being corrupted and controlled. Over and over again.

 

I use to think I was subject to the attention deficit trap ... until I start clocking myself and see that I do stuff into 4h chunk up until my mind is exhausted by the task at end ... Ie I was focusing on the same thing for hours. It's true for social media, after doing works, I hope on youtube or twitter, and do research (I mean I'm looking for thing in a motivated way) for that same chunk of time. SO is it distraction? is it partition of time? The main difference is that there is so much offering that each chunk is information dense, and therefore exhaustion happen after a run. When I'm in the zone I go up to 8h to 12h, which still leave some hour to do other stuff as a day is 16h minus sleep (and I only need 6h of sleep).

Speaking of echo chamber. I myself spend time monitoring a vast cut of the internet, many community and many hate speech spot. While most people only goes to nazi or alt right as a monolithic threshold, I'm much more cognizant of all the nuances and culture they have, their internal battle, belief, and nuances. But then the Dnd political spectrum, I register as as mix of neutral good and neutral chaotic. I'm kind of torn about teh issue of echo chamber, I don't deny it's not there, but along outrage culture, the rhetorics (which is neutral by nature) as been first used to counter the rise of black twitter as political voice. Most people don't realize that racist voice adapt their language strategically coopting neutral feelling to weaponize them against other.

On a less dramatic place, it was also funny to see big tech starting to doubt what social media brought to humanity, when it was obvious social media was becoming a way to challenge their power through criticism, I mean it's okay when it topple a government we don't like, power to the people, but when people come for you, well it's bad for humanity, and we will toss legitimate concern under the bus, because among all the peoples who criticize, there is also the bad people™ we will publicize greatly and we will weaponize victim™, who may have legitimate problem, but why solve this problem when you can use it to rationalized keeping power, like flip flopping around free speech when criticism become too hard against you. It's all too convenient.


Let's just stop here before it became political.

More funnily, you can go into history and see this exact complained leverage against:
- the invention of writing
- the invention of journal news distribution
- the invention of tv
- now it's social media

I guess it's just mean we are getting old in a changing world, get of my lawn kids!

 

Speak for yourself though, since I constantly evolve my stance of common sense and police myself against that. I weigh it up. I'm a programmer and developer for goodness' sake...

I've thought of perversions and weird concepts long before they become mainstream, dabbled with pretty much everything that's dabble-able.

 

Yeah I hate social media too. *posts on forums all day*

 

I don't really consider a discussion board social media. I don't need to be sociable for it to function.

 

Have you been on social media? I'm not sure they are the most "sociable" place.

 

Yeah. You can't have a discussion there without it being all about feelings and whatever political camp people belong to. On forums, feelings take a back seat to facts. Here, if you do not have your facts right, you lose, it's simple.

This is because there is no grey area. ECS is faster. Profiler finds performance issues. Bugs require repro. And so on. It is extremely different to social media, which I think most people take to mean twitter, facebook, instagram and friends. Nobody counts forums and it's best not to pretend.

If you mean a forum, devoted to garbage or agendas, I don't consider those forums that are useful enough to be mentioned.

It'll usually mean twitter, twitch and facebook with a dollop of youtube on top.

 

Yeah, no politics please.

That was one of the points in the video around 2:30-ish.

Do you think it is inherently different, or do you think you have found a way to treat it differently? Because for me I feel it is pretty much the same in terms of its downsides. We have "likes", we have popularity contests and echo-chamber-circle-jerks, we have our regular little outrage events... I don't see the huge difference. The forum even has a "follow" feature and if we hadn't revolted in (at least here) unprecedent intensity "with torches and pitchforks", they would have switched us over to Lithium to make all their stuff even more interconnected and "social-media-like".

You just ninja'd me with your followup post:

Isn't the correct answer for many many questions here "it depends"? Sounds pretty grey to me. When I see two programming nerds argue one pattern against another or some other techy stuff that I don't understand half of, it seems to me like there's plenty of grey area potential for heated emotional debates where both sides just want to be right at all cost. I mean, we are a fair bit more civil here than a typical youtube comment section, but I've seen some pretty rough S*** here too. And many topics seem to be the equivalent of religous faith discussions: mac vs pc, vim vs emacs (did I spell those right? I don't know either), xbox vs playstation, call of duty vs battlefield, unity vs unreal, c# vs c++, assetstore vs self made, generic engine vs custom engine, program A vs program B, etc..


I guess my main argument for forums having the same downside as social media is that I don't actively participate in any of the common social media sites, except forums, and yet I still find myself showing the exact same behaviour patterns of a social media addict. They might compulsively check facebook, I'm doing the same with forums...
I've tried stepping away from here for a month before, and it was really hard for me. And you wouldn't believe how long after I've blocked a website with leechblock I still habitually start typing the first letters of the URL and hit enter for the autocompletion. I might not have a smartphone, but for all intends and purposes I might as well, because I sit in front of the PC all day. This stuff can get to you one way or another.




I've always had trouble keeping focused on a task, but I definitely feel that it has gotten significantly worse over the years and some things that I used to enjoy, now seem crazy boring to me. E.g. I used to paint Warhammer 40k miniatures, can't imagine doing something so boring and time-consuming anymore. I used to watch movies on my own, barely can motivate myself to do that anymore without having someone to watch it with together. I was into TV shows for a while (shorter episode length), but now even that doesn't interest me anymore / or puts too high of a demand on my attentionspan, I can't really differentiate the two. It all feels the same and maybe neurochemically it is?

I used to like working on my own games... you know where I'm going with this...

10+ years ago I still occasionally did things like painting for fun, and I always attributed losing interest in that to me becoming an illustrator, but maybe there is a bigger component in my dwindling attention span than I thought? After all painting is a rather slow process and listening to a podcast while mindlessly grinding through some game is both easier and more fun in the process...

 

For me the forums are even worse then regular social media. When I kill hours browsing Facebook or similar, I know I'm wasting time. Its obviously non productive. Participating in forum discussions gives the illusion of productivity, without actually producing much.

 

Digital Darwinism is exactly the right description for the (not so) subtle switch from Social Networking to social media.

A careful, nuanced, deliberate shift in power, obligation and responsibility, from the entities responsible for governance, infrastructure and platforms creation and maintenance to the users.

And almost nobody noticed, yet.

 

What are you on dude? The responsibilities of platform owners and users has been the central debate of the internet for the last 20 years...

 

Epic satirical reinforcement. Well played!

 

This. It's more of an interactive book. With emotions.

 

Great thread, Martin. I think there is some deep truth in that, matter neither being created nor destroyed, everything in our universe ebbs and flows to the same rhythms.

Time in nature, away from people, people noises, and all technology is probably the best way to get yourself back on the slow rhythm of the seasons. In a few days I'll be going moose hunting -- though I don't seriously plan on shooting a moose. It's too much work. I really just want to sit in this nice glade I know and watch the sky roll by for a few days. Very nice thing to do from time to time.

About games... eh, it seems capitalism favors the most cunning, nothing more. A persons base needs are stronger than their civilized rationale, so make a teenager horny or make him feel all dopamine-ey is always gonna win.

Myself -- being perpetually full of adolescent idealism -- want to make games that guide players in the opposite direction than many others. Embolden the better parts of their character, yada yada yada. Games that stress and then reward patience, perseverance, observation, humility, and so on. I probably won't make much money, but I will make something I can be proud of. But who knows... the success of Dark Souls cannot be ignored. It is certainly a game that demands more patience than typical games, as well as perseverance and plenty of humility.

Anyway, that's the long term plan.

 

Patience is an interesting subject though, for real.

Really great things can come from a bit of patience and really great experiences can come from art that demands patience from the audience.

I do think it's absolutely possible to make entertainment that asks for patience in 2018+...but it's gotta be really damn good. Like really really really good.

 

Sounds good, have fun! Reminds me of this:

I think I should leave the house more too.

Reminds me of a story I've heard about an 80 years old japanese man who still plays Dark Souls 2 and has died over 2000 times in the game.
Or the various crazy and impressive gimmick runs like beating all 3 games in a row without getting hit once or playing the game on a midi keyboard (think of piano keys) or dance mat. It's certainly a game that "inspires" people in many different ways and a worthy design goal to persue.
But I'm not entirely sure if this can be copied. I believe much of this is caused by factors outside of the game. There is a certain image of these games in the hivemind of the public, and I don't think any game by a different studio ever managed to be seen by people in the same light as DS or Bloodborne, even if they basically copied many core design elements like The Surge or Lords of the Fallen did. But I'm getting offtopic here, sorry.

Reminds me of something I read today on twitter:



with this comment:

Yeah, I've spent way too much time on the internet today...

 

I'm already playing no man's sky
I would size the market to 1000 perpetual users lol