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LET'S PLAY: WHY WE NEED VIDEO GAMES MORE THAN EVER - by Mr Biffo

29/1/2016

18 Comments

 
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"Welcome to the world. Society is mandatory. Drop out, refuse to conform, and you will be punished." 

Society seemingly benefits us all, but certainly benefits some of us more than others. The only way to ensure this structure perpetuates is through control, and society controls us in ways that are both overt and covert. 

Rules, laws - these are obvious. But then society exerts its influence on us in ways that are more subtle, insidious, covert.

We're told about doing things for "The good of our society" (or country...). Well, whose society is it? We're never handed a choice to opt out... though given that society is everywhere, where would we go anyway? Society gives us roads, gives us electricity, gives us television, and Sainsburys and Star Wars and a justice system. If you want all that, you have to be a part of it. 

​Alas, society is also hugely, intrinsically, unfair, and has been manipulated to primarily benefit a tiny elite - and from birth we are brainwashed into going along with this conspiracy.

"Grow up" we're told from a very young age. And so, grow up we do, in the belief that it's the right thing to do, and that one day - if we're very grown up - we too might be able to spend most of our lives on a yacht in the Caribbean.

Frankly, it's rubbish. So thank Bushnell for video games.

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PLAY TIME
Humans aren't designed to work the way that they do. Physically, we're hunter-gatherers - not farmers, nor desk jockeys, nor homework machines.

We're meant to be wandering around the tundra for a few hours every day, picking berries off the floor. Then it's back to the cave, where we get to arse around, eat our fruit, and do rudies.

You don't see monkeys complaining of bad backs, and that's because monkeys haven't been crowbarred into doing things that they're not meant to do. Monkeys just eat and play, and that's what we're supposed to be doing with the physical form we were given.

Monkeys don't get stressed or depressed; monkeys don't have to deal with mortgage brokers, the taxman, or wait in for a tumble dryer delivery.

A 2011 report in The Journal of Play stated: "Anthropologists and other observers have regularly reported that children in (hunter-gatherer) cultures play and explore freely, essentially from dawn to dusk, every day - even in their teen years - and by doing so they acquire the skills and attitudes required for successful adulthood."

What the hell is successful adulthood anyway? Not drowning in a little river? Not accidentally eating one of your own poos in front of your bank manager? Not getting a tattoo of the Nando's logo on your forehead?

FREEEE TIME
Whatever it might be, the free time available to kids for play is being squeezed; schoolwork, social media, chores... and as they play less, so there is an increase in anxiety and depression among children and adolescents. Society is wholly unnatural.

According to the report, over the last 50 years, young people - while being wealthier, and less constricted by prejudices relating to gender, sexual orientation and race - feel that their destiny is less in their hands, that they have a greater external locus of control.

Why? One argument is that values have shifted from becoming more intrinsic to extrinsic - material wealth becoming more valuable than, say, family values or just being a nice person. Our goals now become about achieving success in the eyes of society, perhaps trying to offset that feeling of not being in control of our lives; if we can become part of the elite, we'll finally be whole. 

The things that society values - achievement, rather than personal qualities - have also led to a rise in narcissism, according to the report; an increased focus on the self, rather than the needs of others.

​Which might suggest it would pull against the demands of society... but no: work hard to achieve personal success, and you're playing directly into the hands of what they - what society - wants. Work work, money money, tax tax, yacht.

In short, Play is something that ceases to be important as we get older - because Wozniak forbid we disappoint those voices in our head: those guys are a-holes.

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CONTROL ME
Do you remember in school when you'd do a funny dance, and someone would say "You're so immature" as if being immature and doing a funny dance was the worst thing in the world?

Or when they'd tell you sneeringly to "Grow up" as if growing up was something to aspire to?

That was society telling you that; you're more valuable to society the sooner you can be slotted into the engine. Stop your playing and start your earning, kids! Society looks down upon anyone over the age of 14, who builds a cardboard fort, or does a funny dance... unless they're Ricky Gervais and earning millions by once having done a funny dance.

Have you heard of Kidzania? It's simultaneously brilliant and horrifying - like something George Orwell would've dreamed up. There's one in London's Westfield shopping centre, and others around the world; mini cities, where kids aged 4-14 can role-play at being grown-ups.

They can get pretend jobs in burger bars, work as air stewards, bus drivers, couriers, or air conditioning technicians - and they get to earn Kidzania money, which can be spent in Kidzania shops. It's society in miniature, and - while also being really cool - it's brainwashing, and this is why everyone is stressed and depressed, because we're all trying to live up to our conditioning, which pulls against our instincts, and causes us to grow up too fast.

We've all got the emotional bends, but it is what it is; best of luck trying to dismantle that.

In an evolutionary sense, this is why play is important; in children it's an important developmental tool - and in adults... now it's just something we've become too embarrassed to do.

PLAY BY THE RULES
In 2011, 
Pacific Standard spoke to psychologist Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, director of Temple University’s Infant and Child Laboratory. She said: "Play matters, no matter how old you are. The only thing that’s changed is the stigma. We associate play with childhood, and therefore playing with childishness.

"The less we’re in situations where we feel it’s OK to fail, the more likely we are to stop playing. And when we do play, it’s more like 'play by the rules': We’re more likely to play tennis or football or soccer than we are to sit down and simply play in an unstructured manner. But it’s not even that our hobbies have changed. The structure of daily life is so busy that we’ve drummed out a lot of space for natural play.

"Think about the world we live in. You’re supposed to answer your emails within 30 seconds, or you’re considered negligent. If somebody asks 'How are you?', the appropriate answer is 'busy'. Is that really an appropriate answer? No."

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SO WHAT?
And I wonder if this is why video games are where they're at, why they're more popular than ever; because they have become a form of play that is socially acceptable.

For the most part, we play games alone, or at opposite ends of a broadband tube, and nobody can see what we're doing. It's play without consequences, without the risk of social humiliation, or failure. 

​It scratches that itch - or some of that itch - which never entirely goes away; that we'd rather be doing something else other than working, than earning money. Something that makes us happy for the sake of being happy, rather than simply feeling fulfilled, that we've bowed down to the external values that have been imposed on us. That we've ticked off another chunk of what's expected by society.


Ideally, play wouldn't happen on screens; it would be a social activity, one spent outdoors, keeping us healthy in both mind and body. Unfortunately, it doesn't look as if it's going to happen any time soon that the government is going to reverse hundreds of centuries of social order, and let us all go and fanny around in fields all day.

And until that happens, for many of us, games are where it's at; I think they're the fannying around in fields that society deems acceptable. Which is profoundly depressing, but there you go.


FROM THE ARCHIVE:
GAMES JOURNALISM: WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE? by Mr Biffo
GAMES: WE'RE WASTING OUR TIME by Mr Biffo

EVERYBODY'S CHANGED THEIR MIND by Mr Biffo
PRESS REVEAL TO SEE WHAT DOCTOR ASHLEY TAGG THINKS OF ALL THIS:
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​Greetings, dicks. Society isn't a thing I know very much about I'm afraid, though my good friend, Reverend Hugh Troube - all his parishioners call him 'Father YouTube', I don't know why - usually has opinions on most matters. His number is +44 7700 900562 if you wanted to give him a call. I know he'll thank you from the bottom of his heart. 
    /

18 Comments
antony adler
29/1/2016 02:42:43 pm

And yet ,the games themselves are hardly much more fun nowadays. Witness Fallout 4's "oh you have to play 10 hours before it gets going" 200 hour games, bug ridden DLC fests, or IAP portable crap, the simple joy of gaming that I knew in the 80s and 90s seems a long way off. Ooh, except, Just Cause 3. Now there's a fun game. Phew, all is forgiven.

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CdrJameson
29/1/2016 03:14:00 pm

I work at home some days and in an office on others.

On home days when my brain seizes up I will have a dance break , where I go and prat around on Just Dance for five minutes. I suspect this would be frowned upon in the office.

Yet oddly if I went outside for five minutes, stuck a tube of burning leaves in my mouth and set fire to it then that'd be fine.

Society, eh? Tch.

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Damon link
29/1/2016 03:28:54 pm

I have time issues. I went from on-demand work to a 9-5 (well 8-4). Much of my day is spent looking busy while checking on things every hour or so. I keep wondering just how much play I can get away with at work...but it isn't really play I want to do, its a distraction because I lost my place counting in German or something while I look at irrelevant papers.

Once I'm home I'm too tired to do much more than eat & sleep. But I need to be engaged... So then my mind is too busy to sleep and I end up in a spiral of being sore, tired and depressed. On my days off I'm either still to tired or have to fulfill other obligations. Even if I could play trying to get everyone with the same day off would be a laugh. Everyone is on a different schedule so we can't even play at the other end of a tube most of the time.

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badgerpog
29/1/2016 04:29:24 pm

I've started to wonder why I go into work every day when it's the last thing I want to do. In a moment of clarity I realised that standing on a freezing, rainy, windy field with a bag of warm dog poo (walking the dog) was more fun than work. Let's start a petition to get the government to reverse hundreds of centuries of social order, and let us all go and fanny around in fields all day. Or walk the dog.

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FEoD link
29/1/2016 06:30:29 pm

"the free time available to kids for play is being squeezed; schoolwork, social media, chores"
One of these things is not like the others and is an entirely dispensable activity. Maybe if stupid kids and adults spent fewer hours whoring themselves for the adulation of equally vacuous nobodies on social media, they'd recoup some of the free time they bemoan the lack of..?

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Admiral Spiney O'Sullivan
29/1/2016 06:50:21 pm

A while ago I realised I was spending more town reading other people's opinions on games and arguments than I was actually playing them. Now I've dropped pretty much everything but Digi, Retro Gamer magazine and R/games. I really don't regret it.

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Admiral damn you autocorrect
29/1/2016 06:56:41 pm

*more time, not town

Dr Kank
29/1/2016 09:42:56 pm

I remember when I quit a terrible job that I hated, the social pressure to conform and just put up with it was overwhelming. People stared at me like I had just shat myself, which I ended up doing because the whole experience was so unnerving.

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patters link
30/1/2016 09:39:12 am

An interesting read as ever. Gives Alain De Botton a run for his money.

Mr. Biffo should head up a campaign for a statutory living wage for all to allow a person to actually fanny around in a field all day if they so wish. They're trying it in parts of Germany and Finland apparently. It's actually meant to be as expensive as administering a benefits system. Just give everyone 700 Euros a month. I suspect the harsh reality is that rents would simply leap up by 700Eur. Just like with quantitative easing, all the cash simply pumped up asset value and made the rich richer.

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Mr Biffo
30/1/2016 11:08:53 am

Ha ha! "Alain de Bottom"!

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Mr Botton
30/1/2016 02:44:47 pm

Congratulations 6R, that is the world that you, and people like you, have made for Mr De Botton!

Chris
30/1/2016 09:46:19 am

Most of the open world games literally involve fannying around in fields.

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Superbeast 37
31/1/2016 12:29:20 pm

Of course we are supposed to die in our mid-thirties were it not for the interference of the big bad evil society!

The big bad society has doubled that and (touch wood) given me a statistical chance of an additional 35 years with which to play with!

To date I have wasted a shocking 1.5 of those extra years playing World of Warcraft! Ungrateful sod that I am!

Were it not for the big evil system I would have just had time to finish Red Dead Redemption before I expired - if statistical probability had come true. So any game I've played that has been released since then has been a bonus!

In reality though I would have died in 2002 due to an illness I suffered at the time and that was cured by developments of the modern world! Someone had to grow up and work hard to develop and pay for those drugs.

That's assuming the horrendous infant mortality rates of the past hadn't got me first!

I guess you can't have your cake and eat it! I'd love to run around in the countryside with a bow and arrow killing animals and eating them all day (actually I'd starve as I'm too old to catch them) but when everything is weighed up I will stick with sitting at a desk and browsing the Daily Mail when my boss isn't looking!

Far Cry Primal will take care of the rest!

Besides, the Khmer Rouge tried the old "fields" thing and that didn't go too well. Funny how history repeats itself and we see students today supporting ideas that killed 2 million people when they were last in fashion! Short memories and all that!

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william mcneil
1/2/2016 05:21:34 am

are you being sarcastic its hard to tell? the writer says if we work less and play more we would be less stressed or if we felt less pressure of society which tells us we only have value or worth when we make money or have a job
then we could understand better that we have our own worth that has nothing to do with our job

doesnt seem like you are being sarcastic which really puzzles me the writer never said get rid of medicine or get rid of science

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Mr Biffo
1/2/2016 09:28:01 am

Thing is... ultimately, human beings are animals. It's just a fluke of evolution that we developed intelligence enough to arrogantly assume we're better than the rest of the natural world, and that we deserve to live longer. Obviously, I'm aware and don't want to die at 33, or spend my life fannying around in a field (I like video games and TV and crisps too much)... but if you take homo sapiens as another animal species, we're bad for the planet, bad for other animals, and we live to our 70s or 80s at what cost to ourselves? We're a fluke - the agricultural revolution was, in some ways, the worst thing to ever happen to us as species or the planet.

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NOdab88
10/2/2016 10:34:00 am

Dwelling on such things is probably not a good thing. Go outside and play... it'll take your mind off it :)

william mcneil
1/2/2016 05:15:06 am

are you been sarcastic it hard to tell and he never said get rid of medicine or get rid of science he says we should be playing more and working less we would less stressed out and that if we felt less forced to have value in society we would fell that we already had value in ourselves
doesnt seem like you are being sarcastic which is really puzzling he never said tear down the modern world

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Euphemia
1/2/2016 10:37:40 pm

Tear down the modern world!

After Dark Souls 3 is out, naturally. I want to be first in line to whine about how IT'S THE WORST ONE EVER and complain about how much better it was when no one was playing these games. And then lie about how amazing Demon Souls was. "Already completed it, mate" I will hiss to everyone, ever. "Unlocked everything."

What a cunt I will be.

End it all.

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