Followup to Stuck in the middle with Bruce:
Bruce is a description of masochistic personality disorder. Bruce's dysfunctional behavior may or may not be related to sexual masochism [safe for work], which is demonized by most people in America. Yet there are ordinary, socially-accepted behaviors that seem partly masochistic to me:
- Eating spicy food
- Listening to the music of Anton Webern or Alban Berg (not trying to be funny; this is very serious)
- Listening to music turned up so loud that it hurts
- Fiction
- Movies, especially horror movies
- Roller coasters
- Saunas
- Enjoying exercise
- Being Bruce
Question 1: Can you list more?
Question 2: Doubtless some of the behaviors I listed have completely different explanations, some of which might not involve masochism at all. Which do you think involve enjoying pain? Can you cluster them by causal mechanism?
Question 3: When we find ourselves acting masochistically, should we try to "correct" it? Or is it part of a healthy human's nature? If so, what's the evolutionary-psych explanation? (I was surprised not to find any evo-psych explanations for masochism on the web; or even any general theory of masochism that tried to unite two different behaviors. All I found were the ideas that sexual masochism is caused by bad childhood models of love, and that masochistic personality is caused by other, unspecified bad experiences. No suggestion that masochism is part of our normal pleasure mechanism.)
Some hypotheses:
- Evolution implemented "need to explore" (in the "exploration/exploitation" sense) as pleasure in new experiences, and adaptation to any particular often-repeated stimulus. This could result in seeking ever-higher levels of stimulation, even above the pain threshold. (This could affect a culture as well as an organism, giving the progression Vivaldi -> Bach -> Mozart -> Beethoven -> Wagner -> Stravinsky -> Berg -> screw it, let's invent rock and roll and start over. My original belief was that this progression was caused by people trying to signal sophistication, rather than by honest enjoyment of music. But maybe some people <DELETION of "jaded"> honestly enjoy Berg.)
- We have a "pain thermostat" to get us to explore / prevent us from being too cowardly, and modern life leaves us below our set point. (Is masochism more prevalent now than in the bad old days?)
- An objection to this is that sometimes, when people are in emotional pain, they work through it by throwing themselves into further emotional pain (e.g., by listening to Pink Floyd).
- An objection to this objection is that primal scream therapy seems not actually to work except in the short term.
- An objection to this is that sometimes, when people are in emotional pain, they work through it by throwing themselves into further emotional pain (e.g., by listening to Pink Floyd).
- Pain triggers endorphins in order to help us fight or flee, and it feels good.
- We enjoy fighting and athletic competition, and pain is associated with these things we enjoy.
My guess is that, if it's a side-effect (e.g., 3) or a non-causal association (4), it's okay to eliminate masochism. Otherwise, that could be risky.
These all lead up to Question 4, which is a fun-theory question: Would purging ourselves of masochism make life less fun?
ADDED: Question 5: Can we train ourselves not to be Bruce without damaging our enjoyment of these other things?
There are a few sudden deaths not caused by some degree of player error, all in the early game, but even those could be avoided most of the time with sufficiently paranoid play (that most people would find crushingly dull). Beyond annoying things like gnomes with Wands of Death or spike pits with lethal poison, most deaths are caused by reckless combat or failing to take appropriate countermeasures against certain monster types. Skilled nethack players have win ratios of over 60%, vs. people who play for years and never win once.
As evidence, on nethack.alt.org's top deaths list, 10 of the 11 most common game ends are "killed by a (weak monster)", all of which are likely to be player error, including "killed by a water moccasin", which is all but guaranteed to be egregious player error. The 3rd most common is "killed by a wand", which encompases one of the most common "unfair" deaths as well as a fair number of player error deaths. The 12th most common "death" is winning the game. After that, the 13th is again egregious player error, after which are piles more deaths by careless combat, with a few "killed by a *, while helpless" deaths that are again egregious player error.
Reading the source code isn't cheating per se--it certainly doesn't guarantee winning--but it's not required, either. There are a handful of simple spoilers that help a great deal, but most of what you really NEED to know could fit on an index card. Among regular nethack players, almost all are "spoiled" to the hilt, but huge variance in success remains, because some people are better at making rational, methodical estimations of what they can safely do to advance the in-game goals.