[SEQ RERUN] Emotional Involvement

MinibearRex

Today's post, Emotional Involvement was originally published on 06 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Since the events in video games have no actual long-term consequences, playing a video game is not likely to be nearly as emotionally involving as much less dramatic events in real life. The supposed Utopia of playing lots of cool video games forever, is life as a series of disconnected episodes with no lasting consequences. Our current emotions are bound to activities that were subgoals of reproduction in the ancestral environment - but we now pursue these activities as independent goals regardless of whether they lead to reproduction.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Changing Emotions, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Emotional Involvement was originally published on 06 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Since the events in video games have no actual long-term consequences, playing a video game is not likely to be nearly as emotionally involving as much less dramatic events in real life. The supposed Utopia of playing lots of cool video games forever, is life as a series of disconnected episodes with no lasting consequences. Our current emotions are bound to activities that were subgoals of reproduction in the ancestral environment - but we now pursue these activities as independent goals regardless of whether they lead to reproduction.

Can someone explain this post's focus on video games? It seems to me that games in "real life" (from solitaire to football) have exactly the same problem of lacking actual long-term consequences, and anything that might counterbalance this — playing with other people, training to improve, prizes/stakes — applies to video games just as well. If anything, many video games should be expected to be more emotionally involving than real life games simply because they're designed to be. Also, because of the scale and resemblence to real life, it is much easier to take goals within a video game seriously than goals within a game of Settlers of Catan.

I also have the feeling that there are some key differences in the way people involve themselves emotionally. I have read a huge amount of books when I was younger, and while I found them fascinating and captivating, to this day I cannot understand people who find books or movies more emotionally involving than any mediocre video game where you actually do something. Yet these people do exist.

So why this video game bashing? I don't understand it.

Probably because very few people propose playing solitaire and Settlers of Catan forever as their version of a Utopia. Spending eternity playing games on the holodeck, however, is frequently mentioned.

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