depressurize

There’s a cool concept I’ve been thinking about. I first heard of it when reading Jesse Schell’s book “The Art of Game Design”. (Fun fact: Jesse Schell was my professor’s professor, aka my grand-professor.) Then I heard of it again in the LessWrong post “Choosing the Zero Point”. Having been exposed to it twice, I now see it everywhere. I’m not sure how to describe it though, so I’ll just throw a bunch of examples at you: 1. Jesse Schell: the developers of World of Warcraft wanted players to play just a little each day. In the game, you gain “experience points” as you play. So they decided you would get less experience points once you had already been playing for half an hour. Of course, players hated this. But instead of actually changing the system, the developers just reduced the baseline amount of experience points you got, and then said that you got a bonus during the first half hour. 1. In the words of Chris Remo from the Idle Thumbs podcast, “It’s EXACTLY the same as it was before, except NOW everyone is like ‘Fuck yeah, Blizzard, this is exactly what I want!’" 2. Intensionally, it feels very different to get a bonus during the first half hour than it does to get penalized beyond the first half hour. 3. But extensionally, the two systems are the exact same. You get more experience points during the first half hour of each day than during the rest of the time you play. 4. P.S. the above is from memory and may not be 100% accurate to how it happened IRL. 2. LessWrong: some people portray eating meat as evil, and not eating meat as the bare minimum to be a decent person. But it may be more persuasive to portray eating meat as neutral, and to portray not eating meat as an insanely awesome opportunity to do a massive amount of good. 1. Intensionally, they are very different. Finding out that you’ve actually been perpetuating a great evil and must drastically change your behavior and give up something you enjoy to just get back to the baseli