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Is all fun good fun?
Distraction, entertainment, and the slow murder of our capacity for satisfaction.
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I can create anything. Why this?
__________________________
Occasionally, I find myself standing on the edge of a terrible precipice I cannot see, but can sense by the chill rising from the abyss and the ghostly wails of those who have fallen before me.
"Jump, jump, jump," they say, "It's super satisfying."
I am speaking, of course, about that genre of game which we might affectionately call, "work porn."
Behold, the beast:
These kind of games have become quite popular with a large number of people. It is not my intention to criticize anyone's idea of fun, but –
Wait, no, that's exactly what my intention is.
CRITICISM, COMING RIGHT AT YOU!
Power Wash Simulator and other "work porn" games make me metaphysically uncomfortable, and, maybe, they should make you feel that too.
The term "work porn" has a certain tongue-in-cheek sound to it, in the same way that fans of the franchise will refer to The Fast and the Furious films as "car porn," or my costume designer/blacksmith brother will refer to high resolution photographs of Tobias Capwell's $40,000 mastercraft jousting harness as "armour porn" – an exuberantly, self-indulgently detailed display of a shared obsession.
HOWEVER*, in this instance, I believe the term has a more literal application: these products pornographize work. That is, they are to actual work what pornography is to actual romance. (As I've said before, there are many kinds of pornography, and only a few of them are sexual.)
*Please read in Skeletor's voice for maximum effect.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with such things, there is an entire genre of games dedicated to completing menial tasks, such as cleaning up a filthy environment.
I originally started pondering these things back when I was writing a post about why so many video games are about violence.
The short version is this:
Violence is an immediately understandable motivation (wolves are coming to eat your face!) with clear incremental progress (keep hitting the wolf with that sharp stick until it stops moving!) towards a clear binary goal (this wolf is dead – it ain't going to get back up, and it ain't going to get any more dead), and the whole thing survives abstraction much better than almost any more sophisticated thing (hitting ravenous wolves with a sharp stick until their health meter is depleted and they die has a much better connection to reality than, say, giving your uninterested coworker unsolicited presents until her romance meter is filled up and she falls in love with you.)
[If you find this idea confusing/intriguing, I recommend going and reading the other article. I'm not going to completely rehash it here.]
Anyways, almost nothing works as cleanly as violence.
But wait! What about cleaning stuff up?
There are some games that quite effectively sidestep the issue of violence by reaching for a completely different kind of rule set: farming simulators, cleaning simulators, and bizarre exploration games like Grow Home have enjoyed a lot of success by pursuing very different kinds of experiences.
While I really enjoy bizarre little unexpected gems like Grow Home, I have really, really mixed feelings about things like "PowerWash Simulator” and the whole "work porn" genre. While the motivation is not quite as immediately driving as "wolves are coming to eat your face," these games do a decent job of checking off our list:
The player is presented with an absolutely filthy place to clean up. (And unlike real life, clean/dirty is a clear binary state: things are either sparkling and spotless or completely caked in filth.)
Thanks to the completely binary clean/dirty states, incremental progress is super clear: you interact with things to transform them from the filthy state to the spotless state (with accompanying congratulatory sound effects and achievements and so forth). The trail of your sanitizing rampage is clearly visible as you carve your way across the landscape.
A relatively plausible level of verisimilitude… This is where things break down a little bit. Yes, cleaning things transforms them from dirty to clean, but I begin to feel a little uncomfortable with how… shortcut-to-dopamine-y it all starts to feel.
My house is full of things that need actual cleaning. I do begin to wonder: Is spending half an hour in PowerWash Simulator transforming a cartoonishly filthy environment into an equally unbelievably delightful environment… good for me? I receive all the congratulations and satisfaction of a hard job well done (or as close as flashing lights and glowing pictures on a screen can get) all in an unbelievably brief timeframe whilst doing nothing more than clicking a mouse and receiving a compulsion reward every 90 seconds.
Am I undermining my ability to actually… do work and feel satisfaction from it? What I am putting out is not actually effort and what I'm receiving is not actually satisfaction, but dopamine is dopamine.
Well, at least it's not heroin, amiright?
Try as I might, the pornographizing of the basic human desire to work still makes me deeply uncomfortable on some level.
Why settle for real when you can have fake for free?
Well, what if it's a wish fulfillment for people who would love to clean an environment with a power washer, but possesses neither environment nor power washer due to life circumstances outside of their control, such as lacking a physical body? What if players have already cleaned and reconstructed everything around them, and they're literally sitting in paradise weeping that there are no more worlds to clean? What if this is the only way that they can get their hyper-competent refurbishment fix? Did you think about that, Mr. smarty-pants?
I still question wish fulfillments that have a natural and readily available real-world outlet, particularly when that real-world outlet makes you a better, happier person.
Porn is a wish fulfillment for the lonely guy who wishes that he had a girlfriend, but it does not make him anymore likely to get a girlfriend. In fact, research continues to suggest that it not only undermines his ability but also undermines his desire for real human connection. Tastes conform to the shape of the drug, and the addict begins to find the actual romance with actual human beings lacking by comparison. The real thing – which requires time and effort and sacrifice – can no longer hold a candle to the genetically engineered dopamine-shortcut. (There are more than enough horror stories out there about men – and women – who are actually incapable of having real sex with real people because they have completely rewired their brain to only feel attraction for the cartoon shortcut.)
Now... I’ve used a pressure washer and refurbished dilapidated buildings, and I tell you, there was no cha-ching! after I finished each item. I also got sweaty and tired and sunburnt. In fact, I had to stop far short of perfection and settle for good enough. (Now that I think about it, I also probably inhaled non-negligible amounts of lead paint chips, which might explain some things.)
I've also just repainted my hideous, dilapidated bedroom, and I can tell you that my new, soothing rain forest green walls make me happy in a way that no cha-ching! sound effect ever can. I sleep better. My heart rate is lower. I read more. I have created a place where I want to be, and that encourages me to live.
It was a massive pain in the ass.
Tragically, we want incremental progress toward clear binary goals. (There's a reason that almost entirely passive "fill up the bars" games like idle clickers are still around. There's no system to master, but boy do we love seeing things inch towards the finish line. If you want to be good and depressed, go read Ralph Koster's Theory of Fun and then play an idle clicker phone game. It turns out we don't need the "fun" of challenge and mastery when we can just skip all of that and give you the dopamine-triggering audiovisual cues of success.) Our highly adapted survival brains are engineered to find shortcuts wherever we can.
I've talked about pornographization before, in the context of creating characters to be inhuman objects for emotional gratification. It is not a particularly pretty word, but I do think that it describes many of the elements of modern culture which leave us hollow:
Things which provide us with the gratification of a real thing by creating a shallow, warped, cartoonish simulation of it which is engineered to deliver that gratification (or close enough) as instantaneously as possible while eliminating any nuance, work, thought, or other hurdles that may stand between us and it. Whenever I begin to catch the scent of this, I grow wary.
Anyways, please forgive me for breaking the cardinal rule of criticizing what someone else enjoys, but I do believe that sometimes some things are worthy of criticism: the things that hurt us and others, the things that keep us back from what we could be.
As a creator, I feel a moral obligation to create good things. I feel a moral obligation to create art, not pornography, be it sexual, emotional, or any other kind.
Art does not make people worse.
If people come away from experiencing my creation and live less fulfilling lives, even marginally, fractionally, shrug-it-off-edly, because of it, I have not just failed as an artist, I have failed as a human being.*
*You can now stop reading in Skeletor's voice.
AN AD(H)DENDUM*
*For maximum effect, please read in Orko's voice.
I think a lot about making things: not just what to make and how to make it, but why to make it, and how what I make will affect the people it contacts.
It is very easy for me to enter into a designing mindset that is engaged only with the mental challenge of creating an interesting thing and overcoming each hurdle, crafting the interaction between the parts, solving the entire thing like a puzzle where my answer is an end product that exist only for its own elegance.
This is an easy way to end up with an end product that no one actually wants, but it is also an easy way to end up with a product that hurts people.
I solved the problem, and created a thousand more.
Despite my love of design for design's sake, I care about the moral impact of what I do.
I know that there are some things – even things that I am happy exist – that I could not be happy creating myself.
I would not be happy distilling bourbon with the knowledge that there are people out there using my creation to destroy themselves.
I enjoy the ability to pour myself a little whiskey and read the Rubayat of Omar Kayaam. I've also had a front row seat for people who were destroying themselves spectacularly and damaging those around them with the same stuff.
I don't want to give people murder weapons.
While I enjoy, on occasion, the existence of bourbon, I would not find peace and happiness creating it.
But it's their choice to harm themselves!
Well, I don't have to arm them. If I didn't manufacture the bullet, the victim couldn't have been killed by it.
…How is this about games again?
When I see it that a user has put 1,300 hours of their life into a game that I helped make, I grow a little uncomfortable.
When a developer uses the term "compulsion cycle" during a design meeting, I question my career.
This killed a baby, you know.
What?! No! Personal responsibility and stuff! A neglectful mother who happened to be addicted to this thing that was designed to be addicting made the choice to forget that her baby existed for so long that it died.
If this hadn't existed, a 14-year-old would be alive right now.
For myself, what it comes down to is this: when I sit down to create something, I am presented a choice.
I can create anything.
Why this?
*You can't stop reading in Orko's voice now. It's with you for life. I'm sorry.
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