This is not a “gotcha! checkmate idiots!” post, I’m genuinely curious what you think about this. This is the forum for asking questions right?
I have very niche interests. I like specifically shaped plushies of a specific franchise called fumos. I like data hoarding so I like being able to buy a 16TB hard drive and just dump whatever the fuck I find on the internet on it. I like commissioning gay furry porn. I can think of many other niche things. A specific brand of cheese I like, a specific brand of shoes that don’t hurt my feet, specific kinds of fashion I like to wear, etc etc etc.
I like being able to do these things despite them not really appealing to a huge majority mass of people. And I understand why I can do that in capitalism: because it’s a market everyone can sell stuff in and people (theoretically) chose what to buy, instead of it being chose for them. Thus, it’s viable and sometimes even optimal to find a niche to appeal to rather than to make something general and for everyone. That’s why it’s profitable to make fumos.
Under a planned economy, how exactly can this work, though? An overseeing body will care about an overarching goal, and therefore things that are not useful to achieve that goal will be pushed back or completely discarded. Put yourself in the lens of some top-of-the-hierarchy bureaucrat: why bother making something like fumos? It’s a luxury no one truly needs. It’s a waste of resources that produces no tangible benefit. Why bother with 16tb hard drives for personal computers? Most people don’t need more than 1tb or 2tb. Better to just give those to state companies that need them for servers and such. Giving them to data hoarders is again, a waste of resources that produces no tangible benefit. You can just save (what you deem) important things in a central archive.
I know I am talking purely about luxuries, but these things can be severe too. Why bother finding treatments for illneses that affect only very small percentages of the population? Why bother with clothes that can fit specific body shapes that are not found in the vast majority of people without hurting them? Why make game controllers shaped for the minute proportion of people that don’t have five fingers?
Actually why make games in the first place, even? Wouldn’t it be counter productive? That shit can lead to addiction and workers slacking off, meaning less productivity. From the point of view of The Administration it’s only a waste of time. It furthers the goal more if there’s no games. Why fund them?
I understand this kind of thing sort of happened in the USSR, there being very few brands of things to pick from, all the economy being spent on the army instead of things that made people happy, etc. I’m no historian so I’m not going to dwell on it specifically too much though.
I don’t want to live in a world where everything is only made if it fits The One General Purpose. I guess the reply to this would be “fine, some things can be independent”, but what is allowed to be independent and what isn’t? How is that decided? How can we be sure it’s enough?
For the record, I don’t think niche things can only exist with a profit incentive. But I do think they can’t exist without an incentive at all. If the body that controls all the funding and resources has no incentive, even if people out of the kindness and passion in their hearts want to do these things, if the government says “no, that’s useless”, there’s nothing they can do.
I also don’t think the solution to this can be “well just make sure The Administrators do allow these things”, systematically they have an incentive to never do it, and a system that depends on a dice roll for nice people over and over and over is not a system I’d ever trust
Anyway thanks for reading. I mean no ill harm this is an actual question. o/
[pictured: a fumo]
Large hard drives do have use in data centers so I think your data hoarding hobby will be fine under socialism.
Also, money existed in the USSR, you could buy commodities you wanted, luxury ones even. The lack of certain consumer goods were of course a issue since USSR prioritised heavy industry but I think other eastern bloc countries had limited electronics industries like GDR and Bulgaria.
Not really. Video games are a form of art. There were TV Shows and Movies made in the USSR and other socialist states. Games aren’t really different.
Also, USSR wasn’t the only form of socialism. Look at other countries like Yugoslavia. And also keep in mind USSR died in 1991 and what it would be right now had it not is unknown.
In many ways the current capitalist system is more treat constraining with all the chronic unemployment especially in the neoliberal era.
I remain extremely skeptical that games, in the abstract, can correctly be called addictive. Gambling? Sure. That re-wires your brain in a way that lines up with addiction as medically defined. But much like porn, i think “gaming addiction” is more about people"s perceptions of what they should enjoy not lining up with what they do enjoy - in the case of games people are playing a lot of games bc of disintegrating social environment, but don’t know how to articulate that (what no theory etc) and so fall back on the only language they have for when people do too much of something - addiction.
Also - the Soviets semi-famously said “why the fuck is champagne expensive? There’s nothing special about it, it’s just carbonated white line” and went on to make what I understand was a good quality champagne that normal people could afford. I think a couple of former Soviet states still make it. A lot of luxuries are luxuries bc of farts - forced artificial scarcity, and not because the thing itself is necessarily rare or valuable. Gems can be made cheaply in factory labs, someone figured out how to harvest caviar without killing the sturgeon recently, things like that.
And there’d likely be major changes in what people perceive as desirable. We all know that demand is induced by marketing propaganda and isn’t necessarily organic. A culture that isn’t constantly trying to tell you you’re ugly, sick, etc isn’t going to have the same destructive consumer culture.
based, modern Western “gastronomy” is just the illusion of diversity for European cuisine through the use of a gazillion native names like “kielbasa” that literally just mean stuff like “sausage” (but simultaneously never applying native names anywhere outside of Europe)
Also most of these items have literally no consistency whatsoever by their claimed manufacturers, at least in general (idk about EU PDO products)
Even certain apple cultivars have zero flavor consistency
Also, daily reminder that even the best wine snobs can’t differentiate that crap after a certain point (confirmed by study). Probably because bitter tanninic grape alcohol has such an overwhelmingly strong flavor that it’s difficult to pick up on anything else
Nah, I have an addictive personality. With some kinds of games I can feel the hooks sinking in.
Personally I think you’re addicted to gaming if you get mad when you lose
If you feel unaffected when you lose, or if losing/winning isn’t even a thing, then you just enjoy the process
But I think there could be a specific type of “completion addiction” for RPG games
To start; a lot fo my concern is semantics and different definitions of addiction in day to day life versus medical usage. Totes acknowledge that. Now here we go!
I can’t agree with that. I think being mad, the stereotype of throwing controllers, is an emotional regulation problem. If you take the game away from someone they’re still going to have emotional regulation problems in other parts of their life; at work, at school, with friends. They’re people who rage out when they get “cut off in traffic” or their order is wrong at the treats store.
With alcohol, opiates, xanax, and other addictive substances, if you take the drug away their health is going to plummet and they’re going to go in to withdrawal. Apparently gambling and a few other things do it too. I’m sure that there are some people who get that effect from video games, especially gatcha and loot crate games that are gambling games.
But the average guy who has epic gamer moments, i don’t think that’s addiction, or should be called addiction. That’s emotional regulation, tolerance for frustration, and I imagine a lot of toxic masculinity and living in a culture where “winning” is seen as a zero-sum thing.
Re: completionists; i think a lot of them are just doing what stamp collectors or card collectors do. Again, there are folks who have problems with compulsion (which is a distinct set of issues from addiction), especially folks with conditions like autism or adhd (and companies exploit psychology to target these people), but that’s distinct from addiction, and requires different tactics.
But I’m sure tons of alcoholics also wig out when they’re denied alcohol, right? Emotional dysregulation is just one of the myriad ways through which addiction can present itself.
The way I see it is the guy is addicted to the dopamine rush from winning. And when that rush is denied from him, he wigs out
In some sense you could call this addiction to winning rather than gaming per se
I think addiction to gaming could exist in other forms, too, like being addicted to escapism via roblox etc which isn’t really win-dependent
definitely true
Also under communism productivity has an actual goal, which is to provide people what they need. Once that’s been done for the season or whatever time frame you’re talking about you’re done… that’s it until next X time frame. It’s not like capitalism where it’s just and endless sea of shit that has to be produced to keep the line from falling.