You have just been introduced to the wonderful game Progress Which, along with Bartel’s observations of the world of online gaming, is rich with applications for understanding the real world, which can also be compared to a big game in many ways.
Maybe, a Designed game?
ProgressQuest is a parody of the MMORPG habit of “grinding” experience points, i.e. engaging in non-recreational behavior (killing non-player monsters) to achieve another goal, namely an increase in levels, wealth, and special weapons.
Just stop me, when you get the point of this analogy
ProgressQuest requires very little interaction from the player. If it requires interaction, interaction is meaningless. For example, you can choose an affiliation, but it doesn’t matter.
In the game, which plays itself (a parody is present in the auto-kill function that relieves the player of making repetitive actions similar to trivial combat), she heads to the “Killing Fields.” Here you kill one monster after another (serving client after client, writing report after report, receiving phone call after phone call,…) each time collecting a small reward (something the monster drops (affiliate bonus, sales commission, markup on your account once you get Enough rewards, you will automatically return to the city to sell for a level upgrade (career upgrade, house upgrade, …) or a special weapon (vacation, new car, …) straight back to the killing fields.
I was Play It’s been on for half an hour now. I can’t help but admit that it’s kind of fascinating in a trance-like TV-watching state to continue. It’s fun to see what you’ll kill next, what kind of “level” you’ll advance to, or what “special weapon” you’ll be able to buy.
Very similar to real life…
Bartleby split Online players are divided into four categories: Achievers, explorers, killers, and socialites.
Briefly…
- Successful ones play for points, bonuses, levels, weapons, etc. (they act on the world).
- Social players play to interact with other players.
- Explorers play to interact with the world and discover new things.
- Assassins play to influence players, i.e. kill them.
ProgressQuest is a parody of achievers. Achievers are mostly concerned with moving up in the system. Most people are actually overachievers, so most online, computer and – dare I say real world – games are designed with overachievers in mind. You can get them to do anything (namely, hand over their time in the real world, and/or their hard-earned money in the game world) simply by making up titles, little rewards, special items, and things that can show them the world of their accomplishments.
Try clicking on the link and Play it For a moment. Now, let’s say you got $50,000 a year just to watch it or maybe it wasn’t completely automatic, but you had to tap A to attack, and sometimes you’d go back to town to turn your loot and experience points into status tokens, i.e., do something that’s not mentally stimulating on Autopilot. Will you take this job?
Take a red pill Swallow hard.
What amazes me most is that this big piece of social engineering works beautifully. I’m an “explorer”, which I suppose allowed me to learn how the game worked and properly “hack” it to get out the back door. I’m “retired” – and looking for ways to spend my time that don’t involve “accomplishing” and “being everything I can be” by racking up levels, gold, and trinkets.
using Gervais As an analogy, the murderers are the sociopaths, the achievers are the ignorant, the socialists are… well, that analogy kind of falls apart – or at least I don’t see it anymore. In the gaming world, assassins often attract followers who look up to them. I kinda look up to assassins (probably because they kill achievers… hahahaha 
). In the real world, assassins work on Wall Street and in upstairs offices. I kind of see socialists Eloiburger And successful ones like the Morlocks. Explorers are “hackers”. Assassins can’t touch them, and other groups don’t care about them. They exist outside the system, because they have transcended it.
The system we know here is one of a college degree followed by 40 years of 9-5 jobs followed by a retirement home. This system is only part of the world. Fortunately, there is still a lot of world to explore. The hard part, from an early retirement perspective, is how to explore it. Most of the world is built around achievement in the sense of accumulating experience points. Been there and done that; Life is too short. The challenge now is to find a different task.
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Originally published on 2010-08-13 22:04:27.
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