I have just been introduced to the brilliant game. progress search which, coupled with Bartle’s observations of the online gaming world, is rich in applications for understanding the real world, which in many ways can also be compared to a great game.
maybe a game designed?
ProgressQuest is a parody of the MMORPG habit of “grinding” for experience points, i.e. engaging in non-entertaining behavior (killing non-player monsters) to achieve some other end, specifically an increase in levels, wealth, special weapons. .
Just stop me, whenever you get the point of this analogy.
ProgressQuest requires very little interaction from the player. If it requires interaction, the interaction is meaningless. For example, you can choose an affiliation, although it does not matter.
In the game, which is played solo (the parody is in the self-elimination feature which prevents the player from performing the repetitive motions similar to those of trivial combat), you head to the “killing fields”. Here you kill monster after monster (serving customer after customer, writing report after report, answering call after call…) each time you get a small reward (something the monster drops (an affiliate bonus, sales commission, a mark on your resume or post record.) Once you have enough rewards, you will automatically return to town to sell them in exchange for a level upgrade (career advancement, home improvement,…) or a special weapon (vacation , new car,…) back to the extermination camps.
I’ve been playing half an hour ago now. I can’t help but admit that it’s a little fascinating in a comatose, TV-like way to follow. It’s “interesting” to see what you’ll kill next or what kind of “level” you’ll advance to or what “special weapon” you’ll be able to buy.
Very similar to real life…
divided bartleby online players in four categories: achievers, explorers, assassins and socializers.
Soon…
- The winners play to earn points, rewards, levels, weapons, etc. (they act on the world).
- Socializers play to interact with other players.
- The explorers play to interact with the world, discovering new things.
- The assassins play to act on the players, that is to say, to kill them.
ProgressQuest is a parody of achievers. Achievers are primarily concerned with advancing in the system. Most people actually are achievers, which is why most online games, computer games, and dare I say the real world are designed with achievers in mind. You can get them to do anything (specifically, give up their time in the real world and/or their hard-earned money in the game world) just by coming up with titles, little rewards, special things, things they can offer by proving to the world. of his achievements.
Try clicking the link and play it for a while. Now suppose you get $50,000 per year just to see it or maybe it wasn’t fully automatic, but you had to click A to attack, and occasionally return to town to convert loot and experience points into tokens of state, that is, doing something mentally unstimulating on autopilot. Would you take the job?
take a red pill 
Swallow hard.
What fascinates me the most is that this great work of social engineering works beautifully. I’m an ‘Explorer’, which I guess allowed me to figure out how the game works and properly ‘hack’ it out the back door. I have “retired”, looking for ways to spend my time that don’t involve “achieving” and “being all I can be” collecting levels, gold and trinkets.
Using the Gervais analogy, the murderers are the sociopaths, the achievers are the clueless, and the socializers are… well, the analogy breaks down a bit, or at least I don’t see it anymore. In the world of video games, assassins often attract an admiring following. In a sense, I admire the Killers (maybe because they kill the achievers… muhahaha 
). In the real world, the Assassins work on Wall Street and in the offices on the upper floors. I see socializers as eloiburgers and the Achievers as Morlocks. The Explorers are the “hackers”. The assassins can’t touch them and the other groups don’t care about them. They exist outside the system, because they have gone beyond it.
Here the system we know is that of a university degree followed by 40 years for 9-5 jobs followed by a retirement home. This system is but a part of the world. Fortunately, there is still a lot of the world to explore. The tricky part, from an early retirement perspective, is how to explore it. Much of the world is based on achievement in the sense of accumulating experience points. I’ve been there, done that; Life is too short. The challenge now is to find a different search.
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Originally posted on Aug 13, 2010 at 10:04:27 PM.
