GAME THEORY
GAMER PROPAGANDA
I was listening to a podcast and a guy said you’ll learn the most about a person if you play a videogame with him or Monopoly something like that and it seems to me like it’s the opposite of that. Sounds like gamer propaganda. Like isn’t the totally artificial environment of the game the exact opposite of how you’re usually interacting with someone. There you are learning the least about them. Don’t you learn more having dinner together? Walking through grocery aisles together? (I purposefully chose grocery aisles (in an internet article (opening with a reference to social simulation, a podcast)) to make you mad about artificial environments, go cry, bitch.) And then the question betrays the answer: maybe everything is a game to some people. So, we learned more about the gamer speaking on the podcast than we have gleaned some sort of eternal wisdom. The guy wants to win. Some people are out here playing a game. Taking it very seriously. Have you ever heard of game theory? Big books, game of life computer program ching chong bing bing wahoo serious shit. Guy made a computer program that’s supposed to be life. Conway’s Game of Life.
But the truth is it’s neither a game nor is it life, it’s a Rorschach test. What do you see? I don’t know or care because I was looking at the critters in my backyard instead of looking at a cellular automata glider. (You can see so many bugs when you get on the ground.) You can just push Conway into a locker. You can just call him a nerd and fuck his girlfriend. There are guys out here talking about iterated prisoners’ dilemmas. (It’s me.) Did you know tit-for-tat is the optimal strategy across iterated prisoners’ dilemmas? I had that thought (/the thought had me) when I was reading Sadly, Porn where The Last Psychiatrist writes so much about keeping an internal ledger and balancing the ledger by depriving others and everyone is keeping a ledger of relative psychological deprivation with one another and I thought to myself, chuckling internally like a euphoric atheist donning his fedora, doesn’t The Last Psychiatrist know that tit-for-tat is the optimal strategy across iterated prisoners’ dilemmas? I won. I beat The Last Psychiatrist with facts and logic.
Is life a series of iterated prisoners’ dilemmas? Are you gonna win? It would be a shame if you lost. Are you keeping an internal ledger? Are you a cellular automata? Looks pretty dark inside a locker, huh.
Life isn’t a game and you don’t have to keep a ledger. You can just stop if you’re doing it. Games are games. You can just turn the game off. But you’re scared because you’re a smart guy wearing a fedora upvoting epic dunks on Reddit. A bird is not a cellular automata glider. Name one of the birds in your backyard. If you know about cellular automata and you don’t know the sound of one of the birds in your backyard then I get to kill you. You fucking nerd.
Quit playing games with my heart. Quit it.
But you can’t stop because you are a gamer. You are a spy kid in the movie Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over born inside a virtual world. Baudrillard loved Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. He noted that the very title of the movie is a reference to the failure mode of a video game: the Game Over screen, and yet, ending the game was the goal of the titular spy kids characters. Curious. Winning the game was ending the game. The goal of the spy kids was to exit the game. When you finish the game have you won or lost.
You’re allowed to play games sometimes. I give you permission. But only if I like them. You have to show me first because you are a woman who needs permission to do things. A woman spy kid.
You’re only allowed to play Noita. I declare. I have declared. Why am I giving you permission to play Noita? Because I have taste and you do not and I have a leash around your neck you little slut. And you’re too bad at chess to play with me. My head is twice the size of yours. An XL head. I looked up a chart of head sizes and mine is XL. I really did that when I told my gf I have a big head and she said I do not so I took out a tape measure and looked up head sizes and it’s XL. You have a head the size of an adolescent boy. Because you are a woman spy kid. I’m just reporting the facts. Just reading from my teleprompter. I’ll turn it off once we get home.
The reason you are allowed to play Noita is because it is a good game. Why is it a good game? Because its gamified, emergent complexity mirrors the emergent complexity of virtual life in game-world: materialism/physics. (Conway’s Game of Life is an aleatoric movie, not a game. No nudity, so I refuse to watch it. Gamers are FED UP.) Noita is the actual game that Conway wanted to make. Why? Because Noita, like Conway’s Game of Life, is comprised of little boxes (you might call them pixels) which change color depending on the colors of the boxes around it. Noita has more colors and therefore more potential interactions than Game of Life, but we are fundamentally dealing with the same logic. (And we are fundamentally dealing with logic AKA games.) The other difference between Noita and Game of Life is that Noita has a playable character. It’s actually a game. Not aleatoric television. Each pixel in Noita is simulated and changes in accordance with how it interacts with other simulated pixels—meaning a dirt pixel and a water pixel will create a mud pixel, a wood pixel will burn if it touches a fire pixel for enough time. What would happen if the pixel resolution scaled up enough to match the resolution of real life? Trick question. I can hear you yelling about Planck units inside your locker. Resolution is something that an image on a screen has. It’s a number describing how many little boxes comprise the image. You’re screaming and crying in your locker about how there’s nothing arbitrary about Planck units, they’re based entirely on measured physical quantities. And yet once again, we have not gleaned eternal wisdom about nature, we have learned about the gamer stuffed in the locker. The gamer says that everything is measurable and even light is quantized. Everything can be measured and “the resolution of Planck units” is all you need to create the entire world. How’s that going. Has the gamer (the physicist) made anything beyond a game. Would be wild if the vast majority of all his physical descriptions of the world were, by far, mathematical gobbledygook meaning “we do not know and cannot even begin to describe it.” Are ya winning, son?
What makes a game good? There are several factors at play, but for me, an epic gamer, I like emergent complexity. This is, in part (always in parts, huh), why we continue to play chess. The rules are simple but each game has the potential to be different because little simple rules built on top of one another over time can create neat little towers that surprise you. And chess is becoming shittier to play and watch at the highest levels, just like everything else, thanks to computer optimization. No more surprises. The highest level of chess play is a man losing to a computer. Because it’s a game with rules to optimize. The real highest level is watching two computers play against each other. That’s the ultimate gameplay. You don’t even get to play it. You get to watch and jack off. You can’t even compete! But you can feel good you little pleasure optimizer. You little slut. We can borrow an analogy from nature that I and many others have used regarding optimization: nothing beats cancer. Cancer wins every game. Cancer is the most logical biological system.1 (Norm Macdonald said it’s a tie when you and the cancer die. Kinda like keeping an internal psychological ledger balanced. An optimal game.) You are riddled with optimization cancer because you think nature has some resolution and it’s a game and you can win and you’re too busy optimizing pleasure to recognize that the ultimate optimization and dissection game of nature (physics (AKA applied mathematics (AKA applied logic))) can’t tell you shit. You think it can tell you everything because you wanna win the game but the game was rigged from the start. You need me to tell you because you are my little idiot slut with a collar around her neck so you need me to assure you that physics AKA math AKA logic is not going to save you. Logical descriptions will only get you so far and maybe you should exit the game like a spy kid. Exit your little 3-D movie. Game over. Winning the game.
Can we apply physical laws at a large enough scale and a small enough resolution to create life through a computer program? I mean, if everything is material and we understand the rules of the game then it stands to reason that if computation is robust enough, we can create life because it’s just apparent emergent complexity through the basic rules of physics, it’s just a game, and there are only four fundamental physical forces, after all, Noita has more fundamental pixel types. If you think we can create life through logical rules, through a game, then, once again, what you’ve actually done is told us about yourself: you are a gamer retard.
Rationality is a lot like Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. Scott Alexander, rationalist extraordinaire, says, “P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.” Everything is mathematical probability. Everything is logical. Wow this guy’s got it all figured out. Rationality is a game with rules. Applied logic. I am a spy kid. Winning the game is ending the game. Rationality should, if anything, make you recognize that life is not a rational game. I logically deduced that life is not logical. It was a pretty trivial observation, really. “Statistics are more reliable than anecdotes” said my previous victim before I shot him in the face. I’ll let you out of the locker if you promise to turn off the game. If you become a spy kid like me. Also I have a gun.
Oh it’s not? It’s detrimental to the health of the whole organism? In order to come to that conclusion, we have to make a holistic judgment (about the organism and about health and about our judgments). A holistic judgment must take precedence over logic. Biology, logically considered, is just about survival and reproduction, a skill at which cancer cells cannot be beaten. In order to deny the logic of the cancer cell, the biological logic of survival and reproduction, something must take precedence over logic. (This footnote is paraphrased from Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over.)