Regarding the final point, about whether there is a way to "quit the ant game", I think there may sort of be one in the future. The article doesn't account for the possibility of there being only one ant colony that has dominated the entire area, thus eliminating the competitive aspect of its evolution.
I think we are a long way off from even a world government in name, and if and when we first get there it will perhaps be like the wild west in that there is a loose sense of a government presence but much conflict is still settled locally. But if the centralized powers become strong enough, eventually they could effectively end war, with massive economic ramifications as that expense is diverted elsewhere. Obviously there would still be peacekeeping forces, but those would be a massive deescalation compared to the current state of the world.
The danger of this centralization, of course, is that all the eggs are then in one basket. Corruption of that society means corruption of all of humanity. But the cost-benefit of even enslavement under such a government may be worth it on the whole. It doesn't look like it when you're living in a place not ravaged by war, but a world dictator would be better than being in a country being bombed and mined (in both senses of the word) over and over again. And who knows, perhaps we could have a world government some day that is democratic, and our biggest battles will be protests and politics. Call me naive. :)
Some video games that explore the human condition and could be said to be Art with the capital A:
The Stanley Parable (deconstruction of what it is to play a game. It starts with a third person narration of your character being at work, pushing buttons all day without being quite sure why, and proceeds into multiple endings that deconstruct reality in quite creative ways that sometimes break the fourth wall)
Braid (Mario clone, but you can rewind time and there's a story line that riffs on the old Mario memes but uses them as a metaphor for the atomic bomb)
Dragon Age: Origins (DnD based game with excessively fiddly combat but a fairly massive branching story line, asking the user to make many moral choices, with outcomes ranging from mostly happy to everybody dies)
Portal I and II (notable for their sci-fi dystopian narrator GlaDOS, who is voice acted by an opera singer who plays a computer that has gone insane)
A lot of what computer games do as an art form is fundamentally different than other genres - their chief advantage is interactivity, which is something we haven't known what to do with in art very much prior to this, other than a handful of plays that break the fourth wall.
This interactivity allows for experiments in the concept of community and alternative models of fairness and social status. The reason I still would qualify these as art is that they are exploring these spaces in a non-systematic and intuitive manner rather than an academic one.
This puts MMOs at the top of the medium as an example of what games can do to explore the human condition. They can be life-consuming and addictive, but they explore alternative identities, economies, and social systems in a way and on a scale that no purely intellectual endeavor detached from real economic and political consequences has ever done before. As to what we take from this, I'm not sure other than World of Warcraft has taught me how naive libertarian economics can be given how completely a player was able to take over the entire server economy on one server by just buying low and selling high until his economic advantage was sufficient to control the market.
Yeah like I said in another comment, I'm really not trying to deny the validity or value of individual games or anything like that. Portal is brilliant, and I really liked DA:O (though not quite as much as Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity). I just think that the Shakespeare of the video game medium, whatever form that would even take, hasn't been born yet.
Portal may be ok puzzle, but I just really fail to see that as some kind high art equivalent. I mean, it is fun for enough people for me to be sure it is something valuable, but calling it "exploring human condition" would be a massive stretch.
It is enjoyable puzzle that was big deal when puzzles like that were rare. But it is not a game you will show next generation of children so that they learn something about human condition or some such.
Yeah, that's fair. But I'd put it in the category of like sci-fi movies (she's obviously based on Hal from 2001), and Portal 2 has movie-equivalent levels of storyline.
I think it's an art form in its infancy, and that different arts have different levels of both time spent and depth of understanding gained by taking them in. How much does a painting teach you about the human condition?
Most paintings don't, but that standard came from top thread and not from me. Imo it us ok for majority of them to not be that special.
Most paintings are ideally fun to look at and then get forgotten. Others have some practical purpose (showing war at the time with no photos, celebrating personality for propaganda purpose etc) or are simply moving craft to higher level.
The human conditions ones were the ones in what I called practical category. For example when I was reading about John Brown, that famous painting of him helped me to keep in mind the personality. I have some more examples like that but way more obscure.
I think the best of contemporary writing (whether fun or human condition level) is in movie series. That is format that is currently at the top, having the most complicated and touching and what not storylines. None of that was possible before streaming services.
Yeah, that could be. It's a young genre and I think that paintings from before perspective became systematically understood are super awkward. That's a cool thought. I'm totally okay with blowing some hours to experience the Hamlet of games.
The only part of this I really agree with is that the music industry is harming artists more than usual. It is a meme at least as old as jazz or even older (Baroque music was so-named because it was said to be lopsided, like a misshapen pearl) that music ain't what it used to be.
There is still great music being made, and the really deep stuff has always gotten ignored by most people most of the time. Heck, I majored in music and I don't listen to Bach or Coltrane every day. That stuff is too rich for every occasion.
I'd say that innovation within genres - just people making good songs - is every bit as important as creating new genres. New genres aren't automatically created at a certain rate. They're an event, triggered by major social changes or new cultural influences most of the time. For America to invent a new genre we might need to conquer or be conquered by someone else, or have a new wave of immigration.
Some good artists currently making popular music with depth and interest off the top of my head:
St. Vincent, Dessa, Chris Thile, SquarePusher, BJ Cole, Run the Jewels, Billy Joel (I list him here because rather than just repeating his same hits forever, he went and recently released a classical-style piano album that's quite good, so he's still growing and changing as an artist), Tori Amos (she's been making music a long time but has a new style every decade or so).
I dislike the stuff called music so much these days that I have started to listen to classical music. As a hardcore grunge and heavy metal addict I ever thought that hell would freeze before. But the nth remix of a 90 hit doesn't move me - nothing original in it.
I think time will tell us that a bar, alcohol and blue smoke will do more for creativity than a gym and health food all day long.
Classical can get pretty metal, for sure. :) Wagner and Mahler come to mind.
On a totally different note - have you listened to Them Crooked Vultures? John Paul Jones, formerly Led Zeppelin, playing distorted console steel is pretty wild.
A friend and I were having a tangentially related conversation about net-healthy processes that could theoretically be mandated during a pandemic and their effects on the populace at large.
Putting everyone on a daily fitness regimen would almost certainly save lives, even outside of our current pandemic. Likewise, if things got bad enough that grocery stores had to close and the national guard / army / gov were called in to deliver daily rations to households, I wonder what kind of effect that'd have on the country's obesity problem long-term, also.
Ignoring the completely dystopic dictatorship and near-apocalyptic context that'd be required for such a scenario, of course.
Does anyone else feel like this study is a bit tautological in that it's measuring attributes that are valued by the AA method? Many other methods don't preach abstinence so of course they're going to get less total abstinence duration. But I wonder if there are better ways to measure overall effectiveness and well-being. Some people learn to manage their drink and would fare poorly on that metric.
This is an interesting debate, and one where I fear the young generation's attitudes seem to differ. My 16yo says she'd rather get targeted ads than non, because it's just more relevant and she might want to buy those things. She has zero concern about the psychological manipulation factor and assumes she will just say no if she doesn't want a product.
I guess I can see where she's coming from, as I don't avoid physical stores when I'm not planning to buy things. Window shopping is fun. But still, I think all that tracking has a dark side that's difficult to convey to the generation that grew up taking it for granted. Are we just old and fear the new and unknown?
The one thing I definitely hate is how bloated the web has gotten. Everything works great on my old computers that I switched over to linux, until I need to just google (duckduckgo) some simple piece of information on a forum. And then I find myself fantasizing about upgrading to an i7 so I can read the same basic text that could be read online when 1ghz processors were a pipe dream.
Edit: and this is with ad blockers and anti-trackers turned on. The whole browser experience is just slower, and I think the act of having to scan and block all that cruft must have an impact. Browsers used to function on Windows XP machines back in the day, right?
These would be less than convenient to type, but perhaps as we go more and more towards a non-typing web where a walled-garden start page and predefined links lead to the most popular sites with a click, these URLs will become fashionable. I think if so, this will herald the impending death of the human-read and typed URL in favor of start page links and search results.
You don't have to search. Just hit the apple emoji. If you use it frequently, it'll probably be on the front. If not, it takes two seconds to hit the category it's in and then press it.
