Ontology porn
In David MacIver’s “What is it like to read LitRPG?” he brings up the idea of “clarity porn” as applied to games:
Slay the Spire is about making decisions, but those decisions are all of a very particular form. You’re making choices about what cards to add to your deck, what moves to make in a fight, which path to choose up the spire. On the basis of those choices, you will win or lose. These are hard, difficult, choices which benefit from significant care, but they are are all fundamentally clear cut in their ultimate goal.
Because what you’re not doing is making choices about whether you should really be slaying the spire in the first place or whether perhaps you’re just invading a city of people who would just rather be left alone to practice their religion in peace. You don’t ask how you can escape from the endless cycle of death and rebirth trapping you in eternal suffering. All you ask is how you can most effectively achieve your goal of slaying the spire.
Steam tells me I’ve also sunk 322 hours into Slay the Spire (and another 69 in Downfall). And that’s not even my drug of choice — I’ve probably played more Spirit Island and Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, and I’ve definitely played more Through the Ages, where I’m a top 100 player in the International League. I absolutely get where David is coming from (even if I personally can’t stand LitRPG). There’s something extremely satisfying about improving your decision-making capabilities under constraints, and I think my time playing these games has been spent well.
But I also agree with the framing of these games as “choice porn”. The interesting thing about the world is exactly how much you can change the frame to create a new distinction. In Slay the Spire, the wonderful UI makes it easy to have literally all of the information you need for your decision at your fingertips. But in the world, you can always go back to the well of detail, leaving you always with the outer-decision of “am I making every distinction I ought to be?”
TIS is a mongrel bunch not particularly motivated by any central principle, but I like to think a major theme is escaping frames and evaluating the affordances of your current ontology; the willingness to zoom out and contextualize. I’m often asked to explain what exactly our deal is, and David’s framing seems like a very useful way to help explain it. We accept that it’s vitally important to get good at hard, difficult choices that benefit from significant care, the central premise of modern rationality. But focusing on only that devolves into choice porn, so TIS is an attempt to build a shared understanding of observations and tricks that go beyond strictly defined, gamified frames.
Talking with David about this article led him to link another one he’d written about addiction, “The first hard choice.” Another aspect of choice porn is that it’s easy; much easier than looking for structural issues in your conceptions of the world around you. And it’s definitely not a complete waste of your time: DC:SS has improved my patience and comfort with failure, Spirit Island has increased my mental capacity for counterfactuals, and Through the Ages constantly checks my skills at prediction and optimization. But it’s extremely important that some of your intellectual growth and play happens outside of these strict frames with the rules and optimization criteria given to you. Choice porn corrodes agency by totally divorcing your skills of decision making from any maniuplation of the frames themselves. The well-defined objectives are the service you’re being sold when you buy a game, letting you focus solely on consumption; but, as I said in Desystemize #9, you should never mistake a setters kindness for the indifferent illegibility of real-world problems.
Having said all that, I need to call myself out a bit. Yes, studying representational issues is the antidote to getting stuck in static frames, and I feel a genuine moral clarity in championing this sort of thing. But just endlessly rehashing cases where ontological thinking is important is itself a little porny, isn’t it? Reading case studies about frames gone bad can be an enormous help to escape these traps of naively believing any problem formulation you come across, but I am integrating this knowledge to do better thinking myself? Or am I just using it for a sense of smug satisfaction, exactly like others use LitRPG for a sense of a well-defined world? I think TIS is better than most in studying things that can actually be used, but at the end of the day, the proof is in the using.