Sure, game center achievements are a trivial thing to be concerned with. Most people here are quite a bit younger than I am, and probably in many cases have relatively simpler lives at this point, and probably give video games and game achievements more importance than I do... still, I have to admit to feeling some satisfaction when I make it to the top ten on a level. I can understand it. I do have a hard time understanding (believing) your claim that you don't care at all what others think of you. Do you just mean as far as video games go, or all around? If the latter, that's where you lose me. Are you one of those people who wears the flannel pajamas out in public? Those things sure are comfy. I almost wish that I didn't care what people think of me so I could wear them all day too.
So you could instantly recover from even the most humiliating embarrassment if it wasn't your fault? You gotta feel something when people laugh at you. Think of it as a fantasy version of the satisfaction you gain from these real-life achievements you mention. Of course it's not a substitute for anything, but it's just part of the fun. It tends to be more intense among younger players, because they are less involved with the real world and are less capable of real-life achievement (It's almost always the younger players who take games seriously enough to beat each other up over them ). It's all on a subconscious level though, and most people aren't aware of why they are or aren't competitive gamers, so to say that someone is just playing to prove himself is a big exaggeration in most cases.
I might be annoyed that they are so stupid. But that doesn't seem like what you are getting at. This conversation, where you keep saying, "You must think X," and I say, "No, I don't think X," seems to be going nowhere. I am not like you think that I must be. You could learn something from this, people are more different than you recognize. If you have Asperger's, then you should be especially aware that people can be very different from one another.
That seems to imply that I'm coming up with my own theories and speculations. I assure you that's not the case. I think you misunderstand what I'm trying to say; I'm not trying to tell you who you are or what you're like. I'm talking about some of the psychological aspects of people in general. In any case, yeah, this argument has gone sterile.
The World Wibe Web is the liberty kingdom. So noone can impose nothing to anyone. TV, newspapers, radio can order, Internet can not. Period.
If you are making a statistical argument, that most people are like this, then you would need statistical data. If you are making a universal argument, that all people are like this, then it's contradicted by a single counterexample, e.g., me. It seems to me you're asserting the fallacy of central position. You're defending your own position by claiming everyone is like you. But they aren't.
I'm not sure what you're even talking about. What position is that exactly? I don't assume that everyone is like me. In fact, like I said, I have trouble relating to people a lot of the time, and I don't know anyone that resembles me. And just because I was talking about gamers and their attitude towards scores and achievements doesn't mean that any of it applies to me, because that's how I talk about any type of personality, including say, criminals. Why? Because I spend a lot of time learning about this kind of thing, and not because it's related to me in any way.
The position that people care about others not being able to get the game achievements that they worked hard for, because that would make them feel less appreciated by the rest of society than if they can hold up what they did. I think this is actually not how most people feel, much less everyone. We should probably stop derailing the thread, though.
Well, that's an inaccurate summarization of what I've been trying to say, but no matter; I'd have to put it in the form of an essay to make it properly comprehendible. Edit: For clarification: I'm saying that I seem to have failed miserably at expressing my thoughts on the subject.
If you ever feel that you can explain why some people don't like others to get their achievements too easily, I would be glad to hear it.
Well, I can never resist a challenge, can I? Quite frankly though, I can't give a clear and concise explanation, because the reasons are too complex too express in a few words or even sentences. I think the only way to truly understand this kind of thing is by relating to it, directly or indirectly. So if I wanted to explain it to someone, I would give an extreme example and see if they can relate to that. If they can, then they should be able to picture it on a smaller scale. I don't know if you were able to relate to the hard-working student with cheating classmates scenario, in which the student felt that his achievement was cheapened by the fact that his genuine well-earned A+ is indistinguishable from all the fake and meaningless ones, but assuming you were able to relate, a player could feel the same way towards these achievements, albeit on a much smaller scale. The A+ is quite a significant achievement, while the game-related achievement is practically useless, but the same concept applies. I think that's the best I could currently do. I'm disoriented from sleepiness.
If you want to use your good grades to win a scholarship, or admission to graduate school, or a good job, then I can certainly understand why you would be unhappy if your credentials are devalued. But if you just want to post your game achievements on your Facebook page and have other people think what an exceptional game player you are, I can't relate to that.
no, Oxynidus is talking about how the person personally feels about it, not how it would affect them publicly... why am I getting involved in this?
Good. But can you relate to, say, a kid who's about to tell his parents he's the only one in his class that got a good grade in the exam, because he wants to make them proud (with no actual physical reward)? (The only purpose of the question is to figure out if you can actually relate to the child or imagine his satisfaction/joy in this (cliche) scenario)
I think you're misinterpreting Oxy's post. It seems to me that he's not making descriptive claims of the population. He's not saying "most people feel this way", or "all people feel this way". Instead, he's saying "SOME people feel this way... and here's why they feel that way." For such an argument, he needs neither statistical data nor the absence of counterexamples, he simply needs some examples of those feelings (which have already been provided in this thread), and some sort of model for describing how those feelings arose. And that model can take one of many different forms. It looks to me like he was talking about psychology, and indeed, the psychology of video games is a burgeoning field that has a lot to say on the subject of video game achievements. Psychology has already established that the most common motivation for achievement hunting is pride- a desire to demonstrate skill in a public manner. If psychology is not your thing, you could also take several other tacks- you could always go the neuroscience route, for instance, and create fMRI scans of achievement-obsessed gamers to determine which portions of their brain were being activated by their achievements and, thus, to better determine what rewards they were getting out of it. Or you could go with one of my personal favorites, evolutionary biology. For instance, I could posit that this whole fuss about how easily others obtain achievements could very well be an evolutionary relic of sexual competition between males. Sexual competition- whereby males demonstrate a higher degree of fitness in a seemingly arbitrary measure, and females accept that demonstration as indicative of general genetic fitness- is nearly ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, and that would easily explain why some people feel like their accomplishments are lessened by the sheer number of others who have managed the same accomplishment. Anyway, if this sort of thing is interesting to you, I'd recommend checking out http://www.psychologyofgames.com/
As I was mentioning in my other post, a lot of the underlying motivations behind these feelings are evolutionary relics. There's no rational or objective reason for someone to feel that their accomplishments are lessened by the number of others who have accomplished the same (unless we're talking about a zero-sum game, which video game achievements most certainly are not), but as I said, because of mate competition among our ancestors, our brains behave in this irrational manner. To use an example: if Joe Smith makes $250,000 a year and he lives in a neighborhood where the median annual income is $50,000, Joe Smith will feel very rich and be very satisfied with his income. If he lives in a neighborhood where the median income is $2,000,000, he'll feel very poor and be very dissatisfied with his income. In reality, he's making the same money in both instances, and his standard of living is exactly the same; however, since we've been bred to measure ourselves against our peers, we can't separate that "$250,000 annual income" from the context of our neighbors and those we interact with on a daily basis. Likewise, while my achievement is exactly the same regardless of how many others share in it, the pride I take in the accomplishment will always be framed within the context of my peers. As an educated, scientific, and rational adult, I can recognize those feelings for what they are, but since I can't divorce my rational mind from my lizard brain, I cannot avoid those feelings in the first place.
I disagree. What makes an accomplishment meaningful is that it was hard to complete, and if many others have done it, then it isn't much of an accomplishment.
That doesn't make sense if they used an easy shortcut. How hard it was for you to complete the achievement is unaltered by other people getting the same achievement with some shortcut. This is why it seems to me the satisfaction of accomplishment should be unaffected by that. Just as if you studied hard and did well on a test you should expect your parents to be equally pleased by that even if every other kid cheated on the same test.
