Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cogman10 1285 days ago
> I can't understand folks who don't understand this concept.

Ok, very simple example, are slot machines fun?

I think anyone can objectively look at a slot machine and say "no, that's really not fun". Yet, people spend their entire retirements on slot machines. People DIE pumping quarters into a slot machine. People wear diapers to slot machines. Slot machines are HIGHLY profitable for casinos (which is why they have them).

Fun and profit are not the same thing. Some games, such as Diablo Immortal, have realized that addicting is more profitable than fun. The entire game industry has learned that if you randomize rewards (loot boxes) you can trigger addiction without having a fun game.

> You are not the only opinion in this world

I'd look into the mirror before giving this advice. I realize that some people find gambling fun. Whatever floats your boat. But I also realize that there is such a thing as gambling addiction and it is highly profitable.

3 comments

The proper resolution to this is the realization that fun != good. Fun is a property of context, and anything can be made fun with the right context. Multiplayer is the greatest cheatcode to generating fun -- with friends, poking a bloating corpse and playing the ol' hoop n' stick is fun.

Fun cannot be discussed, or argued, because you cannot properly share that context with others, and you cannot deny the reality of their context.

But good is a property of the game itself -- it's essentially the answer to the question "how well does the game achieve the goals it chases, and how well does it choose its goals?". This is still somehow subjective, but dramatically less so -- we can actually discuss it in a manner that's sensible. To a degree, the discussion has to factor in that we have different beliefs of what those goals are, and whether those are good goals to have, but this is true of any judgement.

And when talking about whether a movie, book, game, etc is any good, no one gives a shit whether you had "fun" playing it, because that tells us nothing about whether its good. It just tells us "your" experience -- your specific relationship to the work -- more about you than it... but we're not talking about you.

This is all well and good, and I agree, fun can be different things to different people. So can good.

But that wasn't the comment I was responding to. The comment I responded to made the positive assertion "Things are fun because they are profitable"

> what you define as fun isn't apparently what others define as such, at least when it comes to voting with their dollars.

If you want to change the argument to "fun is unknowable" I can get behind that statement. However, I think the slot machine example is a really good one to prove that fun and profit are not the same thing. Even if you want to argue that the slot machines can be fun, I think you'd have a hard time arguing that addicts to slots are all having a blast.

What's changed in the gaming industry is more focus on profit and less on fun. The gaming industry has learned is what B.F. Skinner discovered decades ago [1], how to get repeat behaviors out of someone with randomize rewards.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201311/us...

I think you're barking up the wrong tree here, friend. You seem to be missing my point, which is that "fun" is subjective and there simply is no definition of "fun" that applies to everyone.

Your whole "slot machine" example is predicated on my response being, "Well no, slot machines aren't fun." However, I do think slot machines are loads of fun! Not for me, but for the millions of people who sit there, spend very tiny sums of money (think like $5 for literally 12 hours of chill entertainment), and get to feel good about themselves while they do it.

Who gets to define 'fun'?
Anything can be fun to anyone, fair enough.

That said, I reject a definition of fun that involves how profitable something is because of the slot machine example.

If fun is anything, it's not getting a diaper rash while going broke.

What if fun is not 'anything'?

i.e. if it were just electrical impulses going back and forth?

Then it isn't anything. What's your point?
Then there's nothing to reject in the first place.