I have a preference for eating tasty food in restaurants. But I am absolutely not interested in teaching chefs how to cook. If I am not satisfied with the food, I will simply never come back to that restaurant again. There are many restaurants to choose from. I don’t really care about what happens to the owner of the bad restaurant; it’s their problem, not mine.
Does this make me an entirely passive NPC, because I completely refuse to participate in this “how to get better at cooking” business and merely evaluate my satisfaction with the results? I don’t think this would be a fair description. I am not waiting helplessly; my strategy is evaluating different restaurants and choosing the best. Yeah, if we assume that each chef can only make a limited amount of food, I am kinda playing a zero-sum game against other customers here. But still, playing zero-sum games is not passivity.
But a naive chef could complain: “All those customers do is criticize. They never help us, never teach us. How are we supposed to learn? Everyone’s first cooked meal is far from perfect. Practice makes perfect, but practice inevitably includes making a few mistakes.” From his point of view, the customers are kinda passive: they want better food, but they are not helping anyone to cook better; they merely avoid those who cook worse, which per se does not make them cook better.
(To make it even worse, in this world vocational schools for chefs have a very bad reputation. People believe they all teach you to use the cheapest ingredients and artificial flavors, because they once read an internet forum where a few chefs debated exactly this. Thus most chefs take a great care to avoid anything that could remind their customers of a vocational school.)
First, here you are a consumer. You have no relationships with chefs and are not interested in relationships with chefs. You pay your money, you get your product and its qualities is all you care about. If that product came from a kitchen two blocks down the street, or was flown frozen from overseas, or made by a robot chef—you don’t care as long as it’s good.
Second, you are active and make decisions. It is not the case that chefs jump on you as you walk down the street and attempt to stuff their food into your mouth. You pick the restaurant you go to. I see no passivity at all, it’s just teaching chefs cooking is neither your role nor your desire.
I have a preference for eating tasty food in restaurants. But I am absolutely not interested in teaching chefs how to cook. If I am not satisfied with the food, I will simply never come back to that restaurant again. There are many restaurants to choose from. I don’t really care about what happens to the owner of the bad restaurant; it’s their problem, not mine.
Does this make me an entirely passive NPC, because I completely refuse to participate in this “how to get better at cooking” business and merely evaluate my satisfaction with the results? I don’t think this would be a fair description. I am not waiting helplessly; my strategy is evaluating different restaurants and choosing the best. Yeah, if we assume that each chef can only make a limited amount of food, I am kinda playing a zero-sum game against other customers here. But still, playing zero-sum games is not passivity.
But a naive chef could complain: “All those customers do is criticize. They never help us, never teach us. How are we supposed to learn? Everyone’s first cooked meal is far from perfect. Practice makes perfect, but practice inevitably includes making a few mistakes.” From his point of view, the customers are kinda passive: they want better food, but they are not helping anyone to cook better; they merely avoid those who cook worse, which per se does not make them cook better.
(To make it even worse, in this world vocational schools for chefs have a very bad reputation. People believe they all teach you to use the cheapest ingredients and artificial flavors, because they once read an internet forum where a few chefs debated exactly this. Thus most chefs take a great care to avoid anything that could remind their customers of a vocational school.)
I don’t understand your analogy.
First, here you are a consumer. You have no relationships with chefs and are not interested in relationships with chefs. You pay your money, you get your product and its qualities is all you care about. If that product came from a kitchen two blocks down the street, or was flown frozen from overseas, or made by a robot chef—you don’t care as long as it’s good.
Second, you are active and make decisions. It is not the case that chefs jump on you as you walk down the street and attempt to stuff their food into your mouth. You pick the restaurant you go to. I see no passivity at all, it’s just teaching chefs cooking is neither your role nor your desire.