do you personally find these status and alliance games interesting? Why?
They’re way more interesting than video games, for example. Or watching television. Or numerous other activities people find fun and engaging. Of course, if you’re bad at them you aren’t going to enjoy them; the same goes for people who can’t get past the first stage of Pac-Man.
Video games have a lot of diversity to them and different genres engage very different skills. Small talk all seems to encompass the same stuff, namely social ranking.
Some of us know how to do it but just don’t -care-, and that doesn’t mean we’re in fact bad at it. I think that is the point this comment thread is going for.
Be careful when you notice more diversity in subject matter you’re a fan of than in subject matter that you’re not. I’m not sure if there’s a name for this bias, but there should be.
When you do that sort of thing to people, it’s called stereotyping of the group you don’t like. I don’t know of a word for noticing distinctions in the thing or people you do like.
There’s also the fact that video games … have a freaking rule book, which tells you things that aren’t complete fabrications designed to make you fail the game if you’re stupid enough to follow them.
I thought for a bit that it would be interesting to have, say, a WWI game where the tutorial teaches you nineteenth-century tactics and then lets you start the game by throwing massed troops against barbed wire, machineguns, and twentieth-century artillery. The slaughter would be epic.
This is something that’s been discussed a few times on LW, but I don’t think it’s accurate. I don’t think there are two sets of rules, a “real” one and a “fake” one. Rather, I think that the rules for social interaction are very complicated and have a lot of exceptions, and any attempt to discuss it will inevitably be oversimplified. Temple Grandin’s book discusses this idea: all social rules have exceptions that can’t be spelled out in full.
The status test (actually a social skills test) isn’t to see if you fail by being stupid enough to follow the “fake” rules rather than the “real ones”. It’s to see if you’re savvy enough to understand all the nuances and exceptions to the rules.
...with video games, the printed, widely available strategy guides often tend to be lacking. For adventure games or Final Fantasy-type games, you can often get decent walkthroughs. But for many games, like say, Diablo II (thinking of the last strategy guide I read), the strategy guide sold in mainstream bookstores can’t get you much farther than a n00b level of play.
To actually get good, the best thing to do is to go to online forums and listen to what people who are actually experienced at the game are saying.
In the case of both social skills and video games, the best way to learn is to practice, and to get advice from the source: people who already broke down the task and are experienced and successful at it, not the watered-down crap in mainstream bookstores.
Right, but at least with video games, the rule book tells you what the game is, and what it is you’re judged on. That gives you enough to make sense of all the other advice people throw at you and in-game experience you get, which is a lot more than you can say of social life.
You effectively answered your own comment, but to clarify -
Strategy guides on dead tree have been obsolete for more than a decade. GameFAQs is over a decade old, and it’s the best place to go for strategies, walkthroughs, and message boards full of analysis by armies of deticated fans. People are still finding new and inventive strategies to optimize their first-generation Pokemon games, after all. Games have long passed the point on the complexity axis where the developper’s summary of the point of the game is enough to convey an optimal strategy.
It’s a bad analogy because there are different kinds of games, but only one kind of small talk? If you don’t think pub talk is a different game than a black tie dinner, well, you’ve obviously never played. Why do people do it? Well, when you beat a video game, you’ve beat a video game. When you win at social interaction, you’re winning at life—social dominance improves your chances of reproducing.
As for rule books: the fact that the ‘real’ rules are unwritten is part of the fun. Of course, that’s true for most video games. Pretty much any modern game’s real tactics come from players, not developers. You think you can win a single StarCraft match by reading the manual? Please.
No, pub talk is not exactly the same as a black tie dinner. The -small talk- aspect, though, very much is. It all comes down to social ranking of the participants. In the former, it skews to word assortative mating and in the latter presumably toward power and resources in the buisness world.
If you have a need or desire to win at social interaction, good for you. Please consider that for other people, it -really- isn’t that important. There is more to life than attracting mates and business partners. Those things are often a means to an end, and it is preferable to some of us to pursue the ends directly when possible.
They’re way more interesting than video games, for example. Or watching television. Or numerous other activities people find fun and engaging. Of course, if you’re bad at them you aren’t going to enjoy them; the same goes for people who can’t get past the first stage of Pac-Man.
Terrible analogy.
Video games have a lot of diversity to them and different genres engage very different skills. Small talk all seems to encompass the same stuff, namely social ranking.
Some of us know how to do it but just don’t -care-, and that doesn’t mean we’re in fact bad at it. I think that is the point this comment thread is going for.
Be careful when you notice more diversity in subject matter you’re a fan of than in subject matter that you’re not. I’m not sure if there’s a name for this bias, but there should be.
I would expect this people are just more familiar with what they’re a fan of, but it could also be related to outgroup homogeneity bias.
That’s definitely it. I suspect it’s too much like work for most people to pay attention to the details of things they aren’t fond of.
Your link is broken.
Oops, fixed.
My father disparages all video games as being “little men running around on a screen”.
When you do that sort of thing to people, it’s called stereotyping of the group you don’t like. I don’t know of a word for noticing distinctions in the thing or people you do like.
Could it just be characterized as a specific example of the halo effect?
There’s also the fact that video games … have a freaking rule book, which tells you things that aren’t complete fabrications designed to make you fail the game if you’re stupid enough to follow them.
I really like the idea of creating a video game with a deceptive rulebook.
I thought for a bit that it would be interesting to have, say, a WWI game where the tutorial teaches you nineteenth-century tactics and then lets you start the game by throwing massed troops against barbed wire, machineguns, and twentieth-century artillery. The slaughter would be epic.
I really like this idea too. Portal does this to some extent, but the idea could be taken much farther.
This is something that’s been discussed a few times on LW, but I don’t think it’s accurate. I don’t think there are two sets of rules, a “real” one and a “fake” one. Rather, I think that the rules for social interaction are very complicated and have a lot of exceptions, and any attempt to discuss it will inevitably be oversimplified. Temple Grandin’s book discusses this idea: all social rules have exceptions that can’t be spelled out in full.
The status test (actually a social skills test) isn’t to see if you fail by being stupid enough to follow the “fake” rules rather than the “real ones”. It’s to see if you’re savvy enough to understand all the nuances and exceptions to the rules.
Not disagreeing with your general point, but...
...with video games, the printed, widely available strategy guides often tend to be lacking. For adventure games or Final Fantasy-type games, you can often get decent walkthroughs. But for many games, like say, Diablo II (thinking of the last strategy guide I read), the strategy guide sold in mainstream bookstores can’t get you much farther than a n00b level of play.
To actually get good, the best thing to do is to go to online forums and listen to what people who are actually experienced at the game are saying.
In the case of both social skills and video games, the best way to learn is to practice, and to get advice from the source: people who already broke down the task and are experienced and successful at it, not the watered-down crap in mainstream bookstores.
Right, but at least with video games, the rule book tells you what the game is, and what it is you’re judged on. That gives you enough to make sense of all the other advice people throw at you and in-game experience you get, which is a lot more than you can say of social life.
You effectively answered your own comment, but to clarify -
Strategy guides on dead tree have been obsolete for more than a decade. GameFAQs is over a decade old, and it’s the best place to go for strategies, walkthroughs, and message boards full of analysis by armies of deticated fans. People are still finding new and inventive strategies to optimize their first-generation Pokemon games, after all. Games have long passed the point on the complexity axis where the developper’s summary of the point of the game is enough to convey an optimal strategy.
Your last paragraph is gold.
It’s a bad analogy because there are different kinds of games, but only one kind of small talk? If you don’t think pub talk is a different game than a black tie dinner, well, you’ve obviously never played. Why do people do it? Well, when you beat a video game, you’ve beat a video game. When you win at social interaction, you’re winning at life—social dominance improves your chances of reproducing.
As for rule books: the fact that the ‘real’ rules are unwritten is part of the fun. Of course, that’s true for most video games. Pretty much any modern game’s real tactics come from players, not developers. You think you can win a single StarCraft match by reading the manual? Please.
No, pub talk is not exactly the same as a black tie dinner. The -small talk- aspect, though, very much is. It all comes down to social ranking of the participants. In the former, it skews to word assortative mating and in the latter presumably toward power and resources in the buisness world.
If you have a need or desire to win at social interaction, good for you. Please consider that for other people, it -really- isn’t that important. There is more to life than attracting mates and business partners. Those things are often a means to an end, and it is preferable to some of us to pursue the ends directly when possible.
The video game analogy is just plain bad.