Principles of Technorealism

1. Technologies are not neutral. A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely free of bias -- that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don't promote certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with both intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Every tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us to c...

 Subjected Under the Guise of Freedom

Any disciplinary power that expends effort to force human beings into a straitjacket of commandments and prohibitions proves inefficient. It is significantly more efficient to ensure that people subordinate themselves to domination on their own. The efficacy defining the system today stems from the fact that, instead of operating through prohibition and privation, it aims to please and fulfill. Instead of making people compliant, it endeavors to make them dependent. This logic of neoliberal...

 Pinball Algorithms

In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever. Pinball developers began to see how they could take advantage of programmable software to monitor, incentivize, and ultimately exploit the players. They had two instruments at their disposal: the score required for a free game, and the match probability. All pinball machines offer a replay to a player who beats some specified score. Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually r...

 Personal Growth is Not Hoarding Knowledge

Personal growth is about figuring things out and gaining experience, not hoarding knowledge. An attitude that promotes discovering the new and the valuable is far more important. Thus, your tactics and strategy should always be changing and evolving. Adopt fresh tactics regularly to replace your old ones. Today is more important than yesterday. What's yours is not the new technique, but rather the effort that goes into unearthing it. Knowing what's needed to make those discoveries will allow...

 All Efficient Strategies Have Their Limits

At the end of the day, all of the efficient approaches and winning strategies have their limits. For example, say there's this great move in some fighting game that only a certain character can use. Everyone knows that using it makes you stronger, so everyone starts using it. Pretty soon, everyone's playing the same way. The move is so influential that everyone depends on it. I would never use that move in such a situation. It wouldn't be easy, of course, but it is never impossible to win wi...

 Importance of Incorporating Change into your Life

Daily change is helpful for anyone, not just gamers. Try taking a new route home, or ordering something you've never eaten, or getting off the train at a different station than usual. It doesn't matter how small, the important thing is to change. With this approach, anyone can induce change at any time. Gain some more experience, and before you know it you'll start to notice that your outlook on things is broader than before.

 Tournaments are a playground for people who practice for ...

Tournaments are a playground for people who practice for growth. It's where they show off their achievements. Once I made that realization, I finally started making continued growth my goal, rather than winning. Games enrich my life by allowing me to grow as an individual, and that's what motivates me to keep on going.

 How New Games/Releases Impact the Meta

A new series release means more than just updated graphics or different character costumes; sequels can have new rules, or introduce entirely new systems, so everyone was starting more-or-less fresh. Experience and knowledge of previous games in the series help to some extent, but you're still learning the new rules from scratch. Being strong in the previous game means less than learning the new one, so without putting in the required work last year's champion can become this year's scrub. Th...

 People Stay in Communities After Jobs Disappear

Surprisingly (to economists, anyway), even though these communities remain decimated, many people have still refused to leave them. Autor, Dorn and Hanson find that it was only foreign-born workers and native workers ages 25 to 39 who were likely to leave. Everyone else basically stayed, even if the economic rug was pulled out from under them. It contradicts the standard economic model, which says people will rationally move to where better opportunities present themselves. Why did so many p...

 Danica Roem on Metallica

While listening to Mandatory Metallica on @SXMLiquidMetal tonight in celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Black Album, I was thinking about what it meant to me as a teenager in the late '90s, a few years after it debuted in '91. So here's a meandering, rambling story. Middle school is when my taste in music started expanding beyond classic rock, which is what I was raised on from basically birth. My sister was big into grunge, so I picked up some of that from her (Nirvana, Alice in C...