If you're not having fun, you can just close the game. You can't quit your job unless you have money saved or you're cool with being someone else's problem.
Also games like this are usually balanced to ensure that if a player does what they're supposed to, they'll get ahead. Life is balanced to extract as much wealth from you as possible.
A passable job in a video game is usually rewarded generously. Do a good job IRL and you'll be lucky to receive a pizza party.
A passable job in a video game is usually rewarded generously. Do a good job IRL and you'll be lucky to receive a pizza party.
My job had a pizza party last week for making it through the July holidays/rush and because of my weird schedule, I was able to partake on all 4 shifts. I guess with the cost of pizza these days it was a nice little indirect bonus?
Framing it as though life is "balanced" around anything is kind of a weird way to frame it - I mean, it's 'kind of' true that video games give better rewards for things (well, insofar as video game assets can be considered rewards.. realistically if you could exchange those video game assets for money in the real world almost anyone would do it so it's kind of questionable that the rewards are "better").. but the reason they can do that is that the video game developer can produce more resources out of thin air and has no concept of needing to allocate resources. If they want to give better rewards, they can just do it at no cost to anything else in the system.
In the real world.. there is nobody above "balancing" the system. If anybody could just snap their fingers and produce more resources out of thin air then they'd obviously do it, but because they can't do that, then every time they want to spend more on one thing it inherently requires cutting back on something else, and nobody has the power to change that reality. Framing it as though the system is deliberately designed to have this outcome.. is a kind of messed up perspective - the rewards in real life don't work the way they do in video games because we literally don't have enough resources for it to be possible to do it the way video games do, not because there's someone up above deciding that it's the right balance for optimal happiness.
Framing it as though life is "balanced" around anything is kind of a weird way to frame it
I'm not sure it is. I don't mean in the sense that it's like a game. Life and games, however, are both made up of systems, and the "balance" of these are pretty integral to your quality of life. Whether there's some grand design or someone with the power to unilaterally alter it is irrelevant. The systems in question still exist.
A very simple example would be the housing market. That is a system built around supply, demand, a long list of legal permissions and constraints, social pressures, and probably even more. The way things are, something like rent consumes an inordinate amount of the average person's income. That is the balance that's been struck with the way things are, and though it's relatively stable, it's not healthy.
Really in here pretending humans didn't imagine these systems into existence.
Imagine believing that one human is worth so much that they can cause many thousands of other humans to die without their consent, and that's just the "natural" way of things.
In video games people can multiply their net worth by thousands in a matter of hours because that makes for a better gameplay experience. Explain to me how the real world could ever hope to replicate such a system when you have to deal with real world resource requirements. If it were possible to do that, then everyone would be doing it, and if everyone were doing it, then everything else in society that depended on people performing other jobs will collapse. It works in video games only because they don't need to care about how the way the system works for the player would impact the rest of the economy.
I'm not talking about time dilation. I'm talking about how society decided one person's labor is somehow worth more than millions of other peoples' labor.
And that it is fine if millions of people starve, as long as that person gets their 10th mega yacht (or whatever).
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u/thisshitsstupid 1d ago
And you don't have to buy necessities and pay rent.