From Philosophical Research
Main entry
- Soviet Union as challenge run / Soviet Union as glitched speedrun -> while people are very misinformed on almost everything in the current century, I think that one type of metaphor that has a lot of promise for getting people to think correctly again is card games and video games. when people say that Communism "doesn't work", what they mean is that Liberal-republicanism is easier to do. it's easy to get it started, it doesn't take extra effort. but things being easy doesn't make them impressive. it's more impressive to beat a civilization game on high difficulty than to pick the game's easiest difficulty and then say you have the best civilization.
god, you know what's frustrating? like. most video games are based on simulating the concept of effort. even when people break the normal mechanisms of games, speedruns and challenge runs still simulate the concept of effort. this is so utterly intuitive to people that The Speedrun Guy who doesn't understand games clumsily tried to argue that speedruns were bad because they were jumping over effort and skipping to the end (which is factually untrue if you've ever seen anyone design a speedrun). and then, you manage to get people like The Speedrun Guy who don't understand the simple concept that challenges are hard and that makes them challenges. ??? why. how do we live in an era where "you can't just skip to the end" is such a big huge talking point for everyone — you can blame "AI" for that spiking more than ever all of a sudden — but like, we don't understand which things are actually hard or impressive.
Related
- speedrun / speedrunning
- lateral thinking / thinking with portals -> I think it's so stupid how every guide to jobs and business is like, lateral thinking! lateral thinking! but if you really truly have lateral thinking you turn the entire thing sideways and realize the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of capitalism that make it eat itself, and once you've thought so laterally you turn against capitalism they really don't like that. then they're like, no, don't you go thinking laterally, there's only one way to do things. this seems to be the heart of that one reactionary video I saw where the guy I can't remember was really mad about the concept of speedrunning. he was like, I hate that people are spending their time speedrunning, it's definitely a synonym of a crumbling civilization when people are going around the real way to do things and looking for shortcuts. and I thought it was unbelievably stupid, because the point of speedruns is basically to learn about the physics of the particular game engine and do science experiments to see if there are different ways those artificial physics could be applied technologically. speedrunning is basically a fictional process of research and development. you're shooting your civilization in the foot by getting rid of all the scientists and inventors. and why would you do it? because you think pure numerical ranking and graph placement produces stuff rather than labor and creativity. you're King Vegeta. but he can't build a
fucking scouter and has to buy it from another country. all because he doesn't like speedrunning, but speedrunning is lateral thinking.
- Speedrunning is for cheaters
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