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I've been going back through this life and not just passively knowing, in the back of my mind in some indirected manner, but truly realizing how odd it is to have grown up playing video games. I played through Ocarina of time when I was like 6. Started with Tetris on the NES and Sonic etc on the Sega Genesis. Rollercoaster Tycoon and The Sims as well. That's a lot of odd logic, structures, metaphysical spaces, psychological allegories, and rituals to lead a mind through during its more core formative years. In a way, it's not unlike a new religion. Now rather than having children go to Bible study or whatever it's video games and television. At the time I thought this was a net benefit and necessary for a sort of mind expansion, to get outside the immediate context and the ego. That artificial environments could be used to improve humanity. Now I find it undeniable that there is a certain contrivance and brainwashing (dissociative priming + hypnosis and repetitive content) involved in submerging people in virtual environments, and it may not be for the best. Net or otherwise. The downsides are not potential, but actual. It's also hard to say because my health collapsed and I had other things going on so there are too many confounders to sort through in my own case. I started playing video games probably ~2. What do Lains think about this? eg as a starter: Can contrived, artificial stimuli improve the human condition? Or will it tend towards unwanted outcomes. I'm not going to put it in terms of good vs bad to start with, those are higher layers.

Never played any games and didn't watch much TV either because most of the time it was broken. Parents and family weren't religious fanatics either. Still ended up with a personality disorder. But, yes media can brainwash and program the mind. No one is immune, especially the people arrogant enough to think that it can't get to them. Subliminal messages, repeating narratives, desensitization to violence, the list goes on. Bibles/churches aren't the answer because you just swap one narrative for another. Being influenced seems to be unavoidable...

>>6947 >Bibles/churches aren't the answer I was saying they were functionally equivalent, rather than one being a decayed state of another. My main interest is the creation of internal structures and machinery which can be drawn on later. For example in pic related you have to light all torches (12 12 12 rings) simultaneously to open the door to the shadow temple. When your mind projects itself into and manipulates these spaces it's changing things in the inner world. I've used this deliberately in more recent times.

>>6946 Playing games (and here I refer to games considered retro by today’s standard) definitely shaped my personality, but I cannot place it in good or bad direction. For example, when facing a problem in life I always stick to it (because I assume there is a solution) and always change strategies when struggling (because maybe the devs intended for it to be solved in a different way). Pair this with the divide and conquer strategy to break hard problems in digestible pieces and it is very powerful. Yet there are cases where problems have no solution or where changing strategies too often makes it unsolvable. I think it made me extremely susceptible to want to work under a boss that rewards me for progress, I never had the aspiration to start a business. It also stirred my passion for exploration but living in a 3rd world country made this unsafe (luckily I migrated to a safer place). It was motivation enough to learn a 2nd and 3rd language yet I feel disconnected from my family, peers and have no sense of community. Most of my peers are enjoying drink parties after work, I join but I just want to go home sit alone and be in a virtual world.

>>6949 OP here. Very similar thoughts, especially about the persistence aspect. I dubbed this a "teleological bias". On one hand it's not a holistic or fully formed notion of reason and purpose behind what is and is not present, on the other a sense of persistence despite it can give you tunnel vision or cause you to feel overwhelmed when you should have just backed out completely and changed the entire plan. Just because there's a problem that exists doesn't mean the means to solve it are immediate or even known at the time. In the real world the search space is extremely large so you can't immediately create a path and sometimes just double down. I also observed the servant mentality. It's not direct, you feel like you're serving yourself, but you're actually deriving comfort by being given tasks from others. It is insidious in that way, removing something from the core of a person. I'm also interested in things like doors being one way in games. Like in Zelda you enter a trap of sorts, bars come down over the doors. As you move through spaces in your mind this expectation will also exist, one way doors or things you may get stuck in. You falsely believe you have to do the thing to get the door to open, when in reality it's all an illusion and there are several things you could do, including just walking away. There is no door. There is no room. There is no task. It doesn't matter, just leave. Weird things like that.

>>6946 artificial experiences in mediums of media will lead to insidious outcomes even if it evolves the human condition past a limitation because it's pretty much opening a pandora's box

>>6946 I have grown up in such a condition and I am happy that I did, if that had not been the case I would not have become aware of my surroundings and would never have thought of topics such as the one you posted about. >improve the human condition What is there to improve? It would be nice if all humans tried their best in their own little field but they do not. Look, to me at least, humanity is one whole, one being doing less than they can is a detriment to everybody, if the "human condition" was to ever improve it would be through a top down prompting inching on being manipulation. Most humans do not have it in their nature to be the humans I would like everyone to be, it is what it is. On a more individualistic level any experience is a good experience, it's best to not let yourself get caught too deep into any of them though and if you do you would better let it go when you have squeezed all of the juice from it, life is really long and if you are my type of human you will "succeed" in multiple things over the course of that life, trying to catch the passion that you once had for one endeavor when you have already squeezed it dry is a pointless act that leads you to madness, this is beyond the point of this thread though I just wanted to mention the thought because its something that has shaped me and its somewhat related (eh).