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Slowcore Quote of the Day

"One might say there is an 'ethics barrier,' a speed above which ethics can no longer exist. After that point, the only remaining goal is to survive the immediate moment... Ethicality requires unhurried thinking."

~ Pekka Himanen, from The Hacker Ethic (2001), pp. 131-132

Writer, senior editor, music nerd, GenX eldergoth, monastery-bootstrapper. https://paragraph.xyz/@danicaswanson https://tinyurl.com/Black-Stone-Wordsmith

Love it.

And this thought now came to my mind: are fast-paced videogames non-ethical by definition?

Invisible Gardener. Regen practices. Degen research. Building StatelessDAO open source co-ops. Pixeloodles & Degenomemetics:  https://zora.co/@invisiblegardener

Hmm... well, instinctively I'd lean toward "no," but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the question you posed there.

I've just started reading a book called "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow." Early in the story the character designs a game.

I tried to put a quote from the book in this cast but seems to be too long, I'll break it into a thread under this comment.

"By way of description, she said, “Well, um, my game is called Solution. It was inspired by my grandmother.

The idea of Solution was that if you asked questions and didn’t keep mindlessly building widgets, your score would be lower, but you would find out you were working in a factory that supplied machine parts to the Third Reich. Once you had this information, you could potentially slow your output. You could make the bare number of parts required not to be detected by the Reich, or you could stop producing parts entirely. The player who did not ask questions, the Good German, would blithely get the highest score possible, but in the end, they’d find out what their factory was doing. Fraktur-style script blazed across the screen: Congratulations, Nazi! You have helped lead the Third Reich to Victory! You are a true Master of Efficiency. Cue MIDI Wagner. The idea of Solution was that if you won the game on points, you lost it morally."

"Sadie’s game was set in a nondescript black-and-white factory that made unspecified widgets. Points were given for each of the widgets you assembled. Sadie had designed the mechanic of the game to be like Tetris, a game for which Dov had often expressed admiration. (He loved Tetris because it was fundamentally creative—a game about building and figuring out how to make pieces fit.) With each of the game’s levels, you assembled widgets that had more pieces and greater complexity, and you had less and less time to accomplish the assemblies. At various times in the game, a text bubble came up, asking if you wanted to exchange points for information about the factory and the kind of products it produced. The game warned that if you received information about the factory, it would result in a minor reduction of your high score. The player had the option to skip as much or as little of this information as they wanted."