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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

    It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

    Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

    Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

    This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

    This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.






  • Scaling small units up is not an issue. Just use multiple of those units. Much like a car battery can consist of thousands of individual cells.

    Scaling large units down, however, can be a challenge with limits. So I would say finding a thing which works well at small scales is gold. If you want more, you’re free to either house multiple units in one building, or distribute them along the shore. Although it may well be possible that another design is more beneficial at other scales.

    It’s also interesting for mobile use cases like naval vessels. I could even imagine some road train truckers having one of these in their emergency gear when crossing deserts, just in case.







  • We also briefly discussed this in Games Master, if only to discover how wide and diverse the range of perspectives are. I feel it misrepresents the subject to talk about a “literal definition”, and to explicitly include “win conditions”. Because there are multiple attempts of a definition, and many do not include win conditions.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game

    One such example definition:

    “To play a game is to engage in activity directed toward bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by specific rules, where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of the rules, and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity.” (Bernard Suits)[14]

    You seem to refer to Chris Crawford’s definition, which is in part:

    If no goals are associated with a plaything, it is a toy. (Crawford notes that by his definition, (a) a toy can become a game element if the player makes up rules, and (b) The Sims and SimCity are toys, not games.) If it has goals, a plaything is a challenge.

    Explicitly calling SimCity “not a game” is purely academic talk, detached from reality. For everyone else, SimCity is clearly a game. If you want to buy it, you look for games, not toys. I feel definitions are questionable which define something to be not what everybody thinks it is.

    Was Minecraft not a game until it included “The End”? I loved playing Minecraft, but I rarely cared about The End, even after it was included. When a player cannot tell the difference between a version of a game which includes a win condition, and a version which does not, how can the existence of that condition be a decisive factor?

    If we widen the scope to include any game, not just video games, we can also have a look at popular children’s games like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Association. My theater group loves to play win-free games as a warmup practice.

    From my point of view, win conditions are a common characteristic of games, but not necessary or defining. Coming up with a short definition which captures all games and excludes all non-games is surprisingly hard.