Author: Feng Guangneng, Distorted Neck San Guan
Hu Yilin, associate professor in the Department of History of Science at Tsinghua University, believes that in industrial civilization, people are easily trapped in a utilitarian cycle, lacking leisure time and therefore lacking the opportunity for reading, social activities, and political activities as Marx said. Gaming can allow people to re-experience the possibility of freedom. At the same time, in industrial civilization, gaming elements are gradually disappearing, as Hei Yijin Ha said, “The prosperity of the gaming industry and the loss of the gaming spirit are typical contradictions of modernity.”
If we hope to reflect on industrial civilization and gradually enter the Web3 era, the first thing that needs to be reactivated is the gaming spirit.
01 The Prosperity of the Gaming Industry
The prosperity of the modern gaming industry is reflected in the globalization of the gaming market and the diversification of game types. The gaming market provides various types of games, such as action games, role-playing games, simulation games, puzzle games, sports games, strategy games, etc., which can satisfy the interests and needs of different people. It can be seen that more and more young people, adults, and elderly people around the world are participating in various game activities using various media. The thriving market has also driven peripheral industries, such as music, painting, storytelling, movies, and forums, all becoming part of gaming culture.
Among many games, role-playing games (RPGs) like The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher, The Legend of Zelda, Dark Souls, Assassin’s Creed, etc. are highly praised by players. Players can play fictional characters, immerse themselves in the world created by the game by completing tasks and experiencing the storyline.
At the same time, with the help of electronic devices and the internet, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have also gradually emerged, opening up many more diverse and prosperous gaming domains.
With a large number of participating players, the gaming industry seems vibrant on the surface. Large gaming companies and startups are constantly developing new games, technologies, and hardware to meet the growing and increasingly diverse demands. However, fundamentally speaking, these gaming industries are still in the transitional stage between Web2 and Web3, and they have not truly escaped the underlying logic of industrial civilization.
02 Working in RPGs
If we start to pay attention to the RPG field and try to find the core part of the game, perhaps we can see that the sentiment of a few people still emits a warm glow, but the glow is getting weaker and weaker.
It’s been a long time since I played Genshin Impact, but I still remember what Venti told me:
“Traveler, when you set foot on your journey again, remember the true meaning of the journey itself. Mondstadt’s birds, poems, and city; the queen, the fool, and the monsters… they are all part of your journey. The destination does not mean everything. Before reaching the end, use your eyes to observe this world.”
On Bilibili, countless Abyss speedrun videos and their number of likes tell us one thing: many players are willing to grind domains and farm resources day after day, just to improve their efficiency by a little bit, and they call it being a “liver”.
“If you are a working person in real life, you will find that even in Genshin Impact, you are still working. Isn’t it hard enough?”
However, discussions like this have not changed the fate of players working in the game, nor have they changed the trend of gamification in games. We still face an ironclad reality: no matter how fun an RPG is when you first start playing, if you continue playing, eventually after completing the main storyline, you will start doing daily repetitive tasks and gradually enter a state of work. It can be observed that even though the game pays great attention to storytelling, even though the game still retains many dopamine-stimulating elements, and even though players can deeply immerse themselves in the game, after the happiness fades away, what is left for the players is still emptiness and confusion. Some players will feel that they have transformed from a painfully working person in reality to a happily working person in the game.
03 Rationality of Tools and Rationality of Communication
From a historical perspective, this is inevitable. The reason is that RPGs are also part of industrial civilization.
Genshin Impact players rushing through Abyss and farming resources are essentially a manifestation of pursuing efficiency. Ever since Watt improved the steam engine of the Anemo Archon, the Industrial Revolution has passed for nearly three hundred years, and the pursuit of efficiency has become a spirit of the times. This is ingrained in our era, so players regard improving efficiency itself as an achievement, even ignoring the law of diminishing marginal returns. In this regard, Habermas has long pointed out that industrial civilization has shaped instrumental rationality, which means achieving established goals with higher efficiency.
According to Habermas, in addition to instrumental rationality, we also need to emphasize communicative rationality, focusing on the public nature of thoughts, actively solving problems through dialogue and discussion, reaching consensus with others, and achieving social harmony. Although this viewpoint has long been a consensus in academia, it has not yet settled into people’s daily discourse activities.
The reason is that everyone lives in an environment, and the environment has biases. Obviously, instrumental rationality is more suitable for people to work in an industrial civilization. The feedback from the industrial civilization constantly reinforces our instrumental rationality, making us more and more accustomed to living around goals and setting goals based on standards that are operational, quantifiable, and evaluable, rather than discussing ideals about life.
Similarly, as industrial civilization brings about a new way of life, traditional street culture and community culture are gradually disintegrating. People’s social interactions increasingly rely on electronic devices such as mobile phones and computers, or participating in goal-oriented gatherings. There are hardly any opportunities for chance encounters and idle chats on the streets. As Xu Song said, modern cities provide a society of strangers, offering young people very few social opportunities, and socializing is a skill that needs continuous practice to master. In this sense, Habermas’s concept of communicative rationality has already been penetrated by instrumental rationality. Therefore, the distinction between the two becomes more important and noteworthy.
04 Loss of the spirit of play
When we talk about the spirit of play, what we are actually talking about is the pursuit of fun. The fun of the game is rooted in the negotiation of rules, because a rule always becomes boring over time, and only by negotiating can new rule realms be opened up to bring new meaning to people.
If we are already dominated by the logic of industrial civilization in the process of dialogue and negotiation of game rules, always designing game rules around standards such as operability, quantifiability, and evaluability, then the underlying logic of our game rules is consistent with the underlying logic of assembly-line products. This means that if we do not reflect on the underlying logic and development process of industrial civilization, then as people living in industrial civilization, the ultimate fate of players is to work in games. This is not only a logical inevitability, as mentioned earlier, but also a reality that has already happened and is still happening.
The more critical issue is that the logic of industrial civilization has been sedimenting into a part of the technological environment through externalization. Even if a game stops updating, it can still run automatically according to the current rules, and players will still play the game according to the rules provided by the game. As rules of the game system, players have no authority to modify them and can only choose to continue playing or quit, without any room for negotiation.
In this sense, we can see that due to the lack of reflection on the underlying logic of industrial civilization, the spirit of play has indeed silently lost in the process of the game industry’s prosperity.
05 Language is a home that exists
Once we inject reflection, we will discover new possibilities for the same thing.
We look back at Genshin Impact and try to ask a question: Why do people prefer to work in Genshin Impact, even spend money to work in Genshin Impact, rather than working in a real company?
When we ask this question, we may notice an interesting but inconspicuous phenomenon: many Genshin Impact players were initially not accustomed to the setting of “undismissable dialogue“, but later gradually liked this setting.
The reason for this is that this setting forces us to spend time listening to the characters’ dialogue and gradually enter the context of their dialogue, and every character in Genshin Impact is well-designed. When we mention Mondstadt, what we remember is not only the statues and windmills, but also many interesting people, such as the six-fingered bard, Jojo, the humorous Bartoon, the innocent and lovely Nora, the homesick Pomegranate, the scholar Masque who likes to study the language of the Hilichurls, and the world-traveling scholar Sayyid…
These characters’ words have rich interpretative space. For example, when we interact with the six-fingered bard Jojo, we often hear him complaining about a mysterious bard who stole his job. As players, we often smile knowingly and think that he is actually talking about the Anemo Archon Barbatos, also known as the bard Venti, thus giving rise to the thought of “So you were kept in the dark”. But if we think about it, did Jojo already know that the bard was Barbatos? Are all the people in Mondstadt cooperating with the Archon to perform a drama on the stage of the city for the Traveler we play?
When we listen attentively to the characters’ words, we will find that they gradually come alive and become our friends. Moreover, although the content of each character’s dialogue is different, they have some common styles and follow some basic rules. Each line of their dialogue is carefully designed. For example, in Mondstadt, we can feel that every character yearns for a poetic life and can freely express their personality during the dialogue. In this way, in the process of talking to these characters, we gradually detach ourselves from the world of industrial civilization and merge into the world of Genshin Impact’s setting. In addition, the voice acting for each character in Genshin Impact is very well done. Combined with the exquisite content, we can feel that this new world is not only vivid and interesting, but also full of life.
Even after playing Genshin Impact for a long time, we may find that the conversations we have in the game are more numerous and fulfilling than the conversations we have with many friends around us. In fact, the conversations between the Traveler, Paimon, and many NPCs are also our conversations with the game developers, as well as our conversations with the game developers and the books they have read. In a sense, the game developers may have developed Genshin Impact in order to prepare for such a conversation.
06 Climbing onto the Historical Stage
Immersing oneself in a world is a wonderful experience in itself. Indeed, not every player addicted to Musk Reef remembers the story of Leonard and the Hat Peak, not every player realizes that the names Mona and Lisa combine to form Mona Lisa, not every player discovers the striking resemblance between Leonard’s Wing of Wind design and the aircraft design by Leonardo, but every Genshin Impact player will not forget their own unique travel experience, will not forget the adorable Paimon, will not forget Mondstadt, which values contracts.
Image source: B station UP主语颂源
Even though the characters in the game speak pre-set lines, and their dialogues are very simple, the different speaking styles of different characters still allow us to gradually perceive the overall cultural atmosphere of the city-state, giving us a feeling of entering a new world. This is actually because Genshin Impact has conducted meticulous research on the city-state culture and character images in history. Under such a background, the position of each character is considered, and inspiration is sought from history, which is rich and diverse. When those who have left traces in history and were later forgotten by industrial civilization appear in the game with a new appearance and meet us, we feel both familiar and refreshed. Moreover, precisely because history is so vast, when Genshin Impact brings out many scholars who enjoy historical research, even if we know little about history, we vaguely have an expectation that the character we are talking to may be related to a real person in history, even if we don’t know the specific nature of this relationship, we know that this relationship exists. In this way, we seem to feel a distant call, as if we have entered the stage of history.
In fact, if we re-perceive the existence of history and consider many traces (texts, cultural relics, instruments, ruins, etc.) as media to access history, then we have joined a grander conversation. Every book, every cultural relic, every instrument, and every ruin tells us about the past in some way. The books written by ancient people are like long letters that have endured the passage of time and reached our hands.
When we read the texts of ancient people, we are actually engaging in a dialogue game with them. Like any other game, we can only have fun if we treat this game seriously. For example, we may read the first half of a book and feel confused, and then be surprised to find that the author has just responded to our questions. Or, when we read the second half of a book, we suddenly remember a sentence the author said earlier and feel the author’s thoughtfulness.
Reading is not necessarily a solitary activity. For example, in 1490, Leonardo da Vinci, together with Francesco Martini, read Vitruvius’ “Ten Books on Architecture”. It discussed how architectural proportions can be designed based on human body proportions and provided detailed explanations on human body proportions. This greatly sparked da Vinci’s interest in human proportions, and with inspiration, he eventually created the timeless masterpiece “Vitruvian Man” in the history of art. In the painting, the man’s arms and legs are separated, with his feet and fingertips as endpoints, fitting into both a circle and a square. This painting demonstrates the combination of art and scientific ideals and is often considered a representative prototype of the Renaissance.
Compared to da Vinci and Martini, we actually enjoy better reading and dialogue environments. We have access to far more books than they did, and our platforms for communication are much more diverse. If we consider each book as a letter from a friend to us, sincerely engage in a dialogue with the book and its author, and then share our insights with people around us, we will step onto the stage of history and coexist with countless outstanding figures from history. Conversely, if we forget about books, it is equivalent to abandoning the revival of the ancients.
After all, the ancients left behind some texts after devoting their life’s efforts. These texts only provide a possibility for reactivation. Whether we choose to embrace this possibility and which texts we choose to read depends on us. Each of us is limited, and the texts we can read in our lifetime are also limited. However, if we have an atmosphere of reading, many texts left by the ancients can be reactivated, and their ideas can continue to shine in our era, illuminating the path ahead.
Of course, we don’t necessarily have to read the books of the ancients. Many outstanding scholars alive today have engaged in extensive dialogues with the ancients. By reading a scholar’s monograph, we can establish connections with dozens of ancient figures and engage in in-depth conversations with several of them. In this sense, reading academic monographs can actually become a fashionable thing, an interesting game.
Just like any other game, there are thresholds in reading academic monographs. We need to set aside some preconceptions, listen carefully to what the author says, and carefully organize the author’s thoughts. After all, a game can only be fun if we take it seriously. However, we don’t need to set overly strict rules for ourselves, demanding to fully understand everything in one step, or requiring ourselves to memorize the main ideas of the book. These are prejudices left over from the past.
An academic monograph is like a topic initiator. For example, if I have a book called “A History of Absurd Medicine” and I complain to my friends, saying that the author recorded a prescription for treating constipation, which consists of “a hint of fruit fragrance mixed with a small amount of dust, feces, and sneezeroot (a highly toxic herb)”. This actually opens up a space for conversation. If my friend happens to be interested in exploring new things, we can start from here and talk about the good solubility of alcohol, because water is a polar solvent and alcohol is a universal solvent. When combined, they can dissolve polar molecules such as salt, sugar, and acid, as well as fat-soluble compounds such as herbs, spices, and oils. After explaining the principle, we can openly discuss various possibilities related to alcohol, such as medicinal liquor in traditional Chinese medicine, tequila, rum, brandy, whisky, vodka, amaretto, cherry liqueur… During this process, we actively think and inspire each other, gradually expanding the topic to the limits of our abilities, and then we generate new confusion, which motivates us to read more books and search for more information.
If there is a community of more than 100 homeless people, and the people in the community have the habit of reading and communicating, they habitually take some leisure time every day to read, and then they meet by chance in life and habitually ask, “Have you read any books recently?” They chat casually, chatting more if they are in a good mood and chatting less if they are in a bad mood. In this way, the cultural atmosphere of such a community will gradually become stronger, and everyone will form various study groups around many interesting topics, gradually developing a diverse collective memory. With an expanding perspective, everyone will treat dialogue as a skill, as a game, becoming more and more interesting during the conversation.
Currently, many imaginations about Web3 are still limited by the possibilities provided by blockchain technology itself, mainly focusing on areas such as cryptocurrencies, DeFi, decentralized identity verification, supply chain management, distributed applications, digital city-states, etc. However, they have not understood blockchain technology in the context of the entire modern technological ecosystem, and they lack sufficient attention to the relationship between online digital city-states and offline digital homeless communities. This is a major oversight.
Technological history is human history. If we look back at the Industrial Revolution, we will find that the innovation brought by the steam engine is an innovation of the entire technological order, and the innovation of the technological order brings about innovations in culture, economy, politics, and other fields. In other words, if we place the narrative of Web3 in the context of technological history, listen to the echoes of history from a distance, and pay attention to the relationship between digital city-states and digital homeless communities, we may see more interesting possibilities.
As Wittgenstein said, the essence of language is a game.
As Huizinga said, what games pursue is fun itself.
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