"What is Technology Doing to Us?"

[quadz]

"What is Technology Doing to Us?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlPF9_1VIso
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[talks about an insider perspective on competing armies of behavioral sociologists in a corporate arms race (to persuade us for every ounce of our available attention)]

[|iR|Focalor]

You probably follow this guy's every podcast... and I don't see how you can stand it. Before he introduced the guest, I noticed he had a very distinct pattern of pauses in the middle of every phrase. For a guy who probably has several different degrees, one class he must've missed or didn't pay much attention to was the Public Speaking course. When I was attempting to major in journalism and english, I remember taking one of the courses... I guess you'd call it an "elective course", I can't remember what they called it, and it was called Public Speaking 101 or something similar. But they taught you to be a more effective and engaging public speaker, and it's the kind of course that ANYONE who's ever gonna do a regular podcast or vlog should consider as essential learning. They teach you things that you may not otherwise discover or notice on your own. Things like... don't interrupt your own sentences with filler words like "um" or "uuuhhhh". "I wanna talk to you today about uuuuhhhh how we can maximize our profits in this uhhhh emerging market of uuuhhh reusable carbon fiber tampon applicators." You don't write a speech like that, and you shouldn't deliver a speech like that because it distracts your audience to where they begin focusing on your poor speech habits and not on the message of the speech itself. Same thing with pauses. I didn't really take the class seriously. It seemed far too easy and almost a waste of time and money to me, so I had fun with it whenever I could. I remember I gave a speech in class one time where I recited a fudge and pecan brownie recipe in an authoritarian tone as if I were Adolf Hitler, banging my fists on the lectern and gesturing with exaggerated motions. Got an A.

See what I mean though? He's a bad public speaker. I probably just spent more time talking about his pauses as a distraction than the time I'll spend talking about the subject of the podcast. Anyway.

Speaking of "Waking Up", if you think internet tech is the only market doing this kind of thing,... you should wake up. It's EVERYTHING. Every big company has PR and marketing departments where they deal in corporate propaganda and wage war on each other for your attention and your money. Every aspect of their product presentation is engineered molecule by molecule to sell sell sell. They have people sitting in a room, rubbing their hands together with a sneer on their face, formulating ways to separate you from your money. They have graphs, they have focus groups, they have scientists and statisticians, they are devising a battle plan to wage war on your sensibilities and overthrow them. "Call now!" Don't wait, be impulsive, you deserve it, because it's only available for a limited time to the first 100 callers. COME ON, DO IT NOW! DON'T WAIT! DON'T THINK ABOUT IT! WE KNOW WHAT YOU NEED, and if you stop to think about it, you might start doing something really bad for us like consider the cost of it to you versus the benefit of it to you, and that only serves YOUR NEEDS, you selfish fucking bastard! They are devoid of scruples and decency. They aren't above going through your sweet and innocent children to attack you too. Those commercials for toys on TV aren't ultimately aimed at the children watching them. They are designed to make your children an evil assimilated appendage of their advertising efforts. "Recruit them young, and you'll have them forever." It's the same philosophy that African jungle warlords keep.

And this is why I tend to hate all political candidates and figures. When they stand up to speak, few of them write and say what THEY actually think and feel. They have speech writers who craft words the same way that companies do to sell products, and what they are attempting to receive from you rather than your money for a product is your vote and support, usually, just like in the retail product market, for ideas and policies that probably won't benefit YOU nearly as much as it will benefit THEM.

The whole world of mankind is out to separate you from your individuality and your rational self interest. It's all one big conspiracy against YOU.

There's only ever been ONE commercial on TV that told the truth, and even then, it was a very brief piece of propaganda included as a fraction of a sentence in which the WHOLE of the sentence was designed to separate you from your money.

JG Wentworth - "It's YOUR money... use it when YOU need it." (aka We'll give you some of what's already yours, but we'll take some for ourself and leave you cold and naked and starving to death when there is no more to be had.)

[quadz]

Every big company has PR and marketing departments where they deal in corporate propaganda and wage war on each other for your attention and your money. Every aspect of their product presentation is engineered molecule by molecule to sell sell sell. They have people sitting in a room, rubbing their hands together with a sneer on their face, formulating ways to separate you from your money. They have graphs, they have focus groups, they have scientists and statisticians, they are devising a battle plan to wage war on your sensibilities and overthrow them.

Agreed. (A colleague used to refer to such practices as, "dark sociology.")

I suppose as a software developer, the tactics discussed in this video hit particularly close to home.

Where I work, we spend our time trying to design and implement features in ways that we hope will be the most useful to our customers. It would feel strange indeed to instead be focused on adding features the customer doesn't really want or benefit from, but which were purposefully designed to subvert maladaptive traits of human psychology that we could exploit to make them subconsciously more "hooked" on using our software.

* quadz goes off and ponders how to add "intermittent variable rewards" to the tastyspleen website... 

[|iR|Focalor]

* quadz goes off and ponders how to add "intermittent variable rewards" to the tastyspleen website... 

Like the post rating system? Or the forum member titles based on post count?

I don't really know how to feel about the rating system. On one hand, if a person makes more retarded and dumbassed posts than coherent and intelligent ones, then other members are naturally going to consider them to be a retarded dumbass whether there's a "dumbass meter" under their name or not. On the other hand, it tends to be a feature which becomes abused on most forums with lots of members and activity. When people start flaming and trolling each other, eventually the shit going on in the posts spills over to the post rating system. On the internet, you gotta assume that if anything CAN be abused and exploited by people, it WILL be if you wait long enough.

[quadz]

Like the post rating system? Or the forum member titles based on post count?

Hah! (OK, neither really matches the "intermittent variable" criteria, but I take your point.)

I don't really know how to feel about the rating system. On one hand, if a person makes more retarded and dumbassed posts than coherent and intelligent ones, then other members are naturally going to consider them to be a retarded dumbass whether there's a "dumbass meter" under their name or not. On the other hand, it tends to be a feature which becomes abused on most forums with lots of members and activity. When people start flaming and trolling each other, eventually the shit going on in the posts spills over to the post rating system. On the internet, you gotta assume that if anything CAN be abused and exploited by people, it WILL be if you wait long enough.

Yeah, it was an experimental feature, and I've occasionally considered removing it, but it's been easier just to leave it be.

Probably will rip it out at some point.

I don't feel the "dumbass meter" was particularly useful, and I'd agree that's what would seem to inspire abuse of the system. (If likes/dislikes were confined to a single post and never tallied on some global counter, there'd probably be a lot less incentive to go around flagging someone's posts.)

etc.

[quadz]

Like the post rating system? Or the forum member titles based on post count?

In thinking about it, I suppose the distinction I'd want to draw would be what's motivating the developer.

When I was in game development, we all wanted to make the overall experience of playing our game as fun as possible. There was no ulterior motive, like engineering some aspect of the game design to be "addicting" regardless of whether it was fun.

Of course, if we succeeded in making a game really fun, then ultimately we've ended up capturing people's attention who enjoy playing it. So I don't know if there's a practical distinction in the end result (when viewed merely through the lens of vying for someone's attention.)

But, for example, something that began to wear on me while playing GTA V multiplayer, was after awhile I felt I was beginning to notice game design decisions where trade-offs were made in favor of driving up the in-game economy (and thus driving a certain percentage of players toward purchasing Shark Cards with real money) at the expense of a different design direction that might have emphasized more fun.

It's looking to me like the new Quake Champions may have some of those trade-offs baked into its DNA as well. (Everyone's under NDA, so I'll refrain from specifics.)

So......................... Eh. :shrug:

[|iR|Focalor]

I wasn't really being seriously judgmental, just trolling. At this point, like... 4 people still bother posting, so the rating system doesn't really matter. The forum member title thing though... that could be interpreted as a reward system to get someone hooked.

GTAonline does something comparable, at least as far as ME and GTAonline are concerned. I started out playing it by myself, getting my ass shot to pieces by groups of other players in crews. So I joined a crew with some other guys. We rode around for a while shooting up other folks, but whenever they weren't on, I spent all my time doing contact missions to make money and rank (because they all had much higher ranks than me, like 50 vs 250). Before long, I got to where I kinda didn't even WANT my crewmates to get on so I could continue spending all my time making money and rank. Now, I don't even bother fucking around in freemode with other people, I stick mainly to missions and private solo sessions where I can do my own thing. And whenever I'm grinding missions to make money, I'm using the rank meter as a progress meter. I'll stop whenever I reach the next rank, then bank all my cash and logout. To be honest, it's gotten to the point where I focus more on gaining rank than the money. Right now, I'm the highest ranked person on my friends list, although there are quite a few GTAonline players out there ranked higher than me... but not very many. Proof that I'm successfully hooked on GTAonline due to chasing an insanely high rank:



edit before posting:
HA! Such a noncoincidental coincidence that you mention GTA before I can even hit POST.

Yeah, GTA kinda sucks with the in-game economy or whatever you wanna call it. Look at my money stats and my rank. I've played countless hours of missions, over and over and over and over, more than most people would be willing to without it driving them insane. I own pretty much all of the big ticket items in the game. I have all the most expensive properties and shitloads of cars and motorcycles customized out the wazoo. I've spent ASSLOADS of money trying to collect all this shit. And for the rank that I currently hold, you'd think I'd have a lot more money to show for it. I have 17mil in the bank currently, and I tend to try to keep at least 20mil on hand in case any cool updates drop with more huge ticket items like the 10mil gold jet that came out a few years back or the 10mil yacht. And if you want to own all this cool shit in the game, you have to spend HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS repetitively grinding missions and other things to pull in the money. And they've got it formulated to where the money you make is directly related to the time you spend playing. I can complete most contact missions in 5 or 6 minutes, but if you want the maximum payout, you have to spend at least 9mins in the mission before triggering the end of it. And you probably end up making anywhere from 100,000 to 160,000 in 2 hours. The heists don't pay any better than the missions due to the fact that it's a pain in the ass to find 3 other decent players to complete all the gay-assed setups, and by the time you're done, you've probably made less per hour than you would just grinding missions by yourself. The best payouts come from doing the CEO phone missions "Sightseer" and "Hostile Takeover". Although... even then they have a timer running that won't allow you to do too many of them back to back without waiting for it to become available again. God forbid you should make that money too fast, ya know.

And when all that shit finally drives you batshit insane, you can, as you said, buy those god damn stupid fucking Shark Cards and give them your REAL money for their fake money. And by then, you end up spending probably 60 to 100 real world dollars to buy an in-game yacht that... don't do JACK SHIT!

I've known other players that spend real money on those cards, and they're being dumbasses doing it. I don't care what excuse they use, - that their money spent buying those cards is better than the time it takes to make the same amount. Pfft. I ain't PAYING for shit I can get for free by playing for it.

And then you had the myriads of assholes who used to spend 20 to 80 bucks a pop buying modded accounts from other people who had modded XB360's to start the account, mod the money/rank/etc, then transfer it to XB1 and sell it off - rinse, repeat, profit. They've prevented that by cutting off transfers from 360 to XB1 and taking everyones modded money. Oh how the modded acct buyers cried and cried.

Ugh. Why do we keep playing this shit? I DON'T FUCKING KNOW!

[|iR|Focalor]

Corporate consumer programming from the past can sometimes make you feel warm and fuzzy.

Then again, after watching an old episode of Family Guy where they did a parody of an old 80's Juicy Fruit gum commercial, I've got that fucking jingle stuck in my head and I don't think even a 12 guage shell could remove it at this point. (I even learned to play it on guitar. Someone kill me.)

I'm an 80's kid, and these are 70's commercials, but I do remember a small number of these that were infrequently still running during the early 80's. I particularly enjoy the first one for Body On Tap shampoo featuring a young Kim Basinger. Apparently washing your blonde hair with BEER was some kind of fad in the 70's? I dunno, I don't remember that one, but it's pretty hilarious.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDIBbzZIDOs

[quadz]

Apparently washing your blonde hair with BEER was some kind of fad in the 70's? I dunno, I don't remember that one, but it's pretty hilarious.

It's been horrifying how, when looking back a few decades, the most 'subtle' marketing tactics look so blatant in retrospect, that I'm always wondering what those bastards are up to right now that I'm not noticing yet.