Do you know what’s worse than stimulating your fear response? Stimulating your anger response. And millions of people choose do that daily in their interactions with social media.
Are you limited to either having a thought or moving your body at any given time? I hope you don’t drive cars or perform other activities that require more than zero thoughts at once.
My guess would be that after we get scared the brain goes “good job, you survived, here’s some endorphins”. That way we enjoy getting scared because happiness follows
I’m going to provide a counter-example to disprove. A slot machine is a video game that is not a puzzle since there is no solution.
I agree with “Most video games are puzzle games” though. There are exceptions like Rail Shooter. Button mash only game. Bullet hell games don’t really have a puzzle element since solution is already shown by areas having no bullets in them.
I feel like this statement also hinges on “all video game strategy is a puzzle” people might disagree with.
This reminds me of an exhibiton I once saw called “No Pain, No Game”. The idea being that any sort of game has some failure state, some obstacle to overcome, that’s what makes it a game. So of course I started thinking of counter-examples. Your slot machine idea is a good one, what I eventually came up with is Cookie Clicker. That game is nothing but positive reinforcement. There’s no way to lose progress or mess anything up, any action you take makes you “win more”. Not taking an action also makes you “win more”, just more slowly.
This showerthought is an idea adjacent to that all. Interesting stuff, even though it’s not too deep.
The cookie clicker could still be a puzzle as long as you make it impossible to win without using some power-ups because you’ll die sooner of old age. That’s assuming there is a win condition in it. Other clickers are genuinely not puzzles since they’re infinite and not winnable. Not winnable makes them not solvable so they can’t be a puzzle.
I’m pretty sure cookie clicker has no victory condition, it just goes on and on. At least it was that way last time I played it. Things might have changed since.
There’s some kind of stock market mini game in there now, so you can play and lose at something in the game, but no overall win conditions im aware of.
I think any aliens advanced enough to visit Earth would probably understand it.
Whether it’s horror movies or extreme sports, it is some kind of play, which is about creating a safe or controlled environment to explore things that either isn’t really happening (horror movies) or things that haven’t been tried before (extreme sports).
A lot of extreme sports are actually relatively safe because it’s done by individuals in highly controlled environments. Statistically it’s a lot more dangerous to participate in other sports or everyday activities where there’s a larger risk from other participants or things that are unpredictable. Things like horse riding, traffic and trampolines are more dangerous because they’re more unpredictable. The consequences might be worse if it fails thoughm, making it “extreme”.
Travelling through space to explore inhabited planets absolutely requires the same kind of desire and process of safely testing out things that are potentially dangerous.
The thought of commuter traffic as an extreme sport depresses me. But then, the number of people who die from cardiac arrest while sitting in a traffic jam is not zero.
When the brain is evolved to recognize immediate and present dangers and react to them, an absence of those dangers (which is true for most of us, most of the time) means that "something is wrong."
Injecting pseudo-dangers, or purposefully placing oneself in actual danger, closes the "danger gap."
I thought I was the only person who felt that way! It makes me so angry when people with spouses and kids or even parents who love them do hyper dangerous sports. Like surely there has to be something more worth doing that doesn’t orphan your children??
(Obviously any sport has some risk as do things like driving, I’m referring to things like free diving or free climbing where there’s no way to have a real safety net)
Im gonna edit my post because everyone is too hung up on extreme sports.
Horror movies also fall under the same category of thing. It’s not about the risk, it’s about triggering fear response. I just picked extreme sports because I couldn’t fit the whole premise in the title
I mean, yeah fear is a big part of extreme sports, but it isn’t the attraction. You never heard Tony hawk say “hey, watch how scared I get when I attempt this trick”. That’s not the point. It’s about the satisfaction of improving motor skills and the ability to move in new and interesting ways. But mostly it’s just fun. Really it’s not so different from skill-based video games, it’s just that in real life you have to work your way up to the more advanced stuff to do it safely.
Maybe I’ll edit my post because you’re not the first person who misunderstood. I’m specifically talking about thrill seeking, not extreme sports specifically. I couldn’t fit the whole premise in the title so I just picked an example 😭
They would think that we create sport out of pushing our physical limits so as to advance our physical limits at an optimal pace.
“The human performed two whole rotations! And while doing so, they removed their vehicle, spun it around their body, and placed it back beneath their feet before landing! However, clearly the humans valued the human who performed two and a half rotations a lot more. They call home ‘Tony Hawk’”.
If you define “puzzle” as a problem that you must work out with hard mental effort, then no; not at all games are puzzles. Rail shooters and other mindless games that rely more on reaction speed would not constitute a puzzle since you don’t really need to even think.
Online shooter, sure. You have to think about what the other guy is gonna do. Virtua Cop? You just need to aim and shoot fast when the bad dudes appear. I mean, you could play Counter-Strike like Virtua Cop but you probably aren’t gonna be good unless you’re posted up with an AWP all the time.
I actually love Metal Gear Solid because its design is much like that of a puzzle game, where the puzzle is “how the fuck do I kill everyone without being seen?” Hitman is the same way, but it always felt less curated than MGS because there isn’t just 1 solution to the problem, where as MGS does. And a lot of it is only conveyed through their respective scoring systems.
On the flip side, I tend to dislike leaderboards in most games because there is only 1 possible way to get the maximum possible score for any given level or minigame that once it’s worked out, everyone can be at the top and the only way to truly rise above everyone is to cheat.
So, when you take a shower, all you think is “scrub, scrub, scrub, scrub, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse”?
When I shower, it’s all pretty automatic and muscle memory kinds of actions. My mind wanders all over the place, usually while listening to music /podcasts /audio books, but rarely do I think about the actual act of bathing.
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