Video games want to become reality

Intellectual stimulation seems inherently good: it staves off boredom and dementia, most forms of fun involve it, and culture is rife with pleas to do it. If video games are intellectual stimulation on tap, it's no wonder people play them! If you were chasing the same stimulation outside of a video game, you’d have to find the right calibration of taste/effort/frequency out there in the real world by putting in the hours to reach a high enough level in your company, move to the right city, meet the right friends, whatever else makes you feel more like a main character. This takes glucose expenditure that sitting in a chair doesn’t, involves far more frustration, and forces you to model other humans. Video games even offer long-term rewards for your trouble, like upgrading your equipment, character, or switching levels. Look at all this progress you're making!

Reality feels a lot more fun than video games to me, and while I know a ton of my friends balance both well, I don't understand how they do it. Games frustrate me: limited degrees of freedom, the fact I'm aware it's an environment made by other humans and not nature, claustrophobia and frustration at having to drag my feet through arbitrary steps to access rewards. It's like games titillate the world-optimizing part of me, then dump it in a fake world and leave it there to look around nervously, bellow with rage at having been duped, pound helplessly on the walls of its limited horizons, and slide to the floor in tears, while hours go by for its human without any legible benefit it can see.

Though your mileage may vary, most agree there's a point where you could be playing video games too much, where your life is coming apart, you could be using your skills for something else, you're flushing your agency down the drain for short-term stimulation, etc. At this point presumably your own world-optimizing subagent would feel skittish, itchy, and restless. Why was it dropped in an environment seemingly designed to satisfy it, yet isn't plugged into reality?

near @nearcyan

<span class="tweet-fake-link">@croissanthology</span> <span class="tweet-fake-link">@gwern</span> i think i still hold my view because discovery is deeply broken on the internet there are perhaps 1,000 niche websites i wish i was reading right now instead of twitter, but it's hard to find them all in fact, twitter actively tries to stop me from finding them, because that is…

Twitter · 18 May 2025 ↗

We seem to've found a multitude of clever tricks to fend off this agent's suspicions for as long as possible. For example, increase the size of the video game so it feels less claustrophobic. Or make the status games surrounding games as expansive as possible, such that it becomes difficult to say “video games aren't reality". YouTube channels, Discord servers, yapping at your friends about it after high school, multiplayer, awards, passes, skins, (all as social status trophies), chat, livestreams, comment-section-of-the-internets like Reddit or Twitter or otherwise... At some point this is perhaps what fuels video games first, before even the immediate intellectual stimulation. Games want to extend their legs out and become status signals, arenas, and characters in the Real World. “Every video game wants to be Roblox.” Fortnite successfully slouched toward “the metaverse”. Minecraft too seems to've converged onto a 3 dimensional social media platform complete with TV, commentary, gossip, scandals, legends. Given the size of the internet, it's difficult to imagine maintaining any semblance of the monoculture things like TV enabled; video games perhaps get closer than any other medium.

This might only be temporary respite. Eventually, you exhaust your brain's suspension of disbelief, and it demands you optimize something in the Real World. Perhaps working as a sewerage system engineer or as a garbage truck driver: a job no-one would do in a post-scarcity civilization, presumably. Who wants to deal with feces all day?

Are some tasks undignified?13 Jan 2026Read →

But shoveling shit is concrete proof that what you're doing has a direct impact on the world, that you're operating in the realest world there is. If your work weren't necessary, no one would be doing it, so you can rest easy—the pencil-pushing email responder in a moral mazed company does not have this comfort.

But you can goodhart this, too: see the strange psychology of YouTuber “Logan Paul", who was criticized for being vapid and spoiled, so much that he decided putting himself through enormous physical pain would fix his problem. Sure looks like a redemption arc montage! Likewise, I wonder how much of gym culture today could be downstream from cultural nihilism about bullshit jobs, a place to let your optimizer-agent unleash its anger from being riled up all day.

As we move toward increasing automation, we might risk reaching for Logan Paul style solutions on instinct, and this would be bad because it's transparently goodharting. But as the waterline rises to submerge most clearly-useful jobs we have left and the world increasingly looks like a video game, it's hard to imagine other ways to escape ever-constricting claustrophobia.