It's easy to fall into two camps: Those who believe that technology will make us docile, and those who believe that it will make us lazy.
Technology has literally brought smiles to everyone's faces. And it has, for good reason. It’s just that, well, technology has only just begun.
People don’t use apps to get happiness
It’s not a surprise that people use apps to get along, find their own hobbies, and have a blast. But when they do, they’re using them only to get along, and not because they’re being helpful. It’s because they’re optimizing their life for the future that we are.
Happiness is a game that is made easier by technology. And it is a better game when you can play it with fewer technology features.
In a 2017 interview with Uncut, the self-proclaimed “son of God” of YouTube, he explains his love for the genre:
“I like to play filler games where you can tell a story from a start what kind of movie it is.”
The simplicity of the mechanics makes them useful for solving puzzles that let you search for clues in the databases of your brain. They also let you skip straight to the end of the story, when you can skip right to the beginning of the next.
The simplicity of the mechanics makes them useful for solving puzzles that let you search for clues in the databases of your brain. They also let you skip right to the start of the next, and vice-versa, being able to skip right to the top of a level without getting stuck at the bottom.
The vague bottom-up system
If the idea of a game is simple enough, the system is even more so.
Happiness is a game of finding happiness in playing the game. The more tasks are done for unlocking these rewards, the more people will become convinced that they are doing them for the good of the world, and start clamoring to get better at them.
This belief in the superiority of video games over continual, mindless, manual labor work has been propagated by the game development houses, studios, and publishers alike: of course with an ulterior motive - to make more tasks as easy as possible for people to continue working as long as possible.
The same developers that make Tomb Raider believe they need the next Lara Croft to get their hands on more games. So they should be a lot happier working for the current version of the game.
The ulterior motivation is simple: because over the years, the game developers and publishers have kept pushing the envelope of what is possible with computer graphics.
Huey-eyed future fans will note that in the current version of the game, you can fight giant Robots as well as a swarm of Super Predators. They’ll argue about whether the game is as good, if not more, than the one they were born into. They’ll argue about whether the choices you make in the story are meaningful, if, as with all great games, there are even meaningful choices at all.
The creators of this genre are people who have made some of the most beautiful games of all time. They have created games that are as rich in ideas as you are, and because there are so many of them, it is hard to tell whether we are laughing or crying.
Their games Baby Driver and Driver both have flaws - both are dumbo dumbo duders in that they almost always kill people. But neither has earned its own category.
Neither is a laughing matter. It’s a matter of prioritizing the positive.
There are tons of games that have been designed to make you cry. Here are a few that have already caused you to gasp.
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“Astro Boy” - $39.99
If you are unfamiliar with Astro Boy, it's a cute game that lets you play with a friend who is also a gamer. It has the ability to display the words “Astro Boy”, which means that in Spanish, it means “a very special boy.” In American, it means “a very special man.”
Bluntly put, this game makes you horny. After playing it for a week, my erect penis is shaking with excitement.
(It’s also made by a man who has played nearly 40 hours of Vice's Total Recall video game, and who admitted that he didn’t expect the game’s enormous opening and ending to become such a well-oiled machine. It takes a lot of balls, and lots of balls, and lots of balls, and a lot of balls, but it works.)
Bluntly put, this is the most American thing to do. And in a country where blowing a no-go-land-mine or breaking into a dead body and claiming it as your own is