Breaking news: retirement from Football Manager

I can’t deal with it anymore. I have invested so much time (and money) into that game series. In the early days (2005-ish), interactive management was breezy and I could mastermind myself to European silverware, top titles and everything below. It’s safe to say that I can’t achieve the level I demand of myself, and I can no longer enjoy the game as I wish to. It is time for me to gratefully walk away from the FM series. Maybe I’ll get into FIFA or some dumbed-down management game I can actually win at least a few games at. The constant defeats in every save have led me to the obvious conclusion that I am terrible at it.

Christ. What a waste of time that all was. The last three or four years, I don’t think I enjoyed at all.

extending the digital day-off

It’s funny meeting people online. You can do so in so many different contexts. It could be because you’re looking for love, making connection over a video, or plunging into a game where your avatars play your collective reality. I did the latter this evening and it was great, even if we were all pretty shit at the game in hand, it was fun to meet some new people and try to work co-operatively towards something, even if we didn’t exactly know what we were trying to do. 

What’s interesting to me, especially in the latter, is how selective we are with the information which we decide to give away. Obviously, this difference depends on the context at work. In most cases online, your information is presupposed in order to function properly on the platform. On Facebook and Twitter, you’re expected to bear your soul to the baying public of oversensitive onlookers. On a dating site, you’d need to provide at least some details, although then again people often withhold some of it and do engage in the odd bit of catfishing. 

I guess that’s what gets me thinking, and not just with regards to online information sharing but just in general: isn’t it funny that we can be so selective of the information we give away. As in, there is always a belief that we can just take information freely, that it should be in the public domain as it is what ourselves as individuals and a wider society need to function properly. You’re expected to tell the truth, you’re encouraged to tell your boss what you plan to do on your day off, your required to fill out the census, and it feels like you need an opinion on everything. 

But just how is it that in particular areas, you don’t need to give it away? People just won’t ask. Being in a situation where I don’t need to speak is a great feeling for me. When I can just be and feel, with no expectation to do or say anything – I can choose to, if I so wish, but there is no pressure to do so. 

This evening, in the midst of the game, I didn’t ask one single question unrelated to the game to my teammates, and even then, these were mostly spatial (where are you? Where are they shooting from? Etc.) I didn’t get their real names (despite having the chance to guess from their usernames), their locations (despite some rather interesting accents), or anything related to what they do or their day. We just got on with it. I could have asked those questions, and they may have given me a response. Yet, in this arena, I didn’t feel the need to and clearly, neither did they. 

For all the information that we do give away online, and just in general, it’s still shocking the amount we conceal or even lie about. This is not to say that we should find the hole in the market and capitalise on this data famine. No, I like the idea that there is uncultivated knowledge about people – stuff that we can leave in the fields and allow to rot away. It’s paradoxically refreshing to know that there is a space we can just get on with things. Maybe the question is, not how to get at this data, but how do we extend the arena so that people don’t need to share their information but can still participate in a society and are respected for sticking to the task at hand, without the flare of a jazzy confetti cannon of their lifetime play-by-play. 

Kant’s Intellectual Intuition, as seen via The Sims 3

I’ve been playing a lot of The Sims 3 today.

It’s an odd game in that it feels like it harkens back to the old era of the original Sims games. It’s limited in the neighbourhoods you can move into (only one, unless I’m doing something wrong), it has such long-time, prestigious residents as the Goth’s and the Landgraab’s, from the earlier part of the franchise, and the game mode has hardly changed – get a job, get the skills, have some kids, get them educated or they face the prospect of military school (not that I know, my kids are all A+ pupils).

There is something very one dimensional about it, and I can’t help but wonder if it reflects the one dimensionality of our lives. You have your youngish original sim, and you get them a job after you’ve built a Barbie house of the damned with the little money you have. You then slave away at this job, pushing them up the rungs of the career. Everything you do, is to push them up this career ladder. You learn skills, you build relationships, you complete side tasks and you look after their needs to a degree that the avid player clearly does not do for themselves.

It’s an odd phenomena. Here I am, sat on my laptop for six consecutive hours, allowing my sim a few minutes to play computer games before I set him the mammoth task of reading the third volume of a book on logic to push him to become a world renowned surgeon. This is all stuff I would not, and clearly do not, do for myself. I’m in the game pushing my guy and his girlfriend and their kids to work hard all in the hope of getting some more money, only for them to die unpredictably, as his mother did on her own wedding day. It had been the third death in as many parties that I’d hosted, so I can’t even enjoy a social gathering, in game.

So why is this a thing? Why do I get so much pleasure out of setting my sims to work? It definitely feels easier and more predictable, the old adages of “work hard, play hard” or “you get what you put in” do definitely occur in the sims. Yes, things outside their work life are difficult to ascertain; they may die at your party suddenly, or another sim may cheat on you, or a burglar may drop by in the middle of the night and steal your house plant and leave your TV.

However, at work and school everything is measured – you can track your sims’ progress with his job or with his homework. There is no randomness at work which will set you back (unless you actively make the wrong choice when a scenario presents itself, although even then, the consequences are plain to see), no asshole boss who passes you over for promotion because “meh”. You can regress in game, naturally. If you don’t do what is required, turning up in a shitty mood, you will regress. And in my head, fair enough – if only it was that simple in real life, just don’t be in a bad mood!

The same with learning skills in game just keep at it, and you will achieve. It’s a real testament and promotion of the theory of needing 10,000 hours to master something: keep playing chess and you will become a surgeon etc etc. It’s a good game, and I think its simplicity is what draws me in. In some ways, the sims universe is a cool place to live. Yeah it may be boring, but it entertains me whenever I play it. Now I think about it, you do almost become God when you play in that yes you control nearly everything, but you can predict everything. Does my sim know that he’s reading this book and he’s getting better? Maybe for him, he’s reading it and it feels shit. Maybe he does feel awful in his job, and he experiences the stresses and strains we all do?

In a way, we almost have some of Kant’s intellectual intuition exhibited when we play The Sims. By this, I mean that we can envisage what we intuit without needing to apply existing principles to it, as he explains God would perhaps have the ability to do if he exists. For instance, if I intuit a tuna sandwich without the intellectual ability, I would need to be able to sense (see, smell, feel, taste, maybe hear too) a tuna sandwich within space and time, and I would then need to be able to understand the concepts of fish, bread, butter, eating food etc etc.

If I were to talk about intellectual intuition, however, I would be able to develop these concepts without needing the experience of objects which created these concepts previously. I would not need to know about fish, bread, butter, the need to eat food or whatever, I could simply be aware of it already. I would know what the object is without needing any sensory input either, I wouldn’t need to be aware of it in space and time. I could essentially dream it up as it is; I would know it as a thing in itself. (*I could be wrong on all of this).

In playing The Sims, arguably, as I have the necessities for achievements presented to me already (e.g. reading books on logic boosts logic by X amount) and I know the route to success for my sims, I am capable of seeing noumenon (the plural product of intellectual intuition – the that which is granted not from experience but purely from understanding). I am intuiting that my sim needs to read specific books to progress his skills, or go on the bench press to boost his fitness, not because I have done this billions of times before (although I have) but because the game tells me to do this. Knowing the noumena (singular) makes everything so much simpler. Like a good rationalist, this is how I would like the world to be, to know exactly what works through our understanding alone.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason posits noumena as a method to prove the inconsistencies of rationalism. His thought is that it is impossible for us to know things that we cannot garner from our experiences, the phenomena. Leibniz’s rationalism did not take the faculty of sensibility seriously as a method of developing synthetic knowledge, as it was assumed that the objects we sense are as they are, a thing in themselves, and thus we did not have this spatio-temporal lens to be aware of them. Kant, on the other hand, showed that through noumena and our sensible intuition, we would be unable to actually process what object are and without this, knowing objects was impossible. (**Again, I could be wrong about all of this)

The Sims, then, is an exercise in how intellectual intuition from the point of view of a God could work, even if my sims don’t know what the hell is going on. I am aware of what works through already having concepts given to me in advance, it is laid out to me beforehand and everything becomes almost pre-determined. This knowledge is something experience is not required for and thus, we can see how it plays out.

Damn it, I thought I could use this as a critique of Leibniz’s theory of mind, but I have forgotten the point I thought I had.

I don’t know if this is all correct, so I would appreciate feedback, even if it is to say that I’m a dumbass and need to do more reading. In all honesty, I’ve never read Leibniz, I’ve only followed up on readings I have on Kant which are used against Leibniz. If there is something I should definitely look at for Leibniz which helps me better understand Kant, I surely will!

Thanks.