Comment by wahern
1 day ago
There's nothing new about earning "points" for kills. Warriors have always tallied their kills and displayed their numbers, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_marking or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalping, though the rewards were typically accolades, and only indirectly access to more materiel.
There is nothing new under the sun. You fail to address my clear moral objection with these irrelevant historical instances. It has no rhetorical value in this context.
The point was just that gameification is just a modern word that doesn't reflect any change in behaviors. Presumably you were familiar with these practices under previous descriptors. And your moral objections would have been shared by many millions before you, long before gameification was coined.
On the other side of the coin to thinking there's something new about the way war is waged are the people who think they can wage war without the same consequences as befell nations before. It's fundamentally the same err, IMO. So I take moral objection to the pretense that there's something morally novel to criticize. This stuff is what happens in war, always. And things can get way worse than this, and will get worse the longer we tolerate open hostilities among nations.
I think the difference is between: 1) me doing a nice thing and them reciprocating later, possibly. Others may or may not see this display of niceness. 2) me doing a nice thing, getting karma points my friend and other sees, which I can possibly use to get perks of some kind.
Gamification is not a new word for an old idea. It's a new thing, at least in many contexts.
#1 seems a lot more human to me.
1 reply →
I think something fundamentally new is not only the incentivisation directly affecting kills - as a top team/unit can iterate up much faster, unlike a soldier who could boast more kills, but still have the same rifle as his colleagues - but the layers and desensitisation overall.
Part of this probably admittedly isn't new, and likely started with drones, where you could kill someone in Iraq sitting in DC, on the other side of the world.
But now with both, being separated from the physicality, and the incentives via points (the same way arguably in app currencies are used in gacha games - "20 tokens for this character!" feels better than $40), this is way more similar to CoD or any other shooting game than it has ever been in human history, and by a significant amount.
Sorry for the rambley and extremely verbose reply but tbh it's absolutely horrifying and sickening to see as a fellow human, and I just wanted to get it out. (I'm obviously not saying Ukraine is wrong for wanting to protect territory - but it's the other aspects that are "awesome" (or awe-full?), in the wrong way of awe.)
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> Gameification of war is the literal worst thing I ever heard. Lords of War, eat your heart out.
What 'clear moral objection' did you make? You talk in cliches so it's hard to tell.
War is inherently amoral and in an argument about its efficacy I don’t understand what your argument is?
Can you expand on that? There is a long history of warrior codes, just war theory, war crimes, etc. Certainly they have virtually always been followed imperfectly, but I'm not sure that means that they don't exist.