In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war continued by other means

You don't run out of PvE content in games where players produce the content. The major contemporary example is Minecraft.

Another example relevant to this post is real life.

I don't want to accept that the best possible future must contain many unhappy people, because status contests have many losers and few winners. There has to be a better way, like procedurally generating PvE content. Of course if some people like PvP, let them play PvP.

But if PvP play really is an integral part of the human experience, a true CEV would notice that, and would preserve these differences instead. To ensure that we always had rival factions sniping at each other over irreconcilable, fundamental disagreements in how reality should be approached and how problems should be solved.

This strikes me as a non sequitur. People self-segregate into rival factions over stupid bullshit as well as irreconcilable, fundamental disagreements, so CEV could retain "PvP play" without having to preserve the deep disagreements.

Yesterday I was using YouTube as a jukebox to listen to Genesis while I was in the office (I'm cool) and in the videos' comments a few Gabriel-era Genesis fans seemed to be getting genuinely angry at the people who preferred Collins-era Genesis. That's the kind of triviality a CEV process could leave us to squabble over after it resolves all of our deep, fundamental conflicts, letting us fulfil our lusts for factionalism and status games. Should be fun!

Nice article. I was a bit unsure about your metaphor at first, but then the simulation part made it worth it.

One thing that occurs is that that while status games (PvP) are an efficient way to keep people occupied (low cost simulation), they're a pretty poor way to optimise hapiness. The majority of writing on hapiness I've seen (psychology/budhism/philosophy of hapiness etc) seems to indicate that one secret to hapiness is to stop playing PvP (and status games). Also, my anecdotal impression of political people, and for that matter heavily-status-focused generally is not one of hapiness. Perhaps that's because in most PvP, like you say, everybody is losing most of the time.

An observation: chess is a PvP game.

PvE can stay interesting if there's a hard mode, or challenges, or different approaches, or a strong random element. I have won Nethack several times, but never twice in a row (or even close). The later games were not much less interesting than the first. I have played Final Fantasy 1 through several times with seriously different parties. That worked quite differently each time. For on-going challenge, there are speed-runs in a gradually changing environment (Kingdom of Loathing springs to mind). You can also mod a game much more simply than creating it the first time, and that can change quite a lot.

Now... how does this translate to Science?

Social science would be on a moving target, and so could stay fairly fresh. You can try taking different axioms in math and seeing what you get, that would be sort of a mod and sort of a different approach. I'm not sure what speed runs translate into. Mods would be alternate physics.

So if you want to keep people occupied for a looooong time without running out of game-world, focus on PvP

Or invest in "procedural content generation", where the game world is constantly generated or regenerated. The "roguelike" genre has made games that have been played for decades (like Rogue, Nethack, ADOM) and continues to grow (Ultima Ratio Regum, Dwarf Fortress). It's hybridizing into other genres like action platformers (Rogue Legacy, Spelunky, Risk of Rain). Games are creating new genres by starting with PCG (FTL, Minecraft). Civilization and the Maxis Sim games are classics in large part because of content generation.

For another perspective, game designer Dan Cook has written several http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/12/steambirds-survival-goodbye-handcrafted.html blog posts on PCG leading to better-designed game systems than handcrafted content. Similarly, Jonathan Blow has argued extensively against games that extend their use of systems (eg. across all the levels of a Super Mario, Modern Warfare, or Call of Duty game, the player will see few or no changes in rules, just new sets) rather than exploring a system once thoroughly (Braid, The Witness, Portal, Polarity).

I'll leave the comparisons to "Scientific Progress [as] the PvE of real life" for the simulationists and solipsists. But I've always seen the human obsession with status and gossip as a bug rather than a feature and endeavored to advance more interesting things in the world.

Some assorted thoughts:

• Virtual PVP games with permadeath (or even progress permaloss) are relatively rare.

• There's currently no virtual PVP game that allows destruction of the game world, e.g. restarting and wiping a server triggered by an in-game event.

• Some real-world PVP games (e.g. racing or MMA fighting) have their risks, but injury or death are relatively rare because these games are regulated. The percentage of the population willing to compete in such games is tiny. There must be unregulated PVP games with permadeath, but I'm struggling to imagine them taking place anywhere outside a Colombian prison - and I don't think the participation there is fully voluntary.

• A CEV implementer can set limits to human conflict. For example, status games, Red vs Blue, bickering and insults are OK, but hurting / killing each other or degrading / destroying the environment are not allowed or impossible. Or, players could simply set the limits of acceptable loss in real-world PVP - or even limit themselves to PVE-only. No doubt there would be 'hardcore PVP characters' of various extent, but I think they would be in a minority.

I like PvP games because the experience tends to be more dynamic and varied. Even games with relatively solid AI often feel artificial.

This post makes an interesting comparison to Scott's latest.

Notably for purposes of your analogy, 'PvE' content in games in not truly 'environmental' at all, since these games are artifacts produced by humans. When you play PvE game, you are overcoming human-created challenges, and observing human creative output. The difference is that you are meant to 'win', that is, the challenges are designed to be overcome rather than to defeat you. Final Fantasy and Fallout are essentially collaborative experiences between you and the developers, a kind of friendly conversation mediated by technology and financial remuneration.

In other words, we can say that PvE game experiences are in the subset of human interactions in which mutual cooperation is advantageous for all parties. But they're still very firmly within the realm of interpersonal interactions, generally. As per Scott's post, we don't really expect these types of experiences to be finite, so that in itself is not an advantage held by PvP/antagonistic/political interactions.

From a CEV perspective, PvP and political goals are bounded in problematic ways. Two people might both want to play League of Legends, but they also both want to win, which is impossible. You can maximize goal-satisfaction by making a really satisfying victory, but your subjects will fundamentally get to experience it half the time, and their wishes will not always come true. It may be that in a far-future situation, this is a fundamental limitation in political relationships that much reduces their use in CEV value determination, in favor of human interactions that can be multiplied to mutual satisfaction without limit.

Someone replied, asking why anyone should care about the minutia of lifeless, non-agenty forces? How could anyone expend so much of their mental efforts on such trivia when there are these complex, elaborate status games one can play instead? Feints and countermoves and gambits and evasions, with hidden score-keeping and persistent reputation effects… and that’s just the first layer! The subtle ballet of interaction is difficult even to watch, and when you get billions of dancers interacting it can be the most exhilarating experience of all.

Can these people start wearing tags so I can stop interacting with them?

I wouldn't say PvP is an "integral part of almost every major video game", many major games, from casual games like Angry Birds/Candy Crush to games for "hard core gamers" like Fallout or Baldur's Gate, are single-player only (or mostly) and don't contain any PvP.

It applies to famous games, and also, perhaps more interestingly, to crowd funding, most of the biggest crowd funding projects are single-player or mostly single-player : Torment: Tides of Numenera, Project Eternity, Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2, or non-directly PvP multiplayer like Mighty No. 9. Only game in the top 5 crowd funded games (according to wikipedia) that contains PvP is Star Citizen - and even Star Citizen is mostly backed (AFAIK) by fans of the Wing Commander saga, which didn't contain any PvP, so I'm not sure PvP is primary reason to back it (I backed it for the single player campaign, not for the online mode).

There are definitely are many popular and commercially successful games containing PvP, like all FPS games or most MMORPG but I think the amount is largely overestimated by people focusing to a subset of games.

I enjoyed this post, but I almost didn't read it since the first part was about video games, which don't interest me.

I just learned that I should not pass judgement so quickly, but I'm telling you so you know that you almost alienated a reader (and maybe did alienate more, who aren't commenting here due to obvious selection effects).

Your metaphor of science as PvE is great, and I do find your narrative leading up to a necessity of PvP in a simulated reality (or any post-scarcity economy really) quite persuasive.

But PvP can take many forms: All sorts of competitive games could be in it, popularity contests (including all the arts), and even tried-and-true competition over mates. I do not see how any necessity for fundamental philosophical disagreements follows from them being part of the PvP set.

Question: How would something like pencil and paper role playing games fit into this dynamic? On the one hand it's sort of like Lumifer's good point about "You don't run out of PvE content in games where players produce the content." Except in the case of games like Dungeons and Dragons, there's usually a person explicitly designated as a content producer and rule arbiter. (The Dungeon Master) that isn't really also a player in the conventional sense of the word.

I don't think PvE is necessarily scientific knowledge. It's more like experience (to expound on the analogy further). While we're currently in one environment -- Earth -- it might be possible for us to explore other environments in the future. But, like the analogy proposes, it would take an enormous amount of manhours/manpower to actually reach this new content.

Very interesting article. The level of PVP could be related to sports in terms that the top players (Olympics) are the best of the best but most of us are happy playing weekend sports or even watching it.

I don't see that PvE is somehow less war than PvP. Both are about fighting.

Fighting isn't the only kind of interaction between humans. When I'm dancing Salsa I'm not fighting with my dance partner or fighting the environment.

PvP is fun even if you aren't good at it, otherwise it is literally just a status game. This is a lot of obfuscating dressing on the idea that human status games is where it's really at. Never mind how they're negative sum, promote perverse incentives, how people coordinate and warp perception to be unfair to people as much as the target's low status will allow, and otherwise 90% shitty in the particular, -pvp is fun, and not really like social status games, so apparently we all have to be bitches in the future.