Tag: players

I’ve never been into games. I find them dreary, but they also require interaction with other people, and that’s a challenging endeavour for me. For most of my life, I stayed on the sidelines, observing others running like lab rats in a maze, which proved convenient when I started working for newspapers. That’s probably why I became a journalist in the first place, as it embraced this habit of mine, allowing me to make a living out of it while at the same time feigning involvement in the affairs of others, at least up to the final punctuation mark, so I could for a little while convince myself that the detachment from the real world that I have always felt is nothing but my imagination. However, one may ask oneself what is more desirable: indifferent reliability or compassionate inadequacy (knowing people, they would aim for compassionate reliability—what a greedy creature human is). But it turns out that if you sugarcoat the former with an impression of sympathy, we are more than happy to embrace it, like the Diplomacy board game players, who were happier to lose to gracious AI than obnoxious human players (see What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? by Virginia Heffernan in Wired magazine).