The pointlessness of existence, online

A Slashdot comment on the problems of playing massively multiplayer online games:

This guy really hits on what I think is the biggest problem with MMO's. There's no end game. If winning is really important to you (and it's an important part of games in general), then you're never going to be satisfied.

I don't play WoW, but I do play Eve-Online, and it's basically the same thing for a lot of people. They've built big and powerful alliances, they control vast in-game resources, and they're deeply involved in all of the political intrigue in the game. But they're stuck at this terrible point where no matter how much they collect, how much territory they control, there's still tons more out there.

Just like many wealthy people in life spend their money trying to procure more wealth, the means and the end have become basically the same thing, watching a few numbers constantly increase. And since there's an infinite supply of higher numbers, there's no final goal to be reached. You end up playing to win a game that can't actually be won. Not because you're unskilled or aren't working hard enough, but because there is no game-mechanic that qualifies as winning.

Yet it still manages to sweep up lots of people, and stings them along until they burn out. But at least with real life wealth, if you eventually realize what's going on and gain some perspective on life, you've probably got a decent pile of money to support you as you move in a new direction. When you burn out on a video game and decide to leave it, you've likely sacrificed a lot of what you had in the real world.

The original essay is worth reading as well.

Unfortunately, the real world is like that too: ultimately pointless. You can choose to have fun, reproduce, accumulate resources or power, or contemplate trivial or deep questions. But there's no endgame, you can't win. At least in a video game, you can stop playing, and have an offline existence to go back to (albeit one perhaps damaged by your virtual sojourn). In the real world, if you quit, that's it. No wonder that a major MMO game is named "Second Life".

I see religion as one of the major ways we humans have come up with to deal with the pointlessness of existence. There's no right answer, thus the diversity of religions. But I wonder if video game companies shouldn't try to encourage some actual religion in-game, to help keep the suckers online, contemplating the fundamental pointlessness of their online world.

Or you could just go to a church in the real world. The bandwidth is better off-line anyway, not to mention the graphics. So realistic. Unbelievable.

This church is going to the dogs...

...or is it the other way around? Just around St. Francis's day, National Geographic brings us a trend story on churches reaching out to people's pets. I haven't seen any dogs in our church, though I've thought about bringing Sheba. I've heard there's a dog who often attends our sister congregation on the other side of the river, and there's a geriatric poodle who often shows up during coffeetime.

A special pet blessing service, though... I think Sheba would enjoy that.

Apocalypse how

I'm reading Ronald Wright's novel, A Scientific Romance. It's an example of a popular form of science fiction, the post-apocalypse story. Only, it's not the 1950's or '60's nuclear holocaust that worries us today. Wright places us in the future world beset by runaway global warming and the ensuing collapse of civilization.

It's credible, and depressing. I've spent time thinking about humans and geochemistry, trying to understand whether the consensus is in fact correct, or whether there's a chance that our mild impact on the planet simply doesn't matter. Mere hubris, really, to think we could alter the chemistry of the planet. What organism could? And there are those who think the whole thing is a sham. But no -- the evidence is everywhere, the skeptics are mere cranks, and enough information was available to get the answer right in 1850, much less 1950. (The essential bits are the IR absorption of CO2 and the fact that fossil fuels burn to CO2 -- that's it.) The carbon cycle is a bit complex, true, but burning fossil fuels has increased, by many orders of magnitude, a previously minor process. Buried carbon entered the atmosphere before humans, slowly weathering in the rare places where geological churning lifted it to the surface, but only gradually. That has been replaced by six billion primates mining that energy resource for all of their short-sighted ape-like ends. And just because we know we're doing it, or some of us know, doesn't mean we can stop.

There are the optimists, those who draw neat plans for getting things down, split the difference, half the reduction for this generation, half for the next, and maybe carbon levels won't exceed double preindustrial, and maybe climate effects will be merely severe, not catastrophic. But we're adapted to the climate we came from, not the climate we're creating. And it's not at all clear to me that the rosy predictions of the possibility of controlling our climate impact are realistic. The climate apocolypse seems real and present to me, something to fear.

No doubt a previous generation feared a nuclear holocaust with fresh presence and realism. I am too young for that, though I remember holding hands across america, a nonsensical response to a nonsensical threat. Surely the Russian realized Reagan was the ironic cartoon every American knew he was? You might have believed in professional wrestling as to believe in nuclear brinksmanship.

On the other side are those who fear fossil fuel exhaustion far more than the consequences of burning it. The die-off folks, who make entirely true statements about the limited supply of cheap oil, and note the vast quantities of fossil fuel embodied in every calorie of food we eat. About seven calories of oil per calorie of human-grade food, we're literally eating oil, and all the easy oil is gone. I'm less worried: there's a lot of coal, low-quality oil, and so on; and one could use existing resources more efficiently. We'd be poor, yes, eating meat once a week, or year, but we'd survive.

As a species, maybe. Not necessarily as a civilization. But it's the civilization I want to preserve. The planet doesn't need my help. Nor do my genes: most are the same as other humans, as the monkey, heck, with the yeast responsible for the miracle of turning grapes into wine. No, it's my attachment to this civilization which leads me to concern for the environment it relies on. It is, I admit, an utterly selfish motivation.

So there it is, modern millenialism, more with a whimper than a bang, ending in fire, not ice. Though some think violent climate disruption could lead to premature resumption of ice ages -- who knows, perhaps it will be ice. Should be good for lots of interesting speciation events, once we're gone. And some civilization, a hundred million years in the future, will find our signatures written in the rocks of the world: bands of iron, molecular fossils of organic polymers requiring unusual conditions to form, the sudden leap in atmospheric carbon. Who knows, they might even correctly guess as to what happened. Cold comfort, perhaps, but that's all we have.