Mine has to be cop procederals and paper money.
A)I just like solving mysteries and problems and have a natural deference to authority figures, so I’ve watched way too many cop shows. The only one I’m not ashamed to name is The Wire, which is really good and probably is the only one with genuine substance.
B)It’s not the concept of money I enjoy, i just like having a physical thing I exchange to get another physical thing. I…“dislike” per se, using numbers on a screen to get food or something.
In a “communist utopia”, we’d probably have the means to require less sleep and to stop aging (with how quickly tech is advancing I wouldn’t be surprised). Thus, you’d have more time to game.
Even the early socialism of the 1936 Soviet constitution limited the working day to 7 hours with plans from Stalin to further shorten it. Everyone being guaranteed a job means less work required from individuals (and higher purchasing power because the price of goods will fall as they become easier and quicker to make). So, your free time may still go up.
The USSR also supported chess players and gave them full time salaries, chess universities and the ability to pursue it as a full time career, same with fitness sports like the olympics.
To be fair, a lot of people think that a big reason why the USSR invested so much into chess and sports is because these were ways to acquire national prestige in international competitions.
I don’t think most computer games would be suitable for this. Sure, e-sports exist, but most people play games for fun, not for any kind of serious competition.
Their really isnt much difference between chess and e-sports tho’
The point is a state directed economy can choose to prioritize stuff that is relevant on a national stage in terms of culture, be it games, sports, music; but they can do it in a way where working class people can participate, rather than in the west where sports, games, culture, tends to be dominated by the rich or sons and daughters of the rich, as they have the free time and resources.
Speaking of sports and physical exercise under socialism: just looking at the relationship that Chinese people today have with sport, i see that in some ways it is very different from what we have in the West. You constantly see people in China, particularly elders, just exercising in public, dancing or practicing martial arts in the parks and public squares in the mornings and evenings.
And from what I understand this is not something they pay for, they are just free to participate or not as they wish. Which is so unlike the way it works here in Germany where you would have to join a sport club or a gym and pay a sizeable fee to take part in exercise groups or take classes, even if you just want to do it recreationally as an amateur.
Everything that can be commercialized is commercialized under capitalism, nothing just happens just because it is good for society and the people.
Reminds me of how some years back, there was a time I was looking into doing martial arts. Used to do them as a kid, figured maybe I’d try to do it again as an adult. Emailed some local place about pricing cause couldn’t find it on their website and instead of an email reply, got a phone call and a subsequent voice message (cause I didn’t answer the call for whatever reason) trying to get me to do like a “come see their facilities” sales kind of thing instead of just telling me what the price was. Which made it clear to me I would not be able to afford it.
And also makes me realize some people who are money poor (or hell, just trying to be frugal) probably are shut-ins more so under capitalism because of being priced out of a lot of social activities. I’m sure a determined enough person would find ways to get out and socialize anyway, but if you’re already predisposed to hiding away, capitalism puts up barriers to getting out of that. And then like in the US, the car situation makes it even worse. So much of getting anywhere is a car, unless you’re in like a big city design, so if you don’t have a car or don’t want to be spending on gas money all the time, another barrier.
Well, yes, except for the fact that e-sports are very corporatized right now and serve to generate profits for corporations which own the rights to those games in a way that chess as a public domain game never really could.
But yeah, e-sports competitions could be turned into a chess-like national cultural pastime under socialism, so i’m not really worried about e-sports; i personally don’t engage much with them anyway.
I’m more wondering what the future of single player and non-competitive games would be in a communist society.
Exactly! This is why I believe that sports are able flourish so much better under a socialist society than under capitalism, where everything is profit driven and huge barriers to entry exist for a majority of people.
I don’t see why games would fundamentally change in a communist society, if anything it would be a golden age for gaming and pretty much all sort of media.
Especially games since they require relatively low equipment to be produced, in fact many games are developed as free time projects, by wealthy citizens from imperial core countries, just to be played by friends (Balatro, a massively succesful game was developed as a side project with the intent of distribute it to the friends of the developer).
I could imagine this happening but on a much larger scale in a communist society where abundance allows a much bigger % of the population access to the tools and the free time to pursue these kind of projects.
You get murmurs of this sometimes, open source games like SS13; Games made by ex-socialist countries by leftists; Pathologic, ice pick studios, disco eleysium ect.