[Ow that ... doesn't hurt at all and Dirk lets it hit but really. Not painful when they're just sitting around like this.]
It isn't prepped. [But it is based on hours of thinking things at himself while isolated from other human companionship so.] If we take games as defined as interactive, goal-oriented, and involving other agents, then we can understand them as meeting different needs. As interactive activities, they allow the exercise of various faculties and a sense of one's own control or capabilities in the event. You can develop in response into a game or test your own limits. That ties into the goal-orientation, which is to say that gaming offers a clear sense of what constitutes as achievement or otherwise. One of the primary addictive components to gaming is its ability to offer clear goals with distinct rewards that create pleasure responses. By involving other agents, you can either compete against others, which gives a sense of further triumph and power, or you can cooperate with others, which is community-building. Both of these possibilities stimulate specific needs we have as a species that is highly reliant on social interaction. Especially in games like sports, which are both cooperative and oppositional, we can develop a more powerful sense of community by building up and working against another community.
In other words, playing a game engages in several basic human behaviours that mirror our impetus towards skill-developing, community-building, and survival-training. They provide relatively safe environments for the emulation of the more hostile kinds of interactions that would be experienced outside of a game and therefore have high value as developmental activities, and our brains reward us for it.
Many species engage in some kind of play as training. It's pretty visible in any of the species you've adopted. Play's a pretty big deal for the Magister's development as a social creature and for his motorskills and intellectual functioning. That's the whole reasoning behind the sand thing.
Basically, humans value play because play is valuable to us. Over millennia of social development, we heaped further value and meaning onto activities the same way we do with any element of culture. Mastery of each specific sport demonstrates and answers mastery of specific kinds of competency in the game, but also competency in the culture and rituals surrounding that game and admission to its community.
no subject
It isn't prepped. [But it is based on hours of thinking things at himself while isolated from other human companionship so.] If we take games as defined as interactive, goal-oriented, and involving other agents, then we can understand them as meeting different needs. As interactive activities, they allow the exercise of various faculties and a sense of one's own control or capabilities in the event. You can develop in response into a game or test your own limits. That ties into the goal-orientation, which is to say that gaming offers a clear sense of what constitutes as achievement or otherwise. One of the primary addictive components to gaming is its ability to offer clear goals with distinct rewards that create pleasure responses. By involving other agents, you can either compete against others, which gives a sense of further triumph and power, or you can cooperate with others, which is community-building. Both of these possibilities stimulate specific needs we have as a species that is highly reliant on social interaction. Especially in games like sports, which are both cooperative and oppositional, we can develop a more powerful sense of community by building up and working against another community.
In other words, playing a game engages in several basic human behaviours that mirror our impetus towards skill-developing, community-building, and survival-training. They provide relatively safe environments for the emulation of the more hostile kinds of interactions that would be experienced outside of a game and therefore have high value as developmental activities, and our brains reward us for it.
Many species engage in some kind of play as training. It's pretty visible in any of the species you've adopted. Play's a pretty big deal for the Magister's development as a social creature and for his motorskills and intellectual functioning. That's the whole reasoning behind the sand thing.
Basically, humans value play because play is valuable to us. Over millennia of social development, we heaped further value and meaning onto activities the same way we do with any element of culture. Mastery of each specific sport demonstrates and answers mastery of specific kinds of competency in the game, but also competency in the culture and rituals surrounding that game and admission to its community.
[and yet: dirk cannot Sport]