I was diagnosed with celiac disease about two years ago. As a kid, I'd always been a very weird and picky eater, quite pale and thin; I kind of outgrew that as I reached adulthood, until a big stress event forced me to become very acquainted with the toilets of this world. Eventually, I found out my immune system was violently attacking my guts, with gluten exposure being the trigger for it. Great: we get rid of the gluten, and we get rid of the problem, right? Right, guys? Guys??
It turns out that not only is gluten in wheat, spelt, barley and some oat cultivars, but that industrial food processing makes it so that by-products of wheat&co. are present in the vast majority of foods out there. My problem became two-fold:
1. Deal with this cross-contamination (certified gluten-free products only, kitchen refurbishing, no food sharing with others, etc.);
2. Permanently and radically eliminate these cereals that are the staple food of untold numbers, and commonly used in the most basic and popular foods of today and yesterday (bread, pizzas, pastas, etc.).
Beyond the fact that my intestines still haven't recovered and that I still have trouble actually absorbing nutrients from food and not being in pain, the even bigger problem is the following: I can't eat like everyone else and I can't eat with everyone else, so I become separated from everyone else. The problem becomes an object dear to me: the interface through which I act and become in the world. After being forced to interact with the fundamental activity of eating in a different way than how it's usually done and how I was taught it should be done - being forced to change my "interface of eat" - I believe I've also come to see how beneficial it might be, for me and also for everyone, that we consider another interface of play, much unlike the one being pushed to players worldwide with the mighty power of marketing and cultural assimilation of the society of "abundance".
Meaningful Scarcity Among Procedural Abundance
Destiny 2's yearly expansion, The Final Shape, recently came out and even before the raving reviews were in, I got excited and bit the bullet for it, despite me not playing it at all for years and previous "return" attempts being a total failure (didn't even finish the Witch Queen campaign). I was feeling that all too familiar anticipation of "having a regular game to play", "playing with others casually", and enjoying the brilliant shooting gameplay. I got even more excited once I saw that the game had changed considerably, and many systems had been added to it and its interfaces: Triumphs (achievements) were refreshed, Guardian Ranks were a thing now, there was a proper quest tab, a detailed timeline and recapitulation of the whole story, etc. This was it, I could feel it: I was going to play this for a long time and be happy for it.
So I played the recap missions of previous campaigns, all well and good, and happily jumped into the expansion's campaign: it was good! There was a new subclass of hybridization, guns and movement felt as snappy as always, the story themes made sense and the missions were pretty distinctive and original, even if the environments were somewhat justified rehashes of formerly visited worlds. It was fun experimenting with different movement, grenade and class abilities; but I started noticing that I would use the same combination of weapons all the time (an exotic auto rifle in the kinetic slot, a sniper rifle in the special slot and a machine gun in the heavy slot); I tried different combinations but I liked all of them less. So I pretty much went through the entire campaign with this one weapon combo.
Different items kept dropping, and not only was I sticking to the same guns, but the armor upgrades didn't really matter because the campaign scaled to your power level and the level of your gear. In the moment, you're not consciously noticing this and especially not verbalizing it, but reflecting on it now, it's obvious the game kept doing things which didn't matter by giving me these items and currencies for manipulating those items: I didn't need them and the "standard" playthrough of the expansion would be the same in any case.
Notice that we're already talking game design: there's the level design (where you're shooting and moving), enemy design (what you're shooting), story & narrative (why you're shooting), and the moment-to-moment shooting mechanics (how you shoot and move). You need to play around with these variables in order to progress the campaign, the "main content" of the expansion. Except this isn't it: there's also items, power level, all kinds of currencies, microtransactions, season passes, character customizations, rarity of rewards, group content (the campaign includes the need to play its 3-player strike mission), legacy quests, seemingly different types of activities, crafting and the list goes on. But the campaign never really goes into them. The main "design piece" of the game's expansion doesn't go into the systems of the rest of the game?!
What happens then? Well, this is what happened to me: I finished the campaign, and I felt kind of bored. I'd played with the same guns for 5-7 hours, fighting the same enemies, getting inconsequential rewards and a pretty mediocre story. Most problematic of all: I had no idea what to do. The game gives you a ton of activities and quests and sometimes tells you what you're going to get as a reward, but it's just the name of a gun or some other exotic item, with no further information on how it looks or what it does. Well, I'm sorry, but I just went through a campaign's load of inconsequential rewards, why would I ever keep playing? And even if I did, what would I play, how would I choose? I tried some Crucible (Destiny's player-vs-player activity) but I had already played that for hundreds if not thousands of matches in the past, again with inconsequential rewards except the potential pride of winning.
I could keep playing and try some other activities, but I just don't want to because I don't see any inkling of a different design that would make any of this fun. Furthermore, any fun I get from the core gameplay loop of "Bungie-shooting-mechanics" has to be at the price of figuring out the pile of systems that the designers threw at the game in the hope of making you play more, a bit like the mentality of "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks".
Here's the really important part: any one of Destiny's regular players, which actually like and continue playing the game, could very easily dismiss all of this by the simple statement "If it's not fun for you, you should go play something else" AND THEY WOULD BE RIGHT. Except they wouldn't. Yes, in theory, what each of us likes, how each of us has fun, and the interface each of us uses to play can be different, and my tastes and enjoyments don't have to be the same ones as yours. In practice, though, we are flooded by social media, television, billboards and other forms of advertisement and culture that tell us how to live, how to eat and how to have fun.
And face it, you and I love to gobble it up and eat it whole: it is in itself a form of enjoyment, because it's a form of excess. Excess food, excess work and excess play. Everything in excess, because that's what capitalism is about: that surplus value, that excess.
That's how they grab you by the balls and never let go: they get you to mortgage a house, they make you have to use a car, they make you eat out when you're sad or angry, and they make you consume as much as you possibly can, and then some more. They overwork you and promise compensation by overconsumption: you deliver, and so do they. This is the meaning of freedom in the society of abundance, and it bleeds into game design, at least into those games which involve a mass budget and a mass audience. After Destiny's Final Shape, I went to test out The Division 2 (another big-budget multiplayer shooter), and I found the same bloated system which, by its weight, crushed any and all of the actually good gameplay at its foundation (cover-based third-person RPG shooting). And I also remember, a year or two ago, when I returned to World of Warcraft for its Dragonflight expansion, where as soon as I finished the new campaign, everything stopped making sense and all sense of coherence was lost.
But it doesn't have to be that way, not for us and not for those that will succeed us.
Passivity of Spectacle: How Video Games Make Us Lonely (Guy Debord)
Even today, many years and many events after I first read Guy Debord's Society of Spectacle, I fell off my chair as I was revising my notes on it. I sincerely cannot believe how applicable and pertinent his 1967 reading can be to the video game industry of today. Indulge me as I try to demonstrate.
Debord's beef is with this phenomenon he calls spectacle, which has come to infiltrate all walks of life, hence an entire society of spectacle, title of his book. What is spectacle? First and foremost, spectacle is NOT a set of images, it is NOT a product of the mass production and distribution of the technologies of imaging & images; rather, it is the inverted meaning produced by a society whose fundamental, non-inverted characteristic is the separation & "alienation" between workers, their process of work and the products of their work. Simply put, spectacle is the vision of an objective world in which the relation between people only happens through the intermediary world of objects.
This is the societal part of the spectacle, its irreductible social facet. And spectacle tries its utmost to confer to social relations the appearance of their impossibility: indeed, its principal vocation is to convince its "spectators" that all social relations, and the power they may confer, are pure appearance and devoid of any reality. It is the logic of disempowerement and isolation.
It is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, that the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation. [...] It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers. Only insofar as spectacle is NOT individual reality become social, or socially dependent, or socially shaped, only THEN is it allowed to appear, to be publicized. (Debord, Chapter 1)
And get this: Debord conceives spectacle as the generalized abstraction of actual society, abstraction that escapes the action of persons, their consideration and any correction that might be brought to it. You know what else is an abstraction? The whole medium of video games itself: computer programming is one big abstraction, based on calculations designed by developers to be performed by the transistors of a CPU/GPU. Isn't the act of playing the game totally separated from its actual design and any thought or correction that might be given to it? Can I just go into the Division 2's source code and take out all the crafting and other bullshit and design new missions for it that don't just change the scenery but also the actual mission design (objectives, obstacles, enemies, etc.)? I love the theme and the setting, but I just can't tolerate having to re-do the same content over and over and pretend I'm having fun.
Well, Debord would say, too bad so sad: welcome to the society of the spectacle, where a certain type of division of labor has specialized the power at the root of spectacle in such a way as to elaborate an activity (the spectacle) whose vocation is to speak for all other activities and individuals; essentially as unilateral communication replacing the lost communication between people as a result of their alienation, spectacle's prime area of deployment is the world of leisure. Hey, videogames are a leisurely activity, yes?
Sure they are, and Debord likely had no idea that video games would become the chief leisure of human beings in the 21st century. But he did suppose that any increase in leisure(-time) would not actually bring extra power and freedom to the individual, because the form of leisure would be copy-pasted from the form of work, whose alienation subsists.
None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result. The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds.” (Debord, Chapter 1)
This is the crux of the matter, the point that really sticks and really hurts when talking about video games and spectacle: we tend to be exposed to video games in such a manner (proprietary, non-modifiable, unquestionable, immense budgets translated into technical marvels, etc.) that they become exterior to us despite our experience with them; our own gestures of play are no longer ours but those of them who represent our gestures to ourselves, outside of ourselves. Whether we like it or not, we swallow what the game companies decide is best for their game and their financial prospects: content vaults, microtransactions, balance overhauls that make you grind for gear again, all the non-playful bullshit that feed into metrics and KPI's (key performance indicators) that they can show stockholders and investors in order to keep getting money to make more of the same.
Debord and his society of the spectacle help us to put into question how we approach and play with computer programs: it's another path whereby we can examine our interface of play. And its strong suggestion about our interfaces of&to play is that when we approach video games as an activity of leisure, we're simulating the same kind of conditions of our work hours: we're compensating for them, we're exhausting ourselves with play so that work might be justified, all while we're not really elaborating any of the play conditions, which are dictated by others and which we must accept if we want to keep playing.
That's why games that also provide an editor or mission designer or way of creating content for the game are so interesting, and historically so impactful: DOTA is a Warcraft 3 map elaborated by the community, not Blizzard; Counter-Strike is a Half-Life 1 mod by the community, not Valve (as much as Valve has actually recycled both DOTA and Counter-Strike into the commodity ecosystem by this day); PUBG was initially an Arma 3 mod, and the list goes on. For my part, I'm currently playing through the Shadowrun RPGs by Harebrain, who also released modding/editor tools and where a lot of other campaigns exist for the game: it's so refreshing and actually restful to not be the prey of some live-service in an infinite hunt for my wallet. Maybe I'll make a campaign for that game. Or for Thief's Dark Mod, based on the Doom 3 engine. I also want to test out Symphony of War, a very celebrated Fire Emblem-like that's actually made in RPGMAKER?!
My point is that there is so much out there which actually engages you to play, to participate, to be active and creative: we don't have to play the games that engender passivity and grumbling acceptance. Most of all, and this ties into our next section, we absolutely don't have to resign ourselves to the abundance of dispossession.
Abundance in Poverty; and Poverty in Abundance (Thoreau)
It is no exaggeration to say that by the time I reached the middle of Thoreau's Walden, my life was profoundly changed by its contents. One of the other problems of celiac disease is that by not absorbing nutrients properly (or at all), it can make you desire food all the time, using the "real" hunger part as an amplifier of the "emotional" side of eating which this sentence implies is a bit less "real"; I don't mean to say that emotions are less real, but they certainly do not have the permanence and solidity of other phenomena. As I read Thoreau's process of building his cabin in the woods, and the simple sustenance he could live by (cornmeal & rye bread he baked himself, some butter, some peas, the very occasional animal protein), I had a startling and world-changing insight: sure, celiac's brings its debilitating complications, but it was certain I didn't need as much food as I thought. Rather, as Thoreau painstakingly tries to explain over over, by talking about building his cabin, about growing beans, about being lazy, about worshiping the beauty of life and "Saturn", food is so far away from the actual fundamental good and reality that human beings can experience: symbols, morality, the words we LITERALLY breathe life into, our aspiration to be noble - these are the actual things, the most real things that actually wake us up in the morning. "This is why you actually rise from bed", he wants to tell us. Not because of a "mechanical servitor" (your clock, your phone, etc.), but because the deepest part of you wants to rise to the occasion of the day:
Little is to be expected of THAT day [...] to which we are not awakened by our Genius, [...] are not awakened by our own newly-acquired force and aspirations from within [...] - to a higher life than we fell asleep from. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. (Thoreau, Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For")
I don't know about you, but it's often happened to me that I wake up quite groggy, unwilling or rather quite unenthusiastic about the prospect of another day, until I think of a thing, a very particular and concrete thing, which gets me excited, which makes me accept all of the routine daily chores that need to be done before or after that thing which I'm actually jumping out of bed for. For me, that exciting prospect will often, if not most often, be associated with a video game: I get a crazy idea I want to try out, to experiment, I want to discover what happens next in the story, or how a new game I haven't tried promises to introduce new ways of play. What's really important about this yearning is, to harken back to Debord as well, that it's not a desire to "rest", or a want for "leisure". It is an aspiration, damn it! It is a most fundamental expression of the need for expression and creativity, of the overwhelming will of realizing and actualizing our essence of life.
Guys and gals, it's really not as complicated as it seems when you ask yourself if you really want to play what you're about to jump into, as it so often happens to me: what you're really doing is trying to rationalize and justify doing something you don't really want to be doing, for whatever reason. For example, I recently tried out Uncharted 4, and after about an hour I was interrupted and had to go do something else. But when I became "available for play" again, I didn't really want to return to Uncharted, even though I could think of so many reasons "justifying" it: capitalizing on my PSN subscription which gave me access to the game, "giving it another chance" considering the universal praise it received, imagining the ways in which the game would be different from what I played in that initial hour, which I had played over and over in previous Uncharted's, Tomb Raider's and other action-adventure games with the "lost treasure" narrative theme: climbing mechanics, light cover shooter mechanics, platforming puzzles, etc. And I'm completely sick of these games, that's the actual truth if I sit down and take five minutes to think about it. So not only have I not returned to Uncharted, I'm positively enthused to never have to play the game again and I'm ecstatic to have been able to consciously & explicitly state why I don't want to go back to it, because it'll be useful for many instances down the line.
This is the very meaning of Thoreau and, by extension, the intuition behind this blog and its title: the notion of the interface, at its most general elaboration, is an expression of the "reawakening" of our consciousness to the aspirations and yearning of the GENIUS inside each and every one of us.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn [...]. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it's far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. [...] Every man is tasked to make his life, even its its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. (Thoreau, Walden, "Where I Lived...")
This is the "poverty in abundance" part: with these noble words in mind, how can we possibly fathom going through "grinding/farming" in games??? What utility and satisfaction can that "god-roll" weapon possibly procure, once you have gone through the same gameplay, the same exact gameplay, tens if not hundreds of times?? Are you actually gaining anything by this process, are you tending to the garden of your genius, that genius that granted you the will&energy to start your day, or are you actually railroading yourself? Because if so, instead of working to be the rail on which the train (of the games industry capitalism) smashes its way through, we could simply forgo the train altogether. Would that be so impossible a proposition?
It is the entire endeavor of Thoreau's writing to answer "NO" to this question. It is not impossible, or rather, it is entirely possible to stop sacrificing yourself and your life to some meandering and wasteful busywork; it is entirely possible to stop compromising your life essence and to start chasing the passion that seizes your heart in the middle of night, when you are woken up by the song of the starry night sky. That magic is real, it really exists, stop believing it's just a fantasy conducive to a futile and temporary escapism! Instead ask yourself if that fantasy doesn't exactly have more power and reality than any other story you've told yourself to "keep going", and most importantly of all ask yourself what you're trying to escape from and why escape seems necessary!..
Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. (Thoreau)
This is "poverty in abundance": it is the abundance of the superfluous, of the unnecessary, which is forced down our throats by the constant and never-ending exposition of our senses to the dominant media which imprisons our minds inside the one-dimensional and repetitive reality it is trying to convince us of: that life is hard, that sacrifices must be made, that you can't live by yourself, that you can't count on yourself, that you have to buy and sell in order to be part of life "as it really is", that it's not about trees and their fruits, nor meadows and their flowers, until all of it can be turned into dollars. That games need microtransactions, that "just cosmetics" is OK, that DLC released concomitantly with V1.0 is acceptable, that pre-order "early access" is OK, that we don't "HAVE TO" buy one of the 5-6 "DELUXE ULTIMATE SPECIAL" editions, etc. This is the trash that is forced down our throat with the massive money invested into marketing and game sites and streamers in order to force your exposition and create a need in your mind to be part of that "next big thing". That's "abundance": the many big things, the interminable procession of gadgets and manufactured products which can all be yours as long as "you gots the monies".
What, then, is "abundance in poverty"? It's having that world-changing suggestion that all of that is completely unnecessary to feeling good. Not just feeling good, but feeling like there's nothing better you could be doing or becoming. It's the poverty of simplicity, of short-circuiting the idea of "need": not by asceticism as a denial of oneself and one's sensuous existence, but by its contrary, the very economical and thorough accounting of all the ways in which our bodily and mental existence already grants us so much power to take in and be part of the world. All of it already there, with so little necessary for the actual sustenance of this huge power, which presents itself in two particular facets: 1) the world interior to us, morality; 2) the world exterior to us, "Saturnian" nature.
1) The world interior to us: simply put, our thoughts. Here, "abundance" is the incredibly numerous, rich, and accessible written works throughout the centuries. Yeah, you can pay for a copyrighted work of any kind to which your payment only grants a "license" to "consume" (movies, books, games, etc.); but there's also a treasure trove, in the most literal "hidden chest of a famously rich pirate", of open-source software & public domain works in every form imaginable. And if you really need to talk about some copyrighted work with someone, 100% you will be able to find access to it through your public library, if not by 21st century piracy.
That absolutely does not mean that it will be easy or straightforward to engage with these objects of realized thought; but it absolutely does mean that it will be worth it in the end. It's not about lulling ourselves as a luxury which softens us and makes our faculties sleepy; it's about "standing on tip-toe" to read and give our utmost attention and wakefulness to.
For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of men? [...] We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. [...] To read well [...] is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. [...] The writer speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him. (Walden, "Reading")
While any work of art is the result of work and the process by which the worker becomes materialized, Thoreau gives special esteem to the written word, for the simple reason that, by its necessity to be spoken, it is "not to be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself".
This utmost reality of the written word, whereby "many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book", makes it so that schools become institutions for each and every citizen, not just children. "It is time we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men & women. [...] Instead of noblemen, let us [thereby] have noble villages of men."
2) The world exterior to us: the "crops of Nature". The expression is not Thoreau's, but it's important because he insists on drawing many intersections between the crops as tended by man, and the crops tended by Nature, and how the two often conflate.
When people cultivate crops, they tend to focus all of their attention either on them as food to be consumed by personal need and for the excess to be brought to market. Thoreau bemoans the lack of consideration given to how the cultivation of crops, as such a direct and strong link with "Nature", can put us into contact with its moral dimensions of truth, sincerity and justice, which can take root inside us just as they take root within the earth we turned by the plough. The beans do not lie: they grow as you have seeded and taken care of them. What more truth and justice is there to be sought in the world?
Being thus deprived of the consideration of the morality of our crops, we become depraved by the very work which should ennoble us: "Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem to not have time; they are busy about their beans." This is crux of the notion of HUSBANDRY as a moral understanding of the activity of farming and as the direct bridge to the "real fruits" of our harvest - here's a quick etymological explanation.
HUSBANDRY = occupation of a husbandman ("farmer")
HUSBANDMAN = husband + man
HUSBAND = hús + bóndi = house + bond ("economy"/"frugality")
BOND = búa ("reside"/"build")
By this understanding, we emphasize the Earth in the "wealth of its nakedness" as our true house which already exists and of which we are first and foremost stewards. Our "residence" is "frugal" because Nature already provides so much food and shelter as to be sufficient; what we must focus on "building" is not so much new houses, which are unnecessary insofar as we already have the Earth, but men's virtues&character according to the qualities to which we expose ourselves by our stewardship of the land. Most importantly, this turns the logic of accumulation into its opposite, sacrifice: we do not take from Nature to nourish ourselves; rather, we take from ourselves (our time, our work, our life) to nourish and maintain Nature.
[We know] Nature but as robbers. [...] This broad field which I have look at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. [...] The ear of wheat (from spe, hope) should not be the only hope of the husbandman; its grain (gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears.
How, then, can our harvest fail?
The Industry of Idleness: A Luxury We Can All Afford
As always, I've tried to marry my love for computer games to my love for the written word in all of its forms. I hope I've managed to express clearly what has arisen, for me, from this write-up: our happiness and much loved hobbies need not get muddled and disgraced by the ugliness of those who only seek to transform all forms of life into dollars; my and your enjoyment of games need not be tributary to the whims and corruptive practices of the video game industry, which isolate and alienate us. Should all VIDEOgames become a microtransaction hell, still we need never despair: we can make our own games, video or not, as we always have and always will.
We always will because that is the luxury we can all afford, and there’s enough of us to make sure we don’t forget it. It’s the luxury of Thoreau's conception of idleness, of being in the world and allowing the world to be in us, and relishing those moments of life and accomplishment. Moments of idleness seldom come spontaneously, and can never take root when we're caught in the web of busy-work, of meaningless activity dressed up with a costume of significance. That is our great challenge: to deconstruct the industry of busy-ness so that we might erect an industry of idleness, of studying the world, of figuring out our place in it, of discovering how much we can do and how far we can go with the existential freedom that is our essential endowment. And all of it is affordable: nothing is out of reach or too expensive except those things which denature us; all that we need, and we need so little, is already there, ripe to be "taken" - and, more profoundly, to be "given" by the sacrifice of our time and life.
More concretely, in computer game terms, I come away with two major principles about this post's subject, overdesign:
1) On the one hand, overdesign is, as I've put it, that practice of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. No matter how well that wall might be built, how pleasant its architecture might be, how tall or how strong it might be, overdesign will make it stink, will give it a particular color and will, in the end and - quite simply - deface, denature and corrupt all that made it good to engage with. These are the MMO's and live-service games of our era, and once you've seen it you can't unsee it: no matter how much I enjoyed certain parts of Guild Wars, Elder Scrolls or The Division in the past, I have to make peace with the fact that these games have been turned and burned for an increasingly singular purpose: to generate profit and to do so at any cost, game design be damned.
2) On the other hand, overdesign is also an issue of the eyes of the beholder. We have to learn to differentiate between game measures of overdesign, such as system mechanics overload (too many RPG systems in an RPG), and player measures of overdesign: among other things, judgments of taste as well as simply preferences. Having read, watched and played quite a lot of works in the genre of science-fiction, "metahuman discrimination" from Shadowrun Dragonfall feels to me like narrative overkill in a game set in the anarchist "Flux State" of Berlin on near-future, corporate-dominated Earth; I want to learn more fundamentally about the principles, workings & origins of that kind of Berlin, more than to simply go through some reheated moral about equality and "meta"human rights; for me, it's fluff and overdesign as long as the base setting of the narrative isn't fully fleshed out; but I can also totally imagine another person's background and circumstances considering this as the fundamentally important element of the game's story, and that would be fine; every one can have their reasons to exist and like different stuff.
These two principles coalesce into what seems to me the posture of "only play when you're actually playing": don't turn it into busywork and don't let anyone else turn it into that either.
The act of playing is a form of husbandry: a stewardship of the world and of our interface of belonging. Immersion should not be its only hope, nor fun all that it bears.
Until next time, I'll be testing out this posture in Age of Empires, Assassin's Creed, Transistor & Graveyard Keeper, among others. Thanks for reading, and have a good summer!