the urge to have all limbs and tails completely enveloping someone else until you can see their anxieties about the external world fade away

@kirakira yeah!! i think so anyway!!

hi im back from being bedridden whatd i miss

combat robit that has particularly thick armor around its neck for… no reason

@kasdeya before i say anything, i want to make sure it’s clear the position i’m starting from:

• i don’t like to wager many guesses about what is inherent to our condition, especially from an evolutionary theory perspective. i think it’s easy to get caught begging the question when we ascribe evolutionary origin to behaviors we see because it divorces them from extrinsic factors that we experience today. it’s sometimes difficult to determine what is evolutionary versus what is the result of immediate environmental factors
• tagging onto the previous point, i don’t believe that the urge to [dominate, conquer, enact violence] is intrinsic because it implies that all cultures and societies have always been subject to this and that we’re all inherently prone to being antisocial. i believe the opposite is true: if anything is intrinsic, its our pro-social behaviors because those are very often demonstrably more effective at large than antisocial ones.
• this is just a personal anecdote, but another reason i don’t believe antisocial behaviors are inherent is because i often feel them in response to something. however, it’s not like feeling lonely or horny or whatever which seems to happen after prolonged deprivation of some need. i figure, then, that if loneliness is the deprivation of a need, then the need is to socialize. if socialization is a need, prosocial behaviors are the ones that would help me fulfill that need.
• i’m a consequentialist. i don’t think having urges to do something makes you cruel, evil, or unethical. what makes you evil is only how to act upon those urges. the only thing having antisocial urges is proof of is that our environments fucking suck

i think that competition can emerge from different desires, either extrinsic or intrinsic. relating it back to my post you linked: i believe marx described the effect of capitalism as fostering individualism and competitive egoism to the detriment of community. i attribute a lot of these types of selfish, competitive desires and behaviors to living under capitalism. if we’re talking about competition in nature, i think we can define it as two or more parties striving for the same goal where success for one is failure for another. or i guess in other words, a zero-sum game. this type of competition is defined by scarcity; the reason things would compete is that the goal is either so valuable or so scarce that competing is less of a threat than the alternative. capitalism’s entire purpose is to create scarcity (commodification) in order to create profit.

as for the intrinsic motivations for competition: the urge to improve oneself, a feeling of belonging to a community that shares the same passion, and even just the joy of competition. i believe that it’s entirely possible to engage in competition where – while the victory may be mutually exclusive between the competitors – enjoyment can be had in either winning or losing.

i don’t think it’s an accident that the increased commodification of games and multiplayer spaces has lead to increasingly toxic game communities. dota 2, league, overwatch, etc. all have a very real monetary incentive to be good at the game. for example, winning the prize pool of the massive tournaments they hold or being a well-known streamer for that game. that plus the proliferation of sbmm has increased overall atomization of the communities; anyone you meet is temporary. it’s hard to form meaningful connections when it’s nearly impossible to have repeated exposure to them. worse yet, even in the instance that players do go out of their way to add one another as friends or whatever – the duration of games and minimal downtime between matches means that it’s actually really difficult to sync up and play without pretty explicit communication. the design of these games is to keep you playing as frequently as possible with minimal downtime. when you’re used to segmenting your play time in multiples of 15-30 minutes, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’ll just play “a few rounds” and go do something productive. when a friend sends a request to join your party, it can feel like a bigger commitment than just churning through match after match of strangers – even if you would’ve spent the same amount playing.

unfortunately i feel that commodification of communities (and the resultant atomization) is something we’re seeing in multiplayer games and online spaces in general.