QC

I last played Fallout when it was Wasteland in 1988. My point is that you shouldn't look to a game to answer fundamental questions about the fragility/robustness of reality. The idea of looking to fake worlds for real answers is so toxic you shouldn't even joke about it.https://twitter.com/mechazuth/status/1160722509014163456 …

We've constructed so many compelling alternate realities that people are losing track of Prime Reality. Which threatens all of civilization, because Prime Reality is that which, if you ignore it, can easily destroy you & all your derived realities.

Virtual worlds can relate to Prime. Money won/lost at online poker is real, and should be treated thus. Fiction (and fictional games) can explore real philosophical topics in useful ways. Twitter forms a world brain to create better analysis of real problems than possible alone.

But these worlds are dangerous, because it's so easy to forget they are derived. It's so tempting to delude ourselves "Sure I play this game 60/hrs a week but I'm learning strategy & teamwork!" Maybe a smidge, but you'd learn those skills even better doing something real.

Crypto beautifully illustrates both the promise and peril of virtual strategy games. The concepts of money, mechanism design, incentives, virtual coordination of real activity (@cdixon) are both addictively fascinating and potentially very useful for organizing Prime Reality.

So, done well, crypto will gamify the economy and finally bring these modern coordination methods to bear on our Prime economic systems. Done poorly - untethered to reality - it will just be an IQ sink like string theory, burning immense brainpower to achieve nothing.