He weeps as he defiantly asks the universe, “What happens when I catch them all?”

As of the week of this writing, you cannot go on Twitter or Facebook or any news site without seeing something about the unstoppable popularity of Pokemon Go. It is everywhere. People are walking around the real world (outside!) trying to catch imaginary creatures, and having a ball sharing screen grabs of cartoons in funny places like on the toilet or next to celebrities. It’s a lot of good clean fun.

But as a more, let’s say, discerning fan of video games, my question with this game, and most free-to-play mobile games where you tend a farm or build a fortress or any other task of accumulation, is why?

Once you get the Pokemon, you have them. You can make them better, by training them. You can fight other Pokemon with your Pokemon, but all this finding, collecting and powering-up of pretend pets is in service of… having lots of Pokemon? Why is that compelling?

I wonder if the real draw isn’t the novelty of AR; the wildfire spread of this game seems in part attributable to the social currency of funny animals superimposed on otherwise mundane places, the appeal of which is obvious (and articulated well here).

But I’m more interested in what comes next. Once people have realized the appeal of an augmented reality game, when do we get one with a real story, a real point of view, as a work of creative art? Getting me out of the house is fine, giving the world another funny little trifle to feed small talk is fine, but how do we make it mean something more?

What kind of game would be a more interesting use of the AR that Pokemon is popularizing?

Is there a different property that would make a better AR game, like Star Wars or Mission Impossible or the Kardashians?

Is there a more tangible good for society an AR game could drive people to participate in, like voting or pothole reporting or recycling?

Read this post, have a conversation, or don’t. It’s really not up to you anyway.

Want to get really philosophical? How about having the argument to end (or begin) all arguments: Do we really even have free will?

For context, there is a growing amount of real neuroscience that says… we kind of don’t. Or it would seem that way, based on the fact that our bodies seem to act before our “thoughts” are enacted in our brains. And that’s only one piece of the puzzle. This Atlantic article goes into more of the science:

The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

…

Yes, indeed. When asked to take a math test, with cheating made easy, the group primed to see free will as illusory proved more likely to take an illicit peek at the answers. When given an opportunity to steal—to take more money than they were due from an envelope of $1 coins—those whose belief in free will had been undermined pilfered more. On a range of measures, Vohs told me, she and Schooler found that “people who are induced to believe less in free will are more likely to behave immorally.”

…but also makes plain that to a certain degree, the same scientists who are disproving free will are in a way saying, “please do not act as if this truth we’re discovering is actually true.” They know that if we throw the premise of will out the window, life fundamentally changes, not necessarily for the better.

If your life is a series of reactions to the world that aren’t really up to you, can you be blamed for doing wrong?

How would thinking of the world this way totally rearrange how we think about people who commit crimes, or are just jerks? Or of good people who are kind and generous?

Angry? Upset? Press X to axe your ex.

Here’s a topic I probably wouldn’t have thought about until reading this excellent Vice article. Apparently, there is a cohort of video game players who like to digitally recreate the ex- or current girlfriends or boyfriends in the video games they play. As you can imagine, this can be for both good and bad reasons…

It would seem designing and controlling avatars that resemble significant others past and present can add a special twist to the gaming experience. For some, using an avatar of their lover, or at least interacting with their digital incarnation, is a benign way to get more into a game, or even add a fun dynamic to their real-life romance. Others, it turns out—the majority of whom are men—enjoy the thrill of subduing and controlling avatars of lovers past.

And the article deals only with how people are doing this in today’s video games, using existing technology. One can only imagine how this ethical dilemma gets more complicated in a more photo-realistic, VR-enabled future… So:

Is it morally wrong to recreate real people in your virtual world? Where’s the line of what’s ok and what isn’t?

How does this change once it’s more than just a character you play in an RPG? What if it’s creating a virtual simulation of someone without their permission?

How does the same question extend to celebrities, for example? Once we have the technology to go on virtual dates with digital copies of famous people, what are the ramifications?

For a post-Cold War generation, socialism is more appealing than scary.

Of all the diagnoses for the reasons behind the financial collapse and slow (or at least uneven) subsequent recovery, this Time piece on the “financialization” of the economy seems to pinpoint the broadest underlying cause with the most specific reasoning. Well worth a read. This excerpt gives you the general idea:

Over the past few decades, finance has turned away from this traditional role. Academic research shows that only a fraction of all the money washing around the financial markets these days actually makes it to Main Street businesses. “The intermediation of household savings for productive investment in the business sector—the textbook description of the financial sector—constitutes only a minor share of the business of banking today,” according to academics Oscar Jorda, Alan Taylor and Moritz Schularick, who’ve studied the issue in detail. By their estimates and others, around 15% of capital coming from financial institutions today is used to fund business investments, whereas it would have been the majority of what banks did earlier in the 20th century.

…

“Across all advanced economies, and the United States and the U.K. in particular, the role of the capital markets and the banking sector in funding new investment is decreasing.” Most of the money in the system is being used for lending against existing assets such as housing, stocks and bonds.

To get a sense of the size of this shift, consider that the financial sector now represents around 7% of the U.S. economy, up from about 4% in 1980. Despite currently taking around 25% of all corporate profits, it creates a mere 4% of all jobs. Trouble is, research by numerous academics as well as institutions like the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund shows that when finance gets that big, it starts to suck the economic air out of the room. In fact, finance starts having this adverse effect when it’s only half the size that it currently is in the U.S. Thanks to these changes, our economy is gradually becoming “a zero-sum game between financial wealth holders and the rest of America,” says former Goldman Sachs banker Wallace Turbeville, who runs a multiyear project on the rise of finance at the New York City—based nonprofit Demos.

And after this broad introduction it goes into finer details. The decrease in small business loans (and hence small businesses being started), the increase in cash upfront home purchases (and hence the decrease of younger families entering the home market), and the skyrocketing of debt, both personal and corporate.

How has this rampant “financialization” — lower interest rates, higher debt, lower loan availability, greater income inequality — affected you?

Have you put off or ruled out any options that would have been more viable at this stage in your life, say, 20 or 30 years ago?

Would you be happier in a world “pre-financialization”? How would your life be different?

The circle of (modern sedentary) life.

Occasionally you come across a trend or opinion piece to which the only appropriate reaction is, “Umm, I think that’s just you.” Getting to judge fancy writers for fabricating a societal trend out of personal experience can be fun and satisfying.

Here’s one: The Times Magazine, “Is Staying In the New Going Out?”.

In it, the author suggests that with all the great technology available to us, from on-demand entertainment to one-click food delivery to right-swipe dating…

…Food, entertainment, romance: The traditional weekend staples are now available entirely on demand. The centripetal force of our homes has never been stronger…

We have memes about staying in (“Netflix and chill”) and phrases like “binge watch,” which suggest pathologically homebound behavior. We no longer dismiss the urge to remain warm, hidden, fed, cushioned and entertained indoors as a lamentable womblike regression.

Though if we were to use actual data, one could reasonably assume that staying in vs going out is a function of some combination of:

1. Aging – having less energy, settling into a comfortable routine, having more obligations and therefore less free time.
2. Relationship status – Not being single, and therefore less pressured to go out to meet potential love interests, or even having a reliable social circle and seeking fewer new friends.
3. Temperament – Being the kind of person that was never that into going out in the first place, and therefore feeling less pressure to do so with each passing year just to impress others.
4. Financial situation – Not having a lot of money to spend on restaurants, shows, Uber/cab fare, bar-priced drinks, and so choosing to stay in out of necessity.

For any given person not still in college, the statement is probably true that “I go out less than I used to” or alternately “I go out less than I’d like to”. I’m just super skeptical that it’s directly related to the rise of mobile apps or streaming services. What do you think?

Do you go out less than you used to? Or less than you’d like to?

What are the reasons behind your growing urge (or tendency) to stay in?

If you feel bad about it? How might you combat it?
If you’re embracing it, why don’t you feel bad about it?