Thanks for the detailed response!
In the scenario of just your reward being smaller or bigger based on the number the RNG is providing you, you’re still gambling with your time and emotions.
If you know that your prize pool is gold between quantities of 1 to 1000 and your 100 lottery tickets have provided you with 100 times only 1 gold, you will feel bad due to randomness.
The reason why we do get excited over lottery and random chances is because we’re able to cognize abstractions of the future which involve positive outcomes but the positive outcomes also have magnitudes and if sufficient magnitudes are not met, disappoint will sink in.
You’re mistaking empathy with hedonism / positive emotions - they’re not even in the same category.
Eating mud can generate pleasurable sensations in absence of pain.
Opiates are a good example of hedonic adaptation and do not generate endless pleasure. Sex also is subject to hedonic adaptation.
There’s no argument made by me that you have to have immediate pain accompanying a momentarily experience in order to feel happy. My argument is that your emotions surrounding your experience(s) are orchestrated by the comparison of previous experiences of the same kind.
Pain is an extremely broad term now which can belong in dozens of categories but I assume you mean emotional pain? Correct me if I’m wrong.
If that is the case then how are negative emotions and emotional pain different? I’d state that even if they are different then emotional pain would still be a subcategory of negative emotions.
Everything you do in life is in the name of improving your condition, whatever the direction you might wish to pursue - this only happens if there’s a reason to do so and the reason most of the time is a loss or a perceived loss of some kind.
Yes, we’re good at patterns and bad at statistics but our emotions or well-being is in no way tied to us experiencing statistical fairness.
Again, I would not use casinos as an example because these involve hundreds of factors more other than simply experiencing a loss in a game.
Items get fractured in this game meaning that they cannot be crafted on any further.
Extreme majority of the crafts aren’t done in such a manner due to items eventually fracturing, it’s exceedingly rare to upgrade your in-use items.
This means that the player has to seek out a completely new item to craft on it. The player won’t be set back on anything else but the time itself.
If this wasn’t the case, the player would have a learning lesson from losing an item and would keep a back-up - I did this already once with my shield which I needed shock shards for. In any regards, even if I did get a major fracture on my shield, I would be set back very minimally.
In real world, it’s simply not possible to forever upgrade your mood / experience from the previous state. You can slow the progress down by not buying a Ferrari as your first car, but you will be met with a dead end.
Inverse or not - the modality doesn’t change and semantically it makes no difference.
If we have only two positive emotions, one will be less positive and the expectations will be set based on the more positive emotion. If a new, third experience will not match up to the previous best emotion, we’re likely to be disappointed or frustrated or angry or anything else negative.
With our brains, ability for sustained positive emotions necessitates juxtapositioning and experiencing of negative emotions - the only people who are happy all the time are mentally ill with mania.
If we manage to somehow become happy little butterflies who never feel bad, our brain will regulate our dopamine levels to a level where homeostatically happiness will shrink close to non-existence / nihilism.
This is simple neurochemistry which applies to everyone healthy.
I very much dislike some modern psychologists / professors due to commonly mass gaslighting students / general population with a sick joke that “being happy” is the nuclei of a functional being and if you’re not happy every day then there’s something wrong with you which is just flat out false on every level.
Shoving that idea down completely healthy peoples throats who display full range of emotions is the easiest way to put them into a DEFCON 1 state and open the door to mental illnesses.
I’ve also written some psychology tips / models to developers, maybe reading them will improve the frequency of this channel.