✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Video games are philosophy's playground — LessWrong

lesswrong.com · 7,000 words · saved by 1 readers

Crypto people have this saying: "cryptocurrencies are macroeconomics' playground." The idea is that blockchains let you cheaply spin up toy economies to test mechanisms that would be impossibly expensive or unethical to try in the real world. Want to see what happens with a 200% marginal tax rate? Launch a token with those rules and watch what happens. (Spoiler: probably nothing good, but at least you didn't have to topple a government to find out.) I think video games, especially multiplayer online games, are doing the same thing for metaphysics. Except video games are actually fun and don't require you to follow Elon Musk's Twitter shenanigans to augur the future state of your finances. (I'm sort of kidding. Crypto can be fun. But you have to admit the barrier to entry is higher than "press A to jump.") The serious version of this claim: video games let us experimentally vary fundamental features of reality—time, space, causality, ontology—and then live inside those variations long e

x Video games are philosophy's playground — LessWrong Causality Gaming (videogames/tabletop) Ontology World Modeling Frontpage 2025 Top Fifty: 13 % 146 Video games are philosophy's playground by Rachel Shu 17th Nov 2025 Linkpost for blog.rachelshu.com 18 min read 17 146 Crypto people have this saying: "cryptocurrencies are macroeconomics' playground." The idea is that blockchains let you cheaply spin up toy economies to test mechanisms that would be impossibly expensive or unethical to try in the real world. Want to see what happens with a 200% marginal tax rate? Launch a token with those rule

Explore this link on the map →

related reading