Jeff Kaplan: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you say, “I love this thing. Here’s an apple. I love apples,” or, “I love bananas. I love fruit…” Like, “I love X,” whatever. You just get made fun of. You get… And then so what the lesson you learn from that is, “Well, I’m just not going to speak up when I love something. I’m going to instead speak up when I, maybe how much I hate another thing that’s similar to it.” Or maybe join in when we’re making fun of a particular quirky thing, about, “Don’t you hate it when bananas are too ripe or too…” Versus like not saying the, calling out the elephant in the room is, “We’re all gathered here today ’cause we love the thing.” It’s interesting. It’s that aspect of the internet that I think is jarring to a lot of people depending on the game, but if you go to Discord or Reddit or so on, in the communities that love a particular video game, there’s a… If you’re not used to it, and I don’t often go, so when I go it’s like, “Wow, there’s a lot of, like, pretty intense kinda mockery and derision and so on.” But you get used to it pretty quick and you understand it. I just, I wish there was more love. I feel bad because I played a role in the earliest development of some of that online culture. It really was social media before it was called social media. You know, I ran a… I actually had this reputation for being edgier than I really was. There were a couple notable posts that survived 30 years that people like to look back on but they don’t look back on the ones where I’m just being chill. And that’s unfortunate. I think a lot as a game designer about the design of social media. And unfortunately, social media in general is designed in such a way where the maximum hyperbole works, and that’s how you get the most points is by being max hyperbolic. And usually, unfortunately, it’s more in the negative direction than the positive direction. You know, if I say, “That’s, that’s a pretty nice mug. I’ve seen nicer, but I like this one,” no one’s interested in that. I have to either love this thing, or better, this thing’s a crime against humanity- … in some way. And it’s very self-reinforcing and everybody sort of feeds into it and- Especially when you’re young. I got to see this kinda interesting thing. So I was at I spent, that’s what we’re talking about, you’re from Pasadena, so I’ve been spending a lot of time in Caltech and working on robots, and we get to see students come in from high school. Undergraduates come in and, like a tour, hang out with the robots. And middle school also. And the interesting thing you see, the younger that they are, the more prevalent this effect, which is all of them are kind of afraid to show that they think a thing is awesome. They’re all… You could just feel they’re checking, “Is it okay?” So they’re kinda like the default mode is whatever, this, everything is stupid, this is stupid. You know, ’cause that’s the safe place to be. It’s a real act of vulnerability. I would say it’s an act of courage, especially for a young person, to be like, “Holy shit, that’s awesome.” Like, I’m gonna, if I think this is awesome, I’m gonna be the nerd, I’m gonna take the risk and be made fun of for saying, “I love this,” in that case, it’s, “I love this robot.” So that’s an actual psychological effect that also young people are dealing with, in-person also. So I think, I just wanna say, for young people listening to this, be vulnerable, be courageous and say you love a thing if you love a thing. And do more of that on the internet, I think. I think people make up the internet, people build the internet, and young people, more than anybody else, define the future of the internet. So put more love out there in the world. If you love a video game, if you love Overwatch, say you love it.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.