The rising price of gas is quite the issue in the US these days. What to do?<\/p>\n
Make it a game, of course.<\/p>\n
Wired writes on hypermilers<\/em><\/a>, people who compete in getting the most mileage:<\/p>\n Even with gas at four bucks a gallon, Yahya Fahimuddin enjoys filling his car. It’s a contest, a chance to see how many miles he can squeeze from every tank. He’s getting about 45 mpg these days and says you can, too.<\/p>\n He’s a hypermiler<\/a>, one of a growing number of people going to often extreme lengths to get 40, 50, even 60 mpg or more. “It’s like a videogame,” he says. “Can I beat my new high score?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As I read it, “game” here implies all the features in my game definition<\/a>, but it can also be described as an attitude, a way of seeing the activity of driving the car as an opportunity for optimizing a strategy, with the optimization in itself being pleasurable.<\/p>\n I have been thinking about describing it in this possibly pretentious way:<\/p>\n Games are the poetry of action.<\/em><\/p>\n Meaning: In the same way that poetry has a focus on the qualities of language itself rather than on conveying meaning (Jakobson<\/a>), games have a focus on the qualities of action itself rather than on what the action can achieve. Or put more simply: games are autotelic (performed for their own sake), like poetry is autotelic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The rising price of gas is quite the issue in the US these days. What to do? Make it a game, of course. Wired writes on hypermilers, people who compete in getting the most mileage: Even with gas at four bucks a gallon, Yahya Fahimuddin enjoys filling his car. It’s a contest, a chance to … Continue reading “Fuel Efficiency as a Game (AKA: Games are the Poetry of Action)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-other"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}