A first order preference is what you want or like. You want pie. A second order preference is your preference about your preferences. You also want to lose weight, so you do not want to want pie. You can keep going to higher orders, where you might run into ambivalence as you miss being interested in something, so you neither want nor want to want it but you kind of want to want to want. Don’t go too deep down that rabbit hole.
I frequently find myself wanting to like things more than I like them. “This is my kind of thing. I should like this. Why don’t I like this?” It’s like I have some misguided loyalty to “my type,” even though I know a thousand details can make it not work. I tend to commit and stick with things, which is good when something goes through a bad patch but bad when it parks in the bad patch and starts digging a hole.
I’m past wanting to play any MMOs, but I still faintly want to want to play because I want to like them. I miss the original ideal of virtual worlds. I love the gameplay of League of Legends, but the community is still highly problematic, so I want to enjoy the game more than I actually enjoy it. Ingress is interesting in the abstract but mostly tedious when I play it more than casually.
I’m not sure of my higher order preferences. I recognize that having a disparity between first and second order is a problem, so I do not want to want to want to play, but I have a certain wistfulness and I am going to cut that thought off there because that way madness lies.
: Zubon
I know what you mean when it comes to the game developers with their terrible patch ideas sometimes, their lack of connection to the community, a community that continues to support a terrible system of disconnection from the developers which almost always leads to disaster and ignored problems in the games we play most of which sometimes stem from the very beta of the game. These patches while well intentioned probably aren’t bad because they don’t fix anything they are bad because they really aren’t listening to their playerbase at all so they don’t realize they are missing their opportunity to fix something that’s essentially broken that’s been requested for years or they just plain ignore it entirely because they have a bad community in that the community keeps shelling out money to them enough for the company to stay in business while the game goes to crapspackle in a bucket and people apparently love being taken advantage of.
Right now what I’ve just described is what’s happening with GW2. Problems that the playerbase of certain classes have talked about for years have been ignored once again by the devs and it’s not for trying and many of these problems are simple fixes. Like hobosacks on Engineers for example.