loobkoob

Guys, don’t fall for this propaganda video about the game, it’s actually much better than he’s making it look - Skeleton Bones Ghoulie just has a bone to pick with Will Smith.

There certainly was some actual “ethics in video game journalism” discussion early on that I felt was legitimate, but that got drowned out pretty quickly by the misogynists (which, from what I gather, was the entire point - it seems the misogynists started the whole thing and used the “ethics in game journalism” thing as a front to try to legitimise their agenda).

I think the discussion about the personal relationships game journalists have with developers in general was a reasonable one to have. It unfortunately ended up just laser focusing on Zoe Quinn supposedly trading sex for good reviews, which was untrue, sexist and resulted in nasty personal attacks. But I think it was worth at least examining the fact that game journalists and game developers often have close relationships and move in the same circles, and that game journalism can often be a stepping stone to game development. Those are absolutely things that could influence someone’s reviews or articles, consciously or subconsciously.

And another conversation worth having was the fact that gaming outlets like IGN were/are funded by adverts from gaming companies. It makes sense, of course - the Venn diagram of IGN’s (or other gaming outlets’) readers and gaming companies’ target audience is almost a perfect circle, which makes the ad space valuable to the gaming companies. And because it’s valuable to gaming companies, it’s better for the outlets to sell the ad space to them for more money than to sell it to generic advertising platforms. But it does mean it seems valid to ask whether the outlets giving bad reviews or writing critical articles might cause their advertisers to pull out, and therefore they might avoid being too critical.

Now I don’t think the games industry is corrupt or running on cronyism, personally. And I certainly don’t believe it’s all run by a shadowy cabal of woke libruls who are trying to force black people, women (and worse, gasp black women shudder) into games. But I do feel it was worth asking about the relationships between journalists, developers, publishers and review outlets - and honestly, those are the kinds of things that both game journalists and people who read game journalism should constantly be re-evaluating. It’s always good to be aware of potential biases and influences.

The fact that the whole thing almost immediately got twisted into misogyny, death threats and a general hate campaign was both disappointing and horrifying. And the fact that it led to the alt-right, and that you can trace a line from it to Brexit and to Donald Trump becoming US president, is even worse.

KOAN Sound - Led By Ancient Light definitely tops my list.

And a couple of King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard albums, but I’ve seen them mentioned already! I’m sure there are probably some more that I’m blanking on right now - I’ll check my music library and edit this if I think of some more!

There are definitely technical reasons why saving mid-run is a lot more complicated. With Pacific Drive, right now when you save, it’ll save:

• the state of your car - this will likely be done by looking each individual “equipment slot” the car has, assigning them a number, assigning each possible upgrade for that “slot” a number/letter, and storing its damage state (which is probably just a scale of 1-5 or whatever). So the game will store everything about your car in the format off “slot x, upgrade type y, damage z”, which can just be three values.
• your quest state. The game won’t remember what quests you’ve done or how you’ve done them in the way that you remember it - it’ll just store that you’ve completed quest step 14a and that 14b is your active objective.

It makes for a fairly simple, small save file. Being able to save mid-run would add a lot of complexity because it’d need to save a complete map state, including:

• the map layout
• your position in the map
• the enemies and hazards in the map - their positions, states, etc.
• what’s happened already in the map
• the loot in the map, and whether you’ve collected it or not

And so on. Not only does it massively increase the complexity, it would also increase the size of save files a lot and make saving and loading a lot more cumbersome. And that’s just a simplified breakdown; there are definitely other factors that can make it much, much more complicated.

There are definitely some games where “easy mode” save systems could be implemented without much changing on a technical level, but I don’t think Pacific Drive is one of them.

I’m not sure I see how they’re comparable. Progressivism requires the ability to progress; if we somehow create a completely perfect utopia then there will be no room for progressivism, but otherwise there will always be some way to improve things and progress. In practice, there will always be some way to improve society which means infinite progressivism surely isn’t unreasonable?

Infinite growth isn’t possible because infinite money doesn’t exist, it’s as simple as that. And if infinite money did exist, infinite growth wouldn’t be possible because everything would already be infinitely large and therefore unable to grow any further…

… but beyond that, it also requires more and more people who can afford whatever the product/service in question is. Which requires either infinite people, infinite money or both. And as the product/service grows and prices likely increase, people will priced out of the market which is the opposite of infinite growth.

It’s also worth considering that progressivism is a mindset that is aiming for zero - zero problems, zero inequality, zero bigotry, etc. It’s not about pushing for infinite anything, it’s about trying to reduce existing issues. And while it’ll likely never reach its goal, it’s not theoretically or mathematically unreachable. It’s much more realistic to attempt to reduce something to zero than it is to increase it to infinity.

I say all this as a non-American, just to be clear. All mainstream American politics looks right-wing to me.

voting green […] can have the effect of moving the Overton window and creating conversation

I’d love if this were the case, but the pragmatist in me can’t agree. Right now, if Biden doesn’t win, the Overton window shifts to the right. Voting Green won’t shift the needle, as much as the idealist in me wishes it could. No-ones going to care that 2% more people voted for the Greens this time if Trump wins. Trump’s already stated his fascist ideals and the Overton window will shift to the right if he wins. Which means if you care about the Overton window at all, you vote to keep Trump out.

If the Democrats were in a more secure position then I’d say voting for the Greens would be very reasonable. It’d be a way to indicate that you’d like to continue to shift things leftwards. But right now, the best thing you can do if you care about left-wing or green values in the long-term is simply to keep Trump out.

Think about where you want politics to be in 2028, or 2032, or even 2036; do you think Trump or Biden winning is the best path to that goal? Because those are the realistic options right now. And personally, I think gradually shifting the Overton window leftwards is the way to do it, rather than letting the country slip into full-blown fascism and then hoping people will suddenly flip to socialism overnight on the evening before the 2036 election.

they’ve had to push a “but trump!” Narrative to scare anyone else from even running.

There certainly has been some of this. But I also think that’s something that’s very relevant right now. The time for finding more progressive Democrat candidates was during the primaries. Now, as difficult as it may be, the best thing to do is suck it up, rally behind Biden and fight for your long-term future by doing what you can to keep out the fascists. It’ll fucking suck, but not as much as Trump winning will.

Not that your suggestion is necessarily bad in general, but I don’t really think it’s necessary when it comes to Factorio. I think it should be clear from playing the demo whether 100+ more hours of that seems worth the asking price for someone. It’s probably the most representative demo I’ve ever played; the full game is just the demo but more. There are no surprises down the line. There are no random pivots to other genres, or the game trying to stick its fingers in too many pies. There’s no narrative to screw up. There’s no “oh, they clearly just spent all their time polishing the first hour of the game and the rest of it is a technical mess”. It’s the same gameplay loop from the demo for another 50 hours until you “win”.

… and then another 50 hours after that when you decide to optimise things. And then another 100 hours when you decide to make a train-themed base. And then another 700 hours when you discover some of the mods that exist…

It’ll let you see which pages you’ve red!

The alternative is requiring 24-hour moderation, which isn’t really feasible unless moderators are paid employees, or just having to deal with posts staying up until a moderator/admin comes online and can sort them out. Communities can obviously try to have a mod team comprised of people from a range of time zones to increase coverage, but aiming for 24-hour coverage would make most mod teams far larger than is particularly necessary for the size of most communities at the moment.

Posts being removed and flagged to moderators for review if a certain report threshold is met is the best middle ground for a community-run, non-commercial forum. Sure, someone can set up 10 (or however many the threshold is set at) accounts and report a post on all of them to have it removed until a moderator is online, but is it really worth it to go through that effort just to get a post taken down for a couple of hours before it gets reinstated?

It’s the best way to allow the community to self-moderate, I think, rather than requiring all the moderation power be in the hands of those with a moderator role.

And also just websites compressing images without the user getting any input. A meme that goes from Facebook to Twitter to Reddit to Twitter to Tumblr to Reddit to here will likely be compressed every time it gets reuploaded. Most social media sites use some form of image compression.

And it obviously doesn’t help that artefacts from compression are multiplicative.

I’m not cheering for the layoffs, of course, nor am I necessarily in favour of monopolies and the consolidation of the gaming industry (although, in this instance, I think it’s probably a positive thing for fans of Blizzard IPs). But layoffs during this kind of merger/buyout are expected. Microsoft has its own legal departments, payroll departments, marketing departments, etc, and while they might need expanding slightly as the company grows/absorbs new companies, they don’t need an entire second company’s worth of those departments.

These layoffs were about cutting redundancy rather than just chasing short-term profits. It sucks for the people who were laid off either way, but I think it’s good to be realistic about why they happened.

“Landed gentry” was a social class of people who owned estates and, well, land. They didn’t have to work; they made their income by profiting off the work of the farm hands, merchants, etc, who worked on their land. The estates these landed gentry owned, along with their wealth, would be passed down to their children when they died. It meant the gentry did very little to earn their station in life, but still had a fair amount of power and wealth.

How spez thinks it applies to Reddit mods, I’m not entirely sure. But he definitely meant it as an insult. His full quote was:

And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.

So I guess he was upset that mod teams get to select who else is a good fit to join the mod team? Of course, the issue is that he is the landed gentry - users didn’t vote for him, nor can they remove him; and he’s profiting off the work of the people who post content and the people who spend their time moderating.

“That means that you won.”

I think it’s good that they asked here. The way the fediverse is structured means there can be plenty of people who use an instance - posting to it, browsing posts from it, etc - without being registered with that instance. If Beehaw says they’re contemplating leaving, only to be met with a “NO, DON’T GO” response from the rest of the fediverse, then that might give them reason to rethink their position. And if everyone just says “eh, whatever” or “yeah, go away” then it may reinforce their position.

Obviously the opinions of the people who’ve registered there should hold more weight, but I think putting the question to everyone is a good move.

You felt much more strongly about it than me then. I just found myself not caring about it in the slightest; the only thing I really felt was boredom. Which is arguably the worst possible outcome for any work of art.

I’m pretty sure the opposite of “critical thinking” is “free thinking”, at least based on all the “free thinkers” I’ve spoken to. I assume it’s short for “free-of-critical-thought… thinking”.

I prefer real poo, personally.

rich people who ruin things

My usual go-to is to ask what their latest/current obsession is. It works really well for a few reasons:

• it’s nice and simple to ask - it doesn’t require a monologue/wall of text to set up, and it doesn’t require you to know anything about them to ask it;
• it’s both as personal and as low-stakes as they want it to be. They can give very intimate, in-depth answers if they feel like it, or they can just mention something like the latest film they enjoyed. There’s no risk of making them uncomfortable by asking it;
• it lets you filter out boring people who don’t really take interest in anything;
• assuming they do have interests, it often gives you plenty of opportunities to dive into deeper conversation;
• it’s often engaging for them because they get to talk about something they’re passionate about;
• it’s often interesting for you because people talking about things they’re passionate about is awesome (and often attractive).
• it’s pretty much always relevant and fresh because their latest obsession will change over time. This makes it particularly great for things like dating sites/apps because people’s bios will often be out of date and/or they’ll have talked about the things mentioned in their bio so much that they’re kind of sick of them.

I’ve actually had multiple people on dating sites tell me how great a question they think it is, and that they’re going to use it themselves in the future. So obviously it’s not just me who thinks it’s a great question!

Dark really sucks me into a dark damp place

Very few places are darker or damper than Winden!