07mk
1d ago
Ban on all tipping, punishable by death-by-torture on any chief executive of any company that implements any sort of tipping system. Customers gain the right to perform summary executions on any service provider who suggests any tips. Naturally, this would also mean no alternative minimum wage for people in previously tipping jobs.
Nationalize TurboTax and other similar services, to auto-file all taxes for everyone, with taxpayers having the option to check and change if they wish.
Ban on all viewpoint-based moderation, by 1st Amendment standards, of any forum beyond a certain size.
07mk
3d ago
Oh yeah, for manufactured pop bands, of which Kpop is perhaps the perfected version, I feel like they're appreciated more for their performance abilities than for their song recordings. So fans might insist on actual human dancers and singers (I don't know how much lip sync is common in these performances; do fans insist they actually sing into the mics while also doing complicated/strenuous dance moves in concerts?), even if they don't care about the AI writing the songs or even "performing" the music. Virtual concert performances like the Crypton Future Media Vocaloids might gain traction, but I also imagine they'd have to be some rare major figure like a Hatsune Miku or perhaps some popular Vtuber (whether human or AI-controlled) for fans to actually want to come out to watch such things.
But with AI songwriting, that's the kind of thing that real human songwriters could employ and just lie about pretty easily, to get the best of both worlds. If Taylor Swift used ChatGPT extensively to write her lyrics or used Suno and reverse-engineered its melodies for her own melodies and just lied about it, no one would ever know, and fans would get the enjoyment of genuinely believing that they're hearing songs that came pouring out of Swift's heart or whatever.
07mk
4d ago
Technology was supposed to automate away the drudgery, so we can devote ourselves to higher pursuits like art, philosophy, and science.
I think technology has done a lot of that, though, with things like dishwashers, washing machines, running water, elevators, cranes, cars, and such. These are all "dumb" tech, though, and they hit diminishing returns; we still have to load our dishwashers and steer our cars (for the most part) manually. I think this just speaks to how difficult the precise and fine manipulation of objects in the physical world really is. From what I heard, image generation AI was actually a consequence of trying to solve this problem; we needed AI to be able to perceive the world similar to humans, which meant identifying objects in images, which was able to be reversed in some way to create new images. And this happened much more quickly than the robotics controls, because manipulating stuff in the digital world is much easier than in the real world.
It's still way too early to tell, but I could also see the argument that AI art does automate away the drudgery so we can devote ourselves to higher pursuits, since it's really primarily good at creating high fidelity illustrations while lacking the good taste or artistic vision required to convey some emotion in a pleasing or provocative way (this is arguable). This allows people to work on the more high level vision of what they want their illustration to look like instead of devoting the time required to develop their manual muscle control.
07mk
4d ago
I wonder how differently this will impact the music industry versus how generative AI has and will impact the digital illustration industry. I'm not much into music, but I feel like a lot more of the appeal to music comes from the personalities attached to the songs than in the case of illustrations. And the personalities can't ever be truly copied without deception; even if we reach AGI with AI personalities indistinguishable from a human, the knowledge that the personality came from a computer instead of a human who had actually popped out of another human will color the perception. When someone puts on a Taylor Swift song during their daily commute or a workout, the knowledge that it was actually written and sung by Taylor Swift almost certainly plays a significant factor in their preference to listen to that song over something else.
That said, there are plenty of more functional uses of music, like BGM for ambience in works like video games, TV shows, films, other videos, b-rolls and the like, where no such personality matters. Even for big time composers like John Williams or Hans Zimmer, I'd bet the typical movie fan wouldn't care if the music had been made by AI, as long as the music actually served the purpose exactly as well as music that had been written by those people. This is analogous to the functional use of illustrations like for movie props, game textures, or book illustrations that provide employment for unknown low-level illustrators, which is what AI seems to be best positioned to disrupt (probably is already). But what I perceive with the music industry is that, even at the low level, fans tend to care about the musicians attached to the music; they don't go listen to the small local band or buy their albums just because of the audio that they put out, they do so because they want to support those people in particular. Again, AI fundamentally can't challenge this without deception, so those low-level employment opportunities for unknown musicians may survive in a way that it won't for unknown illustrators.
Another aspect is how using technology to automate music production seems to have been more accepted than for illustrations pre-AI, i.e. sampling and stuff like that. Some illustrators seem to see AI art as "cheating" because it allows the creation of very high fidelity, high detail illustrations without developing one's hand-eye coordination through years of practice. Whereas musicians are still respected even if they don't play the instruments or sing the vocals themselves. But generative AI will allow people who didn't even write the music or have any understanding of music to produce high quality songs merely from a text prompt, which is certainly a big difference. But also, just like how AI art is being used by illustrators to aid in their workflow, I wonder how/if AI music could play into it. Udio and Suno go straight from prompt to produced song, but what about prompt to lyrics and sheet music, or prompt + lyrics and sheet music to produced song, or any other intermediate steps? In illustrations, it's pretty easy to use the same tool selectively to aid in the workflow since it's all just putting pixels on a grid at the end of the day, but with song production with the different mediums involved, we'd need to see more specialized tools to aid musicians' workflows.
To some extent, it's understandable - it must be a pretty big blow to one's ego for the art one prides themselves on to be so easily recreated and automated by the equivalent of a Chinese Room, especially when the field is still in its infancy and hasn't even come close to anything we would consider agentic - but I can't help but see many of the naysayers about the ability of AI to achieve supposedly uniquely "human" tasks as being clearly myopic and wrong.
I had a conversation with someone last year who was insistent that actually good (i.e. human-equivalent) voice acting AI would require us to first invent general AI, because the various tones and inflections needed to properly convey the character's emotions to the audience would require actual understanding of what the character was going through with all the various nuances and details and such. I just don't understand this perspective, since voice acting, like music, is merely the production of sound waves at the end of the day. AI will only get better at manipulating sound waves, and there's no need to understand the emotions of the character the same way a human actor needs to, merely what sorts of sounds give positive feedback from the human audience (i.e. evokes certain emotions). Same goes for text, images, and video, of course. But even once these technologies become superhuman in ability to create truly meaningful, inspiring, insightful works of art, I imagine there will always be a subculture of people who will insist on only appreciating the maximally manually produced artworks. It's just hard to tell right now if they will be the mainstream or a tiny niche like the Amish.
07mk
5d ago
I think the main problem with the whole "punching up/down" or "egg vs wall" framework is that there's just no agreed-upon way to meaningfully determine which side is actually the stronger and the weaker side. In WW2, the Axis powers lost, so one could argue that, by definition, they are the weaker side, but then others could argue that merely losing to someone else isn't proof of being the weaker side, and we need to analyze the precise details of the situation. It's the same arguments that get brought up in playoffs or MMA fights of, "Did the better team/fighter actually win?" where there's seemingly no way for people to come to an agreement on what standard to choose for determining what "better" means; the very notion of "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" is the point of contention. And so people just twist the logic and evidence in whatever way needed to to make the "side I like" be the "weaker" side and vice versa (or "better team" in the case of sports). It's just naked bias with extra steps. Whenever I see talk about "punching up/down," I mentally replace "up" with "direction I want to punch" and "down" with "direction I don't want punches going in," and it's a more useful way of analyzing the situation every single time.
07mk
7d ago
Obviously there's no way to know for sure, even if you were this man and/or his health professionals, but I interpreted BurdensomeCount's comment as saying that this man genuinely having this rare psychological disorder is his attempt at becoming weaker to gain status within a culture that values weakness above strength. Very few people are going to consciously think to themselves, "My culture values weakness above strength, and so I will cynically weaken myself in order to gain status above others." Rather, their unconscious attempts to gain status within a culture that they unconsciously understand as valuing weakness above strength will manifest themselves as a rare psychological disorder that drives them to take action that weakens themselves.
07mk
10d ago
I mean, I think it's fine to have open discussion, but not everywhere has to be an open discussion. If you have a forum with lots of women, minorities, LGBT people, or whatever, and don't want to deal with people asking about IQ, Jew's, or the 2020 election.
Sure, not everywhere, of course. I don't think anyone is claiming that it has to be everywhere. I don't think the population of women, minorities, LGBT people, or whatever, is what's relevant here, though; it's the population of people who are intolerant of such issues. Many women, minorities, LGBT people have been pushed/pulled toward a belief system that causes them to choose to take offense at such issues, but there's nothing intrinsic or fundamental about those people that makes them intolerant.
I'd also point out when you see people make better arguments than you can on topics, and nothing shifts, there's no reason to further argue. So, when the people with the 93 annotated links and actual statements from various court decisions can't push away somebody from various ideas about 2020, what am I going to do?
Most internet arguments don't end in any arguer's belief apparently shifting and conceding. That's generally not the point of internet arguments. This doesn't mean that their beliefs didn't shift, and it also doesn't mean that some lurker's belief shifting. And for me, personally, simply learning the way that someone I disagree with (and continue to disagree with) chooses to structure their arguments in an apparent good-faith effort to get me to change my mind is something I find value in.
07mk
10d ago
Also, I just do think it's true. The smartest left-wing person with immense writing talent could show up here, and honestly, I don't think a single mind would be changed. Now, I know the response to that is, "that's just because progressivism/leftism/wokeism is such a weak ideology, that even a genius-level intellect can argue for it, and the only reason it wins today is the rich, powerful blah blah blah."
I think fictional made-up examples are less than worthless.
Now, the other thing is, I don't get when it became conservative/right-wing/etc. dogma that liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism. Like again, I'm almost middle aged. I've been arguing on the Internet for a long time - even in the early 2000's, there were still TOS and yes, they were maybe more free-wheeling than 2021 in what you thought Twitter was then, and obviously, some politics has shifted, but you could always get banned, and while people may have argued person x didn't deserve a ban, the argument was never, 'banning people is wrong and against free speech,' because even the right-wingers understood there were rules, and if they didn't like the rules, the door was over there. If mods went too far, obviously there'd be a mass dispersal, but the secret was, in most cases, most people who got banned deserved it.
This is just a strawman. Approximately no one argues that "liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism." I am middle-aged, and I was there in the early 2000s too. Yes, there were TOSs and bans and such. What makes it still liberalism is that bans and such were meant to be viewpoint-neutral. This isn't an easy thing to strictly define, but certainly one side choosing to respond to an argument with offense or choosing to claim that it activates some "fight-or-flight mode" in them merely for seeing such arguments was clearly not considered proper grounds for such bans.
07mk
10d ago
Yeah - like, there's an argument on this thread about leftists not wanting to argue.
But, this isn't true - go to a Democratic/left-leaning well-educated group of political types and ask them about health care, taxes, etc. and they'll be a bunch of different ideas thrown around.
It's just yes, I don't have much interest in arguing about why the 2020 election wasn't stolen, why the Jew's don't actually control everything, how smart or not specific racial groups are, and how much we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, and start having them earlier.
As another left-leaning poster, this is the answer I would give to the top-most comment here about why I didn't post any pushback on the comment they were referencing. The topic is something that's so far out of my wheelhouse and expertise that I just have nothing to add or push back on in a meaningful way.
But I think the point about leftists not wanting to argue is less about actually having a desire to argue about this kind of stuff and more about tolerating arguments about this kind of stuff. I'm really, really glad that I get to participate in a forum where people with opinions like that post or the points in the part I quoted above feel free to state such opinions openly. Partly because someone expressing their opinions is, in itself, a good thing, partly because I want the opportunity to learn from the arguments of such people who might even respond to my own comments in other topics, and partly because I want people with such opinions to explore their opinions and collaborate with each other to create better, stronger versions of their arguments which then provide me greater opportunity to learn from them. I can appreciate and even benefit from all this without ever wanting to actually argue with them. And I think it's a shame that most mainstream leftist spaces that I know of just don't have this kind of tolerance.
07mk
10d ago
I think this place is mostly forthright about saying, "Yeah, this is a place for people who are willing to expose themselves to 20-on-1 arguments based on the strengths of their arguments, regardless of political leanings. Like it or leave." That such an environment tends to draw a more right-wing crowd, I think, is mostly down to modern leftism rejecting liberalism, which leads both to leftists having access to more mainstream forums where challenges to their views get censored and to leftists just not wanting to go to places where such challenges are tolerated. And the vicious cycle that follows.
07mk
11d ago
I am "left-aligned" but this place feels like one of the few places left on the Internet where I'm still a liberal. Anywhere else, if I express my actual (classically liberal, or as the choads on those forums would mockingly say, "cLASSiCly LIbErAl!!!") views, I am immediately tagged as a right-winger. This used to make me say "Wtf?" but now I just accept that I am politically homeless and will be the first up against the wall.
This is mostly my experience as well. I'm a liberal more than I'm a leftist, and in the past, those used to be aligned, but now, leftism has morphed into something that is openly and explicitly anti-liberal, and in that conflict, I'll prefer liberalism every time. As such, a forum like this which is both very right-wing and very liberal is far more interesting to read and to partake in than basically any left-wing forum that I know of. I dislike the right-wing racialism/ethnocentrism, but given that the left side is no better at that stuff, I'll take the liberal discussion about the right-wing than the illiberal (lack-of) discussion about the left-wing.
07mk
11d ago
your community and all their future generations are condemned to poverty and violence"
But HBD doesn't imply this. First of all, by most reasonable historical standards, the "black community," at least in the USA, is one of the least violent and certainly one of the least poverty-stricken communities that has ever existed. It's empirically very possible to reduce these things, and the question is how much further can we reduce them, through what methods, at what cost? As I alluded to in my other comment, IF HBD is true and we accept that it's true, then we would realize that treating the "black community" like it's a defective "white community" is a fool's errand that will only be helpful through sheer luck and coincidence and likely quite harmful on net. I don't see why we couldn't come up with creative new solutions to reduce the poverty and violence in the "black community" even further than we have already, but for that, we need the problem solvers to have an accurate perception of the problem.
It's possible that the relational nature of things will mean that the "black community" will always be behind the "white community" and others in things like poverty and crime, but that's a problem only to the extent that people insist on viewing things in a racial/group-based lens. This is a curse that may be with human society as long as we are around, at least until Senator Jay Bulworth's proposal that we all fuck each other until we're all the same color comes about, but it's possible to have more or less of it, much like how poverty and crime will always be around, but it's possible to have more or less of it. I think a few extremist activists bloviating about how 1% of black community are in poverty with a murder rate a whopping 1 out of 100,000/year instead of the 0.5% of the white community in poverty with a murder rate of 0.5 out of 100,000/year would be a better state of things and even acceptable.
07mk
12d ago
I view it as nothing short of tragic that a people who suffered so much due to being viewed as inferior, who struggled for so long to be viewed as equals and treated with dignity, who endured all kinds of injustices in the hope that we would overcome...only for science to prove that it was fruitless all along. It's so dispiriting the possibility that all the problems in our community: crime, poverty, ignorance, are intransient.
(Emphasis added) This is the part that sticks out to me as false. Presuming that HBD is true and black people have an average IQ of 85 or whatever, this doesn't imply that these issues you name, i.e. crime, poverty, ignorance, in black communities are necessarily intransient. Even if we want to think of the black community as a "community" in some meaningful sense rather than just a bunch of people who happen to have certain genes in common (something I personally don't want to, for any race, but it seems most people insist that we must), it doesn't imply that that this community must have these problems permanently or in the long run. What it does mean is that attempting to solve these problems the exact same way that we have and do solve these problems for other "communities" such as the "white community" or "East Asian community," but more is pointless.
I'm reminded of something people sometimes say about the gender culture wars, that boys get treated like defective girls (e.g. when they're physically violent, aggressive, or restless in classrooms). Some people insist that we ought to just keep pushing boys to be more like girls even harder and punish them even more when they fail, but there are plenty of people who believe that "HBD" (or perhaps more accurately behavioral sexual dimorphism) in this realm implies that we ought to solve boys' problems and girls' problems in different ways. I don't see why this couldn't be the approach to solving these issues in the various communities if it turns out that HBD is indeed true.
Again, my personal preference would be that we ignore the entire notion of "[race] communities" altogether and summarily execute tar and feather shame ignore anyone who insists on analyzing populations on this basis and allow individuals to navigate a world of individuals forming communities with each other based on other characteristics, but that seems like a non-starter these days.
07mk
13d ago
Well y'know, if there weren't cases of pervert men doing precisely that,
This on it's own doesn't tell us anything though. Building a world view in which Catholic priests are just perverted child abusers intentionally trying to prey on children is also supported under this criteria. After all there are cases of Catholic priests doing precisely that.
The issue isn't that some pervert men happen to be doing that, it's that this specific system is structured in a way that provides greater opportunities for such pervert men to exploit. The whole Catholic priest issue is a great example of this, actually, in how the whole structure of the way Catholic churches and communities were run gave greater opportunities for pervert men to do that while escaping justice. As such, people did and do argue that Catholic churches must be restructured to better prevent this.
In the case of the whole transwomen in women's prisons thing, I see a couple of good ways to argue in its favor. One is to say that some female prisoners being raped by male prisoners is a worthy cost to pay for transwoman prisoners having their gender identity validated by the criminal justice system; then we can discuss what the rates of these things would be and how much to weigh them against each other. Another is to say that we can place safeguards to prevent male-on-female rape in women's prisons while still getting the benefits of transwoman prisoners having their gender identity validated; then we can discuss specific protocols and effectiveness of enforcing these things. I think that's the tactic the Catholics have been using.
07mk
13d ago
For your first two paragraphs, I agree challenge can be fun, but I strongly disagree that the challenge I would face would be diminished if other players could opt for an easy mode. That's the crux of the debate here. From your last paragraph I feel like we probably agree on this point. An easy mode would allow more people to experience the games if the difficulty would have otherwise precluded them, and it would smash the elitist snobbery surrounding the games to a good degree.
Yes, we agree that these games would be better with an Easy Mode - even moreso, my opinion is that all games would be strictly better with a Dev Mode where any and all cheats that developers use for debugging/testing their games can be toggled on and off at will, including the ability to hop into any place in the game at any time, and this should be unlocked from the very start. These are games, not exams; let me have my fun.
My point, though, is that, at least with Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring, the high difficulty isn't arbitrary. The difficulty directly impacts the visceral thrill of playing and mastering these games. It's akin to the thrill of a boxing or MMA match, where no matter how well your favored fighter is doing, a single momentary error can mean getting KO'd. No matter how much you've mastered a boss and no matter how close you are to winning, knowing that you can lose it all from being careless for just a second makes the encounters much more fun and exciting. That the games tend to give you a ton of healing items but requires you to leave yourself vulnerable to use them plays into this high-volatility philosophy, since dying is often not about losing more HP than you have available to you (i.e. including healing items) but rather about making a bunch of mistakes in a row. This also means near-misses can happen fairly often, where you go down to 5% HP but then manage to find a healing opportunity to give you more slack for the rest of the fight, which you hopefully go on to win. There's something to be said about winning the World Series on a sweep, but there's greater thrill in winning in game 7 through a come-back walkoff.
07mk
13d ago
Categorically not true. Enemies can attack through walls while you can't. Enemies can attack through each other while you almost never get allies in the first place (at least prior to ER). Grab hitboxes are notoriously terrible. DS2 has a large emphasis on groups of enemies which is the literal definition of unfair.
First of all, when people say "fair" in the context of single player games where it's player vs AI, that doesn't mean having the exact same mechanics available to the player and AI or having the exact same number of enemies as the player (i.e. 1 on 1). The point of fairness in these games isn't to put each entity on equal footing, but rather to have the player experience a challenge where failure is the result of their own mistakes. DMC games are generally regarded as very fair, and the vast majority of the non-boss gameplay is centered around defeating large groups of enemies. All 3 From Soft games I've played have their moments of unfairness, but all have tended to be far better at fairness than most similar games of similar genres.
Second, it's simply not true that you can't attack through walls. I've cheesed enemies in Bloodborne and Elden Ring by attacking them through walls. Your weapon swings sometimes bounce off the wall in both games, but not always.
I actually was going to agree that grab hitboxes are notoriously terrible, but the only ones that really stick out to me are Genichiro's running grab and the Guardian Ape's leaping grab. For most grabs, I'd say it's the tracking that's complete BS, such as with Emma's. I can't speak to the latter half bosses in Elden Ring (I've just gotten to the royal city, having defeated Godrick, Rennala, and Radahn as the main big bosses), but I can't recall a single grab that struck me as being off compared to their character model. Godrick's grab was really frustrating to me, as was the Fallingstar Beast's (rather well-telegraphed) one, but both matched their character models quite well, especially for Godrick where I could just step back a foot and punish the grab by slashing his arm.
07mk
14d ago
This doesn't seem that different from rock climbing or archery or even footraces. These are all intrinsically solitary activities of man vs a static environment, but by doing them together, people can build communities, and by comparing performances, people can compete. I do think there's something about overcoming video game challenges that is intrinsically... not worthless, but perhaps worth quite a lot less than other endeavors, but I see that more as a video game thing.
07mk
14d ago
I think it's that - there's a pleasure in overcoming an unfair challenge. And I think a lot of it is the unfairness. Other video games are difficult, but they play by Marquess of Queensbury rules - no sucker punches or surprises.
I haven't played a Souls game, but having played Bloodborne, Sekiro, and probably half of Elden Ring, I believe this is actually the opposite. The challenges in these games tend to be very fair, even the sucker punches and surprises are ones that could have been prepared for. Which is to say, when you're in a boxing ring facing against an opponent, there's no such thing as a sucker punch, just poor attentiveness. These games have their share of surprise encounters, but every one of them could have been anticipated just by looking around a corner before stepping in - it's just that looking around each and every corner in a large, complex game world with tons of enemies is tough to do and can be quite stressful.
And it's that sense of fairness that makes these games so well-regarded in contrast to the generic difficult action game. They're not perfect and so exceptions do exist, but by and large, they telegraph to the player very well exactly how to react to any challenge to overcome it; they just demand great attentiveness and consistent execution while under pressure. The reputation for difficulty tends to come from how few mistakes a player is allowed to make before their character dies (most regular enemies can kill you in 2-3 hits most of the time). The fact that healing locks your character into a vulnerable animation and thus needs to be strategically used based on one's knowledge of the enemy's behavior also plays into this.
07mk
14d ago
I couldn't disagree more, as someone who thinks From Soft's games are some of the best in the industry - Bloodborne and Sekiro are probably easily number 1 and 2 as the best games of the last 2 decades IMHO, though I'm about halfway through Elden Ring, and I'm pretty sure by the time I'm done, that will steal number 2 from Sekiro and possibly number 1 as well. The unique difficulty setting just doesn't add anything to these experiences, and they would be strictly better with an easy mode (Sekiro and Elden Ring both arguably have different difficulty modes, via the Demon Bell in the former and Fia's blessing in the latter both increasing the difficulty, so adding an easy mode wouldn't be much of a leap). I don't find your arguments compelling:
It provides a sense of meaning to your struggles. When beating a challenge in a game like Sekiro, the reward is that you are able to progress through the game. Overcoming the difficulty has meaning because if you didn’t overcome the challenge, you could not have moved on. Conversely, if there was an easy mode, beating the challenge on “normal” only means that you did not have to lower the difficulty in order to overcome the challenge. It, thus, lowers the meaningfulness of your victory.
There is no intrinsic meaning in moving on in a game. The meaning is only in what the player puts in it, because it's a game, rather than something of actual consequence. A player is free to place meaning in beating the game in Normal mode instead of dropping the difficulty to Easy, and if the player chooses to place less meaning in that compared to beating the only difficulty mode available without hacking the game, then that's a free choice by the player, not something imposed on them by the game.
It provides a sense of unity and comradery. In Dark Souls you can literally see other peoples’ struggles against the exact same challenges that you face. This engenders a feeling of comradery against a common foe, which would be weakened if you couldn’t be sure that they aren’t facing a lesser challenge.
This is also something that's entirely by choice on the player. Furthermore, in games like, say, Devil May Cry which does have difficulty modes, you see no shortage of comradery between players who bond over beating the game in the hardest difficulty. Souls games themselves all have pseudo-difficulty modes other than the ones referenced above, through New Game+, which scales the difficulty through damage numbers bit by bit each iteration. There's already a stratification within these communities where people bond over specifically beating the various challenges at the highest New Game+ when the scaling caps out (e.g. Sekiro caps out at NG+7, i.e. after 8 playthroughs, the rest of the playthroughs have identical difficulty).
It provides a sense of identity for the game. It is no coincidence that discussions about difficulty always pop up around the release of FromSoft games. The unique difficulty setting has helped to create the identity of FromSoft games as “hard games”. Think of other “hard games”. How many of them have an easy mode? Having a strong identity, in turn, makes it easier for people to understand whether a game caters to their tastes. Everyone knows what to expect from the next FromSoft game. In some cases, the difficulty is the entire point of the game. For example, I wanna be the guy, QWOP, and getting over it are specifically designed to frustrate the player.
This is one of the stronger arguments here, but it also has to be weighed against the experience of the player. I'm sure FromSoft gets marketing benefits out of their games having this unique-difficulty reputation, but I don't care about benefits to FromSoft, I care about the benefits to me, the player.
It provides a sense of pride when beating the game. The fact that some people cannot beat the game but you can, is a potential source of pride. If you enable everyone to beat the game, it is gone.
This is, again, a free choice that the player makes about comparing oneself to others. And, again, there's plenty of pride in communities for games that do have different difficulties, where the hardest difficulty is the one that brings the most pride. Again, this is even the case for From Soft's games, where some people don't consider you to have truly beaten the game unless you beat it in the highest NG+.
It saves on development time spent on balancing the game, which can be used on other areas. If the developers care about properly balancing all difficulty levels, this time save can be significant. If they don’t, which seems to be the usual case, the idea of implementing multiple difficulties is flawed in the first place. In the usual case of “easy/normal/hard”, normal is easy but hard means bullet sponge enemies and difficulty spikes. In some cases, it even ruins the game economy. I started out playing “ELEX” on ultra difficulty as an archer but had to quickly realize that killing enemies wasn’t worth it because I simply couldn’t afford the arrows to kill their bloated health totals. Thus, the difficulty setting didn’t provide a challenge for skilled players, it turned the game into a broken, unbalanced mess. There is no way this would have happened, had the developers balanced the difficulty around skilled players from the start.
This is also an arguably strong point, but frankly, Easy Mode is basically trivial to tack onto after the game is developed. Just scale the numbers by an order of magnitude or more. There's no need to make Easy Mode balanced in a fun way, because it still serves the purpose of accessibility. As well as offering experienced/good players a silly and light-hearted way to experience the game.
It allows developers to generate their intended atmosphere more accurately. Some parts of games are meant to be hard to create an oppressive atmosphere. Others are meant to be easy to create a cathartic feeling in players. If there are multiple difficulty levels, a player may increase the level when the game is “too easy” and decrease it when it is “too hard”, thus undermining the developers intended atmosphere.
What the developers intended isn't really important; the player has no responsibility to make sure that the devs that they handed money over to sees their artistic vision realized. The player is there to be entertained in exchange for their hard-earned money, and if that involves experiencing the game in a way that doesn't fit the intended atmosphere, then they ought to experience it that way.
It provides commitment to a challenge. Hard games are oftentimes not that enjoyable to play in the moment but they provide more satisfaction when you finally beat them
This is the one that I disagree with the most. I've yet to play a hard game that I've liked which was not enjoyable to play in the moment. Again, I'm playing Elden Ring right now, and the boss that beat me the most was Margit the Fell Omen, (the first boss of the game for most people, I think), which took me 24 tries. I enjoyed each and every one of the 23 failed attempts that led up to the victorious 24th. Because the game's combat mechanics, the boss's movesets and AI, and the stakes of the fight that were built up from the game's lore all made the experience of tackling this challenge fun. There's no shortage of games that are even more difficult than From Soft's games, but also not fun. We just call those bad games that aren't worth playing.
07mk
14d ago
Hard disagree. I think the Souls games and Elden Ring are all pretty mediocre. They're fine at some baseline quality, but they're only remarkable because of the arbitrary high difficulty that breeds elitist protectionism that this post is a good example of. Sekiro is the only title I'd unconditionally qualify as "great". Never played Bloodborne.
I don't understand this perspective at all. That is, I don't see how the high difficulty in these games is arbitrary. I haven't played a single Souls game, but I've spent probably 500+ hours collectively on Bloodborne and Sekiro, and I'm about 50 hours into Elden Ring right now. Bloodborne is my favorite, though Elden Ring is challenging its place at the top while being by far the easiest of the 3, while Sekiro is a close 3rd despite also being by far the hardest of the 3. And in all of these, the difficulty, or perhaps more precisely the challenge, is one of the core elements that make them fun. And it's not that there's some extrinsic motivation in bragging about accomplishing things other people haven't; out of those 3, Elden Ring is likely the most popular and most well-loved, but, again, it's also by far the easiest and most accessible (Bloodborne being a PS4/PS5 exclusive plays a factor here though, admittedly).
It's generally how quickly and mercilessly they punish you that people consider them of high difficulty. To be honest, the main thing that makes these games tougher than the typical game of the same genre is the scaling on enemy damage; in most games, even bosses can hit you 10+ times before you die, whereas in these games, most regular mobs can kill you in 2 or 3 hits. But this is only one piece of the combat design in these games that make them so fun; the counter to this is that, often enough, the player can kill the enemies very quickly just by playing well. Sekiro exemplifies this perfectly with how every miniboss in the game that has 2 lives can have 1 of those lives taken out immediately before the fight begins, essentially halving their HP.
And furthermore, because enemies are so punishing, it forces the devs to design them to be fair. I consistently marvel at how well designed the enemies are in these games in terms of their attack patterns and animations which clearly convey to the player exactly what they need to do in order to avoid damage and to counterattack safely; the tough part is actually executing them consistently while under pressure from a very intimidating-looking enemy (furthermore, the execution is often not particularly difficult due to the slow pacing of these games; the timing precision and reflexes required for even Sekiro are basically nothing in comparison to something like a Devil May Cry). I've watched players with little experience in Souls games take down tricky bosses like the Guardian Ape in Sekiro - a sort of "twist" boss which took me over a dozen tries on my 1st go-around - on their 1st try, merely because they were smarter than me about analyzing their moves and experimenting safely with counters.
I'm also of the opinion that these games would be strictly better if they had easy modes. Beyond the challenge of the games, I'd say the From Soft games I've played are top of the industry in terms of level design for exploration and lore/world building. These are things that any player who doesn't care about the combat could enjoy and appreciate.
07mk
17d ago
The format is pretty awful, though, at least in the image linked in the top post. A grid of 3x3 means having to scroll left and right and then down then left and right, which is a pain in basically any browser compared to just scrolling down on 9 rows of 1 column.
07mk
18d ago
I played Catherine back in the day when it came out on PS3, having just come off loving Persona 3 & 4, IIRC. I hope you enjoy it more than I did, since I didn't find the base tower climb box-pushing puzzle gameplay all fun enough nor the narrative compelling enough to keep me going beyond probably the third-to-half-way point. The mundane everyday life + nighttime dream fantasy setup like Persona was great, but they could've done a lot more with the narrative, because I found myself very disconnected from the characters, who just seemed to teleport from bedroom to date to bar, with little hints of any life outside. At least Miyuki Sawashiro's Catherine was a joy to listen to as always.
07mk
19d ago
I have no disagreement with your opinion on the pattern of upvotes and downvotes in this case specifically, at The Motte more generally, and in places with such systems even more generally. If anything, I'd say it is a bad thing, but it's indeed natural and unavoidable. Which is why I find complaining about it to be silly and pointless. It's like whining that the Sun rises in the east.
I think this actually explains why game writing in the past was good compared to now; having barely any writing because they didn't need a lot of writing can be very good writing, if it serves it purpose exactly as needed. To build on Carmack's analogy, a film whose entire script is: "Did you order the pizza with extra sausage?" "Yes, but I'm afraid I don't have any money. How ever will I pay you?" or the like has much better writing than something like Rise of Skywalker. The writing in the former doesn't need to be any longer or deeper than that in order to accomplish its goals, and trying to accomplish more with the writing would likely be counterproductive. With the greater production values and focus on narrative in many modern AAA games, writers have a lot more degrees of freedom, which means more room for error and also more rope to hang themselves with. That's even without considering the overt attempts at injecting ideological messaging that has plagued much of modern writing, in games and other media, which was much less common in older games, in a large part just due to older games not having as much writing.
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