07mk
13d ago
Overall I'd say, "game writing was never good." Most classic games barely even had writing, either because it was pointless for an arcade-action game, or because there just wasn't enough memory or disk space then to handle a lot of text. Japanese games had an especially tough time with text.
And, aside from technical issues, a lot of games just don't need a lot of writing, and made a design decision not to include it. They tell the story in other ways. Famously John Carmack decided to put only the bare minimum of story into Doom because “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.". It's only in more recent years that it's just expected that every game must have some sort of story, with full-time writers cranking out the content.
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.
07mk
11d ago
Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate. Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.
I find this apparent feigning ignorance endlessly frustrating. The writers and academics who call themselves "progressive" are very open about their desire and willingness to manipulate the populace into believing things they want them to believe by putting in certain tropes into the fiction they write. This is justified on the basis of their stated belief that all fiction manipulates the audience, and so it's better to do it with conscious intent for causes they consider socially just instead of doing so unconsciously while merely focusing on creating an entertaining/meaningful work of fiction which they contend inevitably reinforces the status quo which they find bigoted and intolerable. It's not always possible to nail down this as the cause of any given individual case of uglification, but given the prevalence of these types of people in fiction production and the ubiquity of this narrative, I don't think benefit of the doubt is at all justified, and it's perfectly reasonable to default to the presumption that any specific case was due to ideological intent until proven otherwise.
And if we were to follow the same standards by which such people deem fictional works as "white supremacist" or "patriarchal" or "heteronormative" or whatever, there would be no question that we could conclude that these were caused by ideological motives: as long as someone can write a convincing-sounding essay connecting some work of fiction with these concepts they consider bigoted, it doesn't matter what the creators were thinking or intending, these works are ideological and for a bad ideology. If the creators had nothing but pure entertainment-focused intent or even if they were actively trying to send a message of equality, then that just means that they fell prey to their implicit/unconscious biases which proves just how entrenched white supremacy/patriarchy/etc. really is. But double standards are also justified on the basis of relative power and such (which themselves are justified by someone writing a convincing-sounding essay).
You see this more broadly with people claiming not to know what "woke" or "critical race theory" mean. It's a kind of dishonest bit of self deception that fools no one other than themselves. I just wish they would loudly and proudly stand up for what they believe in, proclaim that they are trying to manipulate the populace for the purpose of a better, more socially just world, and let the chips fall where they may. I find Scott Adams to be... a very silly person not worth paying attention to, but when he said that he was hypnotizing people, including through the very same message of informing them of this hypnotism, because his hypnotism would work even if the audience was consciously aware of what he was doing, I could at least respect that more than this shell game of implausible deniability many writers and activists on the left like to play of openly claiming a desire to manipulate the audience and then acting shocked and appalled that others would accuse them of making creative choices meant to manipulate the audience.
07mk
23d 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
25d 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
11d ago
Surely these things aren't mutually exclusive, but rather in concordance with each other, right? Which is to say,
they understand enough to know the art is “prestigious” so they trick themselves into liking it whilst looking down on bourgeois taste
is the mechanism by which they arrive at their genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences such that
They don't think it's ugly. They actually prefer it.
...
To them uglyness isn't ugly. It's genuinely mindnumbingly beautiful.
I mean, you see this talk about manipulating, say, straight men into genuinely, honestly believing that fat women and transwomen are beautiful and sexy by putting them on magazine covers or pushing them to watch porn featuring such people. If one believes that such manipulation of one's genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences are possible, it's not unexpected that they themselves have undergone such intentional transformations of their own genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences in order to better conform to what they believe is socially just or whatever.
07mk
24d 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
18d 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
10d ago
I see this accusation thrown at rationalists a lot, and I'm honestly not sure what to think about it. As someone who's mostly ambivalent to the whole rationalist movement/identity but one who spend a lot of time interacting with them on Scott Alexander-related forums, I've rarely seen rationalists imply any sort of greater value on individuals for their IQ. They're often accused of being high IQ people bitter at not being worshiped like the gods they deserve to be merely for their high IQ, but, again, I've rarely ever seen them do or state anything that even remotely implies this sort of belief. I feel like this most likely reflects a sort of intelligence fetishism on the part of the critic, who sees rationalists talk about IQ and intelligence and how useful they are in certain (well, to be fair, many, MANY) contexts and can't separate that idea of usefulness from some sort of inherent superiority.
07mk
5d ago
On my Android phone, I can long-press any app notification, which changes that notification to a menu of options on how to treat that kind of notification, as well as a button to go into the settings to control all notifications for that particular app. Perhaps you have an older version of Android?
07mk
23d 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
11d ago
The number one de facto policy this would change is that proportionate representation by race in jobs that are heavily IQ dependent wouldn't be the goal which, if our society fails to reach, gets deemed White supremacist. Instead, greater emphasis would be placed on removing any extraneous barriers for all individuals from all races, including unfair discrimination, and may the chips fall where they may in terms of the racial proportions.
07mk
14d 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
23d 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
23d 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
If these "radicals," as you call them, stuck to Bene Gesserit-style multi-millennia plans involving eugenics in order to manipulate the genetic causes of the individual/cultural preferences, I think this aspect of the culture wars would be significantly less contentious.
07mk
11d ago
And statistically speaking, CICO is not likely to result in success.
I don't know that this is a conclusion we can draw based on our observation that most overweight people in the west have failed at losing weight, though. First of all, because even though CICO is widely known, there's still also an incredible amount of other misinformation about stuff like "healthy foods" and various diets. There's also the fact that many people receive this very type of message along the lines of "CICO is trivially true from a physics standpoint, but the hard part is actually keeping to it due to self control and hunger" and as such, when they do diet, they pursue strategies for tricking themselves through other diets instead of literally just counting calories in and calories out.
All this means that the overall population of "overweight people who try to lose weight" does not necessarily look like the population of "overweight people who try to follow a CICO protocol for weight loss." I'd actually wager that overweight people who follow a CICO diet strategy while having a genuine belief in CICO and their ability to succeed by using it have higher success rates than overweight people who follow the strategy while being terrified by the prospect of failure due to their inability to control themselves in the face of hunger pangs. And as such, spreading the message that CICO is trivially true but ineffective actually harms people's ability to lose weight.
In any case, this particular comment was about manipulating the commenter's wife to following CICO via mechanisms other than just telling her CICO (i.e. the commenter getting ripped). This seems likely to fail for plenty of reasons, but those are different issues to whether or not [following as a diet strategy] CICO is likely to result in success.
07mk
26d 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
27d 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
17d 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
17d 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
20d 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
27d 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
27d 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
16d 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.
Not having read this essay, one thing that really stands out to me about the headline and the URL is how it frames NPR as the active party that "lost America's trust." This is in stark contrast to 99% of the recent mainstream narrative about people coming to view journalists and journalism outlets with mistrust and even disdain, which is more along the lines of, "Why do these dumb ignorant fucks not trust what we publish, when we're doing everything right? Clearly they must be getting manipulated by disinformation merchants who just know so well how to appeal to their tiny little minds." Back when journalists being less trusted by the public was becoming an issue during the Trump administration, I recall thinking that this should be a time for introspection for journalists, for them to question why they - literal professional writers and speakers - were just so bad at communicating that they were losing out not just to a politician but a politician of the dishonesty level of Trump. Such introspection has been rare indeed, and it's both nice to see it here and unsurprising that this guy was penalized for performing it.
I used to listen to NPR a ton as a kid in my parents' car and also in my young adulthood which was 10+ years ago now. The rare times I drive these days, I still put on NPR, but I honestly can't stand it either, and I'm not sure if it's because I changed or because NPR changed. On Reddit's /r/stupidpol (subreddit for leftists who consider identity politics to be stupid), I read someone say they play a game whenever putting on NPR to see how many minutes it is before there's some mention of a racial or sex/gender-related angle to whatever story they're covering, and they almost never go past 5 minutes; ever since starting to play the game myself, I actually rarely go past 1 minute these days. Could just be coincidence given, again, I rarely listen to any radio anymore these days, but I suspect it's not.
At least, the few times I tune into Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, it's still mostly enjoyable. The kind of self-satisfied smug "obviously the mainstream progressive Democrat narrative is the correct one" attitude can be kind of annoying, but it honestly doesn't seem any worse than when I was a kid - I've just become more aware of the biases I used to have - and I still find Paula Poundstone hilarious.
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