I got to agree that the highest achievement for a game is to be able to carry its narrative in its gameplay. To do the opposite of the often mentionned ludo-narrative dissonance and achieve ludo-narrative convergence.
Another example that attempts to achieve both kinds of narrative crafting (both through writing and ludo-narrative convergence) I'd say is Death Stranding. It only achieves ones of them (ludo-narrative convergence), the writing being symptomatic of a man who has been told too much he is a genius and started believing it. But the way the gameplay is structured seems to be tailor made to reinforce the game's theme: cooperation is better than isolation. The game forces you to forge ahead in areas that are without any infrastructure, and that is where things are at their most risky. Once the region is connected, you can build infrastructure, but the costs are usually exorbitant, requiring unfun grinding to achieve. But the online system sometimes puts other people's constructions in your game, the more time you spend in a region helping the NPCs the more help you get from other players, and what was once difficult treks across inhospitable terrain becomes trivial milk runs due to all the roads and bridges you've made. And eventually you're spending hours building a zipline network in the most challenging region of the game not even for yourself since you don't have to stay there anymore, but for other players to enjoy. The game makes you altruistic. Not by forcing cooperation onto you or by heavily incentivising it, that would be meaningless, but by making you feel grateful for other people's help and by making you feel the gratitude of others (those almost meaningless likes you get when someone mashes a button on infrastructure you built).
I don't know if I can think of any game in older generations that have achieved such a tight integration of narrative in its gameplay. It's the exact opposite of Spec Ops: The Line.
I think part is that the audience on Mac skewing older and more well-heeled, and that outside of multimedia, Macs were not very well equipped to play games for their era, especially for the price. If you wanted a computer for the kids to play games, there were usually cheaper and better suited alternatives. Cheap 8 bits micros were better for games than early monochrome Macs with only beeps, then Amigas were much better equipped with their dedicated sound and graphics chips, then with 486s and above and VGA and SVGA PCs were able to push more complex graphics.
pigeonburger
6d ago
What your narrative doesn't explain is why the US is considering dropping charges now - assuming that they actually are considering that and it's not just another deception.
Leftists and young democrats voters have to be thrown a bone because they're threatening not to show up to vote for Biden over Israel. It's just that.
Ultimately this is the reason why I consider Trump to be easily the best option americans have had in a long time. Of course a wise and devoted to the population's well-being president/king would be best, but at least a vanitous president is a lot easier to keep aligned with the population's wishes than the puppet of a PMC that believes they should be the one deciding what the population should desire. The former just has to be reminded that the population will love him if he does what they want. The only thing that seems to motivate the PMC to go along or pretend to go along with the population's wishes is the threat of losing to a populist who could undo their long term sociocultural engineering projects.
Nothing special really, my friends and I were mostly living in or around the same neighborhood, the bar in question was opened by a friend of ours and was the only pleasant place in the neighborhood, so it made for an obvious meeting place. Tuesday evenings were convenient for everyone the first few weeks, and after that we were just explicit in calling it our weekly tuesdays hangout. I think what helped is being explicit about it, and doing it on an "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" basis. There's also an open invitation to any friends, SO of the regulars. Anyone who wants to be there is welcome, but from the start we were already a stable core group of relatively mature and easygoing men, so there was little risk of personality clashes or drama spoiling it.
What strategies do Mottizens follow for a good social life?
Creating and following a tradition. For over 12 years my friends and I made a weekly habit of meeting at a specific neighborhood bar every tuesday evening. Not everyone is there every week, sometimes life gets in the way, but being there is the expected default, and we can assume we're busy those evenings and try not to schedule anything else then.
Sure, once a week is nothing compared to the socializing people used to do, but most people I mention this tradition to seem to envy it.
I was a big user for a couple of years here, after we got full legalization. Saying it kills motivation is right; I wouldn't say it does it directly, but indirectly by making you boring and okay with being bored. I've mostly stopped not because I made a choice to stop, but because my wife is now living with me, she doesn't use it and I don't think it would be fair for me to be so boring to be around when she's there. When she's not there, I usually have other things I want to do that would bore her but entertain me so I don't really need to make myself okay with boredom.
pigeonburger
8d ago
Yeah, the USSR almost kept up with the US militarily at the cost of the well-being of its citizens, while the US more than kept up with the USSR militarily while at the same time enjoying unprecedented growth and prosperity for its citizens.
pigeonburger
8d ago
And without that motivation, your experiment starts functioning far worse than capitalism.
Exactly, because capitalism is unique in not only assuming humans are greedy but counting on it.
seek and destroy
It's more remind and dissuade.
With one very notable exception, public violence in the US and Canada tends to be criminal rather than terroristic, and when it's terroristic, it's usually a lone wolf. At least for now (until cartel or jihadist violence significantly rises), criminals and criminal organisations there are not exactly geared for high level violence. And for those organisations, public violence is not a smart solution anyway, it attracts too much attention and it's bad for business. Cops with pistols are plenty enough to intimidate them into avoiding public violence. And while lone wolves can buy fancy weapons and equipment in the US, they're by the nature of being "lone" wolves, immediately outnumbered as soon as two cops or armed civilians show up. Europe has more of a problem with jihadist groups with international funding and sometimes high end equipment, a disregard for their own lives and a mission that makes public violence a goal in itself rather than an unfortunate detour to another end. A group of 5-10 of them can outgun and outnumber the police on the scene for enough time to do a lot of damage. These people are not intimidated by a cop with a holstered pistol, they need to be reminded that the country they're thinking of attacking has a military, and that this military is close enough to respond quickly.
All true, but I'd point out that these are the reasons why the US is currently on top. For the most part, it's where the US is coming from, not necessarily where it's headed. For many of those, the US is headed away from them. Like for (2), selective scrutiny of business dealings and of regulatory observance for being on the wrong side of politics is increasingly visible in the US; I don't know if it's more or less the case than before, but it's certainly more high profile. Musk might not be facing jail right now, but there's a large group of people, in some states a majority, who would electorally reward public officials for finding any reason to go after him. There's a large (and growing) group of people who believe Musk (or anyone) should not have been able to make that much money in the first place and that such wealth can only have come from some illegitimate or immoral acts, and while these people are not in power right now (because the elites don't believe it, they just use it for electoral purposes), it could only take one populist rising at the wrong time to ruin the idea that the US is a safe place to do business in.
pigeonburger
26d ago
Current fast food prices would be a great opportunity for the prepared food industry and convenience stores to swoop in and replicate the east asian model of selling relatively high quality food for cheap. I don't know if that has changed in the US but in Canada convenience food/gas station food is still dire, but when I check out videos of the stuff you get in convenience stores in Japan and Korea, I get jealous. Cold, hot or microwavable meals that seem to compare favorably with most prepared meals from supermarkets here, and cost little because there's little need for staff except the one cashier. It would easily replace the "I don't care, I just want something convenient and decent tasting" instances of fast food eating.
pigeonburger
26d ago
The falsehoods are easily dismissed, because if the company is healthy and making more money than they let on, then why isn't the advice to the public to just buy shares (at least, of those that are public)? After all, they're just being greedy, so why aren't they encouraging everyone to put themselves on the other side of that equation? And if they're voting shares they also get a say in C-suite remuneration! Wouldn't that be exactly what people who complain about greed be doing? After all, they seem to know so much about running a business and how pricing should work, I'm sure they'd do a great job as investors! /s
Ah, but 4chan predates reddit, and its community uses the n-word as a way to try (futilely) to keep its community within the bounds of people who don't take words too seriously. If you want, say, a community about biking that isn't a subreddit, you're likelier to end up with a community of people who love saying the n-word and sometimes, rarely, discusses biking. Compare to the subreddit which is going to be mostly about biking, except when progressive politics talking points seep through and you're not allowed to say anything else you'll be either piled on or modded. Normies either agree with the progressive politics, or they don't even notice them as we don't notice the air we breathe, but at least they're probably there to talk on-topic. The alternatives are selecting for people who do notice the air, and they'll be more interested in discussing that than the main topic.
pigeonburger
26d ago
I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why.
I get your feeling, and I think the main culprit, the biggest reason the insular internet mostly collapsed is Reddit (and recently Discord). The technical superiority of Reddit when it came out, its ability to spin up new subreddits on any topic and its originally relaxed moderation turned it into a natural Schelling point for any community. Previously if I wanted to find an active community talking about topic_x, I'd google "topic_x forum" and look at some of the results and join a PHPbb (or similar) forum that seemed to have a vibe I liked. Now the first place I, or pretty much everyone, will think about is /r/topic_x. It will be bigger and more active than almost any other community about topic_x.
The only exceptions are going to be existing communities that don't want to be Schelling points that passively attract newcomers (like this place) or people who have an axe to grind against Reddit. And while I do myself have an axe to grind against Reddit, I have to admit I'm in the company of a lot of witches who really just want a place they can spam the n-word, and the communities created by that second group are likely going to suck.
pigeonburger
27d ago
I recall thinking that the sexual perversion of the Harkonnens didn't add a whole lot to the narrative
Yeah, the main contribution to the book of that is emphazing that you should not think that the Harkonnen are moral equivalents to the Atreides. The aesthetic choices in the movie already do that job well enough.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Couple of weeks ago I moved my MiSTer FPGA from the living room to the bedroom and turned it into more of a retro-computer like setup. But on it, I've been mostly playing MGS for the PSX for now. I've played through and enjoyed Twin Snakes on the Gamecube back in the day, but never the original.
I've also been trying to get into but been unable to really plunge into old school first person dungeon crawlers turn based RPGs. Stuff like Wizardry, Might & Magic and their descendants. I always loved the aesthetic of that genre and I keep thinking that once it clicks I'll love them, but whenever I try to play them I just... mostly don't have fun. They're mean games; they rarely forgive mistakes, they require remembering a lot of stuff to have a chance. Yet I have no problem with challenging games like From Soft games, shmups, fighting games, etc... or with games that require acquiring knowledge (I love straight up oldschool roguelikes like Nethack). But dungeon crawlers... I don't know why it won't click. The only ones I could stomach a bit (and only a bit, I still dropped them fairly quickly) is the Etrian Odyssey games and some MegaTen games (the remake of the original Megami Tensei on the SNES, Strange Journey, SMT IV).
pigeonburger
1mo ago
A lot of the knife answers seem to assume maximum stupidity from the bat fighter and maximum cunning from the knife fighter. That the only strike someone could do with a baseball bat is a big homerun swing. I'm pretty sure most people would figure out that's not all they can do with a bat within seconds of thinking of it as a weapon, and of how to avoid ending up being knifed. Most importantly, a quick overhead bonk (think kendo strikes) leaves you a lot less vulnerable if you miss than a swing, and if the opponent tries to catch it or to block it they will open up the entirety of their body to kicks. While that is not going to kill or even knock out in one shot, just one overhead bonk connecting is likely more than enough to end the fight; the amount of force in it would be enough to have the opponent reeling for long enough to line up another one, and another one, ect... And as for knife fighters, winning with one requires knowing something that is not really commonly known: you will not incapacitate someone with a knife. The targets that can incapacitate are small and an untrained person is not going to hit them on a resisting target. An expert probably wouldn't even bother either. The way to win with a knife is that you tie them down another way (say, by tackling them to the ground), and THEN you do damage with the knife, repeatedly. But the knife is essentially useless to win if you are not able to tie down the other guy, and with no distractions he has a big heavy piece of wood he's highly interested in keeping between you and him.
I'm expecting that the difficulty and variety of bosses will ramp up as I get deeper in, though, since Margit, Leonine, Erdtree Avatar, Godrick, and even the Ancient Hero of Zapor all felt like variations of each other to some extent.
I have to stress that it is a fantastic game that I'm nitpicking and that expecting otherwise is stupidly unrealistic, but sadly I believe this to be the biggest problem with the game, that as you keep playing the map/dungeon/level structure and the boss design, that felt so natural at the start, ends up feeling increasingly game-y. But then again, expecting otherwise is insane; a game that large could not have had hundreds of dungeons with the same intricateness as a bespoke-made Souls game, hundreds of bosses with all different movesets, etc...
Bat is a better fighting weapon, knife is a more lethal weapon. I would say the person with the bat wins more often than not, but it's more likely that "and then he dies from bleeding out after winning" for the bat wielder than the opposite "and then he dies from the delayed effects of a concussion/brain hemmorage" for the knife wielder.
Reasoning: The bat can be held out forward to maintain distance. Can be held with the off hand in the middle to be turned into a shorter cudgel to push away the opponent. It's not a matter for the knife guy to just "close the distance once and stab with the knife" like some sort of ninja: people who who get stabbed while hopped up on adrenaline keep fighting, most of the time, only to bleed out later. Very often they don't even realize they've been stabbed until after. People with shattered arms or legs immediately lose usage of them.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
It sparks an internal and social reflection that we would even entertain the notion that a banana taped to a wall is art, therefore, it is art.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Ah, you are misreading me, it's not Theodore Dalrymple who's the extremist political operative, it's the communist commisars who deployed propaganda knowing full well that its purpose was to humiliate.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
I don't think so, but let's dive into each one.
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It's true that most users probably don't notice the sculpting, but then again, they do notice that for some reason, somehow, Google has gotten worse. I don't know if the sculpting is the issue with search, I don't think anyone outside Google (and maybe inside Google too) knows the exact reason why Google Search sucks now, but since for Gemini's image generation it seems exceedingly likely sculpting was the reason for images not matching the expectations of the prompter, then I think we should assign a fairly high probability to it being at least part of the cause for the degradation of service for search too. And as dominant as Google is now, changing search engines is very easy, low friction, so once a competitor gets enough traction it might turn out to have been very counterproductive.
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I think people at the very top could dial back if they wanted to, as long as it's not framed to be dialing back on the commitment to ideology, but as a technical matter; they don't have to give any rationale except degradation of the service. Companies have been laying off DEI employees/departments with little pushback, because companies still officially run on the rules that put finances above ideology (for now). As long as it's because the company needs to trim some of the less "core" employees, and not framed as "our customers and employees hate everything the DEI department has been doing". So while businesses are not allowed to explicitely retreat from the ideological battleground, they still have the latitude to excuse themselves for technical reasons.
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This one seems pretty unfalsifiable and conspiracy minded. I don't think most people outside of extremist political operatives think along those terms. And demoralization is easily countered by reminding oneself that if it was truly hopeless, they wouldn't need the propaganda, whether it's opinion shaping or demoralizing.
Yes, this is on purpose. It's part of the mechanism by which I would actually curtail the administrative state's power: I want the administrative state to be forced to be hostile to legislators so that legislators take the power creep of the administrative state seriously and write laws that restrict the discretion the administrative state has.
For instance, even though it is technically a crime to make a material lie to any government official, the FBI can lie to other government officials they are investigating and never be charged for it, while the FBI can set perjury traps for other government officials and go after them.
How long would it remain a crime if legislators were maximally subject to it? Legislators have the power to make it not a crime. Or to significantly limit or clarify when and to whom lying is a crime. They just never bothered making it not a crime because they know that unless they find themselves significantly out of favor with the administrative state, everyone with some discretion with regards to enforcing this is gonna ignore it or refuse to prosecute it. But if the opposite political party could, for instance, sue the FBI (or even better; make the individuals in the administrative state personally liable) for not prosecuting crimes of the their opponents, then the law would be fixed in a hurry.
Right now, legislators write laws with significant vagueness, so broad as to make everyone technically commit crimes, safe in the knowledge that the heads of the administrative state are in their peer group and would not weaponise these against them, barring extreme situations (like that one businessman-politician we all know about). And for the most part, they wouldn't even weaponise them against the majority of the population, they're content to keep these laws in their back pocket to use if they need to take someone out. But the average citizen is not in the peer group of the legislators and the heads of the administrative state, all they know is that there are dozens of crimes a hostile state could find them guilty of if it wanted to. They might not mind if the state feels friendly, but increasingly people on all sides except the elites are finding the state to be apathetic or outright hostile to them. Making legislators feel this hostility is the best way I can think of to incentivize them to restrict the power of the administrative state.
Note that I'm also thinking that a "Higher Standard" law, if it turns out to work with legislators, could also easily be applied to the upper echelons of the administrative state and the judiciary: judges, prosecutors, etc... Any one who's got any power to wield the state's power against the population and whose power is based on significant amounts of discretion. Break up the professional courtesy that they have between them that the population at large doesn't get to enjoy; the administrative state being friendly towards itself is not compatible with democratic principles, it's a form of corruption.
Without the urgency of the current war encouraging the West to transfer arms to Ukraine, and especially if the West loosen economic sanctions on Russia following peace, Russia will replenish its arms stocks for the sequel war way faster than Ukraine can.
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