sohois
7mo ago
If individual characters or elements are enough for a game to be woke, and thus the industry, then the OPs question has a very simple answer. Companies are putting these things in because they want to make more money. Adding a women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience
sohois
8mo ago
I dismissed a terrible line of logic. I didn't comment on the other points. This place is for rational discussion, and the argument that a poster thinks a candidate is bad therefore it is impossible that they attracted votes is just not at the standard of the motte.
Even Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote. Why would it remotely be a surprise that a far less divisive candidate attracts more votes, after a mediocre term for Trump that had the misfortune to end with a pandemic?
A new release sold 13000 copies, much lower than the figures for some of the other books.
Why would you post something that harms your own argument? Or are you saying that the 15million figure is the comparison? Except that's not the same time at all, those books were released in 1991 and that's 20+ years of sales, not to mention a massively book industry
sohois
7mo ago
Because people like to play characters that look like them? If you want women, you add women. If you want blacks or hispanics, you add them. If you want lqbt, you add lgbt.
I brought up LoL earlier and just responded to someone else on the game; it's a good case study. A Riot study found that among female players, 97% exclusively played female champions.
This doesn't mean that it's a good strategy to target what are likely niche audiences, but I don't think it's confusing why people believe in it.
sohois
7mo ago
If we're talking about LoL specifically, I'd say female preference appears to tilt towards pretty/cute rather than attractive/sexy. Lux rather than Miss Fortune. And I think Riot's redesign of some earlier characters and move away from the high level of sexualisation (and general huge tits that a lot of the early female champs had) was probably a big deal for potential female players.
sohois
7mo ago
I don't think the woke additions do all follow the one option though, that was just an expression. In some responses below, people are complaining about minor changes like using "Body type" instead of Sex or Gender. Plenty of female characters added into games are good looking and the bizarre non-binary examples from Dragon Age are much rarer.
So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.
sohois
8mo ago
Most nations have some nuclear in their generation mix and will continue to have nuclear for the foreseeable future, but I'm not sure anywhere in the West outside of France will have a significant percentage covered by it. Peaking plants will probably continue to be gas or hydro as nuclear is not suited for this purpose. But ultimately as with renewable generation, the investment in battery technology mean that storage plants and DERs are simply better placed in terms of cost/benefit again.
sohois
1yr ago
I've seen similar sentiment elsewhere, and I think a lot of it is misplaced.
When it comes to non-fiction, there is a gamut running from purely informational/educational to purely entertainment, with everything falling somewhere between the two. If your goal is to simply spread knowledge, you will submit a paper to a journal; if your goal is to entertain, then you are probably making a video. Spurlock did the latter - Supersize Me is primarily an entertainment product, and I would say it succeeds. He takes quite a dry prospect - eating Mcdonalds for every meal - and turns it into an entertaining documentary. Who cares if it isn't all true? It's not really designed for that. If Spurlock wanted to prove something about Mcdonalds, he would have done nutritional studies and submitted articles.
Someone like Gladwell is deserving of scorn, because he positions himself on the educate/inform side, while also spreading a ton of bs.
sohois
2yr ago
This is a classic "lack of charity", accusing your ideological opponents of not holding the views they say they do based on basically nothing
sohois
6mo ago
Many men - including many of these men who desire chastity in mates - are quite dissatisfied if they cannot get laid regularly or at least rack up a reasonable body count for themselves in their youth.
sohois
8mo ago
I expect any Biden supporters could create a list of negatives about Trump just as large as your Biden list.
And indeed, a huge swathe of Democrats did proclaim everything was rigged when Trump beat Hilary. A subject that was much mocked by posters on the right of the spectrum.
sohois
1yr ago
I think anyone with half a working brain could already work out that eating Mcdonalds everyday for a month won't prove anything about the food. I'm not sure Spurlock ever called it science either
sohois
2yr ago
don't get me wrong, I think lockdowns are almost certainly the greatest government disaster outside of war, but I don't think the economic arguments against them do much when compared to life years lost vs life years saved and the moral argument against arbitrary restrictions on freedom.
sohois
2yr ago
One of the reasons why lockdowns perform poorly in data measuring lockdown vs no lockdown seems to be that people largely restricted their own behaviour such that you had many people voluntarily locking down. This can be seen in graphs showing collapses in things like restaurant visits before any lockdowns are introduced.
So there's definitely a question of whether no lockdowns wouldn't have seen many negative economic impacts anyway. And, as you mentioned with places like Sweden, we live in a globalized world. Supply chain impacts from other countries locking down - especially china - would still have hit if some nations decided not to follow lockdown orthodoxy.
sohois
7d ago
I didn't claim that China lacked historical sites, rather that the cities themselves were somewhat lacking. The issue is that all the sites are dispersed throughout a continent-sized nation, making it very difficult to plan a trip - as you've discovered. Personally Suzhou, Luoyang, and Chengdu did not stand out as markedly different from the tier 1 cities in being composed of vast sprawls of communist blocks and a small handful of proper history. At least everyone likes Xi'an, but that seems to be the exception to the rule.
I lived in Harbin for a short period, so it's more that I passed through while the ice festival happened than I visited. Certainly it's very unique, and Harbin isn't a bad city as some of the Russian influences have still remained. But I recommended it more because much of China is quite grim to visit in December, particularly further south: I moved from Harbin to Shanghai in January, and found it worse in the 0-5C of Shanghai to the -20C of Harbin just because so many places lacked proper heating.
sohois
7d ago
Don't focus too much on the cities. The cultural revolution destroyed a ton of history all across the nation, and the development boom finished the job on a lot more. They all have a lot less to see than equivalent cities of their size and history in other nations. You can go to one big city - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. - and you'll have seen them all.
Since you're going in December, how much does weather matter to you? You might be able to catch Harbin Ice Festival if you're willing to bear -20 or lower temperatures.
sohois
10d ago
I did find I was constantly tweaking my gambits, most on account of status effects. Another difference I remember was that with the OG license board, I could give all my characters some low level spells, like Protect or Shell, so the whole party would work together to keep those protection spells up. In Zodiac Age, you tell your single white mage in the part to keep everyone protected, it's virtually all they do it takes so long to cast 3 times in a row, and then it's nearly worn off! Meanwhile they aren't healing or curing status effects.
This was what really put me off the game back when I played the original. IIRC, I had every character basically playing as a red mage, never bothered with skills, and just unlocked the strongest weapons available whenever I found new ones.
sohois
2mo ago
I got a similar score and have a similar ~1sigma lower estimate from correlated tests (although memory was my best individual score). At first I thought the whole test was just a bit biased towards higher scores as multiple posters got scores in 140-150 range, but there are a few lower scores so not sure
sohois
2mo ago
I'm not sure this really maps to right-wing growth in Europe. Le Pen's economics are close to Trump in her economic nationalism, but Farage is an old school libertarian who wanted to make the Brexit campaign all about opening up free trade outside of the EU. Meloni has retreated pretty quickly into bog standard neoliberalism. Can't comment on Wilders or the AfD, but there's nothing to suggest that wider right wing movements are an economic protest
sohois
6mo ago
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Lenovo thinkpad, a personal machine. Windows 11, which was immediately decrapified and since then has largely been worry free. Never noticed any ads, untoward installations, or other issues
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Work Macbook Pro. It's fine, certainly doesn't give me any desire to switch my personal machine though
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Old Macbook Air that I kept from a previous role. Absolute piece of crap, by far the worst laptop I have ever owned, but we kept it around and now my wife uses it.
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Phone-wise I've always stuck with Chinese mid-rangers and don't have any desire to change that. My wife is on Apple for phones as well, she took my work iPhone.
I used to have beefier laptops for gaming, but rarely have the time these days and instead just use Geforce Now streaming on any of the above devices. Pretty flawless experience for me
sohois
6mo ago
Typical for most years, there wasn't much at Cannes this time round and a lot of the Oscar bait will come out December/January.
sohois
7mo ago
You could ask this about millions of bad business decisions: I think the consensus is that there is a bias to action in corporate settings, because people need to be seen to be doing something. In a lot of media, not just games, this ends up as "Put a chick in it and make her lame and gay"
sohois
7mo ago
Just getting regular sales data for retail games is difficult enough, let alone trying to parse out how an ongoing GaaS title is affected.
I think League has probably done well out of it, research suggested female players overwhelmingly played female characters while men played an equal mix - indicating that the male playerbase was unbothered while attracting new female players.
Battlefield V sold less than its predecessor according to Wikipedia, but still sold more than 7 million copies. Presumably there is some percentage of regular players who decided not to buy the game due to the woke marketing, alongside some percentage of new players who were attracted by it. 2142 looked a lot more regular in its marketing, so perhaps EA decided it wasn't worth it overall?
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