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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2534 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 19, 2025

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Is it fair to say that I am not a fan of videogames in general and should only describe myself as a fan of those 9 categories?

IMO, yes.

I can think of another standard that addresses your complaint, but it's even less workable than the first one.

  • There is a list of all non-video-game creative works, numbered n from 0 to nworks − 1.

  • The list is organized in ascending order of quality q, from 0 to 1.

  • There is also a list of what those non-video-game works would look like if they were video games, numbered n from 0 to nworks − 1.

  • For each work, the imagined video-game quality q′ presumably will not be the same as the actual non-video-game quality q.

  • If ∑0nworks − 1(q′) > ∑0nworks − 1(q)—that is, if you think that, on average, the overall quality of a non-video-game creative work would be improved if it were turned into a video game—then you are a fan of video games.

This only measures the difference in video-game fan-ness in comparison to creative works fan-ness. So would give a false positive for someone who hates all creative works but hates video games slightly less. I suppose you could further modify it by hacking the two measures together, perhaps take this and add a minimum amount of video games liked from the previous rating. But that ends up a lot less elegant.

Maybe the issue here is just the strict cutoff threshold. Ie maybe you take the first score and instead of saying someone > 0.5 is a fan and someone less than 0.5 is not a fan, you say that someone's fan-ness is a sliding scale from 0 to 1. Ie, someone who likes all video games ever is more of a fan than someone who only likes half, who is more of a fan than someone who only likes 0.1 (while still keeping the quality weighting so someone with horrible taste who likes the worst games is less of a real fan than someone who likes good ones).

Yeah, that doesn't really click with me. Many non-video game works wouldn't work as video games, but that's not because I don't like video games - it's because video games are best when designed as a game from ground up.

I think there are a lot of visual-novel fans who would disagree with you.

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