domain:shapesinthefog.substack.com
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
9m ago
Hopefully it's more coherent than that! Though healthcare does seem to make people go crazy for one reason or other.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
13m ago
Reading an article on why Britain should settle Antarctica from Palladium got me thinking: are there any major, visionary projects happening at the moment that have a plausible chance of success?
I'm still hopeful for SpaceX to at least make operations on the moon more feasible, though I'm skeptical of making a real go at Mars colonization, especially as Elon's star has fallen so far recently.
China seems a likely contender, but I don't know what they have going on. I know that AGI is the thing on everyone's mind, but I'm thinking more about a physical, non-software based major visionary project that's happening in the physical world.
To quote some from the article:
These apparently radical measures will look less radical by the year, but would nevertheless represent a dramatic break from the Westminster status quo. Declining nations can resort to many sensible technocratic reforms that are easy to explain, but they find it hard to come up with compelling political or bureaucratic motives for those reforms. That can only be done with national visions—visions that are not only suited to the capabilities a country could realistically develop, but also a congruent continuation of its history, or at least the best of its history. We can see that these two conditions have been fulfilled with nearly every successful national founding or refounding. Britain’s overlooked Antarctic legacy, and the vast frozen territory it still retains, then, offer us the opportunity for such a vision.
If such a project is pursued with enough vigor, it will make Britain’s claim to Antarctica inarguable. It is easy to draw peremptory lines on an empty map, but it is much harder and more admirable to people that map and to rescue its land from barrenness. For a stagnant or declining nation, it is easy to find this or that technocratic intervention that can solve this or that economic, social, or political issue. What is more difficult is finding a vision that gives the nation reason to carry out such reforms. These visions must be inspiring, but they must also be within reach. Most importantly, they must match the legacy and history of the country.
This is culture war because, well, the decline of nations is extremely political, and from my view the Trumpian Right, for all it's many and varied flaws, is the only party at least nominally pursuing a future vision of greatness, instead of simply ignoring or managing a decline.
Also, this is a very sassy quote from the article I loved:
This unworldly modern Britain is hardly the “perfidious Albion” depicted in the propaganda of its 19th century geopolitical rivals. Not wholly unflatteringly, contemporary Russian state media still portrays the country as the shadowy orchestrator of coups and death squads. A truer depiction, though, is that of the “cash-poor, asset-rich elderly woman who has somehow inherited a portfolio of scattered, high-value properties she doesn’t know what to do with.”
Corvos
22m ago
The Lion King? The Jungle Book? The Emperor’s New Groove? Aladdin?
Aristocats is more borderline but the American audience is mostly intended to identity with the chirpy working-class American-accented tomcat rather than the beautiful English-accented heroine IMO.
There were multiple dress rehearsals for a national reckoning with race over black males getting killed by police or vigilantes. A lot of those cases (e.g. Michael Brown, Trayvon) didn't really pan out as good outlets or didn't have video.
With Floyd, we did. The video was bad enough that, iirc, initially even conservatives were sympathetic.
JTarrou
54m ago
Disney was always for chicks, some people fell for a marketing ploy when they decided to chickify a couple boys IPs. This was always an act of aggression against those fanbases, and that's why it was done. Disney is a giant international slopCorp staffed by failed theater kids and orally fixated women. If you care deeply about Disney, you need to make your peace with that.
Or you could do what most boys do by the age of five and stop thinking about a globohomo company that makes princess cartoons. It's not the masculine flex you might think.
BahRamYou
57m ago
it's an interesting question that's surprisingly hard to answer.
At first glance, you're right. Those majority-minority districts produce huge majorities for democrats that waste a lot of their votes. For example, look at Georgia's 4th district: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_4th_congressional_district#Election_results where the Democrats have been winning by 50+ points in almost every election.
On the other hand, those districts are very effective. It leads to way more black congressmen than they would probably have without them. For example the Congressional Black Caucus has 55 members while the Hispanic Caucus only has 37, despite the US having a larger overall Hispanic population. And since many of those are very safe seats, it leads to those congressmen sticking around a long time, giving them much greater influence in congress than the ones from swing districts who haveo spent all their time campaigning and usually don't last more than a few cycles.
That in turn leads to black voters being very loyal to the Democrats. Democrats typically get something like 90% of the black vote, compared to 40% of whites and 50-60% of other racial groups. It's actually really hard to find any other demographic that's nearly so loyal to one party. Black voters also have higher voter turnout than most other non-white racial groups. Going from this: https://edition.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results the only similar effect is if you group people by "do you self-identify as a liberal/conservative." Most demographic effects are waaaay smaller. And the Democrats really need that voting block. Playing with https://www.cookpolitical.com/swingometer/2024 shows how ugly the electoral map gets for them without it... changing their share of black voters down from 90% to just around 75% means they suddenly lose all the swing states they won in 2020, without changing anything else.
Or to put it another way: bringing in 10 extra black voters with one voting Republican gives the Democrats around +9 votes overall. Bringing in 10 extra Asian or Hispanic voters with 4 of them voting Republican gives the Democrats just +2 votes. So they'd need 5 times as many Asian or Hispanic voters to get the same effect they get from Black voters.
So, maybe it costs the Democrats a few congressional districts, but pays off for them overall in statewide elections. But then you also have to ask... why are Democrats doing so (relatively) badly among every other demographic? Probably a lot of reasons, but some of it might be that they're giving black voters too much control of the party. They take on positions like Reparations and Defund the Police which are popular with black voters, but unpopular with moderate voters. They choose Kamala Harris in large part just because they needed someone who was black enough to appease their base, not because she was a good candidate.
Overall it's hard to say. In a different world where they weren't required to have those majority-minority districts (mostly meaning black districts because of how the population maps play out), all of politics would be so different that we really can't say with any certainty. It's amazing how redrawing a few lines on the map, which aren't even state boundaries, can have such a drastic effect on everything.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
We had a guy arguing that, I remember ControlsFreak getting into a rather long fight with him over this. I believe the argument is something like "the number is fake anyway, so you don't need to see it".
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
They went full retard. Never go full retard.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
This is your regular reminder that gerrymandering is just a symptom. Your underlying problem is that your voting system sucks.
Now, on a theoretical level, all voting systems suck. But in practice, some do suck a lot harder than others.
The main appeal of first past the post (FPTP) is that you can tie every representative to one voting district. This used to matter a lot more than it matters today. In 1800, having a representative who would visit their district and talk with people was certainly useful. Today, nobody has to ride to DC to talk to their congresscritter any more, they can just use video calls (if they are interested). And for most stuff congress passes, regional considerations are not important. If congress declared war on Mexico, I suppose that Texas might feel different about that than Washington. But if they declare war on Afghanistan or pass Obamacare, the impact will be similar for every state. Most of the federal decisions where some areas are disproportionally impacted is probably federal funding spend on particular contractors located in a particular town. Senators trying to redirect the gravy train to their state seems a bad thing to me.
On the other hand, FPTP effectively means you have a two-party system. This is terrible for political discourse. Basically, you split the electorate in the middle, and everyone to the left -- from Marxists to centrists leaning slightly left -- votes for the D party while everyone to the right -- from right-leaning centrists to Klansmen -- is represented by the R party.
One lens to compare FPTP with proportional representation is through the lens of information content in a single vote. If you pick between two alternatives which are roughly 50-50, then the information content of a ballot is one bit. (Of course, if the outcome in your state is a foregone conclusion, there is a point to be made that your vote has a probability close to zero to change the election outcome.) By contrast, the Shannon entropy of a vote in the 2025 German federal election (if you voted for a party which ended up in the Bundestag) was 2.2 bits. Even if counting the 14% of votes for parties which stayed below the 5% threshold as devoid of information, this gives you 1.9 bit -- almost twice as much as in a US presidential election. In the US system, half of the relevant information -- which two candidates will appear on the ballot -- are decided in the primaries and party conventions.
I think that this is a big reason why US politics became so toxic when social media rose. Both in FPTP and PR, candidates and parties will attack other parties before the election. The difference is that in PR, parties can rarely hope for an absolute majority by themselves, they typically need a coalition. If you have called all the other candidates shitfaces, then it is unlikely that you will be part of a coalition.
With FPTP, once a controversial position is adopted by one party, the other party is bound to adopt the opposite position. If you like both abortion and gun rights, or are concerned about both climate change and immigration, you will just have to prioritize. (Even with a PR system, you are unlikely to find a party which will share all your priorities.
--
The fact that FPTP also allows you to rule with slightly over a quarter of the votes is just the cherry on the top.
I am wondering if any US state had thought to introduce multiple layers of gerrymandering. For example, in a presidential election, rather than awarding your electoral college votes to whom got most votes in your state, you could introduce a state-wide electoral-college-like abomination. Say each neighborhood will award their electors to whomever got the majority in that neighborhood, then the town's electors get awarded to whomever has the most neighborhood electors, then you repeat the same process for a few more layers. With each layer of winner takes all, you introduce another factor of 0.5 to the number of votes required to win.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1hr ago
When have people argued that customers don't want to see price in healthcare? Seems insane to me. I also have no clue why you wouldn't want to price things out up front. Does it benefit the medical industry?
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Yes, if the judge is high enough in the food chain. This is called case law.
For example, Roe v. Wade was case law made by the SCOTUS which made abortion legal in the US on a flimsy interpretation of the 14th amendment, and that stood for 50 years.
self_made_human
śāśvataṃ jīva athavā yudhyamāno mṛtyuṃ āpnuhi
1hr ago
Those are edge cases. Since Phoenix Point has rather granular time units, it is easy enough to make a soldier move a single tile to clear the line of fire, then shoot and scoot back to cover.
self_made_human
śāśvataṃ jīva athavā yudhyamāno mṛtyuṃ āpnuhi
2hr ago
You're welcome! Given how much I've played the franchise, since I was a wee bairn mucking around with the original Operation Flashpoint on my first pc, it would be weird if I didn't heartily endorse it. It's no Tarkov, the kinda game you have a love-hate relationship with but can't stop playing.
For many, it's an acquired taste. There are all kinds of official and fan-made game modes, from the comparatively frantic King of the Hill, which, if not Battlefield levels of intense, is still up there. Then there are full milsim servers, where you might spend half an hour of downtime before being cleared for a sortie, or a medevac crew waiting for a mass-cas event. People usually find their niche quickly, as a Zeus, I did a little bit of everything, even if the majority of the work was commanding the AI around and keeping players engaged.
The main frustration of players accustomed to more casual shooters (let alone Quake) is the downtime. Yet that downtime serves a very important purpose! It offers time for movement and maneuver, allows for wide flanks or ambushes. It makes death mean something, even if most servers won't have a one-life system. You are fighting the world's most dangerous game in PvP, and the pleasure of merking some poor fool arises includes the knowledge that he isn't going to immediately respawn in the building next door and be upon you in a few seconds.
But there is something enchanting with the picture you paint of the kind of fun you unlock when you can study infantry tactics manuals to get better at a game, or the way it forces teamwork in a way other games simply do not even try to.
I don't mean to oversell it, since the level of teamwork can vary considerably.
In organized operations, one can witness communication and coordination that rival professional military practice. Squads have defined roles, leadership structures are respected, and air assets are integrated with ground forces according to established procedure. It is a simulationist's dream. A lot of players are active duty or ex-military, and they love their day job so much they do it again when they're off.
On more casual servers, the dynamic is closer to a Battlefield match, but with a crucial difference. Players may initially operate as individuals, but the game's mechanics consistently pressure them towards cooperation. Almost everyone uses a microphone. A direct request for assistance or coordination is, in my experience, almost always met with a good-faith effort. An emergent cooperative equilibrium tends to form out of shared necessity.
Even when not playing with a clan, I always try to brighten days/induce PTSD by really getting it on in VC:
"I can't feel my legs" + realistic sobbing is a good one.
"Tell my mom I love her" I say, neglecting the fact I almost never actually call.
"Tell my wife that... I have another wife" always goes down well. Never fails to get a chuckle.
"I can see the light, are you an angel?" followed by kissing sounds when someone works on my dying corpse. Or "buddy, that's the sun" if someone pulls that line on me.
(My neighbors love me)
Anyway. Just a few years ago, I would have recommended another FPS that was, itself, well-placed between Battlefield and Arma. Squad, as the name suggests, is a team based milsim-lite, the spiritual successor to a Battlefield 2 mod. It is more rigid than Arma, but also more fast-paced. You play your class with a well-defined role, on a medium sized map. It has a higher skill floor and lower skill ceiling. You must work as a team to get anything done, but often because an individual is unable to do very much except shoot and move. You can't even drive a car without getting approval from your Squad Leader!
I can no longer recommend it very strongly. The developers, in an attempt to further incentivize teamwork by "slowing down" the gameplay, implemented changes to weapon handling that I found debilitating. The player's avatar now moves with the sluggishness of someone suffering from both advanced Parkinson's disease and severe asthma. The stated goal was to make gunfights more deliberate, but the result was a pervasive and frustrating clumsiness that felt less like tactical realism and more like a systemic handicap.
I no longer play it, but many still do. It might be worth checking out, you'll fit right in coming from Battlefield. I would still recommend Arma instead, but watch some gameplay videos to figure out what appeals to you.
RubixRaptor: Absolute chaos and tomfoolery.
Operator Drewski: More considered, tactical gameplay. My ideal.
Karmakut: My man, have you considered joining the Army?
Corvos
2hr ago
He converted at 31 or 33 years old.
Source: https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/the-most-reluctant-convert/
But I would say both serious atheism and serious faith were relatively rare for intellectuals at that time. The majority being cultural Christians, if you like.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
NYT Continues Medical Pricing Beat
They're starting to get closer.
It is well-known that the NYT will plan out long-term foci for sustained coverage, taking their own perspective, keeping it in their pages in a variety of ways. I've covered a few in recent months; this one is in the "Your Money" section.
The piece focuses on the author's experience with his wife's mastectomy for breast cancer plus reconstructive surgery and the role that prior authorization played in it. What's that?
prior authorization, where doctors must get approval from health insurance companies before performing big procedures or prescribing certain medications.
About half of Americans with insurance have needed their insurer’s blessing for services or treatments in the last two years, according to a poll from KFF, a health research group.
Why? The only reason they describe comes from their characterization of the insurance industry's response:
The insurance industry defends prior authorizations as a step to keep people safe — say, by preventing unnecessary procedures — and make sure they are getting cost-effective care.
I'd like to steelman the idea of prior authorization by rolling it into my own perspective that I've been trying to sustain over time.
The fundamental principle is that prices matter to patients. This statement simultaneously seems trivial and is also quite profound in context of the medical industry. There are doctors even here on The Motte who have sworn up and down that prices don't matter, but frankly, they're just wrong about this. This NYT piece reinforces this basic principle, though it does not state it quite so forthrightly.
That is, the story of the article is that, two days before the planned surgery, the author and his wife
found a letter in the mailbox from UnitedHealthcare stating that prior authorization for the operation was partially denied.
This was disconcerting to them, which is somewhat strange if one thinks that prices don't matter. It seemed to matter to them. He writes:
Our minds raced: If the denial stood, the cost could upend our financial lives and years of careful planning. Good luck to us, trying to sort this out on Sunday before we were supposed to show up at the hospital in the predawn hours on Monday. Should we even show up at all?
Contrary to what you might have heard doctors say, that prices don't matter because patients can't possibly make choices with price information, they actually can. Here are actual people, considering making the choice to skip a possibly life-saving surgery, because they have uncertainty concerning the price. I've pointed before to another, doctor-written op-ed in NYT that acknowledges this reality:
One of my first lessons as a new attending physician in a hospital serving a working-class community was in insurance. I saw my colleagues prescribing suboptimal drugs and thought they weren’t practicing evidence-based medicine. In reality, they were doing something better — practicing patient-based medicine. When people said they couldn’t afford a medication that their insurance didn’t cover, they would prescribe an alternative, even if it wasn’t the best available option.
As a young doctor, I struggled with this. Studies show this drug is the most effective treatment, I would say. Of course, the insurer will cover it. My more seasoned colleague gently chided me that if I practiced this way, then my patients wouldn’t fill their prescriptions at all. And he was right.
It also tells the story of an emergency room patient, in quite bad condition, that the author really felt should be admitted as an inpatient. The patient was concerned about the possible cost. No one could tell him anything. He chose to go home that evening.
Prices matter. Patients will make choices based on prices. Patients will make choices based on uncertainty about prices. This week's NYT piece drives this home with yet another example, this time concerning a surgical procedure.
They ultimately decided to go through with it, and it turns out that the author managed to talk to a billing specialist from the surgery provider while his wife was under the knife. What he learned:
Turns out MSK had known about the prior authorization problem about a week earlier, when UnitedHealthcare rendered its judgment. So the insurance company told MSK immediately — but not us.
The billing specialist told me that the partial denial was related to some minor procedure codes, not the most important ones. If big money trouble had been brewing, she said, someone would have told my wife not to come that day. Moreover, MSK would have eaten any out-of-pocket charges related to the prior authorization issue if it couldn’t get the insurance company to back off. After all, it had greenlit the surgery that day knowing that there was a lingering insurance issue.
Let's ignore the whackiness (and the veracity) of the claim that the provider would eat any uncovered charges for now. The article makes a fair amount of hash over the issue that they hadn't opted-in for electronic communications from their insurance company, so they only received a delayed snail mail, but the provider was notified earlier and didn't tell them either! Why not?
“MSK does not communicate secondary denials to patients because they are often resolved the day of or postsurgery,” said Robyn Walsh, MSK’s vice president of patient financial services, in an emailed statement. “MSK is committed to ensuring we are only communicating clinically necessary information to a patient prior to their procedure.”
They are just sooo addicted to price opacity; it's ridiculous. The author is not buying it:
This is a pretty clinical definition of clinical. Given that presurgery mental health is surely part of the institution’s concern, it could have sent out a note saying: “Hey, you’re about to get a scarygram. Don’t worry, we’ve got you. Here’s why.”
Prices matter. Prices matter. Prices matter. Get it through your thick skulls, providers and insurers. Just tell your patients. Tell them. They need to know. They're currently making decisions under uncertainty, and you can just tell them. The author closes with basically this exact plea:
As for the doctors, ask them a number of questions: Will there be a need for prior authorization for this procedure? How quickly are you requesting it, so there isn’t any last-minute scramble or fear? Will you or your institution call me immediately if the insurance company informs you of any trouble? If that’s not your normal practice, how about changing that? And if you won’t change your policy, will you please just do it for me? Who in your office should I call or email if I hear about a problem?
But for all of the opt-ins, app notifications and checklists, there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping all insurance companies from doing the simple and obvious thing right now: If there’s a problem, just alert everyone, always — as many ways as you can and as quickly as possible.
Just tell the patient what's going on. Just tell them the price. Do it before services are rendered.
Ok, with the basics out of the way, I should probably get around to that steelman of prior authorization that I promised. The fact of the matter is that there are going to be some drugs/procedures that insurance won't cover, at least under some circumstances. There's probably not a reasonable way out of this with a rule like, "Insurance must just cover literally anything all the time, no matter what." Obviously, there's going to be a spectrum, with some routine things being covered ~100% of the time, with others having significantly more variance. The useful idea behind prior authorization is that the provider and the insurance company should get together... get their shit together... and figure out what the price is going to be for the patient. And, frankly, that makes sense, especially for items that often have significant variance. It's hard to make hard and fast rules here, but my sense that many insurance companies have a list of items where there is significant variance and so they require prior authorization.
It is good for them to get their shit together. It would be even better for them to get their shit together more routinely and then to tell the patient what things are going to cost. It is a pox on both their houses that they haven't gotten their shit together. The old NYT op-ed was written by a doctor, so it's no surprise that they wanted to put all the blame on the insurance companies. This week's was written by just a guy, one of the journalists on staff, talking about his own experience, and he more rightfully pointed out that both providers and insurers are failing.
NYT is getting closer, but they're not quite there yet. They've given multiple examples of why giving patients prices matters, but they haven't quite figured out that they just need to beat that drum directly.
cae_jones
2hr ago
Wasn't it The Grey King that got the Newberry? I mean, it has conspicuous Newberry bait at one point.
FtttG
2hr ago
Jussay Smol-yay is back in the news this week, with the release of a new documentary The Truth About Jussie Smollett?, which purports to tell an alternative perspective on Smollett's claims to have been the victim of a racially motivated (and homophobic) hate crime on the streets of Chicago, for which he was indicted and convicted for filing a false police report. I think the question mark in the title tells you everything you need to know about the director's confidence in his narrative. Even film critics at progressive media outlets are giving it short shrift.
World of Warcraft is bound up in so many memories of my young childhood, friends I used to have, playing with my dad, my brother, returning to it feels like going back to a city long after everyone you knew there moved out or passed away. And Classic feels (or at least did at the start) like you’re surrounded by so many other people for whom the same is true, trying to get back something that time has taken from them, irreversibly.
Still a great game though.
In just a year since my last time with Fyodor Mikhailovich, I read Gambler last week.
As with Notes from Underground, it holds up amazingly well 150+ years later (give or take all the gentry out and about), with the outchitel MC being a likewise colorful fellow who is entirely ruled by, and unashamed of, his addiction to gambling and pathological simpery. It is morbidly funny to me that gacha games, the scourge of modern vidya, combine the worst of these exact two vices; I offhandedly wondered what Fyodor Mikhailovich would've made of such superstimuli, Alexey (who seemed a rather unsubtle author stand-in) sure seems like the ideal target audience.
Reading about it online after the fact, people seemed to be confused by the abrupt ending with a very rushed resolution of character arcs via a "where are they now" loredump from an in-universe character. I agree that the pacing is weird in places, but to me it seems partly deliberate - there is a certain point ~midway where the book's focus seems to overtly switch from Alexey's simping struggles and general drama around la baboulinka's inheritance to the titular gambling and its consequences for the human race, with all the errant nobility in Roulettenburg (is it still nominative determinism if it's this obvious?) and especially
With this in mind the abrupt ending reads less like a rushed job, and more like a narrative device - the book is explicitly presented as "notes" Alexey is writing during his misadventures in Roulettenburg, which he sometimes abandons for weeks at a time, and has to recount everything for the reader once he takes the pen back up; Mr. Astley (who provides the aforementioned loredump) gives the down-on-his-luck protagonist some money out of pity, but at this point has very little faith that he will use it for anything other than gambling; Alexey in turn is stirred enough by the memories and recollections Astley's words evoke to have a lucid break, feeling genuinely hopeful to try and restart his life, IIRC even mentioning he's excited to put things to paper again... and the book ends, right then and there. YMMV but I felt like the implied, unspoken final relapse was a pretty fitting conclusion.
Despite the themes, the book is surprisingly light reading and has plenty of funny moments - the cringe drama, petty fights and callous mask-off moments between assorted loosely-related people as they wait with bated breath for beloved babushka to finally croak and part with her inheritance show plenty of opportunities for morbid humor, the babushka herself is a riot, and watching the entire trainwreck in slow motion from Alexey's relatively detached POV is very entertaining.
Moving on to Impro sometime next year, as once shilled by Zvi. As an unfettered cringelord amateur actor back in high school who now heavily struggles with creative pursuits like writing, roleplaying and DMing, my expectations are high.
I have long ago dreamt up my ideal game, and started working on it about ten years ago. SInce then, I have learned a lot about making games and even more about how to not make them and I still have nothing playable to show for it. At least it gave me good practice for starting a career in software development.
Here's the pitch: First-Person Kenshi (*) in a low-tech high-existential-horror sci-fi setting.
- Sandbox game, no plot or story whatsoever. You have some freedom in character generation, and then you're just dropped in there.
- Low-fidelity simulated world. Everything that you see in the game is interactable, nothing is mechanically empty set-dressing. There would be economics and politics simulations running in the background for NPCs, but the only way to interact with those is through the NPCs themselves; not through menus.
- Realistic scale, speed and precision. The world is big, there's a lot of space, vehicles move fast, and when you see something impressively big, then it really is big.
- To pay the performance price for the two points above, the world is also largely empty. Many may dislike this, but it suits my aesthetic sensibilities.
- There should be basic survival mechanics - humans need food, temperature matters, injuries don't heal magically, inventory management needs to be done - but it's not meant to be a survival game. The player should be able to just hire a servant to handle all that.
- Optional automations for the player character. I don't want players to ever be forced to do reptitive, mindless actions - you should be able to just do some light scripting to have your avatar do those for you (or hire NPCs to do them).
- The player characters and NPCs to a lesser extent should have a sort of inner world, a collection of notions linked by associations that serves as a sort of semantic database.
- Most content is procedurally generated. This includes meshes. Consequently, graphics would be very low-fi.
- The world would be a large wasteland planet like everyone knows and loves from all kinds of fiction, with dramatic landscapes, ruins to explore and small civilizations scrabbling for survival on the surface. There would be a space layer with some orbital infrastructure and activities and microgravity gameplay. Technology would be constrained by the setting being a sparsely populated economic backwater, even if the game is set many millions of years in the future. The world is under constant threat by economic collapse, war, universal expansion, unfathomable AIs eating whole worlds, moral decay, and god switching off the universe because he's done with it, and the NPCs are aware of it - but all these threats loom at realistic time-scales, which is to say that it's in the far-off future for everyone. It's more background than game mechanic, thematic rather than interactive - how do people deal with the fact that for all their acitivity and thought, it will all come to nought in the end?
- It would be full of cool things I like to see. Spaceships, guns, swordfighting, hiking, stargazing (yes I thought of actual stargazing mechanics), intergenerational contributions to the commons in the face of inevitable annihilation, conversations about one's role in the universe, megastructures, things going fast, big wide open brilliantly blue and golden skies, synthetic aliens, geology, nation-building, and the player free to explore or reject all of it.
Obviously this is all a big technical ask, but over the years I have done little other than tinker up various technical solutions for these various challenges. Some work. Some don't - yet. What I haven't really gotten around to is tying all that together into an actual game, and of course in all my experimentation over the years each individual component ended up being incompatible with most others. It's been a journey, and it's entirely unclear whether I'll ever reach any kind of destination.
(*) A note on Kenshi (https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/): I had my concept largely worked out long before Kenshi ever became visible to the public, but it does hit a lot of the same bullet points. And then goes a completely different way. Still, it's the closest equivalent to what I want to do. I recommend Kenshi as a game that breaks with many conventions and really strikes out to do its own thing.
ulyssessword
3hr ago
It's worth beating the main ending, but I stopped shortly after that. Spending an hour hoping for good rolls so you can test a theory...then another hour running a second test on that same theory wasn't fun.
ulyssessword
3hr ago
I just checked, and I could clearly see 34 words on the screen at a time, with another 16 greyed out. The website isn't even compatible with Reader mode, so I can't view it as normal text either.
Sometimes I'm glad I'm not American.
I had Blue Prince strongly recommended to me, but it just looks a little expensive for a puzzle game.
Also, having been introduced to the game in a verbal conversation, I got its spelling completely wrong - "Is it 'blueprints' or 'blueprint'?" - and originally failed to find it in the store.
No_one
4hr ago
Road 96 is an adventure video game played from a first-person perspective. The game's campaign has the player assume the role of several teenage hitchhikers attempting to flee the authoritarian nation of Petria without being arrested or killed
It sounds incredibly naive. If emigration is actually illegal, the border involves things such as
- self-attacking dogs (they chill in their kennels until it's time to maul a border intruder who unwisely tripped an alarm releasing them)
- a 'fake' dummy border, to make the intruders think they've made it
- electric fences, silent tripwires, flare tripwires
- sometimes, patrols unloading at the intruders with machineguns
It does actually get so bad people would hijack aircraft to get out, or fly a hang glider over it, or if they're a pilot, steal their plane. Usually, though, people just left through a foreign country they could travel to but which did not have prison camp style border. In the real world, this was Yugoslavia.
I recently delved into LitRPG/Cultivation sphere, which I think is somwhat newish offhoot of scifi/fantasy genre and is at least adjacent to YA scene/audience. And to be frank, I start to think that female protagonists like in surprisingly interesting Azarinth Healer series may work better in that context. The male protagonists in many of these stories are some combination of weak whiners, being overshadowed and constantly scolded/humiliated by female side characters, having weird fetish/harem sidestories and more.
The pet theory of mine is that feminism is basically projection of male virtues/characteristics on females. Terrible girl-bossing is just projection of what feminists view as toxic masculinity on women: aggressive know-it-alls, emotionless or even cruel leaders etc. If the author can do modicum of work to reign down the thing at least a little bit, they can actually end up with decent formerly male character only in skirt. With female protagonist you will not see her being literally hit on head if she says something "dumb", scolded for being a creep, being told that she is an idiot, humiliated or womensplained for not knowing something or any other type of terrible writing now so prevalent with male heroes.
It reminds me of the story how the character of Ellen Ripley from Alien was originally written for male actor and how it surprisingly worked well for female - especially in a world where only women are allowed to have oldschool male traits/virtues.
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