07mk
5d ago
Art is defined by being an act whose principal purpose is creative expression of the creator (this is why video games fail to be art; once they're put in the hands of the player, the creator has no control over the creative expression. A "Let's Play" of a video game might be considered "art," depending upon the intent of the uploader; the game itself never can be).
(Emphasis added)
The bolded part just isn't true, though. The creator of a video game has complete control over the creative expression when the game is being played, because the creative expression of the game creator isn't in the playing of the game, it's in the structure and rules of the game. In Mario, the creative expression of Nintendo isn't something like "Mario moving from left to right to hit the flag" or whatever, it's "when A is pressed on the button, the pixels and audio coming out of the TV adjust such that the player character appears to hop in the air, when the right button is pressed, they adjust such that the player character appears to walk to the right, accelerating to a run if the button is held down," and every other rule that makes up the game, along with the images, animations, sound effects that accompany those. Those are all within the control of the game creator and outside the control of the player if modding isn't considered (modding would be a whole other case, akin to someone cutting out pages of a published novel and taping in new pages that they wrote themselves).
The fact that each individual player would - and usually should - interact with the rules of game in their own individual unique way based on their own personal quirks and idiosyncratic preferences doesn't change the fact that the rules they're interacting with is under full control of - in fact, it's the only creative expression of - the creators of the game.
I think one can argue that almost every video game doesn't have creative expression of the creators as its principal purpose or even a particular purpose and, as such, they don't count as "art," for whatever it's worth. But I don't see how game creators have any less control over their creative expression than a movie director or painter, just because they're working in an interactive medium. The players interacting with the game all have to interact with the same set of rules and audiovisual representations of those rules, which were set by the creators of the game.
07mk
7d ago
All of the negative reviews I've seen are bitching about the performance, which hasn't been an issue for me or my circle of gaming friends, the only bitching about the gameplay or story I've seen has been generic 'oh its corpo shlock with cut content and sweet baby were involved' and that's a knee jerk reaction these days.
I plan on playing the game eventually, but my expectations and hopes have been tempered by the reviews I've been seeing, which all seem to criticize the same things. The performance is one of them, though that's been a mostly minor point; more serious issues are the stealth gameplay and the puzzles, both of which have been described as insultingly easy by almost every review I've watched. Particularly the stealth enemy AI has been said to make this year's Star Wars: Outlaws's enemy AI look smart in comparison. Bad stealth gameplay in an Indiana Jones game is perfectly forgivable, but then the puzzles are also said to be extremely easy, which would leave basically just the combat to carry the gameplay, which the reviews say are pretty bare-bones.
The tone and story have received basically universal praise, which is what draws me towards the game as a lifelong fan of the original film trilogy, but I was also hoping that it would have some decent puzzle-solving or exploration gameplay, like it was a modern incarnation of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the LucasArts point-and-click adventure game from the 90s.
07mk
7d ago
Thus, members of the group have collectively decided that they'll allow no words at all to describe their movement, so you have tons of individual definitions like were used to describe the left (progressive, woke, wokist, SJW, social justice leftist, etc etc).
A major difference specifically with the phrase "woke right" that makes this new term extra confusing is that "woke" was never a term used by any rightists to describe their rightist ideological positions. This is in contrast to terms like "progressive," "woke," "social justice warrior," and even "identity politics," which were terms brought into the mainstream by their strongest proponents who were proudly labeling themselves and their ideology as such.
07mk
12d ago
Trans topics haven't been mainstream for a long time, but they've certainly been a part of the progressive movement for a long time, at least decades. It's merely another instantiation of the concept of equal rights being expanded to cover minorities, following the success of the gay rights/gay marriage movements of a couple decades ago. Heck, the mere existence of trans topics as a mainstream political/ideological topic over the past decade or so is an example of swimming leftward.
07mk
12d ago
Well, if by “visceral response” you mean “heuristic.”
I don't. By "visceral response," I mean a sort of automatic, subconscious, emotional response. A heuristic is something else, which you outline below:
Hearing someone choose the word “females” usually says a lot about their worldview.
But... it doesn't. Referring to women as "females" is just accurate, mainstream, correct use of that word. Claiming that only people with a certain type of worldview tend to use this word that way, and as such, forms a meaningful heuristic with respect to how to react to such usage, is, again, something that appears as motivated reasoning. I've yet to encounter a shred of evidence that usage of the word that way has any correlation with the speaker's worldview, or evidence that anyone has even attempted to collect such evidence.
This is in contrast to terms like "male fantasy" or "male privilege," which are well-known terms from a certain specific well-known ideology or cluster of ideologies. It's certainly possible for people to use those phrases in a way that doesn't invoke those ideologies, but the very concept of characterizing individuals as having "privilege" based on their group identity with respect to sex is something that relates to those ideologies.
07mk
12d ago
Billionaires et. al. can afford private security, but there's been a recent movement attacking small business owners as the "petit bourgeois," who are less likely to be able to afford that kind of stuff. Those grievances are likely more local, though, and less likely to make the news. Local level "activism" doesn't generate attention, so maybe it's less of a concern. Idk.
I know nothing about this recent movement, but it reminds me of dekulakization in the USSR roughly a century ago, which led to some pretty bad results for almost everyone involved, so, at first blush, I hope this movement dies a quick death.
07mk
12d ago
First, this isn't how people often use the phrase on this site or others. When they speak of Cthulhu, they're often referring to things happening on the scale of decades or years, and sometimes even less.
This doesn't match my experience. This phrase is so niche that I don't often run into it, but my memory of it is that decades is roughly the minimum timescale involved, i.e. they're talking about decades or perhaps even centuries, not decades or years, and certainly not even less than years. Timescales of under a decade - or even a handful of decades - are so short that extreme, unsustainable things can win out - and often do, akin to a last-place team beating the first-place team in one of their dozen match-ups during an MLB season - such that people seem to believe that they shouldn't talk about them in such grand, sweeping outside-view terms, but rather with the actual inside-view specific factors.
07mk
14d ago
If you say "these people are all liars", then I'm going to call you out. "Lying" is saying things you believe to be false with the intention that others will believe them to be true. It is highly useful to have a word for that, and I think that's worth protecting against hyperbole like yours.
I don't think that's the singular definition of lying. Phrases like "lying to oneself" and "lying by omission" are quite common, and I don't think they're being ironic or hyperbolic. Often, lying to oneself is considered a lesser evil than knowingly saying false things with the conscious intent to make others believe them to be true, but I'd also argue that, often, the truth is so obvious and the false thing that someone believes when they "lie to themselves" is so blatantly self-serving that it's at least as much an evil.
07mk
17d ago
This appears as you typical minding to me. Honestly, the more I think about the deal, the more it appears to be, logically, the best deal in the history of deals, and someone who can make deals that are better than that one is someone who must be in an almost unimaginably privileged position.
07mk
18d ago
As context, Harris's campaign did a lot better than we expected, and than the democratic establishment expected.
Given that the measure of a campaign's performance is election results, is the contention here that the Democratic establishment expected Harris to lose the election by an even bigger margin than she had? I don't think that was the case.
07mk
18d ago
That's one of the justifications I've heard, but it just doesn't strike me as based on anything real. It's often used to refer to animals, but not in a way that distinguishes non-human animals from human ones, like how referring to someone as "it" might. It appears to me as motivated reasoning.
07mk
18d ago
That's an even more cynical attitude than I tend to take on, but I can't really argue against that. I suppose it's true that there's a sucker born every minute, and some people and parties are extremely good at taking advantage of it.
07mk
18d ago
That is exactly what you should do. If your polls show you are losing and you believe them, then one of your only chances is to convince your opponents supporters that actually they are losing in the hope they decide not to turn out on the day, and to convince some people that maybe he is actually really bad. That's why biased polls are useful. Because the polls can influence what people actually do, that is why there is so much argument about them.
This is a very commonly stated model, often even just implicitly taken for granted, but I've yet to encounter anyone who's actually produced evidence that elections and polls work this way, rather than the opposite, which also seems perfectly cromulent. I'd say it's political malpractice on the part of both Republicans and Democrats to push polls biased in their own favor under the assumption that they'll help their chances without actually doing the hard work to prove to some standard that they're actually helping themselves rather than hurting.
Personally, I'd also say that, given that Democrats are supposed to be better than the Republicans, I find the notion that we'd stoop to the level of lying through our teeth to the electorate in order to manipulate them into voting for our side to be less acceptable. If such dishonest manipulation is just accepted by the party, that calls into question every other claim that's been made about how we're meaningfully better than the other side.
07mk
18d ago
Your explanation of the phenomenon reminds me of a stage play or professional wrestling, where everyone knows everything is fake, but we're supposed to suspend our disbelief in order to have a good time. As a Democrat, I feel immense frustration at the kayfabe that the DNC apparently wants all of the electorate to play along with, for the sake of their careers and status and pride and all that, when politics is theoretically supposed to be about actual real life. An election loss like this has consequences; the people who failed to win should be expected to be held accountable for their failures and to honestly assess their failures so as to not repeat them, because their failures hurt many more people than themselves, and yet they're just insisting on play-acting on stage for the audience.
I think Dave Chappelle called Trump an "honest liar" for just telling the electorate that the whole system is fake, while playing along with the fakery. I wonder if there's room in the Democratic party for someone to take on a similar role.
I'm also reminded of the line "magician is the most honest profession there is; he tells you he's going to fool you, and then he fools you." Magic shows are fun, but a stage magician who insists that everyone truly believe that he has supernatural powers, and not as part of his act, is probably not going to gain too many fans other than cultists
07mk
18d ago
I wonder if this explains the bizarre reaction by some feminists to women being called "females," despite not having a problem with them being labeled as being "female." I've seen a number of weird, twisting explanations for why the former is "dehumanizing" or whatever, but all of them appeared as pure motivated reasoning, especially given that no man I've ever heard of has had any problem with being called "a male." Could very well be indeed pure motivated reasoning, meant to put a veneer of justification over what's, at heart, a pure visceral response.
07mk
20d ago
I'm guessing the fact that critical theory, in practice, explicitly rejects critical thinking as a form of oppression, is likely a happy little coincidence rather than anything done with conscious intent, but it's certainly been a funny thing to notice given how much critical theory, in practice, is about conveniently eliding between various definitions of words in different contexts to get people to reject or accept certain ideas (e.g. racism, sexism, white supremacy, feminism).
07mk
20d ago
Sorry, I didn't word my question properly. I meant, does anyone else here, after having been saturated with that song each and every December over the past few decades following its release, still unironically enjoy listening to it on the sextillion-and-first time it's played in their vicinity?
07mk
20d 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.
"Look like them" can cover a wide range of things. Yes, women often tend to play as women, much like men often want to play as men. But I've yet to see any good evidence or good reasoning that women would want to play as women who look like typical women, i.e. within the typical range of looks, as posited by the ideology in question, rather than women who look extremely attractive (whether they be cute or hot or sexy or whatever else). Same goes for men; if we presume that the video game industry of the past had properly marketed to men in terms of playable characters (posited by the ideology in question), then certainly men don't tend to want to play as men who look like them; they want to play as men who look like the top 0.1% of the population in terms of physique.
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.
Again, the confusing part isn't why you'd want to expand playable characters (and NPCs as well, really) to include all sorts of sexes or other demographics. That tends to be just good common sense and also empirically supported and only tangentially related to the "wokeness" being discussed here. I've written elsewhere that Genshin Impact has seemingly done a good job expanding the waifu gacha game market to include many women who would otherwise not be interested in such things, by filling it with women who would almost certainly be at least in the 95th percentile in looks in most places (this extends to NPCs and enemy characters as well, with multiple female enemy characters getting lots of fans purely on their hotness alone).
The confusing part is why attempt to expand the market to women by putting in ugly (or more charitably typical-looking) women, as dictated by this specific ideology.
It's almost Christmas again, which means every retail worker and most shoppers in general are dreading having to listen to Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You about a sextillion times over the next month. This dread has become such a cliche to the extent that Carey herself has pointed it out after Halloween at least the past couple of years on social media, warning people that it's time to be assaulted by that song again.
My question is, does anyone else still unironically like that song*? I'm not particularly one for Christmas, but listening to that song everywhere is one of the parts I look forward to in December, and when I used to run for exercise, that song used to be one of the mainstays on my exercise playlist year-round. I'm not well versed enough in music to meaningfully explain why I like it so much, but I find the extremely sugary-sweet wholesome lyrics along with the melody to be exceedingly pleasant in a way that few other songs are.
* Edit: I meant anyone else today, after having been forced to listen to it so many times each and every December over the past few decades.
07mk
20d ago
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.
The beginning of this paragraph seems true enough, but I don't think we'd need to focus necessarily on individual studio effects. The various things people are complaining about might not all be specifically "add a gay lame woman to it," but they all still fall within the same one ideology or tight cluster of ideologies. Why that specific cluster of ideologies and why follow that off a cliff are the questions at hand.
07mk
20d ago
Well, no. Part of the ideology is that the notion that women tend to be more into games like Candy Crush than games like Battlefield is a misogynist, conservative, right-wing idea dictated by The Patriarchy rather than a reflection of true preferences of women and, as such, doing stuff like putting ugly girlbosses into competitive FPSs or fighting games is how to attract women to your games rather than making games like Candy Crush or Stardew Valley or the Sims or the like.
I think the best version of this sort of argument is demonstrated by Genshin Impact, which IIRC has a fairly high proportion of female players for a 3rd person action gacha game, and which accomplished it through... putting tons of conventionally attractive, sexualized female characters with a diverse range of personalities from tough girlbosses to meek wallflowers. And also male characters sexualized in ways that tend to appeal to straight women, i.e. having attractive personalities that show things like competence, assertiveness, stoicism, confidence. Of course, these also contradict the ideology pretty directly.
07mk
20d ago
I'm far from a typical music listener - I'd guess I'm in the bottom 20% of the population in terms of enjoyment I get from music - so my perspective is probably heavily skewed, but I feel like the discovery or "lootbox" aspect is part of the appeal of streaming over building offline libraries. The vast majority of the music I listen to is instrumental video game soundtracks, and I do so primarily through YouTube music, where I choose some track I like and then let the algorithm go forward. This allows me to discover fan-made remixes/covers of such tracks, which are often far better than the original tracks (despite tending to have much worse production, which even my completely philistine-level ears can detect). And it's those tracks that I actually want to listen to during my commutes, not the original tracks themselves. Now, I could download these tracks and build my library of them, but the rate at which new official tracks come out from companies like Hoyomix (probably a couple times a month on average, but in clumps) and the fan-made remixes/covers that come out (much more often than that, due to each release causing multiple fans to release their own takes) combined with just how little I actually care about music means that the effort to do so each time just doesn't seem worth it compared to just puling on the YouTube Music slot machine lever.
07mk
20d ago
Furthermore, the CEO having given support to government discrimination against gay people signals to gay employees 'You Are Not Welcome Here', to homophobic employees that they are more likely to get away with mis-conduct aimed at gay people, and to managers dealing with said mis-conduct by sub-ordinates that a vigorous response to said mis-conduct might not be appreciated.
This seems like the kind of thing that one would actually need to prove with empirical evidence. As best as I can tell, there's no evidence that someone donating to a mainstream cause against gay marriage would lead to any such downstream effects in their professional conduct in their workplace, or that gay employees in general (versus gay employees of a certain ideological stripe) tend to interpret their boss's political views against gay marriage as being a signal about how welcome they are in the workplace.
07mk
20d ago
The bias to action is orthogonal to the question, though. There's no limit to the types of actions they could have taken in order to expand their audience, but for some reason, they chose to "put a chick in it and make her lame and gay" instead of one of the other options, such as, say, making the chick sexy and gay (a tactic that was likely more common a couple decades ago, though the expansion target was a different group than women).
The answer to that is pretty obviously their ideology, but then the question becomes, why this ideology in particular, and why follow the ideology off a cliff?
No, it's still false while taking the context of your statement and the entire comment thread here.
But this claim is, again, simply wrong. So what if the player interacts with the programming to create the "work?" The creative expression of the creator of the software is the boundaries that are set on how the player can interact with the programming. As long as the player isn't hacking the game, no matter what choices the player makes while playing the game, the player's choices are within the boundaries that are the creative expression of the game devs.
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