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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2320 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 13, 2024

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A friend and I were talking about the changing attitude about the way games are made, marketed and sold to consumers by corpos. A very interesting question was asked that I'd like to repost here:

When was the first time you saw something that made you realise "I am no longer the target audience" for something you used to love? This needn't apply to games, it can be anything you took part in and enjoyed doing but no longer do due to the thing being changed beyond your power.

I'm incredibly biased as someone who plays tennis recreationally, but nothing quite stirs up a feeling of disgust deep in my soul like pickleball.

I've tried out most of the major racquet sports and pickleball is the first time I've felt like a "sport" is Pareto inferior. Racquetball and squash require utilizing wall bounces, table tennis and badminton require quicker reflexes, table tennis also emphasizes more uses of spins, while badminton emphasizes drop shots and overheads.

Pickleball manages to simultaneously de-emphasize speed, strength, reflexes, power, spin, and touch. It's really quite impressive how it can blunt the importance of every aspect of athleticism and skill, all while producing one of the most annoying sounds known to humanity. This type of lowest common denominator slop is effective when you need to get together a group of people of disparate physical ability to play together, but it's largely antithetical my idea of "sport", both for playing and especially for viewing.

I've played all of the racquet sports you mentioned casually (including pickleball) except one, two of which competitively as well in a more formal capacity when I was younger.

I agree, as a sport pickleball is the worst of many worlds. It reminds me of the Robert California quote on the Black Eyed Peas: Pickleball is like tennis for people who don't like tennis, badminton for people who don't like badminton, racquetball for people who don't like racquetball. Yet, it has a relatively high floor and low ceiling, which is a feature and not a bug for people who like it for its Inclusivity and lack of athletic Ableism, especially to serve as a social event.

Pickleball is a recurring source of displeasure in online tennis spaces, including /r/tennis and /r/10s, sometimes with even a "total pickleball-player death when?" vibe. However, mainly for a different reason: the tennis players in such spaces feel there’s a concerted movement to non-consensually Replace them with pickleball players, a movement they’re largely powerless to stop.

They see their local tennis courts getting converted into pickleball courts, when tennis court availability can already be sparse depending on time and geography. Sometimes the tennis nets are removed and pickleball nets installed, the lines repainted from tennis to pickleball court. Sometimes pickleball nets are installed on each half of the tennis courts and the tennis lines are painted over with pickleball lines. Sometimes pickleball players just bring their own portable nets to takeover tennis courts. They report that pickleball players are more wont than tennis players to bring non-playing friends and family, so even when playing tennis on an adjacent court there are more hazards and obstacles in the forms of kids running around and bodies and chairs eating up space in the “out of bounds” regions between courts.

They also resent the unspoken and sometimes spoken message that pickleball is the future and they as tennis players should just bend the knee and yield their courts to pickleball players, for they are on the wrong side of history. Naturally, tennis Redditors refuse or neglect to Notice any parallels there may be between their predicament and other ongoings in the world.

I really liked playing Arkane games, especially Dishonored 1, but after Deathloop I completely lost interest. It got high reviews, and if you mention it on Reddit most people say they like it, but it lacks everything that made their other games interesting, and instead makes it a theme park. It's the ideal gaming journalist game. You go on a short ride for 9 hours, and you're done forever. You can look, but you can't actually do anything except sit in your chair and see your character do all the actually interesting things you could've done in the previous games. On top of that they butchered half the mechanics so they could add pvp multiplayer, which added absolutely nothing for me.

Redfall was even worse, so I didn't even try playing it. And now they're making a third person Blade game. Maybe I'll be good, I don't know.

I don't think it's all bad though. I doubt we'll ever see a similar game of that type from a AAA dev, but there's plenty of cool indie studios making like that look promising, especially something like Peripeteia.

A different kind of game but: I've written before about how there's a cycle of sports in America, where nice nebbish upper middle class white students develop a sport as recreational competition, it becomes professionalized and fills with different sorts of people with more natural athletic ability who pursue it more diligently than the original hobbyists for monetary opportunity, and the next generation of upper middle class white students develop a new sport as an outlet for their desire for masculine physical competition. Historically in the anglosphere this has hit boxing, all three varieties of football, basketball, marathon running. I've seen this cycle hit a bunch of hobby-sports I played around with just in my lifetime!

When I was a teen BJJ and Grappling were, to a certain extent, combat sports for those in the know. A lot of Joe Rogans base was built off the number of amazing people who hung out at Tenth Planet. And while they've held onto that hobbyist base, you see real dedicated athletes in MMA now in a way you generally didn't in 2004, and BJJ gyms in every small town strip center.

In college I took up CrossFit, it was kind of out of the mainstream and for dorks who got into sports late. Now every box I've dropped into is dominated by former college football players and wrestlers, I will never be at the top of the whiteboard for any workout if I joined. When I first tried CrossFit at 20 it was my first real exposure to weightlifting, I was one of the east coast's worst college rowers. Within a few months I could consistently compete for high spots on the WoD. Today I have vastly better lifts, but the competition has increased to the point where it doesn't even register, and because I don't specifically do CrossFit every day I don't have the specialized techniques mastered to even rx some competitive WoDs.

Rock climbing is somewhat resistant to professionalization in that sucking at rock climbing is still very fun, comparable to golf in that way. But as it's become more popular a similar process is ongoing. When I worked at a gym I was one of the better climbers, not great but there wasn't much I couldn't project in the gym even if I couldn't flash it. A kid joined who was dating a girl who'd been a member for a while, he'd been in the local MLS academy system but hadn't quite made it in professional soccer. He was better than me within six months of climbing for the very first time. With climbing hitting the Olympics, it won't be long until every gym is full of real athletes, and the days of the hippies and burnouts and goof around yuppies will be over.

Surely the current yuppie sport of choice is pickleball?

No, pickleball is for high school kids and senior citizens. It's a considerably less yuppie version of tennis, in that it's cheaper and involves less skill.

Tennis is like golf in that it tends middle class, primarily just because of the demographics of existing players and because almost everyone playing it got into it because of a parent.

Pickleball is definitely a yuppie sport, though, like it’s a banker meme, almost an in-joke.

Funny, in my area pickleball is largely a "tech-bro" meme. I didn't realize it had penetrated the finance scene as well.

Pickleball is currently transitioning from the joke stage to the hobbyists taking it seriously stage. It's no longer entirely funny for your coworker to tell you they're going to a pickleball tournament, but it's not entirely serious either.

  • Pitchfork music. Due to cosmic chance, I had an obsession with obscure music in preteen & teen years. Pitchfork collected and reviewed this music. Racial politics didn’t come up in the early days of indie music, and it definitely wasn’t central to music reviews. Pitchfork changed ownership in ~2011 and suddenly they were talking about race and politics in more of their reviews. Bands I liked were smeared for being white. Black music was reviewed considerably more. Pop music was taken seriously (disgusting). This is probably the number one thing that radicalized me. Indie rock music was, just generally speaking, a majority white culture created by majority white musicians, largely from middle to upper middle class families, and wholesome as far as youth music goes. Pitchfork started bashing the culture that created and valued indie music, while boosting pop and rap with a side of LGBT.

  • Reddit in its earlier years. There was actually a time where it had a diversity of political views and some interesting discussions. Obviously, not any more.

When my then-favorite YouTuber, Bisnap, switched his focus from recording normal videos to streaming gameplay live.

Funny to see Bisnap here. I also stopped watching him around the same time.

For me, it was probably Crusader Kings II.

This happened around halfway into the game's lifetime, with the Way of Life and Monks and Mystics expansions marking the transformation from a grounded feudal politics simulator into a wacky reddit screenshot generator, with a slew of event spam I had to download mods to turn off. This was further followed by expansions that expanded the map to include cultures and regions that weren't at all comparable to the european feudal system and in addition slowed the game down to a crawl.

I have barely looked at CKIII. Beyond the fact they've got to recreate and overhaul all of 2's features to make it worth my while, the game seems to be designed for people who loved horse popes and/or want to play Medieval Bridgerton. Everything else that bothered me about CK2 is still there: limited diplomacy, can't intervene between two vassals fighting especially when one of your vassals is directly related to you and countless other things.

This has happened in a few other games but CKII is where I saw it happening in real time.

Felt the same about CKII. CKIII toned down the wackiness a ton, at least at the start (I only played at release), no horse popes or magical satanists, but it seems like the current issue is, like most PDX games, it's extremely easy to become overpowered with even a modicum of game sense.

CKIII toned down the wackiness a ton

Not really, designing new cultures and religions is exactly the kind of cancer that overtook CK2. Now CK3 has imbalanced adventurers where you go around the map as a medieval Herakles instead of dying with 80% probability in the first year like any other small business.

Yeah, the reception to the Roads to Power release has been really funny to me. Sure, adventurers are absurdly overpowered shonen protagonists who can live to 130 while making more money from one contract than most kingdoms do in a year, but hey, they feel really nice to play. The RP! The truth is most CK players don’t want a realistic medieval political simulator, they want the aesthetic of one (in which they win). Compare to Legends of the Dead being canned for the update introducing plagues (losing your genius beautiful Herculean heir bc of RNG sucks, Henry I would agree). But tbh winning is fun, as is dressing up your 3D medieval not!Sims in fancy clothes, so I’m not complaining

My last trip to the Warped Tour. I got a last-second invite from a friend and whrn I got there, I realized I had never even heard of 90% of the bands, everyone was wearing black, and the music had changed from skate punk to screamo.

I was 21 years old and I have never felt older in my life.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Warped_Tour_lineups_by_year 2001 or 2002 looks particularly fun. Wonder if it will be brought back successfully next year.

When I saw Fortnite. I used to be a huge Counter Strike Source player when I was younger and then naturally moved away from the FPS genre (RTS's too) as I aged. I just really didn't see the appeal of Fortnite at all, but I realised it was me that had changed when I saw how popular it was on Twitch.

Also Star Trek Discovery after being a big Trekkie when I was younger (Deep Space 9 was peak Trek). This is probably the best example of a franchise where a small minority of creators decided that only people with their niche values are allowed to enjoy the show any more. Trek was always kind of progressive, but it really jumped the shark in recent years.

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