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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25765 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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This is, to be blunt, a character flaw and not a good argument against difficulty settings. If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.

Not sure about that. Unbounded arrogance is a flaw, but people recognizing their own strong points is something that shouldn't vilify people if they find a way not to be obnoxious about it. I feel like these efforts are trying to enforce a Harrison Bergeron-esque experience for video games. If someone's a chess grandmaster, I expect him to feel some pride about it, otherwise it's just kind of sad.

I think there are at least two different mindsets here: one is the person who is competitive and wants to measure themselves against others. For them, having peers is important, because how else will they judge their own performance and ability save by striving against the best? Thus, including an easy mode is, for them, the equivalent of letting slobs who can barely waddle traverse ten steps of ground, then say they 'completed' and 'won' the same way as if they were running against Usain Bolt in the 100m.

The second mindset is doing it for fun, and not caring about anyone else's result. That view is okay, us slobs will waddle our ten steps over here, you get to race Usain over there, what's the big deal? I'm not stepping on your toes, you're not stepping on mine. I'm not competing with you, I'm not competing with anyone, I don't care if I rank first or ten thousandth on some leaderboard of game scores.

I'm not going to say either mindset is superior to the other, though as a waddling slob of course I'm more sympathetic to the second view.

I have still not seen a satisfactory answer to "so how do the slobs stop you from competing against your peers, anyway?". Right now, slobs can actually waddle ten meters and say they won. Why does that not "ruin" running for Usains but ezmodo ruins games?

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