domain:cafeamericainmag.com?q=domain:cafeamericainmag.com
SteveKirk
9m ago
On the plus side, bugs actually get noticed and fixed now. We don't usually get deus ex style "hey we broke a bunch of maps, all the plasma weapons, and a bunch of character interactions, have fun dealing with that for the next 25 years"
SteveKirk
12m ago
There are a lot of weird errors and inexplicable decisions on Twitter, but I can't tell if it's gotten worse. The timeline spazzes out constantly, showing the same stuff over and over. The other day my account was limited, then suspended out of the blue, then reinstated without comment after I sent an email asking why.
Granted, the only part of that different from 2020 was actually getting unbanned, but still.
I would suspect that boxers and musicians of today lack something that old-time pugilists and rockstars had: chemical enhancement to aid that greater grind.
Games specifically take longer because they're often scoped bigger, are more complex, and the technology that builds them is more complex. In a few hours, one could crank out a barebones Mario-style platformer in 2D. Making that same game into a Metroidvania-style game would take an order of magnitude more time (let's say weeks). Make it 3D, and the time horizon for development extends to months at the minimum.
id Software managed the pace they did at Softdisk because their games were relatively simple, used simple graphics, weren't (yet) trying to push the limits of what was possible with computer games, and knew the hardware they were targeting (in the days before the Pentium and 3D accelerators). That Romero and Carmack were fairly skilled definitely helped, but in hindsight, you might not expect that looking at Rescue Rover or Dangerous Dave.
Games can be made in short timeframes like the old days, but you will notice the difference that lack of extra time makes. Go look at any game jam on Itch and play a few submissions, they're often very barebones, sometimes obviously crude, and typically quite short on content.
SteveKirk
14m ago
Does this place get indexed super fast by Google? The other day I searched for "Kamelanomicon" to see how many people had already made that joke, and we were the top result an hour after posting. Are their scrapers just that regular these days?
daguerrean
16m ago
Why does a shorter development cycle mean that game developers in the past were better? I mean yea, I'm not sure any modern game developers could come up with fast inverse square root but I don't really follow the inner workings of modern games so maybe they are doing equally shocking things and I just don't know about it?
I do think there is something to be said for raw numbers of fights. A similar thing happened in baseball where basically every record based on sheer volume has some unbreakable record from 1910 when pitchers pitched complete games every day. This is undoubtedly largely a result of player pay, if your pitcher has a 300 million dollar contract you are going to treat him like a priceless artifact and handle him incredibly gently, you're never really going to want to push him to the absolute breaking point. When contracts were at most a few hundred thousand a year, yea you can ride him like freaking Secretariat until his UCL turns to dust. So I think there is some truth to the idea that the most resilient players today are probably being held back from achieving their true potential out of fear of injury. Nolan Ryan definitively shows that some humans are capable of throwing at modern speeds for a vastly higher volume of games than pitchers today ever approach.
campfireSmoresEaten
24m ago
I really liked Beau is Afraid, which had a budget of 35 million. And I liked Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Top Gun: Maverick was solid. Joker was a good experience in the theater, although it may not be a work of pure genius.
One side of this political debate believes in consciousness-raising uber alles. They deliberately seek opportunities to shoehorn (and then brag about shoehorning) their values. They want people more aware that they do this sort of stuff.
It works. People become "hypersensitive" as a result. Some people appreciate it and go along, some won't. But they don't get to pretend it isn't a result of their actions.
Lizzardspawn
42m ago
What do you have against basic human decency?
Who gets to decide what basic human decency constitutes. Your basic human decency many be "enabling the delusions and fetishes of mentally ill people" for others.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
47m ago
I don’t think so. It’s just that after a certain saturation point of woke, you just get tired of picking up a game that you just want to turn off the world for a while and play in another universe. Except you don’t ge5 to escape because the designer insisted that he can’t keep away from real world politics for 10 minutes.
I feel the same way, I’m rewatching old sci-fi movies from the 1980s because honestly it’s absolutely refreshing to jus5 see a story that doesn’t have to preach at you.
Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of Christian Rock as a musical genre?
What do you have against basic human decency?
"Basic human decency" is an appeal to shared values. When the values are not shared, the term loses all meaning. Making an appeal to shared values when values are not shared is straightforward deception. Attempting to change the definition of "basic human decency" to point to some novel, bespoke value set you invented five minutes ago and which have no buy-in from even a significant plurality of the public is an extremely central example of dishonest rhetoric.
The history of the Culture War over the last several years has essentially been a case study in the long-term downsides of such a strategy. The strategy burns scarce trust that cannot be replaced, with woeful effects for the community in question long-term.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
55m ago
I think it’s unlikely that you’d find a triple A piece of media produced after 2012. Indy stuff can still be okay, but if you’re looking at big companies producing art, you aren’t going to find much worth the effort. I dunno, so much of it just feels like people ticked off boxes in a spreadsheet and had ChatGPT produce the script. It’s boring, predictable, politically correct, and generally lacks things like plot, characters, or charm. Indie stuff is better simply because you can still find stuff that genuinely creates characters and situations that you actually care about, plots that don’t feel like long setups for the cool action sequence to follow, or contrived “will they won’t they” love interests (who totally will).
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
58m ago
Unless he knew in advance there would be an advertiser boycott and wanted to save money in the long run.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
1hr ago
I actually agree with the fact about great videogames still being made today. Some of the very best video games ever came out not too long ago (of course mixed in with all the usual trash) even if you rule games out for having even a single morel of prog shit.
Even continually updated video games like Dota are hitting it out the park at the moment (the mechanics and content that is, not the bot and win trader addled playerbase) and I'd say have never been better. Dota is miles nicer to play from a mechanics point of view today than it was in 2012.
I attribute this to improving technology. Technologically books today are no different from books of the 1970s but the average PC today is many orders of magnitude more capable than the devices running Pong half a century ago. That on its own opens up huge amounts of design space in video games that was locked off back then. This is not true of either books, television or music though.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1hr ago
Hypersensitive, perhaps. Deliberate seeking, certainly not. I can assure you that the reaction (to the aforementioned video game features) is as spontaneous and vigorous as the left’s reaction to, say, confederate flags and statues.
I would argue that game devs are worse than ever, even the auteurs.
By way of comparison, I was listening to a podcast Dan Carlin did, talking to some boxing historian. And they mused over the fact that most athletes today are better than they ever were. I mean, just look at the records for any particular sport.
And then there is boxing. Boxers of old had a much higher pace of fights, as well as much more polished defensive capabilities because they didn't want to risk injury and losing their meal ticket. While a champion today might have 20 fights, a champion back in "the day" might have 200. Compare anyone who has competed in 200 events versus 20, and who is superior is usually obvious.
If you don't buy that argument, there is always the story of The Beetles, and how they played tens of thousands of hours of gigs before they emerged as The Beetles and went down in history.
Game devs these days might ship 2 games in 10 years. In the 90's it could be as much as 10 or 20. Look back at id software's pre-Wolfenstein days for Softdisk for instance. For a good chunk of the 80's and 90's, if you weren't on a yearly release schedule or higher, you were struggling. It wasn't until the late 90's that id software and Blizzard took on a "when it's done" attitude, but even that might be 2 or 3 years tops. Concord was supposedly in development for 10 years.
Unless the speaker just means Trump is a 'Russian asset' in the minimal sense that his existence is of value to Russia (rather than in the spycraft sense).
...What specific beliefs of the purported "Gribbles" are both widespread and remain preposterous when granted this level of charity? I do not think Flat Earth is a belief held by an appreciable percentage of Republican voters. Ditto for Qanon, which as a diffuse meme has the added benefit of being almost entirely undefinable. What specific Qanon claims are widespread among Republican voters, that we might compare to specific beliefs among Democratic voters?
The others seem a bit more like rash overclaims than complete fantasies to me though it really depends on how the speaker elaborates on what they mean when questioned.
This is a Russell Conjugation: I raise good points from a skeptical perspective, you rashly overclaim, he is a conspiracy crank.
Let's take something pretty spicy: One prominent point in the constellation of Qanon memes is that elites are abusing children and covering it up at scale. Or, alternatively, we could phrase it "Nancy Pelosi is raping and murdering children in a basement under Memories Pizza to harvest their adrenochrome". Now that more specific formulation I just made up; I have no idea if any specific person has ever used it in the wild, and my prior that it is true rounds to zero. But the former formulation is just straightforwardly true, as Diddy's prosecution is now demonstrating. It seems to me that the way you are using Qanon is meant to imply that the specific, explicitly ridiculous formulation is the central example of a Red Triber belief. It seems likely to me that to the extent that Qanon has ever been widespread, the most widespread versions of it have been the least specific and the most plausible, while the least widespread versions of it have been the most specific and least plausible. This should not be surprising, and is not unusually centered in Red Tribe even in the present.
Innocent black men are routinely killed by corrupt police in large numbers, and the murders are covered up.
With the inclusion of the word "routinely", this moves straightforwardly into the realm of conspiracy theory. Certainly there is at least one and perhaps as many as a dozen cases a year in a nation of ~350 million, but Blue Tribers routinely overestimate the number by two to four orders of magnitude, speaking as though this is how the vast majority of homicide against Black people is committed. It is not hard to find prominent Blues feeding the fantasy within the last few years. Nor is the conspiracy element extricable from the structure of this belief. The narrative is that cops routinely kill innocent black people and get away with it, despite obvious formal mechanisms to catch and punish such actions. Major changes in policy have been implemented nation-wide on the basis of this belief, both formal (body cams), semi-formal (the Defund the Police movement) and informal (biased rumor-mongering and disinformation, which remains endemic). The effects of this conspiracy theory have been devastating: nation-wide riots and a collapse in the effectiveness of policing, resulting in a serious violent crime wave and tens of thousands of additional deaths, most of them among Black people.
The Russians hacked the 2016 election
The central example of the claim I'm citing is that Russians hacked the voting machines and changed vote totals to ensure Trump would win. That is very clearly an example of a conspiracy theory. Then we have a motte and bailey where the motte is "Russia engaged in hacking relating the 2016 election" (true, and as you note irrelevent) > "Russia hacked the election, deciding the outcome" (not true and highly deceptive, but with a fig leaf of unfalsifiability) > "Russia hacked the voting machines and changed vote totals" (flatly false.)
Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist, and the Republican machine helped him cover it up.
Two of the three accusations against him were proven false and withdrawn. The third, original accusation was repeatedly proven false on specific questions of fact, only to be serially altered into unfalsifiability. The reality is that there is no credible evidence that Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist or an abuser of any kind, and there is no evidence that the Republicans ignored to secure his confirmation. The beliefs of a large portion of Blues shares no overlap with this reality. And again, conspiracy is implicit here; they're claiming that an obvious truth is being concealed by a definable hierarchy of people for nefarious ends.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
You think correctly and it is vanishingly rare. You're probably redifining "woke" to mean "basic liberal".
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
Well, like I said, depends what your threshold for bullshit is. I'm so fucking exhausted by it, I nope out the moment I see "Body Type" instead of male or female, or if a game lets you pick your pronouns. Is that petty? Perhaps.
It doesn't seem petty to me at least. I have much the same reaction. It's often not even because things are obnoxious in and of themselves, but because I know (given the current climate) that they are likely to be deliberate inclusions of politics. Like, 20 years ago I wouldn't have thought much about "body type A/B", but these days the odds are very high that someone made the game that way as a deliberate reflection of their culture war beliefs. And like you, I have very little patience for it because games (and other entertainment) are my escape from all the unpleasantness of the world. So when they push it back in my face, it's so much more annoying.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
Yeah but when people are railing against the patriarchy they aren't taking issue with patrilineal descent, they do assume nefarious motives.
They rely on the same blurred understanding of intent and agency as the q anon types, in that the more thoughtful among them will, when you really get into it with them, call it a prospiracy in the ssc sense of an aligned group having the same motives and therefore moving towards the same goal without the need to coordinate, but then go to back to using language that implies deliberate action when speaking generally.
You present the 'prospiracy' as the machinations of society and I agree, but the crank sees it as the reason their life didn't live up to their expectations. In my experience that is a better delineation between the crank and the conspiracy theorist than the status of their conspiracies.
KMC
1hr ago
I would suggest that the reason for this is that the total number of people designing video games is growing much faster than the same number producing TV and film*. If you had mentioned Stardew Valley and Dwarf Fortress, you'd have one- and two- man games, but Rimworld and Factorio are small groups heavily inspired by mods. The newest Factorio expansion came about because they hired a modder who did it for free. The dedicated auteur, working alone, is thriving in video games in a way that is not true for hardly anything else.
*The existence of the youtube professional is the comparable medium. These are episodes of TV, or sometimes movies, and they pay the bills. It isn't exactly high art, but this is where a similar sort of small enterprise is thriving.
campfireSmoresEaten
1hr ago
Huge exaggeration, in my opinion.
sun_the_second
1hr ago
No, I don't think you'll be convinced by any example of people I'd assume are "woke" advocating for what I consider "basic human decency", since you ask for such an example as if it's supposed to be vanishingly rare.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
1hr ago
"Our world-view is Basic Human Decency/Objectively Correct Reality; therefore, explicitly acknowledging it as true is un-remarkable, while disagreeing with it, or even not explicitly affirming it, is Shoving Your Politics In My Face."
sun_the_second
1hr ago
We're on the motte, if anyone of the two of us is enforcing consensus it's you and your plentiful ideological allies with the "party line" and "manipulative trick" dismissals.
The ad boycott doesn't seem like the service becoming worse, since the variety and types of ads that a user sees tends to have minimal impact on the user's experience. But even if it were, the ad boycott seems largely coincidental to the firing of ad sales employees, since, AFAIK, the ad boycott happened primarily for ideological reasons rather than due to the lack of resources or competence of the ad sales department on Twitter. The content moderation result seems like almost a strict improvement in service, though opinions obviously vary.
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