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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • American corporations want an “easy” war. Like against a country like Iraq or Afghanistan. You know, someone that has no real capacity to fight back or strike foreign military targets (like a Lockheed martin manufacturing facility) and is more of a punching bag for the US military. A war with China would immediately spark World War 3 and trigger a global economic and military crisis. It is also extremely undesirable because China is a nuclear superpower and, uh…we tend not to get into shooting wars with those because they can potentially escalate into literal nuclear holocaust.




  • That’s fair. I’ll admit that I have a problem with getting overly mad at people for making stupid, accusatory comments that actively misrepresent what I say for their own benefit. I mean, they made a dumb comment and I can, and should, just ignore it. But I also have a difficult time letting things like that go and it’s something I should try to be better about.


  • I’m emotionally incapable of accepting that other people dislike things I enjoy and I perceive their criticism of those things as personal attacks. When they tell me that this is a personal problem that I have and that I should learn to accept that people are complicated and that enjoying something someone else does not is perfectly valid and shouldn’t impact my sense of self-worth, I piss and shit myself and tell them that they’re calling my baby ugly. Because that’s how I think of the mindless entertainment I consume: as the closest thing I’ll ever have to children.

    Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.


  • In terms of AAA video games, I can’t help you. I really like Becky Chambers novels, though. Lots of people talking about their feelings in a space opera setting. Big emphasis on character development. These are things I enjoy. The ball numbing action violence of your typical mass-media space opera stuff? Much less so.



  • I consider myself a pretty big science fiction fan. I’ve read a ton of science fiction novels, both old and new. I enjoy Star Trek. Love Star Wars. I like a lot of science-fiction themed video games, like Zone of the Enders, the original Bioshock, Borderlands, Prey (both the original and remake), Halo, Metroid, Half-Life, Fallout, etc.

    I utterly loathe Mass Effect. I consider it one of the worst pieces of science-fiction ever created. I consider the overly sleek aesthetic of everything, from the ships, to the weapons, to the armor hideous. I consider the characters underwritten. The political entity that runs the galaxy is an uninteresting and derivative bureaucracy. The conflict between the various member races and their respective histories are far more interesting than the looming conflicts of the giant undead space robots looking to destroy the galaxy. And as a game, the gameplay is repetitive and uninteresting. Many of the enemies eventually just become damage soaks. The weapons and abilities are generally forgettable. I don’t think I’ve ever had less mentally impactful combat in a game before (as a note, I consider this a general issue with third-person shooters). And the inventory management in the first game was painfully terrible. I remember getting to the end of the game and having to spend an hour to manage my fucking inventory right before the last fight because I literally ran out of space and at a certain point all the crap you’ve collected just becomes worthless and pointless to have.

    I played the first two games. I hated the first one when it came out and still hated it when I revisited it years later. I did like the incredibly janky Mass Mobile, as it was so poorly implemented that it was hilarious to watch it bounce off of random pieces of landscape like it was made of rubber. The second game I also really disliked because of the bifurcated Paragon and Renegade oppositional morality system that seemed really popular with that era of RPGs. And I didn’t even bother with the third. The games are just dull and frustrating, and I’ve never understood the love people have for them.









  • Gaming, like all software development, becomes plagued by popularized anti-patterns every so often. Remember back in like 2010 and every. single. fucking. game. had unskippable, frustratingly difficult, often instantly fatal should you fail them, quicktime events? Because I fucking remember. And now those are nowhere, because they’re terrible. And, yes, the use of AI is not a game design pattern so much as it is a development tool that will be used to fastforward development and decrease costs around, presumably, asset generation, but to some extent that was always going to happen. Any time a tool comes about that fundamentally reduces human labor, it always sees widespread adoption. Eventually it’ll be industry standard, and it’ll be…fine. It’ll suck for people with aspirations around graphic design and 3D modeling, but those are just the first places there will be cuts. Eventually you’ll have the physics engines, game systems, state management, etc. and other core components of game design automated via AI processes, which will kill a shitload of dev jobs. And eventually the people who make these AI game engines will, instead of selling to a studio who will parameterize the AI with prompts, will automate the prompting process with AI itself, so instead of selling to studios, they’ll just have an AI service that will take your description for a game that you want, run it through a bunch of canned AI subroutines and it’ll crap out a boutique game of your design that they technically own and have full copyright over and which is just incredibly derivative of a ton of other IP - imagine every single game being Palworld, “like X crossed with Y with a bit of A and B thrown in.” That’s right: eventually the end user will design the games themselves. A world in which you never have to consume any game, or probably eventually any media of any kind, beyond the one you already liked and wanted. You’ll never have to be challenged more than you would like or experiment with different forms of media. It’ll be a brave new world, filled with brave new games.