That's the new norm I guess. There's a small minority of people who spend their time and energy on being oppressed terrorising the majority with demands like this.
Seems legit. I'd usually prefer documentation to reflect best practices, and sarcastic or satirical stuff would only add some layer of uncertainty or misunderstanding (as per the maintainer's own commit message). While potentially fun or culturally valuable, I'd prefer such stuff would be external to official documentation.
After reading through the discussions I do have to agree such "fun" is not really contributing to the documentation and just leads to misunderstandings or confusion (such as this very instance). Just didn't really need a bunch of outrage to reach that conclusion IMO :P
And if anyone thought this was serious stuff to spend time figuring out if this is real or not, I suspect they have a bigger problem with their reading abilities
A little inline comment is not the same as an entire documentation page introducing a developer to a process/technique... I don't think the comments in the Apollo 11 code are going to confuse/mislead anyone, nor are they satirical. Quality documentation is factual, to the point, and has minimal chance to mislead or confuse the reader. I can think of multiple people I've worked with over the years who would be confused by the page that was removed, or think it's some weird offtopic political ideological stuff. Satire, due to its figurative nature, is also generally one of the most difficult forms of humour to understand for both autistic/aspergers people and people unfamiliar with the language. Putting "fun" content in your documentation is a balancing act and sometimes the expense (wasting the reader's time/energy or outright confusing them) outweighs the benefit.
No, and I really regret engaging with you people on this! comments like this are obviously inappropriate for technical documentation regardless of whether or not you agree with the message:
> It is a market of poor
souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget
the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief
free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or
services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing
on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with
tremendous existential angst)
Lighten up. Not everything needs to be stuffy and professional. This is an open source project, and if the author wants to include a funny and clearly sarcastic critique of society in the documentation, then that’s up to them. It’s not like this is offensive or NSFW or anything.
I had fun reading it, so your comment stating there is nothing fun at all is pretty self-centered.
Maybe it's good to be reminded, that not all is professional and unambiguous. Just like reality.
I like how the original complaint-maker mentions multiple times that "there are plenty of valid reasons to encrypt save files besides IAP" without giving examples of what those might be.
It's true though. Indeed, it's a useful indicator of the type of so-called leftist whose main concern is scolding others via identity politics, rather than someone with actual left-wing ideals of opposing economic injustice and exploitation (as was done satirically by that now-deleted documentation page). Just goes to show the complainer's priorities really.
Seems like the tweeter's issue is that mocking mobile games and in-app purchases is somehow indirectly joining in on sexism and other "tropes".[0] This seems like complete BS to me. The satire is of capitalism, it's a well-pointed jab at the gaming industry itself, at people who will be using the library for nefarious purposes. The mental gymnastics that turn this from a trenchant anti-capitalist satire into a "punching-down" at women and casual gamers is... breathtaking.
My armchair analysis is that this person has made their career in IAP's and mobile gaming, feels personally attacked by the (accurate, biting) critique, and has abused anti-oppressive language to protect their moral ego.
I used to briefly work in the IAP gaming world. There was a period of understanding the consequences of my work, and it eventually hit me that it just wasn't right. I know that right now someone's mother is lonely, bored, and compulsively dipping deeper into her savings than is wise to grind her way through content I created. I think I might dislike abusive IAP and have found this tragically funny because I love women.
> Seems like the tweeter's issue is that mocking mobile games and in-app purchases is somehow indirectly joining in on sexism and other "tropes".
Indeed, and it's yet another sad example of how the modern so-called left are more concerned with tropespotting, and manufacturing outrage over nothing, than anything of actual importance.
As a traditional leftist, it saddens me that our movement is being successfully hijacked by these fools.
No it isn't. Why does the person who is flaming this project over a _joke_ need to be taken seriously? Honestly. I really wish people stopped caring about the opinions of anyone on Twitter.
You see it wrong. They removed it because they fear being cancelled by headlines saying 'Godot maintainer refused to remove problematic documentation piece'.
The week after the Christchurch shooting? I can see how it's probably a sensitive issue right then.
But like I said, twitter =/= public opinion, just like terrified PR team =/= public opinion. I bet 90% of people wouldn't be offended by that symbol given zero context.
There were a few more stories, but can't find them at the moment. I remember that there was even a huge controversy on Twitter that someone from the British royal family did the OK sign. I think that was royal family, but not 100% sure, can't find any article about it at the moment
And you don't need public opinion to cancel someone. A dozen people complaining is often enough.
What happened to "Do not feed the trolls!" ? I had no idea about what you were talking about so i searched it. The new conotation of the OK finger symbol was invented and spread by 4chan. The den of internet trolls.
Have we (actually, you, because this -- meaning the redefining of OK -- is a US thing, maybe an American thing and I am far away from your continent) sunk so low as a society that we are now expected to be up to date with online trolling operations so that we can selfcensor to avoid being fired?
> we are now expected to be up to date with online trolling operations so that we can selfcensor to avoid being fired?
It appears that you have to basically follow the online outrage crowd to be up to date with what's considered offensive this week. It's not just online trolling. For example, Amy Coney Barrett was attacked for using words "sexual preference" and Merriam-Webster dictionary changed the definition of the word to be offensive in order to justify the attacks after the fact.
News outlets look for sensational news, it is enough for them. Not long before, NYT ruined some hard-earned reputation of jetbrains with their clickbait headline and suffered no repurcursions.
If they were not about to remove it of their own accord, but only after being provoked by a troll, they are indeed capitulating -- trying to pretend otherwise just ignores the problem instead of seeing it for what it is.
Because by not taking the person serious you now commit to making a public political stance. The Twitter user claims that this post contains sexism and elitism.
By keeping it up you must defend the fact that you are not being sexist or elitist by criticising encrypted save files. It’s easier to just cave in than put in that effort for a joke.
Regardless of whether or not you agree with the content of the message it is obviously inappropriate for documentation - it’s just irritating and unprofessional and needed to be removed. Little jokes are one thing, but few paragraphs of ranting really is too much for developer-facing documentation.
Some self-loathing unhinged person wanted to be in the spotlight and seek reaffirmation. They got it, and we as a species are one step farther from the light of God.
Call me old-fashioned, but I enjoy this rage against the machine. Nowadays the common engineer sees it as unprofessional, coarse.. but it's the old Zeitgeist of many a programmer before we learned the new trendy JS framework of the day and started talking about shares, compliance and dividends.
I think the problem is that the temperature in the room has changed.
I've seen people get bent out of shape because people put politics in music, yet Forever Young by Alphaville was written about the prospect of dying during the Cold War. Now, there's definitely a difference between Forever Young and some artist making overt statements, that nuance is not lost. The difference is that these aren't seen as humor, insightful thinking, or light-hearted attempts to nudge us in a direction anymore. Discourse has degraded to the extent that anything you mutter must be an absolute belief and there is some inclination that you ascribe to all ecosystems of belief around that idea as well.
If you previously used inflammatory speech (like this) for effect, you're now viewed as someone who has taken a side not only with ideas discussed here but any ideas which may be distantly related to that idea too.
For what it’s worth my objection isn’t the content or that there’s politics mingling in an open source project - it’s that the specific message was unbelievably asinine and so stupid as to cast doubt on the competence of the developers (for the same reason it isn’t assuring to read a manual for your television and discover a long rant about Flat Earth - it’s not a strictly fair metric for their technical competence but it’s a huge red flag about their general seriousness and reasoning ability).
Software projects shouldn’t loudly advertise that they are written by people with the political sophistication of a college student who smokes too much weed.
Seriously though, while I'd agree that the piece was written in a quite unsophisticated style, what exactly is "unbelievably asinine" about it?
The two main points seem, to me, to be:
1) Mobile games are designed to provide not much more than an addictive dopamine hit
2) Mobile devices in general enable people to fill time they'd otherwise be alone with their thoughts with mindless distractions, and many happily oblige
There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that appeal to intelligence (like say Factorio), the perceived most important trait in our society currently, are OK, whereas games that are addicting and appeal to other traits, like the ability to do the same thing over and over (any game with grinding), are morally wrong. Both types of appeal are manipulative in the same way, but one is cast as morally wrong because it doesn't appeal to what the elites in our society (such as you, dear HN reader) value.
The rant about mobile games and capitalism is simply a reflection of this bias which is a particular view of society, but is not the only one and certainly not one shared by everyone. If you don't share that view it just seems like the person who wrote it is naive and doesn't have appreciation for personalities and perspectives other than his own.
Which is fine, people are different, and engines are written by peculiar people, but if I were to write something similar in another direction people likely wouldn't take it as a joke. For instance:
>Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A clerical
oligarchy runs the world and forces us to trust the science in order to keep the
gears of this rotten society on track. As such, we're supposed to believe anything the clerics say,
and just like they tell us to wear masks, they tell us that the biggest and best model for game engines today
is ECS. It is a model of confused souls forced to architect their games in a particular way to escape the reality that they're just code monkeys gluing ugly code together instead of building a beautiful castle out of lego pieces like they want to believe. And this serves our ruling class, the clerics, as they infect and infest and ever larger portion of game development thought with their rotten ideology. Here at Godot HQ we have none of it, and just like we don't trust the science and we don't wear masks, we also don't use ECS.
Now is this an appropriate joke for an engine's documentation? It's not too far off from the original, just with changed content to suit the changed direction of the joke.
Never played this, but it seems to be designed just to be a fun game. From their pricing model, there doesn't seem to be any incentive for them to keep you addicted. Unlike some of the mobile games with microtransactions.
Being addicted to video games, any kind, is overall a bad thing.
Oh, I have no dog in this fight, but let me tell you Factorio is extremely addicting. As in, "I wonder where all those hours of my day went?". I had to stop playing because it was starting to get stressful.
You can’t just change the words and intent of a joke and use that to argue against the original joke. Of course whether a joke is funny depends on the audience’s point of view.. that’s comedy 101.
What the author was saying really isn’t very contentious if you stop and think about it. Mobile games are a time sink and are often used as a distraction from stressful thoughts. The same is true for other video games, but the author’s view on that isn’t mentioned.
If you think that every humorous statement has to be so clean and pure that nobody takes offense, the I hope you like dad jokes, because that’s about all that’d be left.
Of course I can do that, given that the contention is not whether the joke is funny or not but if it's appropriate for its environment. If you don't think my joke is appropriate for the documentation of an engine, then you also shouldn't think the previous joke is appropriate either.
And he's not arguing whether the joke is funny, he's saying the joke is relevant.
The content of your joke isn't as relevant (which also makes it less funny). You used an anti-science sentiment and threw in ECS to try to make it more suitable, but it isn't analogous with the original statement at all.
How exactly do you think a cynical take on something that occurs widely in the industry is equivalent to conspiracy theory level science denialism?
First of all, Godot actually doesn't use ECS despite the majority of people in the industry saying it's amazing and all that. There was an article about it the other day https://godotengine.org/article/why-isnt-godot-ecs-based-gam.... So the ECS thing isn't entirely made up.
>How exactly do you think a cynical take on something that occurs widely in the industry is equivalent to conspiracy theory level science denialism?
I believe that believing we live in a capitalist oligarchy that does all the things the text says it does is mistaken and wrong, just like you believe that what I said is conspiracy theory level science denialism. From my perspective what I said makes perfect sense and it's a perfect analogy, just like for you what the text said also explains what's actually happening in reality.
This divergence in views is political in nature, and just like from your perspective saying that mobile games are bad because of capitalism is relevant, for me saying that ECS is bad because of blind faith in science is relevant. Why is my perspective any less important than yours, other than for you not thinking it's relevant?
I'm aware Godot doesn't actually use ECS, it doesn't make your joke any more coherent though.
If you want to go down the route that everything is subjective, we're not going to be very productive here. The mention of "capitalist oligarchy" is hyperbole, of course, though I don't know how you want to argue that the world isn't mostly run by capitalist forces. Again, if this is something you want to question I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere.
The factoid in the piece is that a lot of mobile games are built with the intent of being addictive and getting people to spend a bunch of money on micro transactions. Is this another thing that doesn't fit in your view of reality?
Most importantly though, if they added your joke instead I still wouldn't rally to have them take it down. I'd just think it's awkward and embarrasing.
>though I don't know how you want to argue that the world isn't mostly run by capitalist forces. Again, if this is something you want to question I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere.
I believe that the world is primarily run by academia and journalists, and this is best described as a clerical oligarchy. In 1890 the US was definitely a capitalist/commercial oligarchy, in 2020 the US is definitely not one and is instead a clerical oligarchy where institutions with most power are intellectual ones rather than commercial ones. There are reasonable and well thought out arguments for this being the case https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution....
>The factoid in the piece is that a lot of mobile games are built with the intent of being addictive and getting people to spend a bunch of money on micro transactions. Is this another thing that doesn't fit in your view of reality?
I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.
>Most importantly though, if they added your joke instead I still wouldn't rally to have them take it down. I'd just think it's awkward and embarrasing.
Yes, that's exactly what I think of the original joke.
I'll skip right over the conversation about how the world is run. I read some of the article you sent (it's quite long), and let's just say that so far I'm not convinced.
> I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.
If your biggest issue with the statement is that it unfairly focuses on mobile game devs, feel free to extrapolate the sentiment to all game devs who do this, I think most people do this extrapolation.
I re-read the rest of your responses to this thread, seems like your only issue is with how appropriate a joke is in technical documentation.
I am interested, given your world view, to know why you think a tutorial on encrypting saved game states isn't also inappropriate? In fact, isn't the technical documentation inappropriate in its entirety? Why should I be told how to use the game engine? Just because these "elitist" developers built the engine, doesn't mean they can tell me how I should use it?
>If your biggest issue with the statement is that it unfairly focuses on mobile game devs, feel free to extrapolate the sentiment to all game devs who do this, I think most people do this extrapolation.
I'm a game developer. I don't believe that games are inherently immoral otherwise I wouldn't make them. If you're a game developer and you believe that using psychological techniques to make people play games is wrong then you should probably not be making games, otherwise you're consistently engaging in immoral behavior yourself.
The singling out of mobile games is just a reflection of the bias that game developers have to think some kinds of games are morally wrong because it offends their sensibilities.
> I don't believe that games are inherently immoral otherwise I wouldn't make them.
Neither do I, maybe you read my reply incorrectly. I said, feel free to extrapolate the criticism to all game devs who explicitly try to make the games addictive and hook people with micro-transactions. So your whole line of reasoning there kind of falls flat.
There's no criticism. Making a game addictive is making a game addictive. If you're doing it with micro-transactions or with RNG-gating it's the same thing.
You can't conflate games that try to create a fun experience, and engage people through feelings of discovery, fun, achievement, and games that use manipulative techniques to create frustration and exploit psychological feedback loops to extract a steady stream of money from people. Its just not the same thing at all. Like comparing a novel to a lottery ticket. Both are written on paper but the comparison stops here.
> I believe that the world is primarily run by academia and journalists
I think that world would look something like this:
We take immediate and severe measures to curb global warming, don't spend the last decade imposing austerity measures on the European populace, de-escalate the war on drugs, develop a deep understanding of the cultural intricacies of countries we consider invading, avoid publishing clickbait inflammatory anecdotes in our newspapers in consideration for the long term public interest, not the benefit of the shareholders, and drive policy by the nuanced understanding of scientific study, not emotion, intuition, or anecdote.
How does the contrast between the last 40 years of ruthless neoliberalism vs. the very leftist academia and democratic-liberal leaning MSM, fit in your belief that academia and the press are somehow running the show?
For me difference is that Factorio is not containing any way to spend money in game or spend to avoid grinding.
While typical mobile money has grinding solely to force you to pay.
Note: in Factorio my typical strategy is to use mod that makes me start with construction robots, to skip any kind of drudgery at start.
Modding API allowing it is deliberately open and explicitly created to allow this. In typical mobile game I would need to pay large amount of money for that.
Man, you are going all over this thread angry that someone put a clearly marked piece of satire regarding _games_ in a _game engine_.
Harm it does: zero
Levity it provides: some
This has been done in many projects since the beginning of the Web. You are clearly, how you say, "triggered" by someone making fun of mobile game addiction and monetization.
Does the sudden revelation that we all are people with own quirks really shock you that hard? You maybe believe that there is regular people and there is serious people, who work at the serious business, which is by itself serious af.
> Software projects shouldn’t loudly advertise that they are written by people with the political sophistication of a college student who smokes too much weed.
Open source software projects can have the spin and advertising they want, and it's up to you not to use them if you do not agree.
Discourse degraded or maybe it's the coordination of thought made possible from the consolidation of media and the internet, that's made it now possible to target those who seem to threaten the ruling class and their ways.
Or, more simply, political beliefs and values are real and the conflict between two specific ones is much more important than it used to be so people are taking it more seriously.
Isn't that ... that's the analysis anyone would have for another country or historical period with the exact same dynamic.
It's probably not actually "kids these days", only because it never has been so far.
> Or, more simply, political beliefs and values are real and the conflict between two specific ones is much more important than it used to be so people are taking it more seriously.
That American politics have become so bifurcated is the problem. We need more than two parties and we need runoff voting to reinforce their ability to survive. Then we can get out of this black and white / us vs them nonsense and see shades of grey.
There are people who don’t subscribe to either party and I don’t just mean independents. That’s a term that’s limited in use to describing anyone who’s not a member of the two “recognized” parties, rather than a defined party.
> Or, more simply, political beliefs and values are real and the conflict between two specific ones is much more important than it used to be so people are taking it more seriously.
Social media gives everyone a single place in which to express their opinions on matters large and small, whereas previously they might only have been able to share those opinions with friends. I don't think it's obvious to say people are more politically opinionated without considering how much having a place to express those opinions, find others in agreement and possibly even have that opinion affect the real world has had on how vocal people are about things they opinions they had anyway.
I think this is a phenomenon that happens through stereotypical radicalization.
The social bubble has become so close to exploding in our collective faces that everything has to be put in correct form, everybody has to be included, everything has to be perfect.
What happened to the meaning of "human" itself? Why are we not forgiving to humans that simply forgot?
I think the phenomenon of how social shitstorms explode these days is the exact opposite of an inclusive society.
Those that complain about things online usually are the ones that are not inclusive, and live their lives in despair and hate instead of love and compassion.
What we need to do is the opposite: Embrace discussion, embrace debate, and embrace to try to understand the opponents' views. People are quick to downvote, and people are quick to hate. But do you know what it takes to try to understand your imaginary villain? A real hero that offers compassion, not another villain that fuels the hate.
I believe that we as a society need to rethink our social values, because apparently, a major part of our society doesn't give a damn about other parts of our society.
And that's either a social or an educational issue with our moral baseline that we teach our children.
reading the comments here made me think it was going to be a self-serving and possibly offensive screed, but instead it was a mirthful critique of the human condition under captured capitalism, in the service of ‘justifying’ encrypted save files (where the summary answer is to prevent cheating).
> but it's the old Zeitgeist of many a programmer before we learned the new trendy JS framework of the day and started talking about shares, compliance and dividends.
With the money came power, and with power comes an expectation of responsibility. But VCs/execs/boards aren't interested in taking even an iota of material responsibility , and holding them to account is basically impossible, and so all the external anger at a largely unaccountable and unconcerned industry gets redirected at rank-and-file.
As someone born in the 90s, looking back at the "rage against the machine" culture in software seems very fake for an industry that went from academia to an extension of the financial services sector...
If you're ever interested in embarking upon an interesting cultural study of the 1990s, look at some of RATM's label mates on Epic Records. It was a strange decade...
They weren't the same people though. Even the academic types were the type of sandel wearing, long bearded hippies (not an insult BTW) that nixon raged against.
Followed by the tinkering kids and phreakers etc.
There was never a single overarching software culture.
It seems like a fallacy to go backward from "Things are this way in 2021, therefore it could never have been any other way in the 1980s-early 2000s".
Go to Barnes and Noble (or online) and pick up the magazine 2600, which still gives off a very amateur, hacking-positive pre-social-media vibe of the internet, telecom, and computing.
Also, the book "Steal This Computer Book" while outdated was a fun glance-through when I was younger, though it didn't talk philosophy.
You had things like the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace[1] and other essays and myriad discussions about the potential of the World Wide Web.
The Web was smaller, less corporate, and the nerds ran the show. It shouldn't be blamed on them/us that the net is "corporate".
I live with a simple principle: Does it make me think, does it make me feel something? then it's art.
Video games a re definitely art as a means to express a thought or a feeling. Let's not drown that in the flow of soulless triple A sport sims.
Stuff like this should have been encrypted or just base64 encoded and turned into a certificate then used to sign or encrypt something trivial. Bonus points for using XOR and caesar cypher. Easter eggs should be a challenge to find.
Seems a shame. It may have been satirical when written but perhaps not so much now.
Er, I'm not sure whether me pasting it in after they deleted it would be considered mean, but I think this is the gist:
> In isolation that’s just meh. In a context where mobile players got trashed all the bloody time for being fake gamers, casuals, mindless whales, or worst of all, women? In a context of tech people often being elitist “core” gamers? Woops, you’re punching down.
Ah, yes, I strongly disagree to this. An activity being primarily performed by a disadvantaged group does not mean that activity is immune to criticism (see also: fur coats, fgm)
This is, in my mind, a great tragedy of the modern age. We just force people to be in their lanes, and the burden to escape is even harder. It's sad.
The crazy thing is that it only hurts people that don't have humor. For instance, the moment someone is without humor, they get cut out from the fun people.
The Germans have had an entry in a clinical dictionary, the Pschyrembel, for decades about a fictitious animal, the stone louse.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_louse
Therefore, I cannot understand what the problem is with satire in the documentation of a game engine.
On the contrary, it reminds you that you should think about what you read from time to time.
The problem occurs when someone finds it, and make a big deal out of it, totally ignoring the humorous / satirical aspect, by naiveté or otherwise. Maybe someone would merely find it offensive and sexist [1].
If you are a maintainer of a project, you don't want a Twitter outrage storm about it. It may put the project and the maintainer(s) personally in a bad position (completely undeservedly), and turn some of the project's contributors and / or sponsors away.
Because the Internet Outrage Machine is still fully functioning, any technical project has to gravitate to a clinically sterile state to stay safe.
The only people making a big deal out of it seem to be Hacker News, cranking out its typical pearl-clutching and concern trolling and faux outrage over something so insignificant and lacking in intellectual value that it shouldn't even be worth posting here.
If the Internet Outrage Machine was given real power, like legal power to enforce 'their' vision of 'acceptable' would the world be a better place? Why or why not?
Would such a situation create a true mono-culture? If so, would this be a good thing? Why or why not?
White, heterosexual, cis-gendered, neurotypical men doing white-collar jobs. Break out of this pattern, and someone will find something to hang you by.
«Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.»
Or, as somebody said, it's always a temptation to use the devil's enviable energy to pull your cart; the problem is that he knows only one destination.
The problem is the lack of precedent or due process, which creates a chilling effect. You can fairly easily have a happy life under an actual codified set of rules about how to behave - even an oppressive one. When people's lives are destroyed on a seemingly arbitrary whim, when someone who was targeted by accident has no recourse, that's a sword of Damocles hanging over everyone's head.
I'm intrigued. What's the title of the book are you talking about? Is it the Australian Medicines Handbook [0]? The MIMS Annual [1]? Or something else?
It's poking at a particularly exploititive aspect of game design, which is more prevelant in a certain segment of the game industry. It seems aimed squarely at the developers who aim to exploit their customers, not the customers themselves (the snide comments about those gamers are clearly intended to show what the author thinks these developers think of them, not what the author thinks).
I don't think it is. I think it's teasing the companies that try to exploit these gamers and how the author believes those companies view these gamers as something to be exploited.
No way, I was reading this page just a few days ago. I personally enjoyed seeing just a little splash of the writer's personality. Sad to see it go already.
I have found that if I can hack a game and cheat such that it is still fun afterwards, then the game is good. I stop cheating and enjoy it fully.
Take factorio, you can do sooo much stuff to cheat. However, the core mechanics still work and it's fun. Granted, not as epic, but still fun. Any of the free to play stuff, not fun.
There are places on the internet where "fun" isn't appropriate. The internet isn't all 4chan, and we're not all edgelord teenagers. I don't mind humor (indeed, I mind it far more than Hacker News normally allows,) but I still don't read software documentation for the comedy.
I also wouldn't want to read "fun" like this on my bank's website.
It's not a website about making video games, it's documentation for software.
If it were a website about making video games, say, a blog, that would be fine. But a piss-taking rant about the evils of mobile gaming - however correct it might be - isn't appropriate for documenting how to encrypt games.
Edit, since I'm bleeding karma tonight anyway: imagine being downvoted so hard for suggesting humor isn't appropriate somewhere on a forum where humor is never considered appropriate anywhere. I swear for a community that pretends to be hard-boiled, thick-skinned and world weary some of you lot are the biggest, most easily triggered snowflakes I've ever encountered.
> on a forum where humor is never considered appropriate anywhere
Not quite true. There's just a pretty high threshold for what's relevant humour.
(The threshold is not even that high in absolute terms to be honest. Here's a +5 comment spotting a funny typo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26297542 It's mostly repetitive jokes that don't make it)
I don't think it's controversial to say that in a public arena (for example, an office) you have to be careful with subjects like politics and religion, and with humour. And that's always been true.
And social media extends that public arena, and magnifies misunderstanding. It's interpersonal discourse with something like 90% of a person's actual ability to communicate stripped out.
So I think people have to be careful (not in thought police way). If you have something tossed out into the public arena, it doesn't at all mean it can't be humorous or touch subjects that are going to trigger arguments, but for something like technical documentation it is reasonable to just make sure it's neutral. I'd love if most documentation was well written, skilful prose that exposed the authors own opinions but I'm also aware that's not appropriate for most people.
If you are addressing a public audience, often need to meter what is said. I think this is all beyond ridiculous, that the person used Twitter to make what looks like a completely baseless arument and accusations, worded in such a way that sounded authoritative and designed to encourage a pile-on, but whatever, careful when talking about politics at work
Other commenters have focussing on "woke" and "SJWs" etc., and I think that's a chimera, particularly because it goes the other way just as much*. Maybe it's just the birthing spasms of people learning to deal with this form of communication. Here's a person on Twitter who has [deliberately?] misunderstood the intent of another person's writing, then written a screed about some issues that upset them even though those issues weren't present in the text. And it's all very susceptible to manipulation by people with specific agendas -- the tendency is to broadcast rather than communicate (I'm doing that at the minute, I'm writing this down as ideas occur to me, and I've kinda ceased responding to your comment), and two things get confused.
* as a current example, see "cancel culture" in UK universities and the education secretary's (and by extension the government's) response to something that is almost completely fictional. That's heavily social media driven, by people shouting about it.
This is a professional open source game engine freely available to all thanks to a few dev that accept being totally underpaid when they could get the highest salaries of the industry at big companies.
I think we owe at least them the right to express themselves in a small paragraph. Anyone offended by that, is free to go back abusing their users addiction in another game engine that better fit their "view" of the world.
Open source has a societal/education/ethical role to play. Mozilla is not only making Firefox but also writing about privacy ethics. So It could totally make sense for Godot to do the same about game ethics
What I believe has happened here is that the well-pointed satire actually offended some people who have made their career doing what the satire criticizes. Thus they have mobilized all sorts of specious attacks to take it down - arguing that it is somehow contributing to sexism or elitism [0], and arguing it makes the documentation more confusing ("oh won't someone please think of the new developers!").
Ugh. I wonder if Twitter was started from scratch today, they'd be thinking "We need a platform for all the scolds and sanctimonious people out there who have nothing better to do but correct people's thoughts.". Probably, because there's a lot of them out there.
oppression is real and social justice advocation is so important. that's why it's that much more infuriating when I see people like this who only are interested in social justice when it serves their own personal interests and/or vanity. they do so much harm to the image of the struggle for justice
It would be helpful if people within those movements would actually push back on these kinds of overblown displays of victimhood. It would lend the movement more credibility when it tackles real issues.
Unfortunately, it seems to me the structure of the movement itself makes many people too timid to actually push back against toxic behavior like this.
> the well-pointed satire actually offended some people who have made their career doing what the satire criticizes.
This person is referring to the #gamergate controversy from like 6-7 years ago, I understand that much.
But how does a progressive, left-leaning person go from that to being offended by a satire about capitalism? I have no clue. It's like becoming a caricature of yourself.
it literally made me enraged to see someone twist feminist ideas to make an asinine point defending the status quo. I'm not sure what the answer to your question is, but I think it's something like - the person may only be left-leaning insofar as it affects their own rights, being a person from marginalized groups, but is not left-leaning to the point of opposing other forms of exploitation even when they are part of their own paycheck
Maybe they shouldn’t. This is such an annoying comment. GP wasn’t uncalm. By saying such a flippant statement, it seems to me that you’re denegrating GP and saying that his ideas aren’t worth talking about.
As if being calm is some ideal to always maintain anyway.
Slighlty OT for this forum, but the "left" isn't monolithic either. Especially on twitter, there's a lot of left-leaning people who despise the "dirtbag left" that user refers to.
You write “their” as if one specific ideology was a problem. Watch “conservatives” tie themselves into knots to support a most certainly un-conservative demagogue. It’s just as bad as “leftists” who have forgotten about freedom. Radicalisation is a problem, and it is generalised.
I think at this point we can conclude that humor of any form no matter how tame it is, is not accepted on the internet. At least not under your real name.
It just takes one person to write a rant and then its all over. Thousands of examples but a similar one was VSCode having to remove the santa hat from an icon on Christmas because someone claimed it was extremely offensive. I know I'm starting to sound like an American conspiracy theorist about the war on christmas, but the reality is that you just can't show any kind of personality, humor, or fun on the internet without putting yourself at risk.
The most innocent humour I can think of is a goofy self deprecating slip up or remark. I could see those going out of style because they could be seen as portraying somebody or some group the wrong way, of harming people who suffered bad negative effects from such a slip up like a concussion, or even of fundamentally making fun of disabilities (or any group that “acts funny”).
I guess puns might be immune. We still have puns. Unless some alt right jerk uses them as a way to make fun of Japanese people (there is a stereotype from a while back), then we lose puns too
> I guess puns might be immune. We still have puns.
Except when someone deems the subject too serious (“how dare you make jokes about that”). So no, we don’t still have puns.
What I’d like to know is why the American culture in particular seems so hostile to any form of humour. This isn’t something I have seen in other Western European countries to this extent (though it is spreading in thanks to the Internet).
I like making jokes at myself, but people have complained how even that might scare new joiners (eg. they don't know that when you say "what fool did this code change" that it was you, so they might be scared that this is how we generally talk about others' changes).
Some of those are somewhat valid points, but the trick is to find people who don't mind the humour, and then spend the most time with them :)
Unless it’s frogs... I think. I genuinely have started to lose track of which offensive memes are sufficiently unique that they still hold power when referring to them by minimalistic descriptions.
Why not simply allow that person to be offended? Why care? Is it necessary to capitulate to every complainer that shows up and claims your culture is offending them? Just let them complain about the santa hat. Hopefully as far away as possible.
Hope your employer has a strong free-speech culture (how does that even work in the post-Trump era where the term "free speech" is becoming squicky to associate with, I wonder?) or you're self-employed with clients that don't mind SJW outrage.
Because one SJW attacts ten more, and those attract a hundred more, then the media joins in, and then people start sending you and your colleagues threatening messages, doxxing you, and otherwise messing with your work and your community. And then instead of writing free software to do good for the world, you spend your time defending yourself from the trash of the world.
So the pragmatic strategy is to surrender early, when the cost of surrender is still small (just your own shame of yielding to evil people).
Or you could just never defend yourself. The people who don't like it will stop using your software. If the criticism was actually reasonable, and you chose to ignore it, maybe that'll backfire on you. If it was unreasonable, it'll blow over; you're not engaging with it, so there's no story.
That works if you're a CEO of a company and don't have shareholders to respond to, or your shareholders also think alike.
If you're a lowly employee with a family, doing some open source or blogging or whatnot on the side, and that side activity attracts the wrath of professional victims? You're suddenly in risk of significantly derailing your life (and that of your family!), possibly damaging it permanently. So you capitulate, just to survive.
This is why you be pseudonymous. If you're a bigot, it doesn't really help you (people will still stop using your stuff, and your pseudonym will gain a bad reputation), but it protects you from short-term reputation hits due to misunderstandings (like this one).
Sure, if you ignore them, and if you're not a big juicy target, the twisted zealots will eventually leave you alone. But who knows how much rot and corruption they will spread before they lose interest? And even if you can handle getting hate mail, or having your name plastered all around the internet with a cross-hair on it, what if it happens to your family, your collaborators, your employees, your employer, your customers?
You're acting like they're evil. They're not hunting for “big juicy targets”; they're trying to solve societal problems, and are working off the model that there are a lot of charismatic abusers out there, so people defending their actions should be treated with incredible suspicion. (In general, that's a bad attitude to have… but the harm of believing an abuser can be pretty high, so I'm not even saying they're wrong to take that stance by default, given how often they need it.)
If you're not charismatic – you don't try to defend yourself – they'll run through their investigation and find something or find nothing, and then give a fairly fair verdict (or as fair as anything on Twitter ever is).
In this case, the author could've engaged, probably, and said something like:
> This was actually meant to be sarcastic; you're meant to notice how unreasonable it is, and disagree with the narrator, but the narrator doesn't represent my views, which are [XYZ]. Your advice would be good, if I actually agreed with what I'd written, but the point is that it's outlandish and bad, because I'm calling out attitudes in the game industry.
> The feature I'm documenting there is usually used for bad. Your suggestions would be good ones, if I actually believed in that bad, but I don't. Do you have any ideas for how to make it more obviously sarcastic?
I think the author probably missed the boat on this, though; the Twitter mob grows quickly.
Lets remind ourselves that the original post in question is simply calling out in app purchases as evil corporate tools for extracting money.
The person who tried to warp this in to a social issue because they didn't like that they were being called out for using IAPs (being an abuser themselves really), is evil. This person is a harm to society.
Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track.
Not a full hit of on-topic, but I appreciate that you quote from the satirical piece in question (and I imagine you got down-voted by people who didn't read the OP, or who had this fly over their head).
And then the word gets back to your employer, or your potential future employers. Suddenly you find yourself on thin ice for an indeterminate period of time.
No, thanks. I'd just rather my online persona is squeaky-clean under my real name, and anything controversial (oh, I don't know, like holding even one opinion that's got a potential to become controversial a year or two down the line) is under a pseudonym.
>Why not simply allow that person to be offended? Why care?
From a business standpoint: They've shown they're willing to make a scene, while simultaneously making it just controversial enough that you can justify pulling it down (and therefore averting the issue) without major loss of face.
In other words, nobody's primary business is controversial documentation.
I watched a YouTube video by somebody who was the target of these attacks and he admitted that he started waking up feeling so numb from stress that he couldn’t move and once soiled his bed because he couldn’t get up. The level of stress and how his business relationships and family members were targeted was unbelievable. You can’t just ignore how offended they get
Putting the content of the joke aside, humor itself seems to get some kind of strange negative reaction from a subset of people. Even this forum seems to have "sarcasm police" who will attack any joke that isn't properly tagged and licensed. Makes me wonder which comes first, anger at the humor or the subject.
> but the reality is that you just can't show any kind of personality, humor, or fun on the internet without putting yourself at risk.
Completely untrue. Lefty "SJW" Twitter is full of humour and personality. Shitposting takes precedence over serious discussion, massively, to the point where more centrist or right-wing twitter circles seem completely dry in comparison. If your humour and personality aren't accepted, that's on you.
May you please upload a screenshot of the tweet? I can’t see the tweet as I don’t have an account. It appears as though the user has blocked all non-Twitter users from viewing their posts.
It’s impressive how similar these “let’s unpack this sweeite” people write on Twitter. Such an abhorrent monoculture of PMC who unsuccessfully try to fill their empty lives with meaning by doing weird social crusades.
> In a context where mobile players got trashed all the bloody time for being ..., or worst of all, women?
Is that even a thing? Never ever have I heard "mobile players = women" even on the worst dumps of the internet, like 9gag. But then again, I'm not on Twitter.
Whether it's a thing or not, I don't think it's fair to put all that on the author of the comment.
The author was making some pretty clear points about how capitalism produces meaningless addictive games. Accusing author of sexism seems like a non-sequitur to me, especially as the whole comment is completely free of any gendered pronouns, e.g. "These individuals".
I've not seen a direct connection between the two (at least in terms of denigrating). It's true that there is gatekeeping of 'gaming' that tends to look down on mobile gamers (in the sense that mobile games aren't 'real games' by some arbitrary and stupid metric), and the same is also true of women gamers (though more in the sense that there's many accusations of women gamers faking interest in gaming for attention or are somehow less invested in it than 'real gamers', again by some arbitrary metric). It's also true that women make up a much larger proportion of mobile gamers than gamers on other platforms. I'm sure there are some who will (through the lenses of the other biases I've mentioned) view this as evidence that women are 'fake gamers'. I'm not too familiar with whether this is actually a common trope or not, though (I'm not in a position to receive this flack nor do I hang out in places likely to give it out).
(Either way I think the argument that this means the article is intrinsicly sexist is definitely reaching. It seems the accusation of gatekeeping is more valid, though I think this requires a pretty uncharitable interpretation of something which is clearly aiming elsewhere)
> Hyper focusing on the words being used, diminishes time spent on the transaction of mind.
On the other hand, this is the whole point of writing poetry. You focus on the particular shape of words and try to fit them to an arbitrary, meaningless, pattern.
I think the GP was focusing on people rising to fight when "others" are offended (as opposed to "I/we are offended by this"), but it may just be my pet peeve ;)
For what it's worth, I read it months ago. I was not offended by it, but was in agreement with others that its removal would be better because it frankly was not funny at all.
It was an accurate observation, but despite best intentions, it sounded like a teenager on a rant. Not exactly a good look.
Just my two cents - seems that some agree and some don't.
This is the final destination of the leftist movement. We live a life of physical pleasure thanks to automation yet we are devoid of true fulfillment. So we need to channel our energies that otherwise would have been spent, say, working the field, on finding and striking down non-existent controversy. We call this activism and social justice. In doing so, we hope to attain closer unto some fulfillment.
If people don't see the broader implications of this on our society and the obvious slippery slope it engenders then I am truly alone.
Upon re-reading the tweet that ostensibly triggered the takedown, I think I actually agree. Originally I read the author throwing out the insult "dirtbag left" as an indication that they were in opposition to the leftist message presented in the documentation, but with closer reading I see that this person certainly considers themselves to be on the left.
That the complainer uses "dirtbag left" disparagingly is quite telling, given that this style of left-wing activism started as a reaction to bring leftist politics back to its anti-capitalist roots, and away from the sort of hand-wringing politically-correct tropespotting nonsense the complainer likes to tweet about.
It would be better for humanity if we could distinguish between those who profit by destroying it and those who resist them. Defending IAP is not leftist.
> The satire being removed is a leftist criticism of capitalism
maybe. it could very well have been written by Red Skull or Thanos. Re-read in their voice and it works.
Liberals, Anarchists, and Fascists actually share a lot of the same criticisms of society regarding anti-consumerism. They just have very different ways of addressing it.
Linux would be cancelled in current atmosphere. Microsoft would just hire some social justice group to accuse Linus Torvalds about saying mean things.
Then, we could only use Windows Server 2021 Enterprise Platform Web Edition, and only be able to develop in Visual Basic C++ asp pages running in IIS 21.
Then again, how is that any different than current Apple Google monopoly in mobile space?
Seriously? This isn't even offensive unless you happen to run a business designed around compulsively addicting people to mobile devices. Maybe it's telling that people are offended.
I basically stopped playing games around 2008 when I graduated uni. This was a time when I found other interests, didn't have time for games, and when mobile devices started taking over the world.
If nothing in my life changed, I'd have been driven from gaming anyway by IAP and micropayments.
The piece is obviously sarcastic but has some grains of truth (I personally see more than just grains...).
I think that it's important to remove any sort of misogyny, racism, and any other toxic things from technology. I just don't see how this piece has any of that.
> I just don't see how this piece has any of that.
That's because it doesn't. This whole thing stinks of the same type of bad faith as when people try to smear leftist politicians as being sexist, racist, or anti-semitic (they even geared up to try to call Bernie, a Jewish person, anti-semitic, but I guess that was too ridiculous to stick). We're going to see this a lot going forward - the language of anti-oppression being misused to defend an abusive status quo, by people who benefit from it.
I used the word "smear." That means that people attempt to make attacks that are specious and appear to be in bad faith in order to tarnish their reputation. That this happens is true regardless of whether there is other legitimate evidence or good faith accusations of bad behavior.
Sadly because many of the politicians on the so-called right at present are unlikely to have their power limited by fully justified accusations of sexism, racism etc. Other smears may work there but not those ones, it would seem. [1]
And that's great, stupid smears are ineffective! What is not so good is solid evidence of serious racism and misogyny is also ineffective.
Historically there have been plenty of politicians closer to the so-called right who would have the power diminished by being foul. There may well be still in certain areas.
What would be nice is if A good take a little of the good sense from B and B a little of the good sense from A.
What we have isn't that, whatever labels you put on various "sides".
[1] "Jewish space laser" for example. That may not be a smear.
They also pull out this trick in reverse to defend vile centrists like Neera Tanden where they use her identity and record of having received federal benefits to pose her as someone that would defend them rather than someone dedicated to destroying those programs, who attacked an employee, who outed an employee who was sexually assaulted, and suggested stealing Libya's oil to pay for bombing them.
She might not be getting her nomination, but it's a great example of the tactic in action.
Tanden is notable only for her poor social media discipline. There are a hundred less progressive officials in the new administration, who happen to be circumspect enough to take money from Middle Eastern dictators without rivaling Trump in Twitter foolishness.
What "ThinkProgress" do you mean? This one [0], at which the most recent article is from September 2019? That was indeed a union shop, which was cited by Tanden in an internal email as the reason she closed it down. [1] Maybe we should credit her for not calling in Pinkerton assassins, but closing down a workplace because of its union is precisely "union busting".
when people try to smear leftist politicians as being sexist, racist, or anti-semitic
Of course they always, are innocent of such things, always, and never sexually harass their staff either, nor dress up in blackface. All such allegations are lies, I tell you, lies!
Now those dirty right-wingers, you don’t even need proof or a single credible witness, of course they did it... /s
The weirdest thing for me here, is that most of the noise against the piece seems to have been made on twitter by people who probably identify as "leftists", solely because it punches down on some demographic. I'm still trying to ascertain which demographic that is, it's really not clear.
> In isolation that’s just meh.
In a context where mobile players got trashed all the bloody time for being fake gamers, casuals, mindless whales, or worst of all, women?
In a context of tech people often being elitist “core” gamers?
Woops, you’re punching down.
That reads like something I would write if I wanted to troll the Godot project and could not find any actual point to attack. Poe's law is at work once again.
I cannot take this sentence seriously:
> "mobile gamers got trashed all the [...] time for being [...] women"
Plus, Godot's text is about practices preying on mobile gamers (you can find these practices on PC too, but it is more common on mobile platforms), so it is criticizing mobile gaming (and the companies behind the predatory practices) rather than mobile gamers. So the quoted sentence about "mobile gamers" looks like a straw-man, which goes in favour of a trolling attempt.
Considering that the satirical doc criticized the agressive monetization that predominantly affects mobile gamers I find it hard to see how that is trashing mobile gamers.
Or is it so that if I criticize something that affects some group not specifically me it's actually punching down? It's not possible to criticize something that's being done to a group without it being a criticism of that group?
This is absolutely brilliant. PR departments must love this.
The move from "isms" as a character flaw to "isms" as a structural flaw makes this kind of analysis possible.
Character Flaw: X is injured. you intend to injure X as you did Y.
Structural Flaw: X is injured. X was injured by your neglect in considering the interests of X as you did Y.
"Mobile Gamer Egos" were hurt because they werent "properly considered".
The issue with this kind of structural analysis is that you have to show a duty that a person/system has towards X for their "neglect of X" to be their fault. This is routinely missising from the analysis.
> The move from "isms" as a character flaw to "isms" as a structural flaw makes this kind of analysis possible.
I actually think isms as a structural flaw rather than a character flaw is much more pertinent in many cases, certainly most cases that cause the most damage in people's lives. However, the idea that this documentation amounts to some kind of structural discrimination is facially ridiculous, and, in my view, offensive to the real causes whose language it's abusing.
Right, that's why criticizing the companies who shamelessly pushed opioids is actually wrong too, because it's punching down at the people who enjoy using the opioids who often tend to be low-income and yes, women. Woops, you punched down!
And even if you tweak your game to encourage more play and profits, you'd be well aware of that and have already made the decision to shrug off such criticism.
Completely agree. I'd even say that entire rant was generous to the people who run such a business: it makes it seem they actually care about the mental well-being of their players.
I think it's far more likely they view players as rats in their Skinner's box simulator with the reward lever tied to their credit card and the punishment mechanism wired to a timer.
John Cleese of python fame once claimed he lost his sense of humour when he started looking at the entirety of the world as ridiculous. The idea being humour only works when you pick on a ridiculous aspect of the world and make fun of it. If everything is ridiculous there's no normal, sensible frame of thinking in the audience for contrast for the laughs.
I obviously don't speak for the author. This joke was probably better and funnier when it seemed more obviously absurd and ridiculous because nobody would ever believe that. Now it's not so clear that its satire at all. It seems much more like the sort of thing some people really do believe. What was clearly hyperbolic about a quite small piece of silliness is now being interpreted as a mere mild exaggeration of the state of the world to highlight a great truth.
The world is changing under us. Just like always has. It surprises us that it is, just like it always does.
Woah! Didn't know that. Just to verify I went on Wikipedia[1] and it sure is the case
> An important goal of Python's developers is keeping it fun to use. This is reflected in the language's name—a tribute to the British comedy group Monty Python[70]—and in occasionally playful approaches to tutorials and reference materials, such as examples that refer to spam and eggs (from a famous Monty Python sketch) instead of the standard foo and bar.[71][72]
There's this wonderful group called the Flat Earth Society, it's been around for a while. There's always been a few members who take the group very seriously, but for the majority of the members, it's purely a joke. People would propose these absurd theories, and most people understood it was not meant to be taken seriously.
Then somehow there was this modern movement of people who truly believed the world is flat. I heard them promoting the same exact theories that I had heard years before, and when I tried to point that out to some of them, I was called an idiot.
Flat-earthers have ruined The Flat Earth Society. Now normal people believe the Society is real flat-earthers, and real flat-earthers hate the Society because they realized it was all about mocking Flat Earth beliefs.
To me, the entirety of the world is ridiculous, and you have to just laugh at it, otherwise it's all very depressing. People are far too humorless and serious, while society gets even more ridiculous.
Ha! I didn't know about this "flat earth society" thing. In the light of what you have just explained, it seems that it ended up in an extremely fun state of affairs! At least, from the point of view of an outsider. Cannot wait to meet one of those people (of whatever "sign").
Maybe in a rare case, here and there. But you better believe this modern moment isn't trolling.
I've met plenty people who strongly identified with this movement and had several lengthy discussions with them. Literally all of them showcased not just a strong belief in a flat earth (and other easy to disprove conspiracy theories), they also clearly suffered from myriad of clearly identifiable psychological pathologies, underpinning all of it. Not the kind of things that someone who's just trolling would be able to fake (easily, or at all). More like the kind and severity that any sane society (both as a social group and as an institution) would provide psychological or even psychiatric assistance with. But that might just be the bigger issue at hand here.
It appears that insanity has increasingly become a somewhat acceptable (or unstoppable) norm rather than an exception in our modern societies. In particularly in the Western ones driven by capitalism, or so it appears. Instead of treating psychological pathologies for what they are, today pretty much "opinion" has become a "valid" opinion.
I guess that taking the concept of freedom of expression (itself no doubt a good thing) to absurd extremes, clearly doesn't help.
It probably doesn't help either that politicians (of all colors) appear to have no issue with exploiting these collective insanities for their own equally insane goals.
All in all, I think all of it are rather indicative sings of a society that is gradually running off its tracks, like a barometer is indicative for weather to come. I don't see this getting any better anytime soon. Particularly not in the US and EU.
I like your explanation for this. I didn't think it was funny, but didn't see it as offensive either. After reading your post, now I can see how it was funny.
It's bewildering to me that anyone can get offended (to vehement profanity) by the text. At the same time, I'm kinda used to criticisms of the mobile game industry. When I switched from a job in AAA games to the nascent mobile games industry (back in J2ME/BREW days, before smartphones), a number of former colleagues were questioning and even dismissive of my move. They did not consider such a crappy platform as worthy of a game developer. I didn't blame them for having that attitude. I just thought it was fun to be able to make and design games all by myself (instead of being on a team of over 90, about half being programmers) and be able to carry them around in my pocket!
511 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 359 ms ] threadThat's the new norm I guess. There's a small minority of people who spend their time and energy on being oppressed terrorising the majority with demands like this.
Comply or get cancelled
Edit: this twitter thread appears to be the backstory for what led to maintainer deciding to remove it (cw for foul language heh) https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367071124383797256
After reading through the discussions I do have to agree such "fun" is not really contributing to the documentation and just leads to misunderstandings or confusion (such as this very instance). Just didn't really need a bunch of outrage to reach that conclusion IMO :P
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/cb0da994bb6834...
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/cb0da994bb6834...
And if anyone thought this was serious stuff to spend time figuring out if this is real or not, I suspect they have a bigger problem with their reading abilities
- cute comments and snarky method names buried in source code, and
- a long, vituperative, divisive rant in the actual documentation
It’s not just about “having fun” - there’s nothing “fun” at all in the rant, it’s just unprofessional and irritating.
> It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst)
The lady doth protest too much.
Taking down capitalism one scolding at a time.
My armchair analysis is that this person has made their career in IAP's and mobile gaming, feels personally attacked by the (accurate, biting) critique, and has abused anti-oppressive language to protect their moral ego.
[0] https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507?s=20
Indeed, and it's yet another sad example of how the modern so-called left are more concerned with tropespotting, and manufacturing outrage over nothing, than anything of actual importance.
As a traditional leftist, it saddens me that our movement is being successfully hijacked by these fools.
> 'Despicable Me' Actor Fired for Making 'OK' Symbol While Posing With 6-Year-Old Girl at Universal Orlando Resort
https://www.newsweek.com/actor-fired-ok-symbol-universal-res...
But like I said, twitter =/= public opinion, just like terrified PR team =/= public opinion. I bet 90% of people wouldn't be offended by that symbol given zero context.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-coast-guard-member-removed-aft...
https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/cubs-indefinitely-ban-fan...
https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/07/17/mayor-suspends-4-co...
There were a few more stories, but can't find them at the moment. I remember that there was even a huge controversy on Twitter that someone from the British royal family did the OK sign. I think that was royal family, but not 100% sure, can't find any article about it at the moment
And you don't need public opinion to cancel someone. A dozen people complaining is often enough.
Have we (actually, you, because this -- meaning the redefining of OK -- is a US thing, maybe an American thing and I am far away from your continent) sunk so low as a society that we are now expected to be up to date with online trolling operations so that we can selfcensor to avoid being fired?
[0]: https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
It appears that you have to basically follow the online outrage crowd to be up to date with what's considered offensive this week. It's not just online trolling. For example, Amy Coney Barrett was attacked for using words "sexual preference" and Merriam-Webster dictionary changed the definition of the word to be offensive in order to justify the attacks after the fact.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/merriam-webster-barrett-se...
By keeping it up you must defend the fact that you are not being sexist or elitist by criticising encrypted save files. It’s easier to just cave in than put in that effort for a joke.
So much for that
Why was this controversial?
Why remove the code example as well as the satire?
https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367071940092055555
Something about bullying and sexism? I don't really get it
hope they didn't get bullied for suggesting someone was being a bully - the social media cold war continues
I've seen people get bent out of shape because people put politics in music, yet Forever Young by Alphaville was written about the prospect of dying during the Cold War. Now, there's definitely a difference between Forever Young and some artist making overt statements, that nuance is not lost. The difference is that these aren't seen as humor, insightful thinking, or light-hearted attempts to nudge us in a direction anymore. Discourse has degraded to the extent that anything you mutter must be an absolute belief and there is some inclination that you ascribe to all ecosystems of belief around that idea as well.
If you previously used inflammatory speech (like this) for effect, you're now viewed as someone who has taken a side not only with ideas discussed here but any ideas which may be distantly related to that idea too.
Software projects shouldn’t loudly advertise that they are written by people with the political sophistication of a college student who smokes too much weed.
Seriously though, while I'd agree that the piece was written in a quite unsophisticated style, what exactly is "unbelievably asinine" about it?
The two main points seem, to me, to be:
1) Mobile games are designed to provide not much more than an addictive dopamine hit
2) Mobile devices in general enable people to fill time they'd otherwise be alone with their thoughts with mindless distractions, and many happily oblige
Both of these are quite defensible.
The rant about mobile games and capitalism is simply a reflection of this bias which is a particular view of society, but is not the only one and certainly not one shared by everyone. If you don't share that view it just seems like the person who wrote it is naive and doesn't have appreciation for personalities and perspectives other than his own.
Which is fine, people are different, and engines are written by peculiar people, but if I were to write something similar in another direction people likely wouldn't take it as a joke. For instance:
>Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A clerical oligarchy runs the world and forces us to trust the science in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, we're supposed to believe anything the clerics say, and just like they tell us to wear masks, they tell us that the biggest and best model for game engines today is ECS. It is a model of confused souls forced to architect their games in a particular way to escape the reality that they're just code monkeys gluing ugly code together instead of building a beautiful castle out of lego pieces like they want to believe. And this serves our ruling class, the clerics, as they infect and infest and ever larger portion of game development thought with their rotten ideology. Here at Godot HQ we have none of it, and just like we don't trust the science and we don't wear masks, we also don't use ECS.
Now is this an appropriate joke for an engine's documentation? It's not too far off from the original, just with changed content to suit the changed direction of the joke.
Never played this, but it seems to be designed just to be a fun game. From their pricing model, there doesn't seem to be any incentive for them to keep you addicted. Unlike some of the mobile games with microtransactions.
Being addicted to video games, any kind, is overall a bad thing.
PS: it's a really cool game.
What the author was saying really isn’t very contentious if you stop and think about it. Mobile games are a time sink and are often used as a distraction from stressful thoughts. The same is true for other video games, but the author’s view on that isn’t mentioned.
If you think that every humorous statement has to be so clean and pure that nobody takes offense, the I hope you like dad jokes, because that’s about all that’d be left.
The content of your joke isn't as relevant (which also makes it less funny). You used an anti-science sentiment and threw in ECS to try to make it more suitable, but it isn't analogous with the original statement at all.
How exactly do you think a cynical take on something that occurs widely in the industry is equivalent to conspiracy theory level science denialism?
>How exactly do you think a cynical take on something that occurs widely in the industry is equivalent to conspiracy theory level science denialism?
I believe that believing we live in a capitalist oligarchy that does all the things the text says it does is mistaken and wrong, just like you believe that what I said is conspiracy theory level science denialism. From my perspective what I said makes perfect sense and it's a perfect analogy, just like for you what the text said also explains what's actually happening in reality.
This divergence in views is political in nature, and just like from your perspective saying that mobile games are bad because of capitalism is relevant, for me saying that ECS is bad because of blind faith in science is relevant. Why is my perspective any less important than yours, other than for you not thinking it's relevant?
If you want to go down the route that everything is subjective, we're not going to be very productive here. The mention of "capitalist oligarchy" is hyperbole, of course, though I don't know how you want to argue that the world isn't mostly run by capitalist forces. Again, if this is something you want to question I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere.
The factoid in the piece is that a lot of mobile games are built with the intent of being addictive and getting people to spend a bunch of money on micro transactions. Is this another thing that doesn't fit in your view of reality?
Most importantly though, if they added your joke instead I still wouldn't rally to have them take it down. I'd just think it's awkward and embarrasing.
I believe that the world is primarily run by academia and journalists, and this is best described as a clerical oligarchy. In 1890 the US was definitely a capitalist/commercial oligarchy, in 2020 the US is definitely not one and is instead a clerical oligarchy where institutions with most power are intellectual ones rather than commercial ones. There are reasonable and well thought out arguments for this being the case https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution....
>The factoid in the piece is that a lot of mobile games are built with the intent of being addictive and getting people to spend a bunch of money on micro transactions. Is this another thing that doesn't fit in your view of reality?
I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.
>Most importantly though, if they added your joke instead I still wouldn't rally to have them take it down. I'd just think it's awkward and embarrasing.
Yes, that's exactly what I think of the original joke.
> I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.
If your biggest issue with the statement is that it unfairly focuses on mobile game devs, feel free to extrapolate the sentiment to all game devs who do this, I think most people do this extrapolation.
I re-read the rest of your responses to this thread, seems like your only issue is with how appropriate a joke is in technical documentation.
I am interested, given your world view, to know why you think a tutorial on encrypting saved game states isn't also inappropriate? In fact, isn't the technical documentation inappropriate in its entirety? Why should I be told how to use the game engine? Just because these "elitist" developers built the engine, doesn't mean they can tell me how I should use it?
I'm a game developer. I don't believe that games are inherently immoral otherwise I wouldn't make them. If you're a game developer and you believe that using psychological techniques to make people play games is wrong then you should probably not be making games, otherwise you're consistently engaging in immoral behavior yourself.
The singling out of mobile games is just a reflection of the bias that game developers have to think some kinds of games are morally wrong because it offends their sensibilities.
Neither do I, maybe you read my reply incorrectly. I said, feel free to extrapolate the criticism to all game devs who explicitly try to make the games addictive and hook people with micro-transactions. So your whole line of reasoning there kind of falls flat.
I think that world would look something like this: We take immediate and severe measures to curb global warming, don't spend the last decade imposing austerity measures on the European populace, de-escalate the war on drugs, develop a deep understanding of the cultural intricacies of countries we consider invading, avoid publishing clickbait inflammatory anecdotes in our newspapers in consideration for the long term public interest, not the benefit of the shareholders, and drive policy by the nuanced understanding of scientific study, not emotion, intuition, or anecdote.
How does the contrast between the last 40 years of ruthless neoliberalism vs. the very leftist academia and democratic-liberal leaning MSM, fit in your belief that academia and the press are somehow running the show?
(edit: typo)
What this does is ruin the intent and legitimacy of the game.
While typical mobile money has grinding solely to force you to pay.
Note: in Factorio my typical strategy is to use mod that makes me start with construction robots, to skip any kind of drudgery at start.
Modding API allowing it is deliberately open and explicitly created to allow this. In typical mobile game I would need to pay large amount of money for that.
Harm it does: zero Levity it provides: some
This has been done in many projects since the beginning of the Web. You are clearly, how you say, "triggered" by someone making fun of mobile game addiction and monetization.
Everybody's entitled to their opinion especially, if there isn't anything harmful.
At least the guys are creating more than public flame on HN.
As to college students smoking weed, just study history of Silicon Valley to see how many of big name corps were started like that.
Open source software projects can have the spin and advertising they want, and it's up to you not to use them if you do not agree.
The Clash / Allen Ginsberg - Capitol Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qmz03WI-es
Isn't that ... that's the analysis anyone would have for another country or historical period with the exact same dynamic.
It's probably not actually "kids these days", only because it never has been so far.
Previous generations were literally sent to die in the world wars, Korea and Vietnam.
The current generation of recent college graduates has had less suffering than any prior generation.
It is extremely difficult to tell the difference between a Republican or Democrat if you just look at the results and not their rhetoric.
That American politics have become so bifurcated is the problem. We need more than two parties and we need runoff voting to reinforce their ability to survive. Then we can get out of this black and white / us vs them nonsense and see shades of grey.
There are people who don’t subscribe to either party and I don’t just mean independents. That’s a term that’s limited in use to describing anyone who’s not a member of the two “recognized” parties, rather than a defined party.
Social media gives everyone a single place in which to express their opinions on matters large and small, whereas previously they might only have been able to share those opinions with friends. I don't think it's obvious to say people are more politically opinionated without considering how much having a place to express those opinions, find others in agreement and possibly even have that opinion affect the real world has had on how vocal people are about things they opinions they had anyway.
Tom fucking Morello.
The social bubble has become so close to exploding in our collective faces that everything has to be put in correct form, everybody has to be included, everything has to be perfect.
What happened to the meaning of "human" itself? Why are we not forgiving to humans that simply forgot?
I think the phenomenon of how social shitstorms explode these days is the exact opposite of an inclusive society.
Those that complain about things online usually are the ones that are not inclusive, and live their lives in despair and hate instead of love and compassion.
What we need to do is the opposite: Embrace discussion, embrace debate, and embrace to try to understand the opponents' views. People are quick to downvote, and people are quick to hate. But do you know what it takes to try to understand your imaginary villain? A real hero that offers compassion, not another villain that fuels the hate.
I believe that we as a society need to rethink our social values, because apparently, a major part of our society doesn't give a damn about other parts of our society.
And that's either a social or an educational issue with our moral baseline that we teach our children.
With the money came power, and with power comes an expectation of responsibility. But VCs/execs/boards aren't interested in taking even an iota of material responsibility , and holding them to account is basically impossible, and so all the external anger at a largely unaccountable and unconcerned industry gets redirected at rank-and-file.
There was never a single overarching software culture.
Go to Barnes and Noble (or online) and pick up the magazine 2600, which still gives off a very amateur, hacking-positive pre-social-media vibe of the internet, telecom, and computing.
Also, the book "Steal This Computer Book" while outdated was a fun glance-through when I was younger, though it didn't talk philosophy.
You had things like the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace[1] and other essays and myriad discussions about the potential of the World Wide Web.
The Web was smaller, less corporate, and the nerds ran the show. It shouldn't be blamed on them/us that the net is "corporate".
Seems a shame. It may have been satirical when written but perhaps not so much now.
Seems more whimsical than offensive to me, but YMMV.
> In isolation that’s just meh. In a context where mobile players got trashed all the bloody time for being fake gamers, casuals, mindless whales, or worst of all, women? In a context of tech people often being elitist “core” gamers? Woops, you’re punching down.
The crazy thing is that it only hurts people that don't have humor. For instance, the moment someone is without humor, they get cut out from the fun people.
Therefore, I cannot understand what the problem is with satire in the documentation of a game engine. On the contrary, it reminds you that you should think about what you read from time to time.
If you are a maintainer of a project, you don't want a Twitter outrage storm about it. It may put the project and the maintainer(s) personally in a bad position (completely undeservedly), and turn some of the project's contributors and / or sponsors away.
Because the Internet Outrage Machine is still fully functioning, any technical project has to gravitate to a clinically sterile state to stay safe.
[1]: https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507
Would such a situation create a true mono-culture? If so, would this be a good thing? Why or why not?
«Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.»
Or, as somebody said, it's always a temptation to use the devil's enviable energy to pull your cart; the problem is that he knows only one destination.
[0] https://shop.amh.net.au/
[1] https://www.mims.com.au/index.php/products/mims-annual
But it might've been specific to some editions.
I don't think it is. I think it's teasing the companies that try to exploit these gamers and how the author believes those companies view these gamers as something to be exploited.
It's punching the companies not the gamers IMO.
Take factorio, you can do sooo much stuff to cheat. However, the core mechanics still work and it's fun. Granted, not as epic, but still fun. Any of the free to play stuff, not fun.
I also wouldn't want to read "fun" like this on my bank's website.
If it were a website about making video games, say, a blog, that would be fine. But a piss-taking rant about the evils of mobile gaming - however correct it might be - isn't appropriate for documenting how to encrypt games.
Edit, since I'm bleeding karma tonight anyway: imagine being downvoted so hard for suggesting humor isn't appropriate somewhere on a forum where humor is never considered appropriate anywhere. I swear for a community that pretends to be hard-boiled, thick-skinned and world weary some of you lot are the biggest, most easily triggered snowflakes I've ever encountered.
Not quite true. There's just a pretty high threshold for what's relevant humour.
(The threshold is not even that high in absolute terms to be honest. Here's a +5 comment spotting a funny typo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26297542 It's mostly repetitive jokes that don't make it)
in-documentation comedy has been a thing since the inception of computer science. [0]
Personally, I hope it stays. The occasional in-joke keeps me from falling asleep when I review material that isn't teaching me anything new.
> I still don't read software documentation for the comedy.
Don't read any Conrad Barski, you'd probably hate that writing style. I love it.
[0] : https://media.nationalgeographic.org/assets/photos/669/8b7/6...
I don't think it's controversial to say that in a public arena (for example, an office) you have to be careful with subjects like politics and religion, and with humour. And that's always been true.
And social media extends that public arena, and magnifies misunderstanding. It's interpersonal discourse with something like 90% of a person's actual ability to communicate stripped out.
So I think people have to be careful (not in thought police way). If you have something tossed out into the public arena, it doesn't at all mean it can't be humorous or touch subjects that are going to trigger arguments, but for something like technical documentation it is reasonable to just make sure it's neutral. I'd love if most documentation was well written, skilful prose that exposed the authors own opinions but I'm also aware that's not appropriate for most people.
If you are addressing a public audience, often need to meter what is said. I think this is all beyond ridiculous, that the person used Twitter to make what looks like a completely baseless arument and accusations, worded in such a way that sounded authoritative and designed to encourage a pile-on, but whatever, careful when talking about politics at work
Other commenters have focussing on "woke" and "SJWs" etc., and I think that's a chimera, particularly because it goes the other way just as much*. Maybe it's just the birthing spasms of people learning to deal with this form of communication. Here's a person on Twitter who has [deliberately?] misunderstood the intent of another person's writing, then written a screed about some issues that upset them even though those issues weren't present in the text. And it's all very susceptible to manipulation by people with specific agendas -- the tendency is to broadcast rather than communicate (I'm doing that at the minute, I'm writing this down as ideas occur to me, and I've kinda ceased responding to your comment), and two things get confused.
* as a current example, see "cancel culture" in UK universities and the education secretary's (and by extension the government's) response to something that is almost completely fictional. That's heavily social media driven, by people shouting about it.
I think we owe at least them the right to express themselves in a small paragraph. Anyone offended by that, is free to go back abusing their users addiction in another game engine that better fit their "view" of the world.
Open source has a societal/education/ethical role to play. Mozilla is not only making Firefox but also writing about privacy ethics. So It could totally make sense for Godot to do the same about game ethics
[0] https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507?s=20
Unfortunately, it seems to me the structure of the movement itself makes many people too timid to actually push back against toxic behavior like this.
This person is referring to the #gamergate controversy from like 6-7 years ago, I understand that much.
But how does a progressive, left-leaning person go from that to being offended by a satire about capitalism? I have no clue. It's like becoming a caricature of yourself.
As if being calm is some ideal to always maintain anyway.
You can tell because leftists aren't offended by vanilla leftism.
It just takes one person to write a rant and then its all over. Thousands of examples but a similar one was VSCode having to remove the santa hat from an icon on Christmas because someone claimed it was extremely offensive. I know I'm starting to sound like an American conspiracy theorist about the war on christmas, but the reality is that you just can't show any kind of personality, humor, or fun on the internet without putting yourself at risk.
I guess puns might be immune. We still have puns. Unless some alt right jerk uses them as a way to make fun of Japanese people (there is a stereotype from a while back), then we lose puns too
Except when someone deems the subject too serious (“how dare you make jokes about that”). So no, we don’t still have puns.
What I’d like to know is why the American culture in particular seems so hostile to any form of humour. This isn’t something I have seen in other Western European countries to this extent (though it is spreading in thanks to the Internet).
Some of those are somewhat valid points, but the trick is to find people who don't mind the humour, and then spend the most time with them :)
Survivor bias, no doubt.
Sprinkle the code and documentation with random references to your favourite animal. That surely can't offend anyone, right?
It really doesn't matter if you don't listen to it.
Unfortunately a lot of people do, and some people that matter do. I hope this will change.
But if you don't have that, then (I have found) it's easy to ignore.
So the pragmatic strategy is to surrender early, when the cost of surrender is still small (just your own shame of yielding to evil people).
We need to end cancel culture, not capitulate.
If you're a lowly employee with a family, doing some open source or blogging or whatnot on the side, and that side activity attracts the wrath of professional victims? You're suddenly in risk of significantly derailing your life (and that of your family!), possibly damaging it permanently. So you capitulate, just to survive.
If you're not charismatic – you don't try to defend yourself – they'll run through their investigation and find something or find nothing, and then give a fairly fair verdict (or as fair as anything on Twitter ever is).
In this case, the author could've engaged, probably, and said something like:
> This was actually meant to be sarcastic; you're meant to notice how unreasonable it is, and disagree with the narrator, but the narrator doesn't represent my views, which are [XYZ]. Your advice would be good, if I actually agreed with what I'd written, but the point is that it's outlandish and bad, because I'm calling out attitudes in the game industry.
> The feature I'm documenting there is usually used for bad. Your suggestions would be good ones, if I actually believed in that bad, but I don't. Do you have any ideas for how to make it more obviously sarcastic?
I think the author probably missed the boat on this, though; the Twitter mob grows quickly.
The person who tried to warp this in to a social issue because they didn't like that they were being called out for using IAPs (being an abuser themselves really), is evil. This person is a harm to society.
If they had the intention you think they had? Evil. But I didn't get that from reading the archive.is link upthread.
No, thanks. I'd just rather my online persona is squeaky-clean under my real name, and anything controversial (oh, I don't know, like holding even one opinion that's got a potential to become controversial a year or two down the line) is under a pseudonym.
From a business standpoint: They've shown they're willing to make a scene, while simultaneously making it just controversial enough that you can justify pulling it down (and therefore averting the issue) without major loss of face.
In other words, nobody's primary business is controversial documentation.
Completely untrue. Lefty "SJW" Twitter is full of humour and personality. Shitposting takes precedence over serious discussion, massively, to the point where more centrist or right-wing twitter circles seem completely dry in comparison. If your humour and personality aren't accepted, that's on you.
Since humor is now banned on the internet, would you mind deleting your comment as good praxis?
:)
Edit - I found an archive of the tweet https://archive.md/VpYl2
Is that even a thing? Never ever have I heard "mobile players = women" even on the worst dumps of the internet, like 9gag. But then again, I'm not on Twitter.
The author was making some pretty clear points about how capitalism produces meaningless addictive games. Accusing author of sexism seems like a non-sequitur to me, especially as the whole comment is completely free of any gendered pronouns, e.g. "These individuals".
(Either way I think the argument that this means the article is intrinsicly sexist is definitely reaching. It seems the accusation of gatekeeping is more valid, though I think this requires a pretty uncharitable interpretation of something which is clearly aiming elsewhere)
As in: if you don’t have something “we” to say, don’t say anything at all.
Language is a way of conveying meaning.
Hyper focusing on the words being used, diminishes time spent on the transaction of mind.
Life is... when you really think about it... absurd.
On the other hand, this is the whole point of writing poetry. You focus on the particular shape of words and try to fit them to an arbitrary, meaningless, pattern.
The fact that the PR author does not even care that a piece of documentation is lost and there is no attempt to at least rewrite it is disappointing.
Someone please think of the old developers
It was an accurate observation, but despite best intentions, it sounded like a teenager on a rant. Not exactly a good look.
Just my two cents - seems that some agree and some don't.
It is quite typical to dismiss anti-capitalist critique as being youthful and immature
Didn't read it that way. The text seems factually true to me.
If people don't see the broader implications of this on our society and the obvious slippery slope it engenders then I am truly alone.
maybe. it could very well have been written by Red Skull or Thanos. Re-read in their voice and it works.
Liberals, Anarchists, and Fascists actually share a lot of the same criticisms of society regarding anti-consumerism. They just have very different ways of addressing it.
Then, we could only use Windows Server 2021 Enterprise Platform Web Edition, and only be able to develop in Visual Basic C++ asp pages running in IIS 21.
Then again, how is that any different than current Apple Google monopoly in mobile space?
If nothing in my life changed, I'd have been driven from gaming anyway by IAP and micropayments.
The piece is obviously sarcastic but has some grains of truth (I personally see more than just grains...).
I think that it's important to remove any sort of misogyny, racism, and any other toxic things from technology. I just don't see how this piece has any of that.
That's because it doesn't. This whole thing stinks of the same type of bad faith as when people try to smear leftist politicians as being sexist, racist, or anti-semitic (they even geared up to try to call Bernie, a Jewish person, anti-semitic, but I guess that was too ridiculous to stick). We're going to see this a lot going forward - the language of anti-oppression being misused to defend an abusive status quo, by people who benefit from it.
Leftist politicians can be all of those things..
And that's great, stupid smears are ineffective! What is not so good is solid evidence of serious racism and misogyny is also ineffective.
Historically there have been plenty of politicians closer to the so-called right who would have the power diminished by being foul. There may well be still in certain areas.
What would be nice is if A good take a little of the good sense from B and B a little of the good sense from A.
What we have isn't that, whatever labels you put on various "sides".
[1] "Jewish space laser" for example. That may not be a smear.
She might not be getting her nomination, but it's a great example of the tactic in action.
Tanden is notable only for her poor social media discipline. There are a hundred less progressive officials in the new administration, who happen to be circumspect enough to take money from Middle Eastern dictators without rivaling Trump in Twitter foolishness.
[0] https://thinkprogress.org/
[1] https://splinternews.com/the-center-for-american-progress-is...
Of course they always, are innocent of such things, always, and never sexually harass their staff either, nor dress up in blackface. All such allegations are lies, I tell you, lies!
Now those dirty right-wingers, you don’t even need proof or a single credible witness, of course they did it... /s
Okay, he's not an antisemite, he just supported totalitarian antisemitic regime.
> In isolation that’s just meh. In a context where mobile players got trashed all the bloody time for being fake gamers, casuals, mindless whales, or worst of all, women? In a context of tech people often being elitist “core” gamers? Woops, you’re punching down.
I cannot take this sentence seriously:
> "mobile gamers got trashed all the [...] time for being [...] women"
Plus, Godot's text is about practices preying on mobile gamers (you can find these practices on PC too, but it is more common on mobile platforms), so it is criticizing mobile gaming (and the companies behind the predatory practices) rather than mobile gamers. So the quoted sentence about "mobile gamers" looks like a straw-man, which goes in favour of a trolling attempt.
Or is it so that if I criticize something that affects some group not specifically me it's actually punching down? It's not possible to criticize something that's being done to a group without it being a criticism of that group?
This is absolutely brilliant. PR departments must love this.
Character Flaw: X is injured. you intend to injure X as you did Y.
Structural Flaw: X is injured. X was injured by your neglect in considering the interests of X as you did Y.
"Mobile Gamer Egos" were hurt because they werent "properly considered".
The issue with this kind of structural analysis is that you have to show a duty that a person/system has towards X for their "neglect of X" to be their fault. This is routinely missising from the analysis.
I actually think isms as a structural flaw rather than a character flaw is much more pertinent in many cases, certainly most cases that cause the most damage in people's lives. However, the idea that this documentation amounts to some kind of structural discrimination is facially ridiculous, and, in my view, offensive to the real causes whose language it's abusing.
"Any criticisms of Trump are bad faith smears by the Deep State defending the status quo."
Hmm.
I think it's far more likely they view players as rats in their Skinner's box simulator with the reward lever tied to their credit card and the punishment mechanism wired to a timer.
I obviously don't speak for the author. This joke was probably better and funnier when it seemed more obviously absurd and ridiculous because nobody would ever believe that. Now it's not so clear that its satire at all. It seems much more like the sort of thing some people really do believe. What was clearly hyperbolic about a quite small piece of silliness is now being interpreted as a mere mild exaggeration of the state of the world to highlight a great truth.
The world is changing under us. Just like always has. It surprises us that it is, just like it always does.
I had to read that twice to realize you’re not referring to the programming language.
> An important goal of Python's developers is keeping it fun to use. This is reflected in the language's name—a tribute to the British comedy group Monty Python[70]—and in occasionally playful approaches to tutorials and reference materials, such as examples that refer to spam and eggs (from a famous Monty Python sketch) instead of the standard foo and bar.[71][72]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
/sarcasm... but not really
(Made for really tiny devices; originally implemented to run on a device with 32kB of Flash and 2kB of RAM).
Delete this before they find out!
Then somehow there was this modern movement of people who truly believed the world is flat. I heard them promoting the same exact theories that I had heard years before, and when I tried to point that out to some of them, I was called an idiot.
Flat-earthers have ruined The Flat Earth Society. Now normal people believe the Society is real flat-earthers, and real flat-earthers hate the Society because they realized it was all about mocking Flat Earth beliefs.
To me, the entirety of the world is ridiculous, and you have to just laugh at it, otherwise it's all very depressing. People are far too humorless and serious, while society gets even more ridiculous.
Is this not a modern version of bonsai kittens?
The trolls get out-trolled regularly, it's part of what people find funny.
Maybe in a rare case, here and there. But you better believe this modern moment isn't trolling.
I've met plenty people who strongly identified with this movement and had several lengthy discussions with them. Literally all of them showcased not just a strong belief in a flat earth (and other easy to disprove conspiracy theories), they also clearly suffered from myriad of clearly identifiable psychological pathologies, underpinning all of it. Not the kind of things that someone who's just trolling would be able to fake (easily, or at all). More like the kind and severity that any sane society (both as a social group and as an institution) would provide psychological or even psychiatric assistance with. But that might just be the bigger issue at hand here.
It appears that insanity has increasingly become a somewhat acceptable (or unstoppable) norm rather than an exception in our modern societies. In particularly in the Western ones driven by capitalism, or so it appears. Instead of treating psychological pathologies for what they are, today pretty much "opinion" has become a "valid" opinion.
I guess that taking the concept of freedom of expression (itself no doubt a good thing) to absurd extremes, clearly doesn't help.
It probably doesn't help either that politicians (of all colors) appear to have no issue with exploiting these collective insanities for their own equally insane goals.
All in all, I think all of it are rather indicative sings of a society that is gradually running off its tracks, like a barometer is indicative for weather to come. I don't see this getting any better anytime soon. Particularly not in the US and EU.
It's bewildering to me that anyone can get offended (to vehement profanity) by the text. At the same time, I'm kinda used to criticisms of the mobile game industry. When I switched from a job in AAA games to the nascent mobile games industry (back in J2ME/BREW days, before smartphones), a number of former colleagues were questioning and even dismissive of my move. They did not consider such a crappy platform as worthy of a game developer. I didn't blame them for having that attitude. I just thought it was fun to be able to make and design games all by myself (instead of being on a team of over 90, about half being programmers) and be able to carry them around in my pocket!