The other article on the front page about video games being boring and predictable should try this game. I think that works like these are the real future of gaming. People can vote with their wallets at the end of the day. Eventually, people will wise up and start paying for better games that they actually enjoy and stop gambling. Or they won't, and they continue to hurt themselves financially and mentally. Either way, there will still be people making art-games like this, for people who think differently.
I really like the idea of social culture being "frozen" and injected into game experiences. I'd love to play a game about how the Cuban Missile Crisis felt, about how the Great Depression felt, about how the New Deal felt. Reading just doesn't put the mind in that same mode as trying to make moves that benefit my main character and seeing how the events that unfold bear witness to whether or not my decisions were good.
I'm sure there will be some good games soon about how insane it is that there's anti-vaxxers, or election deniers.
I'm not anti-voting, but I guess I'm resigned to the "voting futility" idea that I think you're talking about.
That being said, I am a faithful supporter of DSAUSA and have invested (rather than voted for) significant means towards the cause of a more socialistic reality in America. Faced with the size and influence of corporations in the world, I suppose it's the logical end of things that the world revolve around money and the means of "making" more money.
I still vote too, but I guess I roll my eyes a little bit each time.
In a parliamentary system, votes have a substantial impact. You can vote for a minority party that's actually aligned with your views and get represented if they get enough votes to get a seat in Parliament. It's not "throwing your vote away" like it is in the US.
In a two-party first-past-the-post system, the impact of each vote is substantially reduced by comparison since not only are there only two competitive parties to vote for, but the winner takes everything. A vote for the "wrong" party means that vote leads to no representation.
> Also, you can contribute to any candidates campaign - so you can money-vote in many places (USA)
This is part of the problem in the US, because it gives the wealthiest interests the means to back their preferred representatives at amounts minority representatives can never hope to reach.
It's fairly likely that, by the time I die, none of the voting I've done will have changed the outcome of a single election or ballot question. On the off chance it does, it'll almost certainly be at the county level or lower.
I'm completely convinced that the voting in Redecor - Home Design Game[1] is completely random. What they've done is Skinner boxed their competitions in a way that more or less evenly distributes random rewards to maximize engagement rather than reward players based on merit. It has the veneer of a voting-based competition, but none of the real guts of one.
I think Cart Life was the first game that hit me this way (shortly before Papers, Please). It really made me empathize with the desperate situations the characters were in, and in a way that felt more fully realized than in Papers, Please, though that's also a great game.
> I'm sure there will be some good games soon about how insane it is that there's anti-vaxxers, or election deniers.
I think using the word insane isn’t warranted. Check out Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Rightous Mind. There are good reasons to be skeptical, it’s also evolutionary necessary. The majority can be wrong.
To be specific it was misinformation to say it was a lab leak, now it’s generally accepted. As far as vaxx goes I took it, but the politics mixing with science has deteriorated a lot of trust. Also this is new technology, it’s not zero risk.
Election wise, we have examples in history to show it happens. Why not here? What about democrats pushing out Bernie? Again I agree mostly all good. But it’s not insane to think something is not kosher.
Rather it’s insane to be so certain of these things.
> To be specific it was misinformation to say it was a lab leak, now it’s generally accepted.
Which is a case of some people happening to guess, one time, that an ultimately highly unlikely thing (based on available information) happened.
To peddle such an unlikely, unconfirmed claim as fact before there's actual evidence still isn't/wasn't reasonable. They didn't know it was a lab leak. They wildly guessed. Yet they never treated it as speculation, they prematurely treated it as fact.
Current evidence likewise strongly supports the idea that the 2020 election is legitimate.
nonsense, it's not now 'generally accepted' that it was a lab leak. It's possible. We don't know.
However, and this is critical, it was absolutely 100% misinformation when first claimed. Trump was desperate to deflect blame and not let COVID derail his reelection chances, so he immediately blamed China, well before we had any actual information, analysis, or intelligence to suggest that. Talk about your 'politics mixing with science' deteriorating trust.
I'm not an anti-leaker, of course. I just believe it takes more than mere suspicion to buy into an idea. Otherwise you end up gobbling up whatever propaganda drifts near you, true or not.
1. The Wuhan lab was French built and supposed to jointly operated between France and China, but the French sounded the alarm about the terrible security practices of their Chinese counterparts.
2. Ecohealth, an organization with ties to the Wuhan lab, did a grant proposal to DARPA asking for money to do gain-of-function research on COVID. To be clear, gain of function research usually is something along the lines of: let's make this pathogen able to infect humans so we can study how it might infect humans if it ever evolved the ability to infect them.
3. It's dangerous research and should only be undertaken carefully, rather than in the haphazard way in which the French claimed the Chinese were engaging in research.
4. People close to the situation categorically denied that a lab leak was even possible, calling it a "conspiracy theory" although they knew that the lab had been doing similar research on similar diseases, and had declared an interest in doing so with COVID.
It's like if there was an organization that declared they wanted to make unicorns real, and they had made other fairy tale animals real in the past, and then unicorns appear in the wild in the same city where this organization is based, and they're like, "It is a conspiracy theory to think we had anything to do with this."
Unfortunately there cannot be an investigation. Too much time will pass before the Chinese let anyone investigate, if they ever do.
But there are many areas in life where you can't gather enough information to make a statistically perfect decision. That doesn't mean that we do nothing though.
I think my country should drastically reduce trade with China and tell them it's because they operate biolabs haphazardly and don't allow investigations into pandemic origins. I wish all countries would do this. Then the next pandemic might not happen, because nations would be afraid of the consequences.
Let's also not forget that head of Ecohealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, published (or got published) a letter in the Lancet at the very beginning of this (~Jan-Feb 2020) essentially calling the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory.
Let's also not forget that it turns out the Ecohealth Alliance was essentially able to write the rules that were used to police their own research referenced above.
Also recall that recently a 19 nucleotide sequence (1 out of ~3 trillion liklihood of occurring naturally) out of SARS-COV-2 has been discovered as patented by Moderna back somewhere between 2013 to 2017.
Also interesting to note that I just discovered that in the summer of last year, 2021, Mr. Daszak was recused from the Lancet's Covid commission. Hmmm.
It's more accurate to say it's accepted as a possibility. Back in 2020 it was commonly dismissed as pure conspiracy theory and just not even considered as an option.
Afaik, we are currently back to "probably not lab leak, that is improbably". Unless you live in specific bubble that needs it to be lab leak for political reasons.
I'm not sure what you mean, but Bernie didn't win the primary. That decides the horse that the DNC backs (except in incumbent years).
> To be specific it was misinformation to say it was a lab leak, now it’s generally accepted.
It's not generally accepted except in counter-culture circles. There isn't any more evidence for a lab leak hypothesis today than there was two years ago. The actual cause is not known, so claiming a specific theory with certainty would indeed be misinformation.
It isn't insane that some people won't take the vaccine.
It isn't insane that some people are against vaccine mandates.
It is insane that some people believe what they do about the vaccine: That it's a ploy to decimate the population, that it contains baby parts and poison, or microchips, that it is a test run for the mark of the beast.
I 100% agree. The issue at hand is that those insane people are a small fringe, there are many people who hold slight skepticism, and they are quickly labelled insane and grouped with the fringe. That's not a good thing for a healthy society.
One of the key features of the mark of the beast is the inability to buy or sell goods without taking it. By way of vaccine passports, that already happened, so yeah that fear does have a foundation.
The 'mark of the beast' is, if I'm not incorrect, a fictional idea that is (perhaps intentionally) incredibly easy to generalize with.
Identification with fictional texts is best left to High School English class instead of the real-world decision making process.
People sometimes use weird domain specific languages, the principle of charity goes a long way in being able to understand peoples' concerns despite the weird way they communicate them. I hate how easily we dismiss people with nonstandard language usage. Grow up.
I agree with what he's probably attempting to say -- widespread requirement of vaccine passports is absurd, and functionally locks people out of society.
Regardless, his comment didn't just use it as an example. Without further interpretation, the entire body of his point was that what is happening now is similar to a fictional thing that happened in a fictional story.
Whether or not you agree with the point, it's so absurdly general that it has about the same meaning as, say, comparing Biden to Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I live my life by the way of Master Splinter, as we all should. Every day I hone my Ninjitsu so that whenever evil approaches, whether it be in the form of Shredder or Krang or an argumentative poster on Hacker News, I will be prepared.
The only difference is the level at which people attempt to integrate the philosophy into their life -- I'm sure there is someone out there who has been impacted more by Terry Pratchett novels than the religion they were brought up as, and using either of those in the way the instigating poster did would be silly.
If you have evidence of people being unable to buy or sell goods without a vaccine passport, please share.
Oh, and do recall that the context from Revelation is that a person was completely excluded from the economy, not that they lost some privileges, so please don't waste time with false equivalences.
Although, honestly, it's probably a waste of time anyway: I just don't live in the same fantasy dimension as these people and their arguments hold no water to me.
> There are good reasons to be skeptical, it’s also evolutionary necessary. The majority can be wrong.
However most people that engage in this behavior do it for the reasons that have nothing to do with skepticism or critical thinking.
They do it for exactly opposite reason. People who are prone to it are generally less intelligent, less able to think critically, easier to mislead, they follow along easier, they more strongly bind with their in-group regardless of the crazy practices it performs.
This kind of behavior probably exists for evolutionary reasons, but it's not to help the species discover best truth.
It's more of a plan B for low fitness individuals, who are too flawed to compete with general population. They tend to look for or form smaller sub-populations of similarly flawed individuals in hopes that while in general population they are firmly below average desirability, in those smaller populations they might be above average and have a chance of passing their genes they wouldn't have otherwise.
I'm not exactly well-read on this, but /shouldn't/ there be some emergent structure that maintains a (perceived) low-fitness position?
The actual fitness of a trait can only be seen in the long-term, and in the event the general population was long-term-incorrect in their evolution it is helpful to have a decent number of the alternative on hand.
I was merely suggesting that behavior of people susceptible to conspiracy theories might be fully (or almost fully explained by selfish goals of their individual genes).
I don't disagree with your general view, but all aspects of human biology have a certain level of uncertainty associated with them. Nobody expects guarantees with medications, surgical procedures, treatments for illnesses etc. Being skeptical is valuable against dogmatism, but we're not asserting things with absolute certainty here. We do have to recognize the difference and respect the outcome of the scientific process - which is what produced these vaccines. If you say the majority of scientists can be wrong, you have to be more specific. Do you mean colloquially wrong as in making an error in day to day work, or do you mean being collectively wrong about immunology since 1798 and we should reject things that we built on those discoveries?
If there is any risk here, I'd say the risk here is our own inability in not being able to describe human biology in detail. The vague statement "the human body can heal itself" sounds warm and fuzzy, and most people agree with it, but when transformed into "injecting these set of molecules into your blood will trigger complex interactions with independent internal biological processes and cause the body to produce clones of proteins with increasing avidity towards the original molecules which also trigger further complex biological processes [...]" - can get you into trouble sometimes if you treat it as absolute truth.
This is rather worrying. A game isn't an argument. It's not even evidence! Movies suffer the same problem in that we can couple causes with effects in ways that bear no relationship to reality. Just look at how Hollywood has contributed to deforming how people understand relationships. That's just one domain. It doesn't even need to be intentional, as Chomsky has argued, so no conspiracy is required as long as interests converge. Rather, the corporate-media-education complex is a self-reinforcing system where most of its actors do not even realize they are reinforcing the presuppositions of the system by excluding and punishing that which would threaten the existence of the system, regardless of whether the presuppositions are themselves good or correct. Most people even believe they're doing good (not that malicious actors don't exist, but most people don't give any of these presuppositions any consideration).
Arguments may be bloodless, but they have substance. Theater, interactive or not, is capable of deceiving. Your emotional response is not fact. What you would be presented with in a game about some historical event is a recasting of historical events in terms of our modern sensibilities. Movies do this all the time, this subtle anachronistic and theatrical re-presentation of history. This can be an impediment to understanding, not an aid.
Besides, while recreation has its place, we waste too much time on entertainment. Movies, games, and so on. These are like the cave in Plato's allegory. Instead of leaving the cave, we have doubled down.
I was drawn to it because it's based on surviving the siege of city I've been living in for the good part of the last decade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sarajevo) and playing it is just a painful experience that matches what I've been told and read from those that lived through it.
It's been a while since I've last played it, but from what I remember I always ended up in an absolutely inescapable situation regardless of what I tried. If you want to actually feel something while playing a game, 10/10, would recommend.
A big part of me wanted to find out if the game was ever winnable or even if it ended at all. Then I realized that was kind of the point - the hope that it will end some day and so I avoided finding out if it did or not.
I, too, set out with noble aims but eventually was faced with the prospect of stealing from the nice old couple down the street or starving to death. At that point, I stopped playing. I didn't want to know which one I'd choose.
I was playing it with my wife for some reason. At one point, it sent her out of the room, crying, so we stopped. I'm not sure if that's a recommendation or not.
I saw a headline somewhere that Tesla was going to build robots. I just started playing "Detroit: Become Human", setting in 2038, Russia is attacking neighbor countries, US unemployment is at 35% because robots/androids are employed in many jobs and are cheap. You play various androids and your choices impact game outcomes (there's a flowchart of decisions).
I like games with moral/ethical questions and player choices, it really presents the questions in a way where you are making decisions that have impact - at least as how the game developer gives you options. This is very different than reading about it in a book. Don't get me wrong though, I also like silly action/adventure/puzzle/whatever games too. There is a place for all kinds of artwork.
Not to diminish your point, but I do think that the idea of Shechu has been so imbued in contemporary Chinese popular culture that for many Chinese this is not that serious or artsy a game (think any Netflix popular show that touches some serious social issues -- it can be well-made but usually not that artsy). It will be harder for a general audience to explore a past social culture (e.g. cold war, great depression) than to explore a present, popular culture.
Also not disagreeing with you -- it will be awesome to play some serious game about the new deal/anti-vaxxers. In general, seeing discussions on game design across HN, I think we (HN as a whole) can be more exploratory in our games, going beyond "being serious, well researched, and non-predatory". The sense of ambiguous loss brought by To the Moon is one direction in this. Some other random examples pioneered by films that I think we should explore include more subtle ambiguity in narratives (e.g. Burning (2018)) or delicacy in depicting the adolescent female experience (e.g. Marie Antoinette (2006)).
There are many games like this already. Not including ones already mentioned, here are a few more off the top of my head...
1979 Revolution: Black Friday[0], Iranian revolution
21 Days[1], Syrian refugee crisis
A Golden Wake[2], Florida property boom
Bury Me, My Love[3], Syrian refugee crisis
Through the Darkest of Times [4], German resistance under the Nazis
Way of Defector[5], North Korean defection
There are a bunch more historical narrative games you can find, if you're into that sort of thing. I don't really have time for these conversations about how modern games are boring and predictable, that just shows the person hasn't bothered looking outside of the AAA bubble. There has never been a better time for computer games than right now.
There's an indie game called Deep Sixed that felt this way for me. The plot is that you're a prisoner and your cell is a spaceship that gets moved around for various reasons, and to stay alive you have to constantly fix your spaceship while also battling incoming baddies. It sounded like fun but when I played it I had a genuine stress response. It felt a lot like fixing broken servers while being screamed at on Twitter. I haven't been able to make myself play it since.
> While you're busy putting out fires, please don't forget to buy new parts, to continue your assigned mission and if you could also take care of those aliens attacking the lower ring that would be lovely.
Satisfactory and Factorio do that for me. Really good games but i can barely bring myself to play them with how quickly they start making me feel like i'm working.
Wish there was an.. easy mode, or something. Something that let me enjoy that feeling of my work - which i love - but with some simplifications to not exercise the same parts of my brain i'm trying to rest after a long days actual work hah.
For Factorio:
1. Turn off biters (or turn on "peaceful mode", which mostly lets you ignore them until you want to start dealing with them)
1a. Dragon's Teeth wall design
2. Grab one of the quick start mods so you start with a backpack of construction robots
3. City blocks
After that it's down (and up) to you. I've been able to play Factorio like it's I'm gardening - where I'm just chilling, poking at the puzzles - and other times I haven't been, even when I've got the biter problem resolved, and I'm doing what you described.
> I've been able to play Factorio like I'm gardening
On gardening, same advice would apply: choosing low maintenance, well fitted with the climate or “tough” species is underrated.
Going only for the visual aspect will easily make gardening a second job. Except it’s an actual living thing, and it’s more pressure than the bullshit deadline we have on our projects.
Ayy, that's fair. The prior owners set things up very nicely, so between that and other things, most of my gardening is "optional", which makes it very very nice; and many of the plants are forgiving / masochists (vines and roses).
Step 1: Learn how to trim new plant (holy crap they're algorithmic fractals!). Step 2: Start trimming new plant. Step 3: Go stare at newly-prior plant a few minutes a day, see how it's doing. 10/10 would recommend.
I think for a lot of games it helps to tune them the way you want to play. For Factorio I like to turn the biters to easy mode, add some convenience mods like ranged grabbing etc.
But after that I like to "speedrun" the game to see how quickly I can launch the rocket. My best time is only about 11-12 hours, so it's far off any kind of world record time, but it makes the game a lot more fun when I have a goal in mind, instead of just endlessly optimizing etc.
I used to feel that way, but eventually figured out a set of design principles that took care of the parts of the game that were stressing me out. Turning off biters, building with a main bus, making a mall for yourself, and building with extra space so you can hack easily will go a long way to reducing the "ahh I'm gonna have to redesign this whole thing" stress.
That's really cool! And if you are trying just to beat the puzzle it would make sense to automate the task.
I play ALOT of Sudoku and the game now for me is optimizing my own thoughts while I play. Moving from a random search and find function, to a structure queries that solve the puzzles quicker and quicker. Sort of like a rubix cube. I focus on beating my best time and making it easier and easier.
I used to feel this way too, but I found sudoku varients a lot more enjoyable. If you look up the YouTube channel "Cracking the Cryptic" they have a lot of different ones.
Yes - after I got bored of regular Sudoku, I found "Killer Sudoku" and I've been playing that variant regularly for a long time. The hard puzzles (blank with no "easy" parts) in the killer variant are quite challenging, and over a span of years I've continued to gain new insights into better techniques for finding the answers.
The logical chains you have to build up just to eliminate one possible number somewhere really stretch the brain! More often they're merely tough and I can solve them in one sitting in under half an hour. It's a great mental warmup in the morning with coffee, to get the brain juices going!
You might enjoy KenKen puzzles as well. They are similar to Sodoku but involve more math. I find them to be very fun, although the harder ones can start to feel like work.
I have! I love it but it's very tedious. The controls are just much clunkier than Minecraft (for example). It's been a couple years since I played it though, maybe it has improved a lot.
Yes with Satisfactory especially. The hard part for me is keeping track of goals. I'll start playing with the mindset of "I'm going to finish this factory" and then I'll run out of resources. So on the trip to get more resources I find 5 other things starting to go sideways so I have to start fixing that instead.
I found that playing multiplayer made that experience much better.
The smaller sidetracks are more satisfying knowing others won't have to deal with them, and if others are doing the same thing they're less frequent allowing you to tackle the larger goals more often.
Something that did work as "fun" for me was Infinifactory, even though thematically the game is all about it being a job, it's puzzle nature is less daunting than being a sheer optimization problem.
That, and the incredible "Create Mod" for Minecraft, which gives you all sorts of mechanical gizmos. I find it more interesting because building a machine that does something is the primary focus, instead of linking machines together optimally, and the fact that your automations help you achieve the other open-ended goals of Minecraft
I tried Factorio a few months ago and after my initial shock with the quality of the game being so high, I found myself falling into optimization mode.
And then it quickly turned into a second job. I had to decided whether I wanted to devote time to Factorio optimization problems, or ...anything else in life.
I love both of those games but recently took on Dyson Sphere Program after it was gifted to me. I quickly put in twice as many hours as I had in Factorio. There is no combat, it's beautiful, and the blueprint system makes it less tedious. Most of the complaints I have about it are nit-picks and at $20 on Steam, it is absolutely worth the price of admission.
"'just enjoy it and don't think' is for those who don't understand what a joy it is to think."
If you're the type of person enjoying a game that is like work but without productivity, "fun" and "mindless" are contradictory attributes. Don't fight yourself. The thinking is the enjoyable part.
Lost Ark was recently released into the US market by Amazon / Smilegate and is getting some negative feedback due to the casino-like elements to the game. Some people just don't want a slot machine simulator, but if you're the publisher who wants to extract maximum revenue from players, then Skinner boxes are apparently the way to go. The player can buy their way past randomness by either purchasing material that increases their chances of winning, or gives them more chances to play. So despite complaints I doubt that mechanic will go anywhere.
I work in the web hosting industry. At one point in my career I was answering social media and taking the technical lead in fixing minor server issues. There's a reason I call Twitter "The Little Blue Bird of Hate."
MMORPGs can also give you this stress, especially ones where you are invested heavily into the experience. Spent some time on a MUD with actual roleplay and permadeath where people were crazy to the point where some would do all-nighters for intelligence stakeouts, battles, and other events. Many of the team leaders also set up a "hot pager" system so they could be quickly reached to assist while they were offline.
In moments when my character was near death I was often panicking and really feeling the tunnel vision of combat stress. The stakes were high in that a character and assets you spent over a year developing could be wiped out in an instant if you lost your focus. Eventually I couldn't take it and stopped playing.
On the other hand, there are games that are just straight up work - EVE is an example (haven't played it myself but do know people who do) and Rimworld if you play with an optimization/perfectionist mindset.
Besides the fact that I now have RSI (maybe not just due to Dota, possibly due to time spent in front of screen, overall), I realized after a while that I was a sort of people manager for 12-18 year olds and maybe I could just do the same thing at $DAYJOB and end up getting paid better :-)
>there are games that are just straight up work [...] if you play with an optimization/perfectionist mindset.
Does this apply only to certain (kinds of) games? Does it come from the way the game is structured?
Or does it have more to do with the community around it? For example RuneScape these days seems to be all about optimization, while back in the day it was more about exploration. (I guess for people who are still playing, there's nothing left to explore...)
you optimise what you have left when you have nothing else to do.
there is no exploring left in runescape, for the most part - virtually every corner and easter egg is effectively documented or reverse engineered in some way.
It disappoints me. The usual result of any new game I am looking forward to is effectively first a massive private equity/VC funded pile of advertising and spam that exists to pay people to reverse engineer new games just to datamine it onto a wiki covered in advertising that is filled in by children desperately chasing the next bronze or silver contributor badge for having over 1k edits or some bs like that.
I'm now imagining an MMO game where these kids ends up on a mystic adventure to collect, deconstruct, and optimize otherworldly entities in order to collect badges and gain power. They're in a race against time to defeat a burnt out, disappointed emperor who wants to end the world. But plot twist, the final boss is a tyrannical monster symbolic of the self-destructive extrinsic desire for approval and recognition. Spoiler, the world does have to end, because there's a better one outside. The servers of the actual MMO itself are rigged to break on completion setting absolutely everyone free and leaving the lucky winner feeling like they earned a whole pile of clout but they won't be able to prove it because a deluge, thousands, of pre-planned counterfeit footage and testimonies of the game's end are disseminated IRL by the devs which will drown theirs out, and if they didn't keep records or lose them, ideally gaslight them into one day considering that maybe they didn't actually beat the game, maybe there was another ending, or something beyond it because there are some variants and truncations or extensions to the endings depicted. The devs make money by secretly recording proof of the real winner's true identity, and creates a collage of their adventure on a canvas, selling the result to a billionaire who thinks this whole thing is neat and was in the market for a unique way to launder money anyways.
I was speaking more about sandbox games in that regardless, like Rimworld and Factorio. The idea is that you focus too much on automation and efficiency rather than fun, and want to design your base in a "perfect" manner. Of course once you implement your design in production, you will see issues and want to optimize it more. And so on and on.
However as another commenter said, any game can become work if you want to achieve perfection. For example if you play an FPS game you can always shoot faster and more accurately - if you practice more and more. This can lead to a point where you don't find the game fun anymore.
I wound up having to quit playing Satisfactory at the final tier because no matter how I sliced it it was going to take a ton of time to accomplish.
It was either make an imperfect solution and let it run for a hundred hours, or spend a hundred hours optimizing a perfect solution and then letting that run for ten more hours, or something like that.
At that point, I just tapped out. Building my factory just stopped being fun at that point.
I'm pretty sure it's just a feature of humans. Designing an RPG (and especially a competitive MMO) to be fun is really hard when min-maxers are involved. Once everything gets theorycrafted, everything is either optimal or trash, and anything optimal is an obligation. There's no such thing as a lucky drop, just a soul-sucking mandatory grind. Any choice (skill selection etc.) either affects the performance metric being optimized (and therefore the better-performing choice is mandatory) or it doesn't (and therefore it's pointless and why did the devs even bother).
I found myself doing this regardless of the game, but really wanting to enjoy the game without doing it.
Been playing MMOs since 2003 and in top raiding guilds/corps/etc since 2005, where this was highly rewarding.
Going without a computer (motherboard died) and having to quit MMOs for a while for economical reasons made me enjoy some single player games and heloed me fix this somewhat.
The legendary GDC talk, The Prototype that was Banned from Halfbrick, describes the unpleasant adversarial effects of some multiplayer games like this, and how they can escalate to be really unpleasant experiences for all involved.
I felt this way about an indie game that was actually very well received (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_Metro_(video_game)), and it was fun for a while, but it quickly grew old: the graphics are rudimentary (not expecting AAA-level stuff of course, but still, simple monochrome vector graphics get boring pretty fast), the gameplay is wildly unrealistic (stations popping up out of nowhere that you have to connect to lines which you can instantly change, even erase and rebuild everything, ad infinitum, trains that can be instantly teleported to a completely different line when needed etc.), and every game inevitably gives you a sense of failure, because sooner or later your network is swamped with passengers and collapses. So not really realistic, but the need to constantly optimize the network while the game keeps throwing spanners in your works quickly felt like drudgery. For some time I kept coming back because of the daily challenges and other stuff designed to keep things interesting, but after about one month I decided enough is enough and uninstalled it.
I enjoyed the game for a short while too, I was taking it as having some resemblance of urban planning for the real cities, and getting to redesign some of the terribly inefficient system of cities that I've lived in and others that I greatly admire and try to emulate. Later I just found this is almost random and has not much to do with the actual traffic flow of those cities, it just became an optimization game with increasing difficulty level. That's when I started feeling the "work" element and never went back.
I enjoyed both Metro and the newer Motorways. But inevitably I uninstall them when you realize that at some point at your skill level it just becomes luck as to what items pop out where. With great luck you can easily double the score on a bad luck map.
In a life imitates art moment, I watched the story from the trailer for that game (the character ends up in the cell after being held criminally liable for a mistake at work due to complacency), and then saw this headline in another open browser tab:
My wife (who is an experienced nurse) told me about that case this morning. She has mixed feelings, but is not terribly sympathetic. This person should not be working in the profession, that seems clear. In jail, I don't know. Is there such a thing as "criminally incompetent"?
If you deceive people into giving you responsibilities you're incapable of dealing with, and it brings meaningful harm to others, it can be criminal. There are regulations for legal, medical, and financial services to criminalize that deceit and prevent that kind of situation.
Why is the nurse criminally negligent, but not the company or programmers which made the software that runs the automated medicine cabinet? Or the hospital administration who failed to recognize and do something to correct the systemic problem of why constant "overrides" are needed to complete normal tasks?
Edit: maybe drug companies are even partly responsible for confusing names & the whole system of generic versus trade names (as it seems this incident wouldn't have happened if the generic name were the only name by which the substance was known).
I'm not saying any of the above should be. I just think we should compare and contrast the medical profession with aviation. The reason the accident rate is so low in commercial aviation is a systems approach to safety. In the medical profession it's all about machismo and individual responsibility - which doesn't lead to continual improvement as an industry.
You are correct. Robert Wachter has written a lot on this (see his
The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age) and it's a common error to simply blame someone like a nurse for administering the incorrect medicine as opposed to seeing how that situation came to be. Healthcare has a lot to learn from how similar things are investigated in the aviation industry (note: that doesn't mean nurses get absolved of everything, just that even apparently insanely stupid mistakes are often the result of swiss-cheese style errors).
My experience with an all-stress game is Papers, Please. Between the pressures of the government bureaucracy, the time stressor and the plight of the poor people you have to crush... it's exhausting.
Somewhat related, I remember Space Colony, where you had to manage an eponymous Space Colony, which not only involved assigning jobs to people, but also looking after their mental health.
I feel this way about a lot of games, to be honest. There's so much side-quest filler that feels like work to me (a first play through of one of the Far Cry games had me crafting a wallet or some such nonsense) that it's become quite off-putting. As a teenager with nothing but time, I probably wouldn't have cared, but as a grown man with a full time job and little time to spend on video games, the last thing I want to do is feel like I'm working.
Do you think your age and life (work) experience did that for you? I have noticed myself feeling considerably differently towards different games too. Games I used to enjoy (like Starcraft) back in the days, I enjoy a lot less as an older guy now and having worked for almost 2 decades. It takes a lot of mental effort to keep up and do well (macro-ing and managing my econ, also micro-ing my army, etc.). Whereas if I play some Fortnite with friends (as a 40 year-old...) it's just pretty relaxing overall and I still enjoy gaming that way.
That's an interesting comment. I loved Starcraft as a kid. Played many hours every day. I'm now 33 and never got into Starcraft 2. Nowadays the idea is utterly unappealing. I just play the occasional Call of Duty Warzone (similar to Fortnite) and it's fun.
I feel the same. Starcraft used to be what I would consider a 'light' game. As a teen I got big into the grognard strategy wargames, the kind with over 1000 units and >300 page rule books and very detailed simulation of everything. That and 4X games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri. So much planning and managing and problem-solving through epically long and large games.
Nowadays, in my 40s, it's things like Fortnite (my current favorite), Subnautica, and European/American Truck Simulator. Games where I can just relax and play and not have to do much thinking.
That's a great question. It was work experiences that transformed a challenge into a stressful slog. There are some things in my work history that elicit a PTSD-like response. For example, right now I'm thinking of a software product that I used to have to administer on about 60 servers, and I can feel myself tightening up and almost feeling nauseous. This isn't related to my original comment but answers your question I think. My work experience definitely informed my preference toward games. I like problem solving and expressing creativity. But doing so under pressure is the opposite of fun for me, which is why that game was no-go for this greying geek.
There was a puzzle game that came out when UML was still a thing people talked about doing and put on their resumes. The puzzle was a graph of nodes and edges and you won when none of the edges crossed.
I had fun with it for about an hour and then got this terrible sense if deja vu. And then it hit my like a ton of bricks. This is flattening a UML diagram but turned into a game. I pushed back from my desk and went to get some air, and that was the last time I played that game. And (coincidentally?) close to the last time I volunteered to do make class diagrams.
I went and found this game again relatively recently. It reminds me so much of decoupling and refactoring software or vice versa. I spent a few years occasionally trying to remember what distant memory of an experience decoupling reminded me of.
I quite enjoy both. Whilst simultaneously kind of hating the process.
Incredible sense of clarity once you've resolved everything that was stepping in the way of understanding. Moments of despair and frustration. Sense of progress combined with feeling this could be never ending. Iteratively trying to step towards something better.
It all seeming worth it in the end. So many parallels.
Universal Paperclips is one of those true gems and in my opinion one of the standout examples within the incremental genre of what a game can really be. also good incrementals: a dark room, SPACEPLAN, kittens game, and trimps. with the exception of SPACEPLAN, all of these games have always been greatly enjoyable despite feeling like the worst type of work that one could be doing. i find it odd that I'm willing to do that sort of resource allocation and microoptimization thing almost endlessly for free, but the idea of doing it in meatspace for pay seems almost intolerable.
I once made such a game, but that was more based from how interesting graph theory can be, and how you can visualize graphs and interact with them. The most difficult part was thinking how to create a solvable level, i.e. how to create a planar graph. Oh, and ofcourse actually completing the whole game, which I actually managed to do.
Just greedily generate a planar graph? lay out some points randomly, start adding edges at random and skip adding any new edge that crosses an existing edge? Then randomize the positions of the nodes to give you a game board?
My first job, someone used the Rational Rose diagram tool to print out their diagram (on a huge wide format printer) and it was amazing…ly awful.
There was a bar of lines three inches wide along the top of the chart. They connected a bunch of rectangles on the left side of the chart to rectangles on the right side of the chart. How on earth you were supposed to trace those lines I have absolutely no idea. But we got some good gallows humor out of it.
I used to joke I’d hire some game engine designers to apply their path finding algorithms to solving this problem.
I'll throw light on another linked article from the same website https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006391/how-one-obscure-word-... . Reading it is just blowing my mind, as someone from SouthEast Asia (not China) the conversation on competition and societal pressure rings very true.
> Therefore, the winners demand the losers to admit that they are a failure: Not only that they have less money and fewer material possessions; they must bow down morally and admit that they’re useless and have failed. If you don’t admit it and simply quietly walk away from the competition, you’ll face a lot of criticism. It’s not allowed.
This passage was pretty hair-raising. I think the freedom to fail gracefully is something we take for granted in "the west".
It's funny how I highlighted it as well, along with the guy applying to mcdonald's story. The kind of social pressure and moral shaming it describes is absolutely real
There is plenty of this in The West, too. It's often just couched in different terms, or in different ways. The continued dog-pile on the poor or homeless comes to mind.
To quote some dude from The West:
“It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.”
― Gore Vidal
Something of a tangent but I've found it really helpful in a bunch of situations to force myself to talk/think about "what's the success condition?" rather than "what's the win condition?" to make it harder to accidentally fall into the trap of assuming there needs to be a loser. Positive sum games are a wonderful thing if you can arrange them.
Not sure it's the same point but ultimately you're responsible for yourself. Even if you were born into bad circumstances or had bad luck. Forcing others to be responsible for you is morally and ethically wrong. That doesn't mean we shouldn't help the poor or homeless, often out of our own self interest, who wants to live in a world of poor and homeless people? But, as soon as you claim I'm obligated to help them you've made me a slave instead of a volunteer.
Paying taxes isn't voluntary, so by your definition we are all already slaves. And if I am forced to pay taxes, should I not have a vote in how they are spent? Some people say we should build roads and bridges, others want warships, and some want to help the homeless. Why are any of these choices "ethically wrong"?
'Startup' on Netflix was worse for me, since it didn't bother to lean into the humor at all, and the whole premise became more and more unbelievable as it went on.
I don't need to watch a show about IT security and mental illness -- that's already my life.
I also think that's why Mad Men and some of the Edwardian dramas are so popular: close enough to our time period that we can identify, but different enough that we don't feel that anxiety or uncomfortable connection.
My dad, for example, wasn't interested in watching Mad Men -- he's from big East Coast cities and grew up in that period, went to 'Nam, etc.
I absolutely respect and appreciate that the game wasn't trying to be "fun"; it was trying to communicate a message. And I firmly believe that not all games should be fun.
But at the same time... well, I have enough work to do in my life. There has to be a balance. Not every movie is "fun" but even art house films are generally "pleasant" to watch on some level.
I don’t know how far you got into it, but I will underscore it does have a story and an ending (multiple, even). You won’t be in an infinite daily grind to finish, and your actions have consequences.
Interesting. I didn't feel that way about Papers Please, because it has a story and it's more like a short puzzle.
It's not endless. It's basically a sequence of puzzles (with a story and some choices thrown in), where each stage introduces a variation on the puzzle. There is a very limited number of stages, after which the game ends.
Compare this to something like Factorio, which is essentially endless (and you're programming, so basically it's job #2).
I tried getting into Factorio and bowed out for this reason. It had kind of the same complexities as programming, except now instead of making my arrangements directly I now had to control a little animated sprite to walk around and place things. The spaceman as a character holds no compelling interest.
I suppose there's probably some "pure design" mode that skips that tedium, but then the game feels shallow. You're design a bunch of dataflow pipelines organized on a 2D grid. Also the graphics feel washed out and grainy, and the whole alien species attacks thing was distracting.
Playing factorio just makes me want to reimplement factorio. Not that I have the time or inclination.
I kinda felt that way about Factorio, it reminded me too much of doing CPU metal-layer layout (running roads & rails) combined with microarchitecture design (optimizing pipelines).
But in reality, I think "The Stanley Parable" hit a little too close to home for me.
There really needs to be a comparative study between China's internet industry and the U.S.'s. It often seems like horror stories of 996 are like Silicon Valley unpaid overtime burnout culture, ramped up to a new degree.
> “No matter how good you are at the game, the game has only one ending, which is the company being acquired,” Ding said, adding she was sad when she played it for the first time, believing being acquired means failure. “Later, I searched for a job for a period of time, encountered various setbacks, and gradually realized that the process of trying hard is more precious. When I went back and played it again, I accepted the ending, and felt that it was really in line with the current internet age.”
The same market dynamics on both sides of the Pacific.
I feel like the workaholic culture defies everything we understand about modern productivity and I am surprised it is so celebrated in other cultures.
I wonder if it is more about not raising quality of living TOO high, as opposed to actual competitive concerns.
For me, I see my work and life as a balance of sharpening the axe and cutting through the tree. I practice mindfulness a lot and am constantly trying to optimize my mood and life to stay efficient and happy.
I take care of myself in my down-time, and during work hours I execute ruthlessly. This has always worked well for me. I consistently receive excellence awards at work, get large promotions and raises, and have never been put on a PIP or fired. A CEO at a company I worked at once said of me "I wish we could clone honkycat 5 times to fill these positions." Not to brag. Just establishing that I perform well at work.
Overall my motto is "4 good hours" of deep work a day will keep me in the green performance-wise.
So what is the reasoning of this culture? Am I just mistaken?
A great game I played that has a "Shocking game mechanic that teaches you something", is called Rebel Inc.[0] The game is basically a sandbox inspired by the war in Afghanistan. One of the mechanics is in order to win battles on the map, you need airstrikes in order to gain ground. The downside to more airstrikes is that it leads to civilian casualties. You are basically given a choice between fewer airstrikes or more airstrikes and covering up any civilian casualties.
This is how Factorio feels to me. I love the game. But I can only handle it during long periods away from work, otherwise it leads me toward feeling burnt out.
Idk how it's now, but ten years ago managing a part of a corp in Eve Online was a full-time job, not to mention alliances. Not very different from managing a real company.
Even modern FPS are like that. In the recent installments of Far Cry, for example, I have found myself spending not a small portion of time collecting stuff, tweaking the possessions, building/fixing things. While still enjoying these otherwise excellent and fun games, I find older games, like the original Doom, Unreal, or early installments of FarCry, more enjoyable and fun - exactly because they feel less like "work."
I really wish there were more tactical games where the battles and armies were predetermined rather than configurable - I absolutely love tweaking army composition and handling resource builds and tech trees and etc. -sometimes- but some days I really just want to be airdropped into a (preferably turn based) fight and left to think my way through winning with the resources I've been given.
(then if I really just want to shoot a virtual bad guy, I go back to replaying the old Wing Commander games since for whatever reason I can climb the learning curves of those more easily than FPSes)
You might enjoy Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, although it's pretty shallow in most areas, you can configure the position and composition of your army's units and then watch the battle play out in real-time.
That's awesome (and I've seen other variations on this theme that were also very cool like Elaborate Spaceship Battles) but what I'm talking about looking for is exactly the opposite.
MechCommander 1/2 and the current BattleTech are kinda close since at least I only do the strategy between missions.
Note that Brood War's requirement for Macro -and- Micro play is also fun - too many RTS games let me win via Macro and then rolling over the enemy with effectively unlimited forces - but I really like tactical battles where the point of the game is the tactical side, because sometimes that's what I really want to spend my gaming time focusing on.
You might like some of the games at matrixgames.com and slitherine.com because they specialize primarily in turn-based strategy/war games and have a ton of them. However, while some of them are 'pick a scenario and play', others are hugely complex with full production, logistics, research, etc.
The John Tiller's Campaign Series games and Strategic Command games are pretty playable, Harpoon Ultimate if you like naval, and Field Of Glory if you have interest in the ancient/medieval eras.
If you want to play classic games I would suggest Myth: The Fallen Lords series. It's a story told battle by battle, and you are just given the units you are given.
That part was dreadful for me as a child. It stalled me for months in game. Or maybe it was not understanding that I needed money and shouldn’t blow it on collectible figurines and arcade games… in game.
As an adult I have revisited it and it was incredibly easy. A complete non issue by all means. An interesting game design challenge for sure.
My mind immediately went to EVE when I read the headline.
I love it, I really do but it makes you ask yourself weird existential questions about games and jobs.
The other thing that made me quit after few years was that the company behind it (CCP Games), with it's current management, really seems to be incompetent.
Another interesting game that depicts work life from Chinese point of view is Another Adventure[0]. Rather than going the Papers Please route of forcing the player to do the boring job ad nauseum, it is more structured like a series of brief narratives along the lines of The Beginner's Guide. It's short, but really made an impact on me, as someone who also worked/is working in the tech industry.
I disagree with a statement in the article: "As a tech employee, if you can’t bear overtime, you can pivot to other industries. But the social problem is not going to be solved because you quit."
Quitting is the most powerful signal a worker can send. It pushes up the price of that work and is the strongest-possible declaration that something is wrong.
Source: Have quit from a field that I love deeply because the environment became intolerable. Furthermore, I've now signed on to a new line of work precisely because the environment is so supportive.
Personally, I've found the western tech industry treats employees extremely well, compared to any other job I've had.
Flexible hours and dress code, excellent pay, light supervision, hundreds of employers, air-conditioned offices, great safety record, interesting and meaningful work for those that want it - and it barely needs a college degree. It's not perfect, but it's better than 95% of jobs out there.
(Of course, the games programming industry is to be avoided at all costs)
I believe those fields are where there's high demand but not enough supply.
China tech can treat people like shit because there's always someone to replace them. I think the stats were more engineers graduate from China come out than the entire history of USA engineers each year.
When there's high demand, then any place that systematically treats people like shit would not retain workers and die off. Of course, exceptions exist for places that pay shit tons of money.
Unless the field is small with very inelastic supply demand curves it won't change much for a small percentage of workers to leave. The forces that got those that would leave the position in the first place often still exist. People will train for a role, even a bad one if it puts food on the table.
I was thinking more of the 'typical' (western) HN audience and gp (ISL) specifically - but absolutely agreed, this advice does not work nearly as well in all places.
Yeah, I'm a tech worker in China, I quit a 6AM - 11 PM, 6 days a week job (that I loved, a global startup, blah blah) to work as ... exactly doing the same thing in an investment bank and be paid double for 9am-7pm
You know what we bemoaned the most in my previous startup, when hiring ? We couldn't compete with the banks :D You bet, at 9000 USD a month for 50 hours weeks, feels like the post office :D
Everyone knows, btw, that it's a problem, but it's not going to be solved as long as clients expect China to be cheaper, and when it stops, this expectation, we aren't gonna be able to compete because we're not any better quality-wise than the rest. I think India already is the new China and us we're stuck with robot employees that demand more and more money without really giving clients something in exchange :s And our internal market isn't developing fast enough: in fact, the population even decreases so :s
I group anything "[Job name] Simulator" with this. Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator, PC Builder Simulator, Truck Driving Simulator etc etc.
There is absolutely a place for them. To learn/perfect a craft or dip a toe into it if you wonder how it all works. Just not for me. It is too worklike.
Aside, can we not add "fishing" into every not-water-related game? (Warframe is a prime example...) It seems like 50% of new games now have a fishing minigame in there somewhere. I almost expected Mechwarrior 5 to have slipped in a fishing minigame somewhere....
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadI really like the idea of social culture being "frozen" and injected into game experiences. I'd love to play a game about how the Cuban Missile Crisis felt, about how the Great Depression felt, about how the New Deal felt. Reading just doesn't put the mind in that same mode as trying to make moves that benefit my main character and seeing how the events that unfold bear witness to whether or not my decisions were good.
I'm sure there will be some good games soon about how insane it is that there's anti-vaxxers, or election deniers.
Or a game where people think they can make a difference by voting harder!
That being said, I am a faithful supporter of DSAUSA and have invested (rather than voted for) significant means towards the cause of a more socialistic reality in America. Faced with the size and influence of corporations in the world, I suppose it's the logical end of things that the world revolve around money and the means of "making" more money.
I still vote too, but I guess I roll my eyes a little bit each time.
Also, you can contribute to any candidates campaign - so you can money-vote in many places (USA)
In a parliamentary system, votes have a substantial impact. You can vote for a minority party that's actually aligned with your views and get represented if they get enough votes to get a seat in Parliament. It's not "throwing your vote away" like it is in the US.
In a two-party first-past-the-post system, the impact of each vote is substantially reduced by comparison since not only are there only two competitive parties to vote for, but the winner takes everything. A vote for the "wrong" party means that vote leads to no representation.
> Also, you can contribute to any candidates campaign - so you can money-vote in many places (USA)
This is part of the problem in the US, because it gives the wealthiest interests the means to back their preferred representatives at amounts minority representatives can never hope to reach.
1. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fi.reworks.red...
- Papo y yo - alcoholism and child abuse
- Little Kite - also alcoholism and abuse
- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - mourning and loss
- Orwell - Privacy (although I would not recommend it as much as the first two)
- Valiant Hearts: The Great War - emotional toll of World War 1
- This war of mine - living in a war zone
- To the moon - not going to spoil it
- Rakuen
By the way, Little Kite is free right now https://freebies.indiegala.com/little-kite
I think using the word insane isn’t warranted. Check out Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Rightous Mind. There are good reasons to be skeptical, it’s also evolutionary necessary. The majority can be wrong.
To be specific it was misinformation to say it was a lab leak, now it’s generally accepted. As far as vaxx goes I took it, but the politics mixing with science has deteriorated a lot of trust. Also this is new technology, it’s not zero risk.
Election wise, we have examples in history to show it happens. Why not here? What about democrats pushing out Bernie? Again I agree mostly all good. But it’s not insane to think something is not kosher.
Rather it’s insane to be so certain of these things.
Which is a case of some people happening to guess, one time, that an ultimately highly unlikely thing (based on available information) happened.
To peddle such an unlikely, unconfirmed claim as fact before there's actual evidence still isn't/wasn't reasonable. They didn't know it was a lab leak. They wildly guessed. Yet they never treated it as speculation, they prematurely treated it as fact.
Current evidence likewise strongly supports the idea that the 2020 election is legitimate.
However, and this is critical, it was absolutely 100% misinformation when first claimed. Trump was desperate to deflect blame and not let COVID derail his reelection chances, so he immediately blamed China, well before we had any actual information, analysis, or intelligence to suggest that. Talk about your 'politics mixing with science' deteriorating trust.
I'm not an anti-leaker, of course. I just believe it takes more than mere suspicion to buy into an idea. Otherwise you end up gobbling up whatever propaganda drifts near you, true or not.
1. The Wuhan lab was French built and supposed to jointly operated between France and China, but the French sounded the alarm about the terrible security practices of their Chinese counterparts.
2. Ecohealth, an organization with ties to the Wuhan lab, did a grant proposal to DARPA asking for money to do gain-of-function research on COVID. To be clear, gain of function research usually is something along the lines of: let's make this pathogen able to infect humans so we can study how it might infect humans if it ever evolved the ability to infect them.
3. It's dangerous research and should only be undertaken carefully, rather than in the haphazard way in which the French claimed the Chinese were engaging in research.
4. People close to the situation categorically denied that a lab leak was even possible, calling it a "conspiracy theory" although they knew that the lab had been doing similar research on similar diseases, and had declared an interest in doing so with COVID.
It's like if there was an organization that declared they wanted to make unicorns real, and they had made other fairy tale animals real in the past, and then unicorns appear in the wild in the same city where this organization is based, and they're like, "It is a conspiracy theory to think we had anything to do with this."
So, I would agree that suspicion is warranted. Perhaps enough for an investigation. But, IMO, that's about it.
And they have leaked before. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/report-l...
But there are many areas in life where you can't gather enough information to make a statistically perfect decision. That doesn't mean that we do nothing though.
I think my country should drastically reduce trade with China and tell them it's because they operate biolabs haphazardly and don't allow investigations into pandemic origins. I wish all countries would do this. Then the next pandemic might not happen, because nations would be afraid of the consequences.
Let's also not forget that it turns out the Ecohealth Alliance was essentially able to write the rules that were used to police their own research referenced above.
Also recall that recently a 19 nucleotide sequence (1 out of ~3 trillion liklihood of occurring naturally) out of SARS-COV-2 has been discovered as patented by Moderna back somewhere between 2013 to 2017.
https://api.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/mar/24/blog-posti...
I just thought it was interesting to note the facts and statistics of the nucleotide sequence.
Unless it's functional, which (1) changes the odds; and (2) is a prerequisite for patenting.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210628023048/https://covid19co...
I'm not sure what you mean, but Bernie didn't win the primary. That decides the horse that the DNC backs (except in incumbent years).
> To be specific it was misinformation to say it was a lab leak, now it’s generally accepted.
It's not generally accepted except in counter-culture circles. There isn't any more evidence for a lab leak hypothesis today than there was two years ago. The actual cause is not known, so claiming a specific theory with certainty would indeed be misinformation.
It isn't insane that some people are against vaccine mandates.
It is insane that some people believe what they do about the vaccine: That it's a ploy to decimate the population, that it contains baby parts and poison, or microchips, that it is a test run for the mark of the beast.
That is absolutely batshit insane.
The only difference is the level at which people attempt to integrate the philosophy into their life -- I'm sure there is someone out there who has been impacted more by Terry Pratchett novels than the religion they were brought up as, and using either of those in the way the instigating poster did would be silly.
If you have evidence of people being unable to buy or sell goods without a vaccine passport, please share.
Oh, and do recall that the context from Revelation is that a person was completely excluded from the economy, not that they lost some privileges, so please don't waste time with false equivalences.
Although, honestly, it's probably a waste of time anyway: I just don't live in the same fantasy dimension as these people and their arguments hold no water to me.
However most people that engage in this behavior do it for the reasons that have nothing to do with skepticism or critical thinking.
They do it for exactly opposite reason. People who are prone to it are generally less intelligent, less able to think critically, easier to mislead, they follow along easier, they more strongly bind with their in-group regardless of the crazy practices it performs.
This kind of behavior probably exists for evolutionary reasons, but it's not to help the species discover best truth.
It's more of a plan B for low fitness individuals, who are too flawed to compete with general population. They tend to look for or form smaller sub-populations of similarly flawed individuals in hopes that while in general population they are firmly below average desirability, in those smaller populations they might be above average and have a chance of passing their genes they wouldn't have otherwise.
What scotty79 is proposing is that we should be hyper efficient and hyper unsustainable like our economic system.
I was merely suggesting that behavior of people susceptible to conspiracy theories might be fully (or almost fully explained by selfish goals of their individual genes).
Skepticism is not insanity. Questioning vaccine safety is not insanity.
Many of the anti vax claims were utter insanity (microchips in the injection)
As were the election claims
If there is any risk here, I'd say the risk here is our own inability in not being able to describe human biology in detail. The vague statement "the human body can heal itself" sounds warm and fuzzy, and most people agree with it, but when transformed into "injecting these set of molecules into your blood will trigger complex interactions with independent internal biological processes and cause the body to produce clones of proteins with increasing avidity towards the original molecules which also trigger further complex biological processes [...]" - can get you into trouble sometimes if you treat it as absolute truth.
Arguments may be bloodless, but they have substance. Theater, interactive or not, is capable of deceiving. Your emotional response is not fact. What you would be presented with in a game about some historical event is a recasting of historical events in terms of our modern sensibilities. Movies do this all the time, this subtle anachronistic and theatrical re-presentation of history. This can be an impediment to understanding, not an aid.
Besides, while recreation has its place, we waste too much time on entertainment. Movies, games, and so on. These are like the cave in Plato's allegory. Instead of leaving the cave, we have doubled down.
Enter THE METAVERSE.
Having a quit button is the best part of these video game experiences.
It's been a while since I've last played it, but from what I remember I always ended up in an absolutely inescapable situation regardless of what I tried. If you want to actually feel something while playing a game, 10/10, would recommend.
A big part of me wanted to find out if the game was ever winnable or even if it ended at all. Then I realized that was kind of the point - the hope that it will end some day and so I avoided finding out if it did or not.
I, too, set out with noble aims but eventually was faced with the prospect of stealing from the nice old couple down the street or starving to death. At that point, I stopped playing. I didn't want to know which one I'd choose.
How though? It's in Mandarin.
I like games with moral/ethical questions and player choices, it really presents the questions in a way where you are making decisions that have impact - at least as how the game developer gives you options. This is very different than reading about it in a book. Don't get me wrong though, I also like silly action/adventure/puzzle/whatever games too. There is a place for all kinds of artwork.
Also not disagreeing with you -- it will be awesome to play some serious game about the new deal/anti-vaxxers. In general, seeing discussions on game design across HN, I think we (HN as a whole) can be more exploratory in our games, going beyond "being serious, well researched, and non-predatory". The sense of ambiguous loss brought by To the Moon is one direction in this. Some other random examples pioneered by films that I think we should explore include more subtle ambiguity in narratives (e.g. Burning (2018)) or delicacy in depicting the adolescent female experience (e.g. Marie Antoinette (2006)).
1979 Revolution: Black Friday[0], Iranian revolution
21 Days[1], Syrian refugee crisis
A Golden Wake[2], Florida property boom
Bury Me, My Love[3], Syrian refugee crisis
Through the Darkest of Times [4], German resistance under the Nazis
Way of Defector[5], North Korean defection
There are a bunch more historical narrative games you can find, if you're into that sort of thing. I don't really have time for these conversations about how modern games are boring and predictable, that just shows the person hasn't bothered looking outside of the AAA bubble. There has never been a better time for computer games than right now.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/388320/1979_Revolution_Bl...
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/607660/21_Days/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/307570/A_Golden_Wake/
[3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/808090/Bury_Me_My_Love/
[4] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1003090/Through_the_Darke...
[5] https://store.steampowered.com/app/658660/Way_of_Defector/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/591000/Deep_Sixed/
Hmm, yeah. I wonder where I’ve heard that before.
Wish there was an.. easy mode, or something. Something that let me enjoy that feeling of my work - which i love - but with some simplifications to not exercise the same parts of my brain i'm trying to rest after a long days actual work hah.
Who knows, maybe it would be boring :shrug:
After that it's down (and up) to you. I've been able to play Factorio like it's I'm gardening - where I'm just chilling, poking at the puzzles - and other times I haven't been, even when I've got the biter problem resolved, and I'm doing what you described.
> I've been able to play Factorio like I'm gardening
On gardening, same advice would apply: choosing low maintenance, well fitted with the climate or “tough” species is underrated.
Going only for the visual aspect will easily make gardening a second job. Except it’s an actual living thing, and it’s more pressure than the bullshit deadline we have on our projects.
Step 1: Learn how to trim new plant (holy crap they're algorithmic fractals!). Step 2: Start trimming new plant. Step 3: Go stare at newly-prior plant a few minutes a day, see how it's doing. 10/10 would recommend.
But after that I like to "speedrun" the game to see how quickly I can launch the rocket. My best time is only about 11-12 hours, so it's far off any kind of world record time, but it makes the game a lot more fun when I have a goal in mind, instead of just endlessly optimizing etc.
They add chaos and something else to focus on and if they're making things too hard then you can adjust the difficulty.
I wrote a computer solver for Sudoku and that was enough for me, I feel no need to ever play again ;-)
I play ALOT of Sudoku and the game now for me is optimizing my own thoughts while I play. Moving from a random search and find function, to a structure queries that solve the puzzles quicker and quicker. Sort of like a rubix cube. I focus on beating my best time and making it easier and easier.
[0]: https://tck.mn/speedle
[0] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=13864128...
The smaller sidetracks are more satisfying knowing others won't have to deal with them, and if others are doing the same thing they're less frequent allowing you to tackle the larger goals more often.
Something that did work as "fun" for me was Infinifactory, even though thematically the game is all about it being a job, it's puzzle nature is less daunting than being a sheer optimization problem.
That, and the incredible "Create Mod" for Minecraft, which gives you all sorts of mechanical gizmos. I find it more interesting because building a machine that does something is the primary focus, instead of linking machines together optimally, and the fact that your automations help you achieve the other open-ended goals of Minecraft
And then it quickly turned into a second job. I had to decided whether I wanted to devote time to Factorio optimization problems, or ...anything else in life.
I chose life :)
Now there's always something I want to be doing, but that's another problem.
It's an amazing game. It felt very stimulating the first few hours. Then it became work, and now I don't think I will ever start it anymore.
(it's not sort of my thing but if it's your sort of thing I suspect his endorsement is more relevant)
If you're the type of person enjoying a game that is like work but without productivity, "fun" and "mindless" are contradictory attributes. Don't fight yourself. The thinking is the enjoyable part.
In moments when my character was near death I was often panicking and really feeling the tunnel vision of combat stress. The stakes were high in that a character and assets you spent over a year developing could be wiped out in an instant if you lost your focus. Eventually I couldn't take it and stopped playing.
On the other hand, there are games that are just straight up work - EVE is an example (haven't played it myself but do know people who do) and Rimworld if you play with an optimization/perfectionist mindset.
Besides the fact that I now have RSI (maybe not just due to Dota, possibly due to time spent in front of screen, overall), I realized after a while that I was a sort of people manager for 12-18 year olds and maybe I could just do the same thing at $DAYJOB and end up getting paid better :-)
(Not well, mind you...)
Does this apply only to certain (kinds of) games? Does it come from the way the game is structured?
Or does it have more to do with the community around it? For example RuneScape these days seems to be all about optimization, while back in the day it was more about exploration. (I guess for people who are still playing, there's nothing left to explore...)
there is no exploring left in runescape, for the most part - virtually every corner and easter egg is effectively documented or reverse engineered in some way.
However as another commenter said, any game can become work if you want to achieve perfection. For example if you play an FPS game you can always shoot faster and more accurately - if you practice more and more. This can lead to a point where you don't find the game fun anymore.
It was either make an imperfect solution and let it run for a hundred hours, or spend a hundred hours optimizing a perfect solution and then letting that run for ten more hours, or something like that.
At that point, I just tapped out. Building my factory just stopped being fun at that point.
Been playing MMOs since 2003 and in top raiding guilds/corps/etc since 2005, where this was highly rewarding.
Going without a computer (motherboard died) and having to quit MMOs for a while for economical reasons made me enjoy some single player games and heloed me fix this somewhat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9WMNuyjm4w
I'm getting Victoria 2 flashbacks just reading this sentence...
Kind of put me off all Apple Arcade games honestly.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902...
Edit: maybe drug companies are even partly responsible for confusing names & the whole system of generic versus trade names (as it seems this incident wouldn't have happened if the generic name were the only name by which the substance was known).
I'm not saying any of the above should be. I just think we should compare and contrast the medical profession with aviation. The reason the accident rate is so low in commercial aviation is a systems approach to safety. In the medical profession it's all about machismo and individual responsibility - which doesn't lead to continual improvement as an industry.
Nowadays, in my 40s, it's things like Fortnite (my current favorite), Subnautica, and European/American Truck Simulator. Games where I can just relax and play and not have to do much thinking.
I had fun with it for about an hour and then got this terrible sense if deja vu. And then it hit my like a ton of bricks. This is flattening a UML diagram but turned into a game. I pushed back from my desk and went to get some air, and that was the last time I played that game. And (coincidentally?) close to the last time I volunteered to do make class diagrams.
I went and found this game again relatively recently. It reminds me so much of decoupling and refactoring software or vice versa. I spent a few years occasionally trying to remember what distant memory of an experience decoupling reminded me of.
I quite enjoy both. Whilst simultaneously kind of hating the process.
Incredible sense of clarity once you've resolved everything that was stepping in the way of understanding. Moments of despair and frustration. Sense of progress combined with feeling this could be never ending. Iteratively trying to step towards something better. It all seeming worth it in the end. So many parallels.
The other game I can lose time in is Universal Paperclips[1], I looped through it 100 times before quitting.
1 - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
Or is there a simpler way?
There was a bar of lines three inches wide along the top of the chart. They connected a bunch of rectangles on the left side of the chart to rectangles on the right side of the chart. How on earth you were supposed to trace those lines I have absolutely no idea. But we got some good gallows humor out of it.
I used to joke I’d hire some game engine designers to apply their path finding algorithms to solving this problem.
This passage was pretty hair-raising. I think the freedom to fail gracefully is something we take for granted in "the west".
To quote some dude from The West:
“It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.” ― Gore Vidal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26027673
Tom Nook would like a word.
Silicon Valley was at least fun to laugh at.
I don't need to watch a show about IT security and mental illness -- that's already my life.
I also think that's why Mad Men and some of the Edwardian dramas are so popular: close enough to our time period that we can identify, but different enough that we don't feel that anxiety or uncomfortable connection.
My dad, for example, wasn't interested in watching Mad Men -- he's from big East Coast cities and grew up in that period, went to 'Nam, etc.
I absolutely respect and appreciate that the game wasn't trying to be "fun"; it was trying to communicate a message. And I firmly believe that not all games should be fun.
But at the same time... well, I have enough work to do in my life. There has to be a balance. Not every movie is "fun" but even art house films are generally "pleasant" to watch on some level.
It's not endless. It's basically a sequence of puzzles (with a story and some choices thrown in), where each stage introduces a variation on the puzzle. There is a very limited number of stages, after which the game ends.
Compare this to something like Factorio, which is essentially endless (and you're programming, so basically it's job #2).
I suppose there's probably some "pure design" mode that skips that tedium, but then the game feels shallow. You're design a bunch of dataflow pipelines organized on a 2D grid. Also the graphics feel washed out and grainy, and the whole alien species attacks thing was distracting.
Playing factorio just makes me want to reimplement factorio. Not that I have the time or inclination.
But in reality, I think "The Stanley Parable" hit a little too close to home for me.
> “No matter how good you are at the game, the game has only one ending, which is the company being acquired,” Ding said, adding she was sad when she played it for the first time, believing being acquired means failure. “Later, I searched for a job for a period of time, encountered various setbacks, and gradually realized that the process of trying hard is more precious. When I went back and played it again, I accepted the ending, and felt that it was really in line with the current internet age.”
The same market dynamics on both sides of the Pacific.
I wonder if it is more about not raising quality of living TOO high, as opposed to actual competitive concerns.
For me, I see my work and life as a balance of sharpening the axe and cutting through the tree. I practice mindfulness a lot and am constantly trying to optimize my mood and life to stay efficient and happy.
I take care of myself in my down-time, and during work hours I execute ruthlessly. This has always worked well for me. I consistently receive excellence awards at work, get large promotions and raises, and have never been put on a PIP or fired. A CEO at a company I worked at once said of me "I wish we could clone honkycat 5 times to fill these positions." Not to brag. Just establishing that I perform well at work.
Overall my motto is "4 good hours" of deep work a day will keep me in the green performance-wise.
So what is the reasoning of this culture? Am I just mistaken?
[0] https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/51-rebel-inc
(then if I really just want to shoot a virtual bad guy, I go back to replaying the old Wing Commander games since for whatever reason I can climb the learning curves of those more easily than FPSes)
There’s often a couple different ways to victory and there’s already enough built out to put plans into action immediately.
MechCommander 1/2 and the current BattleTech are kinda close since at least I only do the strategy between missions.
Note that Brood War's requirement for Macro -and- Micro play is also fun - too many RTS games let me win via Macro and then rolling over the enemy with effectively unlimited forces - but I really like tactical battles where the point of the game is the tactical side, because sometimes that's what I really want to spend my gaming time focusing on.
The John Tiller's Campaign Series games and Strategic Command games are pretty playable, Harpoon Ultimate if you like naval, and Field Of Glory if you have interest in the ancient/medieval eras.
Also, a lot of TRPGS tend to be hellishly difficult.
Very iconic game, loved it growing up.
As an adult I have revisited it and it was incredibly easy. A complete non issue by all means. An interesting game design challenge for sure.
Loved that game, but it was more work than my actual job.
I love it, I really do but it makes you ask yourself weird existential questions about games and jobs.
The other thing that made me quit after few years was that the company behind it (CCP Games), with it's current management, really seems to be incompetent.
I'm happy CCP screwed up back during the whole pants-scandal; it made me give up on online gaming, and it was incredibly liberating to get out of it.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/604450/Another_Adventure/
Quitting is the most powerful signal a worker can send. It pushes up the price of that work and is the strongest-possible declaration that something is wrong.
Source: Have quit from a field that I love deeply because the environment became intolerable. Furthermore, I've now signed on to a new line of work precisely because the environment is so supportive.
Flexible hours and dress code, excellent pay, light supervision, hundreds of employers, air-conditioned offices, great safety record, interesting and meaningful work for those that want it - and it barely needs a college degree. It's not perfect, but it's better than 95% of jobs out there.
(Of course, the games programming industry is to be avoided at all costs)
Our team and adjoining teams are hiring for Business Analysts, Data Engineers, Software Engineers, and more in the US and EU.
https://www.rover.com/careers/search/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30533028
The company takes its values seriously.
https://www.rover.com/careers/core-values/
China tech can treat people like shit because there's always someone to replace them. I think the stats were more engineers graduate from China come out than the entire history of USA engineers each year.
When there's high demand, then any place that systematically treats people like shit would not retain workers and die off. Of course, exceptions exist for places that pay shit tons of money.
And, yet, a worker quitting has close to zero effect on an industry of the scale of the one which is at issue.
That it is the most powerful tool you have does not make it a tool that is effective.
Many workers quitting can change an industry.
You know what we bemoaned the most in my previous startup, when hiring ? We couldn't compete with the banks :D You bet, at 9000 USD a month for 50 hours weeks, feels like the post office :D
Everyone knows, btw, that it's a problem, but it's not going to be solved as long as clients expect China to be cheaper, and when it stops, this expectation, we aren't gonna be able to compete because we're not any better quality-wise than the rest. I think India already is the new China and us we're stuck with robot employees that demand more and more money without really giving clients something in exchange :s And our internal market isn't developing fast enough: in fact, the population even decreases so :s
There is absolutely a place for them. To learn/perfect a craft or dip a toe into it if you wonder how it all works. Just not for me. It is too worklike.
Aside, can we not add "fishing" into every not-water-related game? (Warframe is a prime example...) It seems like 50% of new games now have a fishing minigame in there somewhere. I almost expected Mechwarrior 5 to have slipped in a fishing minigame somewhere....