Synthesizing the "faux(-)Asian(-)nationalist" and "East Asian is an ethnicity" posts, clearly your destiny is to conquer the west coast in the name of epicanthic folds of non-specific origin.
[ 400 page forum argument between Neo Asiamerican Nationalists over whether Filipinos are Asian or Hispanic ]
Probably, part of what you’re seeing with yaoi being treated the way it is is that men and their sexuality are basically constantly under attack in the culture war as creepy, oppressive, objectifying, low-status, etc.
But of course, as the sex with higher average libido and a more visual sexuality (because hormones), they are far more vulnerable to these sorts of attacks. Someone who has no sex drive at all can basically dunk on someone who does have a sex drive all day long, portraying them as evil and objectifying.
Of course, women
(including lesbians, as TUOC has posted about) are not actually pure angels, despite what the culture warriors say.
Yaoi then, under this framework, is an exploitable vulnerability to snap back at the attackers and make them shut up - a weakness in the social justice armor.
And for those who have a Correct sexuality under SJ terms, it can be exploited for social standing.
Then of course there are the people that are actually annoyed by it. Not all gay men, for instance, really enjoy straight women coming into gay bars.
Something that is germane to the topic is that “East Asian” practically is a valid ethnicity in its own right, once you’ve emigrated to a non-Asian country and assimilated to the point that the grandchildren don’t speak “their” native tongue and are only distinguishable by having epicanthic folds.
Technically, the mother countries may all hate each other, but on the playground, it’s all the same teasing.
it seems dangerous to play something like baseball in australia. if you go after a ball you hit out of the diamond, you'll probably end up grabbing some sort of deadly insect or something instead of the ball.
I parse you as "trans girl". Probably you are also some kind of Gender Is Complicated too, but that isn't a trait my gender-perceiving module keeps track of.
I love how everyone has a different opinion on this! ♥
I’ll forgive the lack of fruits on this one on account of it’s a valid answer but isn’t in the specification. 🍇
I'd say there's like a 30% chance you're female IRL.
You’re supposed to represent this as a whole number ratio of unicode fruit emoticons, and I’m really personally upset that you didn’t feel it was worth it to address me in the proper way.
This is not intended to be as condescending a question as it reads, but I was wondering if you've studies public policy in university or if you have any qualifications relating to policy or political theory?
My major in university was originally Political Science, and then Political Science/Philosophy/Economics, before I switched to Computer Science, after I started selling some software/3D trinkets, so to speak. I’ve taken classes in international law, comparative politics, intellectual property, economics, and so on.
But my education in those fields is incomplete, and I’m not entirely well-suited to them.
This is a wildcat politics blog. I have no blogging license, nor sanction from the establishment.
I’m not approved by your mother, your progressive liberal friends, or the New York Times. I’ve been compared to Neoreaction, I cannot be cited in arguments, and even if you wanted to cite me, my identity is a deliberate mystery - though I suppose that last part isn’t new in politics.
Of course, what did the Establishment get us? The Iraq War? Meddling in Libya and in Syria? Migration crisis in Europe, and then refusing to acknowledge the issues it causes? Housing shortages paired with high immigration? And what advice do they offer the cities of the interior, but to wither and die?
Some benefit, they may have gotten us, but something better than them must exist somewhere, or some time in the future. Liberal Democracy, in its modern incarnation, is not the end of history, but Democracy means that we all practice politics.
If you want to claim that the distinction between economic incentives and physical force is often irrelevant, fine, make your case. But if you’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist, why should people who built their whole economic system on that difference pay attention?
Also, these arguments usually suffer from the same flaw as “atheism is just another religion”: they are almost always part of a call for more physical force, but if you’re cool with that what exactly is your objection in the first place?
there are no economic incentives that aren’t ultimately backed by force, in any system
Exactly.
And the objection isn’t so much “but they use force,” but rather “you’re claiming your system is Special and therefore should be treated differently. It is not Special, and therefore it lacks moral weight to prohibit us from altering it.”
Typically, it’s in response to bitching about “how dare there be taxation! commerce is freedom!”, when someone suggests some redistributive program. But if it’s work-or-starve, then this whole “commerce is freedom” thing is fundamentally undermined, and you don’t get to claim you avoid any responsibility just because you’re not the one holding the metaphorical gun.
Property, as it exists in nature, is not morally binding, and that’s the only sense in which it exists independently of malleable human construction.
Property might be useful as a concept, but that’s very different from it having inherent rather than instrumental moral binding.
If you want to claim that the distinction between economic incentives and physical force is often irrelevant, fine, make your case. But if you’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist, why should people who built their whole economic system on that difference pay attention?
Hmm, I dunno. Pretty much all states forbid some kinds of physical force but not others, and some kinds of economic incentives but not others. This is especially true when looking at de facto rather than de jure enforcement. In the eyes of the institution, I’d say that the kinds of economic incentives that are banned are more like the kinds of physical force that are banned than they are like the kinds of economic inventives that are permitted. “Is this permitted or not” is just about the most institutionally-salient quality.
Thus, I’m not sure any actually-existing systems really are built on a clear differentiation between those two categories. They tend to be grouped as distinct species in the sense that, say, bribery is distinct from assault, but this seems more like statutory syntactic sugar than the kind of substantive qualitative difference that the “physical versus and economic coercion”distinctionis purported to represent under liberalism. It seems like more of a rhetorical distinction than one that people actually build societies around.
Still, I suppose I can add “accused of being Mencius Moldbug” (though it was very probably a shitpost) to the List, along with “labeled ‘faux Asian nationalist political thinker’,” “suggested should work at a think tank,” and a few other things.
The thing about Neoreaction is that Gnon doesn’t care about you, either, and neither did it care about species throughout history that have gone extinct - and what we want is survival and prosperity for ourselves, not to be subject to outrageous Fortune. And Fnargl? There’s no reason for him not to overwrite your mind with his superior technology or just replace you with a robot.
Neoreaction is not positioned to account for Transhumanism, among other things. As such, it’s a dead end.
Any overlap I have with Neoreactionary thought is largely incidental. I don’t really interact with them, nor read them.
I’m not a dark angel cast out of Gnon’s heaven to dwell among the mortal Liberals and spread the heretical gospels of Dark Enlightenment™. I’m surfing a wave seeking a better future, looking to synthesize a new, upwards axis.
wait a minute... national technocracy. rule by the truly enlightened. red herring memes of a female presenting selfsona that were probably made by a professional artist in MS paint -- and not crowdfunded -- possibly commissioned with peter thiel money. are you mencius moldbug?
wait a minute... national technocracy. rule by the truly enlightened. red herring memes of a female presenting selfsona that were probably made by a professional artist in MS paint -- and not crowdfunded -- possibly commissioned with peter thiel money. are you mencius moldbug?
Though really, I was just trying to figure out a way to have people bet, like a prediction market, on project completion times and success without inadvertently paying them to sabotage the project.
Suppose we have hired a contractor to build a bridge. We issue partial payment for the project in the form of a financial instrument (presumably in a mutual fund or something else that bears interest) which only pays out in X years from now if the bridge does not collapse by then. We then monitor the price of this instrument, particularly the sales by those holding it, in order to obtain information about the quality of the bridge. This allows us to obtain this information without incentivizing anyone to deliberately sabotage the bridge project (assuming we prohibit short-selling).
Huh.
@neoliberalism-nightly
construction surety bonds
So they (or rather, something like them) do exist. Though in this case, I’m thinking that these are offered to the employees, rather than, or in addition to, the company, with less access to the external market for a while, so that we can obtain this information in addition to not rewarding if the project fails to complete adequately.
And perhaps, more importantly, offer these across all sectors of government contracting and even public sector employment generally.
Though… if we have the mechanisms, why the fuck do we still have so many massive time and budget overruns?
And why aren’t we using these on government IT projects?
So many of them fail spectacularly, imagine if we made 1/3rd of the pay into deferred compensation in this format. We could not only see some of these failures coming and plan for them, but we could drive some of these people that cannot deliver a project and turn everything into dragged-out, cost-plus, out of the sector.
>why does the government still pay out so much extra money to their connected contractors?
But of course there are budget- and time-overruns in private contracting as well.
When I’ve seen it, it has typically been one of the following:
Commissioned personnel pushing through a contract that’ll be good for them but not good for the company
rank optimism
VIPs slowing things down by being too busy to have time for you when you need the go-ahead signed
VIPs slowing things down by being too fucking self-important and unable to get it hard unless they first delay a project by grandstanding
Seriously don’t get me started on VIPs
On my tombstone, just write “Sure he’s dead now, but you should see what he did to the other guy once he learned they’d changed the project requirements during the project.”
Sounds like some of these government contracts need what I’ll call “adversarial review”. Imagine, having a department who gets paid by reading through the contract and thinking of all the ways to fuck it up.
Not just some rubber stamp review, but getting paid for all the flaws (and by the magnitude of the flaw) they find.
There’s gotta be some way to bring the rate of costs and fuckups down. Certainly, other countries that are also developed are paying much less for infrastructure.
How do you keep that productive? Criticism is easy, accurate and actionable criticism is hard. Who criticises the critics?
Scott’s IRB experience for example didn’t even have payouts per criticism, ordinary human and bureaucratic motivations were enough to make it counterproductive.
Perhaps we put a contract synthesizer on top that pits the two sides against each other a few times and decides which criticisms actually matter to the organization, and then we also issue a few more employee deferred compensation instruments based on things like the number and magnitude of change orders.
Suppose we have hired a contractor to build a bridge. We issue partial payment for the project in the form of a financial instrument (presumably in a mutual fund or something else that bears interest) which only pays out in X years from now if the bridge does not collapse by then. We then monitor the price of this instrument, particularly the sales by those holding it, in order to obtain information about the quality of the bridge. This allows us to obtain this information without incentivizing anyone to deliberately sabotage the bridge project (assuming we prohibit short-selling).
Huh.
@neoliberalism-nightly
construction surety bonds
So they (or rather, something like them) do exist. Though in this case, I’m thinking that these are offered to the employees, rather than, or in addition to, the company, with less access to the external market for a while, so that we can obtain this information in addition to not rewarding if the project fails to complete adequately.
And perhaps, more importantly, offer these across all sectors of government contracting and even public sector employment generally.
Though… if we have the mechanisms, why the fuck do we still have so many massive time and budget overruns?
And why aren’t we using these on government IT projects?
So many of them fail spectacularly, imagine if we made 1/3rd of the pay into deferred compensation in this format. We could not only see some of these failures coming and plan for them, but we could drive some of these people that cannot deliver a project and turn everything into dragged-out, cost-plus, out of the sector.
>why does the government still pay out so much extra money to their connected contractors?
But of course there are budget- and time-overruns in private contracting as well.
When I’ve seen it, it has typically been one of the following:
Commissioned personnel pushing through a contract that’ll be good for them but not good for the company
rank optimism
VIPs slowing things down by being too busy to have time for you when you need the go-ahead signed
VIPs slowing things down by being too fucking self-important and unable to get it hard unless they first delay a project by grandstanding
Seriously don’t get me started on VIPs
On my tombstone, just write “Sure he’s dead now, but you should see what he did to the other guy once he learned they’d changed the project requirements during the project.”
Sounds like some of these government contracts need what I’ll call “adversarial review”. Imagine, having a department who gets paid by reading through the contract and thinking of all the ways to fuck it up.
Not just some rubber stamp review, but getting paid for all the flaws (and by the magnitude of the flaw) they find.
There’s gotta be some way to bring the rate of costs and fuckups down. Certainly, other countries that are also developed are paying much less for infrastructure.
Suppose we have hired a contractor to build a bridge. We issue partial payment for the project in the form of a financial instrument (presumably in a mutual fund or something else that bears interest) which only pays out in X years from now if the bridge does not collapse by then. We then monitor the price of this instrument, particularly the sales by those holding it, in order to obtain information about the quality of the bridge. This allows us to obtain this information without incentivizing anyone to deliberately sabotage the bridge project (assuming we prohibit short-selling).
Huh.
@neoliberalism-nightly
construction surety bonds
So they (or rather, something like them) do exist. Though in this case, I’m thinking that these are offered to the employees, rather than, or in addition to, the company, with less access to the external market for a while, so that we can obtain this information in addition to not rewarding if the project fails to complete adequately.
And perhaps, more importantly, offer these across all sectors of government contracting and even public sector employment generally.
Though… if we have the mechanisms, why the fuck do we still have so many massive time and budget overruns?
And why aren’t we using these on government IT projects?
So many of them fail spectacularly, imagine if we made 1/3rd of the pay into deferred compensation in this format. We could not only see some of these failures coming and plan for them, but we could drive some of these people that cannot deliver a project and turn everything into dragged-out, cost-plus, out of the sector.
Suppose we have hired a contractor to build a bridge. We issue partial payment for the project in the form of a financial instrument (presumably in a mutual fund or something else that bears interest) which only pays out in X years from now if the bridge does not collapse by then. We then monitor the price of this instrument, particularly the sales by those holding it, in order to obtain information about the quality of the bridge. This allows us to obtain this information without incentivizing anyone to deliberately sabotage the bridge project (assuming we prohibit short-selling).
IDK I fired up FO3 after playing NV a couple years ago and found myself enraged by the bullets moving at the speed of nerf darts. Had to install a mod to fix it. (And that kind of fucked the game balance.)
Admission time: While I enjoyed FO3 very much on the first playthrough, I did use the Wanderer’s Edition mod (or whatever it was called) for most subsequent playthroughs. It makes the combat more lethal and changes the game balance deliberately, but also it feels like guns actually have a real bite to them.
the problem I had, when playing it when it was new, was that you used a mod to make the game harder, then you got to Point Lookout, and everything fucking instagibbed you because Point Lookout also tried to make them game harder by adding free, flat damage to every enemy attack, and if your HP were lower than they should have been you got fucked.
I don’t remember having that problem with the Wanderer’s Edition, but I do remember Point Lookout being harder.
Mostly, the increase in damage all around for gun combat didn’t make the game less or more difficult, but less grindy and more satisfying.
The thing about Fallout 3 is that I had never played a Fallout game before, and when you first exit the vault, and look out at the landscape, that moment…
That is what I play games for.
That feeling of immersion, of another life, a whole other world and life just waiting to be discovered… it’s fantastic, it’s amazing, and we human beings, with only one life, can only truly experience it through the medium of video games.
It’s what makes video games so special, in a way that movies and books cannot be. What sets them apart, particularly AAA games.
So of course, “I” am standing there with the security outfit and “I” immediately began sneaking because that’s the logical thing to do when the environment is full of 2 meter wide radioactive scorpions. But it was great.
A few of them have certainly been cleaned up,
like a dropped sandwich would be, after being “mistaken” for food waste. And in another case, a dropped food item that had nothing to do with the installation was assumed to be part of it.
(Fortunately, the last time I heard about cleaning staff cleaning up an exhibit of this kind by accident, they did not get fired for it.)
Male. I'm not gonna faff around with Unicode emoticons.
I see you subscribe to the Argumate School of Unicode Emoticon Abolitionism.
I can’t say I disagree. May we all work together for a world in which emoticons have been replaced with additional ancient Chinese characters, possibly oracle bone script.
IDK I fired up FO3 after playing NV a couple years ago and found myself enraged by the bullets moving at the speed of nerf darts. Had to install a mod to fix it. (And that kind of fucked the game balance.)
Admission time: While I enjoyed FO3 very much on the first playthrough, I did use the Wanderer’s Edition mod (or whatever it was called) for most subsequent playthroughs. It makes the combat more lethal and changes the game balance deliberately, but also it feels like guns actually have a real bite to them.
“The worlds created by electronic games are more like playgrounds where experience is created by the interaction between a player and a programme. The player cannot claim to impose a personal vision of life on the game, while the creator of the game has ceded that responsibility. No one “owns” the game, so there is no artist, and therefore no work of art.”—
Sorry MoMA, video games are not art (via the-grey-tribe)
I decided to collect this and archive it, after some people asked me what I meant by “fun is an ideology” in the discussion about Polygon the other day.
you know how I always said that critical theory involves just blithely stating hypotheses as if they were facts?
this guy just cuts to the chase and just directly lies as a premise. “everyone was completely fine with financial corruption, gamers only care because they think Zoe Quinn bought reviews with sex, which is unavailable to them”. I can’t read this. he just lies too much. the only kinds of arguments that seem to be available to them are lying and very forcefully stating his premises as facts.
you know how a possible definition of a low-status activity is that you are perceived the more of an expert the less you know about it and engage in it?
This is why Gamergate fascinates me, even though I haven’t played a videogame since around 2008.
the correct reply after this confession is “nice opinion, fuck off”, not taking him seriously for 400 pages
“You are actually not sincerely enjoying it, it’s just artificial desire created by capitalism.” That reminds me of a Rhizome article on porn in which the author answered the question on how the itch should then be scratched and the answer was cultivating a wholesome relationship with a woman. Games aren’t fun, they don’t lead to true self-actualization, but what then does? They could be art, but they aren’t, or aren’t read as such (ie, they or the analysis does not convey messages on class relations).
Insane levels of class reductionism, fantasy=reality, games are good when they’re bad because they expose the reality of class relations, villains should be expropriated, all of this is actually anxiety about how you’re a cog in the capitalist machine, but what is his alternative? He says somewhere how Christianity is like communism, but what branch?
Because I get a sense of that it’s a sort of Calvinism in which only work/self-actualization that enriches the soul according to some vague commie guideline matters (e.g. exploitation for profit is terrible, labour and leisure should serve the community, which is why you’re going to labour camp). We drag you out of Plato’s Cave so we can shove you into the Republic (we’re more equal, says the Philosopher/party intellectual). If you were not weak and impotent, you wouldn’t have sought your solace in consumer goods (this coming from a dude who quotes nothing but Zizek, the go-to philosopher for those whose class analysis can only come through pop culture ephemera).
Also nothing about crunch time and labour circumstances in the industry itself (and thus his posting wholly ignores literally the worst worker exploitation in the vidya industry).
I am 100% sure that a fun game could comment on class struggles.
I know this because Mother 3 exists. And Super Paper Mario.
I am 100% sure that a game could contain an explicit, obnoxious message about class struggles, or a subtle one, even an unintended point about class struggles that emerges from gameplay.
A game could by accident, and with a lot of leeway for interpretation, be a vehicle for feudalism, individualism or neoliberalism. Just think of Eve Online, Minecraft and World of Warcraft. Actually I’m quite sure SMG would agree that WoW is neoliberal.
But there are games that make their points without nuance, without subtlety, and rather explicitly in-character and in-universe. Aerannis by @fffbbb is such a game. Not only is it political - everything is political! - it is explicitly political. The game has a message.
World of Warcraft does not have a political message. The game is not meant to be political. Cart Life and Papers Please are meant to be political.
That does not mean that all these scholarly essays about “The politics of League of Legends” are without merit. But the angry forum posts that decry games as infiltrated and undermined by SJWs are the flip side of academic wankery that brands them as vehicles for neoliberalism.
SMG is an academic wanker stranded in a forum. I don’t know if his words could stand on their own if there was not the occasional goon wandering into these threads, acting as his foil - allowing for breaks from the monotony of baseless theorising about the minds of people who play games by insulting the intelligence of his interlocutor.
So why did I harp on these three statements?
everything is political
games have political content
games have deliberate political messages
People are prone to equivocate between them, step by step. That is not really that bad if you talk about games in the abstract, but it becomes quite annoying if you wrote a game or if you only say you enjoy a game. You talk about the themes in the game, and suddenly you are a hippie nazi communist witch liberal cuckservative.
I believe @avienbgwp that you can make a fun game about class struggles. I’m just wary of somebody going all SMG on that game, redefining the meaning of the game and the word “fun” under my feet.
Grinding
is not separate from the logic of desire, but a purer manifestation of
it. It’s why Progress Quest and Cookie Clicker are fun, despite not
having gameplay. Microtransactions are simply a method of more directly
monetizing grinding - ‘pay to win’ doesn’t ruin fun, but actually allows
for maximum fun.
It’s
incredibly fun to pay to win. That’s why people do it. The problem is
that, once you’ve paid to win, all you’re left with is a videogame - and
videogames are not fun at all.
If you think of game design as an actual discipline, you must either define or taboo the word “fun”. Koster defines fun (and it’s not what SMG is talking about here), while more narrative-oriented game designers do not even want to create Koster-fun or SMG-fun in their games.
SMG does not define what he means by fun, but he uses the word in such a way that it does not mean what we commonly understand when somebody says “fun“, but something very specific: Reward Signals.
SMG enjoys this sophistry too much, enjoys arguing too much to defend a coherent thesis, or to spell out his views.
Gone
Home lacks DLC, microtransactions, grinding, purchasable hats… and as
a result, it provides pretty much no fun whatsoever. This fact makes it
one of the purest examples of game art. That’s not a value judgement;
it probably sucks. Gone Home just is art,
and gamers don’t know what to make of that. Give them Gone Home and
they will try to ‘speedrun’ it. The speedrun takes roughly a minute. The
whole concept is alien to them.
SMG likes to pretend he does the whole metamodernist metacontrarian Lacanian thing, but actually this is the reactionary Roger Ebert position: Can games be art: No, but they can contain art. Art is all the non-game stuff: Story, graphics, dialogue, music. The less gameplay, the more is available for space for art in your game. This is the position of stodgy conservatives in the 90s.
If you simply add grindy combat to Gone Home, you get Bioshock.
That’s a dry ice take. It also betrays the fact that SMG knows a bit more about games than he lets on. But the people who made Gone Home (and Bioshock 2, the same people!) had a certain conception of games and storytelling. Bioshock is not supposed to be a fun game. Bioshock is supposed to be an experience, to be immersive.
The 10/10
for Gone Home is controversial because it makes absolutely no sense
according to the belief that games are fun, and that review scores rank
how fun each game is. The 10/10 is suddenly gauging artistry, and it
instantly reveals the whole system to be laughably inadequate. Imagine
ranking paintings this way.
Any score for Gone Home would have the same problem. “Games are art, but not fun” is the edgiest take possible. “Games are fun, but not art“ is just the standard 90s literature snob take. SMG constructs the category-theoretical dual of a Hegelian synthesis between the two.
The whole thread is really interesting because SMG accepts all claims of GG and their framing. At the same time, SMG demonstrates conspicuous ignorance of games, conspicuous knowledge of certain games,
Gamers seriously believe that a dude’s loopy girlfriend threatening to kill herself should be international news.
Hey quick question because this thread is long and I haven’t read your posts carefully.
If Hitman gets an unprecedented 6/10 for writing, then gamers actually believe that they are not allowed to
like the game. They (jews) have taken the fun, and they (jews) are not
allowing me to have it. If games are actually fun, this obviously
wouldn’t happen.
You are getting worked up imagining their outrage, and that betrays a lack of self-confidence.
The proletariat includes people from all segments of society.
This is a shell game with goalpoasts, and it’s fascinating.
It’s fascinating because SMG got banned from SA so late. This constant bulverism, this constant taking your opponent’s statements and twisting them into a pattern must be corrosive to a community. He’s not writing insight porn about topics, he’s also marketing his insight porn as insight into the motives of other posters. This is almost confusion politics.
If he had a tumblr, somebody would call this gaslighting -it’s not actually gaslighting, but it’s close enough to the tumblr conception of it.
I think by reading into the linked page again, I have started channeling SMG myself, and everything since the occurence of the word “neoliberalism” at the end of the fifth paragraph of this post has become kind of wonky.
So I’m going to twist this into a conclusion: SMG sounds like somebody who is not in his right mind, but he is oscillating in a somewhat predictable way between different opinions. He uses the same words in many of his forum posts, but they mean different things, or at least he uses them as if they did. Maybe he means the same thing throughout, and is even more inconsistent.
Okay, so I had a response ready to type out, and then I got sidelined by the confusing commentary about “jews”, which I’m almost certain was antisemitic.
But anyway, I don’t fault game devs for wanting to put more explicit political content into their games, not separate game devs for wanting their games to be less explicitly political. Artists don’t have a duty to express ideas about politics in their art, unless self-imposed.
I don’t worry about people misinterpreting art, if there is such a thing. Death of the author and all that (just don’t then blame the author for your interpretation). Calling Gone Home “not a game” doesn’t make it not a game, and calling it not fun doesn’t make it so for others, not that that’s what he meant by “fun”. It’s just one extra level to reach understanding that SMG uses “fun” to refer to reward signals, but once there, the problem is when he (seemingly) switches back to the common definition of fun when talking about scores reflecting the funness of games.
I’ve actually heard the point that I think SMG is trying to make before, though they used the term “context” instead of “art” to refer to the non-interactive parts of games (just the point mind you,l not the position). They argued that without context, games can only be so entertaining; that without context most people wouldn’t find even their favourite games as enticing to play, and further that without context, games can only convey a very limited set of emotions.
At worst, if “fun” gets redefined, we’d end up with a different word to replace it. That’s not so bad.
Fun
So if you’re a game designer who is committed to game design as a discipline, you would both avoid saying fun without qualifiers, and use a more vague term whenever possible when you talk about design goals, as well as more concrete terms for the feelings and dynamics that make your game fun. You still need to talk to players though, and you can’t rob them of their vocabulary. You can’t take the word “fun“ away from other people. You can only ask them to clarify, because they don’t always mean “engaging“ by “fun”.
You also don’t gain anything by only replacing one word - “fun” - that refers to a broad and ill-defined concept with another word - “engagement” or “entertainment” - that refers to the same concept.
Politics
But anyway, I don’t fault game devs for wanting to put more explicit
political content into their games, not separate game devs for wanting
their games to be less explicitly political. Artists don’t have a duty
to express ideas about politics in their art, unless self-imposed.
I agree completely.
I don’t worry about people misinterpreting art, if there is such a
thing. Death of the author and all that (just don’t then blame the
author for your interpretation).
This is a big problem. Not only the concept of “fun” is ill-defined. It is very unclear to me, and not agreed-upon in the wider gaming community, what it means for something to be political.
If the author was truly dead, games journalists would not change their positive reviews of games because the author said something political they disagreed with on twitter. Some critics invoke the death of the author when the author defends himself, and others think the author reflects back on the game.
To a certain extent, you get these effects from any loose coalition of people with shared goals but different philosophies.
Art
Calling Gone Home “not a game” doesn’t make it not a game
Early in game studies, or even earlier, back when Chris Crawford wrote the book on game design and founded the GDC, but up until 2008, game design people were exasperated at literary critics. People looked at games, applied the lenses of film studies to literary criticism, and concluded that games were not art (yet).
There had been movements to produce hypertext literature and interactive fiction, art forms distinct from games. Game designers, hypermedia artists, and IF authors all tried to establish their own modes of criticism and analysis. Marie-Laure Ryan, Espen Aarseth, Jesper Juul, Ian Bogost and Frank Lantz tried to understand games, to give us a gamey vocabulary to talk about them.
When independent game development started out as a movement, it was all about games that tried to be art as games, eschewing the trappings of films, paintings, and books. Indie games like World of Goo made bold stylistic choices against a trend toward higher graphical fidelity. Indie games went for tighter loops instead of more stuff. Passage communicated something profound through its mechanics.
Gone Home was so different from games, especially from early indie games. Gone Home used the medium of AAA games, a 3D engine. Gone Home was more hypertext literature in a 3D space than a game. Gone Home tries to be art in the way a book is art.
That’s fine by itself. But when Gone Home came out, everybody said that Gone Home is art, that Gone Home is proof that games can be art, that more games should be like Gone Home. It’s like a stage director telling me that Dogville was the proof that movies can be art, and we need more movies like Dogville and fewer movies like Jupiter Ascending. (Only Dogville came out when we already agreed that movies are art, and it was not made into a symbol of a lerger issue.) When Gone Home came out, we thought we had just finished this debate, and suddenly people flocked to it to concede that games can be art, as long as they are notgames.
The question is, why are these people relevant? Why should we care if literary critic types think games are “art”? Why do they deserve for us to argue with them that they are, rather than to keep putting out and playing games until the next generation of critics replaces them? If some snob says “games aren’t art” to protect his status, self-image, and simultaneous ability to ignore them, why should we care? We don’t owe them anything.
I have no conscious impressions about your gender.
This technically makes you more true to Core Rationalist Principles than anyone else who has answered this ask! Very good1! You win a square watermelon for this take.
1Where “Good” is defined as “within the framework of Yudkowskyan principles” and not as The Good, or other Goods as defined by competing ideological frameworks. Offer not valid in Alaska or Hawaii. Void where prohibited.
watermelon-flavored strawberry, but perhaps just because of the avatar
Sometimes I’ll… hmn, how to describe, use certain twists of language or hints in order to come off one way or the other.
Someone once asked, on a post, “wait, is that a period joke?” Yes, yes it was. It was also several other jokes simultaneously. But that has a certain weight to it in peoples’ gender reading intuitions.
Anyhow,
Avatars have a powerful effect on how we read people online, and lead to us making various subconscious assumptions. Don’t worry though, I didn’t choose my avatar as a ‘gotcha’ to trip people up with.
In an environment where gender presentation is much more of a choice than it is elsewhere, it also becomes part of communication and describing one’s intent to others, just as @wirehead-wannabe‘s rat avatar gives off a certain vibe about him, and @argumate‘s rotated pyramid is as frustratingly neutral as his posts.
So the avatar, too, is part of the message of this blog, an indicator of tone and so on, in addition to visual branding to make it recognizable and differentiate it from other blogs.
I will say that the grey is a deliberate choice as no real races are grey. Yet.
You’re missing like the remaining 11/12ths necessary to describe a full neurotype matrix. I feel cheated, here. But I guess I can’t expect people to be living in the gender world of 2052.
Seriously WHY THE FUCK IS NO ONE PANICKING. This is the point that we can never go back from. No more revolutions, no more coordinating against the powers that be, no more walking down the street to buy food without anyone knowing who you are or what you’ve been doing for the past month.
I was going to say nothing could be done, but actually something could. Unauthorized release of information on someone’s whereabouts and other data could be made a crime of strict civil liability, incurring what would normally be a small fee. Now ordinarily that wouldn’t do much, but after the first few lawsuits, suddenly all those smart features on the phones would be used to auto-blur faces unless the user specifically unblurs them, etc. Also it would kill Equifax and other companies too stupid to adequately secure data.
I made an image edit of one of the images you made with the tanks, and I would like your permission before making a post using the image. The image edit is at imgur / YwFgcjG png . If it pleases the blogger, may I have your permission to use this image in a post?
it was a genuine toss up whether to send that one to you or argumate, correct
Let’s be honest. Kylo Ren doesn’t even have baseline cybernetic enhancements, so if I told him my full gender configuration matrix, it would just render as an unreadable string. (He’s probably not even K-band neurotype, tbh.)
“Men are indeed worse than women in various ways, more antisocial, violent etc…
And we have egg-combining technology so we can make a Lesbian Utopia…
HOWEVER, we should still keep the population at approximately 50:50… For the long-term psychological benefits of romantic interaction, given most women are straight.”
You say this, but I already once did a fake nation writeup where they created a single-sex and it turned out terrible - not because they weren’t gay enough, but rather, because they embraced the worst aspects of both masculinity and femininity simultaneously. (And also, they would have been less bad off if they had just a few teaspoons of Feminism, but that wasn’t going to happen, for Reasons.)
You say this as a shitpost, but if we project my views into the past while keeping them semi-coherent, I would have actually suggested making a queer or gay jurisdiction as a test of just how dangerous it really is.
chelsea manning has such a command over the internet left right now and she’s so pure and amazing and her politics only get more radical literally every day
here’s to hoping she leads us all into a revolution within the next year
Chelsea has achieved left unity through the power of emoji.
Come on, we all know in two years the left will, at best, consider her a vapid distraction, and at worst a reactionary racist. No one can survive the scrutiny applied to leftist purity culture like she’s facing and remain pristine.
Literally instantly after she says a shibboleth wrong, it’ll be back to intentionally misgendering her because she is disqualified from the good gender. I won’t be surprised.
puts post into multi-month queue to see how this turns out in the future
