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So you mean this section?
I taught at a place called Bowdoin College for 16 years, and during the last of those there was a student in attendance you’ve perhaps heard of.
This didn’t even register as unclear or unusual. Obviously “those” refers to years. Are you a native English speaker?
By contrast I found it refreshing compared to the usual 6th grade level found online and in the news.
And the ultra rich would deserve to lose everything
A bag of chips at one of the local groceries is $7, and it’s smaller than it used to be.
Everything is more expensive and smaller.
If the private market can’t do it at a profit without cutting corners or stiffing labor, then don’t.
Probably get as many conservatives out of power as possible. Once they’re gone we can work on climate change, better electoral systems, removing the evils of capitalism, and so on.
Wow all those replies are terrible. Twitter is such a trash heap and people are not shy about who they are.
Sure, but that seems like a separate, closely related, topic.
I was mostly objecting to the idea that souls games are just memorizing and pushing buttons. That accusation could be leveled at most single player games, but people seem to mostly bring it up to denigrate souls games.
Multiplayer often has less memorization though, as you say.
Yeah, that archetype of player is annoying, but I think it might be just a loud minority.
It’s wild to me how some places I’ve worked are like locked down, all the infrastructure is in terraform or whatever and can be deployed immediately… and other places are like “ssh into prod with the credentials from confluence, edit the config in vim, and paste the new code into a new file”
Still on my phone so this might be a little limited.
I can imagine some situations where it could be sure, but most of the times it isn’t and the times it isn’t isn’t worth the effort for me. It just makes the game less fun for no conceivable benefit most of the time. The backtracking Im describing here is essentially filler (the type I don’t think most people like).
So when it is not filler, should you be disallowed from skipping it? Who is to say what the benefit is? Does the design intent matter?
Of course everyone should be able to complete every game. I can’t even think of what point this could be leading to except the obvious absurd idea that people should be expecting not to be able to enjoy the things they purchase.
This is a big disagreement. I don’t think everyone should be able to finish every game. They should be able to work the controls. If someone made Calculus Souls I’m just not going to beat it. I’m not good at math. I don’t expect them to give me the answers or add in an Arithmetic mode. If it’s there, fine, but that’s gravy. That’s like getting a second game for free.
Did you ever read the book House of Leaves? It’s great. Unreliable narrators, unconventional layout and use of form. Several friends of mine bounced right off of it. “Can’t read this”, they said. I wouldn’t say they were gatekept. I wouldn’t say the author is ableist because they didn’t also provide a linear narrative, without all the footnotes. I accept that not everyone is going to finish that book. Even if they paid money for it.
My dad bought a big jigsaw puzzle once. Loves puzzles. Couldn’t do this one. He put it back in the box and never finished it. He didn’t say it was an accessibility problem. It would never occur to him to ask for, like, the backs of the pieces to be numbered
People routinely accept that things will be hard, and maybe they can’t beat them. Maybe they could with more practice, but it’s not worth it. This is not a failure of the game or toy.
That’s what a lot of these discussions feel like. Someone made something interesting and challenging, and people want it changed. If you take all the footnotes out of house of leaves, you get a very different, much reduced, result.
I think the idea here that you seem to be putting out is that there is some point at which a players choice to change the difficulty is no longer valid, and I don’t think any such point exists. Let people do what they want, and give them some reasonable defaults that you’ve actually tested for/think blend well.
Well, earlier I said something about tuning difficulty down to the point of triviality, and you said that was a straw man.
But look, I’m not against options in games (assuming everyone playing gives informed consent. Unilaterally cheating is not okay). I just think the framing of it as accessibility in the same way that subtitles or changing controller inputs is dicey. “I think this would be more fun” is a fine, subjective, argument. “This game is ableist” is much shakier.
Of course, if you’re not saying lack of options is ableist but having them makes the game more fun, then I guess we violently agree.
Well, with the footnote that I do believe some people would ruin their own fun by turning the difficulty too high or low, but that’s not my business, and could be a net zero when compared to people not having fun with the available options. (But like for real when I was a kid I briefly ruined Diablo by cheating myself all the cool items.)
And the thing I was waiting for in real life has occurred. No more editing! Post away!
Right. But I think that applies to both. Lots of options and ways to solve problems, not just memorizing and following a recipe.
You have tons of options you can think of and you can solve problems in a bunch of different ways
Is this describing Baldur’s gare or elden ring? Because it seems to apply to both to me
I think our assumptions are not shared, so arguing more isn’t going to be productive until that’s straightened out.
When you say difficulty settings, I think of lowering enemy effectiveness, raising player effectiveness, and removing consequences for bad play (eg: permadeath of characters). Is that what you mean?
You mention less annoying backtracking. Can you imagine a game where the “annoying back tracking” is fulfilling an important role (eg: resources attrition, encouraging revisiting areas)?
If so, is there a threshold beyond which is too much? If there’s a slider that adjusts enemy damage, should it go to zero? If no, how do you decide the limits? What about the players who want to exceed them?
It seems like you have the assumption that everyone should be able to complete every game. Is that correct? Is that true for all media, or only video games?
I would write more but I’m on my phone and almost to my destination.
Dark souls would be a very different experience if the monsters weren’t threatening and there were no setbacks for defeat. People believe the experience is important. Accepting that defeat is only a temporary setback and you can just try again is a significant experience, and if you make the game trivial you won’t achieve that.
isnt difficult in a sense that you have to think a lot but rather that you memorise what moves the boss has and press your buttons fast enough.
I see this a lot, but that wipes out like most games. Baldur’s gate you just click on stuff. Tekken you just hit buttons. Tetris is just moving blocks around.
Also you often don’t rote memorize the moves. People play by reaction or without knowing exactly what’s coming.
Sometimes it’s easier to type cd ~/D{tab}/M{tab}{enter} open . than using the GUI.
Plus all the fancy stuff that people do with scripting
One time in a game of DND the players were exploring a strange cave system, and found a strange thick goo collecting in a pool. Players being players, one of them decided to eat some.
It was, in my notes, some sort of celestial honey made by these extra planar insects that were causing some of the region’s problems. It was supposed to taste amazing, but with some drawbacks. I started to blank when trying to describe how good it was, and the phrase that came out was “it’s like… It’s like … it’s like seven pizzas!”
The player eating it, his eyes lit up and was like “AMAZING”
The other players were like “wat”
I think that adequately captured how delicious it is but also maybe you shouldn’t be eating it.
Several of my friends are non technical and just put up with the ads. I guess they never thought there was another way
There was an article on a tech news site recently about how to unshittify windows. Just like 4 pages of stuff to turn off and uninstall.
People in the comments unsurprisingly were like “Linux is free and getting better all the time”. People were mad. So mad.
Ok, I apologize because reading that back that sounded extremely passive aggressive but I did mean it sincerely. The sentence quoted seemed natural to me, but I could imagine someone whose native language was something else might find it odd. I butcher pronouns in French all the time (though I’m nowhere near fluent).