Kobolds with a keyboard.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I would argue that in private spaces, absolutely. The owner of a private space has the exclusive right to admit anyone they choose and bar anyone they choose, based on any criteria they wish. [To preempt the obvious objection, I’m talking about e.g. a private residence, not a business.]

    I’d argue this is doubly true for support group style groups. If there’s a support group for a topic that is exclusively experienced by one sex, I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to make that group exclusively for that sex. (Examples might be testicular or ovarian cancer sufferers.)





  • This seems to be a trend as if you only take into account reviews with 2+ hours of play time, Highguard’s opinions are “mixed” rather than “overwhelmingly negative”.

    People who enjoy a game are more likely to have more playtime, therefore the higher the playtime in the ‘window’ of reviews that you look at, the more likely they are to skew high. This is exactly what you’d expect to see on any game, barring situations like the developers making changes that ruin a game that previously was good.

    So after 2 hours of not having a good time, the game was deemed bad and negative reviews were written.

    Two hours is the window for a refund, so I absolutely make a call within 2 hours. If a game - especially a new / expensive game - hasn’t engaged me within that time, I refund it and move on. I don’t have enough hours in the day to play games I don’t enjoy hoping that they’ll get good eventually. Why should anyone feel the need to do that, whether they’re giving the game the benefit of the doubt or not? It’s the MMO argument. “The game gets really good around the 100 hour mark!” I don’t care. I’m not sticking around for it. There are plenty of other games to play that are fun within the first 2 hours. If a developer expects people to slog through an unenjoyable 2+ hours to get to “the good parts”, they probably deserve the negative reviews.





  • I think devs actually get quite a bit for that 30%. Let’s present a hypothetical. What if Valve offered an option where you could list your game on Steam with no restrictions and they’d only take a 10% cut, but the tradeoff is, they won’t promote your game at all? Like, it won’t show up in any Steam storefront advertisements, can’t participate in sales, etc. - it’s still there if it’s linked to from off-Steam or if someone searches for it, but it won’t be promoted, period.

    How do you think that would work out for developers? I’d argue not well, especially for small studios.

    The promotion those games get applies to the game as a whole, not only through Steam - someone can see the promotion on Steam, then go shop around and buy it elsewhere. Why should Valve promote a game if they aren’t getting a cut of the sales?




  • and privatised

    Completely agree with you here. If the technology was being developed and made available to everyone for non-commercial use, while they charged for the commercial use cases, I’d have less of an issue with it (aside from the obvious and serious objection that they’re functionally stealing creatives’ work and profiting off of it - but again, I think this objection could be invalidated with UBI.)


  • I’m going to play devil’s advocate and present a hypothetical alternative here…

    Visual art is not about portraying something in such or such specific manner (be it realism, surrealism, or whatever else) it is about sharing an experience (which no AI can do, as it doesn’t live and can’t experience shit by itself) and it is about sharing an emotion that can be ranging from the pure emotional one to the most cerebral.

    AI art is boring.

    I’d argue that in some applications, this is fine. For example, corporate logos, the equivalent of clip art in presentations, etc. You can argue that that isn’t really ‘art’ in the sense that you’re describing it, but whatever you want to call it, personally, I don’t care if no artist has to do that BS. I highly doubt many artists really want to be doing that stuff. The problem isn’t that AI is being used to generate soulless art for soulless projects, it’s that it’s taking work away from real artists (and that we as modern humans, as a whole, put so much weight on employment).

    If we gave UBI to creatives that covered all of their expenses and let them pursue whatever projects they wanted to work on (and thereby we still, as a species, got to enjoy the actual art by actual artists), would it be so bad that the shitty work is being done by a computer? Theoretically there’d be more ‘real’ art, since artists wouldn’t have to waste their time on the bullshit. Let’s go back to a system of patronage, where society as a whole become the patrons.



  • Achievements (for me, at least) are just a reason to spend more time with a game that I enjoy. In most cases, I have trouble enjoying a game if I don’t have goals to work towards (either game-imposed or self-imposed). If I finish the main part of the game, and am not tired of it yet, achievements give me goals that I can follow if I want to keep playing.

    Definitely agree that there’s too many games that have achievements that are just in no way worth the time and aren’t even fun as an auxiliary goal, though. The best ones are the ones that get you to do things you otherwise wouldn’t (e.g. playing a non-standard playthrough of the game). The lazy ones (‘Kill X enemies, Earn Y dollars’) are just busywork or earned ‘automatically’ while doing other things and add nothing.