So, the Republican shift toward the far right was already in full swing by the 2000s. You’d need to go back to at least Reagan to head that off. Trickle down economics, Two Santas, etc. was already decades in the making. My dad had already been fully brainwashed by talk radio in the 90s.

But on the flip side, the Democratic establishment has made it painfully clear even to this day that their only priority has always been to maintain the status quo for the privileged NIMBY class. The Republican party didn’t need to do anything to keep unaffordability rising, they all want to maintain the housing market bubble to protect the wealth of boomers.

Yeah, a focus on altruism, but make investments to be more effective at it. Hey, you could even get ahead of the game and start a crypto exchange!

Idk but an AI will have written it, and 99.9% of its views will be from bots.

Assuming the content is merely controversial and not objectionable (i.e. exploitative), it seems there may be room for an art-centric game store front.

Ironically, I’m betting it’s nowhere near as exploitative as the monetization practices of virtually every AAA release these days.

Fair enough lol, can’t argue with that.

where we didn’t have to assume every single god-damned connection was a hostile entity

But you always did, it was always being abused, regularly. That’s WHY we now use secure connections.

I think I’m just not picking up whether you’re actually trying to pitch a technical solution, or just wishing for a perfect world without crime.

I’m generally not interested in playing a game in any way other than how the dev(s) intended. Ex. for a souls like, I don’t get any enjoyment using mods to access content I’m otherwise unable to on my own. Using cheats to unlock all guns in GTA, or to get infinite rare candies in pokemon, or to time travel in Animal Crossing is fun for all of about 5 minutes, at which point I feel like I’ve deconstructed the fun out of the game.

My unique experience with a game is defined both by what I do and what I don’t experience. If I use cheats to ensure I experience everything, then IMO I’ve effectively dashed anything unique about my experience with the game.

That said, there are games that I feel I’ve experienced all there is that the dev intended, and now I can use it as a platform for my own creation through mods or custom game modes. Those are generally few and far between though. Something like Minecraft, primarily because it works great as a platform for multiplayer interaction.

I think those were mind blowing when I first played hl2, just because real time physics and destruction was novel, but now I think they grind the pacing to a halt. I think they just don’t work in an action shooter IMO.

Oh you mean a Jumbotron?

Adding a reboot button is ONLY necessary if the game isn’t made correctly. There is otherwise no reason to ever need to restart the game. I would see the addition of a restart option as lazy or an admission of failure by the dev.

almost nobody has put an actual maximiser in a game.

Turn based games would certainly have one. Generally it’s easier to create an AI that maximizes utility for the AI, it’s more difficult to tune it to not trounce the player lol.

This reminds me of how L4D does have that sort of indirect dynamic AI that spawns zombies based on the player’s behavior. If the players have a lot of ammo and health, or are going too slow, the game cranks up the threat. If you’re barely hanging on, the game holds back. I guess that’s not quite adversarial though, more like the AI is trying to maximize the players’ perception of a fun/fair challenge.

Yeah, certainly, sorry if that wasn’t clear. Up above I tried to stipulate that I was speaking from a game theory perspective.

And yeah, you can model the AI in a game in whichever way is most useful. I said as long as they have utility functions that differ from the player(s), but then you also can recursively define games in terms of winning games.

Ex. the famous case of the US deliberately losing battles to not give away that they had cracked the German cipher. Each battle could be modeled as a game, and the war could be modeled in terms of battles.

Similarly, a single room in wolfenstein could present an contained “game”, the outcome of which is applicable to which ending you get in the larger “game” (I haven’t played it), and thus the AI would be agents at one level, but state/strategy at another.

Depends if you define game ais as “agents”, otherwise your definition of game only allows multiplayer games.

AIs are agents when they have their own utility to maximize that differs from other agents (including the player).

their “win condition” is overwhelming you with dirt and hiding it in weird places.

Is that a thing? Does the map create more dirt as a function of the player’s actions? Does the player need to account for this and adjust their strategy to counter it? That would change my categorization, yes.

coop breaks your definition too

It depends. If all players have the same motive and there are no competing agents, then it’s a simulation. If players have different motives, then it’s a game. If players compete against AI agents, then it’s a game.

Maybe a better definition of “game” is needed

The formal definition of a game is:

K_a, {x_K}K∈K_a, x,K_i, {≻K}K∈K_i

I’m arguing that if the size of K_a==1 then it’s not a game, but that page is generous:

For games with a single coalition of action, the set of all situations may be taken to be the set of strategies of this unique coalition of action, and no further mention is made of strategies. Such games are therefore called non-strategic games. All remaining games, those with two or more coalitions of action, are called strategic games.

Which would include a person standing in a room doing nothing as a game. I’m saying that’s not a game, hope we agree lol.

Well that’s not a good argument lol. That’s like saying doing quantum physics is just writing a bunch of shapes on paper and using words that most people don’t understand, so it’s basically the same as what a toddler does every day.

Most FPS games require developing a strategy or skill in order to reach the win condition. If it’s multiplayer, then the strategy development and execution require social interaction or deduction. It fits the definition of a “game” from a game theory perspective. There is more than one agent, they each have win conditions, and their actions prompt reactions from each other.

But this doesn’t, it’s a simulation. I assume it has an end condition, but the strategy is just “move towards it”. Maybe a game like Satisfactory is a more appropriate comparison. In both games you are making optimizations to move toward the end condition faster. You take actions, but there’s no competing agent with its own win condition responding to your actions.

Maybe there’s a compelling story to be had that the trailer is underplaying, idk. I don’t think Powerwash Simulator is hooking people with its story, though.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand why games like this are so successful lol. I guess it’s just the dopamine hits without the microtransactions? It’s not a “game”, though, not in a theoretical sense. More like busy work simulator.

Smaller makes it more expensive. I hope it’ll be under $1000, but I think I wouldn’t be surprised if it were $1200.

Historically, the only thing we’ve found that lowers wealth inequality is inevitably large scale war and death. And i don’t expect that to change before the next time it lowers.

I’ve been with my partner for 16 years. We met one of my friends for brunch last year, and afterwards he and I hung out, while my partner went home. Before she left, my friend said, “it was so good to see you <her name>” and hugged her. Then she turned to me and I said, “bye bitch, see ya at the house”. We laughed and she took off. My friend was like, “dude, I can’t believe you said that and she was cool with it. My gf would be pissed at me for days!”

So yeah, I got a good one :)

How does one even accidentally steal a texture someone else made?

The fact that you’re asking this is almost like…maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about? And should defer to an actual creative who does?

First off, it is a famously non trivial problem to compare every texture to every piece of art on the internet. It is trivial to add a bit of impercievable noise to deliberately foil even the best reverse image searching methods.

I think you may be taking for granted the number of artists and the level of autonomy they are given over their craft for a project of this complexity.

It’s actually more weird to me that you don’t understand why this is easy for a single dev to get away with. This is what happens when a studio trusts its artists to create something. No one is excusing it, but stop acting like Bungie did it on purpose. There’s no evidence of that. The only thing they’re guilty of is making a mediocre extraction shooter.

Roblox is making absolute bank. They have the resources to actually solve this if they wanted. They just believe the inevitable slap on the wrist will cost them less than they stand to make in the meantime.