I have REALLY gotten sick of the “git gud” crowd.

I’ve always been sick of it. It’s impacted how developers create games.

Once upon a time, hard and difficult games on 8-bit and 16-bit platforms were created accidentally, either because of design bugs, or developers not having time to run through proper play-test cycles, or only doing the play testing themselves. We put up with it because we were kids and had a limited budget for games, so we played what we had. It was never intentional, since they wanted to make sure it was balanced enough to appeal to the general audience, but still have difficulty levels for people who wanted to try out a second harder playthrough.

Then, games like Dark Souls came along, which pretended that hard games were a From Software invention, and propped up a community of egoists and digital sadomasochists. All they did was make the designs more deliberate, to the point of developer trolling. (I know this started earlier on in the indie scene, especially roguelikes, but Dark Souls popularized it.)

The “git gud” crowd pushes this narrative of “if it’s possible to do, then it’s the player’s fault for not having the skill to do so”, to the point of personifying a game with statements like “the game is punishing me with bad RNG” or “the game is actively trying to kill me”. This completely ignores the developers’ responsibility of instituting balanced difficulty levels, since it’s the developers’ fault that “the game” does these things.

Again, it has really impacted how developers create games nowadays. First, the “git gud” crowd is loud enough that developers now think they deserve a voice, as if difficult games weren’t absolutely everywhere, even before Dark Souls. The popularity of speed running makes them think that have to cater to that crowd, and streamers streaming impossible challenges skews that difficulty Overton window even more. Developers think they have to make some impossibly difficult game, so that streamers, who famously play video games for a living for thousands of hours a year, will advertise their game and push it to the top.

This predates the ai bubble. There used to be a really common “plagiarism detector” (something like CheckMeIn?] that would generate a “similarity score” with a database of literature. Institutions were welcome to set their own thresholds of what they considered too similar. I hit the threshold multiple times in completely original works by using language that was simply too literary or formal in nature.

This is because all art are forms of remixing, whether it’s intentional or not. We’re teaching the wrong lessons here.

For many many centuries, art and artists, whether it’s musicians, artists, actors, writers, essayists, whoever, they have been facing an uphill battle of oversaturation in each creative industry. It’s only gotten worse in the past 50-75 years, and we’re more exposed to the sheer numbers now. We are throwing a drop of water into an ocean and hoping people will notice.

Trying to use “plagiarism detectors” against databases of millions or billions of pages is about as pointless as accusing songwriters of plagiarizing songs based on four notes. There are only so many musically-useful combinations of four notes, and they have all been used. Adam Neely has been reporting on this garbage for years.

LLMs are just making the problem even more obvious: creativity is not unique, it is not unique to people, and people have been mentally trained to expect uniqueness so much that we purposely ignore 99.999% of the material that is offered to us. As such, only 0.0001% of the ones who create earn any sort of popularity, and the rest starve to death. We ourselves are starved for content, as we consume anything that fits our extremely narrow definition of creativity like the voracious vampires we are.

As somebody who has used Fiverr, there’s a lot of good artists on there, but it does not cost five dollars.

Voyager has its moments, but I would consider it the weakest of the three. Admittedly, I didn’t keep up with the whole series, because I was kinda bored of the concept.

TNG is classic episodic Trek, with very good writing in most of its episodes, even if the first season was a bit weak at spots. Even then, parts of the first season were still interesting. It really hits its stride on the 3rd season.

DS9 is my favorite Trek. It tackled darker themes that TNG and Roddenberry didn’t want to touch, shades of gray that exposed cracks in the Federation, but still remains Star Trek. It didn’t completely throw away the ideals of the Federation in a weakly-written, grimdark manner like Picard. DS9 had some of the best written episodes, and by the 2nd or 3rd season, it was (copying off of B5) telling an overarching narrative that really kept you interested.

Though, Babylon 5 is the series that really started the whole narrative approach to sci-fi. I love both B5 and DS9, but DS9 did steal a ton of ideas from the B5 bible that JMS gave Paramount, during his initial pitch. DS9 had a lot of really good individual episodes, but I thought Babylon 5 had a better, more memorable narrative.

I had some issues with the almost nonsensical decision-making of the end of Season 2. But, I can forgive some of it because of the sheer amount of risk-taking on display to show well-crafted mini-stories within the main plot. And they had the balls to really end the series with a proper finale.

Some parts were messy. Some parts were loosely-connected with bad logic. But, it was still one of the most creative series I’ve ever seen.

Valiant efforts, but I hope Adobe and their software die a horrible death.

Absolutely. Been using GIMP for years, and I have zero need to switch to bloated, Windows-only, monthly-subscription garbage.

DaVinci Resolve, too. The improvements on Resolve 20 are amazing.

Tooting my own horn here, but I just put out a SOMA video essay recently, for when you finish the game: The Lessons of SOMA Are Timeless (or on PeerTube)

JMS had a plan with Babylon 5. He knew how to carry a series forward, figured out alternate plans in case of emergencies, and despite everything, people still remember it 25-30 years later.

Same with Sam Esmail and Mr. Robot. Or The Expanse, despite how many cancellations it got.

The only thing people remember Lost for is how much they fucked up the ending. Or BSG… fantastic series, terrible ending. Just wasted potential tarnishing their legacy.

At least, Vince Gilligan has a good track record.

There’s a Safe Mode, and if you don’t like horror games or anxiety-inducing chases, it’s a good compromise. I talk about that in the intro.

Simon is the most audience surrogate of all time. Also, I think his continuous lack of understanding is partially due to his “flat” scan, being done when the technology was in its infancy.

Space Quest Historian put out a good video talking about these kinds of games. I think it’s too easy for people to get so hung up on these definitions. I know everybody has these kind of expectations of what a “computer game” is supposed to be, but story-focused “walking simulators” still have a place in an interactive medium.

You can’t put yourself in Simon’s shoes like this in a movie or TV series, because you’re controlling him in a first-person view. It just wouldn’t be the same perspective, which is critically important in a game where the POV is almost a centerpiece to the story.

It’s a different kind of game, sure, and not everybody is going to like the lack of traditional “gameplay” or whatever you want to call it. But, it’s a category of game that should be respected as just a valid a “game” as any other computer game. It’s just far more story-focused than most.

Also, also, @Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world, since you asked me to let you know when it was out, here it is!

If only Amazon didn’t need to waste a billion dollars on a failed LotR series.

I didn’t like how much they argued during the first season. The book crew were much more professional and acted like they already knew each other for many years. Which they did.

TV Holden and Amos still had their moments. Still some of the best characters on television.

However, while I saw some really nice updates come through, I also saw some that weren’t so great. It felt like they were making poor choices, likely because of their legal department.

Eugen Rochko: That’s exactly how I would put it. It’s like Cambridge Analytica burned them, and they didn’t want a repeat. And that really limited what they could do.

The tone of how they speak about Meta and Threads bothers me. It was incredibly obvious why it failed.

I was on lemmy.film.

Terraria has always been $10. Stardew Valley: $15. Undertale: $10. Braid was $15 when it launched, and even then, people were bitching about the price. So, the price tag has always been in that range since the first indie game launched.

I think you’re ignoring the incredible amount of oversaturation in the industry. Games are everywhere. I could throw a thousand sticks into the wilderness and it would smack into a thousand different game studios, all working for years on their big hit that (in their eyes) would make them millions of dollars.

But, people don’t have time to even play their own Steam backlog. On average, people buy more games than they even have time to play, and that’s not even counting the sheer amount of movies, music, TV shows, YouTube videos, whatever that is competing for people’s time. If they are playing video games, then they are not watching or listening to other media.

It’s not just the gaming industry. The entire creative industry is propped up on the backing of a 98% failure rate, or sometimes even a 99.99% failure rate. The lucky few get to spout off their survivorship biases, under the bones of former companies and individuals, crunched under the weight of oversaturation.

Will do! One of my favorites as well, which is part of the reason why I’m working on this thing.