Kichae

In business, all data are vanity metrics. If they make you look good, you slap that shit on everything; if they make you look bad, you “don’t have it”.

It’s just that sometimes you can use negative data to make decisions that look good to those above you, and sometimes you know that you can’t.

This is Elon Musk erasure.

Not explicitly, maybe, but implicitly, absolutely, and in multiple ways:

• Supporting the system that creates one over the other
• Having ‘bootstrap’ attitudes about the poor
• Worrying about property value over utilization
• Complaining about the homeless rather than the lack of action on housing
• Voting against people who run on public housing

In so, so many ways, people say they prefer the latter over the former. Usually just with the caveat that the homeless people also be invisible.

Save scumming is natural, and normal, and nothing to be ashamed of.

It does make hair grow on your palms, though.

Being popular and being a good game are completely different things. Being fun and being a good game are different things. Being useful and being a good game are different things.

I’m not making a value judgement on whether 5e is likeable. I like 5e. It’s just that it’s not a complete and coherent experience.

Argument ad populum doesn’t change that.

5e is a bad table top game, but that’s part of what’s made it so successful - it’s not treated as a game unto itself anymore, but just some loose guidelines to help generate setpieces, and people like that.

But also BG3 seems to recognize this and actually fills in the broken or missing game elements, just like everyone’s DM does whenever they come across these gaps. It takes an opinionated approach to implementing the rules, and does so with the confidence of years of building CRPGs.

It’s an impressive feat.

They were never about hardware limitations. Limitations of imagination of the designers, maybe, but we’ve had action games for 35 years now.

Actions such as ‘press the trigger and your character will shoot a gun’ and ‘press the button and your character will swing their sword’ can now be easily expressed without going through a command system.

And yet we can’t purge ourselves of the awfulness that is quick-time events. I don’t buy the argument. It’s an attempt to handwave away trends without discussing real causes and effect. If the suggestion here were true, other similar mechanics, such as QTEs, would have been dead a long time ago, not be a core element of a huge number of triple-A titles.

This aligns with my experience of a very particular kind of game designer. I worked with one who, in a casual conversation about games where someone said “there’s no wrong way to have fun,” they responded with “yes there is, and it’s my job to tell people what the right way is”.

This is not a systemic issue, at Ubisoft or anywhere else. It’s a particularity of a kind of person who is deeply drawn to games, but who also doesn’t see other people as, well, people. It’s a person who has made friends with games and game systems because they’re incapable of being friends with, well, sapient beings.

Video game studio projects tend to have multiple designers working on them, with the creative director (or just “director”) and lead designer working on large scale design things - genre, core loop, etc - and progressively less senior designers working on progressively smaller, progressively more soul crushing design work. Think things like item design and balance. Weirdly enough, the ones who think they’re the arbiter of fun don’t generally progress very high up this chain.

Not in team-based design environments, at least.

This also just is the time defederation happens most. When populations grow faster than people can manage.

Taking on the responsibility of hosting a community website means doing what you think is best for they community. For a place with clear rules and established norms, that means upholding those rules. And if you can’t uphold them against the sheer number of people flooding in, then it means reducing the number of people.

No one website is responsible to the network. This is not a power trip. Though this is about people protecting their “precious communities”, as you so judgementally put it. Because they set up their site to create a coherent community.

If you way to be a part of it, you can apply to join. If you don’t, then you’re not entitled to interact with them.