The problem is, if you are paying them as much as you can afford on bills that are 20x your likely annual income, you are never gonna be able to do anything else. No savings, no investment.
I didn't even really understand entirely what was bugging me at the time, it wasn't until a friend pointed it out that it became more clear. She's more alert to the details of agency questions.
In FF14, I had a thing where I had a quest to "go tell some guy in a crowded bar that you did a thing", and it had the visual effects for "warning, you're about to be in a huge fight". Of course, what happens is I tell the guy, who is happy, and nothing at all happens, and then there is a disturbance outside and my character automatically runs out, witnesses a confrontation between some people, and ends up taking a side in their battle. Then there's a fight where I am automatically placed on one side of that fight. After that, my character goes back to whatever was previously going on.
I don't get the option of not joining this random unrelated fight. I don't get the option of, say, interacting further with the poor girl I just defended against thugs, either.
And that's sort of frustrating, because it's great storytelling for the story of a specific character that may not be the one I wanted to create...
Myst's issues were more subtle, but more totally pervasive. I very rarely knew what would happen when I clicked on something.
Well, "tolerance" which includes saying that people shouldn't be allowed to adopt kids isn't particularly tolerant, and is very bad for society as a whole. We all suffer from kids not getting good homes, and there are more kids needing adoption than there are adoptive families. Preventing gay people from adopting would be bad for everyone, so opposing gay couples adopting is hostile to everyone.
Long story short: People react very strongly to things being unfamiliar or strange. Things you see at least occasionally are much less threatening. If occasional ads include gay couples, then people are a lot more likely to be tolerant of gays and inclined to think gays should get the same basic legal protections other people do. If there are no gay couples on TV, then people are a lot less likely to be tolerant of gays. This is just very basic low-level wiring in the brain; we distrust unfamiliar things, the same way just about all other animals do. And that means that there is significant social impact from having advertisements include, or not-include, particular recognizable classes of people.
Of course, the advertising thing might not have sunk him; it was the adoption thing that sealed the deal.
Probably because they're not relevant to the story. We have technology right now to prevent male or female babies; that doesn't mean that this should be a prominent part of any story about sexism. ("And a reminder, the only reason women are getting treated this way is that people keep having girl babies, despite technology allowing us to detect them very early and abort them.")
Not all phobia is "fear" in the straightforward way. No one worries that spraying materials with scotchguard makes them "afraid" of water.
Secondly... While many anti-gays aren't really exhibiting phobic behavior, some are. Go browse Not Always Right for a while, and look at some of the people who start freaking out and screaming because a store has a gay clerk. That's reasonably categorized as phobia-like.
The first amendment doesn't, really. All the first amendment covers is Congress making laws. That said, the principle of free speech says that they should not be threatened with violence.... That said, I am pretty suspicious that there's a lot more people saying they were threatened than are actually threatened, because I've never in my life met one of these people who threatens people with violence, and I've met lots of people who said completely different things, then got accused of threatening people with violence. Because there's a lot of people who are pretty clear on the fact that they can say they got threatened and their core demographic will accept it as a given because of course the mean old liberals are actually violently oppressive.
You haven't really established that this is the case at all. I got told by a shrink that I was obviously not autistic, and I went on muddling along for a few more years before realizing that he was almost certainly unqualified; went and saw a specialist, and got a lot more information. And one of the things I've gotten, from hanging around with autistics, is that there's a whole heck of a lot of variance, and autistic people don't always react or act the same way.
So, moral of the story, some guy who comes into it overtly hostile and dismissive and hasn't got any relevant qualifications or skills can basically disregard anything. Well-illustrated!
(And yes, I'm familiar with such disorders, and no, that's not "unusual to the point of it being near impossible". That's just you not knowing, at all, what you're talking about.)
I think it's more complex than that. Autism and sociopathy are wildly different. Sociopaths don't feel sorry even after getting caught, although they may regret getting caught. Autistics may fail to evaluate other people's emotions or responses even in places where you'd expect "everyone" to, but are not necessarily going to be unconcerned once they do notice or get told.
I found "and then a long thing happens and I can't do anything and just have to wait while my character does something totally unlike anything I would have intended or tried" to be a significant deterrent. Effectively, a really long delay during which I could do nothing but wait for things to happen, triggered by my character doing something totally unlike what I intended, acted like "punishment" -- it was an unpleasant experience in response to an action that I could not predict would produce that unpleasant experience.
Even just something as simple as, say, a cursor showing what verb would be applied if I clicked on a thing would probably have saved it for me.
I think the distinction here is one of how important agency is to you. It's important to me that I am making decisions for my avatars in games. I don't like it when a game makes a decision for me, especially if it's not a decision I want, or there's no way for me to guess what the decision will be in advance. So, basically, what you experienced as "Myst rewarded you for doing so...", I experienced sometimes as a reward, and sometimes as a punishment.
So it came with, for me, the largest downside of such confusion, which is "it is flatly and totally impossible for me to decide what my next action will be".
I think you're responding to a criticism other than the one I made. And radically so, given that I am pretty much on the opposite end of the game-playing spectrum from the straw man you're arguing with.
My complaint has nothing to do with the logic of the puzzles. The puzzles aren't even remotely, in any way, a factor in what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the interface.
Your mouse pointer is over an object -- say, a box, or a book. If you click on it, will you: 1. Open it. 2. Pick it up. 3. Throw it.
You don't know. You can't tell. There is only one action for each object, but there are many different actions, so when you click on a particular object, you have no idea what instruction you are giving the game.
Imagine that you were to take something like Zork, and replace all the verbs with "click".
> CLICK TROLL You attack the troll, dealing it a lethal blow. It dissipates into greasy smoke, leaving behind a dagger, a book, and a coin. > CLICK COIN You take the coin and stuff it in your pocket. > CLICK BOOK You open the book, find a magical spell which appears to summon a hostile demon, and incant the spell. A hostile demon appears. > CLICK DAGGER Realizing that you have no control over what your avatar does, you lunge for the dagger, then plunge it into your own chest.
And then someone on the Internet tells you it's your fault for not paying enough attention; you should have known what the dagger would do.
No. The problem is that you have no way of guessing what your interactions will be. If I click on a thing, am I taking it, pushing it, pulling it, or doing something else with it? I have no way of knowing. There's nothing I can look at, or study, or do, that will let me answer the question "what action will my implied avatar attempt to take if I click on this object". Sure, once I know that my avatar is going to try to pick a thing up, or try to turn it, or push it, or whatever, then we have puzzles which are by and large decent puzzles. But that's much later in the gameplay process than my criticism.
My complaint isn't about the process of figuring out how something works once you know what clicking on it does. It's that for each object, there is exactly one verb, and the player can't know what it is in advance. If Myst had been an RPG, the only indication of whether another player were a hostile monster or a friendly ally would be that, when you clicked on them, either you attacked them or you talked to them. But there would be no indication whatsoever, before you attack or talk, of which was going to happen...
I gotta say: I have seen people deny both evolution and climate change, and state that the Bible is why. Now, I happen to think those people aren't much better at understanding the traditions of their religion than they are at understanding science, but people really do say this stuff.
No, that's just not so. Silencing new ideas might be a bad idea. Silencing ideas which have already been adequately explored, and are total nonsense is just an essential component of preserving a usable signal/noise ratio.
Well, sorta, yeah. Because they know that many of the people trying to use their site to affect the world are trying to do so for reasons that have nothing to do with science or the promotion of a scientifically-sustainable worldview.
There's a world of difference between "if there were a serious, credible, alternative people would take it seriously" and "it is up for grabs".
"Up for grabs" means that if any random kid who's never even taken a science class says it's wrong because his dad says so and his dad's super religious and therefore right, that's just as important as if the entirety of modern biology and medicine relies on it. And that's... stupid.
Which is odd, because about 70% of the adults I know and hang out with regularly think the first couple of seasons of the recent MLP reboot were really good TV, me among them. So obviously it wouldn't drive just any adult insane; only some of them.
This may require us to confront the horrifying possibility that personal taste in entertainment might be somehow subjective
I mean, yeah, it was gorgeous at a time when games weren't, and it had "new" gameplay.
Only. The gameplay, once you get over the "new", sort of sucks. Yeah, you're supposed to experiment with things to find out what they do, except you don't even know what experiment you'll be trying. There's no way to predict whether clicking on something will try to pick it up, or push it, or turn it, or whatever, so you can't perform interesting experiments to learn about things. And ultimately, it just sorta never gets past that. The writing was interesting, but it worked better as a book than as a game.
Basically, it's like a text adventure with a much worse and stupider parser, but it has graphics.
Which is pretty much why I avoid Python -- because since I happen not to have the exact same intuitions as the Python community, everything written in the "Pythonic" way is awkward and backwards to me. And there's no way for me to use the language without having to be a person who has a different set of intuitions.
I can fake it, but it's a lot of work and I find it unpleasant.
Interesting data point: I hated it, and it was actually the reason I didn't try Ruby the first couple of times I heard about it, because everyone was SO enthusiastic about this, and I couldn't extract information from it.
But I actually love Ruby. It's probably my favorite language to work in.
So this is more subtle than just a do/don't like Ruby thing. And I don't know what the deal is. I do note, I'm autistic and sometimes get bogged down on poetry, and I think a lot of that writing is functionally poetry. I am not in general humorless or anything, and I certainly can use metaphorical language, but I need a certain amount of bare literal information to start with.
I'd guess that if someone had said "Ruby is a scripting language in which objects have types, but variables are usually just references to objects and do not have declared types, with an emphasis on flexible syntax", and then I'd read why's guide, I might have liked it better.
I think you are using the word "fun" too narrowly, perhaps. Interesting might be considered a kind of fun.
"Play" is the word we usually use to refer to the things that small humans, and members of every other species that learns, do to learn how to do things. The discovery that play is an effective way to learn should be totally unsurprising.
And willpower can make up for that, some, but it's a limited resource, and when you use it up making yourself pay attention, you have less cognitive capacity available for the actual learning.
Milage seems to vary. I have a variety Android hardware, and it still feels sluggish to me. On every Android phone I've yet had, I've occasionally had it do a thing where I am asked to push touchpad buttons, and I push buttons, and nothing happens for a second or two, and then suddenly the last three or four UI events process all at once. It's less common now, but it still happens occasionally on... I'm not sure what the work phone is, I think a Galaxy Nexus or something. (It's not nearly as awful as my older G2 was, though.)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, if you are paying them as much as you can afford on bills that are 20x your likely annual income, you are never gonna be able to do anything else. No savings, no investment.
Oh, sure. And we had prosperous booms without computers, too. That people succeeded without something isn't evidence that having it won't help them.
I didn't even really understand entirely what was bugging me at the time, it wasn't until a friend pointed it out that it became more clear. She's more alert to the details of agency questions.
In FF14, I had a thing where I had a quest to "go tell some guy in a crowded bar that you did a thing", and it had the visual effects for "warning, you're about to be in a huge fight". Of course, what happens is I tell the guy, who is happy, and nothing at all happens, and then there is a disturbance outside and my character automatically runs out, witnesses a confrontation between some people, and ends up taking a side in their battle. Then there's a fight where I am automatically placed on one side of that fight. After that, my character goes back to whatever was previously going on.
I don't get the option of not joining this random unrelated fight.
I don't get the option of, say, interacting further with the poor girl I just defended against thugs, either.
And that's sort of frustrating, because it's great storytelling for the story of a specific character that may not be the one I wanted to create...
Myst's issues were more subtle, but more totally pervasive. I very rarely knew what would happen when I clicked on something.
Did you read all the remarks, rather than just the summary? Because it doesn't seem to me that you did.
And you're right, there's no requirement that their beliefs and values represent anyone else's. Or that anyone else buy their pasta.
Well, "tolerance" which includes saying that people shouldn't be allowed to adopt kids isn't particularly tolerant, and is very bad for society as a whole. We all suffer from kids not getting good homes, and there are more kids needing adoption than there are adoptive families. Preventing gay people from adopting would be bad for everyone, so opposing gay couples adopting is hostile to everyone.
Long story short: People react very strongly to things being unfamiliar or strange. Things you see at least occasionally are much less threatening. If occasional ads include gay couples, then people are a lot more likely to be tolerant of gays and inclined to think gays should get the same basic legal protections other people do. If there are no gay couples on TV, then people are a lot less likely to be tolerant of gays. This is just very basic low-level wiring in the brain; we distrust unfamiliar things, the same way just about all other animals do. And that means that there is significant social impact from having advertisements include, or not-include, particular recognizable classes of people.
Of course, the advertising thing might not have sunk him; it was the adoption thing that sealed the deal.
Probably because they're not relevant to the story. We have technology right now to prevent male or female babies; that doesn't mean that this should be a prominent part of any story about sexism. ("And a reminder, the only reason women are getting treated this way is that people keep having girl babies, despite technology allowing us to detect them very early and abort them.")
Not all phobia is "fear" in the straightforward way. No one worries that spraying materials with scotchguard makes them "afraid" of water.
Secondly... While many anti-gays aren't really exhibiting phobic behavior, some are. Go browse Not Always Right for a while, and look at some of the people who start freaking out and screaming because a store has a gay clerk. That's reasonably categorized as phobia-like.
The first amendment doesn't, really. All the first amendment covers is Congress making laws. That said, the principle of free speech says that they should not be threatened with violence. ... That said, I am pretty suspicious that there's a lot more people saying they were threatened than are actually threatened, because I've never in my life met one of these people who threatens people with violence, and I've met lots of people who said completely different things, then got accused of threatening people with violence. Because there's a lot of people who are pretty clear on the fact that they can say they got threatened and their core demographic will accept it as a given because of course the mean old liberals are actually violently oppressive.
You haven't really established that this is the case at all. I got told by a shrink that I was obviously not autistic, and I went on muddling along for a few more years before realizing that he was almost certainly unqualified; went and saw a specialist, and got a lot more information. And one of the things I've gotten, from hanging around with autistics, is that there's a whole heck of a lot of variance, and autistic people don't always react or act the same way.
So, moral of the story, some guy who comes into it overtly hostile and dismissive and hasn't got any relevant qualifications or skills can basically disregard anything. Well-illustrated!
(And yes, I'm familiar with such disorders, and no, that's not "unusual to the point of it being near impossible". That's just you not knowing, at all, what you're talking about.)
I think it's more complex than that. Autism and sociopathy are wildly different. Sociopaths don't feel sorry even after getting caught, although they may regret getting caught. Autistics may fail to evaluate other people's emotions or responses even in places where you'd expect "everyone" to, but are not necessarily going to be unconcerned once they do notice or get told.
It was an analogy, which means the parallels don't have to be exact, it's just there to communicate a concept.
Ahh, I see!
I found "and then a long thing happens and I can't do anything and just have to wait while my character does something totally unlike anything I would have intended or tried" to be a significant deterrent. Effectively, a really long delay during which I could do nothing but wait for things to happen, triggered by my character doing something totally unlike what I intended, acted like "punishment" -- it was an unpleasant experience in response to an action that I could not predict would produce that unpleasant experience.
Even just something as simple as, say, a cursor showing what verb would be applied if I clicked on a thing would probably have saved it for me.
I think the distinction here is one of how important agency is to you. It's important to me that I am making decisions for my avatars in games. I don't like it when a game makes a decision for me, especially if it's not a decision I want, or there's no way for me to guess what the decision will be in advance. So, basically, what you experienced as "Myst rewarded you for doing so...", I experienced sometimes as a reward, and sometimes as a punishment.
So it came with, for me, the largest downside of such confusion, which is "it is flatly and totally impossible for me to decide what my next action will be".
I think you're responding to a criticism other than the one I made. And radically so, given that I am pretty much on the opposite end of the game-playing spectrum from the straw man you're arguing with.
My complaint has nothing to do with the logic of the puzzles. The puzzles aren't even remotely, in any way, a factor in what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the interface.
Your mouse pointer is over an object -- say, a box, or a book. If you click on it, will you:
1. Open it.
2. Pick it up.
3. Throw it.
You don't know. You can't tell. There is only one action for each object, but there are many different actions, so when you click on a particular object, you have no idea what instruction you are giving the game.
Imagine that you were to take something like Zork, and replace all the verbs with "click".
> CLICK TROLL
You attack the troll, dealing it a lethal blow. It dissipates into greasy smoke, leaving behind a dagger, a book, and a coin.
> CLICK COIN
You take the coin and stuff it in your pocket.
> CLICK BOOK
You open the book, find a magical spell which appears to summon a hostile demon, and incant the spell. A hostile demon appears.
> CLICK DAGGER
Realizing that you have no control over what your avatar does, you lunge for the dagger, then plunge it into your own chest.
And then someone on the Internet tells you it's your fault for not paying enough attention; you should have known what the dagger would do.
No. The problem is that you have no way of guessing what your interactions will be. If I click on a thing, am I taking it, pushing it, pulling it, or doing something else with it? I have no way of knowing. There's nothing I can look at, or study, or do, that will let me answer the question "what action will my implied avatar attempt to take if I click on this object". Sure, once I know that my avatar is going to try to pick a thing up, or try to turn it, or push it, or whatever, then we have puzzles which are by and large decent puzzles. But that's much later in the gameplay process than my criticism.
My complaint isn't about the process of figuring out how something works once you know what clicking on it does. It's that for each object, there is exactly one verb, and the player can't know what it is in advance. If Myst had been an RPG, the only indication of whether another player were a hostile monster or a friendly ally would be that, when you clicked on them, either you attacked them or you talked to them. But there would be no indication whatsoever, before you attack or talk, of which was going to happen...
I gotta say: I have seen people deny both evolution and climate change, and state that the Bible is why. Now, I happen to think those people aren't much better at understanding the traditions of their religion than they are at understanding science, but people really do say this stuff.
No, that's just not so. Silencing new ideas might be a bad idea. Silencing ideas which have already been adequately explored, and are total nonsense is just an essential component of preserving a usable signal/noise ratio.
Well, sorta, yeah. Because they know that many of the people trying to use their site to affect the world are trying to do so for reasons that have nothing to do with science or the promotion of a scientifically-sustainable worldview.
There's a world of difference between "if there were a serious, credible, alternative people would take it seriously" and "it is up for grabs".
"Up for grabs" means that if any random kid who's never even taken a science class says it's wrong because his dad says so and his dad's super religious and therefore right, that's just as important as if the entirety of modern biology and medicine relies on it. And that's... stupid.
Which is odd, because about 70% of the adults I know and hang out with regularly think the first couple of seasons of the recent MLP reboot were really good TV, me among them. So obviously it wouldn't drive just any adult insane; only some of them.
This may require us to confront the horrifying possibility that personal taste in entertainment might be somehow subjective
I mean, yeah, it was gorgeous at a time when games weren't, and it had "new" gameplay.
Only. The gameplay, once you get over the "new", sort of sucks. Yeah, you're supposed to experiment with things to find out what they do, except you don't even know what experiment you'll be trying. There's no way to predict whether clicking on something will try to pick it up, or push it, or turn it, or whatever, so you can't perform interesting experiments to learn about things. And ultimately, it just sorta never gets past that. The writing was interesting, but it worked better as a book than as a game.
Basically, it's like a text adventure with a much worse and stupider parser, but it has graphics.
Booting an embedded PPC system directly to Zork.
Which is pretty much why I avoid Python -- because since I happen not to have the exact same intuitions as the Python community, everything written in the "Pythonic" way is awkward and backwards to me. And there's no way for me to use the language without having to be a person who has a different set of intuitions.
I can fake it, but it's a lot of work and I find it unpleasant.
Interesting data point: I hated it, and it was actually the reason I didn't try Ruby the first couple of times I heard about it, because everyone was SO enthusiastic about this, and I couldn't extract information from it.
But I actually love Ruby. It's probably my favorite language to work in.
So this is more subtle than just a do/don't like Ruby thing. And I don't know what the deal is. I do note, I'm autistic and sometimes get bogged down on poetry, and I think a lot of that writing is functionally poetry. I am not in general humorless or anything, and I certainly can use metaphorical language, but I need a certain amount of bare literal information to start with.
I'd guess that if someone had said "Ruby is a scripting language in which objects have types, but variables are usually just references to objects and do not have declared types, with an emphasis on flexible syntax", and then I'd read why's guide, I might have liked it better.
I think you are using the word "fun" too narrowly, perhaps. Interesting might be considered a kind of fun.
"Play" is the word we usually use to refer to the things that small humans, and members of every other species that learns, do to learn how to do things. The discovery that play is an effective way to learn should be totally unsurprising.
And willpower can make up for that, some, but it's a limited resource, and when you use it up making yourself pay attention, you have less cognitive capacity available for the actual learning.
So... learn to play, noob.
Milage seems to vary. I have a variety Android hardware, and it still feels sluggish to me. On every Android phone I've yet had, I've occasionally had it do a thing where I am asked to push touchpad buttons, and I push buttons, and nothing happens for a second or two, and then suddenly the last three or four UI events process all at once. It's less common now, but it still happens occasionally on... I'm not sure what the work phone is, I think a Galaxy Nexus or something. (It's not nearly as awful as my older G2 was, though.)