hisao

@hisao@ani.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I personally wouldn’t call 1:2 “overwhelmingly”, but even so, if there was just a single male Venti in the whole game, it wouldn’t in any way make the claim “Plenty in gachas, jrpgs, and such” untrue, because these games combined have a lot of sexy twinks to pick from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Genshin has plently of male characters (F to M is ~1:2 iirc), and there is a variety of niches covered: cute twink-like types like Venti, hot tall guys like Diluc, and more. Anyway, vote with your wallet. It’s only natural there are more girl characters if that’s what larger chunk of playerbase want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A sexy twink.

  Plenty in gachas, jrpgs, and such, imo.

  We have a cult of toxic misogyny that insists everything MUST be male gaze and the only acceptable nudity is big titty girls and guys who look like Ahnold. And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke”

  I think in heated discussions about “DEI slop” people mostly complain about women being desexualized rather than anyone else being sexualized. Do you have any examples of games where in addition to women being sexualized there were twinks or someone else being sexualized and people insisted that only women should be sexualized but not those other groups? Think of BG3 - it goes beyond regular “male gaze” but it’s still widely beloved because it’s more inclusive to wide range of appeals including regular ones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new research⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is meta-analysis.

• Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to new researchwww.psypost.org ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨148⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some franchises with characters that personify countries?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
  • Kantai Collection (KanColle) – A Japanese browser game (later anime) where WWII-era Japanese warships are personified as girls. Hugely popular in Japan around 2013–2016. KanColle started mostly with Imperial Japanese Navy ships, but later added foreign ones. For France, the characters are:
    • Richelieu – Personification of the French battleship Richelieu.
    • Jean Bart – Battleship, Richelieu’s sister ship.
    • Commandant Teste – Seaplane tender.
  • Azur Lane – A Chinese mobile game (also with anime and manga) that includes warships from multiple countries (Japan, USA, UK, Germany, etc.) as anime girls. This one has a more international cast compared to KanColle. Azur Lane has a whole French faction called Iris Libre (Free Iris, based on Free France) and Vichya Dominion (based on Vichy France). French shipgirls include:
    • Richelieu – Battleship, leader-type character (Free Iris).
    • Jean Bart – Battleship (Vichya Dominion, later joins Free Iris).
    • Le Malin – Destroyer.
    • Le Triomphant – Destroyer.
    • Algérie – Heavy cruiser.
    • Béarn – Aircraft carrier.
    • Saint Louis – Heavy cruiser.
    • Gascogne – Battleship (super prototype type).
    • Dupleix, Émile Bertin, Vauquelin, Kersaint, Forbin, Surcouf, etc. – Various cruisers, destroyers, and subs.

  PS: those two games I had in mind immediately, but I used a bit of AI to put up those lists of characters, added some links manually (for other characters just swap the character name in query)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the first electronic device kids get these days? (Desktop, Laptop, Tablet, Phone, Game consoles?)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, I believe smartphones and tablets are the first devices for almost everyone these days. Especially since kids are equipped with smartphone when parents send them to school.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will Lemmy instances be forced to verify users' ~~ages~~ identities?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is interesting, I did a bit of research and it seems, none of this is legally enforceable unless the company has EU presence. Basically EU just saying “we will do everything we can, but we can’t really do anything if you don’t have any operations on our land”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will Lemmy instances be forced to verify users' ~~ages~~ identities?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I struggle to understand, why do those sites block uk users? Are there really any “international regulations” that demand that if you don’t want to comply with whatever arbitrary rules some country set, you should stop serving users from that country?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will Lemmy instances be forced to verify users' ~~ages~~ identities?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Pixiv, Fanbox, DeviantArt, Tumblr, etc, are also widely used. Very few people only use a single platform. I think Twitter is top 1 for expanding your audience not only because how well their feed algorithm works, but maybe also because all those focused platforms are used more by artists and less by viewers (or used less often by viewers), while Twitter being general-purpose is the one where more people who like to watch/discover arts but are not artists themselves, are. But there are other factors, like Twitter comments being better than Pixiv or DeviantArt comments, etc. Finally, if we return to the context of this discussion, I don’t think any of those dedicated platforms in any way solve the problem of age verification and that is why I wouldn’t recommend migrating to them in this context even if they were otherwise good for art.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will Lemmy instances be forced to verify users' ~~ages~~ identities?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had an impression it didn’t work great across instance boundaries. Like, algorithmic discoverability was very limited. I might be wrong and it might have changed since I last checked though. Also I had an impression that Mastodon doesn’t really have global feed on the same level as Lemmy instances. And again, correct me if I’m wrong here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will Lemmy instances be forced to verify users' ~~ages~~ identities?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s still the biggest art posting platform. And I’m not even sure where art posters should migrate to… I mean sure it would be nice to have them scattered through different fediverse instances, but it would be nice for us, not for them. The main thing they get from X is massive algorithmic reach. You hit like on a Miku art and another artist with their Miku art immediately slips into your feed, you like it even more and you decide to check their profile and you like their other works and you subscribe. This kind of easy and efficient advertisement is something that doesn’t exist anywhere else outside of few centralized systems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will Lemmy instances be forced to verify users' ~~ages~~ identities?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Twitter / X started asking for age verification for NSFW content when browsed from EU.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.

  Free advertising for their product, free efforts to keep the fandom alive. Don’t downplay marketing - marketing is king. Marketing drives the money. Even when it’s unintentional. This is pure speculation, but in my opinion most private server players would never have bought a subscription if they hadn’t first gotten hooked by playing for free on pservers for a long time. And this is a game where people who enjoy it keep coming back for decades. I’d be very interested to see statistics on “how many players who started on free pservers eventually bought a subscription.” Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story - it’s especially common among people from the third world, Eastern Europe, and so on. Without pservers, WoW might never have become as popular as it is today, and it could have been long dead by now.

  They have the resources to be more unethical than you.

  What does this even mean in context of deregulation? If nobody has to pay for lawsuits because there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money.

  Specifically training it on content without permission?

  Under current legal framework, it probably should be illegal, because it’s unfair and inconsistent that derivative works by people are illegal when derivative works by AI are not. But under my perfect legal framework, it all should be legal, and avoiding training on works of people who ask not to, should be a choice not enforced legally, which should be transparently communicated and affect which models people prefer to use or not to use.

  AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs,

  Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources. And OpenAI actually became open a month ago.

  The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool.

  Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying “make me a great game”. That’s fine. It might not be the game you actually wanted though, if you care about any details at all. Because it’s all in the details to the lowest level, to the level how exactly strokes are made, how colors are blended, etc, and when you start going into the details you need a granular model that you can use step by step, interwined with your manual work, manual sketching, etc - just like it works in programming now. Just like it programming some details and intricacies are pointless trying to describe in words because it’s easier and faster just to write few lines of code yourself, do some strokes yourself, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.

  I’m talking about Mangos and its forks here, they didn’t make a game, they made a server emulator. And by “general purpose MMORPG” I meant “general purpose WoW-like MMORPG”. When people develop sourceports for old games for example, those sourceports often work as general purpose platforms for similar games. Countless games based on GZDoom as example. Yet WoW emulator projects failed at this.

  if they did any of the coding themselves

  They definitely did some scripting, but sure they didn’t implement their own server emulator, that’s monumental work. That’s been going on for decades. Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer. If emu devs looked at it this way, maybe they would have also set a goal of making their own frontend as well instead of depending on WoW client and assets. And this would ultimately enable this whole ecosystem becoming a platform for “general purpose WoW-like MMORPGs”.

  And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it’s blizzard taking some small artist’s content and putting it in their games without compensation, no?

  I hear this happening occasionally. Currently it’s uncomfortable because of unfairness with corpos being able to defend themselves legally better than individuals. But I don’t see this as a problem if anyone’s allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone’s else content.

  Is an AI trained on every artist’s content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit “morally good” to you?

  Yes, I’m totally good with AI and even though I used to think about myself as skeptic, at current point I’m more like heavily pro-AI. And I consider AI generations derivative work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok, so then what is your criticism of Turtle WoW?

  It’s not only Turtle WoW, it’s more criticism of the whole Mangos / WoW server emulation community. They were too naive and positive-thinking to jump into developing extremely-high-effort projects like this without planning ahead how exactly it will allow them personally and creators who build upon this to benefit/profit from their work, while also avoiding legal issues. Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys and not moving forward with any lawsuits, maybe they were simply enthusiastic about technical side of things and ignored the big picture for too long. If they realized those points sooner, it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW and makes people legally wrecked the moment they try to go further.

  it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?

  It is “morally good” for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not - it’s subjective. I personally most likely wouldn’t produce derivative works if author asked not to, especially with a stance like this, but that’s just a personal choice, and it’s case-by-case thing. If author is a massive retard like J. K. Rowling - it’s morally good for people to be able to ignore author wishes and opinions regarding their work/characters. And whether author is retard or not is also subjective. In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If I understand your point correctly, it’s not the profit from the fan art that the creator gets, it’s that the fan art drives profit of their original artwork, right? Because we both agree that profiting from someone else’ IP is illegal, right?

  It’s both, and what matters more to me is what works in practice. I consider it totally morally good to profit from content based on someone else’ copyrighted IP. Creator spent effort -> creator can sell their work. It’s sometimes illegal but it should always be legal. By the way, when something is illegal but you think it shouldn’t be, it’s a good soul practice to regularly commit crimes in this area (that you can get away with), to get used and psychologically comfortable with two simple facts:

  • legal =/= right
  • illegal =/= wrong
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.

  The scale is not comparable at all. 100% of artists hugely benefit from fan arts, while maybe 0.01% of modders of popular games benefit from their mods.

  This is basically what I’m saying:

  • creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this where people building/modding upon opensource gaming projects are
  • no creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this is where most of the modding for old/abandonware games is
  • creator profit & corpo profit = good <- this is where most of fanart is
  • no creator profit & corpo profit = bad <- this is where most of the modding for popular and live games like WoW and Minecraft is
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s very different, in multiple ways. Artists earn money from commissions, the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular. Algorithms on main platforms work by association. It’s as simple as this:

  1. I draw my OCs, I want to do commissions.
  2. Very few people are viewing my posts and are aware of me.
  3. What do I do to attract more people, who will in turn buy more commissions?
  4. Draw a fanart of popular character and/or a trending gimmick (your version of new Sonic x Miku meme, Miku birthday, you OC wearing Asuka cloth, you OC in Ghibli style, etc).
  5. This posts gets pushed by algorithm into the feeds of people who like certain popular character or shown interest in current gimmick/meme/trend thing.
  6. Some of those people after enjoying post go to artist’s page and view their other works.
  7. If they like what they see they might subscribe and order commissions later. And, this is not all: to my knowledge, the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I definitely see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku for example, or characters from popular animes.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Lineage 2 also.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m fan of modding, but I wouldn’t want to waste my own time doing modding in cases like this. Outside of opensource projects, modding works well for old, effectively abandonware games, running on custom sourceports. Where almost everything is allowed and corpos don’t blatantly abuse peoples free work. I do mapping for Doom and Heretic. I play Minecraft mods occasionally but I pity developers for spending their time and not getting what they deserve in return and I wouldn’t want to waste my time doing Minecraft mods myself to support Microsoft Mojang mismanaging this game so bad. Theoretically Luanti could have been the solution, but it’s just damn bad because that particular kind of top-down approach to extensibility didn’t work well. Fan art is in much better place because it’s a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but that’s not cool. If you think about it harder, non-naive, you wouldn’t want to do any of this even at the point of realizing that you boost blizz/wow popularity for free, by doing a lot of hard work; you don’t even need to go deeper to the point of realizing you can’t build extended versions of wow this way legally, but this one is even worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would say being unable to legally create/distribute new content based on blizzard-owned IP is the worst kind of being dependent on blizzard IP. If they at least had their own game client with fully FOSS assets, upon which people could create more and more new content freely, then yeah, that I would call independent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is true, but in gaming, open-source projects often have huge, incredible impact, which often goes way beyond their original scope. For example Doom sourceport GZDoom is nowadays often used to create completely new indie pixelart or retro-style shooter games, Morrowind sourceport OpenMW is also to my knowledge have started being used in standalone projects. It will take just a single open-source project that covers MMORPG genre somewhat decently to become a solid foundation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also true, but it’s manageable. Look at Godot for example - they had some huge drama regarding their moderation policies, also some drama regarding their development direction. People who were unhappy with one or the other created forks and continued there. It’s not perfect and problems are possible, but it’s far from being as disabling as corporate bs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Back in the day, people were so idealistic that they poured cosmic amounts of time into reverse-engineering games like WoW - rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand. By making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content), they unintentionally boosted and cemented its popularity for decades.

  But over time, the rose-colored view faded. People began to see that neither Blizzard nor the gaming industry at large were as benevolent as they once imagined. Notice how this never happened again with newer games? WoW was both one of the first and one of the last MMORPGs to inspire that kind of community-driven pirate server scene.

  In the future, I hope we will see a truly open-source, modding-first MMORPG - one that makes corporate nonsense irrelevant. So that players and hobbyists could put their energy into something 100% open-source Instead of wasting time building content for companies that don’t value them and would crush them the moment the numbers dip.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The impressive app store Bazaar has arrived on Flathub⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I find Discover more impressive personally. They managed to implement browsable categories properly. Bazaar is just a typical Gnome thing with fancy big buttons and no functionality. I find it underwhelming to have Gnome-minded app store on KDE system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you are paying to use "AI", who are you paying and what are your regular usecases?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Copilot is an extension for VS Code that does integration of their supported AI models with code editor (including creation/removal/moving/renaming/editing files, providing git-like diffs and per-file keep/discard choices for what AI made in response to your most recent prompt, etc). They only support fixed set of models and don’t provide any way to integrate free / opensource models. So the question is mainly what’s the alternative to Copilot for free models.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you are paying to use "AI", who are you paying and what are your regular usecases?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there anything as good as vscode-copilot for free models? I mean, integrating the process of querying models with actually generating and applying diffs to the files in project, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you are paying to use "AI", who are you paying and what are your regular usecases?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m still on my free month of full-featured Copilot and I’m considering subscribing after it ends (10$/month). Mostly coding, bash scripting.