adam_y
@adam_y@lemmy.world
- Comment on Good luck figuring it out since it also doesn’t come with man pages 5 days ago:
Such wildly fake outrage.
The real outrage should be that we care what the pronouns of any corporate mascot are.
They aren’t real. They aren’t able to feel. Corporations are not people.
“It” until you are open source and then we talk.
Same goes for Ronald McDonald.
- Comment on I'm not saying that I agree. But I understand. 1 week ago:
Aside from the visual cues. The context is clearly bullshit too.
- Comment on How long until the rise of games with mods turns into user created games. 1 week ago:
It’s your assertion that “Devs don’t implement these sort of things because they would rather spend their time on things that make their game different” that I disagree with.
That’s just not how it is. Serious thoughts goes into the mundane stuff. The UI, especially.
- Comment on How long until the rise of games with mods turns into user created games. 2 weeks ago:
Ok, but you understand that even at a reasonably low level “plugins” exist for core functionality.
Libraries within code exist to make certain tasks standardised and easy to implement. Game engines abstract common requirements like level loading, control schemes, camera movement…
The point I’m repeatedly making is that these things already exist, and if a designer chooses to implement them one way or another, then I suspect they have a reason to.
No one sets out to make a half-assed game. Even the jank out there was probably a better idea at one point. But often that comes from hubris, not from a lack of “plugins”.
Again, I used to do this as a job. I was pretty mediocre, but I did get to work with some amazing talent… And I think they’d back me up on this. Creating cm games isn’t about standardisation, it is often about exploration. It is an art form as much as it is a technical process.
However, I highly recommend you give it a go yourself. GODOT is a great engine with a ton of functionality and plug ins as well as tutorials. Spend a week making a very simple game with very simple controls. Do the thing and report back. I promise I’ll play it and I’ll celebrate it with you.
- Comment on How long until the rise of games with mods turns into user created games. 2 weeks ago:
I disagree, rather strongly.
The evolution of gameplay comes from the diversity of design.
This occasionally enables games, of varying quality, to break with orthodoxy and to create new paradigms.
The two stick control method we use for FPS, for example, only happened because someone broke with convention when designing Alien Resurrection for the PS1.
It was absolutely planned at the time, but soon became the standard.
My point is that you don’t know what needs to be improved until the alternatives appear.
So no, inventory should not confirm to a standard. It should be entirely driven by the aspirations of the designer and the needs of the game.
There will be times when games don’t get it right, much like in biological evolution, there are mistakes and dead ends, but the only thing you really want to avoid is a monoculture.
- Comment on How long until the rise of games with mods turns into user created games. 2 weeks ago:
Think you just described a game engine like Godot or Armory.
Ultimately that’s what you are describing there with such a free-form framework. The tools to make anything.
Even at a higher level engines like RPG maker and twine exist within genres.
And that isn’t a mod, so much as a game.
But going back to mods…
And why should that end up with a common look and feel? People have been modding the look and feel of games since the 90s.
Credentials: I made mods and maps in the 90s and commercial games in the 2000s.
- Comment on UK cinema issues Minecraft warning as police are called to ‘disruptive’ screenings 1 year ago:
It is. And in the Independent newspaper which has editors that should have spotted a clanger like that.
- Comment on UK cinema issues Minecraft warning as police are called to ‘disruptive’ screenings 1 year ago:
Yeah, it is a financial success, but so was the emoji movie… Not sure that qualifies it as “culturally renowned”.
Conflating those ideas that money equals cultural impact is what leads us to an endless cycle of sequels and reboots that most people watch once and then forget.
- Comment on UK cinema issues Minecraft warning as police are called to ‘disruptive’ screenings 1 year ago:
Classic independent reporting “the movie whose cultural impact is renowned”.
Is it? There’s no proof that the movie is having a renowned cultural impact above any others and the link on their own site for that quote is talking, not about the movie, but Minecraft as a whole.
- Comment on Gaming has a polarization problem 1 year ago:
The only part that’s unique to gaming is that gamers are the most toxic community in the internet.
I wish this wasn’t as true as it is.
- Comment on Gaming has a polarization problem 1 year ago:
I don’t think k this is a gaming problem.
It is a discourse problem.
People engage in absolutes. They either love a thing or hate a thing. There’s no nuance.
And it must be made to cater for them, there’s no expectation that it will contain choices they don’t approve of.
And this stance, this modern relationship with the world permeates everything, especially forms of media.
You see it in films and books… Fans and stans and folk trying to take it down. There is no nuance or middle ground.
People don’t accept that, perhaps, something isn’t just “not for them”. That’s why you get grown men complaining about the direction of children’s shows they used to watch.
And this is compounded with social media where polarisation, blunt takes and contradiction are the primary drivers of engagement.
Audience error.
- Comment on Mutant Reviewers article: Six of the worst cult sequels out of the ’90s 1 year ago:
Thanks, that guy.
- Comment on Mutant Reviewers article: Six of the worst cult sequels out of the ’90s 1 year ago:
Nice listicle, but would have been better to write something inciteful as to why all these sequels failed so hard.
It wasn’t just the cash grab, but a fundamental misunderstanding of what made the previous film great.
Kids loved watching the original RoboCop because it was R rated. It was a comic book film with gore and guns. It was illicit.
Then they turned him into a cartoon character for kids.
Police academy became a paradox of itself. You could argue that the public perception of the police had changed significantly between the original and Mission to Moscow too. It was no longer funny to be entertained by the thought of inept police.
Anyway, that’s just off the top of my head.
- Comment on SNP MP calls for Trump state visit to be scrapped 1 year ago:
Nah, let him come here and make sure his motorcade gets stopped on the streets.
- Comment on 'Jupiter Ascending' came out 10 years ago, and we're still not sure how The Matrix creators' space opera went so wrong 1 year ago:
You’re hired.
- Comment on Current chain of command 1 year ago:
Going to guess you aren’t European and you aren’t aware of what Putin did to our gas prices at the start of the Ukrain invasion.
You’re out by a million miles (sarcasm, not exact figure).
- Comment on To save the superhero movie, we need to bring back themes 1 year ago:
Yes, I totally agree and I think you’ve hit on something subtle but really important…
The difference between starting to make a work (of art, if we are lucky) with an intent for it to be about something and telling people a work is about something.
I think the intent is important. Marvel’s latest round of press includes them telling us how the new Captain America is about modern politics but the plot really doesn’t hold that up beyond some fairly blunt motifs. Ultimately, it feels as if it about a struggling studio, if that is a theme.
I guess the context is really important… And it highlights the slippery thing between thematics and meaning. Take a film like Stalker where the plot is arguably slightly, but the characterisation and the context give rise to meaning through the themes… It would be a different film if Tarkovsky had tried to market it as being about politics and Chernobyl.
- Comment on To save the superhero movie, we need to bring back themes 1 year ago:
Hang on, are we arguing for the same thing? That story, and more importantly, compelling story, is what is needed?
I was just using king as an example of someone who crafts stories… Whether they are page-turners or not, that compel audiences.
My problem with Marvel films is that they are stale, narratively, and as such the only thing that can fix them is decent writing that isn’t in the service of “franchise”.
- Comment on To save the superhero movie, we need to bring back themes 1 year ago:
Yeah, if we weren’t talking about Marvel films you’d have a point.
- Comment on To save the superhero movie, we need to bring back themes 1 year ago:
Which is to say that absolutely, you are right that theme is important because ultimately theme is context.
I do wonder how much of this belongs, not to the creator, but to the viewer/reader.
There’s that great example with Ray Bradbury telling people that Fahrenheit 451 was not about fascism until someone pointed out to him how it absolutely was.
- Comment on To save the superhero movie, we need to bring back themes 1 year ago:
I think the slightly casual, almost throwaway comment that I started this with was more about the fact that, specifically Marvel, films have become all theme and no story.
The standard superhero narrative of “Bad guy gets weapon, or does something bad and Superhero A must stop them” doesn’t sustaing multiple franchises.
Couple that with the classic trauma genesis story which forms the obligatory introduction arc.
Marvel films have become about themes almost entirely to the point where characters and story are interchangable. Take the latest captain America… Almost any other Marvel character could have played the same role in that film… The narrative is so weak that it doesn’t matter. The themes are grand and perhaps even important (a bright red tyrannical monster rampaging in the whitehouse) but the story is what let’s it down.
These stories are weak and we’ve seen them multiple times now. It doesn’t matter how often we change the themes, whether the film is about fascism in America, finding friendship and family, or the perils of unchecked science… These themes ultimately fall flat when the underlying structure, the story, used to convey them is weak.
Sure, all art is usually about something, and those themes can be important, but I stand by what I said… If you want Superhero films to see any good they need to shrug off the notion of being entirely about symbology and theme and maybe have some gripping story.
- Comment on To save the superhero movie, we need to bring back themes 1 year ago:
Sure mate, Stephen King says this:
. . . starting with the questions and thematic concerns is a recipe for bad fiction. Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story”
But what does he know?
- Comment on To save the superhero movie, we need to bring back themes 1 year ago:
Or, you know, actually stories rather than themes and characters.
- Comment on George Carlin spent nearly his entire life trying to warn us of what is happening 1 year ago:
Only if you think it is mud. I’m kinda proud of the guy for being so succinct and bang on whilst enjoying the powder.
- Comment on George Carlin spent nearly his entire life trying to warn us of what is happening 1 year ago:
Did you down vote that because:
- You think it isn’t true.
- You don’t like that it is true.
You sort of moralising cowards are the sort of folk he took the piss out of.
- Comment on George Carlin spent nearly his entire life trying to warn us of what is happening 1 year ago:
Whilst hooning a ton of coke.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
- Comment on Are mods usually confusing as hell or am I just an idiot? 1 year ago:
"If it was easy, it wouldn’t be a shortcut, it’d just be the way. "
Modding varies from game to game, but having been doing it for nearly 40 years now, I can say it has generally become easier in the titles that want you to and harder in the ones that don’t.
- Comment on What is something that keeps you up at night? 1 year ago:
Being old.
I used to be able to sleep endlessly.
Now I find myself awake early in the morning, despite having gone to bed rather late. And I’d like to go back to sleep but I can’t.
I miss it.
And this isn’t even about needing to get up to pee. That’s apparently something I still have to look forward to.
