darthelmet

@darthelmet@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Death Stranding 2 preview: how a big dollop of Metal Gear is expanding Kojima's bizarre epic⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I couldn’t get through much of it either, but not because of the weird stuff, I like weird, the gameplay is just too… involved? Stressful? Exhausting? Like I’m ok with challenging games sometimes, but needing to spend a ton of time slowly trekking across fields and mountains while manually trying to keep your footing, managing a bunch of consumables, and occasionally needing to play walk through the ghost minefield with your baby detector while dealing with the rest of that is just not something I could keep up for as long as the game was going to go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  True to some extent, but I think there are limits to how enjoyable it can be to not even be able to find the puzzles in the first place. It also makes coming back to it super confusing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some good examples of "Where the fuck do you go" kind of games?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve probably played a bunch, but the one that most comes to mind is Antechamber. Super weird FPS puzzle game ala portal but with a lot of mindbending illusions, non-Euclidean geometry, etc.

  It’s got a metroidvania structure but without much guidance and a lot of stuff will just loop you back to where you’ve been if you’re not getting things right. At some point I was just completely lost. I couldn’t possibly think of where I haven’t tried to go or do. Worst part if I tried to look up a guide I don’t even know where I’d begin to look.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer (Available Today!)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty curious about this. I tried Oblivion a few years ago having never played it before and it just felt too clunky for me to want to play much past the tutorial. Which is a shame because I’ve heard there’s a lot of cool stuff in the game I didn’t get to see.

  If this makes things feel better to play and is a good all around remaster, maybe I’ll pick it up and give it another go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I suppose part of the conversation is about a concept I call “difficulty pressure.” (Maybe there’s another term for it?) Essentially, how does the game’s difficulty affect players’ approach to optimizing builds in a game with them.

  When a game is on the really difficult end of things, (and this goes for competitive multiplayer as well where the “difficulty” is that all other players are optimizing and you need to be better than them to win) the game pressures you to optimize your playstyle in order to just survive and overcome otherwise insurmountable odds. In this extreme environment, there sub-optimal builds get pushed out even if they seem fun because you will very likely fail with them. Thus limiting build diversity.

  At the lower end of difficulty, the game might be so trivial that ANYTHING works, but it won’t feel satisfying because nothing you do really matters. You probably don’t even need a real build at that point, so that feeling of making something crazy that trivializes otherwise challenging content isn’t there. There’s just no reference point to appreciate how good your build is. If every enemy had 1 HP, without damage numbers, how would you even know how much damage you were doing? A build that did one damage would be the same as a build that did a trillion damage.

  Like you said, ideally there’s some good balance state where things are challenging enough to serve as a yard stick, but there are still a lot of builds that can reach that point. There’s a boring way to achieve this easily: No builds. Or at least no difference between builds. Everything does the same thing but maybe the colors are swapped around. Obviously that’s not really what we want out of an ARPG, otherwise we’d just play a pure action game. So builds have to be different enough to allow for very different experiences, but not so much so that some are essentially invalid. But that’s a much more complicated problem. With so many pieces and combinations, it’s virtually impossible to balance faster than the internet hive mind can optimize.

  There’s another boring way to achieve this: Not on the player side, but on the encounter side. Because a very wide variety of playstyles need to be able to complete the content in a roughly equivalent way, the challenges need to be relatively interchangeable because you don’t know exactly what tools the player will have access to. So you flatten the content so there aren’t sharp edges that will make some builds unable to beat it. Alternatively you can require the players to have a specific set of tools no matter the build so that they can deal with all these scenarios. For example, in Noita, you pretty much always need:

  1. A primary damage dealing wand that can reliably kill things safely and which won’t run out of limited charge spells.
  2. A digging wand to access various pickups and other areas.
  3. A mobility wand to be able to get around the more sprawling and dangerous levels as well as get up to places you otherwise couldn’t.
  4. Late game, a healing wand.
  5. There are some enemies that are straight up just immune to some damage types.

  You have 4 wand slots and you will usually need at least one empty wand slot to be able pick up new wands in a level unless you can meet some other specific conditions. So all the slots you can use to make your build are spoken for. This limits what you can build a lot. Late game you can combine some of these effects into a single wand, but until then you have that restriction.

  If the game didn’t have this variety of challenges, you’d be more free to choose what you want out of your build, but then the actual content would be way less interesting.

  This is the core tension. Content asks things of you and your build is the answer to that. The more difficult or specific the challenge, the less freedom you have to make different builds. The more generic or easy the challenge, the less your build matters, meaning you have more freedom but it’s less satisfying to act on that freedom.

  I guess my point isn’t that it’s impossible to make a game that has elements of both. It’s that they are inherently antagonistic, not synergistic concepts. The more builds matter, the less content does and visa versa.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the secret sauce there is that they’re roguelikes. They have meaningful combat and they have the potential for wild builds that completely trivialize that combat. So why does this work for them? Because you can’t guarentee a specific broken build every run. They’re short and random, so the likelihood that you will put together all the pieces needed for a specific build before the end of a run is fairly low. By contrast, while ARPGs are “random”, they’re played over such a long term that it’s expected that you will be able to acquire exactly the things you need for your build eventually. (Outside of chase items, but those usually aren’t build defining for that exact reason.) PLus a lot of your build is defined by entirely deterministic mechanics. You get to choose your skills and passives. And with trading you can take nearly all the uncertainty out of whether or not you’ll be able to put together the remaining pieces.

  So because it’s expected that you’ll for sure be able to build what you want given enough effort, if you optimize your build to trivialize the game, you’ll always be able to do that. When you get a a broken build in a roguelike, it’s because you high rolled that run and you get to have fun experiencing the high point relative to the baseline. You know how tough the combat usually is, so the fact that you can now breeze through it without thinking about it is fun in and of itself. But if it was always like that, it would just be a boring game. Incidentally, this is why I tend to not like roguelites that allow you to define a lot about your build before you enter the run itself. They make it a lot more likely that you break the experience in a very predictable way.

  In ARPGs the high point is the baseline. Either the game is able to be trivialized with a good build, in which case it always will unless you go out of your way to nerf yourself, or you can never really make the game easier no matter how good your build is, in which case the build making isn’t super relevant. There’s a reason people joke about Fashion Souls. The gear you can equip is often so pointless that you might as well just pick armor for how it looks.

  An interesting case study for a sort of in the middle experience that kind of illustrates some of this is Noita. For those unfamiliar it’s a roguelike where you play as a mage/alchemist descending into the depths of the world in search of mysteries. Your builds consist of wands that you can put an assembly of spells and modifiers in to craft very different spell setups. You also get some perks occasionally that do the usual kinds of things you’d expect from a roguelike passive item system. The game is brutally difficult to a degree that’s deliberately unfair to the player. Enemies are chaotic. The environment is volatile and filled with things that can kill you in an instant if you’re not careful, or even if you are careful because some enemy triggers some flying thing on another screen that flies into you out of nowhere. Many spells in the game can hurt you too and even the ones that can’t directly can sometimes have a firing pattern that will make it hard to avoid hitting explosives and stuff that will kill you. Healing is extremely limited. Early on the game is certainly very skill based in the sense that you aren’t going to immediately break the game in the first level or so, so you need to be able to avoid things while you slowly kill them. If you really enjoy build crafting, the early game is fairly boring in that respect. But ultimately as you progress it’s more knowledge based. Your will be hard pressed to outskill later enemies if you’re still running a dinky no damage wand. So you kind of have to find ways to break the game if you want to succeed.

  SPOILERS beyond this point:

  That’s the initial experience. Two things become true once you learn more about the game:

  1. There are a handful of very powerful combos that are way better than most of what you can do in the game. Once you know about them, either through discovery or from reading about it online, you will kind of ruin the build potential of future runs. You can somewhat reliably find at least one of these most runs so long as you make it past a certain point. There’s not nothing cool to discover after that, but they’re all way less practical and only something you will be able to do once you’ve already reached a point where there’s no challenge they’re needed to overcome.

  2. Upon freeing yourself from the initial core run to go see the rest of the world(s), you gain access to essentially unlimited perks. You can gain absurd amounts of health, damage reduction and healing, immunity to a lot of hazards, enough movespeed to avoid most things, and the ability to basically get anywhere you want on the map, etc. You basically become a god of death and destruction, untethered from mere mortal concerns… until you randomly get turned into a sheep and die instantly. So similar to a broken ARPG character, you reach a point in the game where the only things that the game can possibly do to threaten you is to strip you of everything that makes your build and just instantly kill you. And similar to an ARPG, this only really happens because you can play a run for many hours after the initial, more roguelike length run.

  There’s probably something to learn from all of that if you want to try to thread that needle, but I think it at least shows the challenges of reconciling the tension between mechanical skill and cool build making.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been thinking this from the start. The genres really just don’t seem compatible.

  Souls-likes are at their core about the fights themselves. Sure you can make builds, but unless you’re going out of your way to cheese things, you’re probably still fighting the enemies and dealing with the mechanics like anyone else. Outside of boss fights, you fight at most a handful of enemies, all of whom have been very deliberately placed in a level to create interesting encounters that are the right balance of difficulty. Also, your healing is very limited so that the game can punish you for mistakes without outright killing you because you will run out of resources at some point.

  Diablo-likes are about the builds. The enemies are merely fodder for testing out whatever nonsense you’ve made. The norm is to optimize the shit out of your builds. The whole point is to eventually trivialize things. Enemies are randomly generated and placed. You don’t get well crafted encounters outside of bosses so when you’re presented with a mob of random enemies, your solution is to just kill them before they kill you. Also, a component of build crafting is often sustain and if you can build infinite sustain into your character, then the only things which can kill you will just be one shots.

  There’s no obvious way to resolve these contradictions. You kind of just need to pick a lane. If they really want a game that’s fundamentally different from PoE 1… they need to make THAT game. But that’s really far away from the game they’ve actually made and I don’t think any reasonable amount of early access tweaking can get them there from here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Cool. Didn’t know about that site. Thanks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh I was looking at system requirements on the store page. Is that accurate?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a spattering of steam games that don’t list Linux support. Probably the ones I play the most are Deep Rock Galactic and Last Epoch. Outside of Steam I play TFT a lot, which doesn’t work on Linux since they added the anti-cheat software.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I got a new PC recently so unfortunately I am now on Windows 11. I’ve been wanting to make the swap to Linux but I can’t really make a clean break because at least some of the games I play a lot won’t work on Linux. I do think I’m gonna try to set up another hard drive with Linux on it to try to slowly start learning it and ideally move over anything that I can over there eventually and just keep the windows drive for those few games.

  Does anyone have any recommendations related to that? Distro for gaming/ease of use? What’s the best option for setting up the dual boot? Anything I wouldn’t have thought of that’s relevant?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Divided and conquered⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The point isn’t to cede ground and compromise with them. The point is to try to show them that they’ve been duped about who their enemies are. It might still take some time to deprogram them, but if we could at least get them to put that all on hold and focus on the class issue, maybe we can actually get somewhere instead of spinning in circles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Welp.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I have less hope for two reasons:

  1. These are still capitalist countries and thus the incentive for fascism still remains even if it gets delayed a bit.

  2. The US is the largest, most dangerous military superpower the world has ever seen and it has shown time and time again that it’s willing to use that might to bully other nations into economic submission. No country is really safe if it decides to start going after them. The US hasn’t always won these wars, but even when it fails like in Vietnam or Korea, it does enough damage on the way out to cause massive destruction and suffering which has long lasting consequences. I seriously doubt the rest of the world is just gonna get to sit this one out and watch America self destruct.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The USA was always broken⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s Britain’s excuse then?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pills here!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a difference between conspiracy theories and having an analysis of incentives and structures.

  There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy for profit seeking corporations to decide not to invest their money into something they think won’t return as much profit.

  As for everything else staying shitty, why would corporations spend money on lobbying and campaign contributions if they didn’t expect it to make them a profit? Obviously those corporations want less taxes, less regulations that might cost them money to comply with, and the more of the economy that is privatized, the more opportunities capitalists have for making more profits.

  That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s a basic understanding of economics and political economy plus some history.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Interview: Alex Kurtzman on Section 31 and the "evolution" of Star Trek⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think what’s interesting about the conflicts that do arise in Star Trek is that while they often mirror issues we have today in some way, it’s being grappled with by people and a system that has purposefully turned away from greed and cruelty. They might not always get things right, but it’s not because of some special interests making it that way, it’s just because even in the future humans are humans and they make mistakes and have blind spots.

  For example, I was thinking about that episode of DS9 that dealt with Bashir being genetically modified. Obviously it’s some mix of discussions about GMOs, steroids, and one of those imperfect fantasy/sci-fi racism analogies. You’d kind of hope we have stuff like that sorted by the future, but it’s kind of understandable why they have this quandary. The reasons for keeping genetically modified people out of star fleet isn’t entirely without reason and is clearly not coming from a place of cruelty, but it’s also hard to get around the fact that this is still discrimination based on something someone was born with. But nobody really specifically stands to benefit from the status quo. So you just have the matter at hand with no clearly perfect answer getting discussed honestly by well intentioned people.

  Section 31 definitely doesn’t fit that mold. It’s some last vestige of a system that prioritized a self-serving order held up by force. I think to the extent that it has any place in ST, it’s something like how it was handled in DS9 where our characters were actively trying to uncover a rogue organization instead of it just kind of being a part of Starfleet like in Discovery.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wish I could charge $100 a call attempt to these people⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My parents have the longest, most obnoxious ring tones for texts on their phones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Large Language Models in Video Games?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do I think it’ll happen? Yes, even if it’s not good, because AAA companies are cheap and have no taste. They thrive on just spewing out more content than a smaller studio could make, quality be damned.

  That said, whether or not it COULD be useful in the future I think depends on the context and how well you could tune the models.

  I think it has absolutely no place in a narrative game where intentional authorship is what people come for. Even if it’s passable, I want to know that what I’m hearing or reading was something SOMEONE wanted to say.

  But I think it could be interesting in more open ended, replayable sim games where you want to be able to try a wide variety of approaches and have different experiences each time, but it would be impractical for a dev to implement all those possibilities to the point where players would feel like the game adequately responds to their actions. However, I don’t think you could just drop a copy of chat gpt in there and call it a day. You want different NPCs to be different and you want some consistent reality that they all exist in and respond to. So you’d probably need to put in some constraints based on some hidden file describing a particular world gen’s state. A basic example would be the NPC knowing that the town you asked about is to their north or perhaps an existing relationship between 2 characters.

  Idk how technically feasible this would be, but it’d be a cool tool in the right context if done right. I think the key here is it can be good when it enhances what you want to do and you put in the effort to make it work vs just using it as a lazy shortcut.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How This Billionaire Couple STOLE California's Water Supply | The Class Room ft. ‪@SecondThought‬ [08:08 | DEC 20 2022 | More Perfect Union]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  owned four San Francisco’s worth of farmland.

  I’m not from California. Could someone convert this into the standard American measurement: Football fields?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Improve your Wi-Fi with this one trick⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tbf, it’s not like physics stuff is always obvious, especially when dealing with relativity or quantum mechanics. It just feels obvious if you’ve already learned about the research that’s already been done.

  It isn’t even remotely intuitive that light should have a max speed that can’t be added to by moving its source relative to other things. Plus, light does interact with matter, but it can only be slowed down by it.

  So less a stupid question and more just one that isn’t educated about something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Performative Perp Walk⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Kafka wrote stories about confusing, impersonal bureaucracies. So people will describe something as Kafkaesque to convey that sense of being lost in a system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your favorite "gotta go in blind" games?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Understandable. It got pretty frustrating for me too at various points. I’m kinda bad at this kind of combat in general. Most of what motivates me to push through it in games like Dark Souls or Tunic is being interested in the world. But sometimes not even that’s enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your favorite "gotta go in blind" games?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tunic.

  The one thing I think is worth “spoiling” just to save you some pain:

  Tap for spoiler

  If you find a room with a bunch of curtains and bells, it is NOT A PUZZLE!

  I also second Outer Wilds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Witcher 4 has entered full-scale production, CD Projekt has confirmed⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Aside from doing the work to maintain and update your own engine, there is also the problem of onboarding new hires. If you use a standard you can go out and hire people already experienced with working on the engine. If you use your own, you have to teach a new hire to use it before they can be any help.

  I read that this caused a lot of development woes on Halo Infinite for example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Trump's Tariffs Could Cost Gamers Billions⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a shame. Seeing the bullshit companies have done to games for the sake of profit ought to be a pretty easy on-ramp to anti-capitalism. But just like in the real world, racist shit distracts them from any of that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why people consistently vote against their own interests to benefit the rich?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because the rich do a LOT to make it turn out that way.

  • News is largely controlled by capitalists.

  • Education has been gutted in a lot of places to make way for private schools.

  • Corporations can contribute tons of money to candidates. Setting aside the possibility that these are effectively bribes, even if that weren’t the case, the candidates who get that money get to put out more ads and have more campaign infrastructure such as travel funds, staffers, etc.

  • Various kinds of voter suppression.

  • From the very founding of the country, the election system and government has been set up to hamper political participation. Obviously there was the fairly narrow franchise at the start. But even with that expanded, we have the electoral college, unequal apportionment, gerrymandering, first past the post, closed primaries, a court that’s specifically there to slow down popular will, etc.

  • Just being a representative “democracy” puts a barrier between people and the policies they want. You rarely if ever get to vote on policies. You have to vote for a candidate. And the candidate is a whole bundle of policies, but also a record, a personality, etc. So there can be all sorts of political messaging about candidates which has nothing to do with what their policies are. Because of the duopoly party system that is all but ensured by the aforementioned voting system, you aren’t even going to have a candidate you can vote for that will represent your interests. And after all that, even if you manage to vote for someone who says they’ll do the things you want… then they get into office and you’re back on the sidelines. They go and do whatever it was they actually wanted to do, and you have fairly limited recourse for holding them accountable. The most you can do is decide to vote against them next election, but now you’re back to square one.

  • Broader, more participatory forms of political organizing have been violently repressed. Just look at the history of union busting or the police violence during the civil rights movement or even now, etc. In the workplace, where you’re most likely to find others who share your class interests, your boss has a lot of control over you and it’s in their interest to make sure employees don’t talk politics and view each other as competition rather than potential allies.

  • Along similar lines, racism has been used as a tool to divide people who would otherwise share class interests so they wouldn’t focus their attention on capitalists.

  Moral of the story: There is a long history of people struggling against capitalists for a better life and an equally long history of capitalists using every trick in the book to keep them from that goal. The political landscape you see today is the result of that history. Learn from it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Clearly this just means that Silksong IS Half-life 3.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But yes.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not spicy. Everyone knows nuclear power is lemon-lime flavored.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Only have a beginner perspective, but in school I did really well in intro CS class that used Python. 2nd class was in Java and it almost broke me I was so confused.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Serious statement: I don't understand the argument that not voting for Harris was the morally correct thing to do, because of Gaza. Why does anyone believe this?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a philosophical and a practical side to this:

  Philosophically, the core of a democratic system is the peaceful transition of power. The idea that you won’t just try to force your will over people with violence and will respect the will of the populace. This is a fine principle in a proper democracy with a fair process and political outcomes that fall within acceptable ranges. If you wanted more money for the trains and someone else wanted more money for the busses, that’s a disagreement you can live with. And if the voting system is set up so you had equal chances both to introduce topics/candidates and vote on them, then great. By accepting the election and not trying to go outside the system to get your way, you keep the peace and allow for that process to be a viable vehicle for change.

  If this is a requirement for democracy, then the converse is that if a system isn’t fair and produces unacceptable results (eg, Nazis and genocide), participating in it merely legitimizes it. Obviously nothing physically stops you from organizing, but symbolically you’ve shown that you view the system as the sole legitimate way to exert political power and garner authority. And people will then turn around and say you should vote instead of doing xyz actions. “I don’t agree with your methods.”

  On the practical side of this: people put a lot of time, energy, and political capital into supporting candidates in these elections. It eats up the public bandwidth, crowding out other forms of political participation. In addition, once someone works hard to get their candidate elected, there is an impulse, an incentive, to defend them. The people who said to suck it up, vote for Biden, then push him to the left turned around and chastised leftists for protesting over things like the continued anti-immigration policies or the support for Israel’s genocide. US electoral politics is a team sport. People get psychologically invested in their team. They don’t like it when you criticize their team. This makes them resistant to change even on policies they nominally support. I think encouraging people to maintain that emotional investment in elections is harmful. It hinders organizing efforts. It hurts attempts to build class consciousness because it gets people to think about their fellow workers as the enemy and capitalists as potential allies. And the corresponding obsession with 24 hour news cycles turns politics into a TV show. Trying to talk to libs about any history older than like a week ago or maybe at most a presidential term is impossible. If it wasn’t on their favorite TV show it doesn’t exist.

  We need to be drawing people’s attention to actual types of political participation. Elections don’t just distract from that, they make people think they’re doing the right thing. It’s a release.

  All that said, that’s not to say there’s never value in any part of the electoral system, it’s just very limited. Bernie’s attempts at running were part of what got me more engaged in politics and shifted me from being a progressive-ish lib to being more of a socialist. Important to that though was not just the policy platform, but the structure and messaging of the campaign promoted the importance of mass political participation. I ended up meeting some local socialist groups in the process of going to campaign volunteering. However, most of the time and energy still went into the election only for the system to block us at the end and Bernie to give in. Tons of hours of volunteer time went into doing little more than getting people to sign ballot petitions. We weren’t getting those people into a union or a mutual aid group or anything. We basically just tossed our energy into the void.