im a masochist

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i wanna be yur gay

i wanna be yur friend

Fortnite is something I've grown to appreciate (but never play, because I will never make an Epic Games account). The microtransactions are so silly (I feel bad about humanity and society when I think about them) but the game has a lot of technical depth and variety. There's a Guitar Hero in Fortnite. There's a Minecraft in Fortnite. It's really a lot like Ace of Spades was before Jagex killed it.

What I mean to say is "I think you and I think about games similarly and I read your post with that lens." I think the main contention is that "fair" is necessarily subjective, and tricky to define.

If I were to suggest a definition, I'd say a singleplayer game which feels fair is one communicates well, does not have difficulty which demands a huge time commitment, and (counter-intuitively) has generous hitboxes. E.g. Celeste is fair because everything is clearly communicated (you can see the level and know what will kill you), the tricky levels send you back to the start of the screen, and the hitboxes feel sensible by lying to you up and down. (Celeste has three hitboxes, and hazards have tiny and sparse hitboxes.)

And often these games are not as good as From at realizing what players can take or not.

This is something I really liked about Tunic. I could beat any Soulslike I think, but I usually don't want to put up with that. But I had this experience in Tunic, where the first boss was very difficult. I thought I might have sequence broken to an impossible boss. Then, (spoilers; rot-13, you can use DDG to un-rot13 V unq pbyyrpgrq n cntr bs gur phgr va-tnzr znahny, juvpu unq n oyheel fperrafubg bs gung obff ng ebhtuyl zl fxvyy yriry, jvgu na rapbhentvat "LBH PNA QB VG!" zrffntr. Gur tnzr nagvpvcngrq zl pbaprea naq gbyq zr, npghnyyl, lbh pna orng guvf obff.

Then I beat the boss, and I was able to trust that I could beat any of the bosses in Tunic. They were just about the edge of what I was willing to put up with, though. I liked that experience very very much.

This contextualizes it a lot and I appreciate it.

To add on to this, the Dark Souls and related wikis seem to be pretty bad (Fandom??) and a lot of the knowledge seems to be on YouTube videos, which is a culture of knowledge I don't respect and don't want to put up with.

I did try to get into Elden Ring when it launched but it didn't run on my computer, and the community was insufferable. People on r/eldenring got personally offended by the criticism of "it has a launch bug" so I gave up on them.

I've given them a cumulative 10 hours maybe; investing 30 minutes as a Hater with an open mind seems like it might have art payoff.

I'd invested 20 minutes in Outer Wilds before I was encouraged to see it through by a friend, and I am so happy I did. Maybe Dark Soulses can be like that too

You wanna do my crimes? Do you by any chance wanna be my gay?

I am going to offer a counterpoint to the Dark Souls promoters here and as someone who hated Dark Souls when they first played it and then came back to it years later and finished it and thought “That was pretty alright this time” what made it click with me was accepting that the game is badly designed and fails to tell you how shit works properly and, despite what everyone says about these fucking games, it actively punishes experimentation. After that I just looked shit up. Just read fucking stupid, annoying wiki pages to understand basic game mechanics and how I should be using upgrade materials and shit.

People who think Darks Souls is intuitive have either played so much of these games they have forgotten what the first experience is like or watched other people playing it first before playing it themselves or were playing it at the same time as a bunch of friends and sharing information.

To put this in a nicer way and meeting the game more on its own terms: These games were designed to be collaborative. That is why they have messages from other players. That's why you can summon people. They are not intended to be sat down and played by yourself with no extenral input. You aren't actually meant to figure everything out, you are meant to collaborate and share information. And if you aren't caught up in the initial frenzy and excitement of a release and have a bunch of friends sharing information the first time you play one of these then you are not getting the actual experience the game was designed around and you need to look up forum posts and wikis about how upgrading your weapons works.

Or just play a better game.

elaboration that hopefully doesn't make me sound like an obnoxious git gud person:

It's really about the expectation that you'll have to try again, which is a different design philosophy from a lot of other games. The thing that I personally think is satisfying about a souls game is that you can encounter a scenario like a boss that you start out dying to in 30 seconds and barely hurting it, have another go and analyse what you're doing, what's going wrong, where you're getting hit, and work on those individual aspects over the next few encounters, and a lot of the time you can go from losing almost instantly to beating the boss over the course of a play session. This is what I mean when I say "it's easy" - it is still a challenging game but individual encounters let you speedrun that system mastery and get the enjoyment from overcoming a difficult challenge relatively quickly compared to a lot of other hobbies.

The optimal outcome is that you get to feel like Neo in that scene near the end of The Matrix where he starts to see everything as code and he can just effortlessly beat Smith. When you get it, that feeling is extremely satisfying, and there aren't that many single player games that have given me that experience before. The thing is that it's a decent amount of work to get there and it can feel unrewarding on the way. If you don't enjoy soulslikes you can do one of two things - play something else, or work hard to enjoy the acquired taste. I'm personally glad that I beat my head against the wall and I like them now but I can't recommend it one way or the other.

honestly there are 10000 games out there. just move on its not worth it

I feel really bad saying it to people who find DS difficult but it's true Lol

Something that kind of ruins my life to think about is that to young people a videogame is like, some random crap they downloaded to their phone covered in ads or sells gatcha rolls or something. Or like Fortnite? The people who buy games that cost between $20-$70 and provide a contained experience is shrinking population, and it's getting older and older. So the games are getting more niche, and people are seeking experiences where they feel challenged because they've played videogames for decades.

Dark Souls specifically pioneered a "tough but fair" feel, where the tension comes from the fact that you're scared to move forward, and the frustration is offset by the fact that you can retreat at any moment and level up. It makes you learn about the world as you move through it, and enemies have extremely well telegraphed moves that you can just roll through. It's a game about learning. It's less hard than it has a reputation for, you just have to slow down and accept failure sometimes, but if you aren't fucking with it than that's not really shameful. I've played enough of them, I think.

So yeah a lot of indie games copy those ideas because it makes players slow down and appreciate things they might blow through otherwise. A lot of them have accessibility options that Souls games don't have, like Tunic has something that makes the bosses easier, but they are meant to be hard. And often these games are not as good as From at realizing what players can take or not.

It used to be where games were going for flow above everything, where a game needed to be neither too hard or too easy, but that comes off as boring to a lot of players these days. Personally I'm less willing to deal with hard action combat because my reactions have gone to shit, but I want to have to think over long term. Love a turn based. And I want a story to think about. So yeah no souls likes for me, but I get the appeal for sure.

Dark Souls is popular not because it is hard, but because it is easy. Elaboration coming at some point.

I started listening to the Severance podcast, and Ben Stiller and Adam Scott compare Atlassian's Confluence (the worst wiki software in the world, as you probably know; it's so bad) to the Severance procedure, with wording very much like what you quoted in the post.

Orgran Easy Egg, which is a similar product to just egg from my understanding

what mix are you using? is it just egg by any chance? been thinking about giving that a try cause i've heard good things

i had previously read roche's other papers because i was interested in the link between language and nationalism. i speak hakka so originally i was reading work on hakka ethnonationalism. i haven't done any tertiary schooling but i've been interested in national identity formation since high school so this is just a thing i read for leisure. i often find that because i haven't done the foundational readings in an academic context that things go over my head and i have to read slowly but i find the challenge fun?

i didn't expect a reply or for you to read either article closely!! so it's fine!! thank you for your consideration!!!!

hell yeah

hiyohiko azuma has been plotting for ~25 years

i like the cut of your jib. you're hired.

Would her students still be saying "oh my gah" at that point or would it be "oh my gyatt" now?

Well, until it's the year 11930 CE that is :P

Yeah ;( All of my connections outside the USA have some degree of stakes in here (beyond the usual influence the US has worldwide). I'm already in on the "humanity is one organism on the earth, individuals are illusions and borders are lies" thing, but the only non (us) americans I know who talk about local politics are Canadians, which is already pretty heavily intertwined with US politics. I liked to think of myself as a global thinking person, but I've been looking increasingly local, and thinking more and more exclusively about US politics (and the politics of other nuclear-armed nations).

Regarding the first article:

tldr: I read the first article and took away about as much as a non-anthropologist might take away from an anthropology academia paper. I end this section asking how you found this article / how this article ended up on your reading docket?

I do very much appreciate the articles. I've been hungry for Brainy Readings after leaving academia, but there are few forums on the internet where such things are discussed that aren't also LessWrong-likes. I have to admit that I've only read the first one through so far

I started to write something of a book report for the first article that I've had to pare down a lot. Tbh, at first I didn't think I was the target the audience for the first article. The abstract felt like an impenetrable wall (and, at least in my field, that was supposed to be the easy part), but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the rest of the article was the simple thesis, elaborated thoroughly, with a hefty contextualization in an academia I am not part of.

I had some prior background which helped contextualized the sections pertaining to language oppression in the US, Canada and China. I internalized some of those facts but otherwise it felt like too much for me to chew.

But most of what I cut out from the first and second drafts of this reply is "I can't appreciate this entirley". (I know this comment is already so comically long that I had to cut it into sections, but it was way longer!) The field is a bit too distant for me, some terms or ideas are a bit too abstract for me (is it really appropriate to label this academic article 'militant'? Is racism really inherent to any state? These are the ideas which need more elaboration for me to agree with.). It feels like liters of information flowing into my brain which only has room for a pint.

I'm curious, what got this article on your reading docket? When I was in undergrad and grad school, I usually read articles as part of an assignment, or research, or for a presentation for student organizations. Without a question to answer, or deliverable to produce, I felt my reading was directionless.

Regarding the second article, and more of a reply to you:

So I haven't read the second article through yet, and I have a separate 300 words on that already. But I really regret not reading this one first. I feel like I've internalized a lot more from this article (which I've read for only ~10 minutes so far, compared to the ~90 on the first article).

But it's been about 100 hours (I'm sorry it took so long, and I'm sorry I didn't even finish the second article yet!) But yes you did indeed make sense! I'm sorry it took me so long to reply.

Anyways, I am going to read that second paper eventually (probably in the next 50 hours)

incredible foreshadowing

the kids still call her Osaka there is no escape

drink some WATER