Gaming

This is exactly it. I definitely used a lot of walkthroughs as a kid. I also feel like games in the 90s and early 00s were just plain harder, or sometimes poorly designed.

These days I only look something up when I have got to a point of near rage over how much of my limited gaming time has been wasted, and I need to know if I am just a moron, or if it's a bug, or bad game design. Of course, then I get mad that I can't find it written out, and have to skim around in some fucking YouTube video to figure it out.

Beneath A Steel Sky has a help system now you can refer to, and I ended up using it a fair bit. The solutions often just pissed me off though, as they rely on you remembering a one-off bit of dialogue you saw (or skipped) days ago in real time. or were just nonsense.

When I walk around the floor at work now I often see other devs on their phones while they wait for the AI to do stuff. People are getting disengaged are forgetting skills already - this is unsustainable.

The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an "easy button", it's hard to not use it. It's sort of like when you're at work and see the "quick workaround" effectively become the standard process.

Or when you're diving somewhere, and drivers thinking there's an "easy button" gets people killed.

The point, I think, is that society seems to encourage "what can I get away with" while discouraging any consideration of "what should I do". Which, well, seems pretty ass-backwards don't you think?

Then again, we've never truly removed from power the progeny of those that decided beating the shit out of someone else was preferable to doing their fair share of the labor. "But what if someone tries to kick your ass? Then you'll be glad I'm here."

Uhh, like fucking hell I will. That kind of sociopathic fuckery has always been, and will always be, nothing but a drain on the collective effort of any society.

Tldr: I totally agree with you

Oh, and as an aside, part of me kinda hates that Re-Logic added "Journey Mode" to Terraria; I haven't put any significant time into even one classic mode playthrough since.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's something I've been thinking about. I've been playing through some need for speed games on emulators for the past few years. Once I bound keys to save and load states it was over: I'd save-state before every turn and run them over and over until I got them perfect. Doing this I did eventually learn the maps really well though, and on more recent playthroughs I've barely used save-states, which was obviously far more satisfying. I realize this isn't the same thing as ai or walkthroughs, but I think maybe these tools do share something in that they lower the barrier to entry to different sorts of skilled tasks we may not yet feel competent to accomplish. Like training wheels or a helping hand, we can let go of them once we feel steadier on our own.

I like AI because it will ruin next generations, so I will always have job as programmer who can use brain

It's sort of like when you're at work and see the "quick workaround" effectively become the standard process.

Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix

To be fair, I needed some serious help in RCT. The under the hood mechanics were NOT intuitive to me.

I grew up when solutions either were not available or cost money to get either by subscribing to a magazine, buying a magazine, or calling a 1800 hotline which cost ludicrous amounts of money for the time.

When gamefaqs and the like became popular it was great to get the answer instead of giving up. I couldn't imagine growing up always having the answer handed to you though.

It makes sense for me too, and i like your cheat code version of it. I think it's also akin to the tutorial hell for devs and artists.

I had a a guidebook for Desperados. I ended up using the "hide around corner, shoot, and then blast everyone coming around the corner"-tactic instead of the guidebook 80% of the time.

The bits I used gamefaqs guides for (btw I love they are still there ^_^) are rarely fun anyway. Mostly, it's achievement grinding or 100%ing. If the game itself needs a guide to navigate it, I usually just drop it. If it fails at informing me about it's mechanics that much it's not for me.

Counterpoint, like, I can draw things, but I can't draw people, but I have used AI to generate pictures of people that I can then trace to learn how to draw people, and because it's a new person, and it's something I'm in control of, I feel more encouraged to fire up Krita and work on my drawing.

I still suck, don't get me wrong, but I have done more artwork since having access to AI art tools than I did for several years prior to that.

There's just something about having an idea of knowing what the finished output is supposed to look like that helps me figure out how to draw what I'm supposed to draw.

And eventually I will be fully drawing my own stuff from scratch, thanks to using AI as a self-learning tool.