Is open-source compatible with competitive games? As much as I love open-source in general, I feel like cheating would be a serious problem if the source code is available for everyone. That's not really an issue in single-player or co-operative games (outside of cheating leaderboard positions) but it would absolutely cause problems in a PvP game.
loobkoob
joined 2 years ago
As a non-American:
I feel like hyper-capitalism and America's borderline corporatocracy is responsible for this. So many Americans feel like they're being lied or taken advantage of in order for corporations to profit.
The suspicions about "Big Pharma", for instance, almost make sense to me if I try to consider it from an American perspective. Healthcare is insanely expensive there, and being told you need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars "for your own good" is enough to make anyone suspicious. Especially when you see men posting their itemised hospital bills online where they were billed $300 for "women's sanitary products" - it's very clear these companies and healthcare providers are willing to be dishonest in order to profit. So American people start to distrust the entire industry/field.
Of course, when you look at it from a global perspective, or especially from a perspective of a country with nationalised healthcare where the same profit motives don't exist, it seems absurd. Just because the American companies are scummy doesn't mean the science behind medicine is wrong or a lie.
And it's the same across so many other industries. American companies take advantage of consumers, consumers start to distrust them. American people have been conditioned to distrust or be sceptical of so many things at this point that a lot of people feel like their own judgement is the only thing they can trust. Of course, not everyone has the critical thinking skills for that to actually be true, nor does everyone have the education in every single area for it to be true. And for those people with weaker critical thinking skills, having some charlatan come along and say, "well we all know you can't trust X, Y and Z, so what if A is a lie as well? And trust me, you can trust B" makes them think, "oh wow, they're right about not being able to trust X, Y and Z, maybe they're right about A and B too".
And so your Donald Trumps, your Alex Jones, etc, gain power and influence, and the people who follow them feel smart because they can "see through the systemic lies". It doesn't matter that half of what they say isn't provably true because (to their followers, at least) it could be true.
So I don't think it's just American exceptionalism that's responsible. I think the whole system's so broken that it's conditioned people to be sceptical and distrustful about everything, and to try to take advantage of the broken system when they can.
"Landed gentry" was a social class of people who owned estates and, well, land. They didn't have to work; they made their income by profiting off the work of the farm hands, merchants, etc, who worked on their land. The estates these landed gentry owned, along with their wealth, would be passed down to their children when they died. It meant the gentry did very little to earn their station in life, but still had a fair amount of power and wealth.
How spez thinks it applies to Reddit mods, I'm not entirely sure. But he definitely meant it as an insult. His full quote was:
And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.
So I guess he was upset that mod teams get to select who else is a good fit to join the mod team? Of course, the issue is that he is the landed gentry - users didn't vote for him, nor can they remove him; and he's profiting off the work of the people who post content and the people who spend their time moderating.
Yeah, I don't get it. I guess I can see the appeal of some "Internet Of Things" connected appliances, like smart fridges suggesting recipes and keeping track of stock and auto-populating shopping lists for you. I don't need that personally, but I can see why it could appeal to some people.
But things like washing machines and dishwashers? You need to be there in person to fill them up just before they're ready to go on, and to empty them when they're done. And when they're not turned on, they're sat there doing nothing. What "smart" functions can they even offer?
You've got some good answers already, but I can expand on it a little: businesses in most sectors are feeling the impact of increased interest rates - both because they can't borrow as much themselves any more, and because there is less money coming in from investors because they can't borrow as much either - but tech (including games) is doubly impacted because there was such a surge in demand during lockdowns. While other businesses tended to struggle during lockdowns, and have simply had that struggle replaced with a different struggle due to the interest rates, the tech sector grew massively during the pandemic.
People working at home, or furloughed, had more personal time and more disposable income because they weren't spending money on travelling to work, on overpriced lunches, on dining out with friends, going to concerts, etc. It all added up, and they spent that money on streaming subscriptions, video games and just generally on recreational, home-based activities, many of which revolve around tech these days. So the tech sector grew a lot because of the low interest rates, and it grew a lot because more people were buying its products/services. And now, rather than having more disposable income, a lot of people are facing a cost of living crisis, meaning not only have they reduced their spending because they're back in the office and dining out and going to concerts again (and all those other things people spend money on when they're not confined to their house), but many people have less money to spend on gaming, subscriptions, etc, than pre-pandemic.
Also, because the tech sector was doing so well during the pandemic, it was an attractive prospect for investors (who themselves had increased money, as well as great interest rates), meaning it grew even more. Everything kind of fed into each other and the tech sector grew exponentially as a result. Whereas right now, not only does the increased interest rate for borrowing mean investors are throwing their cash around less in general, but the fact that the tech sector is struggling makes it a less attractive prospect for investors, meaning the whole sector kind of doubly loses out on that front.
So these tech companies invested their money into growing their companies and expanding their businesses' scopes like good capitalists. Which does generally make sense - if you find yourself sat on a huge pile of money, it's generally better to find a way to invest it into something useful (or to invest it into something makes you an even bigger pile of money if you see the Monopoly Man as aspirational). The issue is, most of them were somewhat short-sighted (plus global economics is a tricky thing to predict); they spent money as if it was always going to be coming in at the same rate. And now that they're being impacted by increased interest rates on their own borrowing, the loss of investors, and the reduced spending power of consumers and they're very suddenly having to make massive cuts to stay afloat.
It'll potentially just end up like emails (which are also federated, after all), where Gucci employees get an @gucci.com email address and an @gucci.com ActivityPub handle.
"Trump" is synonymous with "fart" in British English. Plenty of Americans already did celebrate and vote for a fart.
Yeah, there's a lot to be said for what the quality of the practice is. Someone just practicing something for 200 hours could see less (relative) improvement than someone who, for instance, records themselves doing something and watches it back so they can find the things they really need to focus on, and then practices those things for 50 hours. Coaching themselves, essentially.
Of course, it may just be that more focused, high-quality practice just lets people reach their ceiling faster and doesn't actually give them any long-term advantage - I don't know. It's something that would be interesting but difficult to study.
My keyboard (Swiftkey) gets very excited about the possibilities when I start to hyphenate words to create compounds. It accepts that they exist, but it starts trying to throw all sorts of random suggestions in for what the second word could be (and it rarely gets the right word).
"Mystery box" storytelling is the name for it and, yeah, Lost, especially, is the poster child for not executing on it particularly well. It can be exciting, and it does a good job of making following a story feel like a communal experience that everyone can participate in - speculating on where things will go next, for instance - but it also often feels like shows using it end up over-promising and under-delivering (and often leaves viewers feeling a little soured at the end).
I feel like Dark was a good example of it being well-executed, and proves it certainly can be done well. But yeah, BSG definitely didn't end up paying off for me either.
You're right about osu! Although it's probably one of the few competitive games where there's no gameplay interaction between players - if another player is cheating, it hurts the overall competitiveness, of course, but it doesn't directly affect your gameplay experience.
It's not like playing a shooter where someone has an aimbot and wallhacks, or a racing game where someone can ram you off the track without slowing themselves down - those things directly ruin your gameplay experience as well as obviously hurting the competitive integrity. I don't think those kinds of games would work at all if they were open-source and without anti-cheat unless there was strict moderation and likely whitelisting in place for servers.