Hard disagree. There’s plenty of games that are little more than dressed up choose your own adventure stories. Plenty that are meant for chill and relaxing gameplay. Plenty that do little more than guide you through horror scenes. And so on.

And even beyond that, most people don’t even play a game long enough to have any real “skill development over time.” I read from the Civ7 director recently that if you’ve ever finished a game of Civ you’re literally in a minority of the player base. And that tracks with what I’ve heard about other games as well.

Most players of any given game never finish it. Most of those quit at the first sign of frustration and most are on the easiest game difficulties. This would indicate to me that the majority’s conception of “fun” has little to no relation to skill development in the game. They’re there for the moment to moment experiences. Rubber band mechanics are there to evoke those fun experiences more often in the majority of the player base.

I think you’re overstating the importance of games as a platform for skill development as opposed to a platform for, you know, having fun. The fact is that the vast majority of players play any game on one of its lowest difficulty settings.

Rubber banding is made for the core of the game’s audience and challenge-seekers are just not large enough to be that core. Some of those rubber banding mechanics can and are disabled at higher difficulty settings. Others are needed at higher difficulty because the AI can’t compete and the investment in dev time to improve the AI just isn’t worth it because, again, very few people actually play the game at those difficulties.

Knowing how Trump has played up his assassination attempt at every opportunity… He absolutely would want to bring attention to any damage to his ear.

I don’t really care one way or another about whatever drama is going on about his ear. I’m just saying, I don’t think he’d choose to use makeup to cover up any scars on his ear.

I never said story games are shallow. But if the games you like are ones where you can feel like you’ve experienced all the game and the story has to offer in a single playthrough then they are, by definition, shallow. Even a great movie is worth watching multiple times of its story has any appreciable depth. Video games, even more so since there should be more to the story to experience.

Sounds like what you enjoy are shallow, linear story games. To each their own, of course. Glad you’re happy with what PS5 offers you in that regard. But the industry has a lot more to offer than that.

I’m in the same boat (as far as free time goes) but I have the opposite outlook. Strategy games, and other games with some amount of crunchy complexity, keep me engaged even when I’m not playing. I can spend some time on wikis, crafting theories, and cooking up plans throughout the week and that keeps me coming back.

I can’t do story games because it’s too easy to forget what’s going on when you spread it out that far. Or there’s online action games (shooters, mobas, etc) but it’s rare that I can guarantee I’ll be on long enough to complete a match.

Guns may not cause the mental health issues that make people turn violent, but they do allow violent people to become mass murderers. Video games do neither.

I’m not sure how anybody can look at the way GTA 5 online was monetized to hell and not seriously question how far they’re going to try to go with GTA 6. I’m fully expecting it to leak into GTA 6’s single player with an intense focus on getting more and more out of mtx.

Can’t say that pretending his narcissistic destructive grifting doesn’t exist sounds like a better option.

Everybody thinks they’ll come out on top after a “revolution” but they almost certainly will not. Such chaos is far more likely to help than hurt fascists. That’s kind of their jam.

I’m guessing this is it. The setting is a 1950’s culture but without the racism and sexism that were rampant at the time. Women and POC holding significant positions in the corporate world, which never would’ve happened in the actual 1950s. It is a fictional world, of course. People seem to forget that.

I would think it would take 4 back to back presidential election wins by the Democratic party. Maybe 3 if it included wipeouts of Republicans in Congress and at the state level. No party can survive being out of power for that long without changing and shifting towards were voters are and that leaves the Democrats room to shift left to solidify that flank.

We’ve already had 1. We’re on the cusp of a possible second. That means we could be 4 years from a complete collapse of the Republican party, if people were actually serious about creating a real leftist movement in this country. That’s because winning is how you affect change. A loss just tells politicians that they need to be more like the winner.

It does and they’re kinda weird (if you’re used to more like Java-style interfaces). It flips the dependency between the interface and implementor on its head. Worth looking it up, it’s interesting.

C is just a work around for B and the fact that the technology has no way to identify and overcome harmful biases in its data set and model. This kind of behind the scenes prompt engineering isn’t even unique to diversifying image output, either. It’s a necessity to creating a product that is usable by the general consumer, at least until the technology evolves enough that it can incorporate those lessons directly into the model.

And so my point is, there’s a boatload of problems that stem from the fact that this is early technology and the solutions to those problems haven’t been fully developed yet. But while we are rightfully not upset that the system doesn’t understand that lettuce doesn’t go on the bottom of a burger, we’re for some reason wildly upset that it tries to give our fantasy quasi-historical figures darker skin.

I mean “taking pictures of people who are smiling” is definitely a bias in our culture. How we collectively choose to record information is part of how we encode human biases.

I get what you’re saying in specific circumstances. Sure, a dataset that is built from a single source doesn’t make its biases universal. But these models were trained on a very wide range of sources. Wide enough to cover much of the data we’ve built a culture around.

This is the thing. There’s an incredible number of inaccuracies in the picture, several of which flat out ignore the request in the prompt, and we laugh it off. But the AI makes his skin a little bit darker? Write the Washington Post! Historical accuracy! Outrage!

How’s the concurrent player count doing? The number of people playing it on my friends list has declined significantly.

Designing for a huge amount of users costs money and expertise, so more money, and not even their most optimistic predictions included this many players. If they hadn’t made it big, that money would’ve been wasted. Which games are going to go viral is just insanely hard to predict.

People are saying that the rubber band on joystick trick doesn’t work, at least. So they at least are checking for changes to input events.

Too bad it was only one season long.