damoj posted:won't spoil the ending but it does some amazing things with male loneliness/alienation/sexual frustration, so much so that i have a very "art as saviour" liberal idea that if only sad incels played the game they might not murder women or whatever. just a fleeting bit of liberalism. sorry about it
the fact is that art does exert some influence on individuals, not to turn them into something they're not, but it can tip the scales in one direction or another. i watched a documentary the other day about woodstock 99, some hbo thing, and there was a more nuanced discussion of the interplay of late 90s popular music and teen violence than usual. like, kmfdm didn't cause columbine, but limp bizkit didn't not contribute to woodstock 99 attendees breaking stuff. anyway, anyone who identifies with video games strongly enough to be 'changed' by them is a lost cause, but i think it would be a mistake to dismiss the value of a story like what you're hinting at, to not bother to tell it at all.
cars posted:video games definitely teach kids to be white-supremacist murderers for the United States government and are funded by the United States government for that purpose
that's different though. COD et al are specific, direct teaching tools, like a flight simulator for pilots in training
there is a video called in "defense of dark souls 2" which is kinda interesting, but it is almost more interesting that this was so heretical to gamers that one of the worst people in the world, "MauLer", made 10 hours of videos in response to it, MauLer is actually a really good example of what u posted above cars, in lieu of anything interesting to say, or any sort of criticality, the fascist "critic" is left with no choice but to talk for 15 hours on continuity errors in star wars the force awakens
over enough exposure, the sum of those little picayune hemmings and hawings will start to feel like a substantive critique, though if you ask someone who sat through it all to summarize, they'll cover up not having any takeaways by rolling their eyes. you're a member of the outgroup, we don't owe you an explanation; it wasn't FOR you. watch the whole thing if you're so curious.
Edited by Constantignoble ()
shriekingviolet posted:oh my god I thought "11 hours" was just hyperbole for emphasis, reality exceeds my expectations once again
we are actually under-stating lengths out of respect for comrades with high blood pressure
tears posted:dark souls 2 is a worse game than dark souls 1 purely because someone named "Matthewmatosis" made a video in 2014 about how it was not dark souls 1 2, but instead something called dark souls 2, and after that everyone collectively lost the need to ever think again.
yeah this is one of the worst things about YouTube but also one of the funniest things about it in a bleak way: how the default response to anyone bringing up any topic in pop culture online is for someone to parrot the most popular YouTube video about it, as though the opinion is their own, achieved through purest independent meditation in Plato's cave, then for everyone else around them to affirm that it's also THEIR completely independent opinion too, in a sort of chaste Dionysian frenzy.
Like on the topic of this thread: there is a popular video "reexamining" the Wii zelda game, about how it is actually bad. The video makes some sound critiques and seems like it was made as a conversation-starter instead of a conversation-ender. But the only reason it's popular is because the person who made it was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Let's Play phenomenon, a host personality from a channel that is much more popular than the video itself. That meant that as soon as the video went up, it became a test of loyalty to a Brand to alter your thinking entirely about this game, which, just before you watched the video, you liked fine or even thought was a very good video game.
So, it has become the default opinion on the video game online, for all the difference that makes to it as an extremely popular and well-liked video game. And now the game has been re-released by nintendo in HD and because it is a zelda game and therefore an obligatory purchase for the sort of people who have parroted that one YouTube video for years... and it is a pretty fun video game or at least a well-refined one in the way main-series nintendo projects usually are... the parrot brains are all breaking down simultaneously in a completely different sort of humiliating public display. Which again is Funny To Me.
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:that's different though. COD et al are specific, direct teaching tools, like a flight simulator for pilots in training
i don't disagree on the difference between the immediate effects. but these tools are cultivated through general government sponsorship of the industry from the local to federal levels and managed by a revolving door policy between the security state and video game companies. like... the successful video games that don't teach kids to massacre Arabs and Hispanics fund the ones that do. and i don't think that makes purging the entire medium from most people's lives even possible in the current system for pretty much the same reason, because just like movies and TV, adults today were brought up on it as a means to relieve the stress of life under capitalism, as student or worker or lumpen, and just try and switch them over to something else while capitalism exists as a global faux-totalized system if your offered alternative not as immediately pacifying. and boy try to make it anywhere near as pacifying without all those dollars and incentive the industry has to make things as much like the previous things as possible. but i try to look it in the eye, that Hollywood's equivalents are just as much propaganda machines as Hollywood is, you pay for some puzzle game about wizard gems nowadays it's probably going toward hiring more DoD stuffed uniforms as project leads for Army Guy Trainer #1488.
cars posted:All PCs are 1st-level half-elf apothecaries per Sages & Specialists (1996) (TSR 2164)
cars posted:a 10th-level Dandy (Dragon #189) approacheth. He would fain receipt 1 Mo. of Beauty Cream (S&S, p. 18)
btw all three of these citations are real, and the situation could have been resolved by asking the Dandy what he would do in your place. That would have invoked his Dandy's luck ability, where "schemes hatched by dandies seem to have an uncanny knack of working", at the risk of exciting complications once things seem to be going smoothly. I'm not disappointed in you though.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/beijing-denounces-video-games-spiritual-opium-tencent-imposes-limits-teenage-players
Populares posted:I'm a big boy, I can play video games and say the nword with my fellow adults.
mods???
karphead posted:i'm just playing noita since i'm on a laptop and have a shit connection
that game is cool
cars posted:(top 1.9% onlyfans)
i paid my way for this one on this page and it definitely deserve more upvotes
kornfan posted:how would a non-capitalist society even have big sweeping films
i have been peeking back at some AAA titles from the last decade and i really had to marvel at skyrim in particular. look at all the half-written ideas, boring mechanics and trite use of their own setting. virtually every quest has some documented bug. the minimalistic "civil war" mostly reduces to a handful of fetch quests. really marveled this time at how truly bad and poorly realized the thieves guild is. you're "dragonborn" and they still haven't worked flight powers back in the setting since removing it after morrowind. it's a mountain-climbing game where you can't climb things. todd howard was recently seen waffling on the question of whether climbing will ever be a mechanic in a Bethesda title
then i look at the breadth and quality of the work in the unofficial community patch fixing the tens of thousands of bugs mentioned, the billion mods that basically make it playable to one degree or other. the labor of thousands shared for free — sans the horrors of industry crunch, even. how can this be anything but an argument against capital? how much better would this pile of shit have been if it had been open-source from the jump, and if people had more free time to think about leisure projects?
"under communism, we will have better games" feels like a really vulgar sort of argument, but its truth is undeniable
Constantignoble posted:kornfan posted:how would a non-capitalist society even have big sweeping films
i have been peeking back at some AAA titles from the last decade and i really had to marvel at skyrim in particular. look at all the half-written ideas, boring mechanics and trite use of their own setting. virtually every quest has some documented bug. the minimalistic "civil war" mostly reduces to a handful of fetch quests. really marveled this time at how truly bad and poorly realized the thieves guild is. you're "dragonborn" and they still haven't worked flight powers back in the setting since removing it after morrowind. it's a mountain-climbing game where you can't climb things. todd howard was recently seen waffling on the question of whether climbing will ever be a mechanic in a Bethesda title
what if the best video games ever made sucked complete ass
Constantignoble posted:how much better would this pile of shit have been if it had been open-source from the jump, and if people had more free time to think about leisure projects?
it wouldn't exist if the only adjustment to work was "more free time to think about leisure projects", because something like Skyrim exists through refinement of the resources developed by Bethesda for earlier games and through crunch time from full-time employees, and an open-source unpaid-collab development would likely as not have been much buggier during early versions (as most mods are), the project itself would likely have failed completely the way that most mod projects that size do, because we still live in capitalism as a mode of production and people still need to sell their labor-hours to survive. That doesn't tell us much about communism really, but even if it meant video games like that would no longer exist, that's... like... not a big deal if you're not stupid or insane.
Edited by cars ()
Here is a 'tool assisted speedrun' or TAS of Paper Mario II. I sometimes think about the hours people put in to speed-running, particularly TAS runs. These people clock out of their day jobs and go home to shave off a couple seconds from their Mario marathon, day in and day out. The TAS people approach their crayola-style nintendos as if they are searching for the god damn higgs boson... They reverse engineer these games, and then program a robot to play them perfectly.
I guess part of the pleasure, why it feels different from normal work is that speedrunning is pointless from the get go, like real sports. They are games played for their own sake. I suppose in that sense, speedrunning is not all that different from any other sport or game. Yet how many games involve solving novel problems in applied computer science? In the past, very few people had the 'leisure' for this kind of tinkering, but when they did they often picked things that were socially useful -- I'm thinking here of the renaissance and enlightenment 'gentleman scientists'.
What a waste of potential. People loathe to do work that is actually linked into the economy, but invent busy-work for themselves outside of it. Meanwhile there is so so much work that needs to be done in agroecology, medicine, healthcare, education, science..
cars posted:because we still live in capitalism as a mode of production and people still need to sell their labor-hours to survive
i wasn't being very precise in my expression, but this is really the thing i was gesturing at as the changed condition, in what i might retrospectively describe as a flight of jehuian fancy
edit: also underpinning my post was the idea that here's a product that's been out for about 10 years, including numerous rereleases and deployments to new platforms, and it's still dependent on large and fundamentally constrained community mod efforts to fix its issues because at no time has it ever added shareholder value to actually improve the thing beyond 64-bit refactoring. probably more to be said about how they've been able to harness that free labor as a way to keep their bullshit profitable over all these years, but i think that's like, the lowest-hanging-fruit behavior to be expected from any capitalist enterprise, so i won't belabor it
Edited by Constantignoble ()
I would add that some of these speedrunning 'advances' are not just individuals making breakthroughs, but that techniques develop on forums and through discussion in a parody or caricature of intellectual labor.
Some of these people are genuinely talented people with a lot to contribute to society but their labor-power is left to rot in these trivial pursuits.
Maybe focussing on the video game example obscures things. Consider gardening. Not every home-gardener will be able to make advances in agroecology, but even their simple labor is inefficient and somewhat meaningless if it never leaves the backyard.
The first world will probably have to undergo land reform and repeasantization to a certain extent to face the climate crisis (Zak Cope says 80%-90% of first world food has a tropical or subtropical component, which is not compatible with a third world with any real sovereignty and control of their production). How many people have spent hours in animal crossing when they probably would have enjoyed real gardening more, if only they had a speck of soil, or a commune that had a place for them? Meanwhile, millions of lawns soak up water, producing hay for the landfill. I'd hazard to guess that some home hobby gardens actually overproduce, because there is no good way to share surplus produce.
I take it for granted that video games provide a substitute for un-alienated work. The promise the feeling of a job well done in a frictionless way, unlike the real world where my labors are tainted by the fact that someone else has planned, directed and profited from them. Is it really so inconceivable that some of the people obsessively researching Mario Kart might have something to contribute to real science?