Lurker > adjl

Because the people who were given the power to decide how much wealth would trickle down like watching their own numbers go up more than watching other people's.

Well that didn't last long.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

You could argue to which degree they influence the act of creation, but that's one mother of a slippery slope because every artist uses tools. There is a significant difference between someone who fingerpaints on a cave wall using self-crafted pigments and someone who draws on a computer tablet or manipulates a photograph in Photoshop, but they're all still artists.

That's the thing: Generative AI doesn't influence or facilitate the act of creation. It replaces it. Every other artistic tool simplifies or streamlines part of that act of creation, which may open up creative possibilities that would otherwise be inaccessible (like being able to select a colour from a wheel of 16.7 million of them instead of having to hand-mix pigments), but the actual act of creation still relies on the artist creating what they want no matter how many tools are available to help them express their ideas.

AI, however, does all the creation for you. Conceptually, it's identical to commissioning an artist to create something for you: You come up with an idea of what you want, you take that idea to somebody that has the skills needed to express that idea, and you work with what they've given you to fine-tune it to your needs/desires. The only real difference is that you don't have to pay for the commission because it's not a person doing it for you.

The line blurs a bit when you start talking about photography, but photography's in a weird space as an art form to begin with (the creativity and skill lies not necessarily in creating something new, but rather in figuring out how to capture something that already exists in a way that expresses the desired vision), so I'm fine with putting that aside because it doesn't lend itself to easy analogies.

Blue_Thunder posted...

Its uses for actual artists are limited, and it's more a tool for people for people who don't make art to make okayish images with minimal effort and for corporate entities to cut costs.

Pretty much. If you have the creativity and skill to create your own art, it's largely useless (at least generative stuff, AI-based enhancements can be helpful). If you don't, it saves you from having to pay somebody to shore up your deficiency.

If it was real, she wouldn't have ghosted you.

grimhilde00 posted...

really depends on the area

Pretty much. If you live in an area that never gets super hot or has ready access to beaches? Not so much. If you live in an area that does get really hot and where there aren't many other options for swimming? They become a lot more desirable.

Under absolutely no circumstances should you ever attempt to self-medicate a suspected hormonal imbalance without consulting a doctor to at least figure out if you actually have one. If you do have one, they can work with you to medicate and correct it. If you don't have one, you're going to create one if you try taking any sort of hormone supplements.

Did you really delete your last bump in an effort to pretend you didn't double bump the topic?

Colonel_Lingus posted...

Curious if anyone would've voted Neopets, YDKJ, or Tokimeki Memorial... wish they allowed for expanded polls.

Neopets is a weird one. Its success paved the way for social media games like Farmville and Words with Friends and ultimately laid the groundwork for most mobile gaming and the whole concept of free-to-play live services (including design elements like rewards for checking in daily, time-gated progression, and social FOMO). It's certainly not the only precursor to that model (WoW's success is probably a larger driver of the live service model in premium games), so exactly how much can be attributed to Neopets is debatable, but that's a massive legacy whose presence is still felt very strongly in the modern industry, such that Neopets can definitely be said to have been a majorly influential game (we'll skip the semantic debate over whether or not calling it a "game" is accurate).

It's not, however, necessarily a *good* legacy. The live service gold rush has been a major driving force behind the trend of predatory monetization and design philosophies that focus more on engagement over fun, detracting considerably from the quality of games and causing no small amount of objective harm. To that end, I don't know if it's a legacy that necessarily needs to be honoured in a showcase of history's most influential games, particularly where Neopets was actually fun in its own right and therefore doesn't necessarily deserve to have such an unfortunate legacy attached to it.

darkknight109 posted...

Honestly, Minecraft - a.k.a. the best-selling video game in history - taking six attempts to get in is crazy.

That's pretty ridiculous. I don't really hesitate to call Minecraft the most influential game ever, given that it's possible to credit its success for the entire indie market (also popularizing sandboxes, survival crafting, and procedural generation, all of which have been huge since its launch). It should have been almost automatic.

darkknight109 posted...

Also, WTF is Barbie Fashion Designer doing in there? I can understand pretty much every other inductee except that one.

I balked at that one on the first pass, but looking at the blurb, it made more sense. It was one of the first games to be marketed specifically to girls, after decades of gaming being an overt sausage-fest, and it saw enough success to cement "for girls" as a worthwhile market to invest in. It couldn't possibly matter less for the kinds of games you and I play, but I can understand calling it a significant part of gaming history for the market it opened up.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's generally easy to work with the three dimensions if you remember 3/4/5 for the sides of a triangle (which TVs generally conform to), and only resort to the full a + b = c if you really need to. So I was able to, say, calculate out pretty easily with 44" wide I'd get 33" high and a diagonal/screen size of around 55".

That's an okay approximation, but it's really only accurate for 4:3 screens, so it's not the most reliable now that widescreen has become so standard. For 16:9 ones, using a 4:3 ratio to calculate will result in underestimating the width by ~25% if you start with a known height, or overestimating the height by ~33% if you start with width. That's offset a little in that the screen border tends to be a bit wider on the bottom to fit the controls in, but 3:4:5 is still going to be a pretty rough estimate.

Of course, I'm also the sort of person who routinely uses algebra to help with video games, so perhaps I'm a bit more of a stickler for doing the math than most.

I don't remember the exact context, but I ended up doing that in reverse once to figure out how wide a TV was that I didn't have definite dimensions for: Take the known diagonal measurement, substitute 9L/16 for the height, expand everything out and solve the equation. Add a couple extra inches for the screen borders, and I had the size I needed.

krazycharlie posted...

I'll go with Guitar Hero. I've had more fun with it than with all of the other nominees combined. Then again, this is just my personal preference.

GH is a weird one to include. It wasn't the first rhythm game, it didn't do anything particularly unique among other rhythm games (it's basically just Beatmania with fewer buttons, stuck on a guitar), and it hasn't really spawned much of a legacy. It's definitely been one of the most popular rhythm game franchises, so it gets some credit for that, but that popularity also got milked to the point of crashing the fad it started, which kind of negates that credit.

I also had a lot of fun with GH (specifically 3 and WT), but I really wouldn't consider it an Important Game in any regard. It was just really popular for a few years, then died out without leaving any lasting impact on the industry. In my mind, that's not the sort of game that a museum exhibit of the most influential games ever should even be considering.

Redfeather posted...

Metroid inspired a whole genre of games.

I was kind of on the fence about Metroid. It inspired the metroidvania genre, obviously, and that's a big deal because of how prominent the genre has become, but it was one of several contemporary games that did (off the top of my head, Kid Icarus was similar in a lot of ways, as was Zelda 2, and I expect I could dig up a few others), and it was Super Metroid (alongside SotN) that really formed the foundation for the genre. It has enough of a legacy to be worth considering, but I don't think it's actually the best game to represent that legacy.

https://imgur.com/qa8EFym

Flappers posted...

Some companies actually experimented with this and found that, not only did revenue either stay the same or increase, but employee productivity went up and resignations decreased

While there are some fields where that won't be the case and that makes legislation kind of tricky, I'm pretty comfortable saying that the only reason this hasn't become standardized by legislation is that it would be unpopular among older and/or conservative voters that refuse to accept the idea of people not having to "work as hard" as they currently do. There are probably a few other factors, like commercial real estate investors not wanting companies to downsize their offices (also playing a major role in the pushback against remote work) and downtown businesses being concerned about having fewer days to make their money (again, also a factor working against remote work, even to the extent of many cities offering tax incentives to companies that force employees back into the office), but the biggest obstacle is almost certainly political backlash from people who don't want life to be easier for future generations.

DirtBasedSoap posted...

does anyone have a full list of every game already in there? their website is ass

https://www.museumofplay.org/exhibits/world-video-game-hall-of-fame/inducted-games/

Gotta scroll down to the bottom and hit "load more" several times to see the full list.

Colonel_Lingus posted...

What a goddamned saint

Do epinephrine next it's criminal what the charge for that shit

Indeed. I believe Epipens are another example of exploiting the longer patent duration for mechanisms than for drugs. Epinephrine is dirt cheap and anyone can produce it, but the actual delivery mechanism is patented and sold at a massive markup because there's no meaningful competition for it.

SunWuKung420 posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/3-poll-of-the-day/80725413

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/3-poll-of-the-day/80721506

It's a little dated in some ways, but otherwise, you aren't going to get too much disagreement on that one. It remains one of the best examples of the Metroidvania genre, even after 30 years of building on the foundation it laid.

Revelation34 posted...

It had a unique battle system. Has any other game ever done it like that?

It wasn't really that unique. The positioning thing was all that really set it apart from other ATB games, and positional bonuses in turn-based games have shown up many times before and since then. It was still well-made, it just doesn't really stand out by modern standards.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'd argue Asteroids and Myst would outrank both of them.

Asteroids was a huge facet of both the arcade and console booms, became sort of synonymous with gaming for years, had a huge influence on the development of later games like Defender and Cosmic Avenger (and thus the games that followed them). And it made more money for Atari at the time than any other game. It's probably tied with Pac-Man for pointing to a single game from that era that most represents the era.

It best represents the era and unarguably played a huge role in the games industry growing as it did, but I'd argue that if we're talking about what's the most influential, it should be a question of which games have elements that have played the largest roles in their respective genres evolving. Granted, Asteroids is effectively the progenitor of twin-stick shooters, even if games that more closely resemble Asteroids itself aren't all that common (whereas games that closely resemble SimCity and Ultima are, which was my logic), so perhaps it deserves more credit than I gave it on the initial pass.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Myst basically helped push the adoption of CD-ROM and CD PC gaming as a whole, and had a huge influence on a lot of games that followed.

That, though, I would say is more a matter of "it popularized the platform" than influencing the market in ways that are felt today. It established a lot of the conventions for point-and-click adventure games, but that genre's heyday has largely passed such that I struggle to say it's been a major influence on gaming as a whole.

ItIsSoOver posted...

How do you figure? What is the difference?

It's a bit of a cop-out, but mostly the fact that extensive study of the matter has found Gender Dysphoria to be a pretty well-defined disorder of its own, but not racial or species dysphoria. That comes with the caveat that future study may find reason to treat racial/species dysphoria as their own things instead of as symptoms of other disorders, but I can't really form an opinion on anything other than the research as it stands now, so I'm comfortable settling on that assumption but keeping an open mind to future developments.

ItIsSoOver posted...

No stranger than identifying as a different race or sex

Only if the thing you find strange is "deviating from your natural state in any regard," in which case getting a haircut or wearing clothes would be lumped in as being just as strange. You've gotta draw a line somewhere. Where the line is drawn is pretty arbitrary, but I'm pretty comfortable saying that it's weirder to not want to be a human at all than to want to be a human with a couple different variables than you were born with. That's a very significant jump, leaving lots of room for line-drawing.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Robots would be immune to every power a vampire possesses except their physical strength.

Fortunately, physical strength is all a vampire would really need to use to beat a robot.

Though, Robot vs. Anything is always a skewed fantasy fight because "robot" can mean such a wide variety of things, meaning it can just be customized to whatever best fits the fight in question. A vampire would have no trouble beating a Roomba (unless it had just sucked up a pile of garlic powder). A vampire would have quite a lot of trouble beating a motion-activated sprinkler that sprayed holy water everywhere.

ItIsSoOver posted...

We definitely don't have a global epidemic of porn addiction or anything.

Wish they'd block that degenerate shit everywhere, but hey, I'm sure it will be fine eventually when civilization collapses from the various pressures pushing it that way.

Ain't no panic like a moral panic. Careful you don't clutch those pearls too hard.

ItIsSoOver posted...

If you consider that pornographic that's your call

Most would consider a facial to be a sex act, and most would consider any depiction of a sex act pornographic. That doesn't mean it was particularly interesting porn, but lumping it in with porn is pretty reasonable. That is, after all, why it was modded.

SunWuKung420 posted...

I'll argue the current push to create more gamblers will cause more problems than porn.

Probably, but I wouldn't really consider either to be harbingers of society's collapse. They're problems, certainly, but in the grand scheme of climate change, an explosive cost of living crisis, and the imminent collapse of the labour market due to runaway automation, they don't really amount to much.

rjsilverthorn posted...

Strictly speaking, TX passed a law that required adult content sites to validate ID's for TX residents and PornHub opted to just block TX rather than comply. I don't really see that as a free speech violation as it is a massive privacy violation. I also see it as being a largely meaningless law for all the other reasons stated in this thread.

It's not strictly an infringement of free speech, but enough other states have tried similar things and yielded the same result that I don't think there's any chance that those proposing the law didn't expect this outcome. They're in a position where they can claim they didn't censor it, but there's functionally very little difference between censorship and what they did do.

Yes, everything else I'm saying about CT not being a remarkable game aside, the soundtrack is outstanding. Credit where credit is due.

LinkPizza posted...

I mentioned to someone that the ones they think theyre protecting are the ones most likely to have VPNs to see what they want, anyway

Or if not VPNs, to be active in enough online communities to find sites that don't have age verification and/or have not blocked Texas. It'll cut down a bit on kids accessing porn, but if they want to find it, they're going to, and the government won't be able to do anything to circumvent that until they make a genuine effort to understand what options are available to verify users' ages securely and without introducing major privacy concerns.

Of course, the actual best course of action would be to accept that it's inevitable that kids that want to see porn are going to access it, and from there develop sex ed curricula that include candid discussions about what porn is, isn't, and the harms it can do if misused, but somehow I don't think Texan voters would get behind that.

LinkPizza posted...

I would figure most people who are in the range for watching porn would probably know

There's a substantial audience for porn in pretty much every age range. Older, less computer-savvy people are more likely to be stumped by the block, though younger audiences (not-so-ironically, the exact audiences this law is allegedly trying to protect) will likely be able to figure it out.

Jen0125 posted...

Thanks Bernie

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/5/5ea2ef6d.jpg

I wonder what that's going to do globally. I've been on Symbicort since I was like 12 and that costs $120 (CAD) for a two-month supply. I fortunately have 80% of that paid by insurance, but many aren't so lucky. Either way, good for the US.

Fun fact: Because the "Turbuhaler" design A-Z uses for so many of their puffers is considered a piece of machinery, it's protected by a standard patent instead of a drug patent. Drug patents usually run out after 20 years, allowing generic alternatives to be produced and sold (this typically leaves 7-9 years of sale without competition, during which companies try to recover the money it cost to produce the drug), but the patent on the delivery mechanism for those puffers lasts for 75 years. This means they've got another 50-odd years of having no competition on any drugs they sell using that design, since producing a generic alternative doesn't amount to anything if they can't deliver it.

Colonel_Lingus posted...

I don't think a 32-hour work week would work as a truck driver.

Reducing truck driver hours would probably necessitate a paradigm shift in how we ship things (namely, moar trains for long hauls, shift to using drivers primarily for shorter trips), but that's still an example of a field where reducing individuals' hours worked will reduce individual productivity because there's no real way to increase productivity per hour by being less tired.

Jen0125 posted...

It's not an alcohol alternative for children. Those are otherwise known as "drinks" or "beverages" to normal people. Children don't drink alcohol so they don't have alcohol alternatives. Plain milk isn't a cheap alternative to a white Russian lol

Not drinking alcohol is exactly why alcohol alternatives exist: To have a similar experience to drinking without actually drinking. In this particular case, it's not so much a matter of being something that tastes similar to champagne as it is being something that looks like drinking champagne. It lets whoever's drinking the juice have the aesthetic of champagne without actually drinking it, which can absolutely be marketed to kids because kids often don't like being left out of what the grown-ups are doing.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

they dont use a resealable cap, it's the kind that once it's off, it's off

now what the hell do i do

Wine stopper?

SunWuKung420 posted...

I've made it a point to urinate outside in every city I've been in

If I were the type to put user quotes in my signature, I'd be sigging this.

It's enough for some roads. $1 billion is also enough to pay $1500 a month to cover rent for 15,000 households for a year (which would probably actually yield a considerable return on investment because simply housing homeless people is significantly cheaper than paying for them to be homeless), which is very obviously a better use of the money than a stadium.

I can understand liking FF8 better than Chrono Trigger just because it does something different. Whether or not you like that different is a matter of personal opinion, but compared to other JRPGs Chrono Trigger is pretty standard. That's largely because it set many of the standards for other games in the genre that followed, but the unfortunate reality is that recognizing a game's legacy doesn't make it more enjoyable to play than a sea of successors that have built on that legacy, and even if it was unique/original when it came out, it no longer feels that way because of its influence on the genre.

Of those, SimCity and Ultima are probably the most influential, which I would say is the primary factor that should be considered in putting together a museum of gaming history.

Looks like I rubbed somebody the wrong way with my post, because it got modded for being "sexually explicit." That's... pretty telling about whoever marked it, really.

slacker03150 posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/2/2d680c1c.jpg

Not the kind of egg roll I was expecting to find.

https://imgur.com/rBHf5DC

Depends what the business case looked like for the city. Stadiums are expensive, but also bring in a substantial amount of tourist dollars and other tax revenue. It may be a worthwhile investment, in which case it's fair game. If not, not so much.

https://imgur.com/V4amA2u

Lokarin posted...

Productivity in the US has gone up 400% since the '40s, but y'all still working 40 hours... If y'all were chillo you'd only need 10 hours a week to get the same quality of life as the 1940s

8 hours, actually. "Up 400%" means we're at 500%.

That explains why it sucks so much.

*Sunglasses*

I do love me some 3-day weekends. Two days just isn't enough. It always seems to work out that I get one day of doing household stuff and errands, then one day of either actively doing recreational things or just chilling at home. That means I don't get chilling time between work weeks if I do stuff, which just makes the prospect of doing things annoyingly tiring. Throw a third day in there, though, and I get one day for each, no problems.

I really need to look into setting up a compressed work schedule. The most common arrangement we use is working an extra half hour each day and getting a day off every three weeks, but where I'm working full-time from home my hours are rarely a consistent 9-5 anyway (since it's so easy to just dip out of work for a bit if it's quiet, or stick around a little longer if I need to) and adding an extra half hour wouldn't meaningfully change that.

But the vampire didn't take it. If a vampire bites a human corpse that's already been fully exsanguinated, the corpse doesn't become a vampire any more than a rock would if a vampire bit it.

Taking their last drop of blood requires them to have some blood in the first place.

Sauron did nothing wrong.

Count_Drachma posted...

Overall, being able to walk anywhere -- without being stuck in a city -- would be nice.

To really be walkable, an environment needs to be at least somewhat urban. You don't necessarily need a big city, but businesses need a certain number of people to be able to reach them if they're to survive. That either means you get walkable areas that have a higher population density, or you get lower-density areas that are difficult to walk around because of all the car infrastructure needed to bring people in. This is why big box stores have become so common in North America: With the shift to suburban living and people having to drive everywhere instead of being able to walk, that's necessitated larger roads, larger parking lots to hold the cars of people that have to drive there, and stores that can carry a large enough variety of items to reduce the number of trips people have to make.

You can usually get perfectly serviceable grocery stores within lower-density neighbourhoods that are walkable, since everybody needs groceries fairly frequently and that makes it pretty easy to hit the required customer count (albeit with less variety than you'd see from a bigger store), and often smaller communities will have general stores to hit various essentials that would otherwise come from a store too specialized to be supported, but otherwise you can generally only pick two of having an area be walkable, having places to go, and not being in a city.

captpackrat posted...

It's not illegal if the fine is less than the amount of money they make doing it.

And that's why we need fines that are a percentage of total company revenue. Breaks are an easy one to calculate: if you keep people working for the full 8 hours instead of giving them a paid 15-minute break, you're getting 3.35% more productivity out of them. So every day there's a report of somebody being denied a break, fine the company 3.5% of their average daily income. They rack up three strikes, assume it's happening chronically and fine them 3.5% of their average monthly income and conduct surprise monthly inspections for the next year. They have another infraction within a year of the first one, fine them according to their annual income.

All of a sudden, Amazon starts caring a whole lot about making sure that every single franchise follows local break laws.

I never really have a problem with a 128 GB SSD, 500 GB HDD, and 1 TB HDD, but then I don't have many particularly large games and I make a habit of uninstalling stuff when I can safely say there's no chance of me wanting to boot it up impulsively any time soon. If your whole drive is only 376 GB, you might want to consider upgrading it, which is a pain in most modern laptops (I miss the days of just having a panel on the bottom you could remove), but nonetheless doable. You can get a 2-3 TB laptop HDD for $75-100, which wouldn't erase your storage concerns, but would leave you quite a bit more breathing room. If you want the speed of an SSD (I'm guessing that's what you've got now if you've got so little space), they're still more expensive than HDDs, but you can still get 2 TB for ~$150 depending on what formats you can use, so you can look into that as well.

EchoBaz posted...

Something is only a requirement if the rule is enforced.

Amazon factories for example do a bunch of illegal shit to their employees out in the open, they know that no one is going to stop them.

More than that, very often the punishment if they're caught is a fine that doesn't come close to what they save/make by ignoring the rule on a larger scale. Even if a given employee decides to report them and they get fined, the (wholly justified) fear of reprisal will keep most employees from doing the same, and more often than not they can easily eat the fine without denting the bottom line (and, in fact, there's a good chance they've already budgeted for the fine).

ConfusedTorchic posted...

they're such a weird group of people who just seem to want to be upset at everything despite actually getting what they want.

Eeyup. They get so frantically terrified of the idea of some SJW bogeyman coming to take away their games that they ignore basic empirical reality.

Count_Drachma posted...

I'd say the same to any "on the street" segments. Even taking everything off the table, somebody isn't likely to meet the best and brightest just out on the streets -- at best, it's the lower side of average people.

And in a city with a pronounced leaning, you also aren't likely to get as many genuine opinions, but instead what they think they can or should say.

It's simpler than that. You don't need to dip into thinly-veiled classism or political victimhood, you just have to look at the simple reality of how those videos are made: The creator goes out, interviews a bunch of people, then selects which of the interviews they want to include in the published video. The format carries an air of credibility because of how casual and random it seems, but in practice all any such video proves is "I was able to find X people that hold this opinion." It indicates nothing about how prevalent that opinion actually is because the presented data set omits every data point that the presenter doesn't want to share. There's a massive selection bias there that cannot be overcome without presenting the video wholly unedited.

So even beyond the question of whether or not it's reasonable to judge a game based on a picture of a character, the whole video exists solely to affirm the beliefs of people who already don't like that character's design, not to serve as an actual poll.