PickTheStick

@PickTheStick@lemmy.fmhy.ml
0 Post – 18 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

#Your favorite game’s “awesome story” robs the player of a basic sense of agency

It is generally not awesome for the player character to join a cult, agree to assassinate their boss’s boss, cheat on their life partner, pick a side in a major power struggle, voluntarily inject themselves with an experimental nano-fluid, etc, without the player’s consent.

Right, so...please tell me a narrative medium that allows this. Somehow movies, books, comics, manga, and literal storytelling all get a pass on this?

I can sort of nod along with everything else, agreeing that there is some truth in the spewing. This statement is so pants-on-head foolish that every other assertion you make gets dragged beneath the water and drowns with chains made of the last page of shitty choose-your-own-adventure book. And for that level of strength in the chains to work, those assertions have to be pretty crappy.

Sorry, but no medium of media allows for agency. I don't care if you have some of the best writing in a game (whether that means Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate II, Disco Elysium, whatever), or if you want to go with the old choose-your-own-adventure books, but there is ultimately little to no player agency. If you want player agency in a game, you have one choice, and it isn't a video game: TTRPGs. Even ChatGPT can't match what a good GM can do, because they can allow you to break the mechanics of the game or add mechanics on the fly to fit what a player wants to do. A GM can literally respond to something a game creator never imagined within seconds. I want to see Planescape or Disco Elysium react to a player doing something they thought of that the game creator didn't imagine. Buuuulllllshit. Player agency my ass.

Also, as the OP obviously fails to mention any games that he thinks is worthy of being an 'awesome story', I'm calling this as a troll/bait post.

The amusing part is that we can't even guess (accurately) what the actual tell will be. Somehow I don't think the time gap between blinks is going to be it. I'm betting it's going to be slang-based. There's a reason kids use slang readily, and it's often to separate the worlds of adult regulators and the 'more free' children/teenagers. Imagine AI trying to keep up with the slang, but just like adults, it will be unable to use it in the same way with all the pseudo-information packed into it.

That's a humorous take, because I've known so many people who went to see crappy movies because of the movie previews for something they liked. This was way before the internet took over as a way to see videos, but still, interesting to note the opposite.

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Am I just dense, or doesn't the reveal being ganders both reveal the gender and make the statement, "There are no genders," incorrect?

It's funny, I really liked the outfit for Berseria. Something about a not well-groomed-in-the-middle-of-fights look stood out from the crowd.

An article on APNews said there were multiple backups onboard... Which sort of engenders the thought of why they needed multiple backups. I'd be sure to have A backup, sure, but multiple?

That's what an article emphasized that I skimmed through. The sub had automatic pinging, and systems to automatically raise it to the surface if an untoward event happened. For communication and pinging to be lost, as well as the lack of floating submersible... It's likely whatever happened buggered the whole setup. The banging also was supposedly heard in 30 minute intervals, but no one is saying how many of those intervals happened. The banging could be from anything. The deeps get strange, and the water distorts much of what we know. Multiple people with knowledge from other searches, like the 2014 MH flight, said banging was often heard during their searches but it was always from other sources.

Just think in terms of the not 'in your face' subs. Memes/pics and such were easy to make a post and it either goes up or goes down, but most other subs would need a little more thought/time for a post to be made.

I was a member of a 2-4 million subreddit, and I think there were only about 20-40 posts a day. Some repetitive posts were removed by the mod bot that you would occasionally see, so maybe a few more than those 20-40, but even the most prolifically engaged-with comment sections would max out around 400 comments.

I've lived and worked in areas like the article describes. I've been the one giving CPR for 20 minutes while waiting for an ambulance. This is just part of living in a rural area. I think we were around 1,000 square miles with one ambulance. It's not just EMS, it's everything. Groceries, police, fire (this was actually the least spread, because everyone likes to be volunteer fire), doctors, lawyers, telecom companies, etc. etc. etc. All of them are spread thin when the populace is thin.

While yes, it sucks, it isn't going to be fixed by throwing money at it from the state. It's just like suburbs of a city taking more money per person in budget areas like infrastructure. If you take money from urban areas to give to these rural areas so they have rapid EMS response, you're spending the money much less efficiently, and it isn't sustainable. Accept that your area's funding is tied to the amount of people, and move to where there are more people or learn to live as you wanted to: away from other people, and the problems and help that they bring.

I have an honest question for you. Have you ever seen a bulletproof vest?

Also, the person you're replying to gave a very frightening scenario: being hunted down at your own home. If you're not shooting back, what do you think the enemy is going to do? Give up and go away? Molotov cocktails are an easy, low-tech solution to a barricaded enemy you don't care about taking alive.

Now, if we assume you're in public, there are still issues with a bulletproof vest. They're not really all that great at being concealed. If you truly have a bulletproof vest that can fit underneath clothing, it's not going to stop many bullets. You can look through the wikipedia page on different levels of body armor, and do a quick search to see how bulky the different types are. Police armor is rated for most handguns, and is super bulky already. Military armor can hopefully stand up to a rifle bullet, but they're often ceramic plates, which don't last against multiple rounds, and are very obvious and stand out. Your slim-fit vest may be able to handle a very small subset of rounds. If you go the route of more protection, you're going to find yourself targeted by the gunman due to your visibility and because your potential as a threat is large compared to others. Even a very high quality, military vest/suit is not going to cover you well enough to make a difference if a single person is shooting at you and A) you don't have buddies to give you cover fire and make them put their head down and B) space because you knew the shooter was an enemy before he pulled out a gun and started shooting at you.

2 more...

They just want to capture the person coming in off of a search platform looking for something in a game. It's all about the clicks.

I was curious about some stuff in Elden Ring, and every search I did had shitty, obviously SE optimized bullshit for at least the first 10-15 results. Well fuck that, I'll just read the also bullshit SE optimized wiki because I can at least keep the adblockers on and the scripts off and wade through the crap.

Just about every area of interest already needs one. Every topic I've wondered about in the past several years and looked for with a search engine has horrible articles that have been SEOed to death, and it is going to get worse with AI being able to generate the bulk of the article now.

They did that with a 30-40 foot stick a few years ago, and the initial attempts by the driver were hilarious. They didn't show improvement because I'm sure it wouldn't be as funny, but I think we all forget how difficult it first was to match up how far to push the stick left or right for a particular turn. Now imagine an actual wheel.

Okay, I like it, but... How do you load the payload?

Ya know, if the dude had just left the original caps on my doorstep, I wouldn't even be upset. I'd drive around for a while loving it.

The mobile app is definitely what turned me back onto OSRS. I wish I had more time, because the gameplay is like comfort food to me.

  1. I've had to wear bulletproof vests, and now choose not to because they are a massive pain. So that's why I felt like I should explain why they aren't a good solution. They won't be of any help in the majority of cases, and will likely slow you down. Unlike the ABS example, the amount of help a vest that would fit underneath your typical clothing is so small that it would be next to useless. At the distance you'd have to be from a shooter in order for it to be effective against a round it isn't meant for, the reason you'd survive is because they can't accurately aim at you. Anywhere within reasonable accuracy distances, it would be worthless. Most individuals aren't going to be accurate with a pistol past 10-15 yards, well within the range that a 9mm, .45, .40, etc. are effective against level I or level II armor.

  2. You're right, I looked quickly and it looked like you were replying to MrVilliam's post, where he said he was afraid the locals would leak his home address. Obviously, on a re-look, that's not the case. So... oops.

  3. No. Concealable guns (handguns, for the most part, leaving aside the ridiculous sweatpants video) easily penetrate all but the best armor. The Ft. Hood shooter, for example, used a pistol that was chambered in .223, the 'civilian' version of the 5.56.

3b. Also, yes. While I wouldn't want to use a handgun against a rifle or shotgun, I'd still much prefer to have one, especially in the situations where the majority of shootings happen. It wouldn't help at all in the Las Vegas shooting, but in the rest? Schools, grocery stores, large chain stores? A pistol would work well. The range you'd be engaging the shooter at will likely be within those 15 yards that people can accurately aim a handgun. That kind of carries into your last, unnumbered point. Right now, non-lethal (which should really be called less-lethal, but that's a whole thing I personally roll my eyes at) options don't have anywhere near a large enough range. The longest Tasers reach around 40', I think, while the 37mm or 40mm bean-bag shooters are never going to be carried around by a civilian casually. The taser almost certainly won't be effective at that range. I think it's an 8 degree spread between the two probes, which works out to about 1 foot of spread every 7 feet of distance to the target. At the maximum range of 40', that's nearly a 6 foot spread. A taser isn't going to be super accurate either, so you'd have to aim for the head and get lucky, and also get lucky that your nearly 6 foot spread of the barbs hit the other guy's foot. Otherwise it isn't going to be very effective at stopping the shooter from shooting you.

As an aside, sure, I'm an American. I think I'm pretty logical about everything, though. I think societies that don't have guns outnumbering folks are great and wish we could get there. I also think that we've gotten ourselves into a shithole, and it is at the point where the first person to disarm is fucked. It's just like this stupid nuclear weapon situation. Can you really imagine America, Britain, France, etc. giving up their nuclear weapons after seeing how Russia is acting? That's what it's going to be like for at least a decade if we vote now to get rid of civilian ownership of guns. 'The Purge' wouldn't be a good depiction of what it would be like, but I don't want to wait 30 minutes for the police to come help when my meth head neighbor decides to get revenge for all the 'slights' I've ever given him (like asking him not to dump his tires and burn them next to my chicken coop because he thought it was funny) with his little dump gun in hand and here I am having turned over my guns to the sheriff.

Comfortably? Nah. They should live in barracks just like the military. Public Service requires public servants.