At first I was going to disagree and say “hey at least they are still looking up information, unlike most people” but then I did a 540° on that idea when I realized that I myself was a great example of how the OP is right.
I have been building things in my back yard like crazy this summer. I am currently working on a purpose-built little lego/craft tray for my wife to use in the house. I have gotten to plan out every detail in my head and sketching on paper, including convenient geometry knowledge like multiplying by the square root of 2 to find lengths for 45° supports or the good old 3-4-5 triangle for getting a right angle in a pinch. I have been able to discuss the table’s use with my wife to figure out the perfect features. It will be a little wooden table that’s ~2’/60cm wide like a TV tray but it will be held up by cantilever legs that are long enough and tall enough to hover the table over her lap with the footrest up. And it will have other features like little segmented bins for pieces/parts, and an instruction holder.
It’s a great activity for numerous reasons. It gets me outside, it gets me physical, it gets me interacting with my wife and excited to give her the finished product, it gives me opportunities to practice new skills/tools, and it engages the senses as well as the mind while I spend hours in a calm almost meditative state and not seeing anything that’s happening on my phone (though it will read texts to me through my earbuds).
It’s a pretty funny look. I’m wearing a big round brimmed sun/fishing hat that looks almost like Gandalf’s but without the pointy top. From the outside the sound of the scene is 95% the sound of falling water and birds chirping, interrupted by the 5% of the time spent actively cutting or planing some wood. But if my earbuds are in my ears, they are blasting my playlist of various high-tempo Thrash and Industrial Metal songs! (at 45-50% volume. I’m responsible here, lol)
So if I take all that and compare it to some schmuck who pulls up ChatGPT and types something like “design me a sturdy two foot wide table, create a list of the pieces I need and the cuts to make them, and generate detailed assembly instructions with pictures.” Yeah you might still get a functional table but your life has missed out on the vast majority of the potential benefit of the activity!
This is the way I started looking at these tasks once I really internalized the whole “life is about the journey, not the destination” thing.
busy weekend for us but there’s no way I don’t finish it tomorrow. (right?)
The stuff I’m making right now is all just pine, with flat surfaces and 90 degree corners like you might get from ikea. But with visible wood grain and built so that you can dance on it or use it to hold the biggest aquarium you can find.
it was so hard for me to play grim fandago without looking up the answers but i did it! 10 hours later and lots of critical thinking and i finally solved the first puzzle!
We played Leisure Suit Larry with my brother at somewhere under 10 years old without knowing one full sentence worth of English, and it took hours to even get the game to start. There was a quiz about US history and politics or something for age verification, and it took a lot of tries to guess our way through and memorize the answers. Didnt get that far in the game either.
You had to look in the manual and type the correct name to start the game. That was their DRM. I remember praying it’d be Jessie Bains, because he was the only one I memorized.
That was vintage copy protection. They would print the answers and stuff in the back of the manual, so you could only start the game (or get past a certain point), if you have a legitimate copy of the game (or just a copy of the manual lol).
There were all sorts of creative copy protection schemes prior to DRM.
Yeah, I’m aware of all the manual and code wheel based copy protections, but I’m pretty sure that the quiz in Larry was just a rudimentary age check. There’s even a button combination to bypass it, which would have been nice to know at the time.
I remember AD&D Hillsfar had a decoder ring that you had to spin to match up the pair of symbols on the screen and type in the decoders output. It was actually kinda cool! I loved that game…
Except game walkthroughs provide correct information, whereas LLMs can just make things up. So it’s more like looking at a walkthrough where each step is from an entirely different game.
We’re entering an era where we need to decide where some lines are drawn.
How much prior understanding is acceptable to incorporate into our reasoning? If the answer has already been figured out, is it reasonable to use that, or should you do the work a second time?
Y’all - For nearly a quarter of a century Nintendo published Nintendo Power, a magazine that was a combination of self-hype and how to beat their own games. In the 90s, it was indispensable for any game worth its salt.
Nintendo used to run a 1-900 number for tips on games. You’d call a real human who would walk you through where you were.
Looking it up online is only “cheating” in the sense that it’s immediate and free. This stuff used to cost money.
Plus with games never explaining how some of their mechanics work and not giving you any realistic way to experimentally determine it, why wouldn’t I look it up online?
A big one that comes to mind is stuff like attacks, armor, and HP. Games handle them differently and very rarely tell you exactly how they work.
Yeah… I’ve made comments before online about how walkthroughs/guides etc tend to ruin games. The response from left leaning folks was a ton of downvotes, largely with comments about how I was an asshole who wasn’t thinking about people with this or that disability that need that sort of guide.
I’m amazed you seem to be getting support for the sentiment. Just shows how much some groups hate AI I guess.
In the 90s I would go to the school library to print out walkthroughs from the internet, to supplement the occasional relevant walkthroughs I could find in magazines. Realistically there was absolutely no way I was figuring out most of the puzzles on my own as a child, games got way more user friendly and self explanatory since then.
I love Wind Waker so much. The Triforce quest toward the end gets some heat, but I think it’s great. Sailing around the open ocean and exploring the islands is the best part of the game. Wish they would have kept some of the cut content and had another dungeon or two, but still overall one of my favorite Zelda games.
The Triforce quest was somewhat nerfed in the remake. You get some fragments immediately instead of finding a map to them.
And the new sail kinda makes wind control useless for sailing which I’m honestly not sure I like. This is just a part of the game’s theme they cut, there is such a thing as too convenient IMO.
I don’t think I hate the triforce quest as much as I see others, as I do have some fond memories of it. Just it drags on a little too long. I disagree with the people who want it cut entirely, but I can respect their opinion. The cut content is so fascinating too. I remember hearing the Iron Boots were cut, and it’s always triggered this sort of morbid curiosity where I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to keep them.
I’ve recently been obsessed with a streamer called AboutOliver. He played Minecraft for the first time about a year and a half ago, played his entire first season with no wiki or external knowledge, got a little tour of the community server (which he 99% forgot at the time Season 2 rolled around) and is now on Episode 75-ish of season 2. Still no wiki, no guides. He has figured out some crazy things about the game (which I won’t spoil), but is also completely clueless about some super basic features.
It’s been incredibly inspiring to just watch him figure things out, because he is exceptionally inquisitive and methodical by default (I think he’s a phd candidate in Astrophysics irl?). Made me realize the point of a game shouldn’t be to produce the optimal output, but that struggling and finding things out is exactly the point. Incidentally, that mindset also noticeably boosted my performance at work because I’m now one of the few people who will happily continue to tackle a programming problem over and over again, even if there are no helpful guides on it.
Long story short, here’s a link to watch the supercut of Olivers Season 1 Playthrough: youtu.be/ljemxyWvg8E
The total season 1 supercut is about 6 hours iirc
Ha! I watched him play Outer Wilds and it was perfect. It is the ideal game for someone like him because this game is all about exploring. But please play the game before you watch him play and don’t research anything beforehand or during playing.
Well…
But considering in modern Minecraft you already have a crafting book that says how to craft any item it’s not as needed anymore as before.
In the early times I believe it was to either know the recipe or to look iz up on the web.
Beneath A Steel Sky has a help system now you can refer to, and I ended up using it a fair bit. The solutions often just pissed me off though, as they rely on you remembering a one-off bit of dialogue you saw (or skipped) days ago in real time. or were just nonsense.
When I walk around the floor at work now I often see other devs on their phones while they wait for the AI to do stuff. People are getting disengaged are forgetting skills already - this is unsustainable.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne