sometimes you just wanna know what to splice to finish your gardening collection instead of brute forcing every single combination of the 40+ plants that exist until you learn that grapes and oats grafted together make elderberries or something weird like that.
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…
There is a time and place for walkthroughs. I doubt I would’ve finished Portal 1 & 2 on my own without them because I absolutely suck at puzzles, particularly visual ones. But if I hadn’t, I would have missed out on the great story and enjoying the craft of the game.
I got this on my wishlist but I gotta wait to pick it up. Money doesn’t go as far as it used to so I gotta be more selective with when and how much I use. Even if the game is less than most AAA games nowadays.
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.
It is the externalization of internal mental processes, causing technological dependencies for even basic thinking on the subject it issues for. It is fundamentally the same as being dependent on a parent for answers, as a child. At some point the parent must force the child into independence to become capable of functioning, to build the infrastructure to answer its own questions by memorizing, and later discerning, the answers.
If we should regress to, or raise our children with, such a dependency, we will become enslaved to those who control these technologies, making useful thought into a subscription service. Technology is incredibly empowering but at some point it becomes a necessity and we are beholden to those who control such things, spawning a techno feudalism in which we are as tied to a corporation’s technology as serfs were to the lord’s lands.
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve been playing through some need for speed games on emulators for the past few years. Once I bound keys to save and load states it was over: I’d save-state before every turn and run them over and over until I got them perfect. Doing this I did eventually learn the maps really well though, and on more recent playthroughs I’ve barely used save-states, which was obviously far more satisfying. I realize this isn’t the same thing as ai or walkthroughs, but I think maybe these tools do share something in that they lower the barrier to entry to different sorts of skilled tasks we may not yet feel competent to accomplish. Like training wheels or a helping hand, we can let go of them once we feel steadier on our own.
It’s just a conversation bud, I don’t disagree with op’s point, just adding another perspective. You can grow dependent on your tools just like you can use them to better yourself.
I don’t really see where the hypocrisy is? If you think what the commenter you’re replying to said wasn’t relevant that’s fine, but where’s the hypocrisy?
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve been playing through some need for speed games on emulators for the past few years. Once I bound keys to save and load states it was over: I’d save-state before every turn and run them over and over until I got them perfect. Doing this I did eventually learn the maps really well though, and on more recent playthroughs I’ve barely used save-states, which was obviously far more satisfying.
statement that sets the context of the comment
I realize this isn’t the same thing as ai or walkthroughs,
statement that disarms anyone calling “bullshit” by acknowledging the context above is useless fluff.
but I think maybe these tools do share something in that they lower the barrier to entry to different sorts of skilled tasks we may not yet feel competent to accomplish. Like training wheels or a helping hand, we can let go of them once we feel steadier on our own.
the hypocrisy of continuing to support an argument previously stated as “not the same thing as”.
this is is pointless commentary from a person who is clearly not objective but is pretending to appear objective by disarming the shortcomings in their argument by acknowledging them outwardly. this is a common tactic employed by people who have a weak position and lack confidence in their argument.
the reason why the argument lacks confidence is because there is no viable evidence that AI improves cognitive ability in humans while there is verifiable evidence that it harms cognitive abilities.
for example:
AI is being abused within schools to falsely achieve educational goals under merits that were unearned
AI is currently being abused by professionals in software development that cause weeks or months of tech debt to clean up that could have been resolved during the development process
AI has lead to several people dying or near dying because they have taken advice from it when it told the user to “smoke meth”, “kill themselves”, “consume bromide”, and others.
there are so many more instances of cognitive decline available, just search for them.
I like this analogy and it’s a good way to think about this sort of AI help, but I guess the problem arises when people don’t have the same awareness. If you don’t realise it’s more fun/satisfying, you might never take the training wheels off. I know it seems obvious to me or you but a lot wouldn’t see that correlation.
I’ve been playing co-op games recently and half my group want to revert the save anytime anything goes south. I always refuse (I host) and we’ve had some really fun times digging ourselves out of the hole. Even the save scummers agree they were the most fun playthroughs, but then they still want to save scum next time.
I have to force myself to not fall into the trap of trying to play a “perfect” game and instead to just let happen, what happens. Blundering through content and accepting temporary setbacks is more fun than following guides or save scumming.
But it also depends on game design:
With bg3 I missed a one of a kind item in act 1, a staple dnd item (ring of protection) that I was locked out off because I did quests in the “wrong” order. that gave me some anxiety, after which I started checking the wiki page before starting a new zone, which eventually sucked the fun out of the game, after which I abandoned my first playthrough.
And then I found a mod that randomizes all loot, so I can just let happen again what happens, without that anxiety of losing access to unique loot because of game design.
You got upset because you missed a +1AC item? There’s so many much better items in that game I’m surprised this one matters so much.
I totally recognise playing the perfect game angle though, depending on the game I look up collectibles ahead of time, so that when I find the area I know there’s one nearby.
Nah, the knowledge that I could be locked out of unique items is what caused anxiety, not what I was actually locked out off (though I do think it’s a really good item for a ring). I played act 1 as a blundering fool, at the end of act 1 I checked an item list to see what I missed, so I could backtrack for what I could use. And then I destroyed my fun in act 2 by checking guides before starting an area.
I also fall into this trap semi regularly, a happy medium I have found is a missable items guide that doesn’t tell you how to play or where to go but it does tell you “make sure you get item X before going to place Y as that’s your last chance”
It means I can be happy to play sub optimally knowing that if I really want I can go back and collect anything I missed later.
I grew up when solutions either were not available or cost money to get either by subscribing to a magazine, buying a magazine, or calling a 1800 hotline which cost ludicrous amounts of money for the time.
When gamefaqs and the like became popular it was great to get the answer instead of giving up. I couldn’t imagine growing up always having the answer handed to you though.
I’ve been running Nobara on my machine for like a year and it’s been a really easy experience! The creator also maintains a popular build of proton and designed it to be pretty hands off.
I’m a noob when it comes to gaming on Linux, having to rely on WINE just working without any changes or Proton on Steam if there’s no Linux port. Still learning how to do more advanced things with WINE rather than just run and hope the program works.
So far I haven’t had any major issues with getting games to play, except for a couple old PC games I found on MyAbandonware that probably need some extra work to work properly. Doesn’t display correctly or play the music for either. Otherwise, my experience has been pretty good.
As for distro side of things, I don’t know, outside of SteamOS on my Steam Deck, I have no clue on what’s happening in the games sphere. I just have Steam downloaded from either my package manager or flathub and call it good there.
Oh, and I also have the native Itchio storefront program and it works just fine as long as I don’t change the language to a certain language because it’ll just cause sorts of problems ( probably due to me not having a language pack for it installed ). The one visual novel I’ve played on Itchio on my laptop worked just fine out of the box, but I assume that’s more or less thanks to the devs.
Counterpoint, like, I can draw things, but I can't draw people, but I have used AI to generate pictures of people that I can then trace to learn how to draw people, and because it's a new person, and it's something I'm in control of, I feel more encouraged to fire up Krita and work on my drawing.
I still suck, don't get me wrong, but I have done more artwork since having access to AI art tools than I did for several years prior to that.
There's just something about having an idea of knowing what the finished output is supposed to look like that helps me figure out how to draw what I'm supposed to draw.
And eventually I will be fully drawing my own stuff from scratch, thanks to using AI as a self-learning tool.
An excellent opportunity to reference a bit of true Internet culture: Old Man Murray’s dressdown of one of the puzzles in Gabriel Knight 3. The most relevant part is their final summary:
That was the one where you had to use cat hair to add a mustache to a fake ID to impersonate a character that had no mustache? Yeah, I don’t really miss moon logic.
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