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.
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.
It works great for most games. Steam makes it really easy to enable proton for all games in your library. However, one caveat I would add is that certain intro/cutscene video formats didn’t play for me out of the box. I fixed it by using ProtonUp-QT or ProtonPlus to download the newest GE-Proton and selecting that to default in my steam compatibility settings.
I’ve come to really like WW over the years, that and TP may be my favourite of the console Zelda games, the graphics of WW aged pretty well imo, art style still looks great some 23 years later.
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.
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.
That it was! It’s a shame Justin doesn’t really compete anymore. That’s how well he does in a game he doesn’t really practice like he did back in the day. That man could pick up a fighting game at Evo that he’s never played before, and he’d still get out of pools.
It’s an action adventure rpg where you whack enemies with ever more powerful sticks and weapons that takes place in a fully different location known as evermore, accessible through the lab of a secret scientist from some American town named “podunk” in the 60’s. Especially the lab, it feels eerie enough to be an end game area. The town of podunk is basically the setup so you don’t get to see much, but it’s cool to see a modern day location in an rpg that isn’t earthbound.
Same with wowhead or runescape wiki. Really kills the video game wonder.
Good news is that you can just ignore that if you want to. I recently played classic wow without any external tools and it was such a fun, adventurous experience!
I’ve long argued that games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley with their seeming inability to actually teach you the game have become far too overreliant on Wikis and walkthroughs. Minecraft for example: its highly unlikely you will naturally discover the path to “winning the game” and defeating the Ender Dragon. Its arcane nonsense.
Mine
Craft
Go to Hell
Go to the End
Kill the Dragon
The official Guide expects you to do this in ways that are 1 no longer possible and 2 rely on innate understanding of the physics of the game (specifically that beds explode when used outside the overworld [excuse me what the fuck how am I supposed to recognize that can be a weapon?]).
It is heavily implied in “Minecraft: Guide to The Nether and The End” (part of the official guidebook series published my mojang) that you’re meant to use beds to cheese the dragon. This is the easiest and most effective way to handle the Dragon, but its arcane nonsense, as stated in my previous comment t.
All of the Elden-Soulsborne games are like that but it never really bothered me. I would have missed tons of the game without the wiki as help, just because of how crazy their games are with hiding stuff
Those are what’s known as knowledge gated games, where your progression as a player is either wholly or mostly tied to your own personal knowledge of how the game world works. Indeed, many of the mechanics may make no sense due to being crude mockeries of how the real world works. But some of them have become so ingrained in the popular consciousness that developers of later Indie Crafty Survival Sandboxy games can rely on the notion that most players will reflexively begin their adventure by punching a tree, and can probably accurately guess what the crafting shape of a pickaxe will be. This is no doubt down to the Earth-shattering popularity of Minecraft itself.
If you ask me, these games refusing to handhold the player and letting them discover things for themselves is part of their appeal. Expecting to be able to dive right in and know everything right from the starting block really rather misses the point. You have to admit that if you’ve been playing, say, Minecraft since the alpha days, your experience and approach to the game if you spun up a new world right now would be vastly different from your first playthrough, and none of the wonder or sense of discovery would be present.
Gating progression by knowledge (byzantine knowledge though it may be, e.g. in the case of specifically knowing not only how to construct a portal out of obsidian but also activate it by lighting it on fire) mirrors real life in an ineffable way that skill or time/microtransaction/XP accrual gated games can’t.
Some games do both. For instance, ask any Dark Souls player. The Souls games are both knowledge gated and very, infamously, exasperatingly skill gated.
I actually played Noita before. I though I was doing pretty good by myself, managed to get quite deep. Then somebody told me about the outside map and all the parallel worlds and wow…
the thing about noita is that you think you’ve discovered the entire game and you’re impressed with how much there was to find, then you notice something and find another game to discover, then you watch a video on noita and realize you found roughly a fifth of the actual full game content
I’m gonna push back on this idea. Take Rimworld. It’s also a “have the wiki open” game. The game tells you how long plants take to mature, but there is a mechanic that plants “rest” a certain amount of time that isn’t mentioned anywhere, so the figure is just flat wrong for all plants by some factor (same factor for all plants). I love these types of games, but it’s not an excuse for relying on wikis to explain things.
I actually replayed runescape classic as Ironman recently and surprisingly most quests can be solved without the wiki! It’s takes much longer though but so much more fun. You get to explore the world more and its a really good world with most characters having some personality and little areas that have you’d never visit otherwise.
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