chonglibloodsport
@chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
- Comment on The Purpose of Difficulty | GMTK Mini 6 hours ago:
Of course. But that’s often a sign of bad game design. Difficulty should follow a smooth curve. Enormous difficulty spikes are what you expect from old games in the 80s.
But there’s also an element to mastery that gamers seem to completely neglect: downtime. I finished my math degree a couple of years ago and throughout that entire process I got stuck on math assignments thousands of times. Bashing my head against a wall trying to solve the problem right now rarely worked. I had much better success putting the pencil down and coming back to the problem later, after a period of downtime.
Since graduating I’ve been revisiting a lot of old NES games that I never finished growing up because they were too difficult. Since I’m busy with work I don’t have a ton of time to play every day. This forced downtime actually has the benefit of getting me to think and reflect on my approach, just as I would expect it to!
- Comment on The Purpose of Difficulty | GMTK Mini 8 hours ago:
It is, but different people enjoy different things. Hard games like this focus on long term goals and achieving mastery as the source of fun. Other games aim to be more relaxing.
I like all types of games. I just think it’s a bit silly when people argue “why isn’t this orange more like a banana?”
- Comment on The Purpose of Difficulty | GMTK Mini 10 hours ago:
I think the runback is important to give you time to think. You can repeatedly attempt a difficult section of a game with a ton of checkpoints and get through it without actually learning it properly. You essentially get lucky that your hands do the right thing just enough to get by.
Imagine going to a piano recital where the person keeps messing up and repeating a difficult passage of the music, never actually being able to play the entire thing without making a mistake! That’s just not very impressive!
The goal of playing a difficult game should be to improve your skills and get better, figure out new strategies and use them in battle, not merely reach the end.
- Comment on YSK about 15 bean soup. 2 days ago:
I haven’t tried it but I’ve heard it works really well! I’m a bit worried that it would not help develop a natural ability to digest beans.
- Comment on What would stop you from switching to a flip phone (or dumbphone) in 2025? 2 days ago:
Banking, messages, email, calendars, discord, messenger, maps, browser, YouTube, music, shattered pixel dungeon, Wikipedia, notes, swipe keyboard, duolingo, WhatsApp, desmos, reminders, camera, photos, home automation….
I use my iPhone for a ton of different things. I pretty much never use it to make calls and hate talking on the phone (which is what flip phones are optimized for).
- Comment on Hollow Knight Sequel 'Silksong' Crashed Game Stores, as $20 Price Irks Competitors 2 days ago:
Daaaamn. Too adorable!
- Comment on YSK about 15 bean soup. 2 days ago:
I eat lots of other high fibre foods: oatmeal, wheat bran, whole grain breads and pastas, salads. No issues.
Oligosaccharides are something different. They’re in between simple sugar and fibre. Medium chain sugars basically. They need to broken apart to be absorbed and used by the body. But we don’t produce the enzyme needed to cleave them.
Bacteria can break them down but they live in the colon (like most other digestive bacteria). This breakdown in the colon essentially results in a bunch of simple sugars being introduced into a bacteria-rich environment. More bacteria grow and feast on the sugars, producing gases such as methane.
- Comment on Hollow Knight Sequel 'Silksong' Crashed Game Stores, as $20 Price Irks Competitors 2 days ago:
Like a rat fuck but a bit bigger, with a cuter face.
- Comment on YSK about 15 bean soup. 3 days ago:
Do you eat beans regularly?
I’ve tried every remedy I’ve heard of to fix beans and none of them have worked. I’ve become convinced that people who eat beans regularly have different gut flora which properly digest the oligosaccharides without producing gas, but I can’t prove it.
- Comment on Happy Birthday! 3 days ago:
Nintendo’s always been litigious and controlling of their brand. What they haven’t been (until recently) is price-gouging peddlers of derivative schlock resting on their laurels. They used to be afraid of low-quality games and rehashes diluting their brand (they witnessed the carnage of 1983). Now they just don’t care.
- Comment on If fossil fuels aren't vegan that would mean almost nobody is actually vegan. 5 days ago:
The question is: can you turn it into a product? Would people be willing to pay $100/lb for hand-pollinated almonds? It’s potentially something to explore on a small scale.
I would love to know how many vegans would pay that much for an ethical product.
- Comment on If fossil fuels aren't vegan that would mean almost nobody is actually vegan. 5 days ago:
Do you have a link to a discussion of some of the problems?
I’ve often been suspicious of bold claims about land use that lump all the numbers together into one huge hectare or km^2 number, ignoring all of the nuance of climate, water access, soil chemistry, or other broad geographical issues that severely limit what kind of crops can be grown on the land.
One thing people ought to recognize is that large farmers can be just as greedy as any big business. If they could buy up a bunch of cheap pasture land and start growing pistachios or almonds they would. The amount of money to be made by doing that is astronomical, which should be a clue that the land is simply not available.
- Comment on If fossil fuels aren't vegan that would mean almost nobody is actually vegan. 5 days ago:
You definitely could bring the wild pollinators back. I do that with my own garden in my backyard. But that means you’d have to remove parts of the orchard to provide a habitat for the pollinators, lowering the density of the trees. Lower density => lower production => smaller crop => more expensive almonds (or peaches etc).
If we want everyone to be vegan that’s gonna mean mostly giving up the luxury products that many vegans currently enjoy and switching to staples (beans, squash, corn, root veggies).
- Comment on If fossil fuels aren't vegan that would mean almost nobody is actually vegan. 5 days ago:
Manually pollinating thousands of almond trees is definitely possible. But then you should expect almonds to be in the same price range as vanilla pods, another manually pollinated crop.
- Comment on If fossil fuels aren't vegan that would mean almost nobody is actually vegan. 6 days ago:
The ones I always come back to are pollinator-dependent crops such as fruits and tree nuts. Wild and feral pollinators are not abundant enough to sustain the level of production we presently demand in these crops. Presumably, if more people were to become vegan then we would demand them even more.
From what I know, vegans oppose the transportation of pollinators for pollinating these crops. Yet it seems most vegans eat plenty of them (apples, peaches, plums, almonds, avocados, etc).
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 1 week ago:
Respect is a weird word. It seems to have 2 nearly opposite meanings (kind of like literally):
- Deep admiration for someone or something for their abilities, qualities, or achievements
- Due regard for the feelings, wishes, or rights of others
So the first one implies that respect must be earned. The second implies that everyone must be respected by default (their due regard), thus respect is unearned.
- Comment on i 💚 animals. 1 week ago:
Space isn’t a science either, it’s the subject matter for astronomy and astrophysics.
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
That’s only half of it. The other half is staying in power and dealing with all the people under you.
The problem is that the dictator is never the only “evil shit” in the regime. Dictators are evil shit magnets for entire bureaucracies full of ladder-climbing sycophants.
Then comes the long-term problem: information and trust. When you’re the dictator everyone wants to be your best friend. They will tell you anything to get what they want. You will soon realize that you can’t trust anyone. That’s when the paranoia sets in. You’ll reorganize your entire government around loyalty to you, not beliefs or abilities, because that’s the only way to survive.
This is why all dictatorships end up looking the same over the long run. They have only one goal: continued survival of the dictatorship. Anything else leads to collapse and death or exile of the dictator.
- Comment on Over 450 Diablo developers at Blizzard have unionized 2 weeks ago:
Well the other thing is that design work doesn’t scale the way art does. You can’t throw 1000 game designers at a project and expect them to create a coherent game design.
So you end up with one or a small team of game designers and they need to get the major parts of the design done early since everyone else follows from that. This leaves you with so little room for experimentation that you end up with a cookie cutter game design.
- Comment on Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters 2 weeks ago:
Sorry dude, but cars are technology too, not just self driving cars. Every death due to cars is a technology death. You can’t escape the reality of tradeoffs.
- Comment on Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters 2 weeks ago:
What do you mean science backs it up? Science is finding massive social problems with technology all the time. Social media and its negative impacts on mental health (especially for teen and preteen girls), for example. Microplastics everywhere, for another. Climate change anyone?
- Comment on CrankBoy - the original Game Boy game emulator for the Playdate console (my article) 3 weeks ago:
Oh okay. That sounds a lot better than I thought!
I think to me the crank seems ideal for a fishing game. Has anyone made one of those?
- Comment on CrankBoy - the original Game Boy game emulator for the Playdate console (my article) 3 weeks ago:
It’s a tough sell then. I did a search in the article for the word crank and got a lot of matches but it was too long for me to read. I would have preferred some short video clips to demonstrate exactly how it works.
- Comment on CrankBoy - the original Game Boy game emulator for the Playdate console (my article) 3 weeks ago:
Ahhh that’s annoying. The crank looks like it makes the whole unit much more awkward to hold, especially for larger hands. The fact that it’s just a control gimmick which doesn’t really add anything to classic Game Boy games makes it a hard pass for me.
- Comment on what are the grievances with the "male loneliness epidemic"? 3 weeks ago:
Evolution is not our friend. Evolution favours reproductive fitness, not happiness. Happiness is just one of many tools in the toolbox for getting us to reproduce.
The current situation with low birth rates due to the availability of contraceptives is a temporary blip. Right now you can witness a wide range of forces arrayed against that status quo. Note that for humans, evolution operates not only at the genetic level but also at the cultural level since parents can pass their culture on to their children.
We’re witnessing a major backlash and reaction against secular liberalism, a return to authoritarianism and a revival of religious membership. Religion has always been one of the most powerful of evolution’s cultural weapons for increasing reproductive fitness.
- Comment on BECOME THE INTELLECTUAL BLADE 3 weeks ago:
Ahhh, I dunno what country he’s from but in my country (Canada) there are loads of jobs for math grads. The one thing you have to give up on is pure math. No business is interested in paying someone to write proofs.
I did a major in computational math with a joint pure math. I took a lot of pure math courses and loved them but there’s no practical use for them outside of academia. It’s like learning to write poetry.
However, the skills of a mathematics grad and the broad applicability of mathematics to many areas of business, engineering, and science are undeniable. Even someone who has only studied pure mathematics has a huge advantage over someone who has an unrelated arts degree, for example, all else being equal (personal hygiene, social and communications skills).
All else is rarely equal though. But that’s another matter entirely!
- Comment on At Gamescom, it felt like the industry now has a plan: make games quicker | Opinion 3 weeks ago:
You won’t get that from AAA studios: that’s largely indie territory today.
The issue with creating novel and interesting gameplay is that it’s not a straight-line process. It takes a lot of experimentation and failure. That doesn’t match with the large teams and assembly-line process of AAA game development.
An indie game developer, especially one who just works on the game in their free time but otherwise has a day job, is 100% free to experiment and redo their game design hundreds of times. Often this doesn’t mean throwing the game away but instead making lots of small games for game jams or just to build a portfolio of projects.
Couple that with the fact there aren’t nearly as many AAA studios as there are indie game developers working on hobby projects and you can see why AAAs are at such a disadvantage when it comes to experimenting with novel and innovative game designs. Indie game don’t need to all be successful to make it hard on AAAs: out of thousands of indie games only one needs to be successful.
- Comment on BECOME THE INTELLECTUAL BLADE 3 weeks ago:
Well it’s hard for me to say what your professor really meant. If he meant “there are no jobs paying math undergrads to write proofs” then yes of course, no one but professors or rich parents would pay for that. But all he said was “there are no jobs for undergrads/masters/PhDs” which to me implies that math grads are no better off than high school grads at getting a job, with which I would strongly disagree.
- Comment on BECOME THE INTELLECTUAL BLADE 3 weeks ago:
I have a math degree. I am far from independently wealthy. There are plenty of math-related jobs out there if you’re willing to stoop from the lofty perches of pure math. Statistics, data science, risk management, actuarial science, finance, accounting, operations research, optimization, computational mathematics, machine learning/AI.
The list goes on and on and on. Many of these jobs might be quite boring for someone who just wants to work on difficult proofs all day but they’re generally a lot better pay than any academic job below the tenure track (and way better pay than Starbucks).
Life is a lot tougher if you’re into physics or chemistry or biology. There you really do need a PhD to do anything and the research positions are extremely competitive to get.
