Godot maintainer removes controversial satirical piece from documentation
github.com
github.com
To have these people paint themselves as oppressed and offended... is exactly what I've come to expect after every online social justice controversy I've witnessed so far.
And I know exactly how they would respond to me: What do you mean by "these people" you *ist!
The last game that blew me away from a sound perspective was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. They used sound in just the ways I imagined it could be used. It is sad that people don't dare to try more stuff like this. Games could be a great artform, but the money/power structures we live in make them cashcows first and foremost.
I'd argue that the past year has been one of the best for the success of games that were the passion projects of smaller teams. Fall Guys, Among Us, Hades and Valheim are good examples that the industry isn't only soulless triple-A productions or quick cash grabs.
Super fun and cool, but given the context of their previous games, def in the iterative camp.
There's lots of indie games that don't have those issues.
But, the problem with making games is the same problem with art or music or opening a coffee shop or becoming a doctor or nurse: it's something that people want to do, and so supply will overwhelm demand until conditions and pay get bad enough to outweigh the romantic appeal.
Programmers in the game industry are treated much worse on average, than programmers working on in-house CRUD apps.
(Similarly, I assume working conditions at Tesla and SpaceX must be comparatively bad. Not necessarily absolutely bad, but compared to what the people working there could get elsewhere.)
Whenever I browse the Google Play Store, it is an unplessant experience. It is hard to find out which games are "real" games without the very exploitive mechancis (of course, it is a spectrum, so it's not always easy to tell). It is hard to find out which features the games have: Singelplayer, multiplayer, offline playable, gamepad support?
Especially the last part annoyed me when I tried out a new android controller but couldn't figure out which game would actually work with it.
But there are good games available on mobile. They are just burried under a lot of unpleasent ones.
Long story short, I started developing my own, gamepad optimized game launcher for android which offers more of a console-like experience. Should I ever invest way more time in it, I'll add my own search and filter overlay for the play store…
;)
It was painful to observe that people from countries with difficult economies can spend so much money to hunt for pixels. This is their choice, of course, but at the same time it's a proactive work to keep them hooked.
After I realized what I was getting myself into, I completed the existing tasks and left the company. It's not for me.
Edit: formatting
I left myself wondering what would I have done in his place. It's really hard to reject a huge financial offer, even though you're well aware of the societal damage your work is doing. Sincere kudos to you for acknowledging it and getting out of the industry.
Like FAANG level money [0], more?
A few choice examples:
- Call of Duty matching players who buy DLC weapons against people who don't have them, and then specifically lower-skilled players
- EA patenting something called 'Engagement Optimized Matchmaking'. It boils down to feeding you games it knows you'll lose, and then once in a while throwing you a bone giving you a near-guaranteed win. This keeps you in the game longer than just trying to balance the the matchmaking as good as possible
- Bungie, ever since having split from Activision and switched to making Destiny 2 f2p* has specifically upped the grind and tedium on most things tenfold, so they can show their investors how engaged players are with the game by virtue of ludicrous amounts of playtime
*not really, you still have to pay for raids and seasonal content, f2p is more like a demo
I miss the old days of things like Unreal Tournament 99 and Unreal Tournament 2004, where both the community and Epic created gigabytes (back then a massive data amount) of content like skins, maps gamemodes, mutators etc for scot-free. Epic even bundled the best of them in two official bonuspacks!
If Android didn't allow blocking notifications, then any app that does this would get the boot. Youtube, HN and eBay is stressful enough to follow, I don't need more of this in my life.
Apps are almost as bad as websites in terms of my willingness to let them send notifications at this point.
It's a nontrivial amount of work. Most people predictably aren't going to do it (otherwise the market would eliminate abusive practices on its own). Hell, most HNers ain't gonna do it. Myself, I wasn't doing it, despite complaining about games a lot.
Fortunately, HN's StavrosK did the research, and created this: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/. I'm forever grateful to him for that.
EDIT: Hey, do you want to become a curator? It's very low-volume and would help keep the site more up to date.
The difference is that in the PC games you can mostly ignore these and you still have a game you play, where skill and work is challenged and rewarded.
The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more. You get a lot of smoke and mirrors on top of this - an artistic theme, social media integrations, ranks, titles, events, etc, but again the big difference is that there is no gameplay.
This is a point-for-point description of one of the most popular "game" types in Las Vegas.
Real life is more complex than the binary way of thinking you propose, and games often implement these techniques with valid reasons behind it other than simply making money or exploiting people. The problem is people acting poorly, and not the techniques in and of themselves.
If you love real games, don't work on mobile gaming.
Don't be an *ist.
(My favorite -ist construction is "wingism", the stereotyping of people of the other political persuasion- I think it's just as destructive to a society as other *ist's)
2. The joke makes fun of those practices.
3. The joke also punches down mobile games and casual players
You say "these people" (ie. the developers of said predatory applications) paint themselves as oppressed and offended [where?], but as far as I know the joke is being mostly criticized because of point 3 (I am not related to the game business).
It was only a matter of time before they did this, tbh, I doubt it will be painted as a social justice issue.
You're inventing a stance to get angry about.
[0] https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507?s=20
It just takes one person to write a rant and then its all over. Thousands of examples but a similar one was VSCode having to remove the santa hat from an icon on Christmas because someone claimed it was extremely offensive. I know I'm starting to sound like an American conspiracy theorist about the war on christmas, but the reality is that you just can't show any kind of personality, humor, or fun on the internet without putting yourself at risk.
So the pragmatic strategy is to surrender early, when the cost of surrender is still small (just your own shame of yielding to evil people).
No, thanks. I'd just rather my online persona is squeaky-clean under my real name, and anything controversial (oh, I don't know, like holding even one opinion that's got a potential to become controversial a year or two down the line) is under a pseudonym.
It really doesn't matter if you don't listen to it.
Unfortunately a lot of people do, and some people that matter do. I hope this will change.
From a business standpoint: They've shown they're willing to make a scene, while simultaneously making it just controversial enough that you can justify pulling it down (and therefore averting the issue) without major loss of face.
In other words, nobody's primary business is controversial documentation.
Sprinkle the code and documentation with random references to your favourite animal. That surely can't offend anyone, right?
Survivor bias, no doubt.
I guess puns might be immune. We still have puns. Unless some alt right jerk uses them as a way to make fun of Japanese people (there is a stereotype from a while back), then we lose puns too
Except when someone deems the subject too serious (“how dare you make jokes about that”). So no, we don’t still have puns.
What I’d like to know is why the American culture in particular seems so hostile to any form of humour. This isn’t something I have seen in other Western European countries to this extent (though it is spreading in thanks to the Internet).
Some of those are somewhat valid points, but the trick is to find people who don't mind the humour, and then spend the most time with them :)
Since humor is now banned on the internet, would you mind deleting your comment as good praxis?
:)
Completely untrue. Lefty "SJW" Twitter is full of humour and personality. Shitposting takes precedence over serious discussion, massively, to the point where more centrist or right-wing twitter circles seem completely dry in comparison. If your humour and personality aren't accepted, that's on you.
Unfortunately, it seems to me the structure of the movement itself makes many people too timid to actually push back against toxic behavior like this.
Edit - I found an archive of the tweet https://archive.md/VpYl2
Is that even a thing? Never ever have I heard "mobile players = women" even on the worst dumps of the internet, like 9gag. But then again, I'm not on Twitter.
(Either way I think the argument that this means the article is intrinsicly sexist is definitely reaching. It seems the accusation of gatekeeping is more valid, though I think this requires a pretty uncharitable interpretation of something which is clearly aiming elsewhere)
The author was making some pretty clear points about how capitalism produces meaningless addictive games. Accusing author of sexism seems like a non-sequitur to me, especially as the whole comment is completely free of any gendered pronouns, e.g. "These individuals".
Didn't read it that way. The text seems factually true to me.
The fact that the PR author does not even care that a piece of documentation is lost and there is no attempt to at least rewrite it is disappointing.
Someone please think of the old developers
As in: if you don’t have something “we” to say, don’t say anything at all.
Language is a way of conveying meaning.
Hyper focusing on the words being used, diminishes time spent on the transaction of mind.
On the other hand, this is the whole point of writing poetry. You focus on the particular shape of words and try to fit them to an arbitrary, meaningless, pattern.
Life is... when you really think about it... absurd.
This person is referring to the #gamergate controversy from like 6-7 years ago, I understand that much.
But how does a progressive, left-leaning person go from that to being offended by a satire about capitalism? I have no clue. It's like becoming a caricature of yourself.
You can tell because leftists aren't offended by vanilla leftism.
It was an accurate observation, but despite best intentions, it sounded like a teenager on a rant. Not exactly a good look.
Just my two cents - seems that some agree and some don't.
It is quite typical to dismiss anti-capitalist critique as being youthful and immature
I don't like this fake-wokism SV monoculture creeping into everything. I wouldn't mind them sharing their opinions on things if they didn't have teeth. Somehow the professionally oppressed are backed by nearly every major corporation on the planet. It makes me overreact. I don't like it. Most people don't like it. Everything they say sounds like "Pick up that can, Citizen."
Archive of twitter thread that started this: https://archive.md/VpYl2
I think a lot of people are feeling this and its probably what is pushing people in to extreme ideologies. You start off getting pissed off at actions like this and then you slowly gravitate as far away from these people as possible.
Honestly I think public social media entirely is a bad experiment and probably needs to be stopped. It used to be that you would know your audience and make jokes to suit, some people are more sensitive to certain things but you would know this and avoid otherwise fine jokes. But now on the internet the audience is literally everyone so you are always going to step on someones toes. Even by something as tame as a rant on encrypted saves and IAPs.
Instead, they got offended by the very thing the text was crticising, which is viewing the players of mobile games as a lower class of human that can and therefore must be milked for cash.
It feels like the whole controversy is just a misunderstanding of two groups having the same idea, but wording it differently.
I guess, it isn't really their fault. Nobody chooses to misunderstand something(do they?). I just wish it had not led to the destruction of something interesting, but if it hadn't, then I would probably never have seen the deleted text; so, maybe, I should be thankful they brought it to my attention, even while wishing someone could have explained the text to them; or, at least, managed to convince them that sometimes it is best to ignore something you don't like, rather than go to war.
No - but people who write sarcastic or satirical things are deliberately choosing to make themselves more likely to be misunderstood. Why would you do that?
"I’ve seen some impressively caustic stuff from that area at times."
Also you and other in this threads seem determined to use them as a scapegoat for all that happens around this joke.
The other statement seems toxic however.
Jesus can we just burn Twitter to the ground already? What a wasteland of morons with useless opinions it is.
As a maintainer I wouldn’t even remove it for content but just because it’s clearly a detriment to the document.
And since they could barely operate a computer there was some natural barrier of entry that kept these people away from the internet. Then phones and apps happened and the all flooded to social media and here we are. They come from all sides of the political spectrum, so pretty much the only way to avoid them is to stay off social media.
When people stop going along with things is when what is acceptable begins to change. Unfortunately, public shaming and ostricism seems to be a fundamental part of evolving social mortality.
It has been a while since last time it was the actual offended party who complained. Nowadays, people who complain are people who pretend to be offended in the name of other people who, in the mind of the first ones, could be offended.
Everything must be soulless and sterile. Just churn out your work as an appendage to the machine, with no culture or expression.
We too
Probably get thick skin advice is offensive nowadays
At least, it's replacing the awkward dudebro monoculture that crept into everything.
Also you're saying their opinions have "teeth" as if making a complaint is some kind of attack on something because it could potentially cause a change to happen, but if you take that view then what is the point of giving feedback if you know it won't be acted on? If you find yourself overreacting to someone else expressing their opinion, perhaps that is another opportunity to expand your viewpoint, instead of overreacting?
Have you ever been to a comedy club or watched a stand-up comedian perform?
If everyone took your stance most jokes would be banned because you can always argue that they are at the expense of some group.
I think what OP is saying is accepting the difference and moving on is also a valid option.
Some people are trying to turn "retracting a statement and apologizing as soon as a single individual states they feel offended" into a categorical imperative which every human ought to obey.
That's the extreme opposite to that other polarizing categorical imperative: "I am able to say whatever I want, regardless how anyone else feels about that."
Categorical imperatives don't work out at all in interpersonal relationships. They leave zero room for empathy or compromise, they dismiss any personal responsibility to take a step back and reflect on the context.
Like this:
> the joke in question is very clearly made at the expense of a certain group of people (mobile game players). What is fake or contrived about this if you're in that group and don't like being the butt of these jokes as is happening here?
One corollary of that categorical imperative is that any and all suffering is absolute. Everything is a 5/5. There's no nuance or room to take this apart through critical questioning.
However, asking critical questions, trying to understand and listening to one another are paramount.
Can you be sure this is targeted at mobile game players? Have you read the tutorial page and are you perceiving things at face value? Have you considered that satire can deliver a valid criticism via irony, pastiche, wit,...? Could this also be a warning or a put down directed at mobile game companies who tend to consider gamers as consumers through their business models?
These aren't questions meant to hurt, they are meant to understand where someone is coming from.
Even so, words do have an impact. They can be used to intentionally hurt. You can use words to clearly convey that you don't perceive the other person as an equal human being. You can use words to dismiss any form of equal reciprocity as to how you and the other behave/act/listen towards one another. That's where insults, disrespect, violence, discrimination and the like come in. And once those are out in the open, you can't take that back.
There's a difference between the former and the latter. A satirical piece questioning a particular behavior is one thing, a piece that intentionally attack individuals themselves is something entirely else.
Asking critical questions is about asserting the intentions of the author, figuring out where they come from, why they put a satirical piece in technical documentation in the first place. You can draw your own conclusions, but unless you ask those questions and go find answers, your conclusions will be conjecture at best, and turn into misunderstandings fueling further polarization deadening any further debate at worst.
> if you take that view then what is the point of giving feedback if you know it won't be acted on?
Interpersonal relationships are complex and multi-layered, meta at many times. All the world is a stage, and there's always an audience around. The point of publishing a satirical piece that targets mobile game businesses isn't to show them "the errors of their ways". It could also be read as a warning to mobile game players: beware from whom you purchase games.
While I'm addressing you directly with my comment, I'm very much aware that this is a public forum and there's an audience lurking and reading this.
Good communication is a complex skill to pick up. That's why communication science, journalism and PR experts are a thing.
I've seen people get bent out of shape because people put politics in music, yet Forever Young by Alphaville was written about the prospect of dying during the Cold War. Now, there's definitely a difference between Forever Young and some artist making overt statements, that nuance is not lost. The difference is that these aren't seen as humor, insightful thinking, or light-hearted attempts to nudge us in a direction anymore. Discourse has degraded to the extent that anything you mutter must be an absolute belief and there is some inclination that you ascribe to all ecosystems of belief around that idea as well.
If you previously used inflammatory speech (like this) for effect, you're now viewed as someone who has taken a side not only with ideas discussed here but any ideas which may be distantly related to that idea too.
The social bubble has become so close to exploding in our collective faces that everything has to be put in correct form, everybody has to be included, everything has to be perfect.
What happened to the meaning of "human" itself? Why are we not forgiving to humans that simply forgot?
I think the phenomenon of how social shitstorms explode these days is the exact opposite of an inclusive society.
Those that complain about things online usually are the ones that are not inclusive, and live their lives in despair and hate instead of love and compassion.
What we need to do is the opposite: Embrace discussion, embrace debate, and embrace to try to understand the opponents' views. People are quick to downvote, and people are quick to hate. But do you know what it takes to try to understand your imaginary villain? A real hero that offers compassion, not another villain that fuels the hate.
I believe that we as a society need to rethink our social values, because apparently, a major part of our society doesn't give a damn about other parts of our society.
And that's either a social or an educational issue with our moral baseline that we teach our children.
Tom fucking Morello.
The Clash / Allen Ginsberg - Capitol Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qmz03WI-es
Isn't that ... that's the analysis anyone would have for another country or historical period with the exact same dynamic.
It's probably not actually "kids these days", only because it never has been so far.
That American politics have become so bifurcated is the problem. We need more than two parties and we need runoff voting to reinforce their ability to survive. Then we can get out of this black and white / us vs them nonsense and see shades of grey.
There are people who don’t subscribe to either party and I don’t just mean independents. That’s a term that’s limited in use to describing anyone who’s not a member of the two “recognized” parties, rather than a defined party.
Previous generations were literally sent to die in the world wars, Korea and Vietnam.
The current generation of recent college graduates has had less suffering than any prior generation.
It is extremely difficult to tell the difference between a Republican or Democrat if you just look at the results and not their rhetoric.
Social media gives everyone a single place in which to express their opinions on matters large and small, whereas previously they might only have been able to share those opinions with friends. I don't think it's obvious to say people are more politically opinionated without considering how much having a place to express those opinions, find others in agreement and possibly even have that opinion affect the real world has had on how vocal people are about things they opinions they had anyway.
Software projects shouldn’t loudly advertise that they are written by people with the political sophistication of a college student who smokes too much weed.
Harm it does: zero Levity it provides: some
This has been done in many projects since the beginning of the Web. You are clearly, how you say, "triggered" by someone making fun of mobile game addiction and monetization.
Seriously though, while I'd agree that the piece was written in a quite unsophisticated style, what exactly is "unbelievably asinine" about it?
The two main points seem, to me, to be:
1) Mobile games are designed to provide not much more than an addictive dopamine hit
2) Mobile devices in general enable people to fill time they'd otherwise be alone with their thoughts with mindless distractions, and many happily oblige
Both of these are quite defensible.
Everybody's entitled to their opinion especially, if there isn't anything harmful.
At least the guys are creating more than public flame on HN.
As to college students smoking weed, just study history of Silicon Valley to see how many of big name corps were started like that.
Open source software projects can have the spin and advertising they want, and it's up to you not to use them if you do not agree.
With the money came power, and with power comes an expectation of responsibility. But VCs/execs/boards aren't interested in taking even an iota of material responsibility , and holding them to account is basically impossible, and so all the external anger at a largely unaccountable and unconcerned industry gets redirected at rank-and-file.
There was never a single overarching software culture.
Go to Barnes and Noble (or online) and pick up the magazine 2600, which still gives off a very amateur, hacking-positive pre-social-media vibe of the internet, telecom, and computing.
Also, the book "Steal This Computer Book" while outdated was a fun glance-through when I was younger, though it didn't talk philosophy.
You had things like the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace[1] and other essays and myriad discussions about the potential of the World Wide Web.
The Web was smaller, less corporate, and the nerds ran the show. It shouldn't be blamed on them/us that the net is "corporate".
I obviously don't speak for the author. This joke was probably better and funnier when it seemed more obviously absurd and ridiculous because nobody would ever believe that. Now it's not so clear that its satire at all. It seems much more like the sort of thing some people really do believe. What was clearly hyperbolic about a quite small piece of silliness is now being interpreted as a mere mild exaggeration of the state of the world to highlight a great truth.
The world is changing under us. Just like always has. It surprises us that it is, just like it always does.
Then somehow there was this modern movement of people who truly believed the world is flat. I heard them promoting the same exact theories that I had heard years before, and when I tried to point that out to some of them, I was called an idiot.
Flat-earthers have ruined The Flat Earth Society. Now normal people believe the Society is real flat-earthers, and real flat-earthers hate the Society because they realized it was all about mocking Flat Earth beliefs.
To me, the entirety of the world is ridiculous, and you have to just laugh at it, otherwise it's all very depressing. People are far too humorless and serious, while society gets even more ridiculous.
Is this not a modern version of bonsai kittens?
The trolls get out-trolled regularly, it's part of what people find funny.
Maybe in a rare case, here and there. But you better believe this modern moment isn't trolling.
I've met plenty people who strongly identified with this movement and had several lengthy discussions with them. Literally all of them showcased not just a strong belief in a flat earth (and other easy to disprove conspiracy theories), they also clearly suffered from myriad of clearly identifiable psychological pathologies, underpinning all of it. Not the kind of things that someone who's just trolling would be able to fake (easily, or at all). More like the kind and severity that any sane society (both as a social group and as an institution) would provide psychological or even psychiatric assistance with. But that might just be the bigger issue at hand here.
It appears that insanity has increasingly become a somewhat acceptable (or unstoppable) norm rather than an exception in our modern societies. In particularly in the Western ones driven by capitalism, or so it appears. Instead of treating psychological pathologies for what they are, today pretty much "opinion" has become a "valid" opinion.
I guess that taking the concept of freedom of expression (itself no doubt a good thing) to absurd extremes, clearly doesn't help.
It probably doesn't help either that politicians (of all colors) appear to have no issue with exploiting these collective insanities for their own equally insane goals.
All in all, I think all of it are rather indicative sings of a society that is gradually running off its tracks, like a barometer is indicative for weather to come. I don't see this getting any better anytime soon. Particularly not in the US and EU.
It's bewildering to me that anyone can get offended (to vehement profanity) by the text. At the same time, I'm kinda used to criticisms of the mobile game industry. When I switched from a job in AAA games to the nascent mobile games industry (back in J2ME/BREW days, before smartphones), a number of former colleagues were questioning and even dismissive of my move. They did not consider such a crappy platform as worthy of a game developer. I didn't blame them for having that attitude. I just thought it was fun to be able to make and design games all by myself (instead of being on a team of over 90, about half being programmers) and be able to carry them around in my pocket!
I had to read that twice to realize you’re not referring to the programming language.
> An important goal of Python's developers is keeping it fun to use. This is reflected in the language's name—a tribute to the British comedy group Monty Python[70]—and in occasionally playful approaches to tutorials and reference materials, such as examples that refer to spam and eggs (from a famous Monty Python sketch) instead of the standard foo and bar.[71][72]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
If nothing in my life changed, I'd have been driven from gaming anyway by IAP and micropayments.
The piece is obviously sarcastic but has some grains of truth (I personally see more than just grains...).
I think that it's important to remove any sort of misogyny, racism, and any other toxic things from technology. I just don't see how this piece has any of that.
That's because it doesn't. This whole thing stinks of the same type of bad faith as when people try to smear leftist politicians as being sexist, racist, or anti-semitic (they even geared up to try to call Bernie, a Jewish person, anti-semitic, but I guess that was too ridiculous to stick). We're going to see this a lot going forward - the language of anti-oppression being misused to defend an abusive status quo, by people who benefit from it.
Okay, he's not an antisemite, he just supported totalitarian antisemitic regime.
"Any criticisms of Trump are bad faith smears by the Deep State defending the status quo."
Hmm.
Of course they always, are innocent of such things, always, and never sexually harass their staff either, nor dress up in blackface. All such allegations are lies, I tell you, lies!
Now those dirty right-wingers, you don’t even need proof or a single credible witness, of course they did it... /s
Leftist politicians can be all of those things..
She might not be getting her nomination, but it's a great example of the tactic in action.
I think it's far more likely they view players as rats in their Skinner's box simulator with the reward lever tied to their credit card and the punishment mechanism wired to a timer.
Seems more whimsical than offensive to me, but YMMV.
> In isolation that’s just meh. In a context where mobile players got trashed all the bloody time for being fake gamers, casuals, mindless whales, or worst of all, women? In a context of tech people often being elitist “core” gamers? Woops, you’re punching down.
The crazy thing is that it only hurts people that don't have humor. For instance, the moment someone is without humor, they get cut out from the fun people.
Therefore, I cannot understand what the problem is with satire in the documentation of a game engine. On the contrary, it reminds you that you should think about what you read from time to time.
If you are a maintainer of a project, you don't want a Twitter outrage storm about it. It may put the project and the maintainer(s) personally in a bad position (completely undeservedly), and turn some of the project's contributors and / or sponsors away.
Because the Internet Outrage Machine is still fully functioning, any technical project has to gravitate to a clinically sterile state to stay safe.
Would such a situation create a true mono-culture? If so, would this be a good thing? Why or why not?
«Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.»
Or, as somebody said, it's always a temptation to use the devil's enviable energy to pull your cart; the problem is that he knows only one destination.
But it might've been specific to some editions.
I don't think it is. I think it's teasing the companies that try to exploit these gamers and how the author believes those companies view these gamers as something to be exploited.
It's punching the companies not the gamers IMO.
So much for that
1. You have been asked to implement a feature.
2. Recognise that the feature really only has benefit for a particular segment of the market.
3. You don't agree with the motivation of that segment, but you want to provide the features your user-base requires.
4. You provide a satirical nod to your opposition, but also implement the feature.
It seems reasonable to me.
--
Edit: typo
As I understand in this case the N is 1? And so
"Godot maintainer removes controversial (to N=1) satirical piece from documentation".
Much better illustrated ridiculousness of the situation.
I wish that people used energy like this to do something more useful (well, 'useful' from my POV).
/s
That's the new norm I guess. There's a small minority of people who spend their time and energy on being oppressed terrorising the majority with demands like this.
Comply or get cancelled
Why was this controversial?
Why remove the code example as well as the satire?
https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367071940092055555
Something about bullying and sexism? I don't really get it
" Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.
But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.
No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order. "
By keeping it up you must defend the fact that you are not being sexist or elitist by criticising encrypted save files. It’s easier to just cave in than put in that effort for a joke.
Seems a shame. It may have been satirical when written but perhaps not so much now.
That's just a griefing of the documentation.
1: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/6ef0538f182c13e169...
Take factorio, you can do sooo much stuff to cheat. However, the core mechanics still work and it's fun. Granted, not as epic, but still fun. Any of the free to play stuff, not fun.
Interesting. I guess the "be professional" army won. I wonder if they imagined the shock troops of social justice would have been the ones to bring about the sanitization of dev docs.
A couple of years ago I visited that page when I encrypted the saves of a hobby game I worked on. I don't remember any sarcasm because I'm pretty sure I stopped reading a sentence or two in, and just scrolled down to the examples.
It was just noise that needed to be filtered out. And that's not okay because as far as good documentation goes, I usually read the entire thing before trying out an example.
What is humor allowed to do? It's a big question of our time, and I'd say everything that is immoral, but nothing that is unethical.
Should humor be kept out of _professional setting projects_. My take: No. If we do that, we humans are just machines.
David Graeber said in Bullshit Jobs (p. 213 of the German version; sentence-by-sentence translation by me):
> You can call this mockery of justice. It exists in many forms. The right-leaning version judges those that believe the world owes them [...] equality before the law. But there also exists a version of the left-wing: It consists of telling people that they should check their privileges, if they had the impression they had the right to anything that poor or more opressed people don't have. With this benchmark even the person receiving a beating by the police and is imprisoned without reason can only then complain about injustice after naming every other category of men that is more likely to be a victim of it.
Anyone not out to be offended could've told the piece was obvious tongue-in-cheek about mobile gamers falling victim to predatory behavior from big companies seeking the few whales they could milk for all their profits. If there was anything to be offended about, it would be that practice. The thread that helped cancel this piece was very in-line with the whole body-positive movement: let's not look at the obvious problem (people weak to sugar getting fat off a western diet loaded with sugar at every corner), instead, let's look at the people rightfully calling out the practice and the result (oligarchs rebranding, renaming and smuggling sugar into almost any produced good, getting people fat and unhealthy).
> If there was anything to be offended about, it would be that practice.
Yes, not the category of people typically playing them.
Let's write a variant of the joke to put it in perspective.
"Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is found in basements. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, their mom, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class (if they have a job). These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is by playing expensive video games and virtual-reality porn.
But what if someone were to find a way to pass a copy of the game to their friends (or, if they lack friends, other random people on the internet)? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content without paying. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.
No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order."
2) In the long run the bad actors who exploit users through IAP/loot boxes are harming the entire industry. This is not a secret to anybody in the industry -- but the bad actors are throwing enough money around that (to a great extent) they've been allowed to keep raking it in so far regardless of the consequences.
3) Genuinely free games do exist but stand little chance when competing with "free-but-IAP-and-dark-patterns" games. App stores need to do more to help users.
4) Strong industry representation is needed to set the proper tone but ESA has not seemed able (or possibly willing) to stand up to some of their funders. At least ESA is finally rid of the bully who'd run it for years. Hopefully they'll do what's right once we begin to return to normalcy.
A long term successful attempt at using humour in a serious subject would be something like 'How to Lie with Statistics' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics). I think humour can help dry subjects, and lets face it, encrypting save files in a game engine isn't exactly the most riveting of subjects so some humour will probably help.
Man, people suck.
And since no body should be entitled to threaten a free speech here is the full text:
>Encrypting save games
>Why?
>Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.
>But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.
>No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order.
I see no big issues with this text but I see a huge problem with attacking such text.
I think someone who have managed to be offended by this innocent text should be near the border of sickness. Or not, it doesn't matter.
What matter is for them to recall that free speech is meant to 'offend' some of us for the benefit of having healthy and honest discussion and avoid much bigger problems that would not just 'offend' but potentially would kill.
Everything that Bradbury, Orwell, Zajdel wrote becomes reality, Brooker's dystopian "Black Mirror" is no longer dystopia. So better remain silent and don't stick out...
> .. This introduction is an Easter egg and is not intended to be taken seriously.
> .. Please don't remove it :)
So sad we take people seriously when they make jokes but ignore their sincere, non-joke comments when it actually matters. I hope the change actually helps solving the problem, if it really exists.
I've been thinking quite a bit and just can't find one, yet the people on Twitter that started this mess assure us that there are plenty...
https://twitter.com/KyleTheCoder/status/1367262726926585866
Gods, I hate nowadays internet.
I'll do it if nobody else will.
Tough problem to solve. I wish we could just accept the fact that people can have opinions different from our own. This is not just normal, but good!
It feels like we're just scaling up small town feuds into a global phenomenon, e.g. "I won't set foot in X or Y's restaurant. Don't you know they buy their cabbages from NextDoorVille instead of buying them from Old Whitney down the street?!"
Having an "open door" and publicly stating an unpopular opinion is, sadly, broadly incompatible.
“ Encrypting save games =====================
Why? ----
.. This introduction is an Easter egg and is not intended to be taken seriously. .. Please don't remove it :) Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.
But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.
No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order.”
2) I worked at freemium game maker Get Set Games, and everyone involved in making the games was an old-school gamer who struggled with the new economics of the mobile game business. In my experience there's a kind of conversation/rationalization where at least at the more conscientious studios people don't want to make addictive games, but they also want to make some money to keep the studio alive. So you don't talk about addiction, but you talk about engagement. You don't do the most user-hostile things, but you do engage in industry norms that are parodied in TFA.
3) I believe that more generally, a lot of people working in the games industry have some level of addiction to games. You can call this love, or passion, or whatnot, but it's there. Staying up 'till 3 to play something and then coming in to work tired. Working on this passion even though there are other interesting and better-compensating or potentially more socially beneficial alternatives that would stroke all the same interests out there.
3b) I'm old enough that when I was a kid, computer games was not a respectable hobby. There was no "gamer culture". If you spent a lot of time on games, you were considered a bit weird or a loser. Because of this, I think that people of my generation get really defensive when there's any talk of addiction. They spent their childhood and adolescence fighting the stigma of being really into gaming, and are not willing to have a nuanced discussion about engagement and addiction. Because, yeah, games can be a wonderful positive force and form of expression. It's just that most aren't.
4) I was a die-hard gamer from about age 7 until my early thirties. I can honestly say that I spent too much time playing games. Yes, it got me a job in the games industry, and while at times horrible, there were many great things about that experience. But ... as you get older ... you realize that 20+ hours a week is a lot of time and that time compounds. What if I had spent 10 hours a week playing games and 10 hours working on math, or physics, or biology, or getting better at business, or living on a sailboat?
I strongly believe that people should follow their interests, as I always have done -- for better or for worse. However when there is an element of external compulsion or facilitation of internal flaws ...
It's a complicated issue and I don't see it being discussed seriously by those in the game industry.
Then, we could only use Windows Server 2021 Enterprise Platform Web Edition, and only be able to develop in Visual Basic C++ asp pages running in IIS 21.
Then again, how is that any different than current Apple Google monopoly in mobile space?
But I belong from a developing country, after I joined the biggest gaming studio, turns out they were making "gacha" games for a big Japanese gaming giant and some other freemium games for US audience.
One of the top grossing games was a Fish game, where people had virtual aquariums, they would need to buy fish eggs from real money, and take care of them till they hatched and grew up, you had to feed them everyday.
Every few days we would launch new expensive fishes, and the guy who used to make those sat few seats behind me, drawing fishes everyday, paid in pennies, and they would sell like hot-cakes.
There was a "feature" in our aquarium that if you didn't feed the fish on time, they would die and float above the aquarium in a gross manner. And our app was very buggy. So everyday we would get support calls from people who would complain that their fishes died even they fed them everyday.
The guy who did support calls sat next to me, and most of the calls were from lonely old American ladies, who would be literally crying on the phone, they even kept names of their "pets" and their untimely death hit them hard, whenever this happened, we immediately updated the "isAlive" field for their pets and they would spring back to life.
But all of this didn't sit well with me, I left soon after, and my skills for game development lended well to frontend development, now I use the JS framework of the week.
I also wouldn't want to read "fun" like this on my bank's website.
Edit: this twitter thread appears to be the backstory for what led to maintainer deciding to remove it (cw for foul language heh) https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367071124383797256
After reading through the discussions I do have to agree such "fun" is not really contributing to the documentation and just leads to misunderstandings or confusion (such as this very instance). Just didn't really need a bunch of outrage to reach that conclusion IMO :P
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/cb0da994bb6834...
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/cb0da994bb6834...
And if anyone thought this was serious stuff to spend time figuring out if this is real or not, I suspect they have a bigger problem with their reading abilities
The lady doth protest too much.
My armchair analysis is that this person has made their career in IAP's and mobile gaming, feels personally attacked by the (accurate, biting) critique, and has abused anti-oppressive language to protect their moral ego.
[0] https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507?s=20