Comment by cycloptic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cycloptic | Hacker News Reader

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>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?

I can't answer those because as far as I can tell, none of that context was really mentioned in the piece. If the bar for understanding the documentation is "you have to go on twitter and ask the author a bunch of critical questions to explain the joke" then consider the group of people who you are limiting that documentation to.

I am not sure what you mean by some people are trying to turn something into a categorical imperative, I didn't see any statements to either of those ends. I see some people who have apparently suffered, making a specific request to another group of people to help reduce their suffering.

>I can't answer those because as far as I can tell, none of that context was really mentioned in the piece

I don't want to be the one to bring this up, but your posts indicate you're less skilled in reading comprehension than this satire is asking for from it's audience.

My personal tastes and goals in technical writing aside, I don't find the reading comprehension level this satire was written for to be incongruous with reasonable assumptions about the audience of godot's documentation.

> I can't answer those because as far as I can tell, none of that context was really mentioned in the piece. If the bar for understanding the documentation is "you have to go on twitter and ask the author a bunch of critical questions to explain the joke" then consider the group of people who you are limiting that documentation to.

It's really simple: "If you have questions: just ask, communicate, listen and don't jump to immediate conclusions from the get-go". That's not too high a bar to set, no?

Suppose someone turns to me and says "You have written a piece, that's how I feel and my conclusion is that you need to retract your statement." My first question to them will be: "Well, have you considered asking and listening to me first before you jump to that conclusion?"

> I see some people who have apparently suffered, making a specific request to another group of people to help reduce their suffering.

Did these people ask why the piece was included in the documentation in the first place? Did they try to understand the intentions of the author? Was their an open debate about this at any point?

If you don't find a debate online, have you asked them if they talked to the author directly, or are you joining a bandwagon without asserting whether or not their suffering might be caused by misunderstanding the intentions of the authors of that piece? Or worst, caused by an unwillingness to consider the intentions of the authors of the piece?

What you're saying is entirely backwards though, from a pure maintenance perspective, the purpose of documentation is actually to reduce the amount of time you need to spend on answering questions and responding to debates. If you receive a lot of questions about what it's supposed to mean, the documentation is not doing its job and needs to be clarified.

And that's a completely valid point. But then we're discussing something entirely different: the usefulness of documentation. A satirical piece conveying criticism on the game industry clearly doesn't help a developer solve a concrete technical problem.

You could extend that to anything that doesn't touch upon the technicalities of the Godot gaming engine.

But that's entirely distinct from the initial point of debate: does this satirical piece offend or doesn't it?

To borrow some language from the piece, how much would you appreciate it if someone put a paragraph in the documentation saying "CaptArmchair is a poor soul filled with tremendous existential angst, who needs to be prevented from thinking so the tremendous agony of realizing CaptArmchair's own irrelevance does not again take over CaptArmchair's life" ? Even if it was a joke, would you really want that in there? (For disclosure, if it was me, I personally would probably not want any hostile things about me written across random open source documentation, so hopefully I am not cursing myself to that by writing this post)

Now you're pulling a single sentence out of an entire context and dismissing that particular context. That's not how it works.

The next parts of that piece are equally important:

> 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.

Clearly "protect the world order" is hyperbole. It is clearly signalling that none of the above is to be taken literally.

Moreover, the "prevents them from thinking" is another form of signalling. It's meant to say "Think about who you're buying from, and what you're buying into." What is absolutely not meant to say is this: "your experience as a gamer is invalid because you buy into a questionable product/service/business model."

The entire piece is satire. It's self deprecating. Satire asks that the reader takes a step back, self deprecates for a minute... and then reflects on what's actually being said.

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