‘This game is so realistic it feels just like working overtime’
sixthtone.com
sixthtone.com
Hmm, yeah. I wonder where I’ve heard that before.
Wish there was an.. easy mode, or something. Something that let me enjoy that feeling of my work - which i love - but with some simplifications to not exercise the same parts of my brain i'm trying to rest after a long days actual work hah.
Who knows, maybe it would be boring :shrug:
After that it's down (and up) to you. I've been able to play Factorio like it's I'm gardening - where I'm just chilling, poking at the puzzles - and other times I haven't been, even when I've got the biter problem resolved, and I'm doing what you described.
> I've been able to play Factorio like I'm gardening
On gardening, same advice would apply: choosing low maintenance, well fitted with the climate or “tough” species is underrated.
Going only for the visual aspect will easily make gardening a second job. Except it’s an actual living thing, and it’s more pressure than the bullshit deadline we have on our projects.
Step 1: Learn how to trim new plant (holy crap they're algorithmic fractals!). Step 2: Start trimming new plant. Step 3: Go stare at newly-prior plant a few minutes a day, see how it's doing. 10/10 would recommend.
But after that I like to "speedrun" the game to see how quickly I can launch the rocket. My best time is only about 11-12 hours, so it's far off any kind of world record time, but it makes the game a lot more fun when I have a goal in mind, instead of just endlessly optimizing etc.
They add chaos and something else to focus on and if they're making things too hard then you can adjust the difficulty.
I wrote a computer solver for Sudoku and that was enough for me, I feel no need to ever play again ;-)
I play ALOT of Sudoku and the game now for me is optimizing my own thoughts while I play. Moving from a random search and find function, to a structure queries that solve the puzzles quicker and quicker. Sort of like a rubix cube. I focus on beating my best time and making it easier and easier.
[0] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=13864128...
The smaller sidetracks are more satisfying knowing others won't have to deal with them, and if others are doing the same thing they're less frequent allowing you to tackle the larger goals more often.
Something that did work as "fun" for me was Infinifactory, even though thematically the game is all about it being a job, it's puzzle nature is less daunting than being a sheer optimization problem.
That, and the incredible "Create Mod" for Minecraft, which gives you all sorts of mechanical gizmos. I find it more interesting because building a machine that does something is the primary focus, instead of linking machines together optimally, and the fact that your automations help you achieve the other open-ended goals of Minecraft
And then it quickly turned into a second job. I had to decided whether I wanted to devote time to Factorio optimization problems, or ...anything else in life.
I chose life :)
Now there's always something I want to be doing, but that's another problem.
It's an amazing game. It felt very stimulating the first few hours. Then it became work, and now I don't think I will ever start it anymore.
(it's not sort of my thing but if it's your sort of thing I suspect his endorsement is more relevant)
If you're the type of person enjoying a game that is like work but without productivity, "fun" and "mindless" are contradictory attributes. Don't fight yourself. The thinking is the enjoyable part.
In moments when my character was near death I was often panicking and really feeling the tunnel vision of combat stress. The stakes were high in that a character and assets you spent over a year developing could be wiped out in an instant if you lost your focus. Eventually I couldn't take it and stopped playing.
On the other hand, there are games that are just straight up work - EVE is an example (haven't played it myself but do know people who do) and Rimworld if you play with an optimization/perfectionist mindset.
Besides the fact that I now have RSI (maybe not just due to Dota, possibly due to time spent in front of screen, overall), I realized after a while that I was a sort of people manager for 12-18 year olds and maybe I could just do the same thing at $DAYJOB and end up getting paid better :-)
(Not well, mind you...)
Does this apply only to certain (kinds of) games? Does it come from the way the game is structured?
Or does it have more to do with the community around it? For example RuneScape these days seems to be all about optimization, while back in the day it was more about exploration. (I guess for people who are still playing, there's nothing left to explore...)
there is no exploring left in runescape, for the most part - virtually every corner and easter egg is effectively documented or reverse engineered in some way.
However as another commenter said, any game can become work if you want to achieve perfection. For example if you play an FPS game you can always shoot faster and more accurately - if you practice more and more. This can lead to a point where you don't find the game fun anymore.
It was either make an imperfect solution and let it run for a hundred hours, or spend a hundred hours optimizing a perfect solution and then letting that run for ten more hours, or something like that.
At that point, I just tapped out. Building my factory just stopped being fun at that point.
Been playing MMOs since 2003 and in top raiding guilds/corps/etc since 2005, where this was highly rewarding.
Going without a computer (motherboard died) and having to quit MMOs for a while for economical reasons made me enjoy some single player games and heloed me fix this somewhat.
I'm getting Victoria 2 flashbacks just reading this sentence...
Kind of put me off all Apple Arcade games honestly.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902...
Edit: maybe drug companies are even partly responsible for confusing names & the whole system of generic versus trade names (as it seems this incident wouldn't have happened if the generic name were the only name by which the substance was known).
I'm not saying any of the above should be. I just think we should compare and contrast the medical profession with aviation. The reason the accident rate is so low in commercial aviation is a systems approach to safety. In the medical profession it's all about machismo and individual responsibility - which doesn't lead to continual improvement as an industry.
Nowadays, in my 40s, it's things like Fortnite (my current favorite), Subnautica, and European/American Truck Simulator. Games where I can just relax and play and not have to do much thinking.
Quitting is the most powerful signal a worker can send. It pushes up the price of that work and is the strongest-possible declaration that something is wrong.
Source: Have quit from a field that I love deeply because the environment became intolerable. Furthermore, I've now signed on to a new line of work precisely because the environment is so supportive.
Flexible hours and dress code, excellent pay, light supervision, hundreds of employers, air-conditioned offices, great safety record, interesting and meaningful work for those that want it - and it barely needs a college degree. It's not perfect, but it's better than 95% of jobs out there.
(Of course, the games programming industry is to be avoided at all costs)
Our team and adjoining teams are hiring for Business Analysts, Data Engineers, Software Engineers, and more in the US and EU.
https://www.rover.com/careers/search/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30533028
The company takes its values seriously.
China tech can treat people like shit because there's always someone to replace them. I think the stats were more engineers graduate from China come out than the entire history of USA engineers each year.
When there's high demand, then any place that systematically treats people like shit would not retain workers and die off. Of course, exceptions exist for places that pay shit tons of money.
And, yet, a worker quitting has close to zero effect on an industry of the scale of the one which is at issue.
That it is the most powerful tool you have does not make it a tool that is effective.
Many workers quitting can change an industry.
You know what we bemoaned the most in my previous startup, when hiring ? We couldn't compete with the banks :D You bet, at 9000 USD a month for 50 hours weeks, feels like the post office :D
Everyone knows, btw, that it's a problem, but it's not going to be solved as long as clients expect China to be cheaper, and when it stops, this expectation, we aren't gonna be able to compete because we're not any better quality-wise than the rest. I think India already is the new China and us we're stuck with robot employees that demand more and more money without really giving clients something in exchange :s And our internal market isn't developing fast enough: in fact, the population even decreases so :s
I absolutely respect and appreciate that the game wasn't trying to be "fun"; it was trying to communicate a message. And I firmly believe that not all games should be fun.
But at the same time... well, I have enough work to do in my life. There has to be a balance. Not every movie is "fun" but even art house films are generally "pleasant" to watch on some level.
It's not endless. It's basically a sequence of puzzles (with a story and some choices thrown in), where each stage introduces a variation on the puzzle. There is a very limited number of stages, after which the game ends.
Compare this to something like Factorio, which is essentially endless (and you're programming, so basically it's job #2).
I suppose there's probably some "pure design" mode that skips that tedium, but then the game feels shallow. You're design a bunch of dataflow pipelines organized on a 2D grid. Also the graphics feel washed out and grainy, and the whole alien species attacks thing was distracting.
Playing factorio just makes me want to reimplement factorio. Not that I have the time or inclination.
This passage was pretty hair-raising. I think the freedom to fail gracefully is something we take for granted in "the west".
To quote some dude from The West:
“It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.” ― Gore Vidal
> “No matter how good you are at the game, the game has only one ending, which is the company being acquired,” Ding said, adding she was sad when she played it for the first time, believing being acquired means failure. “Later, I searched for a job for a period of time, encountered various setbacks, and gradually realized that the process of trying hard is more precious. When I went back and played it again, I accepted the ending, and felt that it was really in line with the current internet age.”
The same market dynamics on both sides of the Pacific.
I had fun with it for about an hour and then got this terrible sense if deja vu. And then it hit my like a ton of bricks. This is flattening a UML diagram but turned into a game. I pushed back from my desk and went to get some air, and that was the last time I played that game. And (coincidentally?) close to the last time I volunteered to do make class diagrams.
I went and found this game again relatively recently. It reminds me so much of decoupling and refactoring software or vice versa. I spent a few years occasionally trying to remember what distant memory of an experience decoupling reminded me of.
I quite enjoy both. Whilst simultaneously kind of hating the process.
Incredible sense of clarity once you've resolved everything that was stepping in the way of understanding. Moments of despair and frustration. Sense of progress combined with feeling this could be never ending. Iteratively trying to step towards something better. It all seeming worth it in the end. So many parallels.
The other game I can lose time in is Universal Paperclips[1], I looped through it 100 times before quitting.
Or is there a simpler way?
There was a bar of lines three inches wide along the top of the chart. They connected a bunch of rectangles on the left side of the chart to rectangles on the right side of the chart. How on earth you were supposed to trace those lines I have absolutely no idea. But we got some good gallows humor out of it.
I used to joke I’d hire some game engine designers to apply their path finding algorithms to solving this problem.
(then if I really just want to shoot a virtual bad guy, I go back to replaying the old Wing Commander games since for whatever reason I can climb the learning curves of those more easily than FPSes)
There’s often a couple different ways to victory and there’s already enough built out to put plans into action immediately.
MechCommander 1/2 and the current BattleTech are kinda close since at least I only do the strategy between missions.
Note that Brood War's requirement for Macro -and- Micro play is also fun - too many RTS games let me win via Macro and then rolling over the enemy with effectively unlimited forces - but I really like tactical battles where the point of the game is the tactical side, because sometimes that's what I really want to spend my gaming time focusing on.
The John Tiller's Campaign Series games and Strategic Command games are pretty playable, Harpoon Ultimate if you like naval, and Field Of Glory if you have interest in the ancient/medieval eras.
Also, a lot of TRPGS tend to be hellishly difficult.
Very iconic game, loved it growing up.
I wonder if it is more about not raising quality of living TOO high, as opposed to actual competitive concerns.
For me, I see my work and life as a balance of sharpening the axe and cutting through the tree. I practice mindfulness a lot and am constantly trying to optimize my mood and life to stay efficient and happy.
I take care of myself in my down-time, and during work hours I execute ruthlessly. This has always worked well for me. I consistently receive excellence awards at work, get large promotions and raises, and have never been put on a PIP or fired. A CEO at a company I worked at once said of me "I wish we could clone honkycat 5 times to fill these positions." Not to brag. Just establishing that I perform well at work.
Overall my motto is "4 good hours" of deep work a day will keep me in the green performance-wise.
So what is the reasoning of this culture? Am I just mistaken?
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/604450/Another_Adventure/
But in reality, I think "The Stanley Parable" hit a little too close to home for me.
Seems like a potentially good game to train oneself in figuring out how to spend investor money though lol.
Silicon Valley was at least fun to laugh at.
I don't need to watch a show about IT security and mental illness -- that's already my life.
I also think that's why Mad Men and some of the Edwardian dramas are so popular: close enough to our time period that we can identify, but different enough that we don't feel that anxiety or uncomfortable connection.
My dad, for example, wasn't interested in watching Mad Men -- he's from big East Coast cities and grew up in that period, went to 'Nam, etc.
1. "A chaotic couch co-op cooking game for 1-4 players. Working as a team, you and your fellow chefs must prepare, cook and serve up a variety of tasty orders before the baying customers storm out in a huff."
I really like the idea of social culture being "frozen" and injected into game experiences. I'd love to play a game about how the Cuban Missile Crisis felt, about how the Great Depression felt, about how the New Deal felt. Reading just doesn't put the mind in that same mode as trying to make moves that benefit my main character and seeing how the events that unfold bear witness to whether or not my decisions were good.
I'm sure there will be some good games soon about how insane it is that there's anti-vaxxers, or election deniers.
Or a game where people think they can make a difference by voting harder!
That being said, I am a faithful supporter of DSAUSA and have invested (rather than voted for) significant means towards the cause of a more socialistic reality in America. Faced with the size and influence of corporations in the world, I suppose it's the logical end of things that the world revolve around money and the means of "making" more money.
I still vote too, but I guess I roll my eyes a little bit each time.
Also, you can contribute to any candidates campaign - so you can money-vote in many places (USA)
In a parliamentary system, votes have a substantial impact. You can vote for a minority party that's actually aligned with your views and get represented if they get enough votes to get a seat in Parliament. It's not "throwing your vote away" like it is in the US.
In a two-party first-past-the-post system, the impact of each vote is substantially reduced by comparison since not only are there only two competitive parties to vote for, but the winner takes everything. A vote for the "wrong" party means that vote leads to no representation.
> Also, you can contribute to any candidates campaign - so you can money-vote in many places (USA)
This is part of the problem in the US, because it gives the wealthiest interests the means to back their preferred representatives at amounts minority representatives can never hope to reach.
1. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fi.reworks.red...
- Papo y yo - alcoholism and child abuse
- Little Kite - also alcoholism and abuse
- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - mourning and loss
- Orwell - Privacy (although I would not recommend it as much as the first two)
- Valiant Hearts: The Great War - emotional toll of World War 1
- This war of mine - living in a war zone
- To the moon - not going to spoil it
- Rakuen
By the way, Little Kite is free right now https://freebies.indiegala.com/little-kite
I think using the word insane isn’t warranted. Check out Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Rightous Mind. There are good reasons to be skeptical, it’s also evolutionary necessary. The majority can be wrong.
To be specific it was misinformation to say it was a lab leak, now it’s generally accepted. As far as vaxx goes I took it, but the politics mixing with science has deteriorated a lot of trust. Also this is new technology, it’s not zero risk.
Election wise, we have examples in history to show it happens. Why not here? What about democrats pushing out Bernie? Again I agree mostly all good. But it’s not insane to think something is not kosher.
Rather it’s insane to be so certain of these things.
Which is a case of some people happening to guess, one time, that an ultimately highly unlikely thing (based on available information) happened.
To peddle such an unlikely, unconfirmed claim as fact before there's actual evidence still isn't/wasn't reasonable. They didn't know it was a lab leak. They wildly guessed. Yet they never treated it as speculation, they prematurely treated it as fact.
Current evidence likewise strongly supports the idea that the 2020 election is legitimate.
However, and this is critical, it was absolutely 100% misinformation when first claimed. Trump was desperate to deflect blame and not let COVID derail his reelection chances, so he immediately blamed China, well before we had any actual information, analysis, or intelligence to suggest that. Talk about your 'politics mixing with science' deteriorating trust.
I'm not an anti-leaker, of course. I just believe it takes more than mere suspicion to buy into an idea. Otherwise you end up gobbling up whatever propaganda drifts near you, true or not.
1. The Wuhan lab was French built and supposed to jointly operated between France and China, but the French sounded the alarm about the terrible security practices of their Chinese counterparts.
2. Ecohealth, an organization with ties to the Wuhan lab, did a grant proposal to DARPA asking for money to do gain-of-function research on COVID. To be clear, gain of function research usually is something along the lines of: let's make this pathogen able to infect humans so we can study how it might infect humans if it ever evolved the ability to infect them.
3. It's dangerous research and should only be undertaken carefully, rather than in the haphazard way in which the French claimed the Chinese were engaging in research.
4. People close to the situation categorically denied that a lab leak was even possible, calling it a "conspiracy theory" although they knew that the lab had been doing similar research on similar diseases, and had declared an interest in doing so with COVID.
It's like if there was an organization that declared they wanted to make unicorns real, and they had made other fairy tale animals real in the past, and then unicorns appear in the wild in the same city where this organization is based, and they're like, "It is a conspiracy theory to think we had anything to do with this."
So, I would agree that suspicion is warranted. Perhaps enough for an investigation. But, IMO, that's about it.
And they have leaked before. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2007/08/report-l...
But there are many areas in life where you can't gather enough information to make a statistically perfect decision. That doesn't mean that we do nothing though.
I think my country should drastically reduce trade with China and tell them it's because they operate biolabs haphazardly and don't allow investigations into pandemic origins. I wish all countries would do this. Then the next pandemic might not happen, because nations would be afraid of the consequences.
Let's also not forget that it turns out the Ecohealth Alliance was essentially able to write the rules that were used to police their own research referenced above.
Also recall that recently a 19 nucleotide sequence (1 out of ~3 trillion liklihood of occurring naturally) out of SARS-COV-2 has been discovered as patented by Moderna back somewhere between 2013 to 2017.
https://api.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/mar/24/blog-posti...
I just thought it was interesting to note the facts and statistics of the nucleotide sequence.
Unless it's functional, which (1) changes the odds; and (2) is a prerequisite for patenting.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210628023048/https://covid19co...
I'm not sure what you mean, but Bernie didn't win the primary. That decides the horse that the DNC backs (except in incumbent years).
> To be specific it was misinformation to say it was a lab leak, now it’s generally accepted.
It's not generally accepted except in counter-culture circles. There isn't any more evidence for a lab leak hypothesis today than there was two years ago. The actual cause is not known, so claiming a specific theory with certainty would indeed be misinformation.
It isn't insane that some people are against vaccine mandates.
It is insane that some people believe what they do about the vaccine: That it's a ploy to decimate the population, that it contains baby parts and poison, or microchips, that it is a test run for the mark of the beast.
That is absolutely batshit insane.
The only difference is the level at which people attempt to integrate the philosophy into their life -- I'm sure there is someone out there who has been impacted more by Terry Pratchett novels than the religion they were brought up as, and using either of those in the way the instigating poster did would be silly.
If you have evidence of people being unable to buy or sell goods without a vaccine passport, please share.
Oh, and do recall that the context from Revelation is that a person was completely excluded from the economy, not that they lost some privileges, so please don't waste time with false equivalences.
Although, honestly, it's probably a waste of time anyway: I just don't live in the same fantasy dimension as these people and their arguments hold no water to me.
However most people that engage in this behavior do it for the reasons that have nothing to do with skepticism or critical thinking.
They do it for exactly opposite reason. People who are prone to it are generally less intelligent, less able to think critically, easier to mislead, they follow along easier, they more strongly bind with their in-group regardless of the crazy practices it performs.
This kind of behavior probably exists for evolutionary reasons, but it's not to help the species discover best truth.
It's more of a plan B for low fitness individuals, who are too flawed to compete with general population. They tend to look for or form smaller sub-populations of similarly flawed individuals in hopes that while in general population they are firmly below average desirability, in those smaller populations they might be above average and have a chance of passing their genes they wouldn't have otherwise.
What scotty79 is proposing is that we should be hyper efficient and hyper unsustainable like our economic system.
I was merely suggesting that behavior of people susceptible to conspiracy theories might be fully (or almost fully explained by selfish goals of their individual genes).
Skepticism is not insanity. Questioning vaccine safety is not insanity.
Many of the anti vax claims were utter insanity (microchips in the injection)
As were the election claims
If there is any risk here, I'd say the risk here is our own inability in not being able to describe human biology in detail. The vague statement "the human body can heal itself" sounds warm and fuzzy, and most people agree with it, but when transformed into "injecting these set of molecules into your blood will trigger complex interactions with independent internal biological processes and cause the body to produce clones of proteins with increasing avidity towards the original molecules which also trigger further complex biological processes [...]" - can get you into trouble sometimes if you treat it as absolute truth.
Arguments may be bloodless, but they have substance. Theater, interactive or not, is capable of deceiving. Your emotional response is not fact. What you would be presented with in a game about some historical event is a recasting of historical events in terms of our modern sensibilities. Movies do this all the time, this subtle anachronistic and theatrical re-presentation of history. This can be an impediment to understanding, not an aid.
Besides, while recreation has its place, we waste too much time on entertainment. Movies, games, and so on. These are like the cave in Plato's allegory. Instead of leaving the cave, we have doubled down.
Enter THE METAVERSE.
Having a quit button is the best part of these video game experiences.
It's been a while since I've last played it, but from what I remember I always ended up in an absolutely inescapable situation regardless of what I tried. If you want to actually feel something while playing a game, 10/10, would recommend.
A big part of me wanted to find out if the game was ever winnable or even if it ended at all. Then I realized that was kind of the point - the hope that it will end some day and so I avoided finding out if it did or not.
I, too, set out with noble aims but eventually was faced with the prospect of stealing from the nice old couple down the street or starving to death. At that point, I stopped playing. I didn't want to know which one I'd choose.
How though? It's in Mandarin.
I like games with moral/ethical questions and player choices, it really presents the questions in a way where you are making decisions that have impact - at least as how the game developer gives you options. This is very different than reading about it in a book. Don't get me wrong though, I also like silly action/adventure/puzzle/whatever games too. There is a place for all kinds of artwork.
Also not disagreeing with you -- it will be awesome to play some serious game about the new deal/anti-vaxxers. In general, seeing discussions on game design across HN, I think we (HN as a whole) can be more exploratory in our games, going beyond "being serious, well researched, and non-predatory". The sense of ambiguous loss brought by To the Moon is one direction in this. Some other random examples pioneered by films that I think we should explore include more subtle ambiguity in narratives (e.g. Burning (2018)) or delicacy in depicting the adolescent female experience (e.g. Marie Antoinette (2006)).
1979 Revolution: Black Friday[0], Iranian revolution
21 Days[1], Syrian refugee crisis
A Golden Wake[2], Florida property boom
Bury Me, My Love[3], Syrian refugee crisis
Through the Darkest of Times [4], German resistance under the Nazis
Way of Defector[5], North Korean defection
There are a bunch more historical narrative games you can find, if you're into that sort of thing. I don't really have time for these conversations about how modern games are boring and predictable, that just shows the person hasn't bothered looking outside of the AAA bubble. There has never been a better time for computer games than right now.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/388320/1979_Revolution_Bl...
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/607660/21_Days/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/307570/A_Golden_Wake/
[3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/808090/Bury_Me_My_Love/
[4] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1003090/Through_the_Darke...
[5] https://store.steampowered.com/app/658660/Way_of_Defector/
Loved that game, but it was more work than my actual job.
I love it, I really do but it makes you ask yourself weird existential questions about games and jobs.
The other thing that made me quit after few years was that the company behind it (CCP Games), with it's current management, really seems to be incompetent.
I'm happy CCP screwed up back during the whole pants-scandal; it made me give up on online gaming, and it was incredibly liberating to get out of it.
There is absolutely a place for them. To learn/perfect a craft or dip a toe into it if you wonder how it all works. Just not for me. It is too worklike.
Aside, can we not add "fishing" into every not-water-related game? (Warframe is a prime example...) It seems like 50% of new games now have a fishing minigame in there somewhere. I almost expected Mechwarrior 5 to have slipped in a fishing minigame somewhere....
Tom Nook would like a word.
As an adult I have revisited it and it was incredibly easy. A complete non issue by all means. An interesting game design challenge for sure.
Cant we have a Web that's clean and only the content?