The game designer playing through his own psyche | Hacker News Reader

The game designer playing through his own psyche

newyorker.com

142 pointsFinnLobsien100 comments

If you haven't experienced The Beginner's Guide - I highly recommend. It's one of my favorite experiences. I look forward to playing through his new game, even if it's a bit different! I'm fully aligned with the goal of trying to convey your sense of self through artistic creations and think he's in a league of his own in his attempts to do so.

Would you still recommend it to someone who didn't like Stanley Parable? I must admit I found his prior game to be extremely boring and pretentious, but I'm willing to have an open mind about the new one if it's different.

I’d say the beginner’s guide is more pretentious, but it’s not as funny.

I still really liked it, though.

I'm not too keen on the Stanley Parable and enjoyed the Beginners Guide. It's definitely something that could be called pretentious but I feel like it's a lot more interesting with how it does it. There's less of a fixation on humour too which is a plus for me because The Stanley Parable's humour grated on me a lot of the time.

It's a walking simulator though, if you're not into those kind of things in general then you're probably not gonna be into it.

FWIW I strongly disliked The Beginner's Guide—I wasn't a huge fan of the Stanley Parable either, but The Beginner's Guide was significantly less enjoyable even so. I know the game gets a lot of positive reviews, but if you're on the fence already, I'd strongly caution you against blindly trusting the reviews.

There's definitely an element of personal taste, though—I tend to really dislike media that I find overly philosophizing (i.e. when I feel like the authors' arguments are too confident, or otherwise discourage the audience from thinking themselves about the arguments or conclusions). That is to say, I might be precisely the wrong target audience for this sort of game :-P

> (i.e. when I feel like the authors' arguments are too confident, or otherwise discourage the audience from thinking themselves about the arguments or conclusions)

The intention of the game is to analyze this and ask why the narrator is so confident and dogmatic and to see a layer underneath, it's not to take the narrator at face value.

I suppose I should also add that I struggle a lot with picking up on subtext :-P

> I must admit I found his prior game to be extremely boring and pretentious,

You definitely won't like it. The Beginner's Guide is much more in that direction than Stanley is.

https://archive.is/NuEsS

The Stanley Parable, The Stanley Parable Demo, and The Beginner's Guide were all “merely” Source mod “walking simulators”, but each of these games had a degree of precision in how they executed their vision that made them feel like very high-quality products, each in their own way. Yes, the nature of these games is such that there's very few “moving parts” that require coordination to provide a cohesive experience—it's mostly just the standard Source first-person character controller and interactable objects you can press +use on, with a narrator narrating the story—but each of these games felt solid to play, with the intentionally minimal “gameplay” getting out of the way of the intended narrative experiences these games sought to provide. I wanted to like Wanderstop on its own terms, but once I got out of the portion of the game that's accessible in the demo, I found myself honestly really underwhelmed by the game's presentation. The intended narrative gravitas of the first dialogue with the first NPC that comes to visit was ruined because one of those little penguin dudes happened to be walking by near her feet, so she kept glancing down at it during the dialogue sequence in a hilariously immersion-breaking way. The guidebook you're given is a series of flat textures, with no animation for turning pages or anything like that whatsoever. The opening “cutscene” is presented as a series of still images like a motion comic, and a couple of the “animations” within them looked amateurishly terrible.

I'll try it out again sometime soon because I (want to believe I) still like Wreden's writing, but my initial experience with the game wasn't the best it could be by a longshot.

Shout out to The Stanley Parable Deluxe Edition. Even if you played the original, you should play this. Without giving spoilers, it's basically an entire sequel, not just a Remaster.

Frankly, the demo isn't really a demo, it's a prequel. You might enjoy the demo if it's been awhile since you've played

Yes! The Demo, the original game, and the Deluxe Edition could almost be considered a trilogy of games.

Second this, Ultra Deluxe is a worthwhile purchase. It gives you enough new content to more or less triple the size of the original game.

But play either game any way you can; if you're a fan of Douglas Adams novels, you'll feel right at home.

Never understood the appeal of stanley parable or beginners guide. After the initial fun wears off, the constant abuse and sarcasm from the narrator is abrasive and noisy. Not as clever as they're hoping. The Beginners Guide even worse. Empty test levels strung together with tedious narration.

The developer's depressed? That's the least interesting thing to learn about anyone. Depressed people promoting their depression sounds disingenuous.

Not to be all negative, for walking simulators with no interaction but nice dreamy atmosphere, try Liminalcore. Relaxing and calming, great on an ultrawide OLED. Lots of vast shadow areas. Huge scale architecture. Bump the FOV setting up a little from default. No cheap gimmicks, just a restrained dream world with subtle hint of something lurking in the shadows. In terms of artistic walking games, this is one of the good ones.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3107900/Liminalcore/

> The Beginners Guide even worse. Empty test levels strung together with tedious narration.

> The developer's depressed? That's the least interesting thing to learn about anyone. Depressed people promoting their depression sounds disingenuous.

I wonder if you played The Beginner's Guide to the end? Not that it necessarily would have changed your mind, maybe the conclusion didn't strike you as it did me (even seeing it coming).

Not him, but I did play it to the end, and it didn't "strike me". By the end, I was finding it more of a chore than a story I could enjoy, although I was a bit annoyed from thinking it would be more interactive (I remember some article I saw about it talking about how it explored the story through a series of games, but the final product doesn't really have any actual games).

I personally absolutely loved the Stanley Parable demo and then the game. For me, the magic was a constant sense of disbelief that the game would let me do that. Like early on, I managed to clip out of the window and found myself outside... only for the narrator to berate me about it. I spent most of the game in a competition with the game itself, where I would try to outsmart it, and it would (almost always) turn around and have planned for that contingency already. I had hours and hours of downright glee playing it.

The remastered version didn't really hit for me though. It had a huge amount of new content, but I wasn't there for the content. I don't think it could create the same magic, because I had had a few years to digest the experience. I understood the game, and so the game could not create the same "there's no way that X will happen" kind of moments because of course it would, that was the whole point of the game.

Fair enough. I mentioned "initial fun". I enjoyed it to a point, but recall it abruptly ends and seemed unfinished, unresolved. The berating was cute at first then gets old.

Compared with a game like Portal, with similar self-referential quirkiness. Even had its own meme "the cake is a lie". That was a resolved game. Stanley on the other hand... I won't hammer the criticism because I'm glad games like this exist.

>Empty test levels strung together with tedious narration.

For me that's a big part of my disappointment, it needed to do a lot more with the game aspect. For some reason he kept referring to an empty Counter-Strike map as a "game" and it kept me from being immersed.

I think it hits harder when you're in high school or early 20s maybe.

Can either game be played on a modern Mac? Steam says it's only for 32-bit Macs.

I've had this problem with a few older games that came out in the 2010s. The easy thing to do is to run it with a tool like crossover, or run the game through Apple's Game Porting Toolkit. I recommend just using crossover's 2 week free trial if this is the only game you're having trouble with

Crossover - https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover?gad_source=1&gbraid=0A...

Macs don't have compatibility libraries? Containers? That sort of thing?

They have VMs :D

Haha that’s funny.

No, they don’t. Just like Microsoft’s obsession with backwards compatibility, Apple is obsessed with changing things constantly.

That chap is a marketing genius. Articles ostensibly about him are effectively a promotional tour for his new game (available in all good stores prices $xx.xx)

If you're thinking of buying the game, though, read its reviews: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1299460/Wanderstop/

And remember... it is a cosy game. That's what you'll be playing. If you like cosy games, then it's a good cosy game with an interesting Wredenesque storyline running through it. If you don't like cosy games, you won't like this game. It's not a deconstruction of cosy games. It is a cosy game.

The new yorker wasn't tricked into marketing his game, they make marketing articles like this all the time. I feel like 9 times out of 10 when I see an article on HN it's some barely disguised ad for a book masked as a human interest story. (PG has a blog post about this.)

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

It's fascinating to see how far the pendulum has swung since those days. Maybe there is no place for honest writing anymore, as he described it, in the blogs of that era, which suffered the same issues of PR and monetization.

> At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times.

I wonder if this holds true.

It is true, but sometimes in an evil way; the NYT literally has a policy that all stories about tech companies must be negative, and the politics section presents everything as the fault of whoever the editors are personally mad at that day. But the details are correct.

I somehow doubt that this is read as much as it is posted on HN.

Most of the book criticism they do summarizes to the point where I don’t feel the need to buy anything so I’m not sure it’s personally working as an ad for me.

Some people want the gory details. Every non-fiction book can be summarized as (wo)man v something, but in doing so, you lose the plot. So while you may be satisfied with the summary (and you're not alone!), knowing that it's out there is more important for people to buy than the summarization.

It's so New Yorker. They're partial to angst-heavy stories.

If "retired fighter with a tea shop" interests you, try the "Legends and Lattes" stories.

Betting it's not him but his publisher. There is a massive industry dedicated to this sort of guerrilla marketing these days. If a company of a certain size is putting out a press release they will coordinate to have seemingly-unrelated articles show up in various news sources (think New Yorker but also, like, ArsTechnica, or even the HN frontpage.) Even though the articles aren't technically ads, they get the name out there so it's on people's minds, making them more susceptible to hearing about/engaging with the news.

I've seen this happen internally at my last employer, but have the impression that it's standard operating procedure in corporate marketing these days. It is quite gross and I'd like to see it banned wholesale (or at least the relationship should be mandatorily disclosed). But... we would need to believe as a country in regulating ourselves to do that.

The idea that arts criticism is somehow 'guerilla marketing' is such a deeply cynical, HN brain take. Of course the people who make things want to get the word out about what they're doing. But The New Yorker doesn't collude with PR agencies to promote things. It's news when people make new things; that's literally the whole idea in coverage of the arts. Is it really your position that when a movie, game or book is reviewed in The New Yorker it's because some PR person told them to? Chris Bryd is a well-respected games journalist, not some industry shill. He's probably wanted to write about this topic for years, and the forthcoming game is part of what makes the profile newsworthy right now.

Anyway if you believe arts criticism is 'quite gross' and want it banned, what does that world look like? Should people who make things not be allowed to tell publications about it? Will there be a cone of silence around new games?

You misunderstand. I'm not being cynical: it really actually does work this way. I'm describing a thing that I have seen happen from the inside.

Paul Graham wrote about it here: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I get your view, read the essay years ago and we agree on the facts. I'm a journalist who gets 5-10 PR junk PR pitches a day. I don’t pitch stories from PR hacks--I pitch and write about the stuff I think is interesting and important. If I got an awesome pitch from a PR person tomorrow about something like that, why wouldn't I pursue the story?

I fully acknowledge the PR industry exists but to suggest that coverage of a beloved indie game creator by one of my industry's most respected reporters is somehow paid off or inauthentic because PR exists is such a leap. As I said earlier he's probably been trying to write about the Stanley Parable for years.

I also have firsthand experience of people I know at startups believing that their PR firm 'bought' them coverage. But if you read Paul's essay again he's careful to acknowledge that the service good PR firms are able to provide is that they can connect with journalists for stories not because of some shady undisclosed loyalty but because the PR people bring them interesting topics.

That's just how the news works dude. You can just call them and say "hey I have something for you to write about". If it's interesting and/or you already have a relationship, which their publisher likely does, it's pretty easy to get an article written.

Sure? I don't have to like it.

You don't like that people are telling "the news" that there's something new? The world is your oyster.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say they dislike the manufactured hype.

What here is manufactured?

Nah, I dislike the thing I was talking about. You are choosing to misunderstand me, but I have no idea why.

You said you don't like it when things are marketed/written about. Why? That's the point of "news".

I recognize that I have been pretty fortunate in life, but I've never been "overnight success, will never actually need to work again" fortunate. I struggle to sympathize with "I got everything I ever wanted, and now I'm depressed". That framing for the article does not exactly have me chomping at the bit to play his newest game.

I think depending on what you've built your identity around, suddenly being free of having to strive for anything can be pretty daunting. "Having everything we need, indefinitely" is certainly not something we were prepared for by evolution, and the questions that arise when you are at that point and still need to structure your life around something don't really have easy answers, I believe.

So it might actually be a pretty good sign that you struggle to sympathize with this, because the alternative might be that you understand it all too well.

I can't imagine how anyone could even achieve such state. There will always be that skill I do not yet have, that book I haven't read yet, that hobby I haven't tried yet, that place I haven't yet traveled to, etc. etc.

Maybe if I get to have an active life of 300 years, I could maybe imagine starting to get closer to "having everything I need".

wants vs needs

No, all of those are needs. Some of them are merely a bit higher on the Maslow's hierarchy.

> I can't imagine how anyone could even achieve such state. There will always be that skill I do not yet have, that book I haven't read yet, that hobby I haven't tried yet, that place I haven't yet traveled to, etc. etc.

I can imagine it. After sidehustling and grinding hard for ~10 years, I realized one day that my savings make more in annual interest than my sidehustle brings in revenue. Not profit, revenue.

After a bit of math I realized that if I just do nothing unusual – go to work, keep my savings rate – I’ll have the option to retire in 3 to 4 years.

The big thing I was pouring my heart, soul, and mind into for so long suddenly feels small and meaningless. Like what is even the point? The sidehustle became more of a hobby. It’s enjoyable but the drive isn’t quite there. The things that used to feel like a big deal make me yawn.

So I try to work on bigger more impactful things. But these take longer and so there’s less of that regular dopamine hit of overcoming challenges. And even if ultimately they don’t succeed, oh well not too big a deal. So they just feel less of a pressing issue.

The ultimate feeling is one of aimless ambition. I want to do and achieve, but wherefore all the effort when chilling brings almost the same result?

> The ultimate feeling is one of aimless ambition. I want to do and achieve, but wherefore all the effort when chilling brings almost the same result?

Surely you have more you want to do and achieve than just that one side hustle? Have you never wanted to write a novel? Learn a musical instrument? A language? How to speedrun your favorite video game? Contribute to open source? Plant a vegetable garden?

There is so, so much to do, and instead I spend all my time working to keep a roof over my head.

Yes there is lots to do! And I’m working on it all.

But it doesn’t hit the same as when success felt like life or death. My actual needs are met. The rest is gravy.

It helps that my dayjob feels like the most effective vehicle for big ambitions. This was a specific thing I optimized for when looking. It doesn’t feel like a necessity or distraction, it’s the thing I want to be doing.

I mean, I'll gladly take most of your savings, to the point you're back to struggling and feeling like every small win is life or death.. :-)

So... you're fine?

Purely selfish pursuits lose their allure when you have the ability to just do them (once the initial rush of being able to do them runs out). At least they did for me.

Volunteering is the answer to this! Work directly with people in need and give something back to your community.

Of course, there is always something to do. But once you have reached the point where 'participation in anything is voluntary' and you don't have the necessity of work to show you the value of leisure time, I guess you need to come up with new reasons that make existence worthwhile purely for the sake of existing itself. (Which is not to say that you weren't facing the same existential questions before, but 'the grind' is a very good way to keep yourself occupied and not ponder these things too closely, I suppose.)

And there definitely are good reasons that make existence worthwhile for its own sake, like using your freedom for discovery and mastery as you said, but unfortunately depression has the nasty side-effect of robbing you of the joy you could find in those causes, and the energy to pursue them.

Depression is not about the world. It's about your own internal state - the way your own brain is wired up. To a first approximation, "I am depressed" is a statement about a particular neuron not getting stimulated, which is only related to how your life is going in indirect ways that - like all proxies - leak a lot.

If tomorrow the greatest dream of AI was achieved, and we had a perfect benevolent AI that would shepherd humanity to comfort and safety forever, that would be just about the best outcome imaginable in material terms. But I think I'd be unhappy with it, because I derive a lot of my personal sense of worth from what I do - from what I build and for what I contribute to other people. I don't know what I would do in a world where that was no longer needed. I'm great at being helpful! I suck at being fun.

Is that healthy? Probably not. (It's actually something I'm working through at the moment, that I increasingly understand as a consequence of both personal and societal-level abuse.) But we're not all healthy creatures. We live our lives as the people we are in each moment, including the ways in which we're dumb and flawed and insecure.

> that would shepherd humanity to comfort and safety forever

If Calhoun's mouse utopia experiments are anything to go by, such a seemingly idyllic situation would spell out humanity's death in very real terms.

Calhoun's utopia was about overpopulation, not about idyllic situations.

> I derive a lot of my personal sense of worth from what I do - from what I build and for what I contribute to other people. I don't know what I would do in a world where that was no longer needed. Is that healthy? Probably not. (It's actually something I'm working through at the moment, that I increasingly understand as a consequence of both personal and societal-level abuse.)

Since you are wondering about the healthiness of that emotion, try to read C.S. Lewis "The Four Loves": the Need love/Gift love opposition may have answers for you.

> If tomorrow the greatest dream of AI was achieved, and we had a perfect benevolent AI that would shepherd humanity to comfort and safety forever, that would be just about the best outcome imaginable in material terms. But I think I'd be unhappy with it, because I derive a lot of my personal sense of worth from what I do - from what I build and for what I contribute to other people.

But surely the Shepherd would be aware of your soul's needs as well, and could pretend that your help is required somewhere in the system.

Perhaps so! I thought about writing a story of an AI like that - something that cures diseases and prevents war and gives you all the tools to be smarter and healthier and more virtuous, but otherwise says "nope, humanity, you gotta figure this out yourself if you want the reward". It'd be an interesting sci-fi setting.

Many books in Iain M Banks’ Culture series describe how humans find meaning or otherwise entertain themselves in an AI-led post-scarcity utopia

But surely the Shepherd would be aware of your soul's needs as well, and could pretend that your help is required somewhere in the system.

I think most people wouldn’t be fooled by this. People intuitively understand when their work is superfluous. They see that even if they slack off nothing blows up, no alarm bells sound, no production lines grind to a halt, no one dies.

Framing this in terms of The Beginner's Guide, I think it's more like:

"I just completed a project into which I poured not just all of my time and energy, but also all of my self-worth. It was a massive success. Now I have nowhere to place my self-worth. Doing this again would be both (1) unlikely to succeed, and (2) extremely toxic, just as doing it the first time kind of was. So how do I get out of this mindset without completely destroying myself?"

Amusingly, his response to that question was to make a game about it.

Few people get rewards on that scale (and thus the chance to exit, or at least the time to think about it), but many develop similar relationships to their work (or art). An exploration of the problems in that dynamic (as in The Beginner's Guide) is therefore relevant to a lot of people.

To add to that -- one part that stuck out to me was when he said he "...[feels] like a guy who had gotten rich making jokes about video games, trying to deceive real writers into thinking that I’m a real writer." The article implies present tense, as if perhaps Wreden still feels this way.

If your dream is to make a great game, and you achieve that, sort of -- it's great to everyone except you -- I think it makes sense to feel more alienated and unsure of yourself than ever, or if your game had not been received as well.

"Now I have nowhere to place my self-worth."

Huh...I'm a bit nihilistic and have never felt a need to put self-worth into something. I just want to relax and play games.

Nihilism can take many forms and is not necessarily indicative of a optimistic or pessimistic worldview

It happens a lot in creative fields. I personally get depressive after putting an album out, and I know I'm not alone in that based on discussions with other musicians. Something about being in the mode of making something for so long, and then it's just... done. When you're deeply involved in something, it changes your personality.

I think it's really more of the "like a guy who had gotten rich making jokes about video games, trying to deceive real writers into thinking that I’m a real writer." feeling he mentions in the article than just being successful. I can't say what actually was going on in his head, but I can imagine making what you see as a joke and then having it get huge, you receive massive praise for it, and people demand more and more of it and consider you to be "the guy who made that funny joke back in 2011 and should tell it again but better" would relate to his issues. The newest rerelease of it really felt like he wanted to move on for good.

If you take a look at someone like Markus "Notch" Persson, he was on a roll of being incredibly famous and at the head of one of the best-liked games in the world.

It was too much pressure at the top, though, and he sold the project to Microsoft and became a billionaire; but what that actually meant is that Microsoft took it over entirely, and he was nothing. He didn't even get the position of "esteemed creative inventor who now only occasionally provides creative direction instead of being responsible for every last thing", that some people get when they sell their projects to faceless behemoths.

He had a further fall from grace in that the public didn't like his stated values on social media, and Microsoft took the opportunity to completely erase him from Minecraft - removed all mention of his name, and he's not invited to anything.

So now he sits alone in his mansion and cries himself to sleep, because while "never work again" money is nice to have, he'd rather have the kudos and recognition of being the creator of a much-loved game. And that's the one thing he can't have any more.

It is interesting to contrast Notch's arc with Zach Barth's, if you are familiar with the Infiniminer[1] connection. The latter has continued to make small idiosyncratic games with a small team and following his own interests.

[1] https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Infiniminer

The latter has also been less of a vitriolic edgelord on Twitter since he started working on Infiniminer.

There's another part of his story, where he did try make new games post-Minecraft and never got very far, and eventually gave up on making anything on a larger scale again. Scrolls had a lot of issues in development. 0x10c had some interesting ideas, but there was no way it would ever be "the next Minecraft".

> So now he sits alone in his mansion and cries himself to sleep, because while "never work again" money is nice to have, he'd rather have the kudos and recognition of being the creator of a much-loved game. And that's the one thing he can't have any more.

I mean, do we actually know that? I haven't heard anything about Notch in years and years, but I just assumed it was because he was hanging out with his friends and family and enjoying his wealth. It's certainly what I'd do in his shoes, but maybe he's said he doesn't enjoy how things out and I was unaware.

I don't know if I have exacting quotes to match up, but he seemed pretty unhappy in 2015: https://money.cnn.com/2015/08/31/technology/minecraft-creato...

(He bought the mansion in 2014: https://www.eurogamer.net/minecraft-creator-notch-just-bough...)

Fair enough. I hadn't seen that, seems like he really is unhappy.

> He had a further fall from grace in that the public didn't like his stated values on social media,

That's a pretty disingenuous take. Here are some examples of his social media:

"If you're against the concept of #HeterosexualPrideDay, you're a complete fucking cunt and deserve to be shot" [0]

He believed in PizzaGate[1][2].

He's tweeted in support of QAnon [3].

There's an easy way to avoid a fall from grace: Don't turn into a right-wing nutjob. Just stay out of politics and social commentary in general.

[0] https://fortune.com/2017/07/02/minecraft-markus-persson-homo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory

[2] https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/minecraft-creator-pizzagate...

[3] https://www.newsweek.com/minecraft-notch-controversy-twitter...

That's sound advice, but to give a comparison: Roman Polanski didn't just post divisive tweets, he drugged and raped a 13 year old girl and has been a fugitive from justice for more than 40 years now. Surely that's worse? And yet, people still keep funding his film making, and his name is on all the films. Why is a rapist given full credit for his creative works, while an idiot with a twitter account stripped of his credit?

He wasn’t stripped of it, he willingly signed all his creative rights away in exchange for $2bn.

It would seem odd, that if he did sign that away, that he nonetheless appeared in the credits of Minecraft, until he caused social media fury, and then Microsoft removed him from the credits.

It does seem crazy to me, given he lived in Sweden, where copyright transfers only economic rights, not moral rights (such as the right to be identified as the creator of a work), but allows the author to waive their moral rights, that he would waive his moral rights.

In any case, he seems pretty miserable, regardless of his twitter outbursts.

It’s not remotely odd, his behaviour online made his name a liability to the Minecraft brand and Microsoft made steps to distance him from it.

For most game developers, getting a credit on a game is not a creative badge of honour, it is sometimes the only hard proof that they worked on a title. It’s part of their portfolio and often essential for their future career and earning potential. This is why they fight so hard for a credit that is essentially free for a company to give.

Everybody knows Notch made Minecraft. He no longer depends on the credit for his future earnings. He chose to give it up.

This isn't 100% correct. He is still in the credits[1] but some splash texts about him were removed[2].

[1]: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/credits (ctrl+f "Markus Persson") [2]: https://minecraft.wiki/w/Java_Edition_19w13a#General_2

An adage that I find more true than false through my own experience: It's harder to manage success than to manage failure.

It does sound counter-intuitive.

However "Post Adventure/Mission Depression" is very common.

See e.g. https://worldextrememedicine.com/app/uploads/2022/07/Lukas-H...

As a person in tech, I have met many millionaires and a few billionaires, and it is really true that huge wealth does not in, and of itself, bring happiness. They're basically still stuck with their old problems, but now also surrounded by sycophants and leaches.

The lack of sympathy is understandable, though I do think becoming depressed after a huge success is probably very common. You've spent so much of your waking life for years working towards a goal and then you attain it, and maybe that success no longer needs your hard work, so there's a massive vacuum in your life. Obviously there's more to life than business success and it'll take time to find your purpose again, but that come down, I think, is natural.

It reminds me of the article about one of the co-founders of RxBar and how he was finding it hard to search for meaning after they sold their company for hundreds of millions. It was posted here years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21138106

"Wherever you go, there you are"

No amount of fame or success will alter who you truly are inside. If anything, laying your happiness at the foot of external validation from others in the form of critical success or fame is a poisoned apple.

There are plenty of examples of wildly successful people unable to manage their own demons -- see Kurt Cobain or Anthony Bourdain.

Why doesn’t hackernews just link directly to the archive?

I’m guessing 99% of readers don’t have the paywalled version.

It’s super annoying.

I think many people, myself included, would argue that that's immoral. The fact that you don't want to pay for access to The New Yorker is fine, but it doesn't mean that we should facilitate your desire to not pay, and that we've effectively normalized ignoring even reasonable copyright rules is a real problem for the industry (we can argue about the merits all we like, but pretending we shouldn't have to pay for an article with little public interest, published this week, is pretty absurd).

We can look at aggregators like HN as a way to curate who you should be giving your money to, or we can use them to facilitate infringement, making publishers rely on sketchier and sketchier methods to stay afloat.

start paying for your news. you won't regret it. three decades of free news leave you hanging bored and annoyed and misunderstanding humanity.

if you want to stay tethered to this reality, commit to the pot. it's recursive and cumulative. otherwise you are left to research from free sources which leave you in 'directed' narratives, divergent and polarizing, devouring your fallacies while feeding off your bias.

free beer is never a better of the available choices.

I agree we should pay but, I'm on the other side not paying because it's very hard to commit to so many subscription things. Back in the day I'd buy a bunch of magazines and would have subscription for tops 3 when I was really into the publication. Nowadays almost everything seems to want to be a subscription service and comes with some shady practices that really scared me away and assume I'm not a rare case either.

> shady practices that really scared me away and assume I'm not a rare case either.

Definitely not the only one, which is ground for discourse, and a source for content, money, critical thinking, improvement and cognitive and linguistic mechanics that help others find their POV ...

... it's not just what it is, it's mostly what it is not and if you can put it in words and or find creators with guts, turn it into a sweeper ...

Every source, free or paid, has narrative, bias, incentives.

He should go back to making half life 2 mods.

I think if he could go back and figure out what made the original Stanley so great, he would.

Hey clearly _can_, the Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe was released in 2022 and is in effect a sequel that was just as good if not better than the original

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