One common personality disorder I see is being extremely defensive when encountering any discussion of human psychology. This comes from a deep psychological fragility.
Or that even the people who believe they are making meaningful text on the internet, because of the constraints of the medium, are simply socializing in a different way.
This kind of black and white moral thinking is corrosive to one's intelligence. You're allowed to talk about who benefits from massive society change and who suffers. You are allowed to talk about the ways that technology is implemented and how that leads to pros and cons. An attitude of "if we ever stop moving forward and think then the evil bad people win" is deeply anti-intellectual.
A statement that can be reversed onto the speaker without effort is meaningless. It has no content. It just means, "I am rational and you are not." Ok, then.
The fact that this article does not mention the word "roguelike" once is quite telling. The argument that gameplay loops are a relic of arcades falls flat when you realize that Rogue came out in 1980, the same year as Pac-man. The entire argument falls flat when you realize that a gameplay loop is simply another way of explaining the means of interactivity, and interactivity is core to the idea of video games. Even the shortest narrative game has a "loop" of some kind.
Honestly, when I read essays like this I always have to ask: have games changed, or have you? I had what felt like infinite time as a kid to devote to gaming, and as I've aged, my relationship to video games has changed substantially. I can relate to wanting more bite sized experiences, but then again, a single run of a roguelike, the ultimate "gameplay loop" can feel just as satisfying as a short narrative game.
There are plenty of valid complaints to lodge against modern game design, but I think the author's framing is flawed.
Yes the games changed. I think that the claim the games did not changed would be absurd to anyone who looked at games in the past and is looking at games now.
We changed too, sure. But kids dont finish games, typically either. And I dont even think pac-man is a good example here, very few people finished pac-man - but the game itself was not meant to be finished. It was meant to be too difficult at some point.
The difference is that 90s games had novelty at the time - many introduced new gameplay ideas.
A lot of today's AAA games have converged into a small number of genres like the open world action RPG games which all have the same "side quests" repeated ad-nauseam.
* Talk to NPC
* Go kill 5 monsters
* Talk to another NPC
* Collect 3 of some item.
* Talk to another (or original) NPC.
* Get some pocket change, EXP and an item as reward.
Repeated several hundred times throughout the game with minor variations and some uninteresting dialogue that doesn't develop your the story or character besides unlocking a new skill. Every skill is acquired the same way - through "skill points" that are acquired with EXP - but there's no novelty in acquiring EXP - just the same quests which increase the game's "content".
But this content is boring an uninspired. It's almost like it's done to keep people employed - or at least, to pay fewer programmer's high salaries and replace them with lower salaries of employees who can use a pre-packaged scripting system to increase the gameplay duration without adding any new gameplay. Or maybe it's the sunk cost fallacy - they feel like they've put some time and effort into implementing some mechanic, so it would be a waste to only use it once or twice, so they have to use it 50 times to justify the budget spent on developing it.
You missed my point. The author argued that gameplay loops are a holdover from quarter munching arcade machines. I used Rogue as proof that this is at best an incomplete account. I simply mentioned Pac-Man as the beginning of the arcade boom, which happened to come out the same year as Rogue, a computer game with a much more addicting gameplay loop (in my opinion).
I almost never finished games even back in the 90s/2000s. I think it's because of how long they are compared to movies and even tv shows. You also (especially back in the day) had to 'rewatch' the same part over and over until you could beat it
I play roguelikes tons and agree with the article's analysis.
A lot of these games feel like the "game loop" only exists as a project management tool to refine the game's release rather than to refine enjoyment. It's made so much worse with games that are in early development where EA feels like just a refinement of the loop rather than refinement of enjoyment .
It's hard to explain, but it feels like a symptom of loop focus over gameplay is that the game peaks suddenly and hard but expects you to keep going.
A game that illustrates how to break past that point is noita -- there's definitely a gameplay loop.. but it's made in a way where the loop is eventually recognizable as not actually the full game. It then goes from being a gameplay loop to a stream of play that doesn't need to loop on itself.
Really, I wish game devs, both indie and otherwise, would try to break out of these loops more readily.
The whole time reading this I was thinking, there's more than one kind of game. Even in the space of single player games there are many kinds. Maybe they should try playing a different one. Or maybe Dwarf Fortress will have enough depth.
The point of distilling a story into a loop does resonate though. Think of games made from blockbuster movies which succeed or fail based on the sliver that made it into the loop. I on the other hand love games that I can play for 10-20 mins, then do it again or not. These tend to be PvP games though.
Which LLMisms are you seeing in their post? Their grammar, word choice, thought flow, and markings all denote a fully human authorship to me, so confidently that I would say they likely didn't even consult an LLM.
lol. I did use a lot of short sentences, that’s my bad. But please read through [1] and compare my text onto it, it may enlighten you on how to actually spot llm writing.
For the future, try to avoid prevaricating when you actually have a clear sense of what you want to argue. Instead of convincing me that you've weighed both options and found luddism wanting, you just come off as dishonest. If you think stridently, write stridently.
I’m not a native speaker and you may find my writing simplistic if your standard vocabulary includes three expressions I’ve had to look up (I don’t mean this as an insult, I was just genuinely stumped I could barely understand your comment).
I may think stridently (debatable) but I generally believe it is best to always try to meet in the middle if the goal is genuine discussion. This is my attempt at that.
But meeting in the middle only works if you honestly believe the middle is a valuable place to be. I don't want to dissect your writing too much, but let's look at one example.
> The issue with most of these articles is that they seem to demonize the technology, and systematically use demeaning language about all of its facets.
This is very confident, strident language. You clearly believe that there is a faction of people demonizing technology, akin to luddites, who are not worthy of being taken seriously.
> This one raises a lot of important points about LLMs, but...
So here you go for the rhetorical device of weighing the opposing view. Except, you don't weight it at all. You are not at all specific about what those points are. It's just a way to signal that you're being thoughtful without having to actually engage with the opposing viewpoint.
> I do think that safety is important... But I think it's better not to be a luddite.
Again, the rhetoric of moderation but not at all moderate in content.
It was a clear mistake to think that this was LLM writing. But I suspect the reason I made this mistake is that AI writing influences people to mimic surface level aspects of its style. AI writing tends to actually do the "You might say A is true, but B has some valid points, however A is ultimately correct." Your writing seems like that if you aren't reading it closely, but underneath that is a very human self-assuredness with a thin veneer of charitability.
Classic OAD (Obvious Asshole Disorder)
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