T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I learned that you can’t have a cough drop in secret. On the night of recording this show, my throat was scratchy and dry. I thought I could alleviate this with a cough drop, and would put it in my cheek when it was time to talk. Nobody would ever know!
And then I realized that the sound of talking around a cough drop was far more distracting than the hoarseness I was trying to cover up. Oops.
EDIT: Listening to the show later, I have to say that Issac did a really great job of editing around this. Everything sounds pretty natural on the show.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast363
Link (YouTube) |
00:00 My advice to Kotick
My advice is, “Get out now. It’s only going to get worse for you.”
Although I would also accept, “Fall in a well and die.”
16:23 Paul’s New PC and Linux Gaming Report
27:43 Dislike Button
Apparently the dislike button is being changed one region at a time, which is why some of us see the change and some of us don’t. Here is what YouTube co-founder Jawed said about the removal of the dislike button:
Watching Matt Koval’s announcement about the removal of dislikes, I thought something was off.
The spoken words did not match the eyes. The video reminded me of an interview Admiral Jeremiah Denton gave in 1966. I have never seen a less enthusiastic, more reluctant announcement of something that is supposed to be great.Calling the removal of dislikes a good thing for creators cannot be done without conflict by someone holding the title of “YouTube’s Creator Liaison”. We know this because there exists not a single YouTube Creator who thinks removing dislikes is a good idea — for YouTube or for Creators.
Why would YouTube make this universally disliked change? There is a reason, but it’s not a good one, and not one that will be publicly disclosed. Instead, there will be references to various studies. Studies that apparently contradict the common sense of every YouTuber.
The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform. Why? Because not all user-generated content is good. It can’t be. In fact, most of it is not good. And that’s OK. The idea was never that all content is good. The idea WAS, however, that among the flood of content, there are great creations waiting to be exposed. And for that to happen, the stuff that’s not great has to fall by the side as quickly as possible.
The process works, and there’s a name for it: the wisdom of the crowds. The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then, the platform invariably declines. Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre? Because nothing can be great if nothing is bad.
In business, there’s only one thing more important than “Make it better”. And that’s “Don’t fuck it up”.
32:18 LudoNarraCon
It’s not a joke. This is a real convention.
33:41 Mailbag: Nethack
Dear DieCast,
What are your favorite Nethack memories?
Also, thoughts on getting in trouble for playing immoral games.Sincerely,
Bobbert
Here is the end-of-game text from Paul.
42:07 Mailbag: DRM Again
Shamus,
Good evening. I know it’s almost certainly too late for the next Diecast, but there’s always another! Would you be able to comment on the recent failure(s) of DRM as seen here? Do you think these problems might actually turn the tide, given the relative lack of utility to a DRM scheme now?
(1) https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/faulty-drm-breaks-dozens-of-games-on-intels-alder-lake-cpus/
(2) https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211109/09064247908/denuvo-games-once-again-broken-paying-customers-thanks-to-drm-mishap.shtml
(3) https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/denuvo-drm-removed-from-upcoming-strategy-game-dev-blames-performance-impact/
50:04 Mailbag: Remasters
Dear diecast,
Recently there have been a number of remaster/remake failures (WC3 reforged, GTA remastered (3/VC/SA)). I, as a non-programmer am quite confused about this. Aren’t modern game systems easier to code for? Arent there more readymade tools to make game coding easier? Why does it take a team years to remake a game (where they already know exactly what the end product should look like. Its not like they have to develop it as they go) and end up screwing up? Shouldn’t “make that but with bigger resolution, modern system support and better textures” be trivial to do?
with kind regards,
chris
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
I had a very promising Knight yesterday. I found an early bag of holding and a leash.
Then my pony tramped a gas spore next to me in a dark room.
Shamus is thinking of MoOII not original MoO. In MoO (the best moo) you automatically massecered the enemy when you conquered a planet.
Also, “Hitler was a light weight. I’ll do it BETTER.” is basically the selling point of Hearts of Iron.
That’s being more than a little unfair to HoI. There’s also “can I conquer the world as Belgium?”
RE: DRM and piracy
The problem with Alder Lake and DRM is that Alder Lake has two different kinds of CPU cores (like most smartphones, it has big.Little architecture). And Denuvo, if it finds the game running on a different kind of core, will think that it’s a different CPU.
As for technical hurdles and pirating, to the best of my knowledge, the only technical hurdles in most cases are having to find a good download and needing to use a torrent client. If you actually manage to download a game, it’s like installing any other program.
What I remember of file sharing from collage was you wait a week for the download to finish.
Then the magic moment when you unziped the package and could find out if you got “coolgame.iso” or “tubgirl.mp4”.
The whole point of the torrent system is that multiple people upload so that their smaller upload speed can saturate your download speed. For popular files, particularly if they’re being hosted with fat pipes, the download should be nearly as fast as (or even faster than) the official distribution channels. If your collage filesharing was only from local computers and/or was at dialup speeds, well yeah it’s going to take forever. I’m fairly certain (I saw it back in the day and have no reason to assume it’s gone away) that modern torrent programs can straight up let you watch a movie while it’s downloading, though that’s of no help if you’re torrenting a game when they’re up to what, 100 gigs? 120?
Huh. I wonder if the ridiculous file bloat could be someone’s intentional stealth DRM: make it so huge that the most reliable download is the store, and poor people that can’t afford a bajillion hard drives (or games) can’t even store the thing.
I take it, the problem of mis-labeled files has yet to be solved.
Well, at least in theory, mis-labelled files would get hosted less. So the more peers sharing it, the more likely it is legit. Also, many torrent aggregation sites have “trusted” or similar badges for file providers, which too make it less likely not to get what you download.
Wait, what, is that Japanese, how on Earth?
Guys, Boby Kotick admitted to threatening to have his personal assistant killed. It’s not an unsubstantiated claim. He claims it was just hyperbole though.
I don’t doubt it was hyperbole. He’s, after all, a massive asshole, not a Mafia Don. You can tell it was hyperbole by the fact that he’s admitting to it, since for every other awful thing he’s ever done he tries to pretend it wasn’t true, wasn’t as bad or was actually benefitial (even though no one but him could ever see the benefits).
Still, it’s probably not going to go well for him in the public eye either way.
I think that the real reason he admitted it is that he did it in a recorded message. So, yeah, it’s hyperbole, assuming he’s not completely stupid, but it’s still, y’know, obviously very bad. You can bet he’d have denied it if there weren’t actual evidence.
I think if he intended it to be intimidating (which seems clear, given the context), then it’s still something that should be treated seriously. It might have been hyperbole or a joke, or it might seem obvious (to us armchair folk) that he can’t follow through on it, but it clearly wasn’t meant to be 100% received as such, because the statement’s rhetorical purpose requires it to be taken seriously on a level at least proportional to the motivation he wanted to discourage.
This wasn’t him goofing around with a friend. This was him trying to shut down hard a line of inquiry he didn’t want, from someone who already saw him as a possible or active adversary.
It’s kind of the same principle as in how using a toy gun (or your finger in your jacket pocket, or a pen pressed against someone’s back, etc.) to commit robbery is legally the same as using a real gun. You don’t get to say “but I wasn’t serious” if your purpose hinged on other party taking it sufficiently seriously to do something they would otherwise not have wanted to.
There is still a dislike button, they just hide the dislikes (I think). I still saw the dislikes when it first hit, but a day later they were gone for me as well. I assume the system still has a lower priority recommending disliked videos, but you cant see it has been mass disliked.
That is how it’s supposed to work far as I know. If I understood it correctly the stated idea is that making the number of dislikes invisible prevents or at least softens the “pileup effect”, or in other words it’s not that much fun to dislike bomb someone if you can’t see the numbers.
Now on the one hand dislike bombing is definitely a thing, I’ve seen situations where creators who normally get views total in hundreds suddenly get thousands of dislikes on all of their content overnight. I want to avoid going too political for this blog but as a minority member I obviously empathise strongly when this happens to someone I relate to and that would drive me to say that anything that prevents this is good, though it obviously affects all sides of a given discourse to some extent.
On the other hand YT’s notorious Algorithm is already a creation of eldritch arcana and I don’t know if obfuscating its actions further is healthy. While I do think the statement about the “wisdom of the crowds” is a bit naive in the age of organized review/dislike bombing I can’t help but distrust a business this size to not use any form of limiting access to information for its own and its associates’ interests. I could go more in-depth but, again, I don’t want to get onto the political minefield.
Yeah, I think most online business just let you pay to expunge unfavorable reviews.
I don’t feel particularly strongly about the change, because I suspect not having a dislike bar leads to ‘better’ dislikes – dislikes that more genuinely reflect the view of people without taking into account other opinions.
Humans are considerably influenced by the opinions of other humans whenever these kind of things are measured – I think they showed that the number of upvotes a Reddit comment displays significantly influences the likelihood of upvoting or downvoting it. (as in when the displayed number of likes is artificially changed)
But it does reduce the useful tools available when searching through very obscure videos. I’ve definitely used the dislike bar there. And that effect it has on the really small videos could have some unintended consequences as far as conspiracy theories etc.
Twitter doesn’t have dislikes but that has lead to “ratioing”. Where someone’s like to comment ratio is very high in favor of comments (while usually likes outweigh comments). If people cant dislike, they make a comment about how much they dislike it in very crude terms. So i can imagine on youtube it will go from from dislikes>likes to “hey just commenting here to say I disliked your video, also I think you’re human garbage”.
Also wisdom of the crowds does work with review bombing. Videos that have a lot of comments and a lot of likes and dislikes are marked as controversial by the system, which also makes the algorithm recommend it to people. So if people dislike bomb, and then other people like it to counteract it, you end up with a video that gets pushed more. This is how “reply girls” operated, people disliking the video would actually help them because it showed people cared enough to click the button. Although youtube curbed that by removing video replies, and rating videos that are watched for only a few seconds low.
Some people set up bots is the problem. It’s not the crowd, it’s one guy.
True, I believe it’s borderline common knowledge that most of these platforms treat “negative engagement” as “still engagement”.
Having said that YT comment sections are, with rare exceptions, considered a cesspool (unless something changed in that department recently), and even then writing a “I hate this” comment is much more work than pressing a readily available button right under the video. Though I imagine this might lead to an increase in bot comments I still feel like those will be easier to manage than button presses.
And with the “wisdom of the crowds” comment I meant both the botting that Syal mentioned but also concerted actions by interested parties. Like, let’s say you dislike spiders (a bit abstract but I really don’t want to give a politically charged example), the theory is that if you use the dislikes on videos of spiders you should stop seeing videos tagged for “spiders” while still seeing videos tagged “funny animals”, furthermore the aggregated data can be used for the algorithm to try to figure out what people who do similar likes/dislikes might be interested in. But lets say you decide to go on arachnophobia.net forum and organize 10000 people to purposefully go and downvote any video containing spiders in the hopes that will make them overall less appealing. And yes, I know I said the “negative engagement is engagement” is a thing but I believe like you said this is mostly true when there is a push on both sides.
The board and shareholders at Activision aren’t going to oust Kotick willingly. They know that the moment they oust Kotick, the company’s valuation will fall. He made them far too much money and they are willing to wait out the whole controversy to keep him around because they have sold their souls to their greed.
There is no need to talk about soul-selling. Boards have fiduciary duty to their shareholders. For them, willingly causing a loss of valuation would be oath-breaking.
Citation needed. That would be an incredibly stupid oath to have, for moral, legal, and “ability to plan more than 3 seconds into the future” reasons.
The “fiduciary duty” argument is not an *entirely* invalid one, but it’s a *mostly* invalid one.
While yes, there is a vicious dehumanizing nature to corporations or really any big group where responsibility is diffused but credit socialized, it isn’t as strict as people are led to believe.
To clarify, “Hey guys, WE ALL DID IT! YAY!” is what I mean by ‘socialized’ or shared credit, not, “Hey guys, we all did it. Also, even employees who aren’t CEOs, on the board, or major investors are getting a cut of the profit.” The act of everybody being in the same group means everybody is encouraged to feel good about successes.
In contrast, nobody is encouraged to feel bad about failures. ‘Diffused responsibility’, for example, could be a company does something bad, like dump pollutants in an orphanage’s backyard, and every employee says, “Oh. I didn’t do it. It’s not my fault.” So you have this weird situation where everybody worked together to do something, and everybody is successful and contributing and encouraged to take credit when there are successes, but somehow, not a single person did the bad thing when the bad thing is done and somehow this is a legal standard that flies.
Further, while the fiduciary responsibility argument is made and sometimes is accurate, it is by no means a real legal requirement.
That is, while it is used to justify bad decisions that hurt people, in sort of a shrug and say, “There was nothing I can do,” when the same groups make decisions that are undeniably bad or not representing the best interests of their investors (like, say, having a worthless CEO acting like a comic book terrorist and two-bit rape apologist rather than a business leader), the social bonds among the rich suddenly break out; the blood bonds measured in blood money are stronger than following the law, figuratively and, in this case (assuming that death threats and covering up rape is illegal in whatever state EA is headquartered in, which I am CONFIDENT it is) literally.
The THEORY, however, is that the board should do what’s in the long-term interest of the shareholders. An action that causes the share price to drop in the short term in exchange for greater long term value should be taken as a positive action. Even if we take “duty to the shareholders” at face value, the question should not be “Would firing Bobby Kotek make the price drop on Monday?” but rather “Over the next 10 years, would the company be worth more or less if we fired Bobby Kotek?”
That second question is the harder one. Apparently the board thinks Kotik’s strategy for running a game company is a good one, since if they didn’t we’d be hearing “fire Boby Kotek!” cries due to the bottom line (you can agree with them or not on this, but the point is the board apparently endorses the current strategy). This would make them loathe to fire a “successful” CEO. If the major reason to fire Kotek is for culture, the board would have to try to assess “Would the gains to our company from having a better culture, as well as the PR value of addressing this issue, be greater than the loss of replacing a successful known CEO with someone new?”
That said, I agree with you that, in practice, very few corporate decision makers appear able to see beyond next week’s stock price. But the “duty to the sharholders!” argument SHOULD cut both ways.
For the moment, keeping Kotick has caused the company’s valuation to fall. If it rebounds, then Kotick’ll stay. If it doesn’t, he’ll be out out out. If it doesn’t rebound and the board keeps him anyway, then it could be the board that’s out out out and the board members know it.
I wonder what rating Nethack would get from the ESRB. (probably banned)
The sheer list of things you can do is staggering and all of them have BOTH up and down sides.
*Theft
*Murder
*Human sacrifice
*Cannibalism
*Genocide
*Desecration of temples
*Brain-eating
*Being raped by demons
You can even name the slime mold “babies” and eat babies! The horror!
My, that was a yummy baby!
Oh, no, a baby eater! Elbereth
I can think of three possible reasons Youtube is removing the dislike count.
A: They’re honest, dislike bombing really is a big problem and removing it lets them get a much more accurate dislike count which makes everyone better off. This seems unlikely based on the common view of dislike bombing, but I guess it could be a huge phenomenon that only Youtube has the tools to notice.
B: They’re incompetent, they’ve gotten another dumb idea in their heads and are making the platform worse for no reason. This seems plausible since Youtube has a long history of baffling errors that are really hard to fit into some kind of villainous master plan.
C: They’re lying, they found that engagement goes up if you hide information about which videos are actually good and force people to rely on the algorithm serving them whatever has been calculated to maximize engagement. This also seems plausible because, c’mon, why wouldn’t they do this?
I don’t think we have enough information to tell which of B or C is the case, and trying to pick between them is basically just answering the question “On balance, is Youtube more evil or stupid?”
Which head does “It is humiliating when stuff we make or are payed to promote gets disliked?”
Yes yes, Rewind sucks, but I don’t think it’s failure mattered to more than the marketing person who put it together. It’s not like Youtube’s going to lose business over it or anything, and they’ve never seemed like the kind of company that cared deeply about the internet pointing and laughing at them.
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”?
“Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.”
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by cupidity.
Never try to explain cupidity when it is attributed to malice.
I think the answer is D: Powerful corporate interests (aka Hollywood) complained.
For example the Ghostbusters trailer was the most disliked for a while. Might still be. Which pisses off media execs. Then there’s all the Covid stories that are being disliked by whichever side thinks that particular video is a lie spreading misinformation. Which pisses off media execs.
Pissed off media execs then start talking in a generally pissed off manner to Youtube and dislikes go away.
I think it’s more along the lines of “major corporate advertisers/creators don’t like having dislikes on their videos”.
If [Film Studio] or [Game Studio] or other companies are doing the following:
a) Posting their own teasers/trailers to YouTube, driving traffic to the site
b) Allowing other creators to create ‘reactions’ or ‘comments’ on these trailers without asking for copyright takedowns
c) and most importantly, buying ad time on other videos to promote their stuff
then they’re probably irritable about whenever their stuff gets a wave of dislikes. Their money talks.
I think the controversy about the Youtube dislike button is way overblown.
Like, on the one hand, I agree that the change probably benefits the platform and its corporate partners more than users and small creators.
On the other hand… it doesn’t matter that much? Some people are acting like the dislike button is one of Youtube’s most essential features (eg the “nothing can be great if nothing is bad” speech), when it really isn’t. The dislike count is a very noisy signal, and in practice tons of platforms outside of Youtube work well enough without it.
If you want to see whether a video is bad before watching it, the top comment (or absence of any comment) is a much more reliable signal.
Heh, this is how it always works. They take away things one at a time so people accept them and even excuse them. “It’s not that big of a deal”, “Other platforms work well without it”, “It might actually be benefitial”, and so on. And every time they do it your voice gets progressively lower. It’ll reach a point where it won’t be heard, because you willingly gave it away piece by piece and by the time you notice, it’ll be too late.
Look at the state of PC gaming. We went from having complete games in a disk to digital games being incentivized, to them being the absolute norm; from patches being a rare thing, to them being ubiquitous to them being an absolute necessity; from DRM being a rare thing that no one liked, to it being a normal thing that no one liked to now being a normal thing that everyone tolerates and many even defend. Little by little they take away control from us and things that used to be considered abhorrent are now considered normal, even if their nature hasn’t changed in their slightest.
This is why the Xbox One’s original launch idea had to be backtracked. Not because it introduced a bunch of negative changes, but because it introduced them all at the same time. Had they done it gradually, people would have very likely eventually accepted them all.
I dispute the claim that DRM used to be rare. It has always been with us, though in the days before digital downloads it was more commonly called “copy protection”. When the game stops in its tracks and asks you to enter the third word on the twenty-seventh page of the manual, that’s DRM. When the developer puts bits on the disk–be it floppy or optical–designed to screw up disk-copying software, that’s DRM. When the game won’t run without the CD in the drive, not even when you’ve done a full install and shouldn’t need the CD for anything, that’s DRM. If the form of DRM has changed over the years, it’s only because technology has changed. If developers could reasonably have required a single-player game to constantly check in with a server back in 1980, 1990, or even 2000, you can be very sure that some of them would have.
Patches, it is true, have become more common, but that’s also largely a product of changing technology. In the pre-internet era it was very, very difficult to distribute patches. Buggy, broken games–and let’s not pretend that there weren’t any or that they weren’t common–stayed buggy and broken for most players even when patches existed because players had no reasonable way to obtain them. If developers could have delivered patches to players in an easy and convenient fashion, then developers absolutely would have. No one wants the stain of a permanently broken, permanently buggy game on their reputation. If you’re arguing that buggy broken games are more common now than they used to be, well, that’s an empirical question. I don’t have any evidence that would answer it one way or the other. Frankly, I doubt anyone does.
I don’t mean to suggest that things now are ideal–or even good, for that matter–but I do not understand the narrative of decline that persists in certain gaming circles.
It makes perfect sense if you stop viewing it as an empirical claim and instead interpret it as an expression of frustration. Sure you could say that you’re angry things are bad, but that’s not strong enough condemnation, you can more effectively vent rage with a harsher statement like “things are worse than they used to be”.
Certain gaming circles really like being mad and are not that attached to the idea that statements should be literally true.
Maybe. But these things get repeated so often that it seems improbable to me that the people who repeat them don’t actually mean it.
I feel like old school copy protection and new forms of DRM are entirely different beasts, even if both ostensibly have the same intention of gating the gameplay experience to paying customers.
That is, the old style of copy protection felt “fair”.
You could install or play a game, which let you get a little demo out of it. With no refunds or digital distribution, this also let you check if you could even install a game, which was neat. Sometimes, the integration was neat, asking lore questions, but it was at least perfunctory and not a ruin to legitimate customers.
Also, the copy protection came with materials: an instruction booklet, a printed map, a 3d object, an in-character reference book, blueprints, something like that. So you were often getting more than “just” a game, but an experience and sometimes even memorabilia. While some were better than others, you could definitely get a feel for when it was more than just lazy passwording versus the developers and programmers legitimately loving their creation.
In contrast, I can’t think of a single DRM that anybody is happy with. Even ‘good’ DRM doesn’t give you any value added. It doesn’t make you feel happy to have made a monetary transaction with your digital distribution platform of choice and the gamemakers behind it.
And that totally ignores the most egregious DRM, which slow you down, install rootkits, steal your information, or brick your hard drive… all while not actually stopping piracy. It isn’t like the company is asking me to make a small sacrifice for their rights or financial well-being; as Shamus more aptly points out, they’re giving everybody a worse experience, *including themselves and their customers*. They’re cutting their nose AND THEN MY NOSE to spite everybody.
I’m not about to go to bat for anything that, say, Ubisoft has ever done. But Steam is basically DRM and, for all its faults, Steam still offers such features as convenience, auto-patching, and mod support. I think a lot of people really genuinely do like it. Even I appreciate those features, and I’m the type who makes it a point to buy from GOG where possible.
Those other features don’t depend on the DRM, though, and can be provided without it. Galaxy, for example, provides convenient game library management and auto-patching without DRM. So the popularity of Steam as an overall package doesn’t mean people like DRM — it just means they’re willing to tolerate it if it is coated with enough sugar.
And you can distribute DRM free games on Steam anyway, which means that any ire at DRM gets directed to people other than Valve.
Yes, exactly. I’m not saying that any consumer anywhere has ever been happy about DRM for DRM’s sake. That’s just silly. I’m saying that a fair number of consumers are happy to accept certain kinds of DRM in certain circumstances, provided it’s not too inconvenient and it comes with enough “sugar”.
So too with everything The Nick mentioned.
I still remember when someone lent me their copy of Startropics, but didn’t lend me the instruction manual that had the code that would let you get past level 4. Bad times, bad times.
(It’s 747, by the way. Mateys.)
DRM is an entirely different beast from copy protection. Copy protection existed because back then copying from one PC to another was the form of piracy. Plus, while it was an inconvenience, it certainly wasn’t very strict. Any manual or code wheel that came with a game could easily be replicated, even back then, on your own. Copy protection was meant to, at best, slow down the convenience of piracy.
DRM, on the other hand, exists to stop a form of piracy that’s no longer the norm, which makes it instantly pointless, yet it still affects only paying customers. The difference being that it stopped being a mere inconvenience and started becoming something that detracts from the experience (when it doesn’t stop it altogether). Which actually serves my point: that, despite your claims, it absolutely has become worse.
And the issue with patches is that, again, because people have allowed it, they have stopped being a tool to help users and become a crutch. Nowadays developers don’t bother to wait until a game is finished to release it because they know they can just patch it later. You can claim there’s no evidence that games didn’t use to be so broken, but this is like saying if car accidents were less common before the invention of cars was an empirical question. No, obviously it’s not. All you have to do is look at it from a logical perspective. Launching broken games before patching became available wasn’t unheard of, but it also wasn’t the sort of thing people would just let pass. When patching became available, all of its positives were good, but then all of the negatives were simply the companies taking advantage. This is not sort of crazy theory I’m cooking up. Go to any forum after the launch of a broken game and you will find people defending it. This sort of thing is considered normal these days. Don’t even pretend it was always the case.
This is how it goes all the time. These companies make things gradually worse for everyone and people like you don’t notice it (like the proverbial boiling frog from that apocryphal factoid) and call everyone who does a “conspiracy theorist” or whathaveyou. You look at games from an entertainment perspective and sure, that way they have become better, but when you look at them from a consumer-friendly perspective, things have absolutely become worse. Can you sell your used PC games now? Please point out to me to any form of copy protection that made your game run slower even if you did everything right. Remember when Assassin’s Creed 2 came out with always-online DRM for a single player game and how everyone protested? These days that sort of thing is “normal” too. And don’t even think about coming to me with the “My internet works fine, so I don’t see the problem”. That’s evading the actual issue.
My point regarding DRM is that it is, conceptually speaking, no different than older forms of copy protection. The purpose is the same. Only the mechanism has changed. I’m not defending the new mechanism and I’m certainly not saying you should like it. I don’t approve of always-online DRM for single-player games any more than you do. All I’m saying is that copy protection is not new and, arguably, is no more common now than it used to be. Not every game is an Assassin’s Creed 2, after all.
If people are more tolerant of launch day bugs than they used to be, it’s because they now have a reasonable expectation of relatively prompt, relatively easy-to-acquire patches. It’s only natural to get pissed off about buying a defective product that you know will never get fixed. It is likewise only natural to get less pissed off than that about buying a defective product that you expect to get fixed in relatively short order. Large numbers of people still get pissed off about broken games, especially when the broken games aren’t patched quickly and aren’t likely to ever be patched fully and satisfactorily. Heck, Shamus has been talking about the Grand Theft Auto remasters for a week now.
Also, please note that I very much did not call you a conspiracy theorist. All I did was disagree with you. I didn’t even disagree with you all that strongly.
IMO the major differences are that 1) now the publisher can reach out over the internet and change the thing you already bought and 2) the Mix N Mojo wheel wasn’t a rootkit and didn’t affect the performance of the software it was protecting.
On the other hand, I owned a game for the Atari ST that had a label on the disc which claimed it would put a virus on your computer if you tried to copy it. Which was almost certainly a lie, but still…
I strong disagree with you John. DRM of today is conceptually speaking, *very* different than older forms of copy protection.
DRM used to be taking the key and the lock you received when you purchased the game and putting them together.
DRM of today is contacting a 3rd party to beg permission to use something you own. Conceptually it is not the same at all.
I didn’t particularly like the DRM of yesteryear. But I didn’t find it offensive. I find the DRM of today straight up offensive. Likewise patches of today (auto updates) I find offensive. Because I don’t want my game to patch at all unless it is broken in a way that affects me. Yet I’ve had that choice taken away from me unless I manually disable my internet to prevent it. (Which I do.) And even that isn’t enough to stop it in many cases. (Like Steam.)
Also, as long as you have the CD and key for an old game, you can still install and play it – even decades later. With today’s DRM, even if you still have the game on your own hard drive, if the company shuts down the servers, your game will be forever broken and unplayable.
Speaking of patches, I just tried turning on my TV. I can’t watch TV because it is updating for fucks sake. I loathe that this has become normalized.
That is to be expected when you hook up your tv to the internet. The internet is constantly in motion. New threat vectors arise everyday. Devices that connect to the internet NEED updates. Devices that do connect to the internet but don’t get updated are a big security risk. Be glad that your TV is updated. Some phones get only updates for two years and then effectively become obsolete. Such a waste.
Disconnecting the internet and watching cable television is always an option.
As someone who recently had their third (and now likely final) attempt to actually finish Skyrim bricked by an unwanted update, I am now very much soured on non-optional updates.
If we disagree, Steve, I think it’s only about the proper use of the word “conceptually”. I have both implicitly and explicitly acknowledged that new DRM doesn’t work the same way that old DRM did.
Don’t be too hard on Valve, Paul. Getting Steam to run on Linux isn’t quite the same as getting it to run on Windows. There is, unfortunately, a lot more that can go wrong. It isn’t just your hardware that matters, but also your distribution–e.g., PopOS–your desktop environment–e.g., Gnome–and even your window manager–e.g., X.org or Wayland. I have been using the Linux native Steam client for many years now. Most of the time it functions perfectly normally. For instance, it works just fine on my desktop PC and always has.
It’s a different story on my notebook though. It used to work just fine there, but then I switched to a new distribution and a new desktop environment and I ran into a problem similar to yours. All of the menus at the top of the client window worked, as did certain library views, but most pages, including store pages, simply refused to load for some reason. This is apparently a known bug and it can sometimes happen in the Windows client as well. I ultimately found two solutions. The most commonly recommended solution is to switch to Big Picture Mode. The second solution I found was to switch from my distribution’s default Steam package,
steam-manjaro, to an alternate package,steam-native, which functions normally. I personally prefer the second solution to the first, but I can personally confirm that the first works and that it’s easy to do. It also has the benefit of being distribution-independent.Incidentally, if you want to find out whether or not one of your Steam games will run in Linux via Proton, I recommend checking ProtonDB. Games are rated (“Platinum”, “Gold”, etc.) on the basis of user reports and reading the user reports can inform you about the kinds of issues you’re likely to encounter and what tweaks may improve your experience. I don’t use ProtonDB all that often myself, as I generally buy Linux-native games, but every so often I get tempted by a Windows-exclusive game and checking ProtonDB helps me decide whether or not I want to roll the dice that the game’ll run on one of my PCs. There’s a similar web page for Wine, WineHQ, if you think you might want to play the non-Steam version of a Windows-native game or use a Windows-native application on your Linux PC.
Regarding the Dislike button, I think they’re doing it like every other major client change – slowly rolling it out region by region in order to avoid bugs. As for the measure itself, well… I’m surprised they didn’t do it sooner, actually.
The vast majority of channels affected by massive dislike waves are big brands – ones whose partnership YouTube values greatly. And the only people this change angers are the most engaged users – the ones who are engaged enough to leave comments, and think about how their behaviour affects the digital environment. And those guys are definitely a minority.
Just look at the number of likes and dislikes on a random video – less than 5% of viewers leave a like or dislike. The people who leave a comment are even less. Most viewers just passively watch videos (very rarely making it past the beginning, even), and they probably won’t even notice that it’s gone.
And as for those of us who don’t like the change, what are we going to do – start using Vimeo?
They’re not even taking the dislike button away, just the ability to see its results. I doubt many people ever use that in their day-to-day experience. It’s pretty much always between 90-95% positive for every video I watch. I have to really go out of my way to find a video with a large number of negative dislikes.
Most of the time I just look at the bar to validate my own feelings on the video and comments can still do that.
I’m sure you’re right, it’s to stop mega companies like Activision recieving headlines about mass dislikes. Money talks
Regarding the dislike button, it is not a big deal to see it go for most videos even if I would prefer to have it and the power-for good or bad-that it gave the community, but for some content it is not just a side feature, it is essential.
YouTube has gotten so big that it has basically become the number one go-to source for help/troubleshooting videos for everything from your computer to your car, and being able to see a massive dislike ratio on those videos at a glance lets you know that it is no good when you might not realize it otherwise (if you knew beforehand, you would not be looking for help), and a lot more reliably than the bizarre algorithm of the comments section (assuming enough people even commented on smaller videos).
I would prefer to not see dislikes hidden at all, but if they have to be, it should only be for certain kinds of videos-may as well put that categorizing algorithm to work. For people trying to diagnose a problem with their spark plugs/Windows update/whatever it is pretty much a flat-out disservice, and frustrating.
PDTOM I would like to give a ‘Like’ to your comment but those have been disabled.
Heh, thanks. I actually, on that semi-tangential note, think that the like button is an interesting discussion in itself when it comes to forums (fora?). Even sans a dislike button, there were two main forums I used to debate things on, one with a like button, one without, and comparing/contrasting them was interesting. The forum that had ‘likes’ both gave you that dopamine hit when you got some and did help to give a better idea of where the discussion was going based on reviewing likes, but also could basically function as a dislike button if everyone was liking a comment countering yours, and definitely led to dogpiling and like-baiting behavior that inhibited discussion. The other felt like a ‘cleaner’ discussion where you could carry on without concern over that metric, but also felt perpetually inconclusive as a result as you would only talk in circles without any way to measure success.
Both of those were much more contentious debate-y forums, for a friendly place like this I think it is fine not to have a like button, for those, I am still not certain where I fall, but leaning against it.
If this change moves us away from the trend towards everything how-to being a youtube video tutorial, that can only be a good thing!
I am not too sure of that. YouTube tutorials can be a flawed medium and occasionally annoying, but I think they are legitimately useful just from their accessibility, some things are easier to understand in video format that text-and-pictures, and especially if you have an obscure problem, a giant platform that anyone can toss a video on gives you more to look through (for good and ill). It also helps you sort those sorts of things-if I am trying to fix a certain whatever and I look at a website or help forum, I am largely taking the word of the author or perhaps a couple dozen people on the forum that the method works, for the YouTube tutorial, if they are giving bad advice, it frequently will be called out in the comments or the R.I.P. dislike button and it is easier to know when being given bad advice than otherwise. Even if the platform itself is not great, I think the proliferation of YouTube tutorials is a net positive.
The problem I have with youtube tutorials is twofold:
1) time. With a good text/pictures based tutorial I can see very quickly whether or not it’s applicable to my situation. I spent a long time last week working through some obscure PC tech issues, and with the text-based articles I could rapidly tell (often even from just the google ‘summary’) if they matched or not. Video tutorials could be minutes long, with often no clue before watching whether they even involved the same software versions (not to mention bloat from creators advertising themselves). Even if they were applicable, referring to them more than once is painfully slow. Browsing through the comments just involves even more time (and you have absolutely zero knowledge of commenters expertise).
2) focus. Youtube tutorials far too often focus on fixing one specific thing in one specific set of circumstances (especially for tech stuff). A good text tutorial isn’t just a sequence of clicks and commands, it actually explains what is going on. This was key in my situation so that I could adapt it to fit what I needed.
But…I agree there are really good uses. Some Blender tutorials are amazing, I learnt almost everything I know about 3D modelling from Youtube (a mix of broad and focused videos, and time wasn’t an issue). And in those cases the good videos invariably end up with the most engagement, so you rarely get stuck watching bad/out-of-date ones unless you go looking for them.
Going to assume the question about immoral games is separate from the Nethack part. Pretty vague since it depends on what “getting in trouble” means, and also what “immoral” means, but the general answer is “if it’s somewhere people are going to see it, prepare to be judged by those people.” There’s a point where you’re crossing the line of decency, and everyone’s got their lines in different places. It’s not just about your taste in entertainment, it’s also about your ability to read the room and keep the peace with other people in it.
I’m a fair fan of some immorality. I like stories where the protagonist is the lesser of two evils; Tales of Berseria, Thomas Covenant*, the Nierengard games. I’m sure some people are uncomfortable with those, but I like debate, ideology discussions, and trying to figure out what makes something work as entertainment, so I’ll bring them up anyway when I think they fit,
There’s one game I’ve been playing that I won’t say the title of, because the contents of that one would make a whole lot of people uncomfortable. (It’s got a list of Kickstarter backers and my reaction was “why would you EVER want people to know you funded this?”) There’s things to discuss about its mechanics and worldbuilding, but in ordinary company the discussion stops long before you get there.
Basically if you make a post to express your love of Nekopara, the reactions are your own fault.
*(Only read the first one, but Thomas Covenant is an evil bastard in the book. Early on he has to gag the world spirit to stop its followers realizing it’s condemned him to death.)
Immoral games like Honey Pop or whatever that game that Shamus likes is called.
My first thought on hearing the phrase “immoral games” was Doom. I don’t think Doom is immoral. If anything, it’s probably more moral than shooters in which you’re killing people rather than monsters. It does, however, contain imagery that some people consider Satanic, making it the kind of game you might not want your parents to find out that you’d been playing at a friends’ house.
Complaining about the “Satanic imagery” in Doom is a little like complaining about Nazi imagery in a WWII shooter. Yes, it’s there, but it’s very clearly the enemy’s imagery, and you’re rather busy painting it with the blood of its followers.
The Covenant books get way better. The second series might be the best non-standard fantasy I have ever read
Is the questioneer chinease? Immoral Games in China, like FIFA Football XX for adding in Tibet as its own nation, could get any chinease citizen in real hot water. And China uses the unusual term immoral for stuff they bann.
The reason GIMP starts so much faster is probably because opening a file is orders of magnitude faster on Linux than Windows. GIMP is made of tons of tiny files that need to be opened and read, it needs to read all the font stuff, and so on. (5697 files and folders on my system)
That’s one reason why many games pack their files into one giant blob. And why some games load much faster on Linux – see Stellaris, Crusader Kings 3 (17892 files in 1747 folders!!), Kerbal Space Program.
Yeah, GNU/Linux isn’t Unix, but it still has a fair bit of that Unix-y “Everything is a file” flair.
I really enjoyed your recollections of playing MoO as I’ve recently started playing Stellaris again and it’s one of the better 4x space conquest games that does the MoO style in an updated package. On the note of dealing with the population of a conquered planet, Stellaris expands on your options in that you can still Purge or Enslave the inhabitants, but you also have options that let you share the planet, or force the alien pops to emigrate or even, depending on race, turn them into food or assimilate them à la the Borg. In terms of options for playing ‘immorally’ it’s really gotten quite deep.
I don’t really understand the mailbag question about immoral games. However I played a board game this weekend (Dinosaur World) that might? count.
The premise is that the players are each running a dino amusement park. Not all the guests are going to survive. They could… but you are in it to make money and win. So a few deaths are to be expected. The best part is that the death count is relative. You subtract the lowest death player’s count from the other players. So if you had 20 deaths, but the lowest player only had 15 then really only your extra 5 deaths count. There’s a little bit of that kind of immorality throughout the entire game.
A fair number of board games are like that. Like the ‘Spartacus: The Movie’ game is about managing your slaves as you have them fight and die in the arena for money and prestige. Hell, even Monopoly was intended to be an criticism of capitalism and the inherent immorality.
Hi Paul, did you forget to post your benchmark program or did you change your mind?
I hope your Steam experience gets better on Linux if you stick with it :)
Oh! Haha! Yes, I forgot. Apparently you’re the first to notice. Here it is:
http://www.tryop.com/MediaDocs/NewComputer/
Yeah, I’m having a great time with Linux. It’s so aggressively snappy and performant! So far, everything has just worked without me needing to run any console commands or anything.
My Steam store page had a brief spell of functionality during which I was able to purchase Potion Craft, which I’m hoping to talk about on the next episode!