T w e n t y S i d e d
I’m a cynical guy, and even I never predicted anything this bad. The modern gaming industry is one where you use a privacy-invading storefront to buy a DRM locked game where you use an in-game storefront to buy lootboxes to gamble for NFTs. I love this hobby, but I would experience orgasmic levels of schadenfreude if we had another gaming crash like back in ’83.
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast373
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes:
00:00 No Man’s Sky?
Oh well. Maybe next update.
00:53 Tough as Nails Minecraft
I really do think that “Don’t Starve, but in Minecraft” is a good idea. But I haven’t found it yet. Several mods have tried, but balancing Hunger / Thirst / Temp / Sleep systems is tricky. Make it too easy, and caring for your needs becomes routine busywork. Make it too hard, and it dissolves into comical nonsense. Stuff like, “I finally got some food, but then I starved to death because I fell asleep before I could eat it.” Or “I ate ten grapefruit and then died of thirst because the fruit only fills your food meter, not hydration.”
Part of the problem is the reliance on the standard “fill the bar” style mechanics. When it comes to consuming stuff, you can’t just use a single bar. With just one bar, you can go from “starvation” to “fully nourished” in a single meal by just clicking on a lot of food. What you need is a sort of two-stage system where you have a cap on how much you can absorb at once. I think the biggest challenge is communicating all of this complex stateThe player needs to be able to tell the difference between “I’m hungry, but reasonably well-nourished” versus “I’m STUFFED, but also underweight and malnourished.” clearly to the player without adding too much clutter to the HUD.
I’m sort of tempted to take a swing at it myself,I actually did a prototype a couple of years ago in C# that I was pretty happy with. but I really don’t enjoy programming in Java.
11:14 The Mushroom Village and Paste Security
Here is the site, if you want to try it yourself.
I realize my take on this might be kind of controversial. “You can’t save ignorant people from falling for scams.”To be clear: The “you” in this sentence is the operating system. If “you” is instead a person, then you can indeed help people. And yes, I realize that when one rube gets duped into installing malware, we all suffer because their machine joins a destructive botnet.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try to help people make smarter choices, I’m just saying that that locking the user out of their own operating system and haranguing every user with endless warning messages is a lousy way of dealing with this problem.
17:59 Dreaming About Games
I tried to make this as minimally cringe as I could. Still, we’re talking about dreams, so a little cringe is likely.
I’m sure I’m not the only one. Who else has dreams where the dreamworld seems to run on videogame logic?
25:50 Mailbag: Hard to play games (for story reasons)
Dear Diecast,
I hope this February finds you well.
I find myself with a bit of a conundrum: I love the gameplay of Breath of Fire IV.
Now, this may not seem like much of an issue, if I like the game, I can just play it, however…
I can’t play Breath of Fire IV.
There is a scene later into the game where (spoilers), the bad guys shoot a magic cannon at the emperor and it is the saddest, most heartbreaking event in any game*.
Not satisfied with that utter gut punch, from the time the emperor (he’s fine, by the way) reaches the imperial capital the game drags the player through one tragedy after another.
Merely thinking about it gives me a stomach ache.So I was wondering, are there games that you guys love playing but simply can’t bring yourself to play because something the story does?
This can be something the game does very well that you simply don’t have the bearing to withstand, or something the game does very poorly that ruins the experience for you.Vale,
– Tim
P.S.
Warning: tragedy lies ahead.
* The way said magic cannon works is by drawing power from someone with strong loving feelings towards the target.
Preparing the… “ammunition” for the procedure involves torturing them to near-death. They tend not to survive the experience.
32:06 Mailbag: Video Game Worlds
Dear Diecast,
What are some of your favourite fictional settings in video games, and why?
What distinguishes them from other ones in the medium that you do not look so favourably on?
And are we greedy or too demanding for wanting rich settings without a whole bunch of jank and inconsistencies souring the experience?Have a wonderful day.
– Andrew
37:12 Mailbag: Logic Artists
Hi Diecast,
There is this game company that I liked, Logic Artists. They are known for their Expeditions series (tactical RPGs) and have recently released the third title of that series: Rome (after Conquistador and Viking). When the game was released, they announced that they won’t be doing any RPGs anymore and instead will focus on creating NFT games. So here are my questions:
1) What the hell?
2) Do you think there will be more companies that will do the same thing?
3) Could you make them stop? Thanks in advance.Cheers,
Darek
Here is the video I mentioned in this segment:
Link (YouTube) |
Like we said on the show, Paul and I disagree with this video (at different points, and for different reasons, I think) but I think we both agree that Dan’s eventual breakdown of NFTs is pretty good.
If he’s right, then this is a problem that should solve itself. Sooner or later the pyramid collapses. And once enough of them collapse, new ones won’t have any way to get off the ground.
I normally wouldn’t care. I don’t mind if wealthy folks devise bizarre new ways to try to hustle each other with new financial technologies. I can just not buy NFTs and it doesn’t really affect me. But now Ubisoft is putting NFTs into their games, and suddenly it’s something I have to worry about.
49:00 Mailbag: Age Math
Dear Diecast,
I hope you’re doing well! Do you ever forget how old you are? I know, it sounds weird, but as I’ve gotten older I sometimes find myself in a position where when I tell someone my age, I have to quickly do the math in my head to make sure I didn’t lie to them. I’m embarrassed to admit that last year on my 28th birthday for a minute or two I thought I was actually turning 29, until I actually did the math!
So, my question is – has this ever happened to you, or am I just really weird (I mean, people always tell me I have a great memory, but maybe I’m just surrounded by even bigger freaks)? And if it has happened to you, is it something you’ve grown out of?
Keep Being Awesome,
Lino
Footnotes:
[1] The player needs to be able to tell the difference between “I’m hungry, but reasonably well-nourished” versus “I’m STUFFED, but also underweight and malnourished.”
[2] I actually did a prototype a couple of years ago in C# that I was pretty happy with.
[3] To be clear: The “you” in this sentence is the operating system. If “you” is instead a person, then you can indeed help people.
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Push the Button!
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
Internet News is All Wrong
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
While you cant stop someone from being stupid, people still try because people are stupid. They are so stupid that even after messing up, they still blame the program for letting them. People got tricked into dropping their iPhone into water because some fake picture told them apple updated the software to automatically shut down if it feels water coming in. People delete system32 copy-pasting something in notepad and running it. People run [songname].exe. You cant rely on common sense. Im sure that you can make people cut their brakelines and drive their car fullspeed at a wall if you tell them it makes them go back in time, or go to hogwarts. So with that in mind, maybe wrap a little piece plastic around the brakelines that tells people there isnt fairy dust hidden inside.
I think it’s probably a bit unfair to simply call people “stupid” in a lot of these cases, because the cases where someone is directly being manipulated are cases where the person doing the manipulating is presenting these things as being normal and safe and things that everyone is doing, and so warnings that it isn’t safe and normal might help. To use Shamus’ example, the instructions will say that in order to do something cool or to fix a specific problem, all you have to do is take the easy and safe step of pasting that in. If the step is generally seen as safe, people might try to do that if they want to get that outcome, but if the system pops up with a warning of “Hey, this is pretty dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing!” at least SOME of those people might stop and ask someone they trust more whether that’s safe to do or not.
Another issue is that a lot of these things take advantage of how humans once they start to follow a set of instructions stop paying attention to the details of them during the process. So even someone who knows that doing that is risky or even if it seems like it’s risky might well skip past that because they’ve become so focused on following the instructions without really thinking about them that they just go ahead and do it, especially if the other instructions are things they didn’t know how to do or understand that well anyway (which will be common if you have to follow instructions on how to do something). I wonder if there have been any studies about slipping weird steps into the middle of an instruction list to see how many people just automatically do them, not because they’re stupid but because their mind has slipped into “just follow the steps” mode.
Also, there’s an issue that we are missing with computers the idea with cars that most of what you could do to screw things up would involve a lot of work and most people have a mechanic or someone to do that for them, and so would be more inclined to simply ask their mechanic to do it instead of trying to do it themselves. So to trick people into doing that themselves the con needs to either make it urgent or make it seem like there’s a conspiracy to not do it. So you’d find it more with things that are useful for someone to do but would be illegal for a mechanic to do, like disabling airbags. For computers, most of the things people can and usually do do on their own, and they don’t usually have a “guy” who does all that work for them (except for a friend, that they might not want to bug for something like that). So again instead of being stupid it’s just that if they want to do that thing they need to take those steps, and they don’t have anyone that they should be getting to do those things for them instead. Add in that with computers legitimate instructions can be as intricate as the fake ones (if not more so) and you get a lot of mistakes being made.
Well, that’s two weeks in a row that we get questions mentioning tragedy in games.
Drinking water doesn’t cool the player down, huh? If only the human body had some kind of temperature regulation mechanism that used water… oh well.
I still don’t know what NFTs actually are, other than that they’re likely illegal yet everyone is trying to cash in on them anyways.
Minecraft is only truly tough when you go into it completely blind and don’t really know what to expect, I mean most people probably remember how their first nights in the game went.
“Cringe” is a strange word to describe dreams to me, they tend to be so nonsensical yet we sort of just accept it as it’s happening.
I wanted to poll people on this at some point but didn’t think the topic fit, because for me while there may be strange leaps in logic all of my dreams are narratives and stories. The sort of dream that Shamus talked about is the LOW end of the narrative detail that my dreams have, and I was under the impression that more people were like you where the dreams seemed more random and less connected. I was wondering, like Shamus, if I was odd or if that was how most people’s dreams are like.
Also, I have a kind of lucid dreaming — related to the graphics thing of video game dreams — because things in a dream don’t look like the real world at all. I’m always having to suspend disbelief to keep the dream going, and so if I’m getting into a nightmare I can recognize that it’s a dream and change it so that it’s not scary anymore. But I also don’t get the wonderful experiences from that that most people do.
My dreams almost always look real, and follow logic, even when it’s weird logic (“We’ve set up a new office. It’s in the infinite black void, just inside this door. Your cubicle’s to the right.”). But I can usually tell it’s a dream because I very rarely ever dream in sound, all conversations are in that thinking-to-myself quietness. Very rarely I’ll hear wind, or hear myself snap my fingers, and sometimes that can convince me I’m not dreaming.
I think the closest I’ve gotten to videogame logic* was a dream where I had to man the radar watch, and the radar was just… swarming with Zerglings. So I had to take my Terrans and wipe out the Zerglings, and then go back to bed.
*(unless I’m specifically dreaming about playing a videogame.)
As for NFT’s:
There’s a bunch of arbitrary complexity, but the long and short of it is that it’s a way to create scarcity among digital goods. I.e., think of having 1000 baseball cards. There are two big caveats to this: owning an NFT doesn’t grant any economic rights, copyright, etc. (What is bought or sold is usually a hyperlink pointer to some artwork, not the artwork itself.)
Second, they can only exist within a blockchain because otherwise it’s just a random record someone created on their private server. (OK, it is still that but on a public record.) Hence today they mainly use Ethereum because it’s easy and the first to do so.
Everything around NFTs and Crypto is there to obfuscate the basic facts of the transaction, so that it all looks like material economic activity. It’s churn for it’s own sake. No actual economic activity takes place, at least none I’ve ever seen seen documented.
As far as I can determine, the Ubisoft nonsense is worse: trying to create their own walled garden and maybe they would deliver real NFTs later. To clarify, from what I read even delivering NFTs pictures of ugly gorillas was well beyond their capabilities, and that’s something literally any random Joe can do.
Have to say this is how it appears to me, too*. Once you strip away the hype, the overblown language and actual processes involved, it’s people trading in…nothing much. Sure, you could say that company stocks and money aren’t really real, but they’re directly linked to companies or countries that make or trade things.
And if you put aside the technology, it’s not even that new! Financial records existed before this. Art existed before this. Art fraud existed before this. Speculation bubbles, nebulous products, fads, ponzi schemes, it was all aready here.
This isn’t a new era of finance, it’s just a new iteration of old problems.
*Or, glib answer: Of course there’s economic activity involved in the making of cryptocurrency: it uses up electricity! Lots of it!
NFTs aren’t illegal, they’re just stupid. That said, some people have tried to sell NFTs related to intellectual property that they don’t actually own, which is illegal. There was, for example, a guy who was very definitely not Wizards of the Coast who tried to sell Magic: The Gathering NFTs. He got shut down hard.
Is that illegal, actually? They’re not actually selling a copy, or claiming to sell the copyright. They’re selling a unique serial number and an URL, no matter what the buyer thinks they’re buying.
NFT marketplaces that want to look reputable will have a rule against this sort of thing. (And they might even enforce it sometimes!) But illegal?
They used copyrighted images in their promotional materials and re-distributed copyrighted images in ways that aren’t covered under fair use. It’s illegal.
Well, you should look at the video Shamus put there to understand it more, but basically they’re digital receipts. They’re not items, they’re “proof of ownership” of items. People tend to mock pictures being sold this way because anyone can just screenshot or download a picture and it doesn’t really matter who owns it, but in reality they can be anything, not just pictures.
It is, of course, an entirely pointless endeavor. You’re basically paying for bragging rights. If that alone was the case, no one would care. People would mock them and move on. The problems with NFTs, though, are different.
For one, their creation and mainteinance takes a ridiculous amount of power, which is bad for the environment. The usual excuse is “Oh, well, a lot of things are bad for the environment, like cars. Are people going to stop using them?” This excuse forgets to mention just how bad the power consumption is, where a few thousand people are consuming as much power as some medium-size countries.
Another thing is the large amount of art theft that’s happening in the NFT world. People just take someone else’s art and put it up for sale without the creator’s authorization or even knowledge. If you have any degree of popularity on the internet I suggest you make a search and it’s likely you’ll find your stuff for sale without no one having told you about it. The usual excuse given is “Oh, well, if they didn’t want this to happen they should have put it up for sale as NFTs by themselves!”, which is victim blaming of the highest caliber.
Let’s not forget that NFTs depend on crypto and as such they’re largely the reason why not even mid-range GPUs can be found anywhere these days, and if they can they’re at exhorbitant prices.
Also of importance, all of the purported benefits of NFTs (like being able to create items to sell in games) is stuff that can already be done, so there’s really nothing positive about the whole ordeal.
This is consistent with my lay understanding. NFTs seem to be like a property registry. Think about your car. There’s the physical object, and there’s the title to the car. The title is registered with a government bureau and is considered proof that you own the physical object. The title is useful because the entity that enforces ownership rights (the government) treats it as definitive. If somebody takes the physical object away from you, but you have the title, you can get the government to retrieve the physical object and return it to you. (Well… in theory.)
NFTs are an attempt to create a distributed property registry using blockchain technology. This looks pointless for at least two reasons. First, the entity that actually enforces ownership rights doesn’t consider NFTs relevant to anything. If I have an NFT, what ownership rights does it give me? What can I prohibit other people from doing with the things I supposedly ‘own’? Sure, I can sell the *NFT*, but what use value does it have? The use value of my car’s title is that it makes the property rights enforcement system protect and enable my use of the actual, physical vehicle. As far as I can tell NFTs provide no analogous use value, and without use value any exchange value they somehow acquire is just a tulip frenzy.
Secondly, there’s nothing about digital property that requires a distributed ownership registry in the first place. You could save a lot of time and money by just creating a centralized ‘digital ownership registry’ and giving people access to it. Steam seems to have done something along these lines already with those various gubbins that games drop into your account now and then.
Granted, I haven’t done a lot of digging into this, so it’s possible I’m misunderstanding something, but so far everything I’ve heard about NFTs indicates they are useless, pointless and a waste of resources.
On the plus side, I have to give props to Ubisoft for finding yet another reason for me to never buy their games. I didn’t think that was possible.
You’re correct about NFTs as they currently exist – they’re just pointers to art, not the art itself, and the art isn’t even stored on the blockchain itself but on a separate remote server which can go down, leaving you with a dead link to nothing. Weeee, how useful!
NFTs for digital goods in games is going a step beyond that, though. Theoretically you could have NFTs for a particular type of car, and you can take this NFT between different racing games and get the same car in each game. And your car can be unique compared to everyone else’s car; which also allows for rarity of cars – maybe only 1 in 1000 people have a car that is purple, so those purple cars stand out and thus have intrinsic value compared to the normal blue and red cars most schmucks have.
There are multiple issues with this concept:
1. For the most part, transferring items between games doesn’t make sense. Cars don’t fit into Diablo or Assassin’s Creed or Bejeweled. Most games have avatars of some sort so you could do things like have hats that move between games, but not all games have avatars (eg, Bejeweled), and again hats wouldn’t make sense in a lot of games anyway.
2. If the items are anything other than cosmetic, then bringing them into different games immediately brings up balance issues. If they’re purely cosmetic, then you’re going to get a large fraction of players who simply don’t care at all (such as myself).
3. You don’t actually need a blockchain / NFTs to achieve item portability between games. Very very few games have item portability like this though (the only one I can think of is Baldur’s Gate 1 being portable to 2, but that’s an RPG and a direct sequel in the same universe so frankly it’d be dumb if they didn’t support it), suggesting that it’s not actually all that interesting an idea (because of 1 and 2 above, and more reasons beyond I’m sure). Even if you wanted to move items between games from different publishers, as you say these items could be managed by Steam as a ubiquitous platform that each game connects into.
Really, I see NFTs as potentially being an important foundation stone for a future metaverse as is depicted in Ready Player One, where a lot of people spend a lot of time in the VR environment as themselves, and they plug into various games as themselves – in this case cosmetic avatar items, or even functional items, could make more sense. But we’re probably at least 10 years away from anything starting to truly approach what is depicted in Ready Player One.
Regarding the “tranferring items between games with NFTs” other than BG a sort of similar thing has been done before with DLCs, codes or the game just checking if you have the other game on your account. An example would be getting themed outfits relating to previous games in later AC titles.
Obviously the caveat is, and I can’t believe that this needs to be said but read on, that this needs to be put in the games by someone, as in it needs to be programmed in and while I’m relatively sure Ubi will do some kind of cross promotion between their NFT games there is literally no reason for, say, Gearbox to code one of Ubi’s stupid iconic hats into Borderlands. What boggles the mind is that there are people on the internet honestly claiming that you will simply be able to do it through the magic of NFT/blockchain alone. Like, I’ve seen and been part of conversations where people basically claimed things like “I’ll be able to buy the Final Fantasy car NFT and put it in my Sims game” or “but I’ll raid your minecraft server with my NFT rocket launcher” and when these people are told that’s just not how it works they get all “fight you IRL” and claim that yes it is because “the blockchain is decentralised” and “metaverse” (no further explanation apparently necessary).
Well yeah, they’re talking about a Ready Player One sort of future I alluded to, where there is a shared platform that games all work on and for the most part items can be transferred between games because they all share that platform.
Obviously no such platform currently exists and so current games can’t do that.
Really NFTs in that use-case are better served by the technological breakthrough that is… the steam inventory system. Think about all those times buying a game has netted you items in TF2? NFTs basically (aspire to) do that, but at extreme cost to the user and with the use of obscene amounts of energy. The idea of universally transferrable ownership is clearly nonsense, you can’t just take an NFT from Zelda and now you’ve the master sword in Mario Kart or Diddy Kong in Call of Duty. The only way it’d work is with bespoke implementations of each item by every creator. Which is already such a closed ecosystem that a centralised server would work better, and the idea of ‘unique’ items requires someone to actually make every single one, which means a game’s gonna have 10 and they’re gonna cost five grand each because you had to pay multiple staff members to make them. So instead we’re back to the generalised idea of transferring items, which would always require a game to support those specific items anyway, and again be far more sensible on something centralised and that doesn’t involve transaction fees.
@MerryWeathers “Cringe” in this context is talking about dreams. Not the dreams themselves. It is generally socially frowned upon for someone to discuss dreams.
I have never been able to remember how old I am without doing the math in my head. I’m mystified as to how anybody does; it’s just not something pressing that I feel I need to keep in mind.
Same here. If I am forced to think about it enough I’ll remember it for a while, but otherwise I need to do the math and usually end up underestimating it if I don’t.
Interestingly, I think it was at about 27 or 28 (much like Lino) that I no longer just remembered my age instantly any more, and instead had to stop and think about it to a varying extent. It’s not like I put any effort into remembering before that, it was just a piece of information that my brain apparently thought important enough to keep in the L1 cache.
I think my favorite thing to come from this whole NFT hullabaloo is watching how Quark lost his apes.
Wow the voices are actually on point!
Thank you so much for this! It made me happy.
A 28-year-old forgetting their age? Once you hit thirty, it is indeed fairly normal to stop and have to do the math, especially when you’re not at or nearing a milestone year. Your age is not as relevant at that point and time does indeed seem to be passing more quickly so you’re hitting new ages all the time.
Thank you for answering my question! Now I feel a little less weird :D
In terms of browser security, I have a similar story. Back when I was using Firefox, I was researching something on Facebook, and I remember opening the Java console (right-click “Inspect”). Plasterer all over the console – in my local language – was a bolded message in all-caps (I’m paraphrasing): “THERE IS NO WAY TO “HACK” ANOTHER PERSON’S FACEBOOK PROFILE! IF ANYONE CLAIMS TO GIVE YOU THAT ABILITY, IT’S A SCAM!”
I literally laughed out loud! And while I don’t remember the exact phrasing, I vividly remember the word “hack” being put in quotation marks. I wish I had taken a screenshot! So yeah, I guess this must be a common type of scam…
BTW, I found the dreams discussion quite interesting. But I wonder – is there some kind of cultural difference here? E.g. if you had a dream and a friend of yours was in it, would it still be considered socially awkward to tell that friend about it? Because I’ve always done it with my friends, colleagues and acquaintances. As have they. Or were you guys just talking about sharing of random dreams?
As for the topic at hand, I’ve also sometimes dreamt of having to use gameplay logic. While I don’t remember particular dreams, I do remember a… not very proud moment in my life where I had a monstrous hangover (it’s actually the only time in my life I’ve been hungover, since I’m usually a very responsible drinker). The previous day the last thing I did before going out was playing The Witcher 2. And before going I had saved my game.
On the next morning, as I was beginning to nurse my horrible hangover – for the first half an hour or so – I was thinking to myself “Don’t worry, I’ve got that save game from 16:30, I just have to load it and not go out!”
Again – definitely my proudest moment……
This reminds me of one time when I, also hung over, tried closing a parenthesis and put “9” instead. Missing a key by one and forgetting to hit “Shift” wouldn’t normally be that bizarre a mistake to make, except I was using pen and paper.
Red dead redemption 2 had a reasonable survival system. You never outright died from starvation, but your stats would deteriorate as you grew hungry, so you got worse at aiming and could absorb less damage before dying.
In essence, you could completely ignore it, but the game got a little harder for it.
At least, that’s the gist I got from playing 20 hours in before some other game distracted me away from it.
In the terms of the kind of hunger system you mention, stuff like Project Zomboid and Cataclysm:BN or DDA have a nutrition system present in them. It is fully possible to eat enough food to not starve, but die out from not actually eating anything with worthwhile nutrients.
Don’t Starve’s hunger system is incredibly basic, just fill it up with anything and you’re good, but it makes it more complex in that food can go stale or spoil. Given that you also have to balance sanity, temperature, and wetness, you’re doing a lot of plate spinning which makes the challenge. Just spoilage alone combined with Minecraft’s built-in hardcore mode having hunger affect regeneration, it would be a nasty combo, but you’d have to make the food harder to get.
I dunno, add boars, rams, roosters, and bulls? Make it to where you’ll have to have a fight to obtain meat, or design some redstone traps to capture animals if you wanted meat otherwise.
The minecraft modpack “SevTech: Ages” has a decent nutrition system – it considers for categories of nutrition and gives benefits if you can keep a “balanced” diet. It’s not exactly a “survival” system, but it does make food a lot more interesting because you’re no longer just looking for the single easiest kind of food to spam, at minimum you’re probably collecting three or four different types of food.
Nutrition systems seem fiddly and obnoxious to me but I once played a modpack that found a good middle ground with a simple variety system. The game tracked the last X amount of food you had eaten (40 fullness units maybe, I don’t recall the numbers) and if your recent diet included too much of any one food item then further consumption of that same item would give decreased fullness. I think it worked out such that you needed to be consuming at least four different food items to stay fed without taking any penalties, it did a good job of encouraging variety without requiring you to look up a bunch of boring nutritional info, and it had the interesting effect of making long journeys require several inventory spaces dedicated to stacks of food because 64 cookies is no longer going to cut it.
Yeah, I forget which mod is responsible for that… potato? Pam’s? Agricraft?
Yes, Zombicide is pretty much the best “survival food system” in videogaming right now.
The thing Don’t Starve nails that I’ve never seen any other survival game do well is a difficulty curve. The average survival game has the problem that it only gets easier over time: the threats you face are constant and the player only gets more powerful as they build up tools and bases. Don’t Starve has two good fixes for this problem.
First, you have bars that go down at different speeds and are most easily refilled with depletable resources. You’ll need to pay attention to your hunger by day 2 or you’ll starve, and after a few days you’ll have grabbed all the non-replenishable carrots nearby so staying fed gets harder, then by day 5 or 6 you’ll need to start paying attention to your sanity and a couple weeks in you’ll have used up all the easy sanity restores.
Second, the environment changes. Spider colonies and packs of hounds get bigger over time, and after a couple weeks the season shifts from fall to winter, forcing you to deal with a new cold mechanic and halting the growth of plants. Things don’t scale up infinitely, eventually you still reach the point where player power is growing faster than the world and the game transitions to something more sandboxy, but the survival elements stay interesting longer than any other game I’ve played.
I like the Winter. It’s the Summer that kills me with all of your crops constantly going up in flames and everything drying out. My wife and I usually use the “Make it back around to Autumn again” as our end goal to stop playing.
Minecraft has the “get stuff made in a hurry so you can survive your first night when the creepies come out”, but I like Don’t Starve’s “Get stuff made in a hurry so you can survive the first Hound attack after a week or so.”
I liked the early version of the game where there were only two seasons, Winter and Not Winter. Winter felt like it was designed to make gameplay evolve in interesting ways, summer and spring felt like the devs going “Crap, we need to come up with more gimmicks to define some new seasons”. They’re not terrible, but I feel like they don’t add nearly as much as winter does.
Re: NFTs, they have a defensible use case in a certain type of games. Specifically, trading card games like Magic: The Gathering. These days most such games are copying Hearthstone on the theory that it’s more profitable to make it impossible for players to trade, but if you don’t go that route and a core feature of your game design is people exchanging arbitrary digital goods, why not use the hot new technology for exchanging arbitrary digital goods?
This raises the obvious question of “Why not just have a centralized marketplace like every other videogame?” and there are two good answers, only one of which developers will admit to. The nice answer is that it allows you to outsource your marketplace: anyone can design an interface to trade your game’s stuff and there’s an established history of players creating third party marketplaces that are way better than the ones developers make. The unflattering answer is that there is an insane amount of money sloshing around in crypto and if your game has NFTs you’ll get some of that sweet crypto speculator money raining down on you. This isn’t necessarily bad for players: just like cosmetic DLC subsidizes Fortnite so that the core game can be free to play, subsidy via crypto whales can result in non-crypto “free players” getting something for nothing.
It’s not that anyone at Ubisoft has crypto wealth that they need to unload (how would that even be helped by NFT weapon skins? Crypto does not work that way), it’s that NFTs are the next dot com bubble with venture capitalists (crypto bros) throwing money at anything they see, so you might as well try to be something they see.
On the subject of NFT games: the problem here is that it’s pure buzz and hype… because this is basically a solved problem. Nothing prevented people from buying and selling game items except the Terms of Service. People do so all the time even against those. The problem is that this is broadly undesirable.
Turning a game into an economic function basically destroys its value as a game, a form of play, mastery and relaxation. The Diablo3 Auction House damaged the viability of the game, so that even though it delivered cash directly into ActBlizz’s veins it was remived; thecost simply wasn’t worth it. Moving that onto a blockchain massively increases the time and trouble for all involved, not the least of which is that functionally requires either a constant update from the chain in order to determine who actually owns what, or constant use of compatible wallets by all players.
Literally there is one and only advantage to this: non-players can speculate on game assets.
But doing so increases the risk of fraud, exposes a company to complex and murky legal issues, and diminishes the quality of a game. If the game is there to create external value, the core game must inherently be compromised in some way. When designers are making decisions to appeal to the NFT market they are always compromising the good of players. Note how the reaction of players to these kinds of announcements is always a genuine “Good Lord No!” Gamers are probably culturally adjacent to the crypto bros and are relatively well-positioned to see the reality of Crypto. The fact that they display an immediate negative response is no accident
This touches on another phrase I’ve seen in connection with game NFTs — “play to earn”. This is such a dishonest concept. The implication is that simply playing the game will lead the player to acquire digital goods. NFTs will make these goods salable in an open market, thus you can earn money by playing the game. Sounds fun, right?
The problem is that a digital good that one acquires naturally by playing the game will be extremely common. Everyone will get it just by playing. And why would anyone want to buy something that is so easy to get? The digital goods that would command significant price would be rare, therefore difficult to obtain. If you want to earn, you will need to play the game in a way that prioritizes jumping through difficult and arbitrary hoops to obtain something rare — and that isn’t “play” at all, not in the sense that makes it appealing to people. It sounds a lot more like work.
You know which people are “playing to earn” right now? Gold farmers in MMOs. Yeah, that sounds like the kind of fun I want injected into my single-player game.
Yeah, Play to Earn already has an example in Axie Infinity (this game features in that video Shamus linked, but that video was made before Axie’s bubble had burst and the economy started cratering)
Market efficiency says that any game premised around earning things worth real money by playing will reach one of two equilibria unless some other factor actively stops it:
* The “earning” activities are fun on their own, to the point where enough people will want to do them that the money involved will be negligible for everyone involved
* The activities are not fun on their own, and there is a real market niche for people willing to grind those activities to sell their progress to people who play for its own sake. At which point you’ll see people in poorer economic niches drive the price down until it’s negligible for, say, anyone in the US (the most famous example being Chinese gold farmers, though in this case the grinder demographic seemed to be mostly in the Phillipines)
Basically there’s no way you’re ever going to make real money playing a video game unless you’re bringing something to the table that can’t be found in every rando.
The TCGification of everything. Good Lord No!
Shamus, Paul, I can’t quite tell how serious you are, but Ubisoft executives are not trying to unload their personal NFT collections on an unsuspecting public before the NFT bubble bursts. They could be doing that in their off hours, I suppose, but that’s not what Ubisoft the company is doing.
No, Ubisoft is creating new NFTs to sell to gamers because (a) they’ve noticed that at the moment there are people out there willing to buy any damned thing with the initials NFT slapped on it and (b) they’re terrified that some of those people will buy some of those damned things from companies that aren’t Ubisoft. The sad thing is that from what I can find online Ubisoft’s revenue from NFT sales in 2021 was less than $2,000. Apparently, very few people are willing to buy an electronic receipt stored on a blockchain that certifies that their gun in Ghost Recon Breakpoint has a unique serial number. Who could have guessed? Not Ubisoft! According to Ubisoft, the problem is that gamers “just don’t get” NFTs yet.
The truth about NFTs is that they’re a low-effort cash grab. Consider Konami’s Castlevania NFTs, fourteen digital Castlevania assets that Konami just happened to have already lying around and which they sold for a total of $162,000. Konami isn’t transferring any rights to those assets or even promising to host them in perpetuity, so I’m not sure what the buyers think they’re getting for their money. Konami also gets a cut of up to 10% every time one of the NFTs changes hands. That’s $162,000 plus who knows how much else for almost no effort or expenditure on Konami’s part. It’s basically free money as far as they’re concerned.
‘Hey, here’s a thing people are shelling out money for, and it’ll cost us almost nothing to jump on the bandwagon!”
It really could be just that simple…
Your last point is very interesting: if Ubisofts NFTs are set up the same way, and they get a percentage every time something is traded, that might add up. Especially when they create something that is traded over and over again.
When you buy/sell a Steam trading card, a percentage goes to Steam. But my guess would be that usually those cards will only be sold once and then kept for eternity.
But what if Ubisoft sells weapons in different qualities, making you want to upgrade after some time? One weapon might swap hands numerous times, earning Ubisoft money every time.
Of course, that may not really matter since Ubisoft is free to keep on adding new stock to sell from scratch anyway. But if they really want to keep volumes relatively low (exclusive!), then making it easy to resell stuff is the way to go for them.
Whomever “mints” an NFT will always get a percentage of every subsequent sale, so yeah, obviously this plays a role.
No idea how it works with Steam cards. Usually people just farm them to sell them, but if there’s a speculative market where you buy some to keep and see if they raise in price I have no idea. I imagine this is a bit of a pointless endeavor. Cards are the most profitable when a game recently launches or, in very rare cases, when a formerly-unknown game gets a sudden boost of popularity (like it happened to Among Us two years after launch).
No they don’t, that is not how this works. Royalties are optional so not all NFTs have them but more importantly royalties are attached to the marketplace not the token. If someone mints on Nifty Gateway then they can set royalties for any time someone uses Nifty Gateway to sell it to someone else on Nifty Gateway, but the tokens are not locked to marketplaces so people can and do simply relist on Mintable to dodge the fees.
Sh, well, shit, I guess I was misinformed. In any case, this makes the situation more puzzling.
Ubisoft specifically has a super-weird heavily locked down system that talks about requiring a certain in-game level and real life age, but it’s not clear to me if or how that is enforced. As far as I can tell there’s nothing stopping anyone from making the transaction as with any other NFT, maybe their PR copy is just wrong and they’re actually enforcing in-game use of it rather than at point of sale? In general though it’s a free-for-all.
Man, now I kind of want to poke at Ubisoft Digits just on the assumption that the implementation is a janky mess and I can probably do something interesting that the developers didn’t intend with it. The only problem with this plan is I’d have to play an Ubisoft game.
As far as I can tell, the only NFT that Ubisoft is currently offering is a “unique” pistol skin for Ghost Recon Breakpoint that, if true to form, will make your P320 pistol a slightly different version of pistol-colored from the other P320 pistols in the game. To claim your pistol skin before the limited time offer expires and supplies of this digital asset somehow run out, you will need to:
(a) be playing Ghost Recon Breakpoint on PC,
(b) be at least level 5 in the game,
(c) have activated two-factor authentication in Ubisoft Connect,
(d) be at least 18 years old,
(e) live in and be a legal resident of an “eligible territory”, which at this time appears to consist of the US, Canada, the larger countries in western Europe, Australia, and Brazil, and
(f) have 100 or more kills in close-quarters-combat.
Once you’ve done all that, you can claim your NFT and trade it on the Tezos blockchain, which I am not going to investigate. I feel unclean having spent so much time on the Ubisoft Quartz website just now. I’ll just mention that according to Forbes, one Tezos was worth about $4 and there had been almost no Ubisoft Quartz trades on Tezos by the end of last year. Your NFT would be effectively unsellable and worth very little even in the very best case scenario. Furthermore, according to Patrick Klepek at Waypoint, who interviewed everyone who claimed the initial M4A1 gun-a-majig NFT and was not too ashamed to speak to him, no one has ever stopped to comment on these supposedly unique skins in-game, so you will gain zero social-cred among your fellow Breakpoint enthusiasts.
TL,DR: For the love of all that is good and righteous, Ninety-Three, don’t do it!
Ah, I read the bit where they say “To acquire Digits you must X, Y and Z” and took that literally, it sounds like what they actually mean is “To click the in-game button that gets you a Digit you must X, Y and Z, at which point you now have an NFT that can be transferred willy-nilly.”
That’s boring, I was imagining that that they were somehow trying to clamp down on trading and it would be fun to test the limits of that system.
There was a rather high-profile case of a DAO spending millions for the NFT of a Dune concept art book and thinking it gave them the right to create derivative works from it: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/28/22950868/spice-dao-crypto-jodorowsky-dune-bible-collective-writing-contest
That was a very interesting article, but it does not say what you suggest it says. According to the article, the DAO bought an actual Jodorowksy Dune concept art book, not an NFT, and did not try to create derivative works. Instead, they are trying to use their leftover money to fund their own, non-Dune TV show.
My interpretation of the article was that this is what happens when a DAO is so incompetently run that they can’t even manage to organise a proper rug-pull.
The MtG DAO might be a better example, at work so can’t really do links but googling “MtG NFTs” should give you all the information you need.
That car ‘seatbelt’ feature sounds somewhat irresponsible. A warning about not wearing your seatbelt is a fine (and even laudable) thing – but do it subtly and shut up when you’ve made your point. Somehing that gets worse over time and never stops very quickly becomes a danger in itself.
If I couldn’t or didn’t do it when I first started the engine, am I going to be able to do it while the car is moving, you jackass?!
I’m 100% with Paul; it’s a system that benefits the insurers in the long run, so it’s been put in regardless of any other concerns. If Shamus crashed his car because he was distracted by an alarm shrieking in his ear and couldn’t hear anything else, the insurers aren’t going to care about the crash – they’d just use the fact he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt to try and avoid paying out.
To be fair, there’s a very simple way to stop the alarm, which is to put the seatbelt on. I hear Shamus speak about it and it really feels he refused to wear the belt out of spite, when it would have been much more simple to just put it on. Yeah, he was driving slowly, but what if some lunatic shows up from behind at high speed and rams his car?
I mean, I get it. Yeah, you’re a responsible adult and you don’t like it when an undescerning machine annoys you to do something you don’t consider necessary, but who are you protesting to in such a situation? It’s not like you’re being monitored by the manufacturer and it’s much less annoying to take a couple seconds to put the thing on than spending several minutes with a constant beeping in your ear. It really feels like it’s just a “You don’t tell me what to do, you stupid machine!” situation. It doesn’t make you feel any better and doesn’t fix your problem, ah, but you get to stand your ground in front of… a lifeless machine.
To be fair, I have been guilty of the same situation, where I get mad at a machine and do the opposite of what it asks me to do just to “teach it a lesson”, but I recognize it as silly behavior done in a fit or rage. I don’t try to pass it off as a sane course of action.
Now Paul’s situation I find entirely agreeable. If the damn thing is malfunctioning then your protests are perfectly legitimate and by all means smash it with a hammer if you have to.
To be clear:
I was the passenger. I wasn’t refusing out of spite. I had a bunch of stuff in my lap. Our car is small. It wasn’t possible to put on my seatbelt without clearing my lap, which would require getting out and stowing the stuff in the back. MAYBE I could have turned around and shoved the stuff between the seats, but doing that while in motion would not have enhanced our driving safety. (Further confounding factor: I was wearing a large winter coat. Moving around in that confined space was not easy.)
“What if some lunatic shows up from behind?”
We were in a parking lot, not on the road. The odds of a high-speed crash were roughly the same as being randomly struck by lightning. The car might as well have been beeping at me for not equipping a lightning rod.
OK, sorry. I’m projecting from my father’s behavior, who does that shit all the time.
It is possible to turn off your car’s seat belt sensor on a per seat basis. Exactly how varies by manufacturer. For my car it was putting the seatbelt in-and-out 15 times within 50 sec.
Google it and I bet you’ll find the exact method to toggle that feature off and on.
Part of me hopes the answer is ‘pull fuse #47’.
Also, I hate it when my car Insists that I buckle my watermelon.
That also works. Kinda. Problem is an annoying warning is tends not to be the only thing on that circuit. However these kinds sensors and warnings (seat belt) are software. It’s a toggle. The only hard part is using the ridiculous hidden “buttons”. OBD2 scanners and programmers (can be done with a phone app) also make these changes.
Yeah, I knew a guy back in collage who wrote a custom ‘software update’ for his engine computer to save a few pennies on gas.
“Step 10: Use a hacksaw to cut lines 3 and 4 as illustrated.”
Hey, I’ve got nothing against say, ten seconds of a machine beeping to tell you that you haven’t put on your seatbelt. But as described, an alarm that just gets worse and antagonises the driver over time isn’t helping.
Sh* – Shamoose Drivecarman might get hit by another car because he was distracted by the alarm.
But for me it’s not so much the alarm as what it represents, which is a cynical and insulting exercise in someone else covering their ass with little-to-no regard for the user. I’ve also seen a friend’s car ‘break down’ in the middle of the the motorway because a sensor near his gas tank got bumped.
(Cost him £200, a missed holiday flight, and 4 days without a car.)
As for ‘it’s much less annoying to take a couple seconds to put the thing on than spending several minutes with a constant beeping in your ear’…to me that’s like saying:
“It’s not that inconvenient when [pick one of many games] shows you 3 company logos via splash screens, then holds you up while it connects to company servers, every time you try to access the main menu.”
Or “Those multiplayer features/lootboxes/microtransactions that the game is forever trying to ‘encourage’ you to interact with are optional! Some of them are even fun!”
I don’t care that these are minor inconveniences or issues; they’re still inconveniences, that I didn’t ask for, that don’t benefit me.
*Actually, lets call him ‘Shamoose Drivecarman’, to avoid ascribing emotions or intentions to Shamus Young that he might not have.
The really fun one was the door alarm. It’s a quite loud alarm that lasts for half a second when the door opens… as long as the alarm is working properly. But that alarm starts going bad, and starts going off at random (you can even leave the door open, and it will still toggle between open and closed). You can end up listening to that quite loud alarm every other second for the entire trip. And of course replacing the alarm requires pulling the door apart.
I can’t for the life of me figure out what my car is trying to achieve with its door alarm:
Scenario a) Park -> switch off engine -> open driver’s door. Result: no alarm.
Scenario b) Park -> open driver’s door -> switch off engine. Result: continuous alarm until I close the door again but only after I switch the engine off
It doesn’t make any sense.
If you’ve left the keys in the ignition, that’s the standard door alarm that tells you that the keys are in the ignition with the engine off so that you hopefully don’t lock the keys in the ignition. The alarm in a car my parents had sounded like the motion detector from the old Aliens video game, which I found kinda cool …
My car doesn’t even have anywhere to put a physical key into the ignition. I’m pretty sure I can park, leave the engine on, get out of my car, close the door and walk off without setting off an alarm until the engine cuts out due to the key fob being too far away, which makes Scenario b) even stranger.
That’s more what annoys me about a lot of these things, which is that the systems don’t really know what’s going on and might break. For the seatbelt alarm, in general it isn’t an issue because if you’re doing what you should do you’d never hear it but in any case where it doesn’t make sense to put the seatbelt on it’s annoying enough to bother most people and isn’t serving its purpose. Your example is one where if the thing breaks it’s really annoying for absolutely no purpose. But these are all minor compared to the automatic breaking and lane assist and traction control and the like. While they may not do the wrong thing that often (traction assist, from what I’ve heard, is the worst of the three as during a recent snowstorm in the area people were being told to turn it off because it was keeping them stuck) if they ever break you can end up with a car that either does nothing or does dangerous things. And if there’s one thing we know about mechanical things it’s that they all break eventually and tend to break in the worst possible ways for the users.
The thing with NFTs is that they’re a self-defeating endeavor, which is why their supporters need to trick people into thinking they’re a good idea. The entire call to fame of crypto and NFTs is that they’re an unregulated market. The problem with this is that since it’s unregulated it’s filled with unscrupulous people selling stuff they don’t actually own. NFTs sell themselves as being something positive to artists, who can sell their stuff as NFTs and have not only a big payout, but also earning royalties for every subsequent sale. The problem is that due to the nature of the system, many artists are getting their stuff sold without their permission or even knowledge, and they don’t see a virtual cent of it, which is the opposite of helping them.
This whole thing is exacerbated by NFT bros trying to convince everyone that whomever doesn’t want NFTs is an uninformed idiot. “Ah, I see people are again talking about stuff they know nothing about”, they’ll say in a smug tone while hilariously refusing to explain just what is what we’re not getting or even more hilariously just repeating the stuff we just refuted.
Yesterday the creator of the popular webcomic Flork of Cows had a bit of a rant on Twitter. Apparently someone put his art for sale as NFTs without his authorization and interestingly enough his initial response was calm. He basically just told them to take that down and not do it anymore. How did they respond? They complained on Twitter. They said that they couldn’t find the artist, which a) is obviously BS and b) still doesn’t excuse them for putting up for sale stuff they don’t own. They also said that their endeavor as NFT sellers is to give an audience to artists, but that they couldn’t do that with someone who responded that way. Yes, a Twitter account with less than 30 followers is going to give an audience to one with 136K, and they’re going to do that by putting up his art for sale without crediting him while literally pretending they created the art (which is what they did, btw), and then they’re going to pretend the actual creator is the jerk for not letting them profit off his work.
So Flork was livid and told them to fuck off. Do you know how much of an asshole do you have to be to get this guy mad? Well, I gave you a pretty accurate gauge up there, I think. And you have to understand that this isn’t an isolated case. This is sadly the norm. These guys know they have a scam on their hands and they know the only way to get people to buy into it is being dishonest.
By the way, NFT sellers don’t deal only in pictures. Everything, even entire Youtube channels and websites have been put up for sale without the actual creator’s authorization. If I were you, I’d do a search to make sure no one’s trying to sell your stuff, Shamus.
I would characterize the situation a bit differently. Right now NFTs are not a free market, they’re a *black* market. The distinction is that a free market is one with mechanisms that punish force and fraud. A black market has no such mechanisms. Scammers and fraudsters are drawn to black markets for obvious reasons — if you tried pulling the kinds of theft that you described above in a free market the government would come down on you like a ton of bricks.
I suspect that if the government were to enact some kind of legal standard for creating an NFT asserting ownership of an object, such that doing so without independent proof of ownership was a prosecutable crime, then a lot of this crap would dry up overnight.
This Flork guy is ngmi, smh my head.
I’ve only watched Omori, because that game gets really, really dark and I’m not comfortable playing through it. Lisa the Painful is the same to a lesser extent*.
Other than that, maybe Nier Automata? The opening of Ending C makes it pretty hard to go through A or B again.
*(Lisa the Painful also has Buzzo, the super punchable villain who effortlessly wins in every scene he’s in and who you never get to punch.)
The idea of a game darker than Lisa scares me.
Omori’s got content warnings at the beginning, and it means them.
It’s also got defeated characters turning into toast and recurring boss fights with Pluto the Rogue Planet, so… it’s funny, and a good game.
But man it gets dark. Willing and able to twist knives.
The whole thing with NFTs (why, how, etc) is a repeat of the speculative Tulip Mania back in 1636. Or the South Sea Company bubble. Which was a company in name only. It never did anything in the 140 yrs it existed. Well, except nearly destroy and create a debt that was only recently paid off in 2015. There’s an early Extra Credits history video about it.
The phenomenon of these kinds of bubbles are well studied by economists. They repeat because the ‘Whys’ and ‘Hows’ don’t change. NFTs are just the next iteration.
Tulip mania was based on a real demand for tulips meeting with early futures contracts, the South Sea Company got big because people thought it would be a real company, and NFTs are in the news because of a mix of wash trading and young crypto millionaires throwing around money like they just won the lottery. Of course the whys and hows change, those are extremely different cases!
I disagree with everything you just wrote there.
I’d be fascinated to hear why you think wash trading isn’t a major factor driving NFT prices.
Wash trading was happening back in both the Tulip Mania and the South Seas Company.
Likewise tulips have no economic use and no plan to make it worth the investment. There was no one who wanted to actually use the tulips. Certainly not at the “market prices” demanded.
It was all Greater Fool speculation along side other frauds.
It sounds like you are not disagreeing that wash trading in crypto is a major thing, which leaves me confused as to what you meant by “I disagree with everything you just wrote there”.
The early investors (not initial though) of the South Sea Company likely thought it was a real thing. Years later though? When it hadn’t done anything? — No.
It was in 1718 that I quote: “Any prospect of profit from trade, for which the company had purchased ships and had been planning its next ventures, disappeared.” It was 1720 the share price ‘went to the moon.’
It was not expected to be a real company. There was not a real demand for tulips. NFTs aren’t big news because of young crypto millionaires. It’s in the news to drive hype and demand. It’s the same forces — speculative greed and a desire to play the system and not be one of the Fools when it ends — that fueled the manias then and now.
The situations are extremely similar. In all cases it was a new unregulated market going nuts. Which was inevitable due to being foundationally built on corrupt systems and individuals. With no counter balancing alternate self-interest to keep it grounded in reality. IE a lot of people wanted these frauds to ‘go to the moon’ while there’s no one who has a vested interest to stop it.
Nah, Steve’s right.
It’s possible that history may have exaggerated the tulip mania, but the South Sea Company was always a scam. The company’s business model was to exploit a royal monopoly on trade between England and Spain’s South American colonies. It sounds good, but (a) England was at war with Spain, so there was no trade and (b) Spain prevented trade between England and the Spanish colonies as a matter of policy even when England and Spain were at peace, so there was never going to be any trade. It would have taken a miracle, or at least a drastic, sudden change in Spanish foreign and economic policy for the South Sea Company to make any money at all, let alone enough to justify its market valuation. And people at the time knew this! But the company claimed that trade between England and South America would obviously be so profitable that of course the Spanish would seek peace and completely overturn their historical colonial policy. The price of South Sea Company stock was driven entirely by wishful thinking on the part of the buyers and fraud on the part of the sellers. The South Sea Company was a get rich quick scheme from start to finish and, in that respect, exactly like NFTs.
You are agreeing with me. People thought that the South Sea Company would perform actual economic activity which would yield dividends justifying their investments. This is not the case with NFTs, a Bored Ape fundamentally does not do anything and that alone puts it into an entirely different category of goods subject to different economic principles.
“It’s a bubble lol” is true of both but if you give it more than four words you will notice that the cases are not the same.
I’m really not. There was no economic activity. There was never going to be any economic activity. Some people said there would be and, at the beginning, some other people believed them, but that had nothing to do with the high stock prices that ensued. That was pure speculative frenzy. The notion of economic activity just isn’t relevant. NFTs are the same because, while there are people out there who believe and believe hard, that has nothing to do with the prices of NFTs now.
There are actual factors which lead to speculation happening for item A but not item B and it is a bad model of speculative bubbles that doesn’t care about the difference between pieces of art and company stock.
“Who else has dreams where the dreamworld seems to run on videogame logic”
I actually had a dream which was entirely in something like Quake engine, but it couldn’t be less viedeogame’y – I met an eel, who proceeded to explain to me why the discography of Fiery Furnaces is awesome and essential (in reality I only like the first two albums).
As I vaguely recall, I stopped Terranigma at some point because I predicted some rather downer story beats. GTA 4 was a drag because I felt bad for Niko and the best thing I could do for him and me was to stop playing. There were other games I stopped due to story but it seems like I successfully forgot them.
In general, I really don’t like bittersweet ending or if things get too dour and I limit which games I play accordingly.
Stories can get to me in ways that negatively affect me for weeks and severely affect my ability to sleep. There’s not a chance in hell I could bring myself to even watch someone else play My Dragon Cancer or This War of Mine.
I also ended Mass Effect 3 right before getting back to Earth because I knew about the ending. Ending it at the Citadel DLC has left me with a mostly positive view of the game.
My big example would be Bioshock Infinite’s DLC Burial at Sea part 2. It’s the best bit of Binfinite from a gameplay perspective, but I’ll never replay it because its story feels so mean spirited towards its protagonist, culminating in an utterly unnecessary horrific first person torture scene. (The fact that it just so happens that the first female protagonist of the Bioshock series is also the first to get a torture scene also feels decidedly icky)
Come to think of, the Tomb raider reboot also qualifies. I really don’t need to see Lara dying horrifically every time I fail a QTE, thanks.
I have many issues with NFTs, but my main one boils down to a very philosophical point.
The main reason why some things are expensive and hard to get IRL is some type of scarcity. Why is the Mona Lisa worth so much money? Because there exists only one in the entire world. You can get printed reproductions that are good enough for your living room cheaply enough, you can get painted reproductions if you want to be fancy (I presume, maybe this is not being done for the Mona Lisa in particular, but some artists indeed do make reproductions of famous pieces that are clearly labelled and sold as such). But none of those will be the original in the end, and even if a reproduction is so close to the original that only extensive scientific analysis could ever tell the difference (afaik primarily by testing the age of the materials), it won’t be the Mona Lisa, the one original instance of the image that da Vinci painted himself.
I say image, not painting, because while a specific painting can only exist once, an image, i.e. the information transported by the painting, can be copied, and if it is a digital one it can be copied without any loss of information. Any copy is identical to the original, any copy effectively is the original because there never existed an original piece in any traditional sense. Even if a digital artist sold you the very hard drive used to make the first instance of an image, on it would be merely a copy because the original existed in that computer’s RAM first, and that data is lost now, but most importantly:
It is irrelevant. This technology makes the distinction between original and copy entirely meaningless.
This is an inherent property of digital information and the very reason why it went to dominate the entire world.
And my philosophical stance is that this is a good thing, and the limitations of the physical world that lead to scarcity, rarity and thus monetary value in certain objects – no, I’d say any object – is just an unfortunate reality we have to deal with, not an ideal that to cherish, let alone reproduce where it is not in effect. Digital information transcends these limitations and enables us to do things with information that would be otherwise impossible.
What NFTs aim to do then, what their proponents themselves claim (and if that claim turns out to be a lie, then NFTs can be dismissed as a deliberate scam right away, but let’s entertain the idea that they actually mean well), is to simulate a kind of scarcity and rarity akin to that found inherent in the physical world. In other words: there are people who aim to prevent a potential digital utopia by turning it into a not just potential but very real digital dystopia where information and the access to it is subject to the same or similar principles as physical objects.
You think it is already bad enough in video games with all the FOMO, special editions, exclusive items, preorder bonuses, twitch drops – all the bullshit where some ingame item or content is held hostage by some arbitrary marketing or monetization scheme, but ultimately still not inherently limited like a physical item, and in many cases easily accessed by other means (e.g. mods), and finally it is still just something in a particular video game when there are plenty of other games – and other forms of media – to enjoy?
Now imagine every kind of digital information potentially bound up in such a scheme. Yes, NFTs don’t really limited access, if you buy an NFT of a JPG you merely own a link to a specific copy on a specific server (whatever “to own” in this context even means) and anyone can access it and look at it, you just get the smug knowledge that it is “yours, somehow”.
But look beyond the technical reality of NFTs now and look at the vision of their proponents. That vision doesn’t talk about hyperlinks on the blockchain, that vision aims towards some form of actual ownership and enforced scarcity, and is not related to video games in the first place. NFTs are just the start and if it does not stop here, we might end up with a very different internet in the long run.
Imagine an internet where any piece of information – images, audio, video, text, code, etc – can (and very often will) be owned, restricted, monetized, and traded, by someone. The prononents are trying hard to make it sound like a nice free-market utopia, where everyone can buy a picture and when they don’t like it any more, just sell it, how everyone can participate in the creating and/or trading of information and thus benefit e.g. by earning money.
But we already know this is not how these kinds of systems work. “Everyone” very quickly dissolves into “anyone, theoretically” before it turns out it always has been “only a few people, actually”.
(If you want to interject here and say something like “that’s still a scam then”, congratulations, you are one step closer to a realization that is too political to spell it out here.)
And now imagine all the shit Ubisoft might be hoping to pull of when they announced they would go big into NFTs, and imagine that kind of bullshit not just in video games, but everywhere.
No Fucking Thanks.
My dreams have cutscenes. Sometimes I do things and then I’m just a passive floating third-person observer for a time. I don’t think I ever saw myself (or someone who represents me in the dream), though.
I did have one dream that took place in a trainyard, except all the tracks turned at 90° like it was SimCity. Unfortunately (or fortunately since I fell on the tracks) no trains came through, so I didn’t get to see them make 3-frame turns.
You don’t need a bar at all. You need cues. The “Realistic Needs and Diseases” mod did this pretty well for Skyrim. Hungry? You hear a tummy rumble. Thirsty? You start to cough and clear your throat noisily. Tired? You start loudly yawning and move slower. Stuffed? You move slower. Drunk? Stuff gets blurry. (That was already in the game of course.) And they affect your stats, as well, so your skills get reduced, your health, stamina, and magika get reduced, which also means that your CARRYING CAPACITY decreases. Your carry weight maximum going down in Skyrim is enough motivation on its own to keep you from ignoring this system, but it also means that if you get in a bind you can just dump stuff on the ground. There are also pop-up messages when your state changes that are very simple, like “you’re still thirsty” or “you could have a bit more” or “you’re full”, but if you were designing a game to incorporate this from scratch you could replace them with animations of your character either guzzling down the water/food ultra-fast or taking a more relaxed sip/bite to indicate when you’re approaching satiation. Or doing a slow climb out of bed when still tired vs. an energetic bounce-out-of-bed. With sounds and animations you don’t need any other cues. And if you make the stat changes semi-independent of your immediate “fullness” state, you’ve got a difference between nourished and malnourished as well. One big meal won’t instantly repair a month of short commons. Likewise, if your character is constantly stuffed, they could undergo some other negative stat changes because they are getting bloated and sluggish.
It’s a very complex system under the hood, but the cues to the player are all idiot-simple and barely require you to pay attention or try to decipher complex symbols on the UI. That’s good design. It was so good it basically ruined the not-nearly-as-good “survival mode” that Bethesda put out later for me.
The other dumb thing that makes the design aggravating is the “oop, meter’s empty, you died” mechanic. It’s dumb. Being at a low satiation shouldn’t make you instantly die, it should do something AGGRAVATING like slow you down or make you clumsy in combat or reduce your carry weight. It should get PAINFULLY annoying LONG before there’s any risk of you just dropping dead. Like hit points in D&D, it shouldn’t be a binary “you are perfectly fine!” vs. “you are dead!”