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The problem is the imbalance, not the idea of protection. We don’t jump to laissez faire legislation because regulatory capture exists. It makes good sense to give legal rights to individual creators for their works so they can choose whether to seek to monetize them or make them freely available, at least until their death. If you wrote a book/song/program/etc. I want you to have the authority to make that determination for your creation, and in a system of person vs person, while it’s not a given that both people would enter litigation as equals, it would at least be more likely than when one of the ‘people’ is a multi-million dollar VC-funded company. If companies have no personhood, they cannot own IP from creation to the end of the universe. No corp personhood would also limit their ability in many jurisdictions to enact lobbying, regulatory capture, and various other chicanery. I’m not saying it’d be easy but it would be effective and a solid step in the right direction, where eliminating IP would only enable further corporate abuse.
Imagine this in another product. Say you were looking at buying some clothes, and because they didn’t want to pay someone to cut the fabric, they just folded it over, stitched the outline of a shirt, and left all the fabric on the inside. Then when you point out that they must either be unskilled as tailors because they can’t even manage simple seam allowance, or greedy, because they choose not to just to add maybe a few pennies to the stockholder’s dividends, some loser who gets zero benefit from the extra fabric runs out of nowhere to explain how ‘it’s your fault. Don’t you have room in your closet for the extra material? Why don’t you just move to a bigger house? I’m morally superior because I’m complaining about your complaining about something you can’t fix rather than about the people who have the power to make the changes choosing not to! Why don’t you stick to wearing your hand-stitched designer clothes made with love and care if you can’t afford to buy a closet big enough to house all the pointless wastage of these incredible producers of generic, lowest common denominator, middle of the road, unoriginal t-shirts that people mostly buy because of marketing and familiarity bias? Don’t you know the only people who matter are the wealthy?’
accommodating preferences in one is far easier than the other.
Tell me you’ve never tried to code a complex interactive experience without telling me you’ve never tried to code a complex interactive experience. If you think it’s so easy to take every element of a highly complex, performance sensitive program and make it possible to pick and choose which ones you experience without breaking the whole experience or turning a 1 year project into a 10 year project, go ahead and try. Do you also ask movie directors to make their movies so that when you hit ‘skip scene’ because you don’t like the way the scene looks, it still makes a good movie?
museums aim to preserve history
That’s just your failure to understand there are more kinds of museum than a history museum. A history museum does have special work involved, but others don’t share that element. Perhaps you’ve heard of an art museum, sometimes also known as a gallery. They can contain all sorts of elements, audio, video, scent, touch, taste, human interaction, machine interaction, ludic interaction, whatever. The artifacts can be any age, with art from hundreds of years ago or being created in the moment via performance.
The analogy is a failure, to be sure, but only because I hadn’t considered the possibility you wouldn’t have that piece of common knowledge. Now that you do have that knowledge, though, if you can’t see the analogy, that’s on you.
You really like the word ‘gatekeep,’ as though it were a bad thing. When you walk into a museum, start complaining about the lack of teleporters and strippers, and then get told to leave, yeah, they’re gatekeeping you, but it’s because you’re complaining about the lack of teleporters and strippers in a museum. That’s not what it’s there for. They have curated a collection of experiences focused on creating an overarching experience, and you have wandered in, said ‘I don’t want to have to walk to each exhibit, teleport me,’ and ‘This exhibit is booooooring. Teleport me to the one with strippers.’ If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re looking in the wrong place.
I’m not sure about every game but I’d like to see a lot more games do what Rebel Galaxy did and let you set up paths for custom OST. No game dev can license the perfect soundtrack for every player, but it’s great to be able to slot in what I feel makes the perfect soundtrack. Some people want their fight scenes to be scored with DMX, some want Burzum, and some want the Cronos Quartet. Let them all find their moment.
I was with you at first, thinking you meant in a sandbox game, like turning off hunger/on hardcore in Minecraft, etc. but you’re just whining because every moment isn’t custom built to keep up with your personal ADHD/hedonic treadmill. The point of a game isn’t to just give you a blowjob from launch to credits. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re looking in the wrong place.
My particularly niche gripe is bad dialogue tree options. There are so many games where the mechanism is selecting an option and watching it play out, but so many of them are shit when it comes to the difference between what you see as the option and what actually is said/done. Heavy Rain did it. ‘What should the character say next? Unreadable zalgotext option A, or unreadable zalgotext option B?’ Or ones where the options on screen are ‘A) I thoroughly agree. B) I thoroughly disagree. or C) What?’ but selecting C means the character isn’t just asking for clarification because ‘What?’ actually points at the voiceline, ‘What the fuck are you talking about, you piece of inhuman filth? I bet your a murdering rapist.’ If I can’t have some idea of what selecting an option will do, I’m not actually playing a game at that point. I might as well be trying to play Mario with a controller that remaps itself randomly.
The others have been improving for a bit but GOG and itch have been focused on niche markets while Steam has grown broadly using the money from valve’s early successes. If they want to step up to the kind of scale steam operates at, it will take a lot to overcome the innate loyalty of ‘I already have 1000 games worth of time and money invested in the steam system,’ and grow their repertoire outside their niches. Epic and Ubisoft also have tried, but they’re still trying to catch up to where steam has been plugging along for ages. Epic has tried to build out their own version of the ‘1000 games’ moat by giving out constant free games but their moat still isn’t that big, and ubisoft has been relying mostly on having a few exclusives, but that hasn’t really been a winning plan either because it’s not enough to get people to think ‘I want a game,’ means ‘go to origin,’ instead of ‘check to see if i already have it on steam.’
I get tired pretty quick of games where the multiplayer aspect is considered important to enjoying the game. If your friends are with you, you can enjoy literally sitting in the dirt doing basically nothing, just chatting. If your game requires me to also drag friends into it like some cultist, just to make it pass the bar into ‘fun’ then the game is a failure, plain and simple. They don’t get credit for the fun I brought with me to the show I paid for.
I played another guy’s game (game dev thesis project) based on the Milgram experiment. It definitely didn’t have this level of graphical fidelity. I’d be happy to give some feedback. I’m running Bazzite at the moment so if you need someone to look at for proton compatibility, etc. I’m happy to be the guinea pig there as well.
Definitely. It’s minimal effort and makes a game vastly wider in its appeal. PvP and PvE are very different experiences in any game. For one, I’ve never fought a bot in a PvE game which then felt the need to call me slurs for winning or losing. Also, I’ve never played a PvP game where I get the depth of strategy I can get against a real person.
It’s been a minute but i think i know what might be bugging you about the controls. If it’s the having to move and look with the same control, check the settings. There might be a way to adjust it.
As for other options…
-The Farming Simulator games are great for controller.
- Story of Seasons is on sale on Steam right now.
- Out of Ore
- Mini Metro
- Jalopy
- Shipbreaker
- the My Time At … series
- No Mans Sky
- Never Alone
- Hokko Life
- Staxel
- Rebel Galaxy
- Olli Olli
- Arctico
Looking on steam cross-referencing ‘casual’ and ‘good for steam deck’ is probably a good way to find some more.
I’ll recommend Kinetica. It’s a one-of-a-kind racing game where you race through gravity-defying tracks as a person in a kind of iron-man negligee with wheels while listening to old-school techno.
Shadow of the Colossus is one of my favorite games ever, battling entities big enough that you run around on top of them, subtle storytelling, an enormous map for the time it was made, and fairly large even by modern standards.
The Tenchu games are also good: ninja stealth assassination.
Dark Cloud 2 is a kind of fun game. Smack your way through dungeons with a wrench and use the bits to build villages for your allies.
Bloody Roar is a favorite for fighting games. Fight to BIOS energy then transform into a wilder form, like a mole, a bear, etc. and you can kick people through the edges of the arenas into new areas to fight.
Devil May Cry is a classic.
Ratchet and Clank, classic.
Time Splitters is reminiscent of even older games.
Red Faction 2 wasn’t a bad little shooter.
I do, because it broadly displays a bad approach. If a thing should be in the game, it should just be in the game. There is no reason the developer has to gate things behind a payment. Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew, and so many others, all managed to keep adding content without pretending that DLC was anything more than a way to pay out for shareholders. The invasion of microtransactions into gaming has been nothing but harmful, deceptive, and malignant, and I refuse to participate.
I haven’t played 4, but I played 1, 2, and a bit of the presequel or whatever it was called. They were essentially all the same game. Run, shoot, run, shoot, hear vaguely off-color joke, run, shoot. Is there any particular reason to bother with an overpriced remake of the same old game? Is there a reason for worrying about 4KUHD textures on a game where the aesthetic is cartoony? If you’re a 9 year old who’s never played, and it’s all on mom’s dime, I could see being tricked into buying it by the advertisers, but why is anyone else excited about it?
Yep. It’d be a massive improvement to see artists getting an iota of the deference the courts show to large corporations.
To make the last part clearer, the state we have now effectively is the ‘no IP’ state, but as created by uneven enforcement. Per the letter of the law, companies are supposed to pay for the IP they use, including, somehow, AI derivatives. Things are bad enough but dumping IP entirely would mean there wasn’t even those ostensible protections. It’d be some Libertarian’s fantasy I don’t want to be anywhere near.