holy shit that fucking tweet at 15:30, "nothing was risked and nothing was gained", my dude this is a fucking video game, NOTHING IS RISKED BY DEFINITION OF IT BEING A FUCKING GAME
shit like this makes the various "you die in the game you die in real life" movie/anime plots seems not even that out there, gamers would ABSOLUTELY sign up in droves for a game like that just so they can brag about how badass and hardcore they are, "you casual gamers don't even face the risk of actually dying, lol scrub"
Achievements and their repercussions have been a disaster.
I still have the old school PC gamer attitude of "I don't care how the dev intended it, I'm going to make it how I intend it."
I disagree with the idea that "gaining" something from stuff we consume is "capitalistic" like it just seems so ideologically confused. What's wrong is not the idea of playing hard video games to experience catharsis after overcoming frustration. There's nothing wrong in wanting to improve gaming skills either. What's wrong is dictating the bestest way to experience games and also making an embarrassing tweet about it. The embarrassing portion is feeling so deeply identified with "gaming" that you take offense when other people experience it in a different way, it's deeply poisoned.
I'm not even going to get into cheating in competitive games either, lumping cheating in single player games and cheating in multiplayer games together already feels like a mistake to me.
I think the video was mostly focusing on single-player cheating, the online stuff was more there as part of the quick historical overview. But yeah, cheating in multiplayer games is a completely different topic.
As for the gaining part - I don't think Polygon are really anything more than libs, so I wouldn't expect ideological coherence there. But there is an actual point to be made about a certain cult-like attitude that every piece of media ought to somehow "improve" you as a person, and be all about self-growth and actualization - you see this kind of stuff with techbros and other such dipshits, who seem to consume a lot of media not because they actually enjoy it, but in order to tick it off on a checklist of "important" media, convinced that this by itself somehow makes them better people. That's... obviously not a particularly good way to approach art.
Like, check the Elon post about chess - he's specifically framing chess' simplicity as being bad because it's not useful in real life. Why does a strategy game have to be in any way relevant to real life? Well, that's precisely this attitude, that everything you do must be making you better - you cannot enjoy things for their own sake, every time you're reading a book or playing a game that's not actively making you smarter, or improving your skills, you're wasting your time. And this I would say does have something to do with capitalism - I'm too dumb with regards to theory to really explain it in proper terminology, but it's something to do with the cult of productivity, the idea that, as a worker, you must be improving at all times, which is framed as being for your own benefit, but in reality is so your bosses can extract even more value from you.
Certainly, games are a relatively harmless place for this to express itself in, but the deeper attitude it betrays is very pernicious, and has genuine negative impacts when applied to the workplace, where you can't just be allowed to do your job - you have to always be optimizing yourself, or you're somehow a bad worker (and person).
But there is an actual point to be made about a certain cult-like attitude that every piece of media ought to somehow “improve” you as a person
Ohhhh yeah I see where this is coming from, and yeah it's absolutely true. I never considered that the "you cheated yourself" nerd was coming from this sigma grindset mentality where your free time must be devoted to acquiring marketable skills or at least pretending that your skills you're supposedly building are marketable. In the case of Musk, I'd argue that it's actually some cheeky post-rationalization, like when CEOs write down obvious leisure time like golfing or eating expensive meals as work, but when that idea comes from the other end and reaches the prole, it transforms into free time being an opportunity for more grinding, and gaming may be a part of that. Yeah, I absolutely agree.
holy shit that fucking tweet at 15:30, “nothing was risked and nothing was gained”, my dude this is a fucking video game, NOTHING IS RISKED BY DEFINITION OF IT BEING A FUCKING GAME
Daily reminder the "They targeted g!mers. G!mers." copypasta was a completely serious R!ddit post from /r/KIA. G!mers have always celebrated mediocrity while disguising it as something arduous. No surprise then that the blob of mediocrity that is R!ddit is filled them with. The easiest way to tell they don't actually want a difficult experience is the fact that they dickride so-called "hard games" when everyone knows that every game becomes hard when you try to speedrun it. Yet these chumps are almost never part of a speedrunning community, but instead act like obnoxious gatekeepers policing people over what games to play. No, beating Dark Souls isn't some arduous experience on par with running a marathon. If you're going to be an obnoxious shithead, at least find something that's actually worth bragging about.
Yet these chumps are almost never part of a speedrunning community
one of the replies to that tweet was
Gaming is all about growth and evolution. You gain nothing by taking shortcuts, that's why I fucking hate Speedrunners
which is just such a profoundly stupid take, and so thoroughly ignorant of the amount of skill and in-depth game knowledge speedrunning actually involves. Even a mediocre speedrunner's probably going to have a far deeper understanding of the game's mechanics and all the little quirks of its engine than any one of these dipshits, since you pretty much need to in order to actually be able to do the various skips and tricks necessary. Just... truly amazing :galaxy-brain:
I think the "nothing was risked and nothing was gained" thing is a meme.
yeah, it's become one, but this is the original tweet that got turned into a copypasta, and seems to have been mostly sincere
It absolutely was, a comment in response to an article about using Cheat Engine to beat Dark Souls
not understanding that the risk vs reward in the context of a video game here is referring to game play mechanics and stakes rather than life is the most boomer ass :wow-cool-future: take I've ever seen on this site.
did you look at the tweet? "you cheated not only the game, but yourself; you didn't grow, you didn't improve, you experienced a hollow victory", how do you expect me to take the guy seriously, straight up going "you did a no growth" over a video game
"you took a shortcut and gained nothing" clearly isn't talking about risk vs reward in terms of mechanics, it's gatekeeping - you played the game wrong, you did not experience it in the proper manner, and thus you haven't gained... whatever it was you were supposed to gain, a dopamine hit?
I hadn't got that far at time of posting she was talking about risk vs reward in terms of risking anti-tilt mechanics. That tweet is cringe in it's misplaced aggression but does touch on a valid point.
whatever it was you were supposed to gain, a dopamine hit?
yeah pretty much. That is what happens when you solve a puzzle or learn a new skill. It's fine if you don't do those things or care about it but obviously you will have a very different experience from those that do. As is usual with gaming there is weird hostility due to lack of useful terminology to separate those two experiences (see casual gamer vs hardcore gamer discourse). A person cheating and a person who is not ARE playing different games, but traditionally the later is considered as being the defacto sole valid one.
being defensive with "lol you are not risking dieing in real life" is easily more cringe than that tweet though.
"you did no growth in videogame" "I don't care :gigachad: " is the only response that doesn't make you more pathetic than the tweet.
That is what happens when you solve a puzzle or learn a new skill.
Only if you solve it in a reasonable timeframe. Spending 10 minutes stuck on a puzzle only to figure it out later makes me feel more bitter than anything, especially if it relies on assumptions that the game doesn't tell you.
I don't get the "being defensive" part, I was just mocking an incredibly melodramatic take, on a website which has an entire subsection dedicated pretty much entirely to making fun of shitty tweets. Like, I do in fact not really care, and rarely let opinions color my enjoyment of a given piece of media (which seems like cope now that I'm responding with it here, but whatever), it's just that the sheer self-importance of it struck me as incredibly weird, considering we're talking about, you know, a game. Maybe my tone's coming off as wrong, or I'm deluding myself that I don't really care, I dunno.
As for the "playing different games" thing - sure, but that's based on treating cheating as a binary, where either you play the entire game legitimately, or play the whole thing while cheating out the wazoo, which is rarely what's actually done in practice. The article which kicked this off was specifically about someone bringing cheats in on the final boss, in a pretty long game. They still played the entire rest of it normally:
I spent hours on some of Sekiro's bosses. I just don't have the time or impetus to prove I can do the sword thing well again. The blade and I get along just fine.
And the cheat was simply... slowing the game down. They still played through the whole boss battle, but simply used the slow-down to have more time to react. And obviously they'd already been playing the game as intended for tens of hours at that point. Which makes the tweet even more ridiculous - it's one fucking boss battle, the guy still "grew" and "improved" over the course of the entire rest of the game, it's just this one last bit at the end, and apparently that makes the entire experience hollow. Fucking Celeste even has modifying game speed as an actual, proper in-game feature under accessibility options.
Some other bits in the article are:
There’s nothing to preserve for the greater good in Sekiro’s design. I'll get what I can from it. And I got a lot from Sekiro.
Difficulty is one axis of Sekiro, not the orbital center. I feel no shame putting that last guy down in slow mo. It looked cool.
Which seem like perfectly reasonable points to me. Firstly - realizing you're just not having fun, and taking corrective measures (whether those be cheating, or simply not continuing) is... good actually. It's a much healthier way to consume media (not just games) than just bashing your head against the wall long after it's become clear you're not really enjoying it, and it's something more people should be comfortable with. Like, probably a solid 2/3 of "discourse" around long-running book and TV series would simply disappear if that was to happen, because so much of it is people who clearly stopped enjoying it several books/seasons ago and yet are still going, becoming more and more angry. Yeah, there's some fun to be had in hate-watching things, but eventually you pass the point where you're even enjoying mocking stuff and are just genuinely full of bile.
Secondly - realizing that a game can have more going on than just the pure mechanical challenge, and that even bypassing that can still leave you fulfilled because of the rest of it, is also good and healthy. Maybe you just enjoy wandering around and looking at the amazing vistas while listening to the soundtrack, or the story, on the lore, or something else. Why deny yourself all that just because you encountered a particularly difficult section, and ended up bashing your head against it until you soured on the whole experience? This does get more into the "different games" aspect of it, but I would also consider a game being able to support multiple different experiences to be a good thing, and here we don't necessarily even have to be talking about cheating - most games have difficulty modes after all. Some even go further and allow you to build your own custom difficulty. Some can be modded extensively, and while I guess a hardline view would consider all mods to be cheating, I wouldn't really agree with that.
“nothing was risked and nothing was gained”
I have risked wasting my time, and by being good at video game, gained not wasting as much time.
wait, does polygon understand that capitalism is destroying video games and name drops that fact?
I thought they were weird tech ghouls?
Polygon are if I had to mark them down as something progressive liberals. Pretty left leaning for gaming standards at least. (Thats at least the impression I got from reading some of their stuff here and there)
The owners are the My Brother, My Brother, and Me podcast guys, I think. Their writers and video producers range from centrist morons like this to cool-adjacent people like BDG (who left).
I think that's the usual case for media writers, though. There's a handful of former Vice Waypoint people who are cool-cool :AC-CommBear:.
