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"

  • CyberSyndicalist [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Tervell [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      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?

      • CyberSyndicalist [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • gremlin [they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          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.

        • Tervell [he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          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.