Unless the game designers specifically accounted for it, cooperative games can rob the autonomy of less confident players. One overbearing player can hijack the whole game. To them to win the game as designed it feels correct to do.
In competitive game it's possible the less skilled player may never win (not true for party games), but at least only they are personally invested in their win so no one can righteously take over.
My first answer is that one of the most amazing mechanics ever designed is health points, I believe invented by Dungeons and Dragons. Almost every non-health win condition feels more arbitrary than health. Whether it's shooting balls in hoops, crossing a finish line first, or collecting victory points they are all less intuitive and feel more contrived than "you have this many points, at 0 you die."
The second is that many game designs are essentially about conflict, whether with other players or game agents. The ultimate conflict is life or death violence, aka combat. So it's a quicky and easy way to raise the metaphorical stakes. If you take an olympic fencing game and instead make them use real swords and no armor then it's a lot more dramatic with no change in the game mechanics.
Making non-violent games is not undesirable, it's just harder to do well when combat fits so naturally. You end with non-violent games being worse on average, non-dramatic low stakes metaphors and contrived win conditions.
I touched on this in my own reply to the grandparent comment [0]. I realized a while ago that lots of competitive games I played regularly were making me feel animosity towards the people I was playing them with, and it led me to think about this issue for quite a while.
Competition is such a default in game design that a game not based on it often isn’t recognized as a game at all. There are cooperative games, but aside from Minecraft, none of them are particularly popular. It’s arguable that this a reflection of the human condition; living things are always fighting for resources, so games attempt to emulate this competition.
It’s odd that this ended up being the paradigm, though; digital worlds can provide us with a space to explore what we would conventionally consider to be impossible - infinite worlds which obviate the need for competition in the first place. There’s maybe a commentary on human nature to be made that even in a game like Minecraft, so many players’ first inclination is to start fighting each other.
Japanese game companies are a lot more protective about their IP. Nintendo is simply consistent about that in the West. To them it's quite normal to exercise a lot of control over how your work is presented in public, which includes things like tournaments, emulation, fan games, mods, and so on.
Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a...
It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.
It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.
Not being noticed due to low quality algorithms. To me TikTok was the first proof that recommendation algorithms can work. I have been using manual curation for so long because so many times I open YouTube or any other social media with the intent to consume content and get that same old feeling "there's nothing to watch" like flipping channels on TV. Just scrolling unattractive thumbnails.
TikTok may have been too effective and addictive, but it undeniably worked. I started watching many niche and interesting content creators that the other platforms wouldn't recommend to me.
> To me TikTok was the first proof that recommendation algorithms can work.
This sounds great at first. Now imagine you are not just into wood working, indie bands or travel logs, but instead slightly interested in right wing or islamist ideology. Within a short time you are flooded with political or religious propaganda. In Europe that has been a real problem. See for example https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000231964/auf-tiktok-re... or https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/tiktok-afd-100... (Sorry, German only.) The right-wing AfD politician Maximilian Krah became so "popular" on TikTok that the platform had to artificially limit his reach! (Kudos to them, but it shows the extent of the problem.)
To be clear, FB and YT have the same problem of creating filter bubbles, but the algorithm is less effective and therefore less dangerous (but still dangerous enough!)
I actually find the opposite is frue. YouTube constantly recommends more of the same of anything I watch, so watching one extremist or even extremist-adjacent video means I will get flooded.
What's so good about tiktok is that it keeps my interests thoroughly mixed. I'm bilingual and I see content from multiple countries about different interests and it keeps me in touch with all of them plus presenting topical and trending content. It also seamlessly measures my interest so if I naturally skip a couple of videos about a topic I'll see less and less until I see none.
> YouTube constantly recommends more of the same of anything I watch, so watching one extremist or even extremist-adjacent video means I will get flooded.
That's true. I got pretty frustrated by YT's recommendation algorithm. The front page got pretty bad and repetitive. However, there's always some good stuff in the right column when you select "similar".
But you know what you can also do? Actively search for stuff! I wouldn't feel comfortable putting my media consumption behavior into the hands of some addictive algorithm. (HN is already bad enough :)
> It also seamlessly measures my interest so if I naturally skip a couple of videos about a topic I'll see less and less until I see none.
Sure, but while you are interested it keeps feeding you the same stuff, like YT on steroids. This is all fine when it comes to hobbies, music, travel logs, etc., but it gets dangerous with other content. People don't really think "I'm not really interested into this right wing or IS propaganda videos anymore, I'll give it a break".
The whole TikTok legislation was not created to suppress Palestinian views, even if that may have been a side effect of it, and repeating that does not make it true.
It’s a convenient narrative because it sounds like „the government“ or „they“ want to conceal the truth, and suppress the honest rebels. It’s a trope.
Again, it may well be that some parts of the government feel like the side effects are beneficial, and I’m not commenting on that. But spinning the story to say this was the whole purpose of the law is simply not the truth, and instead pushing a certain narrative.
The choice doesn't have to be binary. There can be multiple factors, which should all be discussed.
Dismissing a frequently reported on factor that mentioned by officials requires a higher burden than vague commentary on narrative shaping. Trying to minimize it despite factual statements is its own narrative.
I don't disagree with you, and I don't dismiss any factor, but oppose the altered storyline of events offered by GP, which is simply not factually true. Subtly twisting history into a more convenient version may be presidential territory now, but that doesn't mean we should let a proper discussion devolve into shallow, black-and-white stories just because those are easier to understand.
In the second paragraph of the link you posted this is said:
> But in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, conservatives have become hyper fixated on policing pro-Palestinian messages on the app, accusing TikTok of influencing young Americans to “support Hamas” and favoring pro-Palestinian content.
If you follow the link attached to "influencing young Americans", you'll find Palestine isn't mentioned once, but Hamas is.
Of course there's bias everywhere, and we should have by now ways to follows stories to their source automagically by now. But anyhow.
The article and the poll it is based on is wild. Questions like, "do you think all Palistinians are anti-Semitic or just the Hamas terrorists" and similar push poll style nonsense offering limiting answers to slanted questions.
However at least one question is about whether the attacks on Israel...
Can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians
So while most questions force them to pick sides between Hamas and Israel with no option to say they support Palestinians they do get at least one chance to say whether they think the Palestinian people have legitimate grievances (though still only in context of supporting an attack).
And the Intercept article is very clear when they link that they think Palestinian and Hamas support are being intentionally conflated, just as you've tried to do again here.
I first came across Amit's page in middle school 20 years ago, and studied it religiously until I built a hexagonal grid with A* in Game Maker (which taught me programming from the ground up by studying Mark Overmars' amazing manual).
Today I'm directing an indie game with a team of 10 under me.
In competitive game it's possible the less skilled player may never win (not true for party games), but at least only they are personally invested in their win so no one can righteously take over.