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There are too many video games

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101–110 of 173 posts

Re: There are too many video games

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the company hires you for a job and they’re happy with your work, you’re not overpaid. Companies are desperate for engineers that the price has inflated, the value of engineers has gone up because no one wants to make useless apps or websites without being paid.

or: they got so much in VC funding that they don't know what to do with the money anymore money incorrectly spread teachers starving, making an indecent low amount of money; as a result

The existence of VC funding is directly responsible for teachers starving? I don't see how that follows.

Re: There are too many video games

#102
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, that doesn't mirror my experience around any of those areas at all. I lived in LA and the bay area for almost a decade. Plenty of people wanted different tax structures, reduced regulatory burden on businesses (especially small businesses), reevaluation of existing expenditures over increased taxation, etc. Are there specific Republican views that you think are anathema?

> Are there specific Republican views that you think are anathema? Try wearing a MAGA hat in Santa Monica. The arguments here that it's just as cool to be a Democrat as it is to be a Republican is so divorced from reality, I feel like I'm being gaslit. Even on dating apps folks use "moderate" as a euphemism for "conservative" -- I've literally had this conversation on dates before.

It sounds like you've been speaking in bad faith then, since this is a large reversal from what you'd said earlier.

Re: There are too many video games

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, that doesn't mirror my experience around any of those areas at all. I lived in LA and the bay area for almost a decade. Plenty of people wanted different tax structures, reduced regulatory burden on businesses (especially small businesses), reevaluation of existing expenditures over increased taxation, etc. Are there specific Republican views that you think are anathema?

Not OP, but any of the following will immediately get you labeled as a Republican (said with disgust), racist, Trump supporter, or bootlicker: - support for deporting illegal immigrants - opposition against affirmative action / DEI programs with forced quotas - opposition against defunding police - support for stronger punishments for property crime - disdain for homeless encampments - disdain for the combination of…

Most of these are severely exaggerated, in practice (in the context of your starting assertion). You can find individual cases to support any assertion against either party.

Re: There are too many video games

#104
In Iceland, 1 in 10 people will publish a book. Very few of them will get rich off it.

The human need to express is older than agriculture. It's older than civilization. Creation is an essential part of what it means to be human.

Re: There are too many video games

#106
post #15

> This is a whole another blog post, so I'll paint with broad strokes for now. My city, Seattle, is crumbling. We don't have the energy to maintain the roads, and our bridges are literally falling apart. We can't even maintain what our grandparents built, let alone make any grand new projects. What in the world does this have to do with people creating art? Maybe the crumbling infrastructure is emblematic of poor lea…

> we aren't allowed to blame Democrats for running Seattle into the ground in tech circles I exist almost exclusively in tech circles in and around Seattle, and we blame existing leadership for tons of problems. This seems so weirdly divorced from reality that it smacks of ideologue speak.

> and we blame existing leadership for tons of problems

and then vote again for Democrats when elections come. I'm not picking on you in particular, or on the Democrats, in other places it may be the Republicans, but it seems to me that the American society is so much split that when it comes the time to vote, most people will vote for the party that ostensibly is more aligned with their values, irrespectively of the fact that they are doing a good job.

I mean, a bad Democrat is better than a good Republican because at least it is not a racist cunt (or, from the other side, a bad Republican is better than a good Democrat because at least is not a woke idiot).

It looks like in the past it was different, maybe the position of the two main parties were closer so it was not much of an issue, but right now I think that the USA would benefit from a more pluralistic approach to the elections

Re: There are too many video games

#107
We're having major debates right now in the US over whether or not the federal government should invest into infrastructure at all and how much it should invest, and to phrase that as "nobody wants to work" is utterly backwards. Nobody wants to pay to maintain bridges, and whenever we try to set up funds to pay for fixing bridges, it gets funneled towards grifters because of an equal mix of privatization/government corruption/lack of transparency.

You can look at a lot of infrastructure through this lens. Why is our Internet so far behind other countries? Is it because of a lack of workers? No, it's because of a mixture of monopolies, government capture, and both over and under regulation. We make it hard to invest in Internet infrastructure without serious effort from lawmakers and companies, meanwhile we don't regulate the companies that we are funneling public funds to. We give money to Comcast to set up Internet connections, and it doesn't do it, and then we give them more money instead of punishing them.

Meanwhile, the very notion of improving this infrastructure is itself political and constantly debated. At best, our infrastructure projects are rolled up into an increasingly dysfunctional political system where parties are purely interested in maintaining power and opposing each other. Add onto that an unhealthy dose of individualism that teaches us that people shouldn't be paying to maintain common infrastructure and that asking them to do so is theft.

This take is also really disconnected from the reality of gig-workers and factory workers (and out-of-work individuals) across America, including in Seattle. It is not the case that everyone is privileged enough to not work and therefore we have a shortage because too many of them are making art. There is a large population of people in the US who feel forced into oppressive jobs, and companies literally rely on their desperation in order to maintain an underpaid workforce. We have willing workers in America, but a nontrivial number of them are trapped working for Uber and fighting off homelessness.

What does it say about government spending, about the barriers of entry to doing other work, and about the amount of resources we're devoting to infrastructure in general that those people can't get better paying jobs than Uber? It's just so out of touch to act like the potential workforce begins and ends with programmers/artists. Get out of the tech bubble and talk to normal people; the reason Seattle isn't paying to fix potholes is not because there is no one left to fix the pothole, and it is definitely not the worker's fault that they haven't done their civic duty to push blue-collar market wages down far enough.

Re: There are too many video games

#109
There's been a lot of rumbling for the past decade or so, mostly from misguided indie developers, that there are "too many games", as if there was ever a time when marketing a game was easy.

There are a lot of games. Bad games. Boring games. Unoriginal games. Half-assed games.

You know what there isn't an excess of? Great games. Games which serve particular niches really well. The "colony sim" genre has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance since RimWorld proved you can have a big niche hit without replicating the entirety of Dwarf Fortress' detailed simulation - but there still aren't a ton of interesting games in the genre, such that even a highly derivative game like Going Medieval gets a ton of interest.

And that's just one niche! There are many others. Make a game you love, make it great, and you can probably succeed. Don't make boring crap that nobody wants to play.

Re: There are too many video games

#110
post #54

Let's say for the sake of argument that there is too much art out there, that we need less people writing novels and more people fixing potholes and whatnot - fine. How does the author propose deciding _who_ gets to make art? Even if you have an oracle who can assign some sort of quality number to an art project before it's made...how are people supposed to get better at it? It's going to take thousands of cruddy Uni…

Just cancel copyright and see who will keep on creating.
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