This is an older article that I’ve seen elsewhere before, but it’s a good one and I can’t image the problem has gotten better in the intervening time.

Yeah, it’s been the one feature that I’m really missing badly. Edge was genuinely a very good UX experience as far as a daily driver browser goes, and if it weren’t for the persistent feeling that I ought to be supporting FF just so there’s a little diversity in the browser space I’d probably still be using it.

Here is a blog post that I know really influenced my feelings about moderation and rules in online communities, and came up a lot in discussions of what we wanted Beehaw to be. I think we all really just want Beehaw to be a place where nice people want to stay…

I switched back to Firefox from Edge recently (I know, dont @ me) and the only thing I’m really missing at all is the way that tab grouping works in Edge. You can just drag a tab over another tab and it will automatically create a new group for them, then you can collapse groups in the title bar if you’re not using them. That plus Edge’s tab sleeping made for some easy and intuitive tab management that I haven’t been able to recreate in Firefox yet. I know there are some tab grouping extensions but none of them let you drag/drop in the title bar, and a lot of the better ones are very focused on tree syle vertical tabs, which I don’t hate but don’t really use much. I prefer tabs being in the title bar, because that space is going to be there anyway so I might as well fill it up with something useful.

Interesting twitter thread from PopeHat about what this might indicate.

It could be just my personal preference of course

I think that’s probably the case here. I really enjoy environmental storytelling, and piecing together a story from bits of lore and clues scattered around a game world. It’s just a different way of telling a story than a more guided or linear narrative. It’s not objectively better or worse than more traditional story forms. I do think that it is a type of narrative that is easier to tell in a video game than it would be in another format, which is why it feels like such a novel experience to me. I had a very different experience of Breath of the Wild from you, incidentally. Which I think just goes to show how strongly subjective these things are. I found BotW to be incredibly engrossing, and I’ve beat it at least three times, the last of which I cleared all shrines. I mostly didn’t approach the game as a checklist of things that needed to be done, though, or as something that needed to be progressed through in order to get to a particular point. It’s not really structured that way. If you want, as soon as you get off the starting plateau you can just go fight Ganon. There’s literally nothing stopping you other than a lack of health and good gear, and from watching speedruns it doesn’t actually take that long to get pretty passable gear anyway. I constantly found myself traversing huge portions of the map in that game just out of curiosity to see what was over the next hill, or around this mountain, and I felt that the game almost always rewarded that curiousity.

I don’t think that Open World mechanics are at odds with good story-telling, I just think that they are better suited to a different type of storytelling than the traditional linear video game story.

I think the problem is more that a lot of studios want to shoehorn a traditional linear narrative into an open world and usually what that ends up meaning is one of two things. Either you have certain places that the game tells you to go to get more story, and the rest of the world is really just sidequest land (looking at you, Ubisoft), or you wind up having a lot of exposition thrown at you while you’re moving from point A to point B (Rockstar…).

I think good story-telling in an open world is possible, but to effectively use the open world it needs to be different. Environmental storytelling is a lot more important in these types of games. I think Breath of the Wild did a pretty good job of this, although it wasn’t perfect. But I think the environment was put together in a way that you could really start to understand the backstory of the world without somebody lore dumping at you. The problem with BotW is that they didn’t trust the player to pick up on the story, so they still included the lore dump. I think Elden Ring also has some really good open world storytelling. It’s opaque but very evocative. You’re given a few details about the past, but the real heavy lifting is done through the environment and the items you find throughout the world.

What an absolute shitshow.

I don’t completely disagree, but one of the problems with smart glasses continues to be creating a clear display that is unobtrusive, clear, and doesn’t obstruct your view. What’s interesting about this smart contact is that the display is so small and so close to your eye that you basically can’t see the screen itself, but the display is supposedly very crisp. Now whether that’s true in practice I don’t know. And there are a ton of other technical hurdles to overcome. I suspect battery life is probably a big issue, but also the FoV is apparently somewhat of a problem, which they are trying to overcome using eyetracking and software. It’s at least really interesting.

I’m not totally sure where you’re disagreeing with this video. I don’t think he’s trying to claim that CoD singlehandedly invented the war shooter, just that its gargantuan popularity and the way it handles its themes and its feedback loops are at odds with the subject matter.

I’m not sure I can trust this currency, where’s the complicated distributed consensus mechanism? I don’t have to light a forest on fire to interact with it! The value isn’t even fluctuating wildly! 0/5 stars /s

As I’m re-reading this, it occurs to me that point 2 is pretty close to your own point. I think the things are related, a lack of diversity in gaming communities made gatekeeping worse and gatekeeping made lack of diversity worse.

I think this is probably an important part of it, but I’ve been thinking about this recently and I think there are some other factors as well. This isn’t particularly well researched, although I’ve read some interested articles about the alt-right pipelines and that sort of this, this is just my own musings especially about how the right tends to weaponize nostalgia.

1. Nostalgia - Gamer communities have a strong sense of Nostalgia, looking back at some previous golden age of games as the golden age that they wish they could go back to. Like other backward looking groups, I think this leaves them vulnerable to right-wing propaganda, e.g. “Gaming was so much better before all of this woke nonsense”. It’s the start of a radicalization pipeline. When you start to think that minorities or diversity is the reason the thing you have built your identity around is getting worse, it’s a natural pipeline to right wing ideology.

2. Gatekeeping - Gamer communities have always been very prone to gatekeeping. In my mind it’s not hard to connect the dots from, “you’re not a gamer if you didn’t love FF7 as a kid” to “girls can’t be gamers” to more explicit racial/gender hate and homophobia, because the people who gaming catered to in those “golden ages” were overwhelmingly white middle-class boys so the unconscious mental image of the in group “Gamers” is white and male.

I think you see these elements in play in Gamergate, which used the already existing tendency toward misogyny in gaming communities, as well as a strong sense of nostalgia, to radicalize a lot of gamers into alt-right ideologies with a paper thin veneer of defending “ethics” but actually just attacking women and minorities in gaming spaces.

Not sure how I feel about this. Seems like lots of nostalgia goggles and circlejerking about how things were so much better back in some golden age, but as somebody who lived through the good old days, there was a LOT of corporate shovelware in pretty much every era of gaming, it’s just that nobody remembers any of that crap any more.

Honestly, it strikes me as “Gamers” mad that AAA gaming isn’t laser focused on catering to their specific demographic. Sure, there are bad trends in gaming, but there have always been bad, exploitative trends in gaming. Gamers that flip out about microtransactions ruining gaming always seem to forget that the majority of the industry for decades was focused on making games that could extract quarters from kids as efficiently as possible.

But for all the crying and raging, the last decade of video games has produced some incredible games, both AAA/AA and indie. We’re IN the golden age right now, and some people are so focused on the past that they can’t see it.

It reminds me of the way people talk about Classic Rock. People act like there was only great music in the past, but if you look back at the charts there was tons of disposable, forgettable junk that has rightfully been forgotten. I think the same thing is happening with gaming. Sure, there were some real masterpieces. But I know from experience there was a ton of barely playable garbage, too.

That game looks cool, but the thrown spear isn’t really what I was thinking about. I feel like games do a slightly better job representing that.

It’s the spear as a main battle weapon that I think doesn’t get represented well in popular culture. For example, Vikings in games usually are depicted with axes, but spear and shield were probably more common.

The same goes for really any medieval or faux-medieval setting. The vast majority of fighters would have had some variation on the pointy stick as their main weapon, because they were so deadly effective.

There’s also a commonly repeated argument that spears might be the main weapon in massed battle, but in small groups or one on one combat it would be ineffective, but I’ve seen plenty of HEMA matches and recreations that show that spear users can beat sword users, often with very little experience with the weapon.

I always want it to be the spear, but I find that most games don’t really get spears right or just generally make them a worse choice than some type of sword. Spears or something in the spear family were the weapon of choice for the vast majority of human history. This is true both in contexts where fighting would have been done in tight formation and in times/places where it was not. It was more common than the sword, and in many places and times would have been considered a fighter’s main weapon, with a sword acting as a kind of sidearm. In games, however, spears are almost always less effective than swords, while reach advantage is usually very minor or negated altogether.

NASA said that commercially operated space platforms would replace the ISS as a venue for collaboration and scientific research.

This distresses me more than I can articulate. I know that some progress has been made by commercial space flight companies, but the idea of our exploration of space being primarily driven by for-profit companies is beyond disheartening to me.