Lvxferre [he/him]

I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.

They also devour my dreams.

  • 13 Posts
  • 648 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • There are a thousand definitions and mine is just one among many, I’m aware. This is not a “right vs. wrong” matter, it’s how you cut things out.

    For me, a roguelike has four rules:

    1. Permadeath—can’t reuse dead chars for new playthrus.
    2. Procedural generation—lots of the game get changed from one to another playthru.
    3. Turn-based—game time is split into turns, and there’s no RL time limit on how long each turn takes.
    4. Simple elements—each action, event, item, stat etc. is by itself simple. Complexity appears through their interaction.

    People aware of other definitions (like the Berlin Interpretation) will notice my #4 is not “grid-based”. I think the grid is just a consequence of keeping individual elements simple, in this case movement.

    Those rules are not random. They create gameplay where there are limits on how better your character can get; but you, as the player, are consistently getting better. Not by having better reflexes, not by dumb memorisation, but by understanding the game better, and thinking deeper on how its elements interact.

    I personally don’t consider games missing any of those elements a “roguelike”. Like The Binding of Isaac; don’t get me wrong, it’s a great game (I love it); but since it’s missing #3 (combat is real-timed) and #4 (complex movement and attack patterns, not just for you but your enemies), it relies way more on your reflexes and senses than a roguelike would.

    Some might be tempted to use the label “roguelite” for games having at least few of those features, but not all of them. Like… well, Isaac—it does feature permadeath and procedural generation, right? Frankly, I think the definition isn’t useful, and it’s bound to include things completely different from each other. It’s like saying carrots and limes are both “orange-like” (carrots due to colour, limes because they’re citrus); instead of letting those games shine as their own things, you’re dumping them into a “failed to be a roguelike” category.






  • No. But I had a dog that loved pepper sauce.

    I was 14 or so. My dog Lana was begging for food. She always did it. It was frankly annoying, and I was eating some fish cake, with a buttload of pepper sauce.

    I gave her one bit. I was expecting her to smell the pepper, think “eeew, is this what humans eat? This is inedible!” and bug off. Instead she ate the bit, and asked me for more, licking her lips.






  • Yeah, the terminology is currently a mess. Not just due to language changes, but also synchronic variation - different people using the same words for different meanings, at the same time. But for me, it’s a mix of motivations, methods, and morality:

    • hacker strictu sensu - like a kid who dismantles toys to see how they work. Sometimes they break things, but they want knowledge the most. Usually grey hat, sometimes white hat, only rarely black hat
    • cracker - like a kid who bashes toys with a hammer. Not interested on the knowledge itself, except when it allows them to bully other kids. Almost always black hat.



  • My guess:

    Coverage roughly follows money, and that money comes the top of the hierarchy. However, the top is too far from the production to actually get that 1) automation is nothing new, and 2) AI won’t help as much with it as advertised.

    The middle of the hierarchy is close enough to the production to know those two things, but it’ll parrot them because doing so enables the inefficiency they love so much, under the disguise of efficiency.

    Then you got the bottom. It’s the closest to the production, but often suffers from a problem of “I don’t see the forest, I see the leaves”, plus since it has no decision power so it ends as a “meh who cares”. So it’ll parrot whatever it sees in the coverage.

    As such, who’s actually going to get screwed here? The answer may surprise you.

    All three. However not in the way people predict, “AI is going to steal our jobs”. It’s more like suckers at the top will lose big money on AI fluff, and to cut costs off they’ll fire a lot of people.

    Setting aside “and how will it do that?” as outside the scope of the topic at hand, it’s a bit baffling to me how a nebulous concept prone to outright errors is an existential threat. (To be clear, I think the energy and water impacts are.)

    Ditto.