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Logo uses joystick by liftarn
The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an "easy button", it's hard to not use it. It's sort of like when you're at work and see the "quick workaround" effectively become the standard process.
I remember burning out on games because the cheats made them really fun in the short term, but afterward playing normally felt like agony.
Im playing a bunch of soulslikes for the first time now. You gotta exhaust everything you can think of, then check a walkthrough just for the hint youre missing.
The process is the fun part. Looking it up is just a way to minimize frustration because you can't find the goddamn ladder.
In other words im with you
I think souls likes are just not for me. I just want a cool story told in a relatively linear fashion. I'd take a linear 15 hour game over an open world 150+ hour game any day.
Most of em are pretty linear, really. Elden Ring is the exception. But like Bloodborne for instance, youre gonna go pretty much in the same order till you have to return to earlier areas to finish stuff. You've gotta explore a lot though.
Not trying to be like "LOVE THE THING THAT I LOVE DAMN YOU", theyre totally not for everyone.
Soulslikes are great if you're looking to scratch an itch for mechanical mastery, discovery, exploration, etc., but stories are not their strong suit. I'm not saying the stories are bad, just the delivery of them, unless you're the type of player who wants to play detective.
I have to force myself to not fall into the trap of trying to play a "perfect" game and instead to just let happen, what happens. Blundering through content and accepting temporary setbacks is more fun than following guides or save scumming.
But it also depends on game design:
With bg3 I missed a one of a kind item in act 1, a staple dnd item (ring of protection) that I was locked out off because I did quests in the "wrong" order. that gave me some anxiety, after which I started checking the wiki page before starting a new zone, which eventually sucked the fun out of the game, after which I abandoned my first playthrough.
And then I found a mod that randomizes all loot, so I can just let happen again what happens, without that anxiety of losing access to unique loot because of game design.
I also fall into this trap semi regularly, a happy medium I have found is a missable items guide that doesn't tell you how to play or where to go but it does tell you "make sure you get item X before going to place Y as that's your last chance"
It means I can be happy to play sub optimally knowing that if I really want I can go back and collect anything I missed later.
This has been quite good for Clair obscur
BRO this is literally normal life now. No one wants to figure anything out. Its why I hate llms. Breeds laziness like never before
Man, I was recently working with another senior. The guy has been in this job like ten years longer than me. And to be fair, we were working with a language that he isn't familiar with, but I had a problem which wasn't language-specific (basically, I had a user-provided timestamp and needed to guesstimate whether that's winter or summer time).
And yeah, his first thought was to ask ChatGPT. On some level, it is a wrapper around Bing and I did a web search, too, so sure, let's do another web search in case I missed anything.
But ol' Chappity G spat out the same solution attempt, which I had also found initially, which wasn't actually applicable there. So, we told it what the problem with that was, and it generated another attempt, which didn't cover edge cases. The next time around, it generated a solution which used an entirely different time library. And so on.
The guy was absorbed for ten minutes trying to explain to the Magic 8 Ball what our problem was precisely and why its solution attempts were bad.
I'm not saying ChatGPT should've been able to solve this problem. Date/time handling is one of the hardest computer science problems.
It was more just that he was constantly pulling the slot machine, hoping it would suddenly spit out the perfect solution, when even just five seconds of independent thinking should've made him realize that there is no easily web-searchable solution and the spicy autocomplete cannot do the reasoning to come up with a solution of its own.
If you want to speedrun Idiocracy, an overreliance on AI seems a good way to get there.
Brawndo has what plants crave.
it was so hard for me to play grim fandago without looking up the answers but i did it! 10 hours later and lots of critical thinking and i finally solved the first puzzle!
We played Leisure Suit Larry with my brother at somewhere under 10 years old without knowing one full sentence worth of English, and it took hours to even get the game to start. There was a quiz about US history and politics or something for age verification, and it took a lot of tries to guess our way through and memorize the answers. Didnt get that far in the game either.
Police Quest 2 had mugshots.
You had to look in the manual and type the correct name to start the game. That was their DRM. I remember praying it'd be Jessie Bains, because he was the only one I memorized.
OP attacks every subscriber to Nintendo Power magazine. It's super effective.
We were so bored back in the day we spent hours, days, months finding out how to get by stupid things in point&click games, it was better than not playing them but it was also not like the best time ever either.
I don't know if we "got smarter" by it really.
Being bored was the healthy part, developmentally speaking.
Not that there weren't overstimulating games back then, or healthy problem solving games today. But with enshittification, the shit is drowning out the gold.
Except game walkthroughs provide correct information, whereas LLMs can just make things up. So it's more like looking at a walkthrough where each step is from an entirely different game.
Y'all - For nearly a quarter of a century Nintendo published Nintendo Power, a magazine that was a combination of self-hype and how to beat their own games. In the 90s, it was indispensable for any game worth its salt.
Nintendo used to run a 1-900 number for tips on games. You'd call a real human who would walk you through where you were.
Looking it up online is only "cheating" in the sense that it's immediate and free. This stuff used to cost money.
I had a rule where I wasnt allowed to use a gameshark until I had already beaten the story mode.
So I guess the analogy there would be learn how to do the thing the old fashioned way and then only use AI as a tool to do it better.
One time I used a GameShark mid game for a Zelda game, I saved my file and came back later to find that by maxing out, I had ruined my save file and lost all my progress. I cried my eyes out and it took days to get back, boringly replaying the game.
I always wondered if that was an intentional lesson by the GameShark devs... ChatGPT seems designed to make you act against your best self interest.
I've recently been obsessed with a streamer called AboutOliver. He played Minecraft for the first time about a year and a half ago, played his entire first season with no wiki or external knowledge, got a little tour of the community server (which he 99% forgot at the time Season 2 rolled around) and is now on Episode 75-ish of season 2. Still no wiki, no guides. He has figured out some crazy things about the game (which I won't spoil), but is also completely clueless about some super basic features.
It's been incredibly inspiring to just watch him figure things out, because he is exceptionally inquisitive and methodical by default (I think he's a phd candidate in Astrophysics irl?). Made me realize the point of a game shouldn't be to produce the optimal output, but that struggling and finding things out is exactly the point. Incidentally, that mindset also noticeably boosted my performance at work because I'm now one of the few people who will happily continue to tackle a programming problem over and over again, even if there are no helpful guides on it.
Long story short, here's a link to watch the supercut of Olivers Season 1 Playthrough: https://youtu.be/ljemxyWvg8E
The total season 1 supercut is about 6 hours iirc
OR, if you are insane, here's the link to the full-episode playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL68V5Cxs_CvTpTY9o7KJ75nLPqlCRxze0
It's 50 Episodes á 3-5h, great as background noise when doing something else.
In the 90s I would go to the school library to print out walkthroughs from the internet, to supplement the occasional relevant walkthroughs I could find in magazines. Realistically there was absolutely no way I was figuring out most of the puzzles on my own as a child, games got way more user friendly and self explanatory since then.
I had a friend who had a whole scrap book of notes for Myst. I wasn't dedicated enough 😅
Same with wowhead or runescape wiki. Really kills the video game wonder.
Good news is that you can just ignore that if you want to. I recently played classic wow without any external tools and it was such a fun, adventurous experience!
I've long argued that games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley with their seeming inability to actually teach you the game have become far too overreliant on Wikis and walkthroughs. Minecraft for example: its highly unlikely you will naturally discover the path to "winning the game" and defeating the Ender Dragon. Its arcane nonsense.
The official Guide expects you to do this in ways that are 1 no longer possible and 2 rely on innate understanding of the physics of the game (specifically that beds explode when used outside the overworld [excuse me what the fuck how am I supposed to recognize that can be a weapon?]).
This is exactly it. I definitely used a lot of walkthroughs as a kid. I also feel like games in the 90s and early 00s were just plain harder, or sometimes poorly designed.
These days I only look something up when I have got to a point of near rage over how much of my limited gaming time has been wasted, and I need to know if I am just a moron, or if it's a bug, or bad game design. Of course, then I get mad that I can't find it written out, and have to skim around in some fucking YouTube video to figure it out.
Sometimes the game is just annoying about certain things / buggy. Especially in older games
Looking at you Morrowind and your Dwemer puzzle box
When the answer is to grab the fork seventeen levels back, and to not use it on the dog 3 screens before so that you had it to look at after answering a riddle written backwards in Spanish that is actually an in-joke from the devs childhood you’re damn fucking right I’m not wasting my time to “figure it out”.
Video games are not reality, I can’t look at an easily surmountable barrier and just walk over it like I could in real life to solve the issue, I have to take some deranged imagined route by a dev. I can’t logically work my way out of a situation that is some guys bullshit idea of a solution.
It is the externalization of internal mental processes, causing technological dependencies for even basic thinking on the subject it issues for. It is fundamentally the same as being dependent on a parent for answers, as a child. At some point the parent must force the child into independence to become capable of functioning, to build the infrastructure to answer its own questions by memorizing, and later discerning, the answers.
If we should regress to, or raise our children with, such a dependency, we will become enslaved to those who control these technologies, making useful thought into a subscription service. Technology is incredibly empowering but at some point it becomes a necessity and we are beholden to those who control such things, spawning a techno feudalism in which we are as tied to a corporation's technology as serfs were to the lord's lands.
There is a time and place for walkthroughs. I doubt I would've finished Portal 1 & 2 on my own without them because I absolutely suck at puzzles, particularly visual ones. But if I hadn't, I would have missed out on the great story and enjoying the craft of the game.
The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an "easy button", it's hard to not use it. It's sort of like when you're at work and see the "quick workaround" effectively become the standard process.
Or when you're diving somewhere, and drivers thinking there's an "easy button" gets people killed.
The point, I think, is that society seems to encourage "what can I get away with" while discouraging any consideration of "what should I do". Which, well, seems pretty ass-backwards don't you think?
Then again, we've never truly removed from power the progeny of those that decided beating the shit out of someone else was preferable to doing their fair share of the labor. "But what if someone tries to kick your ass? Then you'll be glad I'm here."
Uhh, like fucking hell I will. That kind of sociopathic fuckery has always been, and will always be, nothing but a drain on the collective effort of any society.
Tldr: I totally agree with you
Oh, and as an aside, part of me kinda hates that Re-Logic added "Journey Mode" to Terraria; I haven't put any significant time into even one classic mode playthrough since.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
except walkthroughs are much more accurate...
I like AI because it will ruin next generations, so I will always have job as programmer who can use brain
Here's something I've been thinking about. I've been playing through some need for speed games on emulators for the past few years. Once I bound keys to save and load states it was over: I'd save-state before every turn and run them over and over until I got them perfect. Doing this I did eventually learn the maps really well though, and on more recent playthroughs I've barely used save-states, which was obviously far more satisfying. I realize this isn't the same thing as ai or walkthroughs, but I think maybe these tools do share something in that they lower the barrier to entry to different sorts of skilled tasks we may not yet feel competent to accomplish. Like training wheels or a helping hand, we can let go of them once we feel steadier on our own.