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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.
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.
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'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.
Ha! I watched him play Outer Wilds and it was perfect. It is the ideal game for someone like him because this game is all about exploring. But please play the game before you watch him play and don't research anything beforehand or during playing.
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.
For me it's the opposite. I remember getting stuck in a game for days or weeks in the 90s. I would get to a point where I would just try to click everything on the screen, use every item with everything else, try all possible item combinations, etc.
These days, if I'm stuck for more than an hour or two I'll just Google it. I'd rather move on faster and get to play more games in the limited time I have for such things.
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.
Sometimes the game is just annoying about certain things / buggy. Especially in older games
Looking at you Morrowind and your Dwemer puzzle box
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.
It's sort of like when you're at work and see the "quick workaround" effectively become the standard process.
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix
It makes sense for me too, and i like your cheat code version of it. I think it's also akin to the tutorial hell for devs and artists.
To be fair, I needed some serious help in RCT. The under the hood mechanics were NOT intuitive to me.
At first I was going to disagree and say "hey at least they are still looking up information, unlike most people" but then I did a 540° on that idea when I realized that I myself was a great example of how the OP is right.
I have been building things in my back yard like crazy this summer. I am currently working on a purpose-built little lego/craft tray for my wife to use in the house. I have gotten to plan out every detail in my head and sketching on paper, including convenient geometry knowledge like multiplying by the square root of 2 to find lengths for 45° supports or the good old 3-4-5 triangle for getting a right angle in a pinch. I have been able to discuss the table's use with my wife to figure out the perfect features. It will be a little wooden table that's ~2'/60cm wide like a TV tray but it will be held up by cantilever legs that are long enough and tall enough to hover the table over her lap with the footrest up. And it will have other features like little segmented bins for pieces/parts, and an instruction holder.
It's a great activity for numerous reasons. It gets me outside, it gets me physical, it gets me interacting with my wife and excited to give her the finished product, it gives me opportunities to practice new skills/tools, and it engages the senses as well as the mind while I spend hours in a calm almost meditative state and not seeing anything that's happening on my phone (though it will read texts to me through my earbuds).
It's a pretty funny look. I'm wearing a big round brimmed sun/fishing hat that looks almost like Gandalf's but without the pointy top. From the outside the sound of the scene is 95% the sound of falling water and birds chirping, interrupted by the 5% of the time spent actively cutting or planing some wood. But if my earbuds are in my ears, they are blasting my playlist of various high-tempo Thrash and Industrial Metal songs! (at 45-50% volume. I'm responsible here, lol)
So if I take all that and compare it to some schmuck who pulls up ChatGPT and types something like "design me a sturdy two foot wide table, create a list of the pieces I need and the cuts to make them, and generate detailed assembly instructions with pictures." Yeah you might still get a functional table but your life has missed out on the vast majority of the potential benefit of the activity!
This is the way I started looking at these tasks once I really internalized the whole "life is about the journey, not the destination" thing.
I had a a guidebook for Desperados. I ended up using the "hide around corner, shoot, and then blast everyone coming around the corner"-tactic instead of the guidebook 80% of the time.
The bits I used gamefaqs guides for (btw I love they are still there ^_^) are rarely fun anyway. Mostly, it's achievement grinding or 100%ing. If the game itself needs a guide to navigate it, I usually just drop it. If it fails at informing me about it's mechanics that much it's not for me.
I grew up when solutions either were not available or cost money to get either by subscribing to a magazine, buying a magazine, or calling a 1800 hotline which cost ludicrous amounts of money for the time.
When gamefaqs and the like became popular it was great to get the answer instead of giving up. I couldn't imagine growing up always having the answer handed to you though.
I've fallen into this exact trap when I played the HD remaster of Suikoden 1&2 a few months ago. The games still hold up pretty well but are a bit too dated to my taste to have more than a single playthrough, so I followed guides to get the perfect ending, which involves recruiting all 108 characters into your army.
At first I was just looking at a very light guide that told me which characters were missable and approximately when to get them. Then I got impatient and looked up their location and recruitment conditions. And then I ended up following a complete walkthrough step by step to make sure I wasn't making any mistake.
That completely took the fun out of the games and I burnt out halfway through the second one.
I wish there were more options for “hints” instead of just giving you the walkthrough. I keep getting stuck in Subnautica, but I don’t want to just make a beeline to where I need to be.
Cheating always made games boring for me. I remember doing a cheat in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life to get all items, and it just evaporated any fun I had.
The best balance was a GameFAQs I printed out for Morrowind that just covered the first handful of quests of the game. Gave me tips for class and race selection, and just enough guidance to get my bearings.
Counterpoint, like, I can draw things, but I can't draw people, but I have used AI to generate pictures of people that I can then trace to learn how to draw people, and because it's a new person, and it's something I'm in control of, I feel more encouraged to fire up Krita and work on my drawing.
I still suck, don't get me wrong, but I have done more artwork since having access to AI art tools than I did for several years prior to that.
There's just something about having an idea of knowing what the finished output is supposed to look like that helps me figure out how to draw what I'm supposed to draw.
And eventually I will be fully drawing my own stuff from scratch, thanks to using AI as a self-learning tool.
I think that's more than a fair point. AI is a tool, and I'm personally (tentatively) optimistic about what it will be capable of helping us with.
I think the distinction to be made in this case is when the use of a tool undermines the desired experience without us realizing it.
Like "I want to enjoy playing this game." > (uses cheats for a little bit) > "Now I don't enjoy playing it normally anymore."
Or "I want to be able to think critically." > (consults AI for everything) > "Now I have a hard time reasoning on my own."
I played with cheats almost all the time when I was a kid, but I was rarely doing it for difficulty reasons. I just got used to the idea early on of game engines just being digital sandboxes and loved seeing how far I could push things.
I don’t really understand using cheats as a difficulty bypass unless you’re there just to get the story/explore.
I use ChatGPT similarly. If I want to explore an idea without consequence, I can use it to brainstorm, but it’s not going to be how I lay out an entire project.
Weird, I love problem solving. Its why im so upset with people complaining about computers when all they have to do is tinker with them or google about it. Walkthroughs are for when you need it, if you have an urge to use the walkthrough only instead of actually playing the game, then thats a you problem.