Man, you are going all over this thread angry that someone put a clearly marked piece of satire regarding _games_ in a _game engine_.

Harm it does: zero Levity it provides: some

This has been done in many projects since the beginning of the Web. You are clearly, how you say, "triggered" by someone making fun of mobile game addiction and monetization.

Found the mobile game dev ;)

Seriously though, while I'd agree that the piece was written in a quite unsophisticated style, what exactly is "unbelievably asinine" about it?

The two main points seem, to me, to be:

1) Mobile games are designed to provide not much more than an addictive dopamine hit

2) Mobile devices in general enable people to fill time they'd otherwise be alone with their thoughts with mindless distractions, and many happily oblige

Both of these are quite defensible.

There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that appeal to intelligence (like say Factorio), the perceived most important trait in our society currently, are OK, whereas games that are addicting and appeal to other traits, like the ability to do the same thing over and over (any game with grinding), are morally wrong. Both types of appeal are manipulative in the same way, but one is cast as morally wrong because it doesn't appeal to what the elites in our society (such as you, dear HN reader) value.

The rant about mobile games and capitalism is simply a reflection of this bias which is a particular view of society, but is not the only one and certainly not one shared by everyone. If you don't share that view it just seems like the person who wrote it is naive and doesn't have appreciation for personalities and perspectives other than his own.

Which is fine, people are different, and engines are written by peculiar people, but if I were to write something similar in another direction people likely wouldn't take it as a joke. For instance:

>Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A clerical oligarchy runs the world and forces us to trust the science in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, we're supposed to believe anything the clerics say, and just like they tell us to wear masks, they tell us that the biggest and best model for game engines today is ECS. It is a model of confused souls forced to architect their games in a particular way to escape the reality that they're just code monkeys gluing ugly code together instead of building a beautiful castle out of lego pieces like they want to believe. And this serves our ruling class, the clerics, as they infect and infest and ever larger portion of game development thought with their rotten ideology. Here at Godot HQ we have none of it, and just like we don't trust the science and we don't wear masks, we also don't use ECS.

Now is this an appropriate joke for an engine's documentation? It's not too far off from the original, just with changed content to suit the changed direction of the joke.

You can’t just change the words and intent of a joke and use that to argue against the original joke. Of course whether a joke is funny depends on the audience’s point of view.. that’s comedy 101.

What the author was saying really isn’t very contentious if you stop and think about it. Mobile games are a time sink and are often used as a distraction from stressful thoughts. The same is true for other video games, but the author’s view on that isn’t mentioned.

If you think that every humorous statement has to be so clean and pure that nobody takes offense, the I hope you like dad jokes, because that’s about all that’d be left.

Of course I can do that, given that the contention is not whether the joke is funny or not but if it's appropriate for its environment. If you don't think my joke is appropriate for the documentation of an engine, then you also shouldn't think the previous joke is appropriate either.

And he's not arguing whether the joke is funny, he's saying the joke is relevant.

The content of your joke isn't as relevant (which also makes it less funny). You used an anti-science sentiment and threw in ECS to try to make it more suitable, but it isn't analogous with the original statement at all.

How exactly do you think a cynical take on something that occurs widely in the industry is equivalent to conspiracy theory level science denialism?

First of all, Godot actually doesn't use ECS despite the majority of people in the industry saying it's amazing and all that. There was an article about it the other day https://godotengine.org/article/why-isnt-godot-ecs-based-gam.... So the ECS thing isn't entirely made up.

>How exactly do you think a cynical take on something that occurs widely in the industry is equivalent to conspiracy theory level science denialism?

I believe that believing we live in a capitalist oligarchy that does all the things the text says it does is mistaken and wrong, just like you believe that what I said is conspiracy theory level science denialism. From my perspective what I said makes perfect sense and it's a perfect analogy, just like for you what the text said also explains what's actually happening in reality.

This divergence in views is political in nature, and just like from your perspective saying that mobile games are bad because of capitalism is relevant, for me saying that ECS is bad because of blind faith in science is relevant. Why is my perspective any less important than yours, other than for you not thinking it's relevant?

I'm aware Godot doesn't actually use ECS, it doesn't make your joke any more coherent though.

If you want to go down the route that everything is subjective, we're not going to be very productive here. The mention of "capitalist oligarchy" is hyperbole, of course, though I don't know how you want to argue that the world isn't mostly run by capitalist forces. Again, if this is something you want to question I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere.

The factoid in the piece is that a lot of mobile games are built with the intent of being addictive and getting people to spend a bunch of money on micro transactions. Is this another thing that doesn't fit in your view of reality?

Most importantly though, if they added your joke instead I still wouldn't rally to have them take it down. I'd just think it's awkward and embarrasing.

>though I don't know how you want to argue that the world isn't mostly run by capitalist forces. Again, if this is something you want to question I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere.

I believe that the world is primarily run by academia and journalists, and this is best described as a clerical oligarchy. In 1890 the US was definitely a capitalist/commercial oligarchy, in 2020 the US is definitely not one and is instead a clerical oligarchy where institutions with most power are intellectual ones rather than commercial ones. There are reasonable and well thought out arguments for this being the case https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution....

>The factoid in the piece is that a lot of mobile games are built with the intent of being addictive and getting people to spend a bunch of money on micro transactions. Is this another thing that doesn't fit in your view of reality?

I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.

>Most importantly though, if they added your joke instead I still wouldn't rally to have them take it down. I'd just think it's awkward and embarrasing.

Yes, that's exactly what I think of the original joke.

I'll skip right over the conversation about how the world is run. I read some of the article you sent (it's quite long), and let's just say that so far I'm not convinced.

> I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.

If your biggest issue with the statement is that it unfairly focuses on mobile game devs, feel free to extrapolate the sentiment to all game devs who do this, I think most people do this extrapolation.

I re-read the rest of your responses to this thread, seems like your only issue is with how appropriate a joke is in technical documentation.

I am interested, given your world view, to know why you think a tutorial on encrypting saved game states isn't also inappropriate? In fact, isn't the technical documentation inappropriate in its entirety? Why should I be told how to use the game engine? Just because these "elitist" developers built the engine, doesn't mean they can tell me how I should use it?

>If your biggest issue with the statement is that it unfairly focuses on mobile game devs, feel free to extrapolate the sentiment to all game devs who do this, I think most people do this extrapolation.

I'm a game developer. I don't believe that games are inherently immoral otherwise I wouldn't make them. If you're a game developer and you believe that using psychological techniques to make people play games is wrong then you should probably not be making games, otherwise you're consistently engaging in immoral behavior yourself.

The singling out of mobile games is just a reflection of the bias that game developers have to think some kinds of games are morally wrong because it offends their sensibilities.

You can't conflate games that try to create a fun experience, and engage people through feelings of discovery, fun, achievement, and games that use manipulative techniques to create frustration and exploit psychological feedback loops to extract a steady stream of money from people. Its just not the same thing at all. Like comparing a novel to a lottery ticket. Both are written on paper but the comparison stops here.

> I don't believe that games are inherently immoral otherwise I wouldn't make them.

Neither do I, maybe you read my reply incorrectly. I said, feel free to extrapolate the criticism to all game devs who explicitly try to make the games addictive and hook people with micro-transactions. So your whole line of reasoning there kind of falls flat.

There's no criticism. Making a game addictive is making a game addictive. If you're doing it with micro-transactions or with RNG-gating it's the same thing.

> I believe that the world is primarily run by academia and journalists

I think that world would look something like this: We take immediate and severe measures to curb global warming, don't spend the last decade imposing austerity measures on the European populace, de-escalate the war on drugs, develop a deep understanding of the cultural intricacies of countries we consider invading, avoid publishing clickbait inflammatory anecdotes in our newspapers in consideration for the long term public interest, not the benefit of the shareholders, and drive policy by the nuanced understanding of scientific study, not emotion, intuition, or anecdote.

How does the contrast between the last 40 years of ruthless neoliberalism vs. the very leftist academia and democratic-liberal leaning MSM, fit in your belief that academia and the press are somehow running the show?

(edit: typo)

> Factorio

Never played this, but it seems to be designed just to be a fun game. From their pricing model, there doesn't seem to be any incentive for them to keep you addicted. Unlike some of the mobile games with microtransactions.

Being addicted to video games, any kind, is overall a bad thing.

Oh, I have no dog in this fight, but let me tell you Factorio is extremely addicting. As in, "I wonder where all those hours of my day went?". I had to stop playing because it was starting to get stressful.

PS: it's a really cool game.

For me difference is that Factorio is not containing any way to spend money in game or spend to avoid grinding.

While typical mobile money has grinding solely to force you to pay.

Note: in Factorio my typical strategy is to use mod that makes me start with construction robots, to skip any kind of drudgery at start.

Modding API allowing it is deliberately open and explicitly created to allow this. In typical mobile game I would need to pay large amount of money for that.

The bias is born from the pay to win. How many of these games simply put players against an exponential cost curve for marginal benefits?

What this does is ruin the intent and legitimacy of the game.

In your biased elite opinion, of course. A vast majority of people have no problem with pay to win in the games they play.

You sure make a lot of absolute claims. How do you arrive at that conclusion?

Chill out. These guys are developers, not world leaders.

Everybody's entitled to their opinion especially, if there isn't anything harmful.

At least the guys are creating more than public flame on HN.

As to college students smoking weed, just study history of Silicon Valley to see how many of big name corps were started like that.

Does the sudden revelation that we all are people with own quirks really shock you that hard? You maybe believe that there is regular people and there is serious people, who work at the serious business, which is by itself serious af.

> Software projects shouldn’t loudly advertise that they are written by people with the political sophistication of a college student who smokes too much weed.

Open source software projects can have the spin and advertising they want, and it's up to you not to use them if you do not agree.