boy was that a mistake. If there's a hobby you like, ,its always best to keep it niche, lest the mainstream completely ruins it and the hobby's communities as well
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I bet a lot of gamers can relate to this around 2008. People were talking up Shadow of the Colossus and Mass Effect because they proved that games could be art. But what ended up happening is the industry promoted a bunch of shysters and pretentious amateurs in a cargo cult race towards legitimacy, like Anita and the clowns who work for Kotaku.
The problem is larger than games, though. Nerdy franchises across all mediums became stupider and more political as they tried to be more thoughtful. Some point out the desire for sophistication itself is often the problem, but although I agree, the root cause runs much deeper than that. We are facing a whole generation of middle and upper class millennials, now firmly in the workforce, who have been conditioned by the elites to blindly accept the totemic credentials of our culture such as "expert" pronouncements and New York Times headlines and whose minds have been utterly polluted by the K-12 system that raised them in place of their parents.
The major issue with calling video games art is that “Art” has been butchered at its core. A banana tapped to a canvas is considered art while people like Thomas Kincaid is crushed by critics and considered bad. I’d rather not consider video games modern day “Art” but something better.
One of the most overlooked failures of the education system is that the vast majority of people don't even understand something as basic as the definition of art. The title "art" does not confer any designation of quality by itself, it's just a definition of a human product with a particular aim.
I’ve always thought that people who struggle to define “art” are either stupid or dishonest.
And you can see how that failure transfer over to much bigger consequences in society, such as treating "human" as an innately good thing that no longer applies to bad people and allows you to remove their rights and treat them as you wish.
I am completely convinced that the majority of art is just money laundering. Especially with retarded trash like that banana taped to a wall.
Snobs gonna snob. Kincaid isn't bad; just boring.
Apparently bananas taped to a urinal is what excites them. I never deal with this crowd IRL. I have explicitly moved away from where they are.
A lot of art is just tax evasion anyways.
It’s money laundering. Unnamed foreign cash buyer, bribe an auction house, sell it for 100x, claim the 99x as legit washed cash income.
For sure.
Or, you buy a painting for (eg) $10k. You hype up that guy. His art's value goes up. You donate it to somewhere and write off $50k. It's also part Ponzi scheme since eventually someone will get stuck with this worthless art like a hot potato. Right now they're all just using it to ends.
As for the auction house thing, I saw a YT about people bidding on their own auctions to drive up the price of classic video games.
The final donation in the chain is to a non-profit, usually a hospital, who puts the art up in a wing somewhere for a month or two, then quietly discards it. Since they're non-profit, it doesn't matter if they were holding a high-value asset or not.
You could probably even sell art to a charity. Claim that it's worth $50,000, you paid $100, and you sold it to them for $20,000.
Don't they have to sell it and report the price, though? That's why I thought someone gets stuck with the art.
Or else what do they give the IRS for value?
When it's being used as a money launder scheme, someone does get stuck, but it doesn't matter:
"A" makes a painting. "B" buys it for $1000. "B" then gifts the painting to Dickish "D", who is trying to launder money. "B" THEN pays "C", an "art Critic", $1000 to say the painting is worth 5,000,000. "D" could also do this step, skipping "B" entirely, but obfuscation is nice to have. "D" now sells the painting to an Enterprising "E" at "market value". This is where your scenario stops: "E" never pays "D", and is some $100 numbered corporation that just dissolves into thin air, but "D" notes that the laundering-needed money came from "E", and now is a legit source of funds.
But the more advanced version has "E" be a large megacorp, easily able to eat a 5Mil purchase. "E" then has their own appraiser re-check the value of the piece, since it has appreciated so much in such a short time already. Wow, wouldn't you know, it's now valued at 25Mil. Now, this WOULD be a problem, since you need to recognize appreciation of assets as income when realized... But it is never realized. Instead, it is donated to "F", our Final stop, a hospital or a university, or even a political party, that is a registered charity. "E" is down 5Mil, that's rough. But it just donated 25Mil to charity, lowering their income by 25Mil (and their tax burden by about 5Mil), AND gives them a charity deduction of ANOTHER 5Mil off their tax burden! By buying and ditching that worthless piece of art, their coffers are 5Mil heavier.
The non-profit, of course, has a painting probably not even worth the original $1000. But it got it for free. Source of funding, plus 25Mil... But they're a non-profit, they just raffle away the painting for a piddling fundraiser amount and mark down the loss.
Chrono Trigger was art, and no one can tell me different.
SotC and ME were specifically aimed at general audiences, they were never art.
Anyone who argues about which game is “art” is a pretentious douchebag.
Who tf calls Mass Effect art? It was fun but it was the epitome of pulp sci-fi. It's not meant to be deep, it's just fun genre goofiness.
I think all video games are art except walking sims. Those are just incomplete games.
they are choose-your-own-adventure ebooks. they're about as much "incomplete games" as a car is an "incomplete aircraft".
And Chrono Trigger wasn't aimed at general audiences? We're talking about a SNES game here. They're all art. The superiority of one product over another doesn't make it art and the other not art.
I wouldn't say it was targeted at all really. It was simply a good adventure well told.
too lazy to type this morning so I copy paste: three designers that Square dubbed the "Dream Team": Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Square's Final Fantasy series; Yuji Horii, creator of Enix's Dragon Quest series; and Akira Toriyama, character designer of Dragon Quest and author of the Dragon Ball manga series.
Ah yes, Chrono Trigger, created by a small gaming company with humble devs and artist making a hand crafted small batch game for discerning niche audiences.
It sold 2.6 million copies back when that was a lot.
That comment was 100% sarcasm lol
Popularity =/= quality.
Not that CT isn't a quality product.
You could defend it better then just saying: it has big names on it.
For me, it was 2000-2 when Xbox and console gamers in general were starting to have an influence on PC games and developers. It was slow at first because PC gamers were very resistant and knew we had a good thing, but bit by bit the creep was evident. PC gamers were accustomed to full blown expansions that were competitive products, in most cases, and we saw the garbage console gamers were tolerating, especially shit pushed by Microsoft, and most of us pushed back when we could.
WoW changed things by drawing many console gamers to PC, and the lines between the two audiences started to blur. By 2006, we had the "horse armor" BS that, while mocked and rejected, was still a sign of what was to come.
In another timeline Halo never switched to being an Xbox exclusive and games of the 2020s didn't become worse than games from the 2000s.
Son, you build trenches around your hobbies, lined with barbed wire, mines and an artillery barrage if they attempt to get to close.
The Asians thankfully have their language barrier to act as this, Warhammer in that the level of nerd is suppressing the tourists but everything else has been raped like a locust swarm has ravaged the area
From what I've seen gw has basically ditched most of the 'hobby' part of the hobby and now is in the habit of 'retiring' models. If the demand got high enough I could see them offering prepainted sets too.
Warhammer still has an inbuilt immunity in that the whole point of the setting, especially 40k, is to be as grimdark as possible in the bluntest and sometimes most juvenile way possible. There is a limit to how edgy you can get, which has been reached a few times, but if you take away the ability of people to meme and flex about edgy content then there is no pathetic neckbeard group of hardcores that will keep the hope alive like with Star Wars. They will just leave for another tabletop game.
They already ditched their dark fantasy setting for something more generic so never say never. One of the big ethos these culture vultures espouse after all is 'X is for everyone' and their always making moves.
You'll know if they fall if they do female space marines, till then it's just throwing bodies at the issue hoping to either hold the line or crush them under the weight.
So regular 40k battles.
From what I understand of GW inside baseball, the unceremonious botch job of Warhammer Fantasy into Age of Sigmar was a profit-based decision, which is right in the GW playbook.
I want to get into Warhammer before the show premieres but I have lots of homework
I am going to pass along a jewel, Smitty. The All-Guardsmen Party. This is one of the better views of what it would look like to be a normal person trying to fight in the 40K universe.
Hands down my favorite piece of Warhammer media.
You linked the wrong playlist though. Deadpan delivery is best.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1fLIzO-7JpYb0ajewD4soD2PuXAcaJyy
Thanks!!!
Plenty of YouTube channels for that like Arch, Lutin, Adeptus ridiculous is another on that too that's good for newbies.
One benefit of having insomnia is that I can watch these super late at night
For the hobby side of warhammer, check out Eons of battle, tabletop time and Squidmar. Lots of cool paint jobs and builds. Play on table top has great videos of actual gameplay edited down to 40 or so minutes.
If you want Warhammer Fantasy, the Total War Warhammer Trilogy is an unironically great place to just dive in and start absorbing the best parts of the era everyone liked from it and find what races appeal to you most to start your reading there. And if you don't pick SETTRA THE IMPERISHABLE, KING OF KINGS, then you are wrong. Vermintide is also good if you have friends to play with.
40k doesn't have one on that level that stands above the rest as a jumping point, but games like Space Marine and Mechanicus are similar good times to just immerse yourself in small snippets before you get overwhelmed.
I’ve said the same thing. I stupidly thought the MCU movies could get people into comics. Now I never want anything to be adapted and I hate the fact that nerdy stuff became trendy. Look how they murdered Wheel of Time and Witcher
Comics are so bad the MCU made 30 billion dollars and it didn't budge comic book sales in any noticeable way.
Exactly. Crazy they couldn’t capitalize on it. I heard a story from a comic book store where a boy wanted an iron man comic and left empty handed because they just had ironheart. Also people like the idea of comics but don’t actually read them. But they see a woman with a Captain America shirt on and they think she reads comics
A cute girl wearing a comic book t-shirt just wants you to look at her tits twice.
Then when a guy asks her what comic book she likes she will whine about “being quizzed by hardcore nerds”
He... asked me, without consent, who my favorite character was! The toxic harassment and bro rape culture of the hobby needs to be cleansed! Thxy can't just put such gatekeeping quizzes on the entryway to thxxr hobby!
Amazon butchering the one digital storefront for them certainly didn't help the situation. I'm still salty about that.
I don't know what Amazon did with any comics storefront, what happened?
Comixology was the smoothest most refined online digital comics experience. Amazon bought them out and gutted the entire app and basically just redirected everything to kindle. It more or less killed off a huge chunk of digital readership in the industry.
It'd be like if Steam suddenly became an unusable slag heap of awful UX design that made the shittiest mom and pop eCommerce site look like futuristic tech, except that no one else was selling PC games. And also some of your games just straight up stopped existing as a bonus.
Internal activists basically killed any idea of this, forcing comic stores to stock the titles they wanted sold rather than the stuff people were actually willing to buy. IIRC.
I marvel(heh) at the stupidity of some people, but I honestly think people don't realize just how much lightening in the bottle the MCU really was, myself among them.
Literally the start and end of the argument. If it caters to everyone, it's good for no one.
Our mistake was thinking our niche interests were unpopular because people didn't know about it, rather than because they had unique aspects nobody else was looking for.
Yeah, I remember the days when I didn't think 90% of the population are retarded and an anchor around the neck of humanity too.
As a hobby gets more popular women try to include themselves for the purpose of attention whoring. Then they complain if they aren't catered to. Then the simps in positions of the smallest authority mistakenly think if they give them women what they want it will give the simp a chance of getting laid. Then the hobby "community" stops being about the hobby and turns into catering to women.
Hope your boys can turn it around soon. Anyone who beats the Yankees in the World Series is a friend of mine.
Very true. I’m a life long Rangers fan but my little league team was the Pirates. Plus y’all had Bonds and Sid Bream. Of course more Old School Honus Wagner, Clemente, and Mazeroski
Astros fan for 20+ years here. Albeit way less so than I used to be honestly. I was souring on the experience after 2017 before all the scandalous stuff that's so overblown anyway. It was way more fun being a fan of a team that's shit where no one cared, instead everyone fucking hates your guts now. Random people would say stuff because I had a shirt on.
I've gotten more and more away from sports fandom anyway. It kinda sucks, because baseball brought me and my dad something to be into together when we had nothing, so I'll probably never totally quit it. It's lost it's fun though.
Linux too. Growing up the people who used it were all about "how do we get more people to use this Linux thing that's so cool?"
Which is interesting because that same group of people (myself included) were keenly aware of the "Eternal September" effect and yet apparently somehow didn't think it would happen in this instance.
Which just tells me that every group has its "golem": some entity that the group courts thinking they'll always have control over it but eventually destroys the group. And for nerds and their hobbies that golem is "normies". We can't help but try to get them interested in our hobbies and interests, and it always comes back to bite us.
Linux getting big meant professionals at big companies started developing Linux, and with that came HR and PR departments taking an interest in Linux development.
And with that eventually came Codes of Conduct.
I don't think that distro can physically exist, particularly since it's all spawned out of the framework Linus Torvalds created. Dude's just too much of an unlikeable fuck for anything he built to be user friendly.
I tried to get into Ubuntu back in the mid 2000s when it was being pitched as exactly the kind of user friendly distro you want. I had a full blown Linux guru as a roommate and it was a bunch of Computer Science majors in that appartment, but even with all of that going for me I ended up switching back to Windows after a couple semesters. Linux is just unfriendly by nature.
That said, I'm happy to see people driven away from it, so maybe you guys can keep ahold of that one after all.
Modern Ubuntu basically is that distro now and has been for at least a few years. It's not 100% problem-free as Windows but it's like 80-90% of the way there and you can run basically any Windows program or game without too many bugs or hassle trying to find an answer on Stack Exchange now.
The ironic thing about Linus is his disagreeableness used to be something people in his position aspired towards but is no longer "HR approved", and he had to recant a lot of it to stay in the good graces of his tribe.
Imagine being a self-made man in a way most of us can't possibly comprehend (in the sense that he has achieved immortality through his work) but still having to comply with arbitrary HR dictates made and enforced by useless people far beneath him. Well that's Linus.
"If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"
His problem is his daughter is full blown woke
Definitely a "be careful what you wish for" moment for the geeks. Even getting girls involved. People probably wanted waifus, and instead they got THOTs with controllers... and trannies (not mutually exclusive, unfortunately).
I just want my friends to like my hobbies. That's actually the way to go.
Fuck Hipster Hobbyists.
They're cultural Mongol hordes.
I never wanted my hobbies to be "popular", but I did want to know a few more people who shared some of the same interests when I was younger. Which isn't at all the same thing as making everything mainstream since the normies still don't understand me or my interests at all.
I never really related to this type talk until I thought of it, as I really don't consider gaming a hobby. It's something to kill time. I'm not really in to it. Even when I collected games I wasn't attached to any of it. I think most of the hobbies I had from a kid until now were inherently gatekept by needing one or both of money or mechanical skill. Like today, I'd way more call cars a hobby than games for myself. When I was a kid/teenager I was into RC car racing, again money or mechanical skill. That seems to run off the trannies and crazies, because they have neither.
Still, niche is always more fun than mainstream things really. I've never felt the need to follow along, so I've never cared if others did what I did.
I remember when I was 12 or 13, and the SNES had been out about a year, and there were rumors in video game magazines about Sony entering the ring, with a CD based console. Just rumblings, hearsay. Then later on in 1993, they became real.
I remember taking a look at the sega CD and thinking "They want more of that?" it was filled with FMV games, or games that could easily have been put on a cartridge if they left out the cut scenes. The FMV games in particular were barely qualified games. Most of them were Dragon's Layer level of interaction, but with worse quality video.
I'm not sure what happened after 1994, but it seems like people who were calling everyone who played video games losers were desperate for a piece of the growing financial pie, while continuing to shit on and destroy video games.
The thing is, it may not be possible to keep video games niche. It just attracts too many people for any sort of gate keeping at all. You can try, and you can be vitriolic to those that want in, to make them less interested. But they'll just avoid you, and try it if they're actually curious about it.
I'm not sure what can be done anymore. I've almost entirely abandoned AAA gaming and buying new games in general. With the exception of the games I suggested in another thread, the newest game I bought this year was released in 2006.
I don't hate the idea of something being popular, I hate the idea of it not being properly gatekept. Unfortunately, the more popular something becomes, the less likely people at large will step up and weed out the people who have no love for the hobby.
If you lived through pokemania then you probably have a vision of your hobby infecting the whole world, basically making you cool, and allowing you to play it with strangers and make new friends. There was an incredible psychological element involved, and it was all empty suggestions but it worked and had an influence on a generation of consumption related aspiration
If you are interested in my hobby, it's not my responsibility to ensure you have a good time. It's your responsibility to prove to us how enthusiastic you are about it. There are films, music, books. Consume them - enjoy them, and if you love them, you'll find a way into the hobby after enough time. The good time comes automatically when everyone who is enthusiastic about it gets together. We're not rolling out the red carpet. It doesn't have to be inclusive. In fact - it's because it's exclusive to those who truly appreciate it as part of the reason we think it's so good.
it's not that i wanted my shit to be popular, i just wanted the annoying faggots to leave me alone.
Yeah I got mass reported back in warzone 1 after winning and was shadowbanned for some time.
I am of the personal opinion that if a computer can do it for you, it's not fun. Everyone should be aim-botting.
... and now I retreat again from the shooter game community.
I used to tell people how fun Quake was, never could get them to play it. Which I guess is good for you. The thing I'd say about Quake that modern games don't have is it's simplicity. Like you mention skill, and of course there is some, but it's a bit of an easy to learn but difficult to master game. I hate how modern games seem to be the opposite, they are so incredibly caught up in complex mechanics. Even like the most mainstream things like Fortnite, I have to go around pick up all kinds of shit, manage an inventory, build at hyperspeed, etc. Quake? I keep up with a weapon and jump around shooting shit.
That was the thing I noticed when I started playing the recent Hitman games coming from playing Blood Money for the past 15 years. The new games have pre-planned "mission storylines" which let you assassinate targets in pre-determined ways by playing through a sequence of actions displayed on screen, a HUD, and a mode which lets you "see" NPCs through walls and on other floors.
The old games have "press select to see a top-down map (which does not pause the game and only shows targets when you play at the highest difficulty level)."
But to the devs' credit you can turn all the new stuff off, and if you do the games still play exactly like the old ones do.
I appreciate when they offer options to turn those things off for sure. I'm probably a bad example in Hitman as I like to complete the challenges, you know drown the victim, make them shock themselves, etc. so I don't really turn HUDs off, but I don't like to look up solutions either so there's that.
I never would have finished Witcher 3 without a lot of the HUD off. I got bored quick of follow the GPS line to hear some dialog to follow a fast cloud to follow another GPS line. Navigating with my eyes and the map changed the game for me.
I thought the same thing about the HUD in Assassin's Creed. It turned a game which should have been about exploring the cities and completing tasks you find along the way into a game where you just go from waypoint to waypoint.
Was Morrowind the last major RPG that gave you a world map and NPCs who would give you vague directions and that's it?
Because I'd rather play Unreal Tournament and be moon jumping with rocket launchers.