I've found my mind wandering toward online gamer culture recently (and not just because I'm trying my hand at Gamedec) and I'm reminded of one glaringly constant quibble. See, from the mid-'90s we've gone through 2D, 2.5D, 3D and back to hipster-retro "pixel art". We've gone from 28.8 modems to cable and fiber optics to having nothing worth playing online because multiplayer quality has stagnated or deteriorated so badly. We've gone from hyperaggressive little cretins charging in blindly to dickless retarded little bitches too scared to ever risk their own scores for the sake of the team.
But no matter the decade or the generation or the polygon count, somehow, for almost thirty years running, online gamers still don't know the difference between network lag and FPS. It's... well, at some point the overt effort put into such willful ignorance starts rivaling that of religions. Mind you, we're not talking about specialized knowledge like Nvidia's latest thread-tunneling-vertex-packets, or about the general knowledge no-one seems to acquire anymore. Ping/frames is a very basic distinction which not only affects your favorite hobbies on a daily basis but has done so for uninterrupted decades, to the point that for any gamer it should some as naturally as differentiating between coffee and gasoline. Both keep things running, but they're not interchangeable!
Yet a couple of days ago I saw, as I have in innumerable game discussions since the days of Warcraft 2 and Quake, two knuckleheads trying to fix rubberbanding by turning shadows or reflections off in their graphics settings. I had half a mind to tell them to press Alt-F4.
How has an entire global population who routinely download and upload entire terabytes on a whim not managed to transmit such a minute yet critical factoid over an entire medieval serf's lifespan ?!?
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