Maybe I'll write the post I'd intended for today next year. In its place, have a sad shrew in snow.

Player Values Environment

"Slickback, wisecrack, I can smell a rat
Ransacked, setback, down another cul-de-sac
Bullwhack, maniac, sitting on the train track
Crookback, lumberjack, think I better backtrack"

 

Oi Va Voi - Dusty Road

 

 

While Kingdom Come: Deliverance will never hold my attention quite like Mount&Blade, it's still an undeniably expert piece of work and even its infuriating melee combat, savegame potions, stripping down to sneak or other minor chores can't stop me from returning to polish off at least a majority of quests, basking in recherché medieval immersion and hardcore mode's lack of pointers forcing you to navigate by landmarks and cardinal directions.

Having bemoaned the loss of such mechanics repeatedly in the past and clung to the few attempts at rebuilding video game pathfinding (like Miasmata or Sir, You Are Being Hunted) in the era of Skyrim map markers, I had to note how KCD makes stumbling around the woods so engrossing. Largely, as it turns out, by stepping back and giving control to the player (ironically where its overscripted melee combat fails in the opposite direction) and giving you tools and goals but few direct procedures (alchemy recipes aside, natch) letting you game the system via your own aptitudes. Most important among such tools is shaping the terrain itself as to encourage the player to deliberately get his bearings and plot a course.

 

Having snuck out of Ledetchko in the dead of night for some innocent deer poaching (and incidental deer-poacher-poacing; turns out poachers are a territorial breed) I made to turn in their RAW DRIPPING LIVERS to the butcher of Sasau only to find myself yet again hopelessly discombobulated after my adventures and unaware how many roads or woods I'd crossed in the dark. I ambled rather aimlessly downhill in hopes the river may lead me to civilization. Luckily, first light broke just as I broke through the trees above one of the land's many mills and (praise be unto Saint Christopher!) gleamed white against the distant unmistakable squarish sight and newly raised bell tower of Sasau monastery. A quick glance at the map unmistakably pinpointed the mill itself and thereby my own position.

Knowing this helpful landmark would be once again blocked by the upland fields once I descended down the escarpment to the river, I made my plans (as I had business in town) not to cross the fields but skirt their border with the woods. Sure enough I soon hit the final landmark, the roadside shrine to some mysterious benefactors (read: kickstarter donors or somesuch) and was home free!

Other games have tried to reward you for walking, sometimes by such insulting metrics as simply counting the number of steps you've taken (looking in your direction No Man's Sky) or giving you levelups for such a freebie action. But whatever KCD's other faults or accolades, Warhorse Studios displayed unimpeachable artistry in making good on restoring travel's due relevance, not by arbitrary carrots or sticks but by employing the terrain itself in its own traversing: well-drawn maps, rises and rivers, recognizable mills and camps, towns with individual traits, breaks in the trees, vantage and markers and the ever-glimmering stars.

But of course, when we think of terrain interaction, we mostly think of combat advantages. Aside from maneuvering your archers to high ground, many a fight in Bannerlord will center on keeping your cavalry on open ground or breaking your enemy's charge using fences, trees or rivers to effortlessly pincushion them while slowed.

More interestingly though, even the overland map yields positioning advantages and disadvantages, some unexpectedly... economic.

Much as I bitched out my emperor for gifting me a low-yield string of castle fiefs, the southmost of these, Akiser, reaped an unexpected windfall in ransoms when wars broke out with the Southern Empire and Aserai. Aside from defending it myself, friendly armies fleeing sieges tended to take refuge at the nearest unblockaded castle, and as the AI apparently unburdens itself of prisoners at the first dungeon... ka-ching!

 

In Stellaris as well, much use can be made of third parties or game events punching holes in your rivals' territories.

Around mid-game, the marauders which had heretofore remained contained in their original systems might balloon in strength thanks to the rise of a "great khan" and begin expanding. During other runs it spelled my death. Here I was able to sit on defense and let the khan chew up my opponent then sweep up its systems without risking a diplomatically self-destructive open war. Or take one of the end-game events:

Like the khan, extragalactic invaders can be particularly nasty because instead of claiming territory they wipe existing ownership and take over, even rendering planets uninhabitable. Here one of the systems they "liberated" happened to include a jumpgate which once neutral I used to move up behind their lines and snatch up the conquered stars. Joined by other opportunists, we knocked the Raxycodium Alliance completely out of the running for victory with a third of its territory nibbled off... all perfectly peaceful and legal and even heroic in our timely appllication of squatters' rights. In case you're wondering, it works in reverse as well: under #3 in this post, the different colored territory in the bottom of the image resulted from a Gray Tempest event paired with my ill luck in finding half a dozen L-gates inside my borders. Hey, sometimes you're the Swiss and sometimes you're the cheese...

 

Once you've seen so many games make such creative use of maps and positioning and logistic opportunism, it becomes particularly annoying to see so many more treat theirs as only a flat surface on which to farm ten to the tenth rats. Even some attempted terrain features can be worse than useless for lack of integration.

11bit did brilliant work on Frostpunk, but their earlier offerings fell rather short of that standard. Anomaly Defenders, a tower defense I already bashed here, filled one mission with random meteor strikes destroying your towers. In a better game, this would've entailed some means of detecting, deflecting or intercepting said meteors in such a way as to inform your construction going forward or be deliberately used against your enemies. Here, it's merely more whack-a-mole: the strikes are truly random and inevitable and give little forewarning. "Rocks fall, everyone dies" indeed.

 

The most insulting attitude though would have to be that of mindless arcade-throwback twitch-games in which enemies simply teleport in on top of you to be popped off like skeet. Doom, a classic which should never have remained an aspirational goal, remained a worst offender as of #3, where I quickly learned to mechanically, mindlessly twirl after picking up a health/ammo pack and plug the enemies inevitably spawning to "ambush" me. Diablo-inspired loot grinds like Warframe are at least up front about such idiocy being their core feature, one-upping MMOs without the pretense of larger (nonexistent) events. It's a lot more galling in games like No Man's Sky where exploration presupposes some preparedness, or Mechwarrior which at least facetiously touts some tactical elements but where units are flat-out too fast relative to weapon ranges, making positioning largely irrelevant from second to second. Instead of fabricating the shallow "feels" of enemies coming over the rise and turning this into mere whack-a-mole, why not allow the rise to be deliberately used? Get a rise out of your rise!

The Whipping Experiment

"All we know is violence, do the job in silence

Walk the city streets like a rat pack of tyrants"

 

2Pac - Trapped

 

 

With yet another Dune adaptation having come out in recent years, I can only assume publishers have been pushing Herbert books left and right, so you may have glanced at The Dosadi Experiment's cover. Worth a read, almost entirely for its highly memorable social experiment core gimmick.

For a bonus, read it alongside its loose predecessor Whipping Star. Neither's the author's best work. Both carry a juvenile air of overstatement (sapient stars, etc.) born of early 20th-century pulp SF, but lacking Pandora or Dune's multifaceted world-building to redeem them. A fairly cartoonish superspy type, uniquely talented and connected, is called upon both times to do the impossible. Whipping Star's more forgettable "save the galaxy" plot spiced up by an awkward fetish mention barely ties into Dosadi's. Well, except for borrowing the almighty star gods as phlebotinum justifying planetary isolation.

Dosadi fares better for its tighter focus and less forced hyperbole. There's a fairly common trope in fiction of heroes emerging from harsh environments as not only pluripotent renaissance men but also moral paragons, a variation on the noble savage or salt of the earth arguments superimposing the notion that overcoming adversity builds character. (A common theme of politicians' and corporate profiteers' "born in a log cabin" hagiography as well, always cheerfully eliding survivorship bias as gratuitously mandated by the end-goal of producing such a perfect being as the speaker.) Herbert's rejoinder is a cackling novel-length "NO" taking the idea to its logical extreme via privation and overcrowding within a megalopolitan nightmare isolated on a poisonous world. Mumbai cubed. The social experiment yields products alert and proactive but also hopelessly sociopathic.

 

Hard to miss the real-world parallel to the wealthy fomenting slum conditions in a thousand cities around our world, and without spoiling too much of the ending, it's worth noting Herbert's characteristic moral ambiguity: someone will always find a use for sociopaths. Whatever his intent with the book (maintaining as it does a large degree of characteristic fascination with cut-throat survival) it works best as an illustration of the upper and lower classes' conspiracy against the middle. Ravenously power-hungry underlings are the first necessity for ruthlessly powermongering overlords, a resource factory-farmed and hoarded, and the science of breeding animalistically murderous hordes continues to advance.

________________________________________________

P.S.:

For a counterpoint, try Lem's Return from the Stars.

Crossroads of Flesh

"Is that squire on the fire?"

"Mercy no, sir, look closer, you'll notice it's grocer"

"Looks thicker, more like vicar"

"No, it has to be grocer - it's green"

 

A Little Priest (Sweeney Todd)

 

(or, alternately, try The Cathedral of Flesh's theme; Redemption, for all its flaws, featured some of the most inspired game music ever recorded)

 

 

I speculated at one point on how a fantasy RPG inkeeper game should play, and marked a few random titles I found on that theme. Two of those, Travellers Rest and Fortune's Tavern, look like RPGMaker fare, and I'd rather not pay good money for freakin' chibis. Tavern Keeper might've vaporized? I eventually caved in and gave Crossroads Inn a try just to see the concept in execution. It's not very executive.

 

Not pictured: lists upon lists of redundant recipes.

Opting for campaign mode first, I quit two minutes into the opening cinematic when the narration headed for some manner of painfully trite chosen one / secret orphaned prince setup. Why? When for once you're working with a theme so apt to show a commoner's rise to greatness in the absence of cosmic favor... WHY?!? why why cling to the same perfunctory star-crossrailroaded specialness as 95% of fantasy fiction?!

Anyway, swapping to the more freeform game mode, I was immediately struck by how unfinished Crossroads Inn looks even four years and a couple of DLCs after release, and even by the standards of my generally low-budget RPG/Strategy collection.

why one box but not the other...?

If you've played games with a managerial side you'll be familiar with the resource stockpiling/recombination paired with Sims-inspired customer/employee mood management, but here both sides appear truncated from their design aspirations, with features like employee mood/loyalty or resource decay stripped of their effects to save balancing. I eventually quit due to the time-honored algorithmic foible of pathfinding (and the unrestricted drag-drop tool you're given to move NPCs should tell you just how often they get stuck) but the depths of Crossroads Inn's amateurishness show in rando' crap like lack of feedback on whether your orders are queued, neglecting to word-wrap a text box, or autosave never replacing old saves, accumulating hundreds of daily files.

To compensate for all these lacks, its developers leaned hard on expanding your trade network on the overland map. At some point they seem to have decided to give up on actual gameplay and just copypasta the nearest cookbook, making you gradually unlock dozens, scores and hundreds of recipes for which to stockpile more and more redundant ingredients. Ditto for furniture. While some such breadth in a core feature is expected (see Dwarf Fortress' livestock) even the fifteen types of customers don't justify the sheer repetition of yet another omelette and yet another soup. Even the developers themselves obviously had no idea what to do with them all. "It's a chair, don't know what more to tell you" sounds cute the first time. Not so much the fiftieth.

 

Sinking all their work-hours into a heavily scripted campaign instead of addressing basic functionality makes Crossroads Inn overpriced even at 80% off.

But enough about its failures, let's segue to what was never attempted. Despite a smatter of fantasy gimmicks like griffin eggs and alchemy, the game's creators opted for more of a vaguely Dumas-flavored inn of intrigue, never quite meshing with the managerial simulation precept and casting the choice of setting in doubt. In my original post linked at the start I'd said "Fantasy tavern management shouldn't be about cheerfully serving drinks. Your struggle to stay in business should center on your innkeeper's role as middle-man to the forces out to destroy the world, a conniving tool and accessory, a racketeer, a money-launderer, an accomplice, an enabler to the universe's gutterspawn and all the grandstanding, self-righteous loose cannons who stand in soi-disant opposition to "evil" forces." And while I stand by playing up the destructive nature of adventurers and fantasy inns' role as drama magnets, there might be a useful link here to my declaration that I wanna be a Tzimisce.

Why not pair the fleshcrafting of a villainous lair with a greater context for acquiring more flesh to craft? Fantasy races tend to be carnivorous anyway, and if a poor wing-sore griffin on above the road would pay good money for a haunch of hobbit... and hobbit-hide makes such lovely upholstery... well, who are you to deny it in here? In that context, the inn itself would be... bait.

 

Crossroads Inn's obsession with gathering recipes from the three corners of the world got me thinking I'm also gathering connoisseurs from said corners, and it's a damn shame to let that culinary variety go to waste. By all means advertise horse steaks to lure in all those Dothraki nomads, to lure in those independently wealthy dragons with a taste for Dothraki. And what giant doesn't love a good Jack'n'beans? Maybe stock up on honeydew for a fairy brunch, and some fairy popsicles for the orc table's dessert tray? Why not? You'll keep players' attention more readily by serving cousins than cuisine.

And who better to put the... leftovers... to good use than a tzimisce inkeeper, faultlessly polite and mannered and always on the lookout for more art supplies? As the inn prospers aboveground, so does its hidden counterpart below, sinew by sclera.

Look, not to get too lycanthropic here, but parental watchdog groups are gonna keep bitching about video games' corrupting influence anyway. Give 'em something to cry about. Beats counting the pixelated mugs of lager any day.

Nose to the grindstone blind stone drunkest own it never outgrown ingot bored straights cared a naphtalene unknown quantity ease oaf ax sets down for a spell ailing but never wailing groan through every second verse same as the faust ousted from your own comfort zone blown away by every delay stay with missed opposite you nit pick easily queasy with your own reflection dissection sick shown grown down with every ear to the ground where it's say fully what you mean very little while long 'er but never long ingenuously mind your own man or so they sleigh right into a re-hearseal the deal with it on your owe in term suffer for your part in a small rolled up and tied upward of your net war thalamused up dried up and dead to the woe relayed racing every rat until pestle grinds you down don't frown upside owned your faults lined up for inspection upon reflection a concoction of deflection until nothing resounds good to me let's do it to it broke down choked down grokked a not in the cacophony leaning against the wall outside the symphony seam phony it snapped into place matted with disgrace grates against your blinded nose.

Deva Made Me Do It

"His perfect kingdom of killing, suffering in vain

Demands devotion, atrocities done in his name "

NIN - Heresy

 

Interesting word "Deva" starting in the dankest murk of prehistory (likely as one of our endless catch-all terms for supernatural beings) then with the rise of Zoroastrianism diverging along a dividing line between West and South Asia. On the east side, the various priesthoods of the Indian subcontinent kept Deva an overwhelmingly positive or even beneficent figuration. On the west side the successive Iranian faiths came to regard Daeva as maleficent demons.* Angels on one side, devils on the other, what's in a name? I won't pretend to dissect the whole etymological/historical conundrum, but I'll go out on a limb here and speculate both aristocracies must've been well served by this semantic schism in securing their local rabble's automatic enmity toward the other side of the fence as devil-worshipers or god-killers.

 

Religion is many things: delusion, self delusion, mass delusion, crass delusion, a tool of social control, unearned entitlement, a for-profit enterprise, but for the moment let's focus on its role as justification. While I haven't followed Sam Harris' podcast too closely since he paywalled it, earlier this year a full-length episode #300 focused on Meg Smaker, whose documentary Jihad Rehab was struck down by the Sundance festival's newly burgeoning censorship board in a particularly odd fit of woke insanity** before it had a chance to air. I highly recommend the interview as a whole, Smaker herself being quite an interesting person and her description of the wokeysition's intimidation campaign against anyone involved with the film a prime example of 21st-century America's peculiar insanity. As to the topic at hand, her interviews with former Jihadists yielded one unexpected conclusion: religion did not predominate among their motivations for joining a religious war, instead falling equally among a clutter of thrill-seeking, community pressure and good old-fashioned moolah. Mullah moolah.

Perhaps spurred by the Jihad Rehab kerfuffle, Reuters fed me an article back in February confirming the U.N. found roughly the same answers from Muslim terrorists in the Sahel, with money even more important given the region's infamous poverty. Now, I'm not one to rely on the probity of braindead superstitious murderers and would-be mass-murderers, but given their geographic and sectarian disparity and the fact many of them would have been isolated in various prisons prior to their interviews, I'll accept the unlikelihood of collusion in some nebulous deceit. Let's take them at their word. Religion does not overwhelmingly motivate these young men to join religious mass murder.

First off, yes of course religious beliefs did not initially motivate them because most true believers in the supernatural don't have the first fucking clue about whatever faith they subscribe to, not rhetorically or dogmatically, not historically or philosophically, and especially not factually. It makes their parents and neighbours happy to believe the same nonsense, so they believe it.

Second off, yes, we already know religious wars are driven by the interests of tribal leaders whipping their peasantry into a frenzy on religious pretexts for personal motives. When discussing some of the more casual feminist propaganda saturating our media, I even juxtaposed the witchcraft trials against the immensity of death and destruction caused by the Thirty Years' War during the same time period, in which religion proved as always a ready and enthusiastic tool for the ambitions of the rich.

So what if Jihadists were not originally motivated by a conscious adherence to religious demands? If they hail from theocracies, joining a charismatic military leader is identical to joining a crusading bishop anyway. If glory and adventure are synonymous with religious promises of supernatural favor in the recruit's mind, if they believe prosperity comes from their big magic sky-daddy, the distinction is moot! Is a get-rich-quick scheme predicated on gettin' in good with the fairies up in the clouds an "economic" motivation? Full stop?

 

Perhaps unlike those few of you reading this, I actually was subjected to official, state-sanctioned religious indoctrination in grade school. Ironically, it rather precipitated my switch to atheism, especially via supposed iron-clad arguments like Pascal's Wager. Even at nine years old I quickly called bullshit (mentally, not publicly) on the notion of making myself believe something for pragmatic expediency. You believe stuff that makes sense, not the other way around, like, duh!*** But most naked apes never reach even that basic level of reasoning. Speech evolved from animal calls, expressions not of ideas but primitive instinct or emotion (angry roars, plaintive meowls, drawling trills of horniness) and most humans will merely vociferate whatever may retroactively justify their impulses, and then will further retroactively claim their vociferations to possess some real-world justification. Let's fuck. Why? 'Cause God is love, babay! What? Yes of couse God exists. How could he not, when my wiener doth wax with love o'er-weening?****

For one last example, let's take a recent Associated Press article on one Philippine village's unusual Easter celebration re-enacting the crucifiction with actual nails.

First, note the most wildly inaccurate Roman LARP costumes ever! You call those plumes?!?

Second, I'm amused at the repeated mention of the Catholic church's consternation at this unlicensed spin on their copyrighted sympathetic magic rituals. Yes, when the Vatican's trying to stop heretics from being strung up, we truly do live in a topsy-turvy world.

Third, South Asia is hardly unaccustomed to festivals in which devotees of this-and-that pierce their bodies with needles, swords and hooks, be they Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist or whatever. The particular supernatural justification to mortification is simply made to fit, and be honest now Pope&Co., you do tend to ramble on and on about the importance of those Nine Inch Nails, don't you?

After all, that's the advantage of the supernatural, isn't it? Precisely because it is nothing, because it is literally make-believe because it has zero basis, faith can be made to fit anything. Any profiteering, any neurosis, any crime, any war, any oppression. Devotees will claim it also props up good works, but good doesn't generally need an excuse, a pretense of Almighty sanction. You can be nice without permission. It's when it comes to the physical and mental mutilation of self and others that the saints come marching in. So I find it worrisome to hear Sam Harris hum along with downplaying religiousity's influence in Jihadist recruitment. Yes of course young men want money, adventure and respect, and precisely because of that you need to knock down the idiotic gibberish promising them money, adventure and respect for slaying the infidels.

 

Until religion is viewed as shameful primitivism, what else can you do with the rabble, constantly ensure you're their top brainwasher? Look at the Catholics scratching their heads at Filipino antics. Geez, take yer eyes off the yokels for one GodDamn minute and they start nailing each other to posts! Or, across the pond, outlawing abortion. The public is stupid, yes, but a public finding justification for its stupidity in the supernatural is doubly dangerous. You should have selected for a more intelligent public before it was too late, before you got eight billion imbeciles with a deva of each brand on their shoulders justifying all their worst impulses requiring constant perfect authoritarian control because they can't be trusted not to jump on the first idiotic notion feeding their monkey impulses. You should never have expected to be able to control such overwhelming mass of stupidity by simply altering the wording of sermons. Society's better minds should not and cannot be expected to devote every second of their existence to marching the morons.

And now it's too late.

 

 

___________________________________________________

 

 

* Weirdly enough, the word "devil" itself has a different etymology from Latin/Greek, despite Ahriman as religious antagonist looking likely as partial inspiration for the Abrahamic Accuser.

** Can't claim to have watched it myself, but from Harris' comments and as Smaker herself emphasized, a documentary displaying Jihadists as ordinary schmucks instead of rabid heathens should, if anything, have pissed off the religious/militarist right wing and been embraced by the supposedly multicultural left.

*** Yes, even as a pre-teen I was a pedantic little snot.

**** Yes, you may borrow that line. Let me know how it goes. *wink-wink*

Humor thy farter and thy martyr.

Think everything's fine in the big time

"Save your money, man. Save your money, too. Hit single don't last very long, yknowhatImsayin'? I mean, I been lucky in this game too. There's gonna be another cat comin' out, lookin' like me, soundin' like me, next year, I know this! It'll be a flip-side to what you did, somebody else tryin' to spin off like some y'know... series."

Cypress Hill - Rock Superstar

"Our community would be nothing without you, which is why we would like to invite you to share your thoughts on everything MTG: Arena and help us shape the future of Magic. Click the link below to take the survey!"

- Wizards of the Coast

 

Oh, ye noble squires of Hasbro, such olde-fashioned courtesey! Though, being as I be such honor-ed companee, mayhap in stead of clickething yon spam, ye yourselfes mayst for a span repair thine odiferous posteriors to mine own lycanthropic abode wherein I shalt verily merrily expound thine faults in muckle detail:

 

Detail the first:

STOP MARKETING TO RETARDS!

End of details.

 

MTG:A's current overwhelming flaw is partly inherent in CCGs' microtransaction business model pioneered largely by MTG itself: in order to sell, every single card must be more amazingerer than the last!!!!1 Which inevitably leads to escalating until every single usable card is either an "I win" button by itself, or an all-purpose "you lose" way of cancelling such buttons (e.g. destroy/exile) throwing out all the buildup and effect chains that made MTG enjoyable in the first place. This problem should be dampened by MTG retiring card sets every few months, but it obviously doubles as a selling point power fantasy. The whole reason we bought those stupid cards as tweens was the idiot dream of opening a pack to find some rarity letting you effortlessly beat your friends into the ground and lording it over them, right? And the friends get to sit there and take it... right? Awesomesauce.

 

As reference point, let's take Diablo, guiltiest purveyor of "action" R PGs, a genre/series predicated since its second installment increasingly on gambling addiction, rolling the dice for ph4t l3wt with every kill. A decade ago I was marginally jazzed for #3's release, but immediately gave up the notion* a few seconds into one of the first hype videos released, showcasing the barbarian, which in the words of its imbecile narrator exemplified Blizzard Entertainment's design philosophy: "there's no such thing as too much power" - in which case they wouldn't need a game at all, just a literal button labeled "I win" subtracting $50 from your credit card.

Balance is intrinsic to all games. Everyone plays on the same board with the same value pieces and the same number of moves. Imbalance, unfairness, is cheating, and cheating is not just a hollow phrase but a principle biologically hardwired into our interactions. Both sides will try to maximize their own gains, but if either gets too far ahead, the interaction can collapse. This works well enough for Diablo, wherein one side does not, in fact, exist. It's PvE. Diablo's not a real dude. Cheating against him by picking an overpowered player character spinning to win isn't unfair, just pathetic.**

But especially in PvP cheaters depend on a population of players willing to play it straight whom they can exploit, and one feature of cheating in the natural world is that as a rule, it must remain in the minority. The higher the incidence of cheating, the more your designated victims are motivated to cease the interaction altogether. Counterstrike's "AWP map" was never particularly popular, because AWPers wanted non-AWP-ers to exploit. A game revolving around the one single overpowered option gets boring fast. What game publishers have done is shift the very definition of gameplay in favor of legitimized cheating, spoon-fed winning options, so heavily as to skew into overt parasitism, with an overwhelming population of griefers or dead weight exploiting a handful of honest players.

 

After all, someone has to play a support to support the morons' higher K/D ratios. Someone has to pick the weaker, more interesting option to make the cretins spamming the simpleminded flavor of the week feel big about themselves for taking a free win. Someone has to organize the raid. At least one and a half out of five players must know the fight. A population full of parasites is dead on arrival.

 

In the real world, parasites persist because host organisms cannot avoid them. But can you as purveyors of online entertainment keep your designated victims captive? To some extent, yes, via gambling addiction, status symbols or other reward stimuli... but gradually, as with every predatory gimmick, the populace acquires resistance, gamers grow inured or have been realizing they can find that instant gratification elsewhere. Like Angry Birds. And so, genre after genre of multiplayer games (MMOs, RTS, MOBAs, etc.) are increasingly discussed in terms of their failure.

 

By maximizing parasite appeal, they drove away their pet parasites' hosts.

 

________________________________________________

 

* The stupid bubble-gummy aesthetic didn't help.

**  Even there you have to account for competition and game style diversity, but leave that topic for some other time.

E.T. Semaphore Home?

"Perhaps these air-breathing, radiation-sensitive bundles of unstable carbon compounds had no right beyond the atmosphere; they should stick to their natural homes - Earth, Moon, Mars. Some day the real masters of space would be machines, not men"

 

Arthur C. Clarke - A Meeting With Medusa, 1971

______________________________________________

"We are dealing with a scenario in which if those things that people are observing are aliens who wish to be observed they can settle the question any day they want to."

 

- Bret Weinstein suspending his suspension of disbelief

______________________________________________

I checked in on some YouTube channels this week, and both Bret Weinstein and Tunderf00t are talking about UFOs, so apparently that's in the news again? Yet again? And again and again? Somehow? Presumably spurred by the whole Chinese spy balloon storm in a teacup? Which of course didn't stop fifty million conspiracy nuts rehashing the usual UFO! UFO! UFO! jabber and waving declassified air force lunch menus around with ponderous import.

 

Weinstein's interview's a relatively confused, dull string of noncommittal random physics jargon and name dropping amounting to very pointedly <not> discussing the topic of extraterrestrials, until late in the show when he

1) notes the intelligentsia's skepticism toward conspiracy theories may itself be exaggerated, which is a fair point, albeit still moot in the absence of evidence

2) asks one obvious question: why do UFO true believers keep bitching at the U.S. government to release more information, as if said government could do anything to stop nigh-omnipotent galaxy-hopping space gods from talking to us if they really wanted to?

- and then veers into more general conspiracy talk.

Thunderf00t's rant at least included the words "mass hysteria" and showed how easily some supposed video "evidence" can be duplicated as the usual lens flares, focus failures, random windblown grit, etc.

But more than that, every time the topic comes up I keep meaning to point out UFO sightings / theories are a form of mass hysteria from seventy years ago, which has never outgrown WW2-era technological precepts, when spaceflight meant rocket-men with diving bells strapped to their heads jetting about from planet to planet hefting knock-off Smith&Wesson laser six-shooters. Meanwhile:

- Most have noted the average smartphone has orders of magnitude more features, capacity and utility than a Star Trek communicator.

- By the end of the cold war first strike was already redefined as computer-guided, rovers are roving Mars and drone warfare is now gradually taking over the skies.

- Your phone's camera knows your face better than you do.

- Human-made telescopes are starting to photograph objects across galaxies.

If that's our level of miniaturization, teleoperation, AI and telescopic refinement, what do you think these would be for an entity which, from our perspective, can do the impossible by breaking the light speed limitation? What makes you think they'd be using such primitive means of data collection as flying around our atmosphere? What's next, smoke signals? The very notion that some biologically evolved alien species would need to bodily travel to our planet in the equivalent of an intergalactic tour bus in order to observe us is absurd. Much less that it would come all this way just to get a flat tire or run out of gas and get caught by a bunch of monkeys in farting tin cans. If any extraterrestrial intelligence were observing us, it could probably do so from Neptune's orbit via an object no bigger than your fist, or sprinkle our stratosphere with self-destructing nanotech recorders or fuck it, fMRI our brains all the way from Andromeda.

Nothing advanced enough to reach us would need leave any trace detectable by some adrenaline junkie flying a fighter jet, much less some hick with a cellphone.

Not to mention anything that advanced would have long shed any trace of impractical, primitive biological evolution and would have no more interest in contacting apes than you do in inviting your amino acids to a Zoom conference. We are beneath contempt.

If they wanted to talk you'd be powerless to ignore them.

If they don't you'll never know it.

 

UFOlogy is just quasi-religious make-believe.

Help is not coming.

Deal.