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Your explanation is good and thorough.
I always struggle to know when to use the square brackets. The straightforward answer is to just quote directly where possible. But especially in interviews, someone’s answer may be jumbly, so the most honourable thing to do may be to use square brackets to make it easier for the reader to understand the speaker’s point, but you’re not being misleading.
For example, maybe this interviewee said something like “in the future, it — we might come to see that game development, and games overall, will end up turning out to be player-driven”, which could be straightforwardly shortened to what we see in the screenshot: “in the future, it [will be] player driven”. Square brackets, in the hands of a skilled journalist, can be used to manipulate a narrative through selectively quoting people, but they can also represent a speaker’s point far more authentically and cogently than the literal words.
"in the future, it will be player-driven
It probably is irrational, but humans are pretty irrational.
I think this kind of tension is inevitable when so many people say “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”. Many people with work burnout tried that, and found that they came to hate the thing they love.
Often, when we get stuck in that rut, we can’t undo the harm that it’s done to our passion, and retraining in a different field may be difficult or impossible. Maybe there was a period where it was possible to toe thelp line and make a career out of a hobby, and an attempt to regain some elements of that. In many cases, it’s dumb as hell to keep throwing oneself at the same thing that made someone burnt out in the first place but sometimes, reclaiming something they love is liberating and healing.
I say this speaking as an academic who has always found it hard to separate my work from what I love doing, because even my “extracurricular” projects tend to have a fair bit of overlap with my work. I sometimes wish that I was someone who could have a clear divide between work and fun, but to do that, I’d need to find work much further away from my passions.
When one of my friends started playing Dark Souls, one of the first areas he went to was somewhere that was extremely difficult at his level and skill (he went to the catacombs straight after firelink). He found it exceptionally difficult in a not-fun way, but he continued pushing forward, because he had heard about how gruelling and difficult Dark Souls was.
He told me about this when I was first playing the game, as a way of explaining how the game isn’t necessarily difficult in the way people make it out to be. He needlessly struggled because he was inadvertently listening more to how people talk about the game than what the game was actually communicating to him, via it’s in-game mechanics: namely the skeletons weren’t reviving because the game is unfair and mean, but because there are some mages reviving them; said mages are often difficult to reach, but ranged weapons exist; divine weapons make the skeletons stay dead and can be obtained by explaining other parts of the game; clubs are better against skeletons than swords.
The thing that he, and later I, loved about the souls games is how the challenge works. I like how they foster an environmental awareness in me, both for lore purposes, and figuring out if there are any sneaky mages hidden around. I like being very autistic and getting attached to certain weapons, leading to some enemies being much more difficult than if I were more flexible (and occasionally, I like changing my play-style when the game’s systems are screaming at me “WHAT YOU’RE DOING ISN’T WORKING. TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT — LITERALLY ANYTHING DIFFERENT, YOU HAVE SO MANY WEAPONS”)
This post and the discussion on it made me think of Moon Duchin’s essay "The Sexual Politics of Genius
It’s a long read, at 34 pages, but is easier to read than the title might suggest, possibly because Duchin is a mathematician, which I speculate contributes to her pretty straightforward prose.
I wonder whether it doesn’t have any inherent meaning. I mean, we all get the sense that it’s an insult.
I say this because one of my favourite insult formats is "you [multisyllabic adjective] [random noun]. Stuff like “You incorrigible spade” or “You abominable turnip”. They’re next to meaningless, but my intention is clear
Sometimes. The chess community is very weird in my experience. Like, anarchy chess is a thing and shitposting seems to have permeated chess culture. Case in point, the double bongcloud being played in tournament (1:32 length clip). (For context, the bongcloud opening is very bad, playing it is basically a self nerf. Because of the way that tournaments and points work, the end outcome of this game was basically a mutually agreed draw, but they did it in the most shitposting way possible.).
Personally, I think this is great, it’s made it harder for some people to be gatekeepy arseholes within the chess community. I am always slightly perplexed by the memes though - with absurd humour, it can be hard to tell whether I’m missing the joke, or whether the joke is that there is no joke.
I got that trait too. When I first picked it up, some 18 years into the game, I didn’t mind too much, but I didn’t realise that the trait gets worse as you level up? Apparently the version of the trait that my character has can be prevented from progressing by spending more time “outside”, but that just sounds like a scam intended to make me spend more on some new dlc or something.
I agree that hyper focus is a mixed bag. I’ve heard it works best for players with a really clear plan for their character build, so they can use the buffs most strategically, but I have no idea how people can make effective characters based on such RNG mechanics.
Regarding the depressed moodle, I feel your pain; I feel like whoever designed this game needs to read about reinforcing and balancing feedback loops, because it’s fucking dreadful with how easy it is to get into a losing spiral, where you end up with such severe debuffs that it feels impossible to get out of. Honestly, even though all my friends play this game and seem to have a lot of fun in it, I’ve come close to just stopping playing a few times, with how unfun it is.
This might not be helpful advice, because the effect doesn’t seem to proc for everyone, but apparently when you’ve been stuck with the depressed moodlet for a long time (and apparently some other conditions), you start to receive a hidden xp bonus to routine tasks. I always thought it was bullshit they told people to keep them playing, but I tried it once (almost out of spite to prove that it wouldn’t work), and I found that yeah, I did actually see bonus progression from lower level tasks that wouldn’t ordinarily give xp. I found that the “showering” and “eating” tasks were the highest yield, but the xp-farming loop was too grindy and I got burnt out too easily to keep it up alongside the debuffs. I found that the xp multiplier still applied to smaller quests though, like “use wet-wipes to approximate a shower”, or “eat a snack”, and I could do those things close enough to my daily respawn point that it was easy enough to do on the side.
This certainly isn’t a solution though. Like I say, the balancing of this game is out of whack, and it sounds like you’ve been having a grim time of it. I hope that you’re able to break out of this cycle somehow and find aspects of the game you can engage in again, whether that happens via the game gets a big balancing update (unrealistic hope with these devs, I know), or something other way (such as grinding, or finding an exploit in the code that allows you to shed your debuffs)