From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free 🇵🇸
The key is that you like your job. That makes a world of difference if you have adhd. I like my job too, but still struggle pretty regularly. It’s a day-to-day struggle. Some days I’m really focused and motivated, and then others are a wash. If you can get tested and try out meds, it’s worth pursuing. It helps me with social situations too and keeps me on task. I communicate more clearly, and I can complete tasks with less distractions. The only issue I encounter while on them is mood change. I have to be aware of it because it can make me get short with people. Not necessarily in an angry way; it just makes me super fixated on results and getting to the point.
It’s the increase of noise in our heads. It makes diving into deep, story-rich games harder to do. It’s the reason I had 78 new games played this year alone. I skipped around on tons of stuff in the same way that my scattered brain does with everything going on.
Programmer here. Both my wife and I WFH too. I was diagnosed with adhd back in the 90s and I find it just gets worse the older I get.
These big companies have it all backwards. We don’t need them; they need us. I don’t suddenly like slot machine video games just because their fucking bean counters say so. Ever since I bought a Steam Deck, I’ve played nothing but indie and old games, and I ain’t going back. You can keep your 3 bundles and your $70-110 price tags. I’ll play 500 hours of Vampire Survivors before I’ll buy another casino that they happened to build a game around.
In the wise words of the Soulsbourne community: GIT GUD (at not making shitty games).
But the point is that it shouldn’t replace people. I’ve been a programmer for 20+ years and there’s nothing that will make me want to work with tools I know can eventually replace me or someone else. Aside from that, the energy usage is getting batshit insane while we’re all in the midst of a climate crisis.
Never used that one but I use Copilot daily and have tried similar. Copilot has gotten considerably worse since I started using it (I think because they mixed in ChatGPT results), so I rely on it very little.
These tools make people too dependent upon them, similar to how a lot of us can no longer navigate without map software. It feels like I’m slowly building my own coffin the more I use AI to write my code.
Aside from that, when you start to dig into the energy and water consumption required to run these things, it’s kind of insane.
I guarantee 5-10 years from now, those same companies will be complaining that development is not happening fast enough, more developers will burn out, and this cycle will repeat again. Thus starts the new search for speeding things up yet again. The problem is that capitalism demands infinite growth and that translates to speed. So nothing will ever truly be fast enough to meet the demands of people that need their 5th vacation home.
I’m a programmer and I’ve been telling people this for a while now. You will never be fast enough. That’s not a jab or a criticism; it’s the reality of work demands under capitalism. It’s why when a manager constantly says we need to be faster, I start job searching again.
We are witnessing the stage of capitalism where innovation has peaked. That’s why we see ads permeating everything; why live services are in so many games; why data hoarding and required account login is in everything; why we have a seemingly never ending stream of remakes and reboots no one asked for. Capitalism has made it so that there is no time or space for truly new ideas and they instead milk what they can from what already exists.
I find myself buying almost exclusively from indie devs lately. They make games that still have a soul and aren’t driven by this stupid mentality that better looking magically equals more engaging gameplay.
There are probably a ton of devs in the video game world that were once passionate about making games, that have since been burned out by the industry’s grueling demands. AI is a bandage on a far bigger existential problem and that real problem is capitalism.
If I see a game that costs $70-100 now, I drive right past it. So many of those high dollar AAA turn out to be absolute duds that have live service and other BS jammed into them that some suits in a boardroom thought up.
I learned recently that it’s called “unregretted attrition”.
They could’ve done that without the greedy crypto aspect, but as the enshittification trend goes, they just couldn’t help themselves.
But Gametech’s efforts to legally acquire the Flappy Bird name seem to go back much further than that. Back in 2014, an outfit called Mobile Media Partners tried to claim the Flappy Bird trademark in a filing made mere days after Nguyen pulled the game from the App Store. Coincidentally enough, the specific New Jersey address listed by Mobile Media Partners on that 2014 application matches an address used by Gametech Holdings in the paperwork for its 2023 legal efforts.
Purely opportunistic bullshit and painting it as anything innocent is disingenuous.
It introduced me to Sea of Stars and I could not stop playing that game until I completed the story. It made me envy every person that backed the Kickstarter and finally got to play it for the first time. I adore Gamepass for gems like that. You and I could probably exchange suggestions for those 4-5 hour, small indie team games. They’re passion projects for people. I find so much soul and love in those small games.
For example, I haven’t yet played Botany Manor, but still have it installed for when it comes to me. My wishlist on there is huge. I’ll spend 15 minutes sometimes going through every game to add things. My wife will play the same couple games for months and really delve into them. I have a constant rotation of 5-10.
Yeah, I never consider it a waste if you got some personal enrichment from it as an outlet. My goal was to never spend any actual money on the online portion and eventually people just got way too overpowered. It was a glaring example of pay-to-play and how it can ruin a game. It shut out any chance of growth and fun.
My favorite feature of GTA Online was when I’d get destroyed by someone with every weapon, only to respawn walking distance from them over and over and over. They’d kill me repeatedly before I even had a chance to do anything. The only way I could escape was to hope I found a car quick, or hope they got bored of spawn killing me.
This game is a fucking joke. Rockstar has been a shell of its former self for years.
There is absolutely no reason to buy a Ubisoft game anymore, or from any large studio that is trying to appease shareholders first and foremost. They aren’t making games for you to have fun with; they’re making games to extract as much money from you as possible. Instead of giving you fun quests and characters, they are behind the scenes trying to figure out how to manipulate you. Fuck that noise. The last game I paid full AAA price for was Elden Ring because From deserves my money.