Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 14 April 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 14 April 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
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got this over IM, apparently a twitter is making SM-Civ into a cognitohazard. must be a slow news day
that thread is quite nuts, as his main complaint is some sort of 'you can no longer take over the world as easily' thing, while civilization always had anti-snowballing mechanics. (He also doesn't mention the spinoffs like alpha centauri, colonization and call to power, which (apart from call to power I think) should be part of the conversation as they were created by the same teams/software houses as the civs at the time. But the changes in those games would undermine his message of 'ruling class (?? Firaxis ruling class really??) cultural decline'. And not just a higher focus on different game mechanics because they want every game to have a distinct different felling to try and get new people involved, the market has changed and pure 1991 style civilization games don't do as well and don't recoup your budget. The problem also seems to be that he is a 'conquerer' type player while civ tries to also appeal to the 'builder' type players, and I think more modern civs also try to appeal to the 'multiplayer' type player which is in conflict with the 'conquerer' type. (I made the specific types up here, but there are general types of players, and somebody interested in a 'clash of civilizations I want to take over the world' type of game is going to want a different type of game than a 'clash of civilizations I want to build the best civ' game or a 'clash of civilizations, I want to play a game with my friends' game).
This thread feels like a shapiro, and I have only glanced at game design theory as an amateur.
Edit: sorry my comment is obviously bad as I didn't first replay all the civ games before making this comment. ;) But if I had, I would remember that in the first game you could 'win' the game by building a spaceship to alpha centauri, as the game was score based (I think a successful big spaceship gave a massive score boost), not 'win by taking out all other empires' based (which iirc just ends the game, aka he confused completing a game with winning a game). In civ1 you don't play against others, you play against your earlier self via the high score system.
Also any hardcore Civ player will tell you that full conquest is basically the only possible win strategy on Diety (the highest difficulty level), because the AI gets such sick bonuses to all stats that you can't compete on science or anything else. Conquest is literally the meta!
Honestly, I am more disgusted by this guy's bad takes about Civ than the reactionary talking points. If you want to be an obnoxious white gamer dude at least do it correctly you piece of shit.
In Civilization: Beyond Earth you can literally become an imperialist Earth puritanian faction whose agenda is eradicating all native life and colonising the planet.
Woke?
Because I am a glutton for punishment I found the unrolled thread here (via HN but they don't have anything to say apart from complaining you have to be logged on to Twitter to read it).
All I'm gonna say is that if you're coming after me with a thesis about the Fall of the West, you'd better not have apostrophes in your possessive its.
edit I read the first few tweets and it sure seems like this dude is mad Civ is no longer the realization of the core ideas of Mein Kampf.
Which is kind of funny to me because compared to games like CK2 that focus on a specific part of history Civ's application of a single set of unified mechanics to the whole of human history ends up creating a kind of state realism that is not without political implications of its own. Like, Civilization is a series in which the entirety of human history is described in terms of a competition with explicit winners and losers between entities with strictly defined borders and policies enforced within them, i.e. nation-states. It's not a very big leap into nationalism and it's arguably a testament to the durability and strength of democratic and egalitarian cultural norms that the series has evolved the way it has instead of becoming something more actively right-wing.
Isn't Hearts of Iron IV the game of choice for people who want to explore victorious virtual Third Reichs?
Only the noobs conquer the world with the third reich, the experts use decolonialist South Africa to take over the world.
I skimmed this thread and OOP is mad that you can beat Civ without literally conquering the world, a change which may have been made for balance and depth; but ig its just another attempt by the soiboi elites to longhouse gamers
Edit: whoops, turns out everyone wrote my comment but better. Have an unhinged quote retweet instead
Dunno about that edit, “soiboi elites” is a hell of a contribution in sneer commentary :D
my Soiboi Elite is my favorite gaming mouse
It is really annoying how political my decades old nickname has become.
This is a bit meta but the fact that this Black Horse guy got his thread recommended by the algo seems to imply he's a bluechecker but there's none visible. So the question is if he is hiding it, and if it will be revealed by the latest ukase from St. Elon that hiding the blue check is no longer possible...
flipside: the content is definitely a type of topic that elmo wants to amplify, could be amplified under that too?
