Since I’m a little embarrassed by the mistake, what do you look for in an incremental game? I can look through the ones I’ve played for Android and see if any could work?

Oh, right, so I was so excited to mention it I forgot it’s not a mobile game >.<

It’s on steam, but yeah, my bad.

Thanks for posting this. I really enjoyed getting to play Magic again thanks to Forge, and Anuto is a really solid tower defense.

Hey, it’s a paid game (non-freemium) but you could try Orb of Creation. I think there’s a free demo on itch. One of the most fascinating incremental games I’ve played. I actually played all the way up to the current content’s end.

Eagerly awaiting updates.

Very interesting resource. I found her video presentation about online gaming very informative and delightfully fair.

How many times can journalists retread this conversation from 2018? The polls are still out.

Preach. I’m so bad at selling myself!

I just want a job with a living wage now, and it’s agonizingly, dehumanizingly hard to look online. Especially if you have the extreme rejection sensitivity aspect of ADHD.

I’m forced to agree. It feels weird to do so, but, I guess yeah- the thing which should be focused on is the how and why of this and not just focus on the puritan disgust angle.

I’ve seen the Shaun video (linked in these replies somewhere) so I’m familiar with what’s going on socially around this video game. Being upset because of misogynistic objectification is appropriate, but sex isn’t inherently bad.

It’s possible, but I don’t doubt that there’s going to be a continued push to consolidate people into smaller and smaller parts of the internet- quite possibly through legal means, but definitely through as many commerical ones as possible.

I don’t have a lot of faith in the perseverance of the vast majority of websites, not because of their lack of willingness or desire, but because of a lack of funds.

People get poorer, needs get more expensive and things like this place become harder to keep running.

You are right, though, that it’s not written in stone. I will try to hold out a metered measure of hope.

Search engines are already basically worthless, so I’m not surprised with the falling axe.

The shift from search engines actually indexing things to search through to trying to parse a question and find an answer has been the most irritating trend for me. I remember when you could just put in a series of words and be delivered unto every indexed page that had all of them.

Now I regularly get told that even common words don’t exist if I insist that, no, google I do want only searches with the words I put in.

This is my old person rant, I guess. /s

This change is probably going to cause huge problems for a lot of existing sites, especially because it means Google will probably start changing their advertising model now that they can consolidate the views into a specific location and pocket the money. The article mentions this, but doesn’t realize the implications.

“The internet will still be around,” is only true if you hold that the super consolidated, commericalized nexus of doom is going to continue on just fine, while countless small, very useful websites made by actual people for actual reasons fade away into oblivion.

It sucks to watch something I have loved my whole life die, but it’s going bit by bit because we can’t convince our politicians to do anything about it.

Such a dramatic title.

It’s complicated. The current state of the internet is dominated by corporate interests towards maximal profit, and that’s driving the way websites and services are structured towards very toxic and addictive patterns. This is bigger than just “social media.”

However, as a queer person, I will say that if I didn’t have the ability to access the Internet and talk to other queer people without my parents knowing, I would be dead. There are lots of abused kids who lack any other outlets to seek help, talk to people and realize their problems, or otherwise find relief for the crushing weight of familial abuse.

Navigating this issue will require grace, awareness and a willingness to actually address core problems and not just symptoms. It doesn’t help that there is an increasing uptick of purity culture and “for the children” legislation that will curtail people’s privacy, ability to use the internet and be used to push queer people and their art or narratives off of the stage.

Requiring age verification reduces anonymity and makes it certain that some people will be unable to use the internet safely. Yes, it’s important in some cases, but it’s also a cost to that.

There’s also the fact that western society has systemically ruined all third spaces and other places for children to exist in that isn’t their home or school. It used to be that it was possible for kids and teens to spend time at malls, or just wandering around a neighborhood. There were lots of places where they were implicitly allowed to be- but those are overwhelmingly being closed, commericalized or subject to the rising tide of moral panic and paranoia that drives people to call the cops on any group of unknown children they see on their street.

Police violence and severity of response has also heightened, so things that used to be minor, almost expected misdemeanors for children wandering around now carry the literal risk of death.

So children are increasingly isolated, locked down in a context where they cannot explore the world or their own sense of self outside the hovering presence of authority- so they turn to the internet. Cutting that off will have repercussions. Social media wouldn’t be so addictive for kids if they had other venues to engage with other people their age that weren’t subject to the constant scrutiny of adults.

Without those spaces, they have to turn to the only remaining outlet. This article is woefully inadequate to answer the fundamental, core problems that produce the symptoms we are seeing; and, it’s implementation will not rectify the actual problem. It will only add additional stress to the system and produce a greater need to seek out even less safe locations for the people it ostensibly wishes to protect.

Exactly. Well put.

I wonder which sci-fi novels it’s mimicking here.

Yeah! Also, sometimes I use emulators that work well on phones to play older games, I had fun playing Final Fantasy Legends 2 with RetroArch.

My suggestion is to either change the context you play games in, or pick games that are very cognitively different from what you normally do at work.

You can change your context with a new console, but I think it may be cheaper to do something like buying a controller and playing games while standing up, or on your couch/armchair, or playing games while sitting on a yoga ball. The point is to trick your brain, because it’s associated sitting at a desk in front of a computer with boring tedium. Change the presentation and your subconscious will interpret it differently.

You can also achieve this by identifying the things that you have to do in your job that mirror videogame genres you enjoy and picking a game that shares few of those qualities.

I worked at the post office for years, doing mail processing, and my enjoyment of management and resource distribution style games went down sharply during that time because of the cognitive overlap- I played more roguelikes and RPGs as a consequence.

Part of the problem is that sufficient wealth seems to destroy people’s understanding of consequence. They don’t experience them very often, and so reach a point where they can simply pursue whatever their feelings tell them to do and the world magically restructures itself to allow them to do so.

Combine this with how the incentives of the social system result in the people who are most likely to pursue a selfish course being the most financially successful- you get a recipe for short-sighted, ignorant and self-important nonsense.

Hey, thank you so much for your contribution to this discussion. You presented me a really challenging thought and I have appreciated grappling with it for a few days. I think you’ve really shifted some bits of my perspective, and I think I understand now.

I think there’s an ambiguity in my initial post here, and I wanted to check which of the following is the thing you read from it:

• Generative AI art is inherently limited in these ways, even in the hands of skilled artists or those with technical expertise with it; or,
• Generative AI art is inherently limited in these ways, because it will be ultimately used by souless executives who don’t respect or understand art.

You make a compelling and very interesting point here. I’m still l considering it, because it’s provoked a lot of thought for me. Once I feel like I can definitely make an argument against or in favor of your point, I’ll get back to you.

Well done, I love intelligent discussions like this so much, I really missed them when my online communities started decaying. The pursuit of truth is so much fun!

The university I went to had an unusually large art department for the state it was in, most likely because due to a ridiculous chain of events and it’s unique history, it didn’t have any sports teams at all.

I spent a lot of time there, because I had (and made) a lot of friends with the art students and enjoyed the company of weird, creative people. It was fun and beautiful and had a profound effect on how I look at art, craft and the people who make it.

I mention this because I totally disagree with you on the subject of photography. It’s incredibly intentional in an entirely distinct but fundamentally related way, since you lack control over so many aspects of it- the things you can choose become all the more significant, personal and meaningful. I remember people comparing generative art and photography and it’s really… Aggravating, honestly.

The photography student I knew did a whole project as part of her final year that was a display of nude figures that did a lot of work with background, lighting, dramatic shadow and use of color, angle and deeply considered compositions. It’s a lot of work!

I don’t mean here to imply you’re disparaging photography in any way, or that you don’t know enough about it. I can’t know that, so I’m just sharing my feelings about the subject and art form.

A lot of generative art has very similar lighting and positioning because it’s drawing on stock photographs which have a very standardized format. I think there’s a lot of different between that and the work someone who does photography as an art has to consider. Many of the people using generative art as tools lack the background skills that would allow them to use them properly as tools. Without that, it’s hard to identify what makes a piece of visual art not work, or what needs to be changed to convey a mood or idea.

In an ideal world, there would be no concern for loss of employment because no one would have to work to live. In that world, these tools would be a wonderful addition to the panoply of artistic implements modern artists enjoy.