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A long time ago, when MMORPG was a new thing, I was still playing regular, "paper based" RPG. When someone asked me why am I not jumping on the shiny bandwagon I told them it's because I cannot make the decision to, in case I have the strength for it, pick up a random log of tree in the forest and kill the attacking giant with it in the game, because the choices there are limited to whatever the programmers decided to add.

Yep. I play some video games. But tabletop will always be better for me and my friends because of this freedom.

The exact response I have to people that badgered me about joining their WoW guild. I was thankfully playing D&D in the years prior and that inoculated me against the MMO genre...

Nearly a decade later, I was leveling a WoW hero to lvl 20 in order to get a Liadrin hero portrait in Hearthstone. Though I think the UI is fantastic and the music score is superb, every game mechanic just seems watered down and the world seems to have all key points curiously spaced out, as if to waste your time on traveling.

When I got repeatedly bullied by the Snapping Turtles in an oasis where you're meant to plant some dried seeds, I just gave up and went back to Teleglitch. Now that's a great game!

> By pushing the job of coming up with options to tools, like the choice of restaurants and bars to Yelp, we narrow our worlds. We limit our expressiveness and creativity.

And the sad thing is, those same tools could help us significantly extend our expressiveness and creativity. Instead of narrowing available options they could be expanding them. Think about this every time you see someone saying it's good to remove features because "99% of users don't need it" or "more features = more work for developers".

George Orwell felt similarly. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

Really good essay, thanks for reminding me of that one. I believe it's been posted to HN before (I read it from a link here), but it may have been another comment suggesting it.

  But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

(about 3/4 down)

I saw it here first as well. It's made a number of appearances: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fwww.mtholyoke.edu%...

hey dang, how about a category link that automatically recycles classic submissions like this?

Related to this essay is the appendix from 1984, containing a discussion on the principles of Newspeak.

http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app

> the demo was with a graduation photo, and a few suggested responses like "You look great!" "Congratulations, so happy for you" or something similar).

Don't know why anyone would actually use features like this. It's very impersonal and insincere

It makes for a cool demo, but impractical for real-world use.

It might be good for some laughs to have bot-only conversations.

People already just like photos like that. Or say simply "happy birthday" to everyone when Facebook tells them it's time. It's a small step from this state to a slightly extended set of canned responses to pick from.

The "Happy birthday" messages were nice the first time (circa "thefacebook"), but the more I thought about it the more depressing and creepy it became. I hid my birthday, then closed my wall, and then left facebook entirely. Now it's only sincere messages from a close few, which feels like much more.

definitely agree, on the other hand it's funny to see people who put fake birthdays on facebook actually getting the "happy birthday!" messages on the fake date

So are greeting cards but those are huge, for many people receiving one is a requirement for every Hallmark holiday.

good points about greeting cards, but people usually add to greeting cards... right?

Eventually we will have a bunch of bots commending each other on their autogenerated graduation photos, and we can go outside and have actual human interactions again.

I wonder how much uptake Allo is going to have. Personally I'm going to stay away from it - why should I need to compete with a robot to provide authentic responses?

People are going to pick apart what you say on Allo. "Did he just click on the bot response, or did he really mean that?"

This started with multiple-choice tests in schools, ages ago.

This means Facebook's trending topics list is, essentially, the news.