Godot maintainer removes controversial satirical piece from documentation | Hacker News Reader

Godot maintainer removes controversial satirical piece from documentation

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386 pointsphreack493 comments

I recently worked for one of the biggest mobile game developers. While I game a lot and have been for over 20 years I never played anything on my phone (PC gaming only) so I was pretty shocked at the state of the industry. They have meetings about making the game more addictive, taking away any chance to get ahead in the game by skill or grind so you must spend, targeting vulnerable groups, making it hard to see how much you actually spent in the game.

To have these people paint themselves as oppressed and offended... is exactly what I've come to expect after every online social justice controversy I've witnessed so far.

And I know exactly how they would respond to me: What do you mean by "these people" you *ist!

It's not like you can't get pc games packed with micro transactions, loot boxes, asset flips, etc. You probably just know not to buy them, you could do the same research for mobile, there are plenty of mobile games that don't follow the model. I would say to a non computer literate, the state of the pc software industry in general is just as spammy, perhaps even worse as it's much more mature, it is harder to get the worst through google play and the app store.

> It's not like you can't get pc games packed with micro transactions, loot boxes, asset flips, etc.

The difference is that in the PC games you can mostly ignore these and you still have a game you play, where skill and work is challenged and rewarded.

The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more. You get a lot of smoke and mirrors on top of this - an artistic theme, social media integrations, ranks, titles, events, etc, but again the big difference is that there is no gameplay.

Yet in real life games like Genshin Impact implement most of the techniques you find morally wrong yet the game has actual gameplay and most people playing it have no problem with it.

Real life is more complex than the binary way of thinking you propose, and games often implement these techniques with valid reasons behind it other than simply making money or exploiting people. The problem is people acting poorly, and not the techniques in and of themselves.

Interesting. Can you name some valid, non-monetary reasons to have lootboxes?

In the same way that randomness in a roguelite leads to you feeling really good when you find an item that is cool and that you didn't expect to get, you have that same mechanic taking place when you either save enough in-game currency or use real money to buy a new lootbox and get a new item/character.

It's a different mode of accessing gameplay that is random, and just like in a game that abuses this mechanic to keep people playing for hundreds of hours (roguelites), these mobile games also do that, except with the possibility of paying real life money.

What you described is a planned dopamine release you have to pay for. I was under the impression the gameplay itself is there to make you have fun - if you have lootboxes, you're compensating for gameplay, or more likely, are doing it for monetary reasons.

Well, anything that involves a monetary exchange can be described as "for monetary reasons". I explained to you that a non-monetary reason is similar to the reasoning behind similar mechanics in roguelites, which generally do not ask the player for payment.

I can even make the same argument you made instead about roguelites: "What you described is planned dopamine release you have to wait for. I was under the impression the gameplay itself is there to make you have fun - if you have RNG, you're compensating for gameplay, or more likely, are doing it for nefarious reasons such as extending the amount of time people play your game for."

Yet roguelites are not seen as morally wrong at all. Why? They're both using the same mechanic, except one lets you pay to skip the RNG-gating.

No roguelike ever had a locked chest that wasn't meant to be open. Lootboxes aren't meant to be open unless you pay.

Plenty of roguelikes or roguelites have locked chests that can only be opened after you play for an arbitrarily long amount of time. That is the same as a lootbox in a game that lets you buy lootboxes with in-game currency at a slower rate than if you paid for them, such as the example I gave with Genshin Impact, where you can open lootboxes while paying nothing but the game is also structured to incentivize you to pay.

Games that are designed to suck hundreds of hours of your time and cause addiction are nearly as bad as games designed to tempt minors and vulnerable people into gambling. I'm not sure why you're bringing up the former as a defense of the latter.

I bring it up because the majority of people who have a problem with mobile games do not have a problem with roguelites. Either you have a problem with both or with none. I'm firmly in the none camp, it seems like you're in the both camp. Either way, singling out mobile games like the text in Godot's documentation did is a mistake.

No that's you putting words into my or OP's mouth.

I don't have a problem with roguelikes, but I do have a problem with mobile games.

One is optimized to provide gameplay experience and fun, the other one is to extract as much money as humanly possible from their users.

The fact that they might use some of the same building blocks doesn't mean that end result is similar.

Just like playing poker and uno might use some similar mechanics (cards) that doesn't make them equal games. One is regulated the other one isnt.

Or you throwing dice in monopoly and craps

>One is optimized to provide gameplay experience and fun

It's not though, it's RNG-gating content and therefore not really optimize to provide gameplay experience and fun, it's hiding gameplay behind RNG, just like it happens with lootboxes. You happen to not be bothered by this fact because you enjoy the good feelings that come with finding new and unexpected items, but understand that the same feeling exists with the lootbox system, it just asks for money instead of time (which you have to spend to explore all the content when a game is RNG-gated).

Your dislike of one over the other is arbitrary and unreasonable, which is fine. But if you're going to ascribe moral value to things I'm not going to take you seriously because it's clear you haven't thought about it enough.

But it's not gating content. You still go forward, whatever you get or don't get.

It just means that most of your runs will be different. And will enable you to do different things (maybe you get staff of freezing and freeze the lake, or maybe levitating boots and walk on water .)

Non of that gates you, just provides flavor, and different runs.

Sure some things are better and some things are worse, but my fondest memories is getting a win with hilariously bad drops.

In mobile games you cant proceed, until you buy crystals, or wait down the increasingly long timer, or simply can't kill a boss without a powerup from cash store.

When it comes to compulsive gambling, the monetary risk is an integral part. People who suffer from it get their fix not by winning but by putting things on the line. This is why gambling is almost universally regulated, and yahtzee is not. It's mind poison for some people.

Saying that "time" is a currency sounds good on paper, but in this case it doesn't work. Those whales that spend tens of thousands of dollars on loot boxes would not have spent an equal amount of time otherwise.

It's predatory, and it's bad.

"Either way, singling out mobile games like the text in Godot's documentation did is a mistake."

You're right, console and desktop games that do that are also a problem.

I've read the entire comment chain and the myopic focus on roguelites makes me feel like there's something that isn't being said.

Roguelites are designed for huge replayability so of course there's an element of randomness and difficulty in place of pure linear progression. Personally I don't see exploitative gambling/addiction mechanics in a game like Spelunky or Risk of Rain or Dead Cells.

It's utterly disingenuous to put these on the same level of cynical mobile titles that rub their exploitation in your face and continually blueball you with arrays of counters, timeout mechanics, fake currencies (backed by real money), and loot boxes. It's absurd to draw equivalence to the practice of exploiting 'whales' and young children, to squeeze as much money out of them as possible.

If Spelunky or some other roguelite had a mobile version that monetized every element of gameplay and made it 'freemium' then it would be another scummy mobile game, and would warrant the comparison. But not until then.

So you would equate a digital blackjack game without real money involved to actual casino blackjack? I don't know if it's an expression in english, but it seems to be a case of "degrees in hell". Contributing to video game addiction isn't great, but intentionally siphoning money out of the wallets of whales is downright evil.

> Plenty of roguelikes or roguelites have locked chests that can only be opened after you play for an arbitrarily long amount of time.

I am pretty sure that I have seen no such thing in Nethack, nor would I expect to see it in Rogue - the "rogue" part of "roguelike". Lootboxing roguelikes/lites are a subset of the genre, so it's not fair to use the entire genre as a defense of this practice.

Because, in the end, you end up paying real money, and not only that, you have mechanics that are designed around making that choice as tempting as possible, while attempting to masquerade as something harmless.

In a roguelite you end up paying real time, and not only that, you have mechanics that are designed around making spending that time as tempting as possible, while attempting to masquerade as something harmless.

> you have mechanics that are designed around making spending that time as tempting as possible

Citation needed. Old rougelikes/rougelites are designed to optimise for subjective fun, which naturally translates to more time spent. If something is fun, it's obvious that people will keep playing for longer. What's wrong is using dirty psychological tricks to bypass that and go directly for increasing the time spent on the game.

My argument is that roguelites are fundamentally using a psychological trick via RNG-gating content to make people play the game for a longer amount of time. That's built into the genre. And that this trick is the same as the one used by lootboxes. People have a problem with one and not with the other for very complicated reasons, but they're fundamentally the same, and thus it's a mistake to single out one and not the other.

I think there's a fundamental difference: pay-to-progress games have a strong incentive to make progressing without paying as painful as possible. Getting people hooked is just a means to get them paying. Games with long progression paths have an incentive to keep that process as interesting is possible, otherwise people will just stop playing (and along the way the player is having fun).

Also, I've not come across many roguelites which have a strong RNG component in their progression path. Roguelites are inherently random but their progression mechanics are generally quite regular on any given playthrough. All the ones I've played you progress quite linearly just by playing the game, not grinding for a chance to process. The worst I've heard of is one FTL's ship unlocks which involves getting two or three good rolls in a playthrough, which players (mostly 100% speedrunners) do complain about. Certainly nothing to the level of what is very common in lootboxes (where a massive grind for a less than 1 in 100 chance is common).

>I think there's a fundamental difference: pay-to-progress games have a strong incentive to make progressing without paying as painful as possible. Getting people hooked is just a means to get them paying.

Games with RNG-gated content have a strong incentive to make progressing take as much time as possible, because the more time it takes the more people play the game, and the more people play the game the more they'll naturally advertise it to their friends.

>Games with long progression paths have an incentive to keep that process as interesting is possible, otherwise people will just stop playing (and along the way the player is having fun).

Games that ask for money also have an incentive to keep that process as interesting as possible, otherwise people will also stop playing. Just because you're asking for people to spend money it doesn't mean that you can magically make a shit game.

> Games that ask for money also have an incentive to keep that process as interesting as possible, otherwise people will also stop playing. Just because you're asking for people to spend money it doesn't mean that you can magically make a shit game.

They have an incentive to make the path where you're paying as interesting as possible, and make the path where you're not as painful/boring as possible (while dangling the idea of the interesting bits in front of you)

You have just described gambling exactly. The problem is, in most places it's illegal for minors to gamble and it's likely that the majority of Genshin Impacts players are minors.

Genshin Impact is notorious for preying on it's users and monetizing everything they possibly can. The only difference from other similarly monetized games is that they included an actual fun game - although they stole plenty of assets and animations apparently, e.g. from Niers Automata (ironic because that game is the epitome of a game that was clearly made with love and has no microtransactions).

Genshin Impact is an example of a game where the gameplay is intrinsically designed to facilitate the monetization though - it's taking what would be perfectly alright gameplay, and making it _really shitty_, so they can monetize.

A Genshin Impact that cost full price but had no 'original resin' garbage, no running the same boss a dozen times (but only 4 times a day unless you pay!) to 'ascend' a character, that didn't gate most of the actually effective characters behind gacha pulls, might actually be a decent game. Probably wouldn't have made as much money though.

Clearly most people aren't bothered by it as it's an extremely popular game that has remained popular months after release. If it was just a quick low quality cash grab people would have moved on, but they haven't. So you have to come to terms with the fact that reality is rejecting your particular perspective on the issue.

How do you know people haven't moved on? Have you got Genshin Impact analytics that the rest of us don't? It's free and getting lots of installs as you'd expect - how do you know if people are sticking with it?

It's a perfectly fine game for the first quite-a-few-hours and then suddenly turns into an appalling grindfest (and yes, the 'quality' is clearly front-loaded, the game drops off a cliff once you get to Liyue)

Does it seem like a game that's consistently getting millions of views on videos about each update is experiencing some kind of serious decline in popularity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrH9vMZBwAk

That isn't a clear cut answer to the game being played, they can play it and not be happy with some of the games practices, we really don't know unless a study is done.

Anecdotally All of my friends who play games hate microtransactions and loot boxes. Some don't care if it's only cosmetic though.

It sounds like you're saying something that's popular can't be bad?

If something is consistently popular it means enough people like it or aren't bothered by it enough to be a problem. The popularity of these games that you really don't like is a signal that your view of the world in regards to this issue is lacking and incomplete.

This only follows if the playerbase are expected to have full knowledge of the dark patterns at play but don't care about them. It's more likely they have no objection because they aren't aware.

Popularity doesn't mean that it's good or that the monetization is reasonable. I happen to have seen sales figures for one of the top slot machine apps on one of the major mobile app stores and their revenue was as good or better than GI.

Most people who attend casinos aren’t bothered by gambling mechanics either. Says nothing for the quality of gambling as gaming, though.

Again, you took the time to find the games that allow you to do this and then just say every free mobile game employs the model you don't like

> The phone "games" that company develops (again, top in popularity) had no gameplay to speak of. You click a button, something spins, over a large number of spins you reliably lose ingame currency so you need to buy more.

This is a point-for-point description of one of the most popular "game" types in Las Vegas.

At this point, I consider the majority of the mobile gaming space to be indistinguishable from a casino.

- Pretty flashing lights and bings? Check

- Keep feeding it money to be entertained at a constant rate? Check (or else it will taper off to nothing/degrade down to "not fun")

I would make a more complete comment, but I can't be bothered to spend the time at the moment. This comment would get so little points this deep in the thread tree. Wait, that almost sounds familiar...

> you could do the same research for mobile, there are plenty of mobile games that don't follow the model

It's a nontrivial amount of work. Most people predictably aren't going to do it (otherwise the market would eliminate abusive practices on its own). Hell, most HNers ain't gonna do it. Myself, I wasn't doing it, despite complaining about games a lot.

Fortunately, HN's StavrosK did the research, and created this: https://nobsgames.stavros.io/. I'm forever grateful to him for that.

EDIT: Hey, do you want to become a curator? It's very low-volume and would help keep the site more up to date.

Thanks for the offer! I'm trying to learn to stop agreeing to things on impulse, so I'll think about it and get back to you no later than Monday.

If you can, please also tell me what exactly does curating this list entail, either here or privately.

There's a "review queue" of games where you see user feedback and you decide whether to allow the game on the list or deny it, along with a reason why. It's an allow/deny system, basically, except sometimes you have to look at the games to try and tell if they should make the list or not.

Or you could use Apple arcade and not worry about it I guess?

Even if I was on iOS, I've learned better than to trust commercial entities with curating mobile games and apps.

I have a similar experience. Technical challenges are one thing and they can be interesting, but ethics is more important to me.

It was painful to observe that people from countries with difficult economies can spend so much money to hunt for pixels. This is their choice, of course, but at the same time it's a proactive work to keep them hooked.

After I realized what I was getting myself into, I completed the existing tasks and left the company. It's not for me.

Edit: formatting

I have a close friend that worked for such a company targeting the people you mention, they paid him really, really well (more than the big request he had made when they had made the offer, he had hoped they'd say no) but said company also left my friend really, really burned out after just one year (he's no longer with them).

I left myself wondering what would I have done in his place. It's really hard to reject a huge financial offer, even though you're well aware of the societal damage your work is doing. Sincere kudos to you for acknowledging it and getting out of the industry.

I'm a games designer/developer and I work freelance for other studios. I say NO way more often than I say yes, precisely because of that particular problem. Money is nice and all that, but I've seen first hand the damage that these predatory practices can do to people. AND the attitudes of the people working at these game studios ands its frankly disgusting.

Given the absurd salaries that exist in the software industry, what does "really, really well" mean here?

Like FAANG level money [0], more?

[0] https://www.levels.fyi/

> Given the absurd salaries that exist in the software industry, what does "really, really well" mean here?

I'm from Eastern Europe, so it was "really, really well" compared to local IT salaries (which are not low, mind you, at least compared to European standards). Said friend ended up working for a local FAANG entity after that experience, for lower salary.

Games industry could learn alot from Weapons design and manufacture, and the Nazis. Moral reprehensible tasks can be split up into lots and lots of smaller tasks, until the responsibility is diluted enough. This is very amateurish process design- its not that hard to make a murderous golema who nobody feels responsible for.

I was making one of those "games in disguise" once, where the game was marketed as an app doing something useful to you. All we talked about was "first day retention" and "3-day retention" and how we keep people opening the app. I mean, if users find the app useful, you don't need to spam them with messages.

I recently set up a new phone and I was shocked that I got a notification from SoundHound. That's one app that has no business trying to "engage" me - it's there for one purpose, identify songs when I want it to. If it's once every two months, that's all the engagement they are getting. There is no retention to be had, and I will not give them any.

If Android didn't allow blocking notifications, then any app that does this would get the boot. Youtube, HN and eBay is stressful enough to follow, I don't need more of this in my life.

Similarly, Hulu started sending me engagement notifications. It has no notification controls so I disabled notifications entirely.

Apps are almost as bad as websites in terms of my willingness to let them send notifications at this point.

Just turn _everything_ off except the strictly nessesary, which for me is just whatever messaging app I use to talk to close friends

I worked as a freelance re-recording mixer for film. Most of my audio collegues told me to stay away from the gaming industry if I can. In theory game engines could be very interesting for telling moods and creating worlds. In practice the salaries are bad and the time tables so crammed, that it is a struggle to keep even basic quality levels. The freedom to find something truly good, new or interesting is rarely there.

The last game that blew me away from a sound perspective was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. They used sound in just the ways I imagined it could be used. It is sad that people don't dare to try more stuff like this. Games could be a great artform, but the money/power structures we live in make them cashcows first and foremost.

I don't think this is endemic to gaming, it's difficult in all creative media to predict the commercial success of a product. The film industry does the same thing in producing blockbuster productions that are more iterative than innovative and are safe bets, so they can then take gambles on more niche projects.

I'd argue that the past year has been one of the best for the success of games that were the passion projects of smaller teams. Fall Guys, Among Us, Hades and Valheim are good examples that the industry isn't only soulless triple-A productions or quick cash grabs.

I found Hades was squarely in the iterative category. The studio used a very similar forumla as their previous games (Bastion, Transistor, dead ells) then mixed in rogue like elements to give it interesting decisions.

Super fun and cool, but given the context of their previous games, def in the iterative camp.

Dead Cells was not developed by Supergiant Games. It was made by Motion Twin.

I found dead cells and hades to be entirely different games, at least in the sense that hades did not grab onto me and dead cells did.

Also, they don't actually make dead cells, motion twin does

To each their own tbh, and I am glad that both games enjoy the success.

I am the complete opposite, I liked both, but Hades easily is the winner for me (and I am saying that as one of the very very early dead cells backers). Because they managed to refine the roguelike gameplay to almost-perfection, but the storytelling and writing are on a whole other level compared not only to other roguelikes, but a lot of games in general.

I'm going to try to pick up Hades again. Perhaps notably, the previous games like Bastion didn't grab me for whatever reason, but it might be because I needed to let go of some preconceived gaming notions I had as a traditional action-RPG lover.

Bastion is a bit different. I liked the music and art a lot, but the story was kinda basic (despite the great delivery), and the gameplay was just "satisfactory" imo. In Hades, gameplay itself takes the prime spot, despite the rest of the aspects being also great. With Hades, you can enjoy the game even if you don't care about the storytelling or art at all. With Bastion, that would be a really questionable proposition to play it just for gameplay.

My advice for Hades is to give it about 2-3 hours of try, and then decide if you want to play more. Mostly because it takes about an hour or two until the game gives you all the essentials before releasing you into the world where you can play it "for real". Sort of like a less extreme version of Red Dead Redemption 2, which requires you playing 10+ hours to finally to be able to play it "for real" (referring to having to get to chapter 2 or so, before you can free roam and enjoy sidequests and start doing things at your own pace).

> Games could be a great artform, but the money/power structures we live in make them cashcows first and foremost.

There's lots of indie games that don't have those issues.

But, the problem with making games is the same problem with art or music or opening a coffee shop or becoming a doctor or nurse: it's something that people want to do, and so supply will overwhelm demand until conditions and pay get bad enough to outweigh the romantic appeal.

Programmers in the game industry are treated much worse on average, than programmers working on in-house CRUD apps.

(Similarly, I assume working conditions at Tesla and SpaceX must be comparatively bad. Not necessarily absolutely bad, but compared to what the people working there could get elsewhere.)

I was a 17 year old "whiz kid" with my own game studio, I was a beta tester of the original Mac and one of the OS developers for the 3D0 and the first PlayStation. After living through the EA Spouse era I left games for good. I don't play them and I refuse to support the industry in any manner at all. I have grown to believe the Gaming Industry embodies the harshest legal exploitation possible, and frankly I damn them all to hell.

Sounds like you have an interesting perspective. Was there any specific events that led to you changing your opinion? What do you think about the future of the games industry?

Actually, it was working at one specific studio I will not name. The working conditions were absurd - a low rent building with no ceiling between the workers and the roof, the roof had birds that routinely crapped on people's heads and not a single thing was done about it. The building was surrounded by homeless camps, and going to lunch was both risky and overly expensive as the places to eat were all high end hipsters joints. The studio owners openly discussed how much money they were making (tens of millions) while being aggressive dicks to all their staff. At one point there was an "engine crisis" and one of the lead engineers fixed the situation by bringing in his own home made game engine from before being hired, and he recreated the in-production game himself over the weekend to prove his engine could handle the situation - the studio owners refused to pay him for his engine and threated legal action if he took it back.

That was it. I was openly showing management displeasure and they found a reason to fire me soon thereafter. I went into VFX and never looked back.

As far as a future for the games industry - they need a whole #I_was_enslaved_too movement. I won't even get into the difficultly in getting anyone in the game industry to recognize the need for better industry ethics across the board - in every aspect, every nook and every cranny of the industry it is corrupted pretty extreme.

That sounds like a nightmare. I'm glad you got out.

It's so sad to hear these stories. Game development has such great potential to be a stimulating workplace in the mix of tech, storytelling and art. On paper it is a fantastic blend. Alas, everyone I've spoken to that's been in the industry has similar horror stories to share. The workforce seems to be regarded as expendable. Investments dictates strategy that ends up being anti-consumer. Maybe this is the same thing that happens in TV or music, when you have big money combined with an endless supply of dreamers that wants to be part of it no matter what?

For someone who is interested in making games (like yours truly), the only viable way forward appears to be the hobbyist/indie route. To ever get discovered without a herculean effort and a massive dollop of luck seems quite unlikely though.

Put your creative energies into interactive digital art. Seriously. Museums are hungry for digital art, and the "digital artists" out there are not very sophisticated, technologically. Exercise your intellectual art mind-fuck muscles a bit and you could make a name in the serious art world.

This is not just something for the mobile gaming industry anymore.

A few choice examples:

- Call of Duty matching players who buy DLC weapons against people who don't have them, and then specifically lower-skilled players

- EA patenting something called 'Engagement Optimized Matchmaking'. It boils down to feeding you games it knows you'll lose, and then once in a while throwing you a bone giving you a near-guaranteed win. This keeps you in the game longer than just trying to balance the the matchmaking as good as possible

- Bungie, ever since having split from Activision and switched to making Destiny 2 f2p* has specifically upped the grind and tedium on most things tenfold, so they can show their investors how engaged players are with the game by virtue of ludicrous amounts of playtime

*not really, you still have to pay for raids and seasonal content, f2p is more like a demo

I miss the old days of things like Unreal Tournament 99 and Unreal Tournament 2004, where both the community and Epic created gigabytes (back then a massive data amount) of content like skins, maps gamemodes, mutators etc for scot-free. Epic even bundled the best of them in two official bonuspacks!

If this is at all accurate, I am disgusted by the state of the industry.

I guess that's why I don't play new games at all.

For what it's worth, I don't have this experience at all in the Nintendo ecosystem. Nintendo aren't saints either, they did much of the same bullshit in that Mario Kart app for Android, but all the games I'm playing on the Switch are free from this crap. I can't be 100% certain it's going to stay like that, but if Nintendo becomes another EA, they'll probably be among the last big studios to do so.

(I have no affiliation with Nintendo or any other game developers or publishers.)

Neither do I. I don't enjoy multiplayer games, so my experience is exclusively single-player with the occasional co-op session thrown it every couple of years.

The worst side of it is, that it drags the rest of the mobile game ecosystem down with it.

Whenever I browse the Google Play Store, it is an unplessant experience. It is hard to find out which games are "real" games without the very exploitive mechancis (of course, it is a spectrum, so it's not always easy to tell). It is hard to find out which features the games have: Singelplayer, multiplayer, offline playable, gamepad support?

Especially the last part annoyed me when I tried out a new android controller but couldn't figure out which game would actually work with it.

But there are good games available on mobile. They are just burried under a lot of unpleasent ones.

Long story short, I started developing my own, gamepad optimized game launcher for android which offers more of a console-like experience. Should I ever invest way more time in it, I'll add my own search and filter overlay for the play store…

Google will van your application if you do a filtered Play store search, so make sure it is available on F-Droid and elsewhere.

....like...down by the river??

;)

Original meaning is the FBI van shows up and arrests you, I think it’s morphed to a van shows up and puts a black bag over your head, or your app in this case, and your app gets disappeared. I first saw the term on 4chan in like the mid 2000s.

no. parent is sarcastically referring to a (very old now, circa 1990) saturday-night-live skit where the actor always ends up mentioning that he lives "in a van, down by the river"

I think parent poster means that there are no other places to put the app/launcher.

Right I know the van down by the river sketch with Chris Farley, but the parent post is almost definitely using the verb “vanned” to mean the app will get disappeared.

No, I the phone just autocorrected 'ban' to van. You people can be really fucking strange at times..

Hey, it's SV. Living in a van down by the river is the new dream.

Name/Type of Game + Open Source

On iOS Apple launched Apple Arcade to combat this and I must say, those games are pretty good. I seem to recall Google launching a similar service?

1. There are predatory practices in mobile game industries

2. The joke makes fun of those practices.

3. The joke also punches down mobile games and casual players

You say "these people" (ie. the developers of said predatory applications) paint themselves as oppressed and offended [where?], but as far as I know the joke is being mostly criticized because of point 3 (I am not related to the game business).

Have you guys cancelled Karl Marx yet for being a racist and an anti-semite? He's punching down minorities.

What does Karl Marx and "them guys", whoever "they" are, have to do with mocking predatory practices in mobile games or mobile gamers?

Besides Karl Marx being generally held in high regard among people who are criticizing the mocking of those predatory practices, it's just an analogy.

It's like getting angry about mockery of the tobacco industry using feminism at some point to get women into smoking, because it puts feminism in a bad light and punches it down or whatever. Or China using feminism to pacify, if not outright genocide Uyghurs[0], for the same reasons.

0) https://archive.is/Xy5g6

> It's like getting angry about mockery of the tobacco industry using feminism at some point to get women into smoking, because it puts feminism in a bad light and punches it down or whatever.

That would be more like the kind of wake-washing that "you people" (what's the equivalent of marxist? Adam Smith), you Smithes also dislike?

I don't get it. I can't parse what you've said at all, please clarify

>Karl Marx being generally held in high regard among people who are criticizing the mocking of those predatory practices

I really doubt this, The only communist game devs I know are ZA/UM (Disco Elysium (amazing game)) and they are as far from being exploitative game devs as you can get.

Karl Marx was jewish lmao.

I know. But still:

> Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

It's from his book "On the Jewish Question". If I didn't knew any better, I'd say that it was written by a Strasserist or something like that.

And I'd imagine that most left-wing people would strongly object to this.

>And I know exactly how they would respond to me: What do you mean by "these people" you *ist!

You're inventing a stance to get angry about.

Mobile gaming is a completely different forest. If you want to survive in mobile gaming business you have to do monetization, monetization and monetization. I don't think it's going to change.

If you love real games, don't work on mobile gaming.

The last two paragraphs in your comment made absolutely no sense to me, sounding almost like a complete non-sequitur. Are mobile game developers painting themselves as oppressed an offended...? Where? What?

In the Twitter threads where they all pearl-clutched in response to the satire removed in the linked article.

Oh ok, I just read the thread. While I don't agree, I really don't think it's any better for a bunch of seemingly mature adults being this upset over someone on Twitter posting a bad take and getting 10 likes. It just screams garbage "anti-sjw" culture which adds nothing of value to any discussion.

I like the expression "*ist" as an all-around catchall way to describe people who stereotype groups of other people in any way, shape or form that is loosely correlated with some attribute.

Don't be an *ist.

(My favorite -ist construction is "wingism", the stereotyping of people of the other political persuasion- I think it's just as destructive to a society as other *ist's)

It's tittytainment.

I think it's more that a few of them are giving quite large sums of cash to the Godot project.

It was only a matter of time before they did this, tbh, I doubt it will be painted as a social justice issue.

What I believe has happened here is that the well-pointed satire actually offended some people who have made their career doing what the satire criticizes. Thus they have mobilized all sorts of specious attacks to take it down - arguing that it is somehow contributing to sexism or elitism [0], and arguing it makes the documentation more confusing ("oh won't someone please think of the new developers!").

[0] https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507?s=20

Ugh. I wonder if Twitter was started from scratch today, they'd be thinking "We need a platform for all the scolds and sanctimonious people out there who have nothing better to do but correct people's thoughts.". Probably, because there's a lot of them out there.

oppression is real and social justice advocation is so important. that's why it's that much more infuriating when I see people like this who only are interested in social justice when it serves their own personal interests and/or vanity. they do so much harm to the image of the struggle for justice

FWIW I believe this comment is talking about the busybodies on Twitter, not the comment it is in reply to. I don't think the downvotes are warranted.

I was wondering about that. yes, by "this" I meant the tweet, not the person Im replying to

It would be helpful if people within those movements would actually push back on these kinds of overblown displays of victimhood. It would lend the movement more credibility when it tackles real issues.

Unfortunately, it seems to me the structure of the movement itself makes many people too timid to actually push back against toxic behavior like this.

> the well-pointed satire actually offended some people who have made their career doing what the satire criticizes.

This person is referring to the #gamergate controversy from like 6-7 years ago, I understand that much.

But how does a progressive, left-leaning person go from that to being offended by a satire about capitalism? I have no clue. It's like becoming a caricature of yourself.

it literally made me enraged to see someone twist feminist ideas to make an asinine point defending the status quo. I'm not sure what the answer to your question is, but I think it's something like - the person may only be left-leaning insofar as it affects their own rights, being a person from marginalized groups, but is not left-leaning to the point of opposing other forms of exploitation even when they are part of their own paycheck

They don't. They didn't like being the butt of the joke and so they spun up some bullshit in the voice they felt had the best chance of working.

You can tell because leftists aren't offended by vanilla leftism.

Slighlty OT for this forum, but the "left" isn't monolithic either. Especially on twitter, there's a lot of left-leaning people who despise the "dirtbag left" that user refers to.

It's been a while since their ideology has become a collection of mutually incompatible senseless ideas. As you say, a caricature.

You write “their” as if one specific ideology was a problem. Watch “conservatives” tie themselves into knots to support a most certainly un-conservative demagogue. It’s just as bad as “leftists” who have forgotten about freedom. Radicalisation is a problem, and it is generalised.

I think at this point we can conclude that humor of any form no matter how tame it is, is not accepted on the internet. At least not under your real name.

It just takes one person to write a rant and then its all over. Thousands of examples but a similar one was VSCode having to remove the santa hat from an icon on Christmas because someone claimed it was extremely offensive. I know I'm starting to sound like an American conspiracy theorist about the war on christmas, but the reality is that you just can't show any kind of personality, humor, or fun on the internet without putting yourself at risk.

The most innocent humour I can think of is a goofy self deprecating slip up or remark. I could see those going out of style because they could be seen as portraying somebody or some group the wrong way, of harming people who suffered bad negative effects from such a slip up like a concussion, or even of fundamentally making fun of disabilities (or any group that “acts funny”).

I guess puns might be immune. We still have puns. Unless some alt right jerk uses them as a way to make fun of Japanese people (there is a stereotype from a while back), then we lose puns too

> I guess puns might be immune. We still have puns.

Except when someone deems the subject too serious (“how dare you make jokes about that”). So no, we don’t still have puns.

What I’d like to know is why the American culture in particular seems so hostile to any form of humour. This isn’t something I have seen in other Western European countries to this extent (though it is spreading in thanks to the Internet).

I like making jokes at myself, but people have complained how even that might scare new joiners (eg. they don't know that when you say "what fool did this code change" that it was you, so they might be scared that this is how we generally talk about others' changes).

Some of those are somewhat valid points, but the trick is to find people who don't mind the humour, and then spend the most time with them :)

Perusing what's presently successful in online comics, I note how CAREFUL they are.

Survivor bias, no doubt.

Ah, "careful". Treading lightly and quietly seems like an environment in which creativity and humor can really thrive!

> the reality is that you just can't show any kind of personality, humor, or fun on the internet without putting yourself at risk

Sprinkle the code and documentation with random references to your favourite animal. That surely can't offend anyone, right?

Unless it’s frogs... I think. I genuinely have started to lose track of which offensive memes are sufficiently unique that they still hold power when referring to them by minimalistic descriptions.

Why not simply allow that person to be offended? Why care? Is it necessary to capitulate to every complainer that shows up and claims your culture is offending them? Just let them complain about the santa hat. Hopefully as far away as possible.

This. Just uninstall Twitter and let them rant and rave to their heart's content.

It really doesn't matter if you don't listen to it.

Unfortunately a lot of people do, and some people that matter do. I hope this will change.

Hope your employer has a strong free-speech culture (how does that even work in the post-Trump era where the term "free speech" is becoming squicky to associate with, I wonder?) or you're self-employed with clients that don't mind SJW outrage.

yeah, exactly. There are "people who matter" who pay attention to Twitter, and their opinion may be influenced by dogpiles.

But if you don't have that, then (I have found) it's easy to ignore.

Because that's not how it works anymore, they will make it their primary purpose in life to cancel you to hell and back.

Because one SJW attacts ten more, and those attract a hundred more, then the media joins in, and then people start sending you and your colleagues threatening messages, doxxing you, and otherwise messing with your work and your community. And then instead of writing free software to do good for the world, you spend your time defending yourself from the trash of the world.

So the pragmatic strategy is to surrender early, when the cost of surrender is still small (just your own shame of yielding to evil people).

This is why we need to reject extremism in all its forms on both the left and the right.

We need to end cancel culture, not capitulate.

Or you could just never defend yourself. The people who don't like it will stop using your software. If the criticism was actually reasonable, and you chose to ignore it, maybe that'll backfire on you. If it was unreasonable, it'll blow over; you're not engaging with it, so there's no story.

That works if you're a CEO of a company and don't have shareholders to respond to, or your shareholders also think alike.

If you're a lowly employee with a family, doing some open source or blogging or whatnot on the side, and that side activity attracts the wrath of professional victims? You're suddenly in risk of significantly derailing your life (and that of your family!), possibly damaging it permanently. So you capitulate, just to survive.

This is why you be pseudonymous. If you're a bigot, it doesn't really help you (people will still stop using your stuff, and your pseudonym will gain a bad reputation), but it protects you from short-term reputation hits due to misunderstandings (like this one).

Sure, if you ignore them, and if you're not a big juicy target, the twisted zealots will eventually leave you alone. But who knows how much rot and corruption they will spread before they lose interest? And even if you can handle getting hate mail, or having your name plastered all around the internet with a cross-hair on it, what if it happens to your family, your collaborators, your employees, your employer, your customers?

You're acting like they're evil. They're not hunting for “big juicy targets”; they're trying to solve societal problems, and are working off the model that there are a lot of charismatic abusers out there, so people defending their actions should be treated with incredible suspicion. (In general, that's a bad attitude to have… but the harm of believing an abuser can be pretty high, so I'm not even saying they're wrong to take that stance by default, given how often they need it.)

If you're not charismatic – you don't try to defend yourself – they'll run through their investigation and find something or find nothing, and then give a fairly fair verdict (or as fair as anything on Twitter ever is).

In this case, the author could've engaged, probably, and said something like:

> This was actually meant to be sarcastic; you're meant to notice how unreasonable it is, and disagree with the narrator, but the narrator doesn't represent my views, which are [XYZ]. Your advice would be good, if I actually agreed with what I'd written, but the point is that it's outlandish and bad, because I'm calling out attitudes in the game industry.

> The feature I'm documenting there is usually used for bad. Your suggestions would be good ones, if I actually believed in that bad, but I don't. Do you have any ideas for how to make it more obviously sarcastic?

I think the author probably missed the boat on this, though; the Twitter mob grows quickly.

Lets remind ourselves that the original post in question is simply calling out in app purchases as evil corporate tools for extracting money.

The person who tried to warp this in to a social issue because they didn't like that they were being called out for using IAPs (being an abuser themselves really), is evil. This person is a harm to society.

Unless we're looking at different tweets, the person to tried to warp it into a social issue completely missed the sarcasm.

If they had the intention you think they had? Evil. But I didn't get that from reading the archive.is link upthread.

Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track.

Not a full hit of on-topic, but I appreciate that you quote from the satirical piece in question (and I imagine you got down-voted by people who didn't read the OP, or who had this fly over their head).

And then the word gets back to your employer, or your potential future employers. Suddenly you find yourself on thin ice for an indeterminate period of time.

No, thanks. I'd just rather my online persona is squeaky-clean under my real name, and anything controversial (oh, I don't know, like holding even one opinion that's got a potential to become controversial a year or two down the line) is under a pseudonym.

>Why not simply allow that person to be offended? Why care?

From a business standpoint: They've shown they're willing to make a scene, while simultaneously making it just controversial enough that you can justify pulling it down (and therefore averting the issue) without major loss of face.

In other words, nobody's primary business is controversial documentation.

I watched a YouTube video by somebody who was the target of these attacks and he admitted that he started waking up feeling so numb from stress that he couldn’t move and once soiled his bed because he couldn’t get up. The level of stress and how his business relationships and family members were targeted was unbelievable. You can’t just ignore how offended they get

Putting the content of the joke aside, humor itself seems to get some kind of strange negative reaction from a subset of people. Even this forum seems to have "sarcasm police" who will attack any joke that isn't properly tagged and licensed. Makes me wonder which comes first, anger at the humor or the subject.

> but the reality is that you just can't show any kind of personality, humor, or fun on the internet without putting yourself at risk.

Completely untrue. Lefty "SJW" Twitter is full of humour and personality. Shitposting takes precedence over serious discussion, massively, to the point where more centrist or right-wing twitter circles seem completely dry in comparison. If your humour and personality aren't accepted, that's on you.

I'd like just to point out that I find your comment absurd to the point of being really funny.

Since humor is now banned on the internet, would you mind deleting your comment as good praxis?

I personally cannot care less about these woke mooks. They can flame all day and I can ignore them all day.

May you please upload a screenshot of the tweet? I can’t see the tweet as I don’t have an account. It appears as though the user has blocked all non-Twitter users from viewing their posts.

Edit - I found an archive of the tweet https://archive.md/VpYl2

It’s impressive how similar these “let’s unpack this sweeite” people write on Twitter. Such an abhorrent monoculture of PMC who unsuccessfully try to fill their empty lives with meaning by doing weird social crusades.

"woops, you punched down!"

> In a context where mobile players got trashed all the bloody time for being ..., or worst of all, women?

Is that even a thing? Never ever have I heard "mobile players = women" even on the worst dumps of the internet, like 9gag. But then again, I'm not on Twitter.

Whether it's a thing or not, I don't think it's fair to put all that on the author of the comment.

The author was making some pretty clear points about how capitalism produces meaningless addictive games. Accusing author of sexism seems like a non-sequitur to me, especially as the whole comment is completely free of any gendered pronouns, e.g. "These individuals".

I've not seen a direct connection between the two (at least in terms of denigrating). It's true that there is gatekeeping of 'gaming' that tends to look down on mobile gamers (in the sense that mobile games aren't 'real games' by some arbitrary and stupid metric), and the same is also true of women gamers (though more in the sense that there's many accusations of women gamers faking interest in gaming for attention or are somehow less invested in it than 'real gamers', again by some arbitrary metric). It's also true that women make up a much larger proportion of mobile gamers than gamers on other platforms. I'm sure there are some who will (through the lenses of the other biases I've mentioned) view this as evidence that women are 'fake gamers'. I'm not too familiar with whether this is actually a common trope or not, though (I'm not in a position to receive this flack nor do I hang out in places likely to give it out).

(Either way I think the argument that this means the article is intrinsicly sexist is definitely reaching. It seems the accusation of gatekeeping is more valid, though I think this requires a pretty uncharitable interpretation of something which is clearly aiming elsewhere)

I’m imagining a world where writing the word “they” is banned.

As in: if you don’t have something “we” to say, don’t say anything at all.

I've learned to just avoid people that get caught up on such petty semantics.

Language is a way of conveying meaning.

Hyper focusing on the words being used, diminishes time spent on the transaction of mind.

This is key for adults. This is one reason that I generally avoid people that are put off by bad words even positive intent.

Life is... when you really think about it... absurd.

> Hyper focusing on the words being used, diminishes time spent on the transaction of mind.

On the other hand, this is the whole point of writing poetry. You focus on the particular shape of words and try to fit them to an arbitrary, meaningless, pattern.

I think the GP was focusing on people rising to fight when "others" are offended (as opposed to "I/we are offended by this"), but it may just be my pet peeve ;)

Whether it is an offended party or a result of the constant conditioning in some community that this kind of satire is offensive,

The fact that the PR author does not even care that a piece of documentation is lost and there is no attempt to at least rewrite it is disappointing.

Someone please think of the old developers

For what it's worth, I read it months ago. I was not offended by it, but was in agreement with others that its removal would be better because it frankly was not funny at all.

It was an accurate observation, but despite best intentions, it sounded like a teenager on a rant. Not exactly a good look.

Just my two cents - seems that some agree and some don't.

What's not funny about a teenager on a rant?

So the "teenager on a rant" is right yet must still be dismissed? Why?

> it sounded like a teenager on a rant

It is quite typical to dismiss anti-capitalist critique as being youthful and immature

> satire

Didn't read it that way. The text seems factually true to me.

Think of the manipulative, exploitive Skinner box designers!

Thanks for explaining I read the commit 3 times trying to find out what could be offending.

Life is controversial by its very nature. I'm not saying you have to go full teenage edgelord, but we have to learn to accept that everyone has different lives and experiences. These experiences lead to different viewpoints and opinions. I have very different viewpoints than even myself a few years ago. I imagine a completely different person in a different city or country would disagree with at least some of them. And you know what? I am okay with that.

I don't like this fake-wokism SV monoculture creeping into everything. I wouldn't mind them sharing their opinions on things if they didn't have teeth. Somehow the professionally oppressed are backed by nearly every major corporation on the planet. It makes me overreact. I don't like it. Most people don't like it. Everything they say sounds like "Pick up that can, Citizen."

Archive of twitter thread that started this: https://archive.md/VpYl2

>It makes me overreact. I don't like it

I think a lot of people are feeling this and its probably what is pushing people in to extreme ideologies. You start off getting pissed off at actions like this and then you slowly gravitate as far away from these people as possible.

Honestly I think public social media entirely is a bad experiment and probably needs to be stopped. It used to be that you would know your audience and make jokes to suit, some people are more sensitive to certain things but you would know this and avoid otherwise fine jokes. But now on the internet the audience is literally everyone so you are always going to step on someones toes. Even by something as tame as a rant on encrypted saves and IAPs.

The medium of exchange has transitioned from smaller local groups to larger groups. It's like a group of people all screaming in a room trying to talk over one another. The only voices that stand out are the most outrageous ones. Large group forums have less depth. You can see this on websites like Reddit, where the most popular subreddits are reactionary and shallow, while smaller ones have more depth, ideas, and conversation.

I think you can see it in this thread, too, where many people are aghast at the maintainers' decision to remove the piece and citing it as evidence that jokes aren't allowed on the internet anymore.

And at the same time, widespread rejection of certain things people do and say is a critical part of changing popular ethics. I'm not saying I agree with every contemporary expression of wokeness. But we have made some progress in part because when someone said something "offensive" to their coworker or acuiantance the offended party told that person to stop.

When people stop going along with things is when what is acceptable begins to change. Unfortunately, public shaming and ostricism seems to be a fundamental part of evolving social mortality.

No one would think twice if this document contained something truely offensive or hateful and the maintainers refused to remove it. But the fact is people have taken this so far to the point that it’s not a means to an end, it’s a hobby. And now we have harmless jokes being taken down.

Also, the piece that got taken down is a piece that essentially mocks morally bankrupt companies for abusing people. That's about as opposite for what the woke thing stands for (or at least is supposed to) as you can get.

Yeah, I'm not citing this circumstance as a quality case. But the OP connected this to the general wokeness narrative. And while I have very ambivalent feelings about the current rash of performative indignation, I think it's important to point out that such pearl clutching and scandal is not new and has functioned to change society in ways most people probably agree with (i.e. the decline of tacit sexual harassment and casual racism).

> But we have made some progress in part because when someone said something "offensive" to their coworker or acuiantance the offended party told that person to stop.

It has been a while since last time it was the actual offended party who complained. Nowadays, people who complain are people who pretend to be offended in the name of other people who, in the mind of the first ones, could be offended.

There's a lot to unpack here and I'm feeling very confused as to what you're talking about. Godot is not a major corporation, and you seem to be dismissing someone's complaint as "fake-wokism" and "professionally oppressed" when the joke in question is very clearly made at the expense of a certain group of people (mobile game players). What is fake or contrived about this if you're in that group and don't like being the butt of these jokes as is happening here? I personally can see why someone would be offended by such cynical and condescending statements, even though I am not in that group.

Also you're saying their opinions have "teeth" as if making a complaint is some kind of attack on something because it could potentially cause a change to happen, but if you take that view then what is the point of giving feedback if you know it won't be acted on? If you find yourself overreacting to someone else expressing their opinion, perhaps that is another opportunity to expand your viewpoint, instead of overreacting?

> What is fake or contrived about this if you're in that group and don't like being the butt of these jokes as is happening here?

I think what OP is saying is accepting the difference and moving on is also a valid option.

That isn't really a valid option though, if this kind of thing is in the official documentation, and you have to read it in order to use that particular feature. It would be there every time you have to refer back to the documentation or refer someone else to it.

> the joke in question is very clearly made at the expense of a certain group of people

Have you ever been to a comedy club or watched a stand-up comedian perform?

If everyone took your stance most jokes would be banned because you can always argue that they are at the expense of some group.

Yes, many times, but I don't see how that is relevant. Technical documentation is not a comedy performance, you read it to learn how to use the product, not to develop your sense of humor. Why would there be jokes in there made at the expense of any group? Within the documentation, it makes perfect sense for these projects to ban any of these kind of jokes that could anger people, if what you really want is cynical hot takes and snarky jokes, there seems to be no shortage of that on HN and Twitter and other places that aren't technical documentation.

Humour is humour, and shouldn't be limited only to designated stages. I personally enjoy technical documentation or even math books that contain humour. I'd even say it's quite common in the geek culture, so I'm not sure what your opinion is based upon.

Sometimes I do enjoy that too, but I can also see how other people don't enjoy that type of humor and wouldn't want to be subjected to being mocked. You can't force people to think a joke is funny especially if you're intentionally doing it outside one of those designated stages, often the context is the entire reason the joke is funny. It's one thing if you're picking between 100 math books on the same subject, and you pick one of them that contains the humor that you like, but that's different from when you're shipping the official documentation which is supposed to be the one source of truth for the project. Users can't just pick a different book there if they find your jokes off-putting.

> Sometimes I do enjoy that too, but I can also see how other people don't enjoy that type of humor and wouldn't want to be subjected to that.

How is anyone subjected to it? No one is being forced to read anything. It is wrong to remove text in the anticipation of the possibility of someone coming along and being offended by it.

As far as I can tell people are being forced to read it if they want to learn that particular API. It wasn't some third party blog or tutorial. (Please correct me if I am wrong about this)

You are unlikely to need to read that part of the API unless you want to mess with a very specific feature (encryption in save files).

Even then, text (as a format) allows you to easily skip to parts you care about. If I was looking for docs on this API, I'd skip to examples and read paragraphs above them if code is unclear.

I also wholeheartedly disagree with your stance that there is a time and place for humour: humour is for every occasion (and I know of cases where it was successfully applied in the saddest of moments, someone losing a loved one)!

You are also guilty of assuming that someone is offended where you are not! Sensitivity and empathy are needed, but we can't hear from the really offended ones because people who are offended in their stead just add the noise.

I still upvoted your comments because I also disagree with downvotes being used for disagreement :)

Why are you making normative claims about technical documentation? That seems to me more preposterous than anything written in the mentioned piece.

I'm not sure what you mean, the entire point of technical documentation is that it explains a technical subject, that is the definition of the phrase. You could add other things but then it stops being just that.

No, it doesn't "stop being that". You're going to have to provide some sort of justification for that statement.

I said it "stops being just that." You removed the word "just" which changes the entire meaning of the sentence.

Sorry, one can read "just that" in two ways there, "it at all" or "only".

To carry on with your intended meaning, what is the problem if the technical documentation is more than just technical documentation? We're talking about a paragraph here, maybe 0.1% of the documentation. Are you making a claim that at some percentage of non-technical content the documentation becomes illegitimate?

I'm honestly just trying to understand what you're getting at.

Possibly I should have said "it stops being only that," that might have been more clear. The problem with making that 0.1% into something else is that people still get annoyed and distracted by it because it's not what they expected, and they complain, which is exactly what happened here.

> the entire point of technical documentation is that it explains a technical subject

It also becomes incredibly boring. I hear what you're saying, but work has to be fun, at least sometimes.

Could not possibly disagree more. The tech industry has always had humor lurking around. Easter eggs, little jokes. BeOS wrote their error messages in Haiku. It was a lot of these little things that endeared you too a product.

Communication and engagement often require some humor. The first programming book that helped me grok programming was full of humor and stupid cartoon drawings.

And let us not forget Godot is open source. People do this for fun and put in their own time and effort. I don’t think anybody should really be telling them what they can and cannot be doing while pursuing their passion for your benefit.

The constant stream of little quips and inside jokes that endear you and I to things also can be off-putting and drive outsiders away. I am sorry but I've spent my years explaining so many strange things that nobody understands like "Guru Meditation," and it's not really funny any more when you have to keep explaining the joke. And those are just the little innocent gags, it's much much worse when the joke is disparaging someone.

It also doesn't seem like this was written by some random open source contributor, it seems it was done by the maintainers, who are being paid to work on it by their patrons. They absolutely do have to answer to those patrons. While people seem to like to assign all blame for things on twitter commentators for whatever reason, it's likely the actions they took are the result of feedback from the patrons.

> I am sorry but I've spent my years explaining so many strange things that nobody understands like "Guru Meditation," and it's not really funny any more when you have to keep explaining the joke.

New people are born every day and we have to explain to them a lot of well-known things, again and again. This is how everything works, not only humor. I do not want to lose great things like "guru meditation" just because some people like you are tired of explaining them.

I don't know you mean by lose, the original Guru Meditation is already long gone. If you have your own thing and you want to keep the joke alive by spending your time fielding a bunch of support requests from confused users asking what "Guru Meditation" means then be my guest, I can't take that away from you.

My feeling is just that if you change that message from "Guru Meditation" to "you are an ass hat" or something rude like that, you will probably get many more complaints.

> And those are just the little innocent gags, it's much much worse when the joke is disparaging someone.

This may be a stupid question, but why is it such a bad thing that they are disparaged? Maybe Godot doesn't want them as patrons, and are they even contributing that much?

> Technical documentation is not a comedy performance,

Maybe not for you! Some of the clowns I've had to work with ....

edit I'm getting downvoted for this. Please argue why you disagree. This is an honest attempt at breaking open a ground for open discourse. I'm open to discussion. If you feel this is pedantic, that's fine, but I would ask you kindly to move on and don't engage with this.

Some people are trying to turn "retracting a statement and apologizing as soon as a single individual states they feel offended" into a categorical imperative which every human ought to obey.

That's the extreme opposite to that other polarizing categorical imperative: "I am able to say whatever I want, regardless how anyone else feels about that."

Categorical imperatives don't work out at all in interpersonal relationships. They leave zero room for empathy or compromise, they dismiss any personal responsibility to take a step back and reflect on the context.

Like this:

> the joke in question is very clearly made at the expense of a certain group of people (mobile game players). What is fake or contrived about this if you're in that group and don't like being the butt of these jokes as is happening here?

One corollary of that categorical imperative is that any and all suffering is absolute. Everything is a 5/5. There's no nuance or room to take this apart through critical questioning.

However, asking critical questions, trying to understand and listening to one another are paramount.

Can you be sure this is targeted at mobile game players? Have you read the tutorial page and are you perceiving things at face value? Have you considered that satire can deliver a valid criticism via irony, pastiche, wit,...? Could this also be a warning or a put down directed at mobile game companies who tend to consider gamers as consumers through their business models?

These aren't questions meant to hurt, they are meant to understand where someone is coming from.

Even so, words do have an impact. They can be used to intentionally hurt. You can use words to clearly convey that you don't perceive the other person as an equal human being. You can use words to dismiss any form of equal reciprocity as to how you and the other behave/act/listen towards one another. That's where insults, disrespect, violence, discrimination and the like come in. And once those are out in the open, you can't take that back.

There's a difference between the former and the latter. A satirical piece questioning a particular behavior is one thing, a piece that intentionally attack individuals themselves is something entirely else.

Asking critical questions is about asserting the intentions of the author, figuring out where they come from, why they put a satirical piece in technical documentation in the first place. You can draw your own conclusions, but unless you ask those questions and go find answers, your conclusions will be conjecture at best, and turn into misunderstandings fueling further polarization deadening any further debate at worst.

> if you take that view then what is the point of giving feedback if you know it won't be acted on?

Interpersonal relationships are complex and multi-layered, meta at many times. All the world is a stage, and there's always an audience around. The point of publishing a satirical piece that targets mobile game businesses isn't to show them "the errors of their ways". It could also be read as a warning to mobile game players: beware from whom you purchase games.

While I'm addressing you directly with my comment, I'm very much aware that this is a public forum and there's an audience lurking and reading this.

Good communication is a complex skill to pick up. That's why communication science, journalism and PR experts are a thing.

>Can you be sure this is targeted at mobile game players? Have you read the tutorial page and are you perceiving things at face value? Have you considered that satire can deliver a valid criticism via irony, pastiche, wit,...? Could this also be a warning or a put down directed at mobile game companies who tend to consider gamers as consumers through their business models?

I can't answer those because as far as I can tell, none of that context was really mentioned in the piece. If the bar for understanding the documentation is "you have to go on twitter and ask the author a bunch of critical questions to explain the joke" then consider the group of people who you are limiting that documentation to.

I am not sure what you mean by some people are trying to turn something into a categorical imperative, I didn't see any statements to either of those ends. I see some people who have apparently suffered, making a specific request to another group of people to help reduce their suffering.

> I can't answer those because as far as I can tell, none of that context was really mentioned in the piece. If the bar for understanding the documentation is "you have to go on twitter and ask the author a bunch of critical questions to explain the joke" then consider the group of people who you are limiting that documentation to.

It's really simple: "If you have questions: just ask, communicate, listen and don't jump to immediate conclusions from the get-go". That's not too high a bar to set, no?

Suppose someone turns to me and says "You have written a piece, that's how I feel and my conclusion is that you need to retract your statement." My first question to them will be: "Well, have you considered asking and listening to me first before you jump to that conclusion?"

> I see some people who have apparently suffered, making a specific request to another group of people to help reduce their suffering.

Did these people ask why the piece was included in the documentation in the first place? Did they try to understand the intentions of the author? Was their an open debate about this at any point?

If you don't find a debate online, have you asked them if they talked to the author directly, or are you joining a bandwagon without asserting whether or not their suffering might be caused by misunderstanding the intentions of the authors of that piece? Or worst, caused by an unwillingness to consider the intentions of the authors of the piece?

What you're saying is entirely backwards though, from a pure maintenance perspective, the purpose of documentation is actually to reduce the amount of time you need to spend on answering questions and responding to debates. If you receive a lot of questions about what it's supposed to mean, the documentation is not doing its job and needs to be clarified.

And that's a completely valid point. But then we're discussing something entirely different: the usefulness of documentation. A satirical piece conveying criticism on the game industry clearly doesn't help a developer solve a concrete technical problem.

You could extend that to anything that doesn't touch upon the technicalities of the Godot gaming engine.

But that's entirely distinct from the initial point of debate: does this satirical piece offend or doesn't it?

To borrow some language from the piece, how much would you appreciate it if someone put a paragraph in the documentation saying "CaptArmchair is a poor soul filled with tremendous existential angst, who needs to be prevented from thinking so the tremendous agony of realizing CaptArmchair's own irrelevance does not again take over CaptArmchair's life" ? Even if it was a joke, would you really want that in there? (For disclosure, if it was me, I personally would probably not want any hostile things about me written across random open source documentation, so hopefully I am not cursing myself to that by writing this post)

Now you're pulling a single sentence out of an entire context and dismissing that particular context. That's not how it works.

The next parts of that piece are equally important:

> But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.

> No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order.

Clearly "protect the world order" is hyperbole. It is clearly signalling that none of the above is to be taken literally.

Moreover, the "prevents them from thinking" is another form of signalling. It's meant to say "Think about who you're buying from, and what you're buying into." What is absolutely not meant to say is this: "your experience as a gamer is invalid because you buy into a questionable product/service/business model."

The entire piece is satire. It's self deprecating. Satire asks that the reader takes a step back, self deprecates for a minute... and then reflects on what's actually being said.

>I can't answer those because as far as I can tell, none of that context was really mentioned in the piece

I don't want to be the one to bring this up, but your posts indicate you're less skilled in reading comprehension than this satire is asking for from it's audience.

My personal tastes and goals in technical writing aside, I don't find the reading comprehension level this satire was written for to be incongruous with reasonable assumptions about the audience of godot's documentation.

The joke in question is very clearly at the expense of multi-billion dollar companies using really cynical tactics to make money from the aforementioned mobile gamers. This kind of corporate fake-wokeism that uses its power to insist that punching up by criticising them is punching down, and of cynically invoking the powerless in order to silence critics in ways that wouldn't work if it wasn't really helping the powerful, is getting really tiring. Not only that, it feels like there's something deeply, fundamentally wrong with our current social justice activism that leaves it not only structurally incapable of actually representing the powerless, but also using its power so aggressively against anyone who challenges its claims to be doing so that it's actively harmful to any attempt to genuinely do so.

> twitter thread that started this

Jesus can we just burn Twitter to the ground already? What a wasteland of morons with useless opinions it is.

I don't think the problem is with twitter here. Let people have opinions, even if you think they are useless. They are opinions after all. Your issue should be with the maintainers who will remove any content on the slightest objection to it in a bid to do the "right" thing by whatever group of people got offended by it.

I mean the whole thing is a total non-issue. Someone writes a silly screed in docs, someone notices it and points it out, maintainers of a project that wants some semblance of professionalism remove dumb screed.

As a maintainer I wouldn’t even remove it for content but just because it’s clearly a detriment to the document.

Aren't you engaging in victim-blaming here? Shouldn't you be blaming the mob, not the individual maintainer giving in to the mob?

I think we should be blaming anyone who complies with the mob, since that is the only thing that gives the mob power. If everyone just ignored them, this phenomenon would peter out quite fast.

Don't underestimate the power of a mob, even an internet mob. They can and have done a lot of damage to people, even those who don't directly engage with them (especially when they attack those who don't have a lot of individual power: ironically while those who participate in them seem to have a sense of 'punching up', they can only hurt those for which they are as a collective punching down).

But they can only do damage as long as HR departments and conference organizers and whatnot bow to the demands of people on twitter. Of course they have done a lot of damage but almost all of it indirectly. The people who actually execute on it in meatspace are at least as much to blame, IMO.

It used to be that you could be a bit selective with your circle of friends and you would only have to deal with "less capable" people in family meetings a couple of times a year because you don't get to choose those.

And since they could barely operate a computer there was some natural barrier of entry that kept these people away from the internet. Then phones and apps happened and the all flooded to social media and here we are. They come from all sides of the political spectrum, so pretty much the only way to avoid them is to stay off social media.

yes, please, stay off social media

I would love to, but then who will drive people away from the big, diluted platforms?

while I appreciate your sense of sacrifice I'd rather see you lead by example and find peers in a social network that fits your preferences.

Welcome to democracy :D

What surprises me the most is that in all the controversy, nobody tried to interpret the text as what it clearly was; a criticism of practices in mobile game development.

Instead, they got offended by the very thing the text was crticising, which is viewing the players of mobile games as a lower class of human that can and therefore must be milked for cash.

It feels like the whole controversy is just a misunderstanding of two groups having the same idea, but wording it differently.

Yeah, after reading the deleted text I couldn't understand the controversy, so I read some of that Twitter thread. They clearly had not understood what they had read, having missed all nuance as they made their very literal interpretation of the piece. It was bizarre to see them zoom in on little details, such as picking apart 'we/us' vs 'they/their', whilst missing the entirety of what was going on in the text (including why 'they/their' were used).

I guess, it isn't really their fault. Nobody chooses to misunderstand something(do they?). I just wish it had not led to the destruction of something interesting, but if it hadn't, then I would probably never have seen the deleted text; so, maybe, I should be thankful they brought it to my attention, even while wishing someone could have explained the text to them; or, at least, managed to convince them that sometimes it is best to ignore something you don't like, rather than go to war.

> Nobody chooses to misunderstand something

No - but people who write sarcastic or satirical things are deliberately choosing to make themselves more likely to be misunderstood. Why would you do that?

For fun.

Humor, the hope that one is not alone in their beliefs, and that if there are a few others, you can filter for them by their reactions. Of course, this is a brute force method that has potential ... side effects.

Some things are communicated outside of the surface level of literal text that cannot be communicated within it. Even if they could be, some people enjoy nuance and complexity and think they are worthwhile for their own sake.

But really, this can't be explained in this fashion (and in this is the explanation...). Go look at a painting, read some poetry, listen to some music, enjoy a conversation with some friends, and ponder an interesting idea, and after all that reflect upon what you have experienced, and then, maybe, you'll be enlightened.

Both absurdism and sarcasm present unrealistic scenarios and trust the listener not only to a) understand that the scenario presented is deliberately false but also b), to see the humour in resolving the distance between reality and the presented scenario.

I've had a conversation with this person on Twitter as well, and immediately blocked me for not being "good faith" while she casually throws around terms like "dirtbag left" and "those East Block country devs are caustic". I'm all for a more inclusive community, but spewing toxicity against a certain political ideology and using classicism in the process makes you a bigger problem than the piece itself imho.

The "dirtbag left" is a particular segment of leftist podcasters who called themselves that e.g. the hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast.

The other statement seems toxic however.

The other statement is not a direct quotation.

Twitter is officially 4chan now.

You can't in good faith use quotation marks when the quoted thing was not said. The "dirtbag left" comment was already quoted, not written as-is, and the other tweet said:

"I’ve seen some impressively caustic stuff from that area at times."

Also you and other in this threads seem determined to use them as a scapegoat for all that happens around this joke.

Wow, what a toxic person. I think counterculture is an important part of the tech community, and for this to be removed is... Saddening.

The thread is everything that's wrong with Twitter.

This is sad, there is no free expression anymore. You can't have any jokes or sarcasm in code comments, between colleagues or in documentation.

Everything must be soulless and sterile. Just churn out your work as an appendage to the machine, with no culture or expression.

"I don't like this fake-wokism SV monoculture creeping into everything"

At least, it's replacing the awkward dudebro monoculture that crept into everything.

Staying off of Twitter and leaving the Bay are my two countermoves against it. Principled discussion only please.

Back in... saner times, there was a saying: "don't feed the trolls". Unfortunately it seems people have been doing that far too often, and now they have grown big and strong.

Nowadays it seems that "trolls are free outrage fuel" is more apt. How else would we power our tribalism generators?

>I don't like this fake-wokism SV monoculture creeping into everything

We too

Probably get thick skin advice is offensive nowadays

Reading that, it makes me wonder how they'd react to G.A. Romero's take on consumer culture.

Call me old-fashioned, but I enjoy this rage against the machine. Nowadays the common engineer sees it as unprofessional, coarse.. but it's the old Zeitgeist of many a programmer before we learned the new trendy JS framework of the day and started talking about shares, compliance and dividends.

I think the problem is that the temperature in the room has changed.

I've seen people get bent out of shape because people put politics in music, yet Forever Young by Alphaville was written about the prospect of dying during the Cold War. Now, there's definitely a difference between Forever Young and some artist making overt statements, that nuance is not lost. The difference is that these aren't seen as humor, insightful thinking, or light-hearted attempts to nudge us in a direction anymore. Discourse has degraded to the extent that anything you mutter must be an absolute belief and there is some inclination that you ascribe to all ecosystems of belief around that idea as well.

If you previously used inflammatory speech (like this) for effect, you're now viewed as someone who has taken a side not only with ideas discussed here but any ideas which may be distantly related to that idea too.

For what it’s worth my objection isn’t the content or that there’s politics mingling in an open source project - it’s that the specific message was unbelievably asinine and so stupid as to cast doubt on the competence of the developers (for the same reason it isn’t assuring to read a manual for your television and discover a long rant about Flat Earth - it’s not a strictly fair metric for their technical competence but it’s a huge red flag about their general seriousness and reasoning ability).

Software projects shouldn’t loudly advertise that they are written by people with the political sophistication of a college student who smokes too much weed.

Found the mobile game dev ;)

Seriously though, while I'd agree that the piece was written in a quite unsophisticated style, what exactly is "unbelievably asinine" about it?

The two main points seem, to me, to be:

1) Mobile games are designed to provide not much more than an addictive dopamine hit

2) Mobile devices in general enable people to fill time they'd otherwise be alone with their thoughts with mindless distractions, and many happily oblige

Both of these are quite defensible.

There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that appeal to intelligence (like say Factorio), the perceived most important trait in our society currently, are OK, whereas games that are addicting and appeal to other traits, like the ability to do the same thing over and over (any game with grinding), are morally wrong. Both types of appeal are manipulative in the same way, but one is cast as morally wrong because it doesn't appeal to what the elites in our society (such as you, dear HN reader) value.

The rant about mobile games and capitalism is simply a reflection of this bias which is a particular view of society, but is not the only one and certainly not one shared by everyone. If you don't share that view it just seems like the person who wrote it is naive and doesn't have appreciation for personalities and perspectives other than his own.

Which is fine, people are different, and engines are written by peculiar people, but if I were to write something similar in another direction people likely wouldn't take it as a joke. For instance:

>Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A clerical oligarchy runs the world and forces us to trust the science in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, we're supposed to believe anything the clerics say, and just like they tell us to wear masks, they tell us that the biggest and best model for game engines today is ECS. It is a model of confused souls forced to architect their games in a particular way to escape the reality that they're just code monkeys gluing ugly code together instead of building a beautiful castle out of lego pieces like they want to believe. And this serves our ruling class, the clerics, as they infect and infest and ever larger portion of game development thought with their rotten ideology. Here at Godot HQ we have none of it, and just like we don't trust the science and we don't wear masks, we also don't use ECS.

Now is this an appropriate joke for an engine's documentation? It's not too far off from the original, just with changed content to suit the changed direction of the joke.

> Factorio

Never played this, but it seems to be designed just to be a fun game. From their pricing model, there doesn't seem to be any incentive for them to keep you addicted. Unlike some of the mobile games with microtransactions.

Being addicted to video games, any kind, is overall a bad thing.

Oh, I have no dog in this fight, but let me tell you Factorio is extremely addicting. As in, "I wonder where all those hours of my day went?". I had to stop playing because it was starting to get stressful.

PS: it's a really cool game.

You can’t just change the words and intent of a joke and use that to argue against the original joke. Of course whether a joke is funny depends on the audience’s point of view.. that’s comedy 101.

What the author was saying really isn’t very contentious if you stop and think about it. Mobile games are a time sink and are often used as a distraction from stressful thoughts. The same is true for other video games, but the author’s view on that isn’t mentioned.

If you think that every humorous statement has to be so clean and pure that nobody takes offense, the I hope you like dad jokes, because that’s about all that’d be left.

Of course I can do that, given that the contention is not whether the joke is funny or not but if it's appropriate for its environment. If you don't think my joke is appropriate for the documentation of an engine, then you also shouldn't think the previous joke is appropriate either.

And he's not arguing whether the joke is funny, he's saying the joke is relevant.

The content of your joke isn't as relevant (which also makes it less funny). You used an anti-science sentiment and threw in ECS to try to make it more suitable, but it isn't analogous with the original statement at all.

How exactly do you think a cynical take on something that occurs widely in the industry is equivalent to conspiracy theory level science denialism?

First of all, Godot actually doesn't use ECS despite the majority of people in the industry saying it's amazing and all that. There was an article about it the other day https://godotengine.org/article/why-isnt-godot-ecs-based-gam.... So the ECS thing isn't entirely made up.

>How exactly do you think a cynical take on something that occurs widely in the industry is equivalent to conspiracy theory level science denialism?

I believe that believing we live in a capitalist oligarchy that does all the things the text says it does is mistaken and wrong, just like you believe that what I said is conspiracy theory level science denialism. From my perspective what I said makes perfect sense and it's a perfect analogy, just like for you what the text said also explains what's actually happening in reality.

This divergence in views is political in nature, and just like from your perspective saying that mobile games are bad because of capitalism is relevant, for me saying that ECS is bad because of blind faith in science is relevant. Why is my perspective any less important than yours, other than for you not thinking it's relevant?

I'm aware Godot doesn't actually use ECS, it doesn't make your joke any more coherent though.

If you want to go down the route that everything is subjective, we're not going to be very productive here. The mention of "capitalist oligarchy" is hyperbole, of course, though I don't know how you want to argue that the world isn't mostly run by capitalist forces. Again, if this is something you want to question I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere.

The factoid in the piece is that a lot of mobile games are built with the intent of being addictive and getting people to spend a bunch of money on micro transactions. Is this another thing that doesn't fit in your view of reality?

Most importantly though, if they added your joke instead I still wouldn't rally to have them take it down. I'd just think it's awkward and embarrasing.

>though I don't know how you want to argue that the world isn't mostly run by capitalist forces. Again, if this is something you want to question I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere.

I believe that the world is primarily run by academia and journalists, and this is best described as a clerical oligarchy. In 1890 the US was definitely a capitalist/commercial oligarchy, in 2020 the US is definitely not one and is instead a clerical oligarchy where institutions with most power are intellectual ones rather than commercial ones. There are reasonable and well thought out arguments for this being the case https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution....

>The factoid in the piece is that a lot of mobile games are built with the intent of being addictive and getting people to spend a bunch of money on micro transactions. Is this another thing that doesn't fit in your view of reality?

I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.

>Most importantly though, if they added your joke instead I still wouldn't rally to have them take it down. I'd just think it's awkward and embarrasing.

Yes, that's exactly what I think of the original joke.

I'll skip right over the conversation about how the world is run. I read some of the article you sent (it's quite long), and let's just say that so far I'm not convinced.

> I don't believe mobile games are any worse than other types of games when it comes to addiction. Just because mobile game addiction focuses on certain traits, games that are addictive but focus on other traits are not any better. To assign a negative moral character to mobile games alone is a mistake that people currently make that I disagree with.

If your biggest issue with the statement is that it unfairly focuses on mobile game devs, feel free to extrapolate the sentiment to all game devs who do this, I think most people do this extrapolation.

I re-read the rest of your responses to this thread, seems like your only issue is with how appropriate a joke is in technical documentation.

I am interested, given your world view, to know why you think a tutorial on encrypting saved game states isn't also inappropriate? In fact, isn't the technical documentation inappropriate in its entirety? Why should I be told how to use the game engine? Just because these "elitist" developers built the engine, doesn't mean they can tell me how I should use it?

>If your biggest issue with the statement is that it unfairly focuses on mobile game devs, feel free to extrapolate the sentiment to all game devs who do this, I think most people do this extrapolation.

I'm a game developer. I don't believe that games are inherently immoral otherwise I wouldn't make them. If you're a game developer and you believe that using psychological techniques to make people play games is wrong then you should probably not be making games, otherwise you're consistently engaging in immoral behavior yourself.

The singling out of mobile games is just a reflection of the bias that game developers have to think some kinds of games are morally wrong because it offends their sensibilities.

> I don't believe that games are inherently immoral otherwise I wouldn't make them.

Neither do I, maybe you read my reply incorrectly. I said, feel free to extrapolate the criticism to all game devs who explicitly try to make the games addictive and hook people with micro-transactions. So your whole line of reasoning there kind of falls flat.

There's no criticism. Making a game addictive is making a game addictive. If you're doing it with micro-transactions or with RNG-gating it's the same thing.

You can't conflate games that try to create a fun experience, and engage people through feelings of discovery, fun, achievement, and games that use manipulative techniques to create frustration and exploit psychological feedback loops to extract a steady stream of money from people. Its just not the same thing at all. Like comparing a novel to a lottery ticket. Both are written on paper but the comparison stops here.

> I believe that the world is primarily run by academia and journalists

I think that world would look something like this: We take immediate and severe measures to curb global warming, don't spend the last decade imposing austerity measures on the European populace, de-escalate the war on drugs, develop a deep understanding of the cultural intricacies of countries we consider invading, avoid publishing clickbait inflammatory anecdotes in our newspapers in consideration for the long term public interest, not the benefit of the shareholders, and drive policy by the nuanced understanding of scientific study, not emotion, intuition, or anecdote.

How does the contrast between the last 40 years of ruthless neoliberalism vs. the very leftist academia and democratic-liberal leaning MSM, fit in your belief that academia and the press are somehow running the show?

(edit: typo)

The bias is born from the pay to win. How many of these games simply put players against an exponential cost curve for marginal benefits?

What this does is ruin the intent and legitimacy of the game.

In your biased elite opinion, of course. A vast majority of people have no problem with pay to win in the games they play.

You sure make a lot of absolute claims. How do you arrive at that conclusion?

For me difference is that Factorio is not containing any way to spend money in game or spend to avoid grinding.

While typical mobile money has grinding solely to force you to pay.

Note: in Factorio my typical strategy is to use mod that makes me start with construction robots, to skip any kind of drudgery at start.

Modding API allowing it is deliberately open and explicitly created to allow this. In typical mobile game I would need to pay large amount of money for that.

Man, you are going all over this thread angry that someone put a clearly marked piece of satire regarding _games_ in a _game engine_.

Harm it does: zero Levity it provides: some

This has been done in many projects since the beginning of the Web. You are clearly, how you say, "triggered" by someone making fun of mobile game addiction and monetization.

Chill out. These guys are developers, not world leaders.

Everybody's entitled to their opinion especially, if there isn't anything harmful.

At least the guys are creating more than public flame on HN.

As to college students smoking weed, just study history of Silicon Valley to see how many of big name corps were started like that.

Does the sudden revelation that we all are people with own quirks really shock you that hard? You maybe believe that there is regular people and there is serious people, who work at the serious business, which is by itself serious af.

> Software projects shouldn’t loudly advertise that they are written by people with the political sophistication of a college student who smokes too much weed.

Open source software projects can have the spin and advertising they want, and it's up to you not to use them if you do not agree.

The Clash with Allen Ginsberg, making quite "overt" statements. Ginsberg spares no one here.

The Clash / Allen Ginsberg - Capitol Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qmz03WI-es

Discourse degraded or maybe it's the coordination of thought made possible from the consolidation of media and the internet, that's made it now possible to target those who seem to threaten the ruling class and their ways.

Or, more simply, political beliefs and values are real and the conflict between two specific ones is much more important than it used to be so people are taking it more seriously.

Isn't that ... that's the analysis anyone would have for another country or historical period with the exact same dynamic.

It's probably not actually "kids these days", only because it never has been so far.

Your statement rings hollow to me.

Previous generations were literally sent to die in the world wars, Korea and Vietnam.

The current generation of recent college graduates has had less suffering than any prior generation.

It is extremely difficult to tell the difference between a Republican or Democrat if you just look at the results and not their rhetoric.

500k dead Americans disagree.

Are you arguing that Covid disproportionately kills the young (current generations)?

> Or, more simply, political beliefs and values are real and the conflict between two specific ones is much more important than it used to be so people are taking it more seriously.

That American politics have become so bifurcated is the problem. We need more than two parties and we need runoff voting to reinforce their ability to survive. Then we can get out of this black and white / us vs them nonsense and see shades of grey.

There are people who don’t subscribe to either party and I don’t just mean independents. That’s a term that’s limited in use to describing anyone who’s not a member of the two “recognized” parties, rather than a defined party.

> Or, more simply, political beliefs and values are real and the conflict between two specific ones is much more important than it used to be so people are taking it more seriously.

Social media gives everyone a single place in which to express their opinions on matters large and small, whereas previously they might only have been able to share those opinions with friends. I don't think it's obvious to say people are more politically opinionated without considering how much having a place to express those opinions, find others in agreement and possibly even have that opinion affect the real world has had on how vocal people are about things they opinions they had anyway.

Someone on Instagram told Tom Morello to stop talking politics and stick to music.

Tom fucking Morello.

Don't know about Morello, but Dead Kennedys definitely should: https://archive.md/F5pu9

They died when Jello left...

I'm dying. Thank you for the laugh.

I think this is a phenomenon that happens through stereotypical radicalization.

The social bubble has become so close to exploding in our collective faces that everything has to be put in correct form, everybody has to be included, everything has to be perfect.

What happened to the meaning of "human" itself? Why are we not forgiving to humans that simply forgot?

I think the phenomenon of how social shitstorms explode these days is the exact opposite of an inclusive society.

Those that complain about things online usually are the ones that are not inclusive, and live their lives in despair and hate instead of love and compassion.

What we need to do is the opposite: Embrace discussion, embrace debate, and embrace to try to understand the opponents' views. People are quick to downvote, and people are quick to hate. But do you know what it takes to try to understand your imaginary villain? A real hero that offers compassion, not another villain that fuels the hate.

I believe that we as a society need to rethink our social values, because apparently, a major part of our society doesn't give a damn about other parts of our society.

And that's either a social or an educational issue with our moral baseline that we teach our children.

reading the comments here made me think it was going to be a self-serving and possibly offensive screed, but instead it was a mirthful critique of the human condition under captured capitalism, in the service of ‘justifying’ encrypted save files (where the summary answer is to prevent cheating).

> but it's the old Zeitgeist of many a programmer before we learned the new trendy JS framework of the day and started talking about shares, compliance and dividends.

With the money came power, and with power comes an expectation of responsibility. But VCs/execs/boards aren't interested in taking even an iota of material responsibility , and holding them to account is basically impossible, and so all the external anger at a largely unaccountable and unconcerned industry gets redirected at rank-and-file.

As someone born in the 90s, looking back at the "rage against the machine" culture in software seems very fake for an industry that went from academia to an extension of the financial services sector...

If you're ever interested in embarking upon an interesting cultural study of the 1990s, look at some of RATM's label mates on Epic Records. It was a strange decade...

They weren't the same people though. Even the academic types were the type of sandel wearing, long bearded hippies (not an insult BTW) that nixon raged against. Followed by the tinkering kids and phreakers etc.

There was never a single overarching software culture.

It seems like a fallacy to go backward from "Things are this way in 2021, therefore it could never have been any other way in the 1980s-early 2000s".

Go to Barnes and Noble (or online) and pick up the magazine 2600, which still gives off a very amateur, hacking-positive pre-social-media vibe of the internet, telecom, and computing.

Also, the book "Steal This Computer Book" while outdated was a fun glance-through when I was younger, though it didn't talk philosophy.

You had things like the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace[1] and other essays and myriad discussions about the potential of the World Wide Web.

The Web was smaller, less corporate, and the nerds ran the show. It shouldn't be blamed on them/us that the net is "corporate".

I live with a simple principle: Does it make me think, does it make me feel something? then it's art. Video games a re definitely art as a means to express a thought or a feeling. Let's not drown that in the flow of soulless triple A sport sims.

John Cleese of python fame once claimed he lost his sense of humour when he started looking at the entirety of the world as ridiculous. The idea being humour only works when you pick on a ridiculous aspect of the world and make fun of it. If everything is ridiculous there's no normal, sensible frame of thinking in the audience for contrast for the laughs.

I obviously don't speak for the author. This joke was probably better and funnier when it seemed more obviously absurd and ridiculous because nobody would ever believe that. Now it's not so clear that its satire at all. It seems much more like the sort of thing some people really do believe. What was clearly hyperbolic about a quite small piece of silliness is now being interpreted as a mere mild exaggeration of the state of the world to highlight a great truth.

The world is changing under us. Just like always has. It surprises us that it is, just like it always does.

postmodernity really do be like that sometimes.

> John Cleese of python fame...

I had to read that twice to realize you’re not referring to the programming language.

Well, the language is named after the comedy group so it's not a far association.

Woah! Didn't know that. Just to verify I went on Wikipedia[1] and it sure is the case

> An important goal of Python's developers is keeping it fun to use. This is reflected in the language's name—a tribute to the British comedy group Monty Python[70]—and in occasionally playful approaches to tutorials and reference materials, such as examples that refer to spam and eggs (from a famous Monty Python sketch) instead of the standard foo and bar.[71][72]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)

Watch out! You know if you highlight that, some twitterati will throw a fit and demand to call the language "snek".

/sarcasm... but not really

There’s already a Python-like language called “Snek”: https://sneklang.org/

(Made for really tiny devices; originally implemented to run on a device with 32kB of Flash and 2kB of RAM).

>and in occasionally playful approaches to tutorials and reference materials

Delete this before they find out!

There's this wonderful group called the Flat Earth Society, it's been around for a while. There's always been a few members who take the group very seriously, but for the majority of the members, it's purely a joke. People would propose these absurd theories, and most people understood it was not meant to be taken seriously.

Then somehow there was this modern movement of people who truly believed the world is flat. I heard them promoting the same exact theories that I had heard years before, and when I tried to point that out to some of them, I was called an idiot.

Flat-earthers have ruined The Flat Earth Society. Now normal people believe the Society is real flat-earthers, and real flat-earthers hate the Society because they realized it was all about mocking Flat Earth beliefs.

To me, the entirety of the world is ridiculous, and you have to just laugh at it, otherwise it's all very depressing. People are far too humorless and serious, while society gets even more ridiculous.

Ha! I didn't know about this "flat earth society" thing. In the light of what you have just explained, it seems that it ended up in an extremely fun state of affairs! At least, from the point of view of an outsider. Cannot wait to meet one of those people (of whatever "sign").

> modern movement of people who truly believed the world is flat

Is this not a modern version of bonsai kittens?

The trolls get out-trolled regularly, it's part of what people find funny.

> The trolls get out-trolled regularly

Maybe in a rare case, here and there. But you better believe this modern moment isn't trolling.

I've met plenty people who strongly identified with this movement and had several lengthy discussions with them. Literally all of them showcased not just a strong belief in a flat earth (and other easy to disprove conspiracy theories), they also clearly suffered from myriad of clearly identifiable psychological pathologies, underpinning all of it. Not the kind of things that someone who's just trolling would be able to fake (easily, or at all). More like the kind and severity that any sane society (both as a social group and as an institution) would provide psychological or even psychiatric assistance with. But that might just be the bigger issue at hand here.

It appears that insanity has increasingly become a somewhat acceptable (or unstoppable) norm rather than an exception in our modern societies. In particularly in the Western ones driven by capitalism, or so it appears. Instead of treating psychological pathologies for what they are, today pretty much "opinion" has become a "valid" opinion.

I guess that taking the concept of freedom of expression (itself no doubt a good thing) to absurd extremes, clearly doesn't help.

It probably doesn't help either that politicians (of all colors) appear to have no issue with exploiting these collective insanities for their own equally insane goals.

All in all, I think all of it are rather indicative sings of a society that is gradually running off its tracks, like a barometer is indicative for weather to come. I don't see this getting any better anytime soon. Particularly not in the US and EU.

Same one that writes "We have members all around the globe" in twitter bio?

I like your explanation for this. I didn't think it was funny, but didn't see it as offensive either. After reading your post, now I can see how it was funny.

It's bewildering to me that anyone can get offended (to vehement profanity) by the text. At the same time, I'm kinda used to criticisms of the mobile game industry. When I switched from a job in AAA games to the nascent mobile games industry (back in J2ME/BREW days, before smartphones), a number of former colleagues were questioning and even dismissive of my move. They did not consider such a crappy platform as worthy of a game developer. I didn't blame them for having that attitude. I just thought it was fun to be able to make and design games all by myself (instead of being on a team of over 90, about half being programmers) and be able to carry them around in my pocket!

Seriously? This isn't even offensive unless you happen to run a business designed around compulsively addicting people to mobile devices. Maybe it's telling that people are offended.

I basically stopped playing games around 2008 when I graduated uni. This was a time when I found other interests, didn't have time for games, and when mobile devices started taking over the world.

If nothing in my life changed, I'd have been driven from gaming anyway by IAP and micropayments.

The piece is obviously sarcastic but has some grains of truth (I personally see more than just grains...).

I think that it's important to remove any sort of misogyny, racism, and any other toxic things from technology. I just don't see how this piece has any of that.

> I just don't see how this piece has any of that.

That's because it doesn't. This whole thing stinks of the same type of bad faith as when people try to smear leftist politicians as being sexist, racist, or anti-semitic (they even geared up to try to call Bernie, a Jewish person, anti-semitic, but I guess that was too ridiculous to stick). We're going to see this a lot going forward - the language of anti-oppression being misused to defend an abusive status quo, by people who benefit from it.

>This whole thing stinks of the same type of bad faith as when people try to smear leftist politicians as being sexist, racist, or anti-semitic

Leftist politicians can be all of those things..

I used the word "smear." That means that people attempt to make attacks that are specious and appear to be in bad faith in order to tarnish their reputation. That this happens is true regardless of whether there is other legitimate evidence or good faith accusations of bad behavior.

In that case, why single out leftist politicians? The same tactic is used against right-wing politicians.

Sadly because many of the politicians on the so-called right at present are unlikely to have their power limited by fully justified accusations of sexism, racism etc. Other smears may work there but not those ones, it would seem. [1]

And that's great, stupid smears are ineffective! What is not so good is solid evidence of serious racism and misogyny is also ineffective.

Historically there have been plenty of politicians closer to the so-called right who would have the power diminished by being foul. There may well be still in certain areas.

What would be nice is if A good take a little of the good sense from B and B a little of the good sense from A.

What we have isn't that, whatever labels you put on various "sides".

[1] "Jewish space laser" for example. That may not be a smear.

Examples please... and don't say "Adam Schiff".

They also pull out this trick in reverse to defend vile centrists like Neera Tanden where they use her identity and record of having received federal benefits to pose her as someone that would defend them rather than someone dedicated to destroying those programs, who attacked an employee, who outed an employee who was sexually assaulted, and suggested stealing Libya's oil to pay for bombing them.

She might not be getting her nomination, but it's a great example of the tactic in action.

Don't forget the union busting!

Tanden is notable only for her poor social media discipline. There are a hundred less progressive officials in the new administration, who happen to be circumspect enough to take money from Middle Eastern dictators without rivaling Trump in Twitter foolishness.

What union busting? ThinkProgress and CAP were both unionised.

What "ThinkProgress" do you mean? This one [0], at which the most recent article is from September 2019? That was indeed a union shop, which was cited by Tanden in an internal email as the reason she closed it down. [1] Maybe we should credit her for not calling in Pinkerton assassins, but closing down a workplace because of its union is precisely "union busting".

[0] https://thinkprogress.org/

[1] https://splinternews.com/the-center-for-american-progress-is...

when people try to smear leftist politicians as being sexist, racist, or anti-semitic

Of course they always, are innocent of such things, always, and never sexually harass their staff either, nor dress up in blackface. All such allegations are lies, I tell you, lies!

Now those dirty right-wingers, you don’t even need proof or a single credible witness, of course they did it... /s

Bernie was USSR supporter, explicitly anti-semitic state with anti-jew affirmative action.

Okay, he's not an antisemite, he just supported totalitarian antisemitic regime.

The weirdest thing for me here, is that most of the noise against the piece seems to have been made on twitter by people who probably identify as "leftists", solely because it punches down on some demographic. I'm still trying to ascertain which demographic that is, it's really not clear.

https://archive.md/VpYl2#selection-4573.0-4573.260 is linked near the top of the comments and contains this:

> In isolation that’s just meh. In a context where mobile players got trashed all the bloody time for being fake gamers, casuals, mindless whales, or worst of all, women? In a context of tech people often being elitist “core” gamers? Woops, you’re punching down.

That reads like something I would write if I wanted to troll the Godot project and could not find any actual point to attack. Poe's law is at work once again.

I cannot take this sentence seriously:

> "mobile gamers got trashed all the [...] time for being [...] women"

Plus, Godot's text is about practices preying on mobile gamers (you can find these practices on PC too, but it is more common on mobile platforms), so it is criticizing mobile gaming (and the companies behind the predatory practices) rather than mobile gamers. So the quoted sentence about "mobile gamers" looks like a straw-man, which goes in favour of a trolling attempt.

Considering that the satirical doc criticized the agressive monetization that predominantly affects mobile gamers I find it hard to see how that is trashing mobile gamers.

Or is it so that if I criticize something that affects some group not specifically me it's actually punching down? It's not possible to criticize something that's being done to a group without it being a criticism of that group?

This is absolutely brilliant. PR departments must love this.

The move from "isms" as a character flaw to "isms" as a structural flaw makes this kind of analysis possible.

Character Flaw: X is injured. you intend to injure X as you did Y.

Structural Flaw: X is injured. X was injured by your neglect in considering the interests of X as you did Y.

"Mobile Gamer Egos" were hurt because they werent "properly considered".

The issue with this kind of structural analysis is that you have to show a duty that a person/system has towards X for their "neglect of X" to be their fault. This is routinely missising from the analysis.

> The move from "isms" as a character flaw to "isms" as a structural flaw makes this kind of analysis possible.

I actually think isms as a structural flaw rather than a character flaw is much more pertinent in many cases, certainly most cases that cause the most damage in people's lives. However, the idea that this documentation amounts to some kind of structural discrimination is facially ridiculous, and, in my view, offensive to the real causes whose language it's abusing.

Right, that's why criticizing the companies who shamelessly pushed opioids is actually wrong too, because it's punching down at the people who enjoy using the opioids who often tend to be low-income and yes, women. Woops, you punched down!

"Any criticisms of leftist politicians are bad faith smears by oppressors defending the status quo."

"Any criticisms of Trump are bad faith smears by the Deep State defending the status quo."

Hmm.

Nowhere in my comment does it say or imply "any criticisms are smears." All I said is that people do use bad faith smears.

Your analysis of his sentence is completely incorrect.

And even if you tweak your game to encourage more play and profits, you'd be well aware of that and have already made the decision to shrug off such criticism.

Completely agree. I'd even say that entire rant was generous to the people who run such a business: it makes it seem they actually care about the mental well-being of their players.

I think it's far more likely they view players as rats in their Skinner's box simulator with the reward lever tied to their credit card and the punishment mechanism wired to a timer.

If you want to see the removed article, it is (for now) still up here: https://docs.godotengine.org/ko/latest/tutorials/io/encrypti...

Seems more whimsical than offensive to me, but YMMV.

And the (somewhat tortured, IMO) thread accusing this article of implicit sexism, which led to it being removed, is here: https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507

I would agree that 'tortured' is well-chosen adjective to describe the Twitter thread.

Twitter doesn't let me see that thread. Says something about "this account owner has limited who can see their tweets".

Yes because when your post reach HN you need to lock your account or else you'll have people argue in your mentions for days.

It's twitter - that's what it is designed to do.

Looks like the account author privated their account and therefore killed the thread. What was the complaint? How was this article sexist?

Er, I'm not sure whether me pasting it in after they deleted it would be considered mean, but I think this is the gist:

Ah, yes, I strongly disagree to this. An activity being primarily performed by a disadvantaged group does not mean that activity is immune to criticism (see also: fur coats, fgm)

That is such a huge stretch, wow.

Here is the archive: https://archive.md/VpYl2

Yeesh

I think it only takes a handful of humorless people to make it not worth keeping it up. He wants to write a game engine, not be a comedy writer.

This is, in my mind, a great tragedy of the modern age. We just force people to be in their lanes, and the burden to escape is even harder. It's sad.

The crazy thing is that it only hurts people that don't have humor. For instance, the moment someone is without humor, they get cut out from the fun people.

It’s also in the linked article since we can view the deleted file in the PR.

If you're offended by a satirical piece at the expense of exploitative, designed-for-addiction, altogether harmful-to-society gambling-based monetization... Well, perhaps the problem is in the mirror and not in the documentation.

The Germans have had an entry in a clinical dictionary, the Pschyrembel, for decades about a fictitious animal, the stone louse. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_louse

Therefore, I cannot understand what the problem is with satire in the documentation of a game engine. On the contrary, it reminds you that you should think about what you read from time to time.

The problem occurs when someone finds it, and make a big deal out of it, totally ignoring the humorous / satirical aspect, by naiveté or otherwise. Maybe someone would merely find it offensive and sexist [1].

If you are a maintainer of a project, you don't want a Twitter outrage storm about it. It may put the project and the maintainer(s) personally in a bad position (completely undeservedly), and turn some of the project's contributors and / or sponsors away.

Because the Internet Outrage Machine is still fully functioning, any technical project has to gravitate to a clinically sterile state to stay safe.

[1]: https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507

The only people making a big deal out of it seem to be Hacker News, cranking out its typical pearl-clutching and concern trolling and faux outrage over something so insignificant and lacking in intellectual value that it shouldn't even be worth posting here.

If the Internet Outrage Machine was given real power, like legal power to enforce 'their' vision of 'acceptable' would the world be a better place? Why or why not?

Would such a situation create a true mono-culture? If so, would this be a good thing? Why or why not?

The key is to only make sexist remarks about men. Then the outrage machine will just laugh it off.

White, heterosexual, cis-gendered, neurotypical men doing white-collar jobs. Break out of this pattern, and someone will find something to hang you by.

As long as it's about outrage, I doubt it.

«Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.»

Or, as somebody said, it's always a temptation to use the devil's enviable energy to pull your cart; the problem is that he knows only one destination.

The problem is the lack of precedent or due process, which creates a chilling effect. You can fairly easily have a happy life under an actual codified set of rules about how to behave - even an oppressive one. When people's lives are destroyed on a seemingly arbitrary whim, when someone who was targeted by accident has no recourse, that's a sword of Damocles hanging over everyone's head.

Trivia: Australian drug dosage booklet includes a recipe for roast potatoes.

I'm intrigued. What's the title of the book are you talking about? Is it the Australian Medicines Handbook [0]? The MIMS Annual [1]? Or something else?

[0] https://shop.amh.net.au/

[1] https://www.mims.com.au/index.php/products/mims-annual

Royal children's paediatric, so I guess AMH-CDC. https://shop.amh.net.au/cdcbook

But it might've been specific to some editions.

It's not that it's satire per se. It's that the satire is teasing a certain type of game and gamers.

It's poking at a particularly exploititive aspect of game design, which is more prevelant in a certain segment of the game industry. It seems aimed squarely at the developers who aim to exploit their customers, not the customers themselves (the snide comments about those gamers are clearly intended to show what the author thinks these developers think of them, not what the author thinks).

> gamers

I don't think it is. I think it's teasing the companies that try to exploit these gamers and how the author believes those companies view these gamers as something to be exploited.

It's punching the companies not the gamers IMO.

Barbra Streisand effect at it again. Great piece of writing I would've missed if not for this commit. Thank you :)

""" .. This introduction is an Easter egg and is not intended to be taken seriously. .. Please don't remove it :) """

So much for that

This directly solves a problem a maintainer might have faced:

1. You have been asked to implement a feature.

2. Recognise that the feature really only has benefit for a particular segment of the market.

3. You don't agree with the motivation of that segment, but you want to provide the features your user-base requires.

4. You provide a satirical nod to your opposition, but also implement the feature.

It seems reasonable to me.

Edit: typo

I don't think it's reasonable. The maintainer is the only person standing in the way of enabling the abuse of real people. Just say no.

I wish headlines like this also included N, the number of people that considered the issue controversial.

As I understand in this case the N is 1? And so

"Godot maintainer removes controversial (to N=1) satirical piece from documentation".

Much better illustrated ridiculousness of the situation.

The tweet has +400 likes so there's that.

400 likes is pocket change on Twitter. I'm surprised it led to cancellation so quickly; perhaps Godot developers are wisely being cautious and trying to prevent this from blowing up into a proper Twitter drama.

I think it was more than one person, the original thread that started this is here : https://archive.md/YwxsS

I wish that people used energy like this to do something more useful (well, 'useful' from my POV).

No way, I was reading this page just a few days ago. I personally enjoyed seeing just a little splash of the writer's personality. Sad to see it go already.

They may say it was intended to be satire, but regardless of intention it is pretty accurate for some of the population.

“Satire” these days means telling the truth through humour.

That's satire always

I guess I found it more depressing than funny.

Well thank goodness we scrubbed the internet of that perverse filth that made me laugh and made me like Godot a lot more.

This seems accurate to me. Not sure why they'd be forced to remove it.

I blame the capitalist oligarchy. Some context would be nice though.

> Not sure why they'd be forced to remove it

That's the new norm I guess. There's a small minority of people who spend their time and energy on being oppressed terrorising the majority with demands like this.

Comply or get cancelled

I wish they had kept it, a little bit of fun doesn't hurt anyone nor detract from the project.

Two questions:

Why was this controversial?

Why remove the code example as well as the satire?

2nd question touched on in https://twitter.com/Akien/status/1367107113760284680

thanks!

Regardless of whether or not you agree with the content of the message it is obviously inappropriate for documentation - it’s just irritating and unprofessional and needed to be removed. Little jokes are one thing, but few paragraphs of ranting really is too much for developer-facing documentation.

> Why was this controversial?

https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367071940092055555

Something about bullying and sexism? I don't really get it

Holy Christ, I wish I could believe that was satire.

Good example of Poe's Law, I thought.

Social media was a mistake.

darn - seems the user has closed off their account

hope they didn't get bullied for suggesting someone was being a bully - the social media cold war continues

Is there a difference between being bullied and being criticized?

people who live in glass houses...

Some self-loathing unhinged person wanted to be in the spotlight and seek reaffirmation. They got it, and we as a species are one step farther from the light of God.

You can tell from their profile that they’re a professional shit stirrer.

Here's the removed content. Honestly it's funny and not offensive, and I'm speaking as someone who spends a lot of my time combating various forms of bias.

" Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.

But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.

No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order. "

It's not the most professional thing but a little fun doesn't do any harm at all. If someone is offended by this, they just need a thicker skin.

Thicker skin doesn't help people who get offended for publicity.

What? It's really hard to have fun on the Internet.

No it isn't. Why does the person who is flaming this project over a _joke_ need to be taken seriously? Honestly. I really wish people stopped caring about the opinions of anyone on Twitter.

The dev removed it to remove confusion, not to capitulate to a troll.

You see it wrong. They removed it because they fear being cancelled by headlines saying 'Godot maintainer refused to remove problematic documentation piece'.

You actually believed it would have caused the slightest bit of backlash? Twitter =/= public opinion.

I mean...

> 'Despicable Me' Actor Fired for Making 'OK' Symbol While Posing With 6-Year-Old Girl at Universal Orlando Resort

https://www.newsweek.com/actor-fired-ok-symbol-universal-res...

The week after the Christchurch shooting? I can see how it's probably a sensitive issue right then.

But like I said, twitter =/= public opinion, just like terrified PR team =/= public opinion. I bet 90% of people wouldn't be offended by that symbol given zero context.

Before Christchurch:

https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-coast-guard-member-removed-aft...

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/cubs-indefinitely-ban-fan...

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/07/17/mayor-suspends-4-co...

There were a few more stories, but can't find them at the moment. I remember that there was even a huge controversy on Twitter that someone from the British royal family did the OK sign. I think that was royal family, but not 100% sure, can't find any article about it at the moment

And you don't need public opinion to cancel someone. A dozen people complaining is often enough.

What happened to "Do not feed the trolls!" ? I had no idea about what you were talking about so i searched it. The new conotation of the OK finger symbol was invented and spread by 4chan. The den of internet trolls.

Have we (actually, you, because this -- meaning the redefining of OK -- is a US thing, maybe an American thing and I am far away from your continent) sunk so low as a society that we are now expected to be up to date with online trolling operations so that we can selfcensor to avoid being fired?

Unfortunately, it does appear that way. [0]

[0]: https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

> we are now expected to be up to date with online trolling operations so that we can selfcensor to avoid being fired?

It appears that you have to basically follow the online outrage crowd to be up to date with what's considered offensive this week. It's not just online trolling. For example, Amy Coney Barrett was attacked for using words "sexual preference" and Merriam-Webster dictionary changed the definition of the word to be offensive in order to justify the attacks after the fact.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/merriam-webster-barrett-se...

what, how... no... what... no... how... my brain hurts.

News outlets look for sensational news, it is enough for them. Not long before, NYT ruined some hard-earned reputation of jetbrains with their clickbait headline and suffered no repurcursions.

If they were not about to remove it of their own accord, but only after being provoked by a troll, they are indeed capitulating -- trying to pretend otherwise just ignores the problem instead of seeing it for what it is.

Because by not taking the person serious you now commit to making a public political stance. The Twitter user claims that this post contains sexism and elitism.

By keeping it up you must defend the fact that you are not being sexist or elitist by criticising encrypted save files. It’s easier to just cave in than put in that effort for a joke.

Stuff like this should have been encrypted or just base64 encoded and turned into a certificate then used to sign or encrypt something trivial. Bonus points for using XOR and caesar cypher. Easter eggs should be a challenge to find.

Seems a shame. It may have been satirical when written but perhaps not so much now.

So, they just removed the entire article. Do they think, that they have too much documentation? Those methods are still there in the code.[1] Don't like it - update it. Why remove the entire thing?

That's just a griefing of the documentation.

1: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/6ef0538f182c13e169...

aw, I enjoyed that and it made me stop to consider why I wanted to encrypt saves and realize I didn't need to.

I have found that if I can hack a game and cheat such that it is still fun afterwards, then the game is good. I stop cheating and enjoy it fully.

Take factorio, you can do sooo much stuff to cheat. However, the core mechanics still work and it's fun. Granted, not as epic, but still fun. Any of the free to play stuff, not fun.

I don't really see anything controversial. It is just somebody's opinion about generally miserable state of things. I see it different way but, hey, who said everybody has to have same opinion?

Cringe. Software developers should really start inhaling a big dose of dadaism to realize how useless their mega seriousness often is.

The satirical piece is actually well written. I can't help appreciate it even if i used to make money just the way it criticised.

The problem is that you can't "know your audience" when the audience is infinite. Someone somewhere is going to be offended by a joke or Easter egg.

Interesting. I guess the "be professional" army won. I wonder if they imagined the shock troops of social justice would have been the ones to bring about the sanitization of dev docs.

Though I didn't like the devs renaming things to puppet (of all things), from master/slave, I think this change is fine.

A couple of years ago I visited that page when I encrypted the saves of a hobby game I worked on. I don't remember any sarcasm because I'm pretty sure I stopped reading a sentence or two in, and just scrolled down to the examples.

It was just noise that needed to be filtered out. And that's not okay because as far as good documentation goes, I usually read the entire thing before trying out an example.

Great, now there is no noise and no example. Because they just removed the entire article.

I just realized that. That makes absolutely no sense.

Why can't a joke be a joke? In the original thread mentioned by _obviouslynotme_ [0] it starts out with saying they hate how mobile gamers are always the target of mockery. This note does not target mobile gamers as target of mockery, but as victims of engagement strategies to make you addicted. And then it fails to understand the sarcasm of the overall text.

What is humor allowed to do? It's a big question of our time, and I'd say everything that is immoral, but nothing that is unethical.

Should humor be kept out of _professional setting projects_. My take: No. If we do that, we humans are just machines.

David Graeber said in Bullshit Jobs (p. 213 of the German version; sentence-by-sentence translation by me):

> You can call this mockery of justice. It exists in many forms. The right-leaning version judges those that believe the world owes them [...] equality before the law. But there also exists a version of the left-wing: It consists of telling people that they should check their privileges, if they had the impression they had the right to anything that poor or more opressed people don't have. With this benchmark even the person receiving a beating by the police and is imprisoned without reason can only then complain about injustice after naming every other category of men that is more likely to be a victim of it.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26338268

Because people have gotten hypersensitive in a world devoid of true challenges. These people are routinely bored and have learned that the easiest way for them to get attention, is to place themselves as an underprivileged special case, or as a "hero" to those who are underprivileged. Paradoxically, they are also unwilling to admit personal weaknesses while strutting around socially acknowledged weaknesses or something (e.g. feeling offended when someone calls them out on being overly sensitive, meanwhile strutting around a mental disorder because it gets them brownie points with the big public. It is hard to explain, can't quite put my finger on it).

Anyone not out to be offended could've told the piece was obvious tongue-in-cheek about mobile gamers falling victim to predatory behavior from big companies seeking the few whales they could milk for all their profits. If there was anything to be offended about, it would be that practice. The thread that helped cancel this piece was very in-line with the whole body-positive movement: let's not look at the obvious problem (people weak to sugar getting fat off a western diet loaded with sugar at every corner), instead, let's look at the people rightfully calling out the practice and the result (oligarchs rebranding, renaming and smuggling sugar into almost any produced good, getting people fat and unhealthy).

If you want to see hypersensitive people just look at this thread.

> If there was anything to be offended about, it would be that practice.

Yes, not the category of people typically playing them.

Let's write a variant of the joke to put it in perspective.

"Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is found in basements. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, their mom, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class (if they have a job). These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is by playing expensive video games and virtual-reality porn.

But what if someone were to find a way to pass a copy of the game to their friends (or, if they lack friends, other random people on the internet)? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content without paying. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.

No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order."

And that, in a way, would be correct. Did the piece fit inside the documentation or the topic at all? Nope. They already put up a source and mentioned themselves that the anecdote doesn't really hold. But why pointing out the obvious predatory practices is such a sin, is beyond me, let alone writing multiple tweets about it. Can we just admit there are loads of dark patterns out there taking advantage of people? Or must we instead continue burying it, trying to deny it or worse, praise their outcomes as if they were some sort of medal to carry? I don't believe so. And we should be making the gamer community healthier in that regard, too.

I read the diff. No satire detected. First paragraph is literally true.

1) Although the satire seems obvious, it does help to know that the engine is named for the play 'Waiting for Godot'.

2) In the long run the bad actors who exploit users through IAP/loot boxes are harming the entire industry. This is not a secret to anybody in the industry -- but the bad actors are throwing enough money around that (to a great extent) they've been allowed to keep raking it in so far regardless of the consequences.

3) Genuinely free games do exist but stand little chance when competing with "free-but-IAP-and-dark-patterns" games. App stores need to do more to help users.

4) Strong industry representation is needed to set the proper tone but ESA has not seemed able (or possibly willing) to stand up to some of their funders. At least ESA is finally rid of the bully who'd run it for years. Hopefully they'll do what's right once we begin to return to normalcy.

If someone was relying on client-side encryption for digital assets, they deserve whatever hacks they get.

That includes DRM (DVD protection/BD protection/Denuvo DRM/etc).

Having had a quick look, I don't think the original document is particularly offensive, or particularly funny. It's a bit meh to me, and I think either deleting it, or re-writing it to be funny was the right thing to do, and obviously deleting it won in the end.

A long term successful attempt at using humour in a serious subject would be something like 'How to Lie with Statistics' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics). I think humour can help dry subjects, and lets face it, encrypting save files in a game engine isn't exactly the most riveting of subjects so some humour will probably help.

Tweet is down. What’s the reason, LiaSae?

Holy moly, that is controversial?

Man, people suck.

Remember, no fun allowed.

Since any text could have variety of interpretations any text could 'offend' someone.

And since no body should be entitled to threaten a free speech here is the full text:

>Encrypting save games

>Why?

>Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.

>But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible, because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing their own irrelevance would again take over their life.

>No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order.

I see no big issues with this text but I see a huge problem with attacking such text.

I think someone who have managed to be offended by this innocent text should be near the border of sickness. Or not, it doesn't matter.

What matter is for them to recall that free speech is meant to 'offend' some of us for the benefit of having healthy and honest discussion and avoid much bigger problems that would not just 'offend' but potentially would kill.

It is 2021, you say or write something and six months later it turns out that there is some "oppressed" minority that is hurt by your words, people are insulting you on Facebook and Twitter, your friends are removing you from their friends list, your employer is firing you, Amazon AWS refuses hosting, Google marks your website as dangerous, Youtube demonetize your videos, then it (shadow)bans them. And you are done.

Everything that Bradbury, Orwell, Zajdel wrote becomes reality, Brooker's dystopian "Black Mirror" is no longer dystopia. So better remain silent and don't stick out...

If that is the case then we should stick out more because later it will be even harder and hiding would not work anyway.

Jordan Peterson: Free Speech & the Right to Offend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44pERGAaKHw

Rowan Atkinson on free speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU

As a parent I hate these micro-transactions with a passion. It is astonishing how much misery they can bring. As a long time gamer I am torn on both the enjoyment and learning you can get from games as well as how they are often made in ways that are kind of abusive and literally ruin people’s lives in ways that remind me of drug addiction.

You can give apple arcade or google play pass a try, both are $5/month and have a large supply of good games with no ads/IAPs.

It's not even that controversial. A large portion of people would agree with the statement that unbridled need of monetisation has led us to in-app purchases, virtual currencies and pay-to-win games, and that this sucks for games and gamers. This is primarily the reason I have stopped playing games on my phone altogether.

Being part of this community makes me sad.

The piece starts with:

> .. This introduction is an Easter egg and is not intended to be taken seriously.

> .. Please don't remove it :)

So sad we take people seriously when they make jokes but ignore their sincere, non-joke comments when it actually matters. I hope the change actually helps solving the problem, if it really exists.

Serious question for anyone familiar with game dev: what IS the other legitimate reason to encrypt saved games besides in-app purchases?

I've been thinking quite a bit and just can't find one, yet the people on Twitter that started this mess assure us that there are plenty...

Oh, wow, speaking out the truth is considered controversial nowadays. What a time to live.

True reason why it had to be removed

https://twitter.com/KyleTheCoder/status/1367262726926585866

Gods, I hate nowadays internet.

An enjoyable read, funny this is controversial, maybe a little to close to the bone ?

sigh

I'll do it if nobody else will.

https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/pull/4722

Crushed :(

Obligatory reference to http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Tough problem to solve. I wish we could just accept the fact that people can have opinions different from our own. This is not just normal, but good!

It feels like we're just scaling up small town feuds into a global phenomenon, e.g. "I won't set foot in X or Y's restaurant. Don't you know they buy their cabbages from NextDoorVille instead of buying them from Old Whitney down the street?!"

Having an "open door" and publicly stating an unpopular opinion is, sadly, broadly incompatible.

Old text was:

“ Encrypting save games =====================

Why? ----

.. This introduction is an Easter egg and is not intended to be taken seriously. .. Please don't remove it :) Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is through in-app purchases and virtual currency.

No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to encrypt savegames and protect the world order.”

I dunno, looks accurate. Former mobile / game developer.

1) If only people would pay as much for a game as they do for a coffee, there wouldn't be these ridiculous incentives to aggressively monetize the 2% who pay for the 98% who don't pay. At least for studios that are content to be successful small business, rather than industry-dominating outliers.

2) I worked at freemium game maker Get Set Games, and everyone involved in making the games was an old-school gamer who struggled with the new economics of the mobile game business. In my experience there's a kind of conversation/rationalization where at least at the more conscientious studios people don't want to make addictive games, but they also want to make some money to keep the studio alive. So you don't talk about addiction, but you talk about engagement. You don't do the most user-hostile things, but you do engage in industry norms that are parodied in TFA.

3) I believe that more generally, a lot of people working in the games industry have some level of addiction to games. You can call this love, or passion, or whatnot, but it's there. Staying up 'till 3 to play something and then coming in to work tired. Working on this passion even though there are other interesting and better-compensating or potentially more socially beneficial alternatives that would stroke all the same interests out there.

3b) I'm old enough that when I was a kid, computer games was not a respectable hobby. There was no "gamer culture". If you spent a lot of time on games, you were considered a bit weird or a loser. Because of this, I think that people of my generation get really defensive when there's any talk of addiction. They spent their childhood and adolescence fighting the stigma of being really into gaming, and are not willing to have a nuanced discussion about engagement and addiction. Because, yeah, games can be a wonderful positive force and form of expression. It's just that most aren't.

4) I was a die-hard gamer from about age 7 until my early thirties. I can honestly say that I spent too much time playing games. Yes, it got me a job in the games industry, and while at times horrible, there were many great things about that experience. But ... as you get older ... you realize that 20+ hours a week is a lot of time and that time compounds. What if I had spent 10 hours a week playing games and 10 hours working on math, or physics, or biology, or getting better at business, or living on a sailboat?

I strongly believe that people should follow their interests, as I always have done -- for better or for worse. However when there is an element of external compulsion or facilitation of internal flaws ...

It's a complicated issue and I don't see it being discussed seriously by those in the game industry.

Streisand effect at full force.

More polemical than satirical.

Linux would be cancelled in current atmosphere. Microsoft would just hire some social justice group to accuse Linus Torvalds about saying mean things.

Then, we could only use Windows Server 2021 Enterprise Platform Web Edition, and only be able to develop in Visual Basic C++ asp pages running in IIS 21.

Then again, how is that any different than current Apple Google monopoly in mobile space?

I would like to share a personal story regarding this, when I graduated I always wanted to work on video games, my expectation was that I would be making the next Call of Duty or StarCraft.

But I belong from a developing country, after I joined the biggest gaming studio, turns out they were making "gacha" games for a big Japanese gaming giant and some other freemium games for US audience.

One of the top grossing games was a Fish game, where people had virtual aquariums, they would need to buy fish eggs from real money, and take care of them till they hatched and grew up, you had to feed them everyday.

Every few days we would launch new expensive fishes, and the guy who used to make those sat few seats behind me, drawing fishes everyday, paid in pennies, and they would sell like hot-cakes.

There was a "feature" in our aquarium that if you didn't feed the fish on time, they would die and float above the aquarium in a gross manner. And our app was very buggy. So everyday we would get support calls from people who would complain that their fishes died even they fed them everyday.

The guy who did support calls sat next to me, and most of the calls were from lonely old American ladies, who would be literally crying on the phone, they even kept names of their "pets" and their untimely death hit them hard, whenever this happened, we immediately updated the "isAlive" field for their pets and they would spring back to life.

But all of this didn't sit well with me, I left soon after, and my skills for game development lended well to frontend development, now I use the JS framework of the week.

Remember, no fun is allowed on the internet anymore.

There are places on the internet where "fun" isn't appropriate. The internet isn't all 4chan, and we're not all edgelord teenagers. I don't mind humor (indeed, I mind it far more than Hacker News normally allows,) but I still don't read software documentation for the comedy.

I also wouldn't want to read "fun" like this on my bank's website.

This is an open source game engine, ostensibly in existence to create fun.

Well it's not your bank, it's a website about making video games.

> I don't mind humor (indeed, I mind it far more than Hacker News normally allows,)

in-documentation comedy has been a thing since the inception of computer science. [0]

Personally, I hope it stays. The occasional in-joke keeps me from falling asleep when I review material that isn't teaching me anything new.

> I still don't read software documentation for the comedy.

Don't read any Conrad Barski, you'd probably hate that writing style. I love it.

[0] : https://media.nationalgeographic.org/assets/photos/669/8b7/6...

Before you're dead, yeah.

I don't think it's controversial to say that in a public arena (for example, an office) you have to be careful with subjects like politics and religion, and with humour. And that's always been true.

And social media extends that public arena, and magnifies misunderstanding. It's interpersonal discourse with something like 90% of a person's actual ability to communicate stripped out.

So I think people have to be careful (not in thought police way). If you have something tossed out into the public arena, it doesn't at all mean it can't be humorous or touch subjects that are going to trigger arguments, but for something like technical documentation it is reasonable to just make sure it's neutral. I'd love if most documentation was well written, skilful prose that exposed the authors own opinions but I'm also aware that's not appropriate for most people.

If you are addressing a public audience, often need to meter what is said. I think this is all beyond ridiculous, that the person used Twitter to make what looks like a completely baseless arument and accusations, worded in such a way that sounded authoritative and designed to encourage a pile-on, but whatever, careful when talking about politics at work

Other commenters have focussing on "woke" and "SJWs" etc., and I think that's a chimera, particularly because it goes the other way just as much*. Maybe it's just the birthing spasms of people learning to deal with this form of communication. Here's a person on Twitter who has [deliberately?] misunderstood the intent of another person's writing, then written a screed about some issues that upset them even though those issues weren't present in the text. And it's all very susceptible to manipulation by people with specific agendas -- the tendency is to broadcast rather than communicate (I'm doing that at the minute, I'm writing this down as ideas occur to me, and I've kinda ceased responding to your comment), and two things get confused.

* as a current example, see "cancel culture" in UK universities and the education secretary's (and by extension the government's) response to something that is almost completely fictional. That's heavily social media driven, by people shouting about it.

This is a professional open source game engine freely available to all thanks to a few dev that accept being totally underpaid when they could get the highest salaries of the industry at big companies.

I think we owe at least them the right to express themselves in a small paragraph. Anyone offended by that, is free to go back abusing their users addiction in another game engine that better fit their "view" of the world.

Open source has a societal/education/ethical role to play. Mozilla is not only making Firefox but also writing about privacy ethics. So It could totally make sense for Godot to do the same about game ethics

It's hip these days to censor the truth.

As a mobile developer, I can see it as pretty narrow minded, not particularly offended but it's hard to deny there isn't a certain subset of developers and gamers who like to sneer at everything mobile. It doesn't really bother me, most of the time I think it's dumb, especially for developers who are just thumbing their nose at a massive market. It kind of pretends that non mobile developers are very virtuous people who make wholesome and good games. And no pc software has ever existed that isn't predatory, spammy or outright malicious like that isn't something that hasn't existed on desktop for decades longer. If godot would want to expand their source of developers to include mobile games, then it probably isn't a good idea to insult them.

cool down, mobile game company manager!!

I don't make games, not professionally. And I don't play many mobile games, but I'm quite happy with the ones I have, all of them paid, minimal micro transactions, complete games. But it's continually surprising how many people look down on something that is so mass market which miliions up millions of people have access to, use ever day, anywhere. Even business wise, many companies focus so much on desktop where what they're running could be much better done on a mobile device, you see them used more and more in every aspect of business outside of offices but there are so many office based developers working on pcs who still look on them as toys, and, it's just, dumb

Seems legit. I'd usually prefer documentation to reflect best practices, and sarcastic or satirical stuff would only add some layer of uncertainty or misunderstanding (as per the maintainer's own commit message). While potentially fun or culturally valuable, I'd prefer such stuff would be external to official documentation.

Edit: this twitter thread appears to be the backstory for what led to maintainer deciding to remove it (cw for foul language heh) https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367071124383797256

After reading through the discussions I do have to agree such "fun" is not really contributing to the documentation and just leads to misunderstandings or confusion (such as this very instance). Just didn't really need a bunch of outrage to reach that conclusion IMO :P

Man, imagine hating fun even more than old school NASA engineers, the stereotypical anti-fun people.

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/cb0da994bb6834...

And if anyone thought this was serious stuff to spend time figuring out if this is real or not, I suspect they have a bigger problem with their reading abilities

A little inline comment is not the same as an entire documentation page introducing a developer to a process/technique... I don't think the comments in the Apollo 11 code are going to confuse/mislead anyone, nor are they satirical. Quality documentation is factual, to the point, and has minimal chance to mislead or confuse the reader. I can think of multiple people I've worked with over the years who would be confused by the page that was removed, or think it's some weird offtopic political ideological stuff. Satire, due to its figurative nature, is also generally one of the most difficult forms of humour to understand for both autistic/aspergers people and people unfamiliar with the language. Putting "fun" content in your documentation is a balancing act and sometimes the expense (wasting the reader's time/energy or outright confusing them) outweighs the benefit.

A little confusion from time to time is a good thing, it's an reminder that the real world is confusing too and full of misinterpretation.

You are one of the few sane people on this site.

I shouldn’t have to explain this, but there is a huge difference between

- cute comments and snarky method names buried in source code, and

- a long, vituperative, divisive rant in the actual documentation

It’s not just about “having fun” - there’s nothing “fun” at all in the rant, it’s just unprofessional and irritating.

So, selling addictive in-game purchases to kids and teenagers is professional and mature?

No, and I really regret engaging with you people on this! comments like this are obviously inappropriate for technical documentation regardless of whether or not you agree with the message:

> It is a market of poor souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with tremendous existential angst)

Lighten up. Not everything needs to be stuffy and professional. This is an open source project, and if the author wants to include a funny and clearly sarcastic critique of society in the documentation, then that’s up to them. It’s not like this is offensive or NSFW or anything.

I had fun reading it, so your comment stating there is nothing fun at all is pretty self-centered. Maybe it's good to be reminded, that not all is professional and unambiguous. Just like reality.

You must be fun at parties.

I like how the original complaint-maker mentions multiple times that "there are plenty of valid reasons to encrypt save files besides IAP" without giving examples of what those might be.

The lady doth protest too much.

We require strictly defined areas of uncertainty!

Seems like the tweeter's issue is that mocking mobile games and in-app purchases is somehow indirectly joining in on sexism and other "tropes".[0] This seems like complete BS to me. The satire is of capitalism, it's a well-pointed jab at the gaming industry itself, at people who will be using the library for nefarious purposes. The mental gymnastics that turn this from a trenchant anti-capitalist satire into a "punching-down" at women and casual gamers is... breathtaking.

My armchair analysis is that this person has made their career in IAP's and mobile gaming, feels personally attacked by the (accurate, biting) critique, and has abused anti-oppressive language to protect their moral ego.

[0] https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507?s=20

I used to briefly work in the IAP gaming world. There was a period of understanding the consequences of my work, and it eventually hit me that it just wasn't right. I know that right now someone's mother is lonely, bored, and compulsively dipping deeper into her savings than is wise to grind her way through content I created. I think I might dislike abusive IAP and have found this tragically funny because I love women.

> Seems like the tweeter's issue is that mocking mobile games and in-app purchases is somehow indirectly joining in on sexism and other "tropes".

Indeed, and it's yet another sad example of how the modern so-called left are more concerned with tropespotting, and manufacturing outrage over nothing, than anything of actual importance.

As a traditional leftist, it saddens me that our movement is being successfully hijacked by these fools.

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