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The difference I am highlighting isn't that it is wrong to think about how to make your game "fun" but the perspective you are thinking about it from. You can try to treat creating fun using a scientific or neurological framework or you can think about it from a more artistic standpoint. When Shenmue chose to make you start doing forklifting (and while I can't prove it) I am sure this was more of a artistic decision and they weren't thinking about it in terms of extrinsic or intrinsic rewards. At least to me it is obvious when something is designed more by an artist and less by someone trying exploit human psychology.

That isn't to say there isn't any logic to the design of great games but also something much more intuitive to their design decisions that doesn't follow known principals or science.

>Gaming has always been about exploiting human psychology.

If you think about it from this perspective than it certainly makes sense to add elements of randomness with intermittent reinforcement (e.g. slot machine) to any game or quick rewards and exponential progression (e.g. Cookie Clicker). Meanwhile you have games like Shenzhen.io which have a PDF that you need to go through to solve programming puzzles and no hints. What part of human psychology is being exploited here outside of progression from solving the puzzle which you would naturally always have?

Or even look at Shenmue. While every game at the time was a platformer where you collected things, Shenmue made you take on a partime job doing fork lifting, yet it is a cult classic. Did they use a framework to make that decision? Doesn't seem like it when it defied all game design at the time.

I watched a lot of Sakurai's (Smash Bro's director and creator of Kirby) videos on game design and development and not once did he bring up "dopamine" or any other neurochemical. I think once you start thinking about game design from this perspective you are essentially looking for ways to exploit human psychology which explains how a lot of games have now turned into casinos. Some of the best games out there defy a lot of prior design knowledge or things most people don't like but still have a cult following (look at Death Stranding) (Dark Souls made difficulty cool again when everyone else was trying to be "accessible"). The best games are also probably by people who were just passionate about bringing a certain idea into life because they themselves want that thing (Pokemon got a lot of its inspiration from the creators childhood exploring outside) not because people will get addicted to it. I understand treating game design as a science to some degree but it rubs me the wrong way.

When I was younger I used to make the mistake that others had the same bit of humanity as me even if it wasn't obvious, that it must of existed somewhere within them. Then I learnt to accept that some people just suck and there isn't anything you can do about it. The only thing you can do is distance yourself from them.

Do you know what a psychopath is? They aren't that rare you know.

What is the end goal? GPT-5 wasn't even a step up from o3.

ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users but only 10 million are paying.

London has pretty much a bit of everything. And even next door boroughs can be polar opposites.

I don't think anyone can go London and think it is all bad unless you just don't like urban places.

Source: Went to UCL, they have a bunch of made up degrees that only international students sign up for.

They don't care. Universities have been taken over by parasites (like a lot of sectors).

These lot pay premium rent in places like Canary Wharf no problem. Basically stuff that >90% of the population could not afford.

I know an international student from Asia. Them and their large group of friends already all know each other from their home country, come from the same couple of high schools, have a big society where they just party together for 3 years and then are given work visas. Pretty much a whole pipeline ready made. They just need to enter certain high schools in their country, get the bare minimum grades and it is all set for them in the UK (work, social life, accomodation).

I would take a guess and say most of their parents are also rich so accomodation even in West London is no problem.

This is not a poor student who worked their ass off to get to the UK storyline, this is a foreign program set up in the UK. Makes you wonder what the fuck is going on.

You realise that the whole world has suffered through tons of atrocities right?

Should we go through the history of India, China, Cambodia...

"I am going to attempt to delegitimize the killing of children by acting like I care about this other conflict."

Yikes.

Tesla is a meme stock.

A lose lose situation for most people. Either the stock market crashes or AI progress meets expectations in the coming years and people start losing jobs.

>Its none of your business if people voluntarily produce it and its also none of your business if people voluntarily market it between each other.

I mean it is no secret a lot of people who produce these things have mental health issues or come from very poor families. That's not even including the illegal activity that might seem legal on the surface.

I don't know about you but "defending pornography to strangers" wasn't on my bucket list. Glad you got it out of your system.

you mean the thing you can turn off in a click?

Civilisation would be better off without porn but this was obviously always a non-solution. In fact Google doesn't even censor its images still.

1. A number of apps have made using VPN a 1-click task.

2. Children aren't as well versed with tech as you think, just because they spend a lot of hours in front of a screen.

Greed is at a 21st century high. I am just waiting for the rugpull moment when billionaires decide the show is over (https://seekingalpha.com/news/4464647-deeper-dive-the-wealth...).

Even George Hotz understands this is the symptom of a larger issue and it is going to end bad: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/24/gambl...

Narrative: You are teaching about the intricacies of finance and the stock market.

Reality: Dump everything into Nvidia / S&P 500. Number go up.

We are so back! How many bad 20th century ideas can we fit into the 2020s?

Prepare for the bogeyman.

Economy in bad shape + AI bubble + tons of fake jobs = prepare for this to be much more common in the next coming years.

>But so are most pieces of opinion journalism. What is the distinction here?

I gave you the distinction. If you don't think there is anything wrong with outside actors influencing your country's direction with black box models on unknown training data and fine-tuning under the brand of "intelligence" then we simply have different beliefs.

>But why can it not be used to inform people?

Because it is biased. You are essentially giving up your decision making to people who don't even live in the same country as you. You wouldn't use it if it were trained in Russia.

>We spent the last N years letting *profit driven media* decide everything.

What do you think "AI" is? Though it has the potential to be even more influential due to its ability to gaslight at scale asynchronously while sitting behind the brand of "intelligence".

You are literally asking what is wrong with deciding the future of a country with a token predictor.