454 karma · joined August 18, 2018
I also think the security will be better on my extension. You have to give greasemonkey edit permissions for all websites whereas I have a PR in the works where you only grant permission to the sites you want to disengage from. Even now it only asks for permissions to the subset of sites it modifies. Due to the nature of how web extension manifest permissioning works, greasemonkey can't offer this. If you look at their permission model it says "This add-on can: Access your data for all websites". IMO that's way more dangerous than your paranoia about a new extension with tight permissions.
Here's the repo if anyone is interested. I still use it to this day but haven't worked on it in a while cuz I'm learning rust.
Launched game after game for our target audience, casual gamers. These are players who don't identify as gamers but probably play games for as many hours or more as those who do. These games were well-received. 4-5 star ratings, letters and gifts from players thanking us for making them feel less lonely at home or have a new way to connect with their grandkids or whatever.
On the flip side you are universally hated by self-identifying gamers who aren't even your target audience. And worse, you're hated by other professional devs in the industry. For a couple years at GDC I would walk around with my badge flipped or my employer obscured cuz it was better to make a first impression and _then_ reveal you worked for the dog. Eventually I would rep my employer proudly, even wearing obnoxious internally-gifted whatever-Ville shirts, just to ruffle feathers. This was the start of my growing resentment for self-identifying gamers, be they players or developers, which eventually led me to leave the industry.
Zynga was a "clone shop" because they understood that their target audience doesn't trade in mechanical novelty. Find something that already works, polish it, and extend it. That was the strategy. Game ideas are meaningless, literally every employee has a dozen good ones. Execution is all that matters. Your feathers are probably ruffled by now but we adopted this strategy from EA and the rest of AAA who do exactly this year after year for the very audience that condemned Zynga for it. You think all those open world games aren't really clones of Assassin's Creed? Cuz that's how they're all pitched. It's the game industry equivalent of "Uber for X". Everything is Assassin's Creed or Halo. Open world or on-rails. Chocolate or vanilla. Then you add the sprinkles ("this time they're toffee!") and ship it. Would you criticize Ben & Jerry's as a clone shop? I mean all they're doing is releasing the same ice cream over and over!
That should be enough pretext to answer the question. Obviously it feels like shit to work somewhere where people have decided you're cancer. But deep down you know they're wrong. There are plenty of ppl out there who enjoy your game, but they aren't the loudest ppl who write the public narrative. You're on your own to reconcile that. How I did it was to accept that self-identifying gamers are entitled brats who have no idea how the things they're critiquing actually work. I use the term 'self-identifying' so often because it's an important piece of the puzzle. These are ppl who consider playing games to be their thing, in the way that a Hot Topic shopper might consider dark clothes and Jack Skellington to be their thing. When you disrupt their internal reality, say by releasing a clone of Scrabble with more power-up tiles and a chat box, they feel like you are offending them and will now spend hours online spreading hate and misinformation. It's a little like politics.
I was pitching in on a mobile design for a game about collecting and raising dragons, cuz that was a hot mobile thing at the time, right around when the Tiny Tower debacle happened. To catch everyone up, Tiny Tower was a successful mobile game by a small indie studio. Zynga had released a clone called Dream Heights and the devs decided to weaponize the frothing self-identifying gamers in a FUD campaign to protect their game from a competitor. Pretty soon the Zynga version, which previously enjoyed 4 star rating and had a growing following of fans, got inundated with negative reviews from ppl who had no interest in the game at all. The company dropped the game because the target audience can't tell this is what happened. They just think the game is bad. Zynga actually winced pretty hard internally from this. It started cancelling other clones out of fear of a trend starting. In my opinion this was Zynga listening to the haters which is never the right thing to do. That dragon breeding game I was telling you about though; it was a clone so after nearly two years of development by a team of 40+ it was cancelled. When a game is cancelled before launch you can't really put it on your resume. If you're an artist you have to smuggle the art out of the company to use it in your portfolio, labeled as concept art or something. Obviously it would be better if two years of your life amounted to a name you could drop on your resume.
And ultimately that's what it feels like to work at a company after releasing a negatively received game. The frustration of being burned alive by a witch hunt mixed with the suffocating feeling that your career has stalled.
If there needs to be a moral to the story, it's to not let the entertainment you consume become your identity. It will make you a worse person.
The theater experience is going to have to figure out what its USP is in the digital era. It's no longer enough to provide access to the movie.
Anecdote: my gf and her friends were gonna watch Roma on the couch until they found out it was playing at the nearest theater. They then had to devise a plan to sneak alcohol and candy into the theater, coordinate ticket purchasing using venmo, and actually head out into the rain to get there. There was a lot of buyer's remorse. Good luck, theaters.
The games industry's hive amnesia makes it a great place for sadistic and plain bad managers to make a nice career.
After ten years in that industry the only thing I would teach junior devs is to massively distrust any words from management. Learn how to say no to your employer and once they catch on that they can't manipulate you, get a job in another industry.
I've been alternating between working for someone else and then spending my savings investing in myself.
In both cases my goal is to aquire new skills. When you work for someone else, make sure you are learning something on their dime and saving money. Then spend that money on learning something no one will pay you to learn at work.
My interests have been all over the place - game design, programming, writing, philosophy. Just to name a few I've gained expertise in with my strategy. I don't view any of these things individually as destinations. I don't consider myself a programmer, or a designer, or a philosopher. But each one does give me new skills and perspectives which benefit the others. In the future I will likely invest my time into a science like biology and maybe even push that further to neuroscience.
A story that has always resonated with me is the one about some dna sequencing database (nucleotide blast perhaps?) told by a TA in college. I was taking a biology requirement but majoring in CS. The TA said the database came about when some former programmers learned of a search problem biologists had no solution to. Their programming background meant they already knew how to solve this other domain's problem. I think a lot of breakthroughs come from this formula of porting one domain's expertise to another domain's problems.
Hopefully this illustrates how skill acquisition is a good "passing play" while figuring out what you want to do in life. I still don't know what it is exactly I want to do, but I will keep learning skills that seem relevant and clarify the picture as I go.
It's easy to hide for a long time because a hit can be so profitable. Look at Riot Games. League of Legends remains their only product even after trying to find another one for a decade. Zynga is still around because in a few short years they got a couple billion in the bank.
The games industry preys on young ppl who don't know what a healthy work/life balance looks like. The pay is lower because employees are passionate. Passion doesn't pay rent. It doesn't provide stability for your partner and children who all will suffer because you chose to work in games.
Your passion will be compromised endlessly by marketing and management who can air drop in and change a game's entire direction in one meeting. Because they saw a Minecraft commercial and their kid responded to it. They'll make you work weekend after weekend to fit their pivot into the original schedule and stop in for an hour to drop off donuts. Oh good, eight hours of work for a donut. Donuts also don't pay rent. They don't fix your marital problems.
Games is an industry stuck in a groundhog day loop of misery. This is my warning to anyone who thinks they like games enough to make them. You won't like them after making them. It isn't worth it.
IMO once the account was verified as Wheaton's the entire federation should have blacklisted every instance harboring a false accuser until they demonstrated they can be a functioning member of the fediverse.
Of course, there are better ideas in this thread such as removing the social proofing mechanisms which fuel tweet/toot abuse in the first place. But if we're just speaking in the nouns and verbs that are part of Mastodon's sales pitch they had a tool to address this and demonstrated they can't wield it.
Every pro-Mastodon article mentions I can pack my bags and leave for a new instance but if you do research you find that that feature isn't built yet and the community can't agree on how it should work. So picking the right server is currently a very heavy decision.
I've tried some of these instance finder tools but they reveal that Mastodon instances are like 25% furry communities and other fringe fetishes and I really just want a place to talk tech, philosophy, and video games.