Jenna Magius @jennamagius@octodon.social

@PsySal Well, seems like we're completely 1000% aligned on this issue. XD

@PsySal (Also, "normative" is a great word, but "positive" has the same problem as "criticism" in that it's two nearly unrelated words jammed into the same word and it's impossible to use the less common one because people won't understand you.)

@PsySal I don't even know how to put "non-bugginess" in a positive way that doesn't imply that games shouldn't be buggy.

Buggy games are good! There is a place for buggy games.

@PsySal If people could rate games on like:
Duration
Complexity
Non-bugginess

That's information that could be just as useful but way less normative.

@PsySal "Oh, we should just delete all the one star games because they're bad games"

Or "creator, you created a bad game and you should feel bad."

Those are terrible ideas. I love a one star game, when that's the mood I'm in & the thing I have time for.

@PsySal I think that's kinda a mixed bag. I think they provide value in helping people spend limited time efficiently, BUT: not in the way that "Oh, it saves them time because they don't have to play bad games".

More like... it gives information about scope and tone that helps players pick games that match their at-the-time needs.

There's probably a better way to communicate that information that doesn't lend itself to wrong ideas like:

@varx Thank you for receiving my @ s and helping me think this through :p

@varx "I'm not going to get mad that this video game is excessively talky because it's not final." Just don't get mad about games being talky at all!

Design games with less dialog, play games with less dialog, but _don't_ conflate your preferences with an independent truth.

@varx You got me past my roadblock in understanding my feelings about this.

I'm not worried about a deficiency in engaging critically with works. I just hate the concept of declaring media "good" or "bad" as if that's some kind of context-free truth.

@varx "There's no point in understanding this game I'm playing because it isn't the release version"

@varx Also that sentence doesn't seem like it's even gramatical? But that's neither here nor there.

To be a bit more precise/honest about my feelings, I'm watching a Pathfinder: Kingmaker alpha LP and the LPer keeps saying "I'm not going to criticize this because this is an alpha and it's probably going to change."

WE CRITICIZE THINGS TO UNDERSTAND THEM DEEPLY. THAT'S WHAT IT'S FOR. NOT TO DECIDE IF THEY'RE GOOD OR NOT.

@varx Huh! That's a term I wasn't familiar with. Thanks for the link.

I will call out that the first sentence of the second paragraph is "Problematization is a CRITICAL thinking" :p

@jennamagius Or even "some parts of this are good, some parts are bad, distinguish which is which".

I am extremely not interested in the definition of "criticism" that is like "distinguish good media from bad media".

Hey y'all, remember when Google Talk was XMPP

Ironic insofar as... the problem with trying to get people to switch away from closed platforms is mostly only a problem _because those are closed platforms_.

Ironically, one of the most important properties of an open platform is that it's easy to switch away from.

It'd be nice to have a client that presented both tweets and toots to me, and Twitter is the bottleneck on that.

@tinker (Also they took it out like... August 2017, I was just now noticing XD)

@tinker (At one point I played hard enough to get up to Exhumer class mining, but I too fell off long ago)