6 ms·
Those seem to be legitimate complaints that seem to be "take something specialized that caters to a small crowd, then water it down so it appeals to everyone."
by heartsucker 10y ago
Those seem to be legitimate complaints that seem to be "take something specialized that caters to a small crowd, then water it down so it appeals to everyone."
That said, sometimes such complaints are clearly a bit whiny, but then again, sometimes they are warranted critiques.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoI don't think Burning Man could yet be called "appeals to everyone". Got a ways to go? There's still a core of weirdness that proves its still got something going on.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoIt appeals to a certain kind of everyone. But this always happens in anything that starts out as counter-culture. Always. First the freaks and the true believers invent something that appeals to other freaks and true believers. Then it gets bigger and becomes a mainstream business. Then eventually it crashes as it starts to feel sterile and commoditised, and it becomes more about management and money than expression. Then the cycle starts again elsewhere - sometimes with the same people. (Any similarity to software is intended. Although sadly I think we have too few real freaks and true believers in software. Certainly not too many.)
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoI don't think it can be said to be 'about money' yet. Still a principle of no commercial presence. Again, got a long way to go yet.
- jbpetersen 10y agoAny favorite examples of freaks/true-believers in software?
- rogual 10y agoStallman? Also Erik Naggum springs to mind.
- icebraining 10y agoErik Naggum's rant against XML, which I discovered thanks to the great uriel's site on harmful stuff, is a treat to read: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/s-exp_vs_XML http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/s-exp_vs_XML By the way, I wouldn't call him a freak, but I greatly admire Joey Hess, writing great Free software from his off-grid cabin.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- shuntress 10y agoI don't have any data to back this up but I would argue that as the total number of video games has increased, the number of good games (as good and better than the games when you were 20 years younger) has also increased. We didn't take N good games that 10% of people like and turn them in to N bad games that 90% of people like. Instead, we have something more like 10xN good games that 10% of people like and 100xN bad games that 90% of people like. With movies, as opposed to games, I think this is less pronounced given the age of medium but still present.
- pjc50 10y agoI don't know why this is being downvoted; there have never been more or more diverse games, and the old ones don't go away quite so readily, between emulators and GoG. Gaming is now mainstream and very nearly respectable. Kind of like football ("soccer") in the 90s, just with a different kind of hooligan. We've lost a bit to genre crystallization, but there's no shortage of people willing to experiment with weird things in Unity or mods to existing games. The hyper-mainstream games are of course boringly predictable, but it's a short step away to other things.
- jbpetersen 10y agoMy own experience seems to reflect this. The availability of quality work seems to grow logarithmically in relation to the quantity of something.
- shuntress 10y agoI think the level of quality has also increased compared to pre-2005. Games like Factorio and Minecraft didn't even exist. It's not a stretch to call FTL and Spelunky the best rouge-like games so far. Ocarina of Time, even with its huge nostalgia bias, is less re-playable than A Link Between Worlds. CS:GO basically amplifies everything good about CS 1.6 and CS:Source then adds the competitive support. Similarly, DOOM (2016) takes everything (Except perhaps the mod-ability and level design) that made Doom so good and improves it.
- 10y ago
- FireBeyond 10y agoIt never really appealed only to a small crowd - that's the point of 'feeling special'. In a country of 300M people (leaving aside international visitors), let's not pretend that only one hundred people (early 90s) or even the mid 90s 8,000 attendance are the only people to whom the idea appealed. Popularity, and prominence are distinct, and tangential from these complaints.