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Godot maintainer removes controversial satirical piece from documentation
- nynx 6y agoThis seems accurate to me. Not sure why they'd be forced to remove it.
- anoncake 6y agoI blame the capitalist oligarchy. Some context would be nice though.
- bitcharmer 6y ago> 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
- amatecha 6y agoSeems 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 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
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoMan, imagine hating fun even more than old school NASA engineers, the stereotypical anti-fun people. https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/cb0da994bb68343c0795d94118dc2a3a324dbd1f/Luminary099/LUNAR_LANDING_GUIDANCE_EQUATIONS.agc#L1375 https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/cb0da994bb6834... https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/cb0da994bb68343c0795d94118dc2a3a324dbd1f/Luminary099/THE_LUNAR_LANDING.agc#L245 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
- amatecha 6y agoA 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.
- croes 6y agoA 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.
- tubularhells 6y agoYou are one of the few sane people on this site.
- ojnabieoot 6y agoI 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.
- cqlake 6y agoSo, selling addictive in-game purchases to kids and teenagers is professional and mature?
- AlexandrB 6y agoI 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.
- kwdc 6y agoWe require strictly defined areas of uncertainty!
- conradfr 6y agoExpected amount of pronouns in bios on that Twitter thread.
- 1f60c 6y agoPlease don't do this here.
- dat_ire_is_said 6y agoIt's true though. Indeed, it's a useful indicator of the type of so-called leftist whose main concern is scolding others via identity politics, rather than someone with actual left-wing ideals of opposing economic injustice and exploitation (as was done satirically by that now-deleted documentation page). Just goes to show the complainer's priorities really.
- orthecreedence 6y ago> Just goes to show the complainer's priorities really. Taking down capitalism one scolding at a time.
- gotostatement 6y agoSeems 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 https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507?s=20
- JetAlone 6y agoI 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.
- dat_ire_is_said 6y ago> 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.
- cuillevel3 6y agoWhat? It's really hard to have fun on the Internet.
- scruple 6y agoNo 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.
- amatecha 6y agoThe dev removed it to remove confusion, not to capitulate to a troll.
- tubularhells 6y agoYou see it wrong. They removed it because they fear being cancelled by headlines saying 'Godot maintainer refused to remove problematic documentation piece'.
- sodality2 6y agoYou actually believed it would have caused the slightest bit of backlash? Twitter =/= public opinion.
- ttt0 6y agoI 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-resort-orlando-1462632 https://www.newsweek.com/actor-fired-ok-symbol-universal-res...
- sodality2 6y agoThe 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.
- valbaca 6y ago""" .. This introduction is an Easter egg and is not intended to be taken seriously. .. Please don't remove it :) """ So much for that
- pentaphobe 6y agoTwo questions: Why was this controversial? Why remove the code example as well as the satire?
- amatecha 6y ago2nd question touched on in https://twitter.com/Akien/status/1367107113760284680 https://twitter.com/Akien/status/1367107113760284680
- pentaphobe 6y agothanks!
- ojnabieoot 6y agoRegardless 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.
- ttt0 6y ago> Why was this controversial? https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367071940092055555 https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367071940092055555 Something about bullying and sexism? I don't really get it
- unethical_ban 6y agoHoly Christ, I wish I could believe that was satire.
- prawn 6y agoGood example of Poe's Law, I thought.
- PurpleFoxy 6y agoSocial media was a mistake.
- blunte 6y agoThey may say it was intended to be satire, but regardless of intention it is pretty accurate for some of the population.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago“Satire” these days means telling the truth through humour.
- AbrahamParangi 6y agoThat's satire always
- blunte 6y agoI guess I found it more depressing than funny.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y agoCall 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.
- kodah 6y agoI 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.
- ojnabieoot 6y agoFor 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.
- boring_twenties 6y agoFound 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.
- kwdc 6y agoStuff 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.
- ineptech 6y agoIf you want to see the removed article, it is (for now) still up here: https://docs.godotengine.org/ko/latest/tutorials/io/encrypting_save_games.html https://docs.godotengine.org/ko/latest/tutorials/io/encrypti... Seems more whimsical than offensive to me, but YMMV.
- ineptech 6y agoAnd 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 https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507
- tanseydavid 6y agoI would agree that 'tortured' is well-chosen adjective to describe the Twitter thread.
- generalizations 6y agoTwitter doesn't let me see that thread. Says something about "this account owner has limited who can see their tweets".
- junke 6y agoYes because when your post reach HN you need to lock your account or else you'll have people argue in your mentions for days.
- unethical_ban 6y agoIt's twitter - that's what it is designed to do.
- Macha 6y agoLooks like the account author privated their account and therefore killed the thread. What was the complaint? How was this article sexist?
- Kaze404 6y agoBarbra Streisand effect at it again. Great piece of writing I would've missed if not for this commit. Thank you :)
- maxrev17 6y agoBeing part of this community makes me sad.
- redisman 6y agoIf someone was relying on client-side encryption for digital assets, they deserve whatever hacks they get.
- sodality2 6y agoThat includes DRM (DVD protection/BD protection/Denuvo DRM/etc).
- electro_blah 6y ago"This introduction is an Easter egg and is not intended to be taken seriously. Please don't remove it :)" LOL
- croes 6y agoThe 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 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.
- nine_k 6y agoThe 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 https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507
- krapp 6y agoThe 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tanseydavid 6y agoIf 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?
- drummer 6y agoIt's hip these days to censor the truth.
- JetAlone 6y agoNo 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.
- iamevn 6y agoaw, I enjoyed that and it made me stop to consider why I wanted to encrypt saves and realize I didn't need to.
- mathgladiator 6y agoI 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.
- tubularhells 6y agoRemember, no fun is allowed on the internet anymore.
- krapp 6y agoThere 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.
- brailsafe 6y agoThis is an open source game engine, ostensibly in existence to create fun.
- tylersmith 6y agoWell it's not your bank, it's a website about making video games.
- krapp 6y agoIt's not a website about making video games, it's documentation for software. If it were a website about making video games, say, a blog, that would be fine. But a piss-taking rant about the evils of mobile gaming - however correct it might be - isn't appropriate for documenting how to encrypt games. Edit, since I'm bleeding karma tonight anyway: imagine being downvoted so hard for suggesting humor isn't appropriate somewhere on a forum where humor is never considered appropriate anywhere. I swear for a community that pretends to be hard-boiled, thick-skinned and world weary some of you lot are the biggest, most easily triggered snowflakes I've ever encountered.
- viraptor 6y ago> on a forum where humor is never considered appropriate anywhere Not quite true. There's just a pretty high threshold for what's relevant humour. (The threshold is not even that high in absolute terms to be honest. Here's a +5 comment spotting a funny typo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26297542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26297542 It's mostly repetitive jokes that don't make it)
- 0x003 6y agoI wish they had kept it, a little bit of fun doesn't hurt anyone nor detract from the project.
- gotostatement 6y agoWhat 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 https://twitter.com/LiaSae/status/1367074344313237507?s=20
- brailsafe 6y agoUgh. 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.
- gotostatement 6y agooppression 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
- orthecreedence 6y agoFWIW 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.
- gotostatement 6y agoI was wondering about that. yes, by "this" I meant the tweet, not the person Im replying to
- Hammershaft 6y ago
- cc_cccc 6y agoThis is the final destination of the leftist movement. We live a life of physical pleasure thanks to automation yet we are devoid of true fulfillment. So we need to channel our energies that otherwise would have been spent, say, working the field, on finding and striking down non-existent controversy. We call this activism and social justice. In doing so, we hope to attain closer unto some fulfillment. If people don't see the broader implications of this on our society and the obvious slippery slope it engenders then I am truly alone.
- root_axis 6y agoWhy are you characterizing the removal as leftist? The satire being removed is a leftist criticism of capitalism...
- cambalache 6y agoBecause the satire is the left, and the tweet complaining is the "left". Recently (and not without design) the "left" has totally eclipsed the left
- frashelaw 6y agoThose "left" are liberals obsessed with identity-politics, hardly the same as the actual left
- gitrog 6y agoNot sure why you're being down-voted, you're spot on. Hope one of the down voters will come and explain.
- root_axis 6y agoUpon re-reading the tweet that ostensibly triggered the takedown, I think I actually agree. Originally I read the author throwing out the insult "dirtbag left" as an indication that they were in opposition to the leftist message presented in the documentation, but with closer reading I see that this person certainly considers themselves to be on the left.
- wwww4alll 6y agoLinux 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?
- tehjoker 6y agoSeriously? 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.
- jonpurdy 6y agoI 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.
- gotostatement 6y ago> 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.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago>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..
- gotostatement 6y agoI 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.
- harry8 6y agoJohn 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.
- calibas 6y agoThere'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.
- enriquto 6y agoHa! 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").
- 6y ago
- brozaman 6y agoIt'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.
- majjgepolja 6y agoThicker skin doesn't help people who get offended for publicity.
- lmilcin 6y agoI 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?
- mikroskeem 6y agoRemember, no fun allowed.
- chairmanwow1 6y agoWell thank goodness we scrubbed the internet of that perverse filth that made me laugh and made me like Godot a lot more. /s
- dleslie 6y agoIf 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.
- rdiddly 6y agoI read the diff. No satire detected. First paragraph is literally true.
- wruza 6y agoTweet is down. What’s the reason, LiaSae?
- obviouslynotme 6y agoLife 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 https://archive.md/VpYl2
- SilverRed 6y ago>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.
- um_ya 6y agoThe 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.
- 6y ago
- pototo666 6y agoThe satirical piece is actually well written. I can't help appreciate it even if i used to make money just the way it criticised.
- tomc1985 6y agoHoly moly, that is controversial? Man, people suck.
- upwardbound 6y agoHere'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. "
- dshpala 6y agoI 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.
- jobigoud 6y agoThe tweet has +400 likes so there's that.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago400 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.
- niea_11 6y agoI think it was more than one person, the original thread that started this is here : https://archive.md/YwxsS https://archive.md/YwxsS I wish that people used energy like this to do something more useful (well, 'useful' from my POV).
- teraku 6y agoWhy 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26338268
- BlargMcLarg 6y agoBecause 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).
- trabant00 6y agoI 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!
- secretsatan 6y agoIt'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.
- trabant00 6y ago> 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.
- adnzzzzZ 6y agoYet 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.
- namelosw 6y agoOh, wow, speaking out the truth is considered controversial nowadays. What a time to live.
- cesaref 6y agoHaving 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 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.
- timdaub 6y agoCringe. Software developers should really start inhaling a big dose of dadaism to realize how useless their mega seriousness often is.
- socialdemocrat 6y agoAs 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.
- ido 6y agoYou 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.
- secretsatan 6y agoAs 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.
- majjgepolja 6y agocool down, mobile game company manager!!
- secretsatan 6y agoI 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
- renewiltord 6y agoThe 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.
- icemelt8 6y agoI 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.
- TeddyDD 6y agoTrue reason why it had to be removed https://twitter.com/KyleTheCoder/status/1367262726926585866 https://twitter.com/KyleTheCoder/status/1367262726926585866 Gods, I hate nowadays internet.
- lovelyviking 6y agoSince 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.
- piokoch 6y agoIt 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...
- diegoperini 6y agoThe 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.
- viseztrance 6y agoThough 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.
- slezyr 6y agoGreat, now there is no noise and no example. Because they just removed the entire article.
- viseztrance 6y agoI just realized that. That makes absolutely no sense.
- HPsquared 6y agoMore polemical than satirical.
- brador 6y agoOld 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. 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.”
- lwhi 6y agoThis 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
- ddevault 6y agoI 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.
- perryizgr8 6y agoIt'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.
- phn 6y agoObligatory reference to http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html 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.
- stuaxo 6y agoAn enjoyable read, funny this is controversial, maybe a little to close to the bone ?
- cryptoquick 6y agosigh I'll do it if nobody else will. https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/pull/4722 https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/pull/4722
- cryptoquick 6y agoCrushed :(
- slezyr 6y agoSo, 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/6ef0538f182c13e1691eb0e03211c949e11beed4/core/core_bind.cpp#L1525 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/6ef0538f182c13e169...
- techlaw 6y ago1) 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.
- JabavuAdams 6y agoI dunno, looks accurate. Former mobile / game developer.
- franga2000 6y agoSerious 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...
- JabavuAdams 6y ago1) 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.
- jsilence 6y agoStreisand effect at full force.
- FuckMeNow69 6y agohttps://sites.google.com/view/meet-for-sex69/home https://sites.google.com/view/meet-for-sex69/home