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What you're saying is entirely backwards though, from a pure maintenance perspective, the purpose of documentation is actually to reduce the amount of time you

What you're saying is entirely backwards though, from a pure maintenance perspective, the purpose of documentation is actually to reduce the amount of time you need to spend on answering questions and responding to debates. If you receive a lot of questions about what it's supposed to mean, the documentation is not doing its job and needs to be clarified.

CaptArmchair 6y ago
And that's a completely valid point. But then we're discussing something entirely different: the usefulness of documentation. A satirical piece conveying criticism on the game industry clearly doesn't help a developer solve a concrete technical problem. You could extend that to anything that doesn't touch upon the technicalities of the Godot gaming engine. But that's entirely distinct from the initial point of debate: does this satirical piece offend or doesn't it?
- cycloptic 6y ago
  To borrow some language from the piece, how much would you appreciate it if someone put a paragraph in the documentation saying "CaptArmchair is a poor soul filled with tremendous existential angst, who needs to be prevented from thinking so the tremendous agony of realizing CaptArmchair's own irrelevance does not again take over CaptArmchair's life" ? Even if it was a joke, would you really want that in there? (For disclosure, if it was me, I personally would probably not want any hostile things about me written across random open source documentation, so hopefully I am not cursing myself to that by writing this post)
  - CaptArmchair 6y ago
    Now you're pulling a single sentence out of an entire context and dismissing that particular context. That's not how it works. The next parts of that piece are equally important: > 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. Clearly "protect the world order" is hyperbole. It is clearly signalling that none of the above is to be taken literally. Moreover, the "prevents them from thinking" is another form of signalling. It's meant to say "Think about who you're buying from, and what you're buying into." What is absolutely not meant to say is this: "your experience as a gamer is invalid because you buy into a questionable product/service/business model." The entire piece is satire. It's self deprecating. Satire asks that the reader takes a step back, self deprecates for a minute... and then reflects on what's actually being said.

CaptArmchair 6y ago

And that's a completely valid point. But then we're discussing something entirely different: the usefulness of documentation. A satirical piece conveying criticism on the game industry clearly doesn't help a developer solve a concrete technical problem. You could extend that to anything that doesn't touch upon the technicalities of the Godot gaming engine. But that's entirely distinct from the initial point of debate: does this satirical piece offend or doesn't it?

cycloptic 6y ago
To borrow some language from the piece, how much would you appreciate it if someone put a paragraph in the documentation saying "CaptArmchair is a poor soul filled with tremendous existential angst, who needs to be prevented from thinking so the tremendous agony of realizing CaptArmchair's own irrelevance does not again take over CaptArmchair's life" ? Even if it was a joke, would you really want that in there? (For disclosure, if it was me, I personally would probably not want any hostile things about me written across random open source documentation, so hopefully I am not cursing myself to that by writing this post)
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  Now you're pulling a single sentence out of an entire context and dismissing that particular context. That's not how it works. The next parts of that piece are equally important: > 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. Clearly "protect the world order" is hyperbole. It is clearly signalling that none of the above is to be taken literally. Moreover, the "prevents them from thinking" is another form of signalling. It's meant to say "Think about who you're buying from, and what you're buying into." What is absolutely not meant to say is this: "your experience as a gamer is invalid because you buy into a questionable product/service/business model." The entire piece is satire. It's self deprecating. Satire asks that the reader takes a step back, self deprecates for a minute... and then reflects on what's actually being said.