drorco

Most of the discussions I've seen about this disregard the fact that on paper it's all nice, but in practice it's a rabbit-hole of constraints. Developers often use 3rd party SDKs and services that can render the game useless if they are not included is just one concern, and many times they cannot be technically or legally included in client versions for players.

Personally, for all I care, even as a game-dev, I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game.

This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers, doesn't force them to comply with anything, and doesn't incur any additional costs. Maybe there'd be some tiny loss of revenue, but it's arguably miniscule if the games are already abandoned.

It pretty much already happening with games like the C&C Generals that have pirated abandonware versions.

Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players, instead they should just legalize reverse engineering.

I think regulation is a superweapon that should mostly be used in cases where there can be severe long-term damage (physical and health dangers, loans, etc.) or in cases where what it regulates is simple and easy to comply with.

For example, it makes a lot of sense to regulate gasoline so there won't be any lead in it. It also makes sense to standartize and simplify loans which can also have severe impact on people. I don't think it makes sense to regulate games to that degree, which are merely a form of entertainment and have no severe consequences on people, especially not SKG.

If I have to watch ads, I personally prefer personalized ads as they waste less of my time if I happen to see an ad for something I would actually want. I think generally, scaring people with "oh noes they'll have your annonymuized data" is not that dissimilar from scaring about radiation radiation from their wifi router.

Anyway, the discussion was about the harms of regulations and why developers would resist these. I personally know several indie mobile developers that had games that their core business model was ad monetization, and the regulation made these businesses less viable, and it's likely that players who enjoyed these kind of games, will now see less of these indie games.

I personally think this regulation does more harm then good for small businesses and players alike. I think legeslation has to be super careful when it comes to regulating businesses, anytime I had to deal with compliance around accessibility, privacy, transparency etc. I saw how intentions were good, but execution was absolutely terrible, with so many holes that the ones who benefit the most are the big companies that can workaround these clauses, while good intentioned small businesses need to spend money on compliance before they even know if the business is going to be viable.

That's cool and all, I really don't have a problem with the requirement to tell players to their face that if they play the game for free, they are sharing their data and preferences with 3rd parties. Denying content creators the ability to (a) restrict content to free loaders who refuse, (b) forcing companies to pay for services that so they could reasonably comply, mostly because the legal language is so ambiguous and broad, is something I do not appreciate.

This is my second business after already having experience with GDPR. Thinking of it in advance does make it easier but it can definitely still break a business and it's not a trivial cost. Moreover, it's still changing frequently, just about 2 years ago there was a major change were asking for simple consent was not good enough and now there's a whole CMP TCF2 protocol you have to implement. From research I made, the tools that provide good coverage are not cheap, I pay a lot of money for these services, and they are also 3rd parties that without them the game experience might degrade. Just a little example, if the privacy consent service times out, the game load time increases to about ~10s at least.

Moreover, I have to also pay a company just to be my representative in the EU and have a stupid email address that is completely useless.

I don't know these things definitely don't make my appreciate regulations, and I think if you want to add more layers of regulation, you have to be really thoughtful about them, because often like DRM, eventually they screw the little guys more than they screw the bad actors.

Yea good luck getting any reasonable visibility on App Store or Google Play without paying good amount of $$$ to meta, Google etc.

Trust me I would have loved to throwaway this dependency on these platforms, I don't enjoy paying for ads. The market is not pretty, but there's a reason for why it's the way it is. For some reasons, players prefer downloading games for free and then paying potentially hundreds to thousands of dollars on IAPs, rather than everyone paying $5 for a game. I would have preferred it to be the latter personally, but the market doesn't seem to want to act this way.

But there are 3rd party SDKs that rely on outside servers that will stop working and the app could have unexpected behavior. It doesn't have to be complete crash, but it might be enough to degrade functionality to a point where some players might say the game is unplayable etc.

Being bootstrapped with no investors, there's no extra resources, and no financial benefit in making sure that the app can function well even with these 3rd party services, servers etc. not working.

Did you ever build a commercial project or any business yourself? The nature of your comment implies to me you haven't. I highly recommend you give it a try, it might actually change your mind!

Well I'm talking from experience as a mobile indie game developer.

Pretty much every year I'm getting warnings from Apple or Google, or 3rd party SDKs, that unless I make sure to update libraries, or comply with a new rule, they are going to take down the game.

One of the latest rules was some sort of a digital services act (again another regulation) that made it very difficult for indie devs not to share their personal address and phone numbers.

I'm a developer of a mobile indie game and it's not true. Just to get started you need to implement tons of third part SDKs like Meta Ads, AdMob, Google Analytics, etc. These require actual handling of player choices, data sanitation etc. disregarding the loss of revenue with not being able to serve personalized ads, or even ads at all to large segments of players. And I'm talking about strictly optional rewarded ads.

These already harmed a lot of small mobile game companies, while the bigger mobile companies had much better means to deal with these.

I personally paid over $10K for different services just to comply, disregarding the loss of revenue over this compliance.

If you're actually curious, to gate a taste of the cost of compliance, I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc. On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want a accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc. so you could tick off a box and have some sort of insurance in case you're being sued.

Now you probably don't have a lot of empathy for big corps, but those laws often apply for small businesses as well (why wouldn't they?) and now imagine the struggling indie dev now also having to deal with another legal compliance so they won't lose their house to a legal troll, when they just struggle to get a game out there they have no idea if it's even going to ever be successful.

Or in the absence of other competing systems which can be shown to be more efficient, we could say OK seems like billionaires are part of this ecosystem. If you'd like, similar to how we don't like mosquitos but they are nevertheless an important part of the current ecosystem, whether we like it or not. Though if we ever find a better alternative, they'd definitely be in a hard spot.

You know that human civilization exists because of all the people putting in work every day who are not motivated just by by money, right?

Where did I say that?

If everyone was billionaire level money obsessed society would cease to work. There is nothing to indicate billionaires are giving us a disproportionate amount of what makes society work, and without working society to host it there is no progress.

I think if you wouldn't have the crazy risk takers who want the power/influence/money, either other people would need to take the lead on that, or there'd be a lot less advancement and we'd be closer as a society to our ancestors.

I've yet to see mass systems of groups in which work is being done without the leadership and initiative of a small proportion of people. For example, imagine a movement that is not founded by 1 or few people, but instead a company that is founded Day 1 with thousands of people, instantly. I think that's practically impossible without a hypothetical hivemind, but I'd like to be proven wrong!

I cannot understand this conclusion at all. Why should the structural relationship to other species be reflected within the species itself?

It's all an interpretation, never claimed it to be anything beyond a thinking model I like.

To me, that doesn't sound like an observation, but rather an interpretation. We could apply various epistemological carpet beaters to see what remains. One would be the critique of ideology. A few others can be found in the philosophy of science. It also seems to contradict your reference to thermodynamics. Wouldn't that mean that personality traits don't play a role at all? We don't look at individual particles, and certainly not at their personality traits.

No we don't, but I don't think it's necessarily because we don't want to, but because we often can't. Nevertheless, I think my rationale still applies. For example, if you take a bunch of matter, for example water, you'd find out that the distribution of Deuterium and definitely Tritium is really "unfair". Why only so few particles get to have that extra neutron and others do not?

I cannot understand this conclusion at all. Why should the structural relationship to other species be reflected within the species itself?

It doesn't necessarily have to but: 1. It seems to have been very favorable trait evolutionally to force your will on other species. I'm no brain nor social expert but it seems to me that in order to stop this trait internally, there would need to be some pretty strong inhibitors to counter that. 2. Regardless of the species claim, you can see the pattern of exceptional individuals with disproportionate influence in many other places in nature: queen bees, pack leaders, and human kings of sorts. in I think practically every culture on earth in recorded history?

I really struggle to think of any mass systems, in human society or nature in which power is not distributed disproportionally to a relatively small portion of individuals.

I'm mostly trying to make sense of the world and so far I found out that looking at it as a chaotic thermodynamic-like system makes the most sense.

So in regards to this economic issue, it seems that human personality traits that lead to disproportionate power/influence/money are distributed non-uniformly to an extreme extent.

We can try and moderate it as a system (e.g some forms of democracy, socialism, etc.) to maybe lower the amplitudes, but it would be ignorant to deny that this might be a core part of current human nature. Humans themselves are a specie with disproportionate power & influence compared to other species, so I think it would only make sense if this trait would also apply within the specie.

Now imagine, there'd be some alien government, who'd be like "whoa humans are making way too disproportionate progress compared to the other species, let's tax/prune them so they don't get too much power".

I'm not American. I did stay for months though in the US (SF, NY) and Europe (Italy, France, Greece, PT, DE, more) at times.

I think for competitive and talented people, US in general offers much more lucrative opportunities as long as you're OK with the US specific drawbacks. For non-competitive people, living in Europe would probably be a more convenient.

I think the problem though is in the future, both the US and Europe has grave societal and economic issues but from the different angles. Europe lacks economical drive and seems to discourage change on a cultural level. The US on the other hand seems to be an extreme catalyst.

I'm not familiar enough with quantitative data to judge on the compound interest, nevertheless I think in the last few decades we have already been witness on the global level to major changes in wealth: empires like UK have shrank, giants like China have risen. This had been very different a few decades ago and is an anecdote at least that compound interest can only do so much for empires, in the face of major changes.

Maybe, I think it definitely happened with millionaires, there are probably many more millionaires these days compared to a few decades ago. Inflation helped too for sure.

But I think still a lot of people would argue the distribution is too unequal.

Isn't this basically Entropy? Why do stars fuse and spread out their energy? Can't they just keep it all in? They are going to blow up/die out eventually, how is this sustainable?

The notion I'm getting is that these forces that drive change are bigger than all of us, and they are inherently unsustainable in the larger scale of things, pretty similar to how solar systems are not really sustainable in a scale much larger than us, but not that is still pretty small in a universal scale.

So for your perspective it might be unsustainable, but for the bigger system what you describe is smaller than a grain of sand.

OK that's one thing, but still there are many new billionaires that didn't exist a few decades ago, let alone a few years ago. Why did they become billionaires and the wealth didn't distribute over a much larger group?

Then the next question is why does wealth, in practically all industrious countries seem to distribute disproportionally and not uniformly?

One argument could be that maybe entrepreneurial personality traits aren't normally distributed, and unless you find a way change people's personalities in mass, the imbalance in wealth attraction will remain inherent.

Then you might ask, if that's true, do you I want to enforce equality, potentially dragging down the economy to mediocracy (for example many stagnating European economies) or maybe accept that current nature does not meet our societal desire for equality.

Hiragana being far more useful to know starting out, if you had to pick one.

Before visiting Japan, I learned to read in both Hiragana and Katakana, but I didn't really know more than a dozen or so words in Japanese. While visiting Japan, I found Katakana to be a lot more useful, because it's commonly used and often is just English words converted to Japanese letters. I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading.

So essentially one giant blob of cosmic background radiation was at the time its light was emitted, the size of an atom or so?

Maintain low expenses, be OK with going down in life quality, be willing to burn through your life savings and be OK if you lose it all.

I did it once, now doing it for the second time. I think most people will not bear it, but for me it feels like the only natural thing to do.

I can never imagine enjoying either running a hyper-growth VC funded company or being an employee, and I realize most people are not like that.

So on that end, maybe ask yourself if you were OK with cutting costs like losing the car, moving to a smaller apartment (even back with your parents) etc. and be happy about it even if your company flops.

:D

I should probably give KSP a try again. I guess there's an initial threshold I got to power through first, as I got a bit exhausted after the first mission hehe.

I'm actually working now on a game of my own, with themes of science, and it's indeed a game-first approach rather than an educational game, but I do hope to maybe inspire some ideas and motivation with at least a few players.

I totally believe there's a lot of untapped potential in this area, and advancing towards cracking learning motivation + capabilities could have a huge impact.

They call these kind of games "chocolate covered broccoli" and I totally agree.

I think games, have lots to teach, but that most of the time they are a catalyst for learning or inspiration to learn, but on their own, they will rarely actually teach you. It's hard to put the finger on it, as for example, I'm not a native English speaker, but I learned and practiced most of my English from playing video games, and they were the catalyst to make me WANT to learn English, but they didn't exactly *teach* me English.

Another part of it, is I bet if you sample today's scientists and engineers at places like NASA, you'd probably find that a lot of them loved watching Star Trek/Star Wars as kids. So while sci-fi hasn't taught them how to work with Schrodinger's equation, it probably had a major part of what sparked their motivation to get started. Games probably do that too, and then some, thanks to interactivity.

It's just the way my mind works and motivated. Motivation is a very elusive feeling that I did not find easy ways to manipulate. It's not as if I'm totally blocked from learning stuff with no clear purpose, but it will require much more mental capacity that is often difficult to muster in the day-to-day routine. Another example, is I did try to learn what I perceive as totally theoretical math such as "prove that there are infinite primary numbers" which was a nice idea to entertain, but it didn't really make me want to dig in further. On the other hand, learning about linear algebra in the context of machine learning, suddenly got Linear Algebra a lot more interesting and easy to learn.

Totally! One of the first thing I did after learning Newton's law of gravity, was to write down a small simulation of planets in orbit and how they "dance" around each other. This little exercise totally blew my mind and the code was really simple to code.

There's probably an untapped opportunity here, but ed-tech is such a difficult industry.

Same. I really struggle to learn anything which I can't see a practical use for.

Just as an example, in high school learning trigonometry was really difficult for me, like why would I even care about finding an angle in a triangle, etc.?

Only once I studied physics or game dev, this has started to become relevant, and then studying it got SO MUCH easier.

At the quality of the current output, I think players still easily differentiate between AI generated art and hand-created art. Maybe in future versions this will be less noticeable.

As a game dev, I think at this stage AI can be a helpful utility, but it does not replace a designer's touch for professionally looking games.

I'm no expert with LEDs' technical bits, but I purchased LIFX bulbs which were pretty expensive and they've lasted for almost a decade now.