I find FPS writing is often a lot better, probably because there is a lot less of it. Yes, RPGs have a more narrative focus so more nuance to characters or whatever but you're asking a committee of 1-5 usually mid-tier writers to pump out 2-10 novels worth of text within a year under often radically changing requirements. The actual writing is usually hot garbage.
Games are not books or movies either. Usually the best stories are inferred by the player from well designed systems in the game. Just ask any 10 year old about their stories from their Minecraft world and they’ll never stop talking. None of that was written by a “writer” at mojang
Pokémon (most of them) have pretty good writing. Planescape Torment has ok “endcap of the airport bookstore fantasy shelf” writing. You’re making exactly the mistake I’m talking about.
(Even narrative-heavy FPSs like Bioshock have an order of magnitude less writing than most RPGs.)
You've got to be joking. Pokemon has better writing then planescape torment or "endcap of airport fantasy shelf" writing?
This isn't a mistake I'm making. Less writing isn't better writing and more writing isn't better writing either. I think you're one of those people who just likes things extremely plain. Basic text that's less wordy is usually an example of bad writing imo. This kind of writing is good for research papers but for stories it's not a good thing.
Anyway here's an example of the "good writing" you're talking about in pokemon:
Most people would disagree with you and agree with me. All the writing in there is pure garbage. I don't understand how you can call that "good" other then if you have a preference for simple sentences.
>You appear to have linked to an anime. We’re discussing video games.
The anime is called Pokemon. This is the source material for which all the Pokemon games are derived from and strive to imitate in style.
Any writing in a video game on Pokemon is equivalent (or worse) in quality and style to the original anime which all Pokemon games are based on.
>Simple sentences are great for simple ideas. Most video games, including most RPGs, only have simple ideas.
Writing isn't only about ideas. That's what research is about. Presenting facts, figures, results and ideas. For stories there needs to more irrational fluff. The writing needs to be immersive, emotive and vivid, eloquent, etc. Most people would agree with me on this matter.
I would say you're the one who has a different preference here.
Pokemon is an anime. Video games and the card game are derivatives of the anime.
I linked to the anime as an example of the writing to prove you wrong. The anime is childish and the games reflect that in the writing.
Maybe you're too young to know this. The anime just had its last episode 2023. It's been around for 25 years. Or maybe you're trolling. Pikachu is literally in that video. The information is quite obvious.
We have to ban accounts that keep breaking HN's rules like this. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the intended spirit, we'd be grateful.
Unfortunately the site in general has gotten increasingly unhinged lately. One of those is a literal "well, actually" defending torture!
I wish you'd stop playing this "I don't want to ban you, but I will ban you if you don't follow the rules, which I also set" game. Do it or don't but jesus christ, this obsession with tone over meaning is so 2010.
If you're referring to some comment that should have been moderated but wasn't, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. If you want to link to it, I can take a look.
"The site in general has gotten increasingly $FOO lately" is the sort of thing people have been saying for 15 years. Such perceptions are notoriously unreliable for a lot of reasons—one is that it's human nature to overgeneralize from randomness, and another is nostalgia bias. It's hard to extract signal. Most likely what you're observing is random fluctuation, but of course I can't be sure.
When I say I don't want to ban you I mean it! You're a good user generally. I'd rather persuade you to follow HN's rules, such as not attacking other users, and it's my preference to try for a long time before giving up on someone.
I'm fine. A bit rude to ask that it implies as if something is wrong with me.
If it's trivially disproveable then just trivially write out the proof. No need to comment on the fact.
>Well, yes, but childish isn’t a synonym for poor quality.
At a pedantic level yes they aren't synonyms. But any reasonable person knows writing is dumbed down and made worse in order for children to understand and follow. It's not just the writing, but the plot line and everything else is made worse and simplistic.
This is your thing. You equate simplistic to good writing. Most people would consider this completely orthogonal to good writing. A simplistic plot can be expressed in a silent film with absolutely no writing. See those Pixar shorts. But in those cases writing doesn't even exist, writing isn't even part of the equation, but I feel that is what you label as "good writing" and what your main point is about.
It also needs to be a method that isn’t pharmacologically complicated, because manufacturers and pharmacists refuse to be complicit in this today. That’s the main reason, and also a reason Alabama has botched so many executions in recent years with experimental drugs and untrained executioners.
Imagine you have a team migrating the federal tax system of a smaller country - you can choose to develop the project in C and have X amount of devs work on it for 3-4 years 40-50h a week. The resulting code base will be huge and probably hard to maintain.
Or you could choose to hire devs in a higher level language, maybe X/2 or X/1.5 amount of devs - saving you the environmental cost of running possibly hundreds of workstations every single day for years at a time and doing administration for more employees. The resulting code base will also be smaller and (hopefully) easier to maintain.
I don't think you could call this immeasurable at all. (This is based on a real example)
Not just the workstations. You really need to factor in the other carbon output of those developers for the time spent on the project too, not just the tools.
And you then need to consider to what extent any performance saving will be efficiently captured as reduced power use.
But, yes, fully agree.
One system I worked on recently involved about 20 developer years of effort, and about 40 core years of computation... I'm pretty sure the developers machines combined spent far more energy than the production systems, for a Ruby deployment, before factoring in any other energy use relating to difference in effort.
IME development resources will always expand to the available budget and time anyway, the programming language or programmer skills really don't matter much.
Also, whether C is actually more or less "productive" than other languages for specific tasks isn't all that clear either. For the things I pick C for (for instance cross-platform libraries sitting between OS APIs and user code, and home computer emulators), it is also the most productive option (in the sense that higher level programming languages wouldn't make me more productive, because all that's needed for this type of stuff is functions, structs, loops, conditionals and a handful of math operators - and all those things are in C). High level features like automatic memory management don't make much sense when there's hardly any heap memory to be managed, and a rich stdlib also isn't needed when all you do is number crunching and bit twiddling.
The bar for epubs is so fucking low I have a hard time believing this matters at all. Just last week I bought a book set in the late Middle Ages which managed to transcribe all “þ” as “p”. Until publishers care about that stuff, none of these high-falutin technical discussions change anything.
The file format doesn’t matter one bit when the reading and authoring tools are shit and the editors can’t/don’t fix anything. And papers will generally have a lot fewer resources to deal with this than major book publishers, who have been epub-focused for over a decade now and actually make money from it.
Any decent publishing or html editing tools fully support utf-8 by now. It's not the tools.
Publisher and editor laziness may be a reason to be cautious about epubs currently for niche or esoteric works, but that's not the same thing.
> I bought a book set in the late Middle Ages which managed to transcribe all “þ” as “p”. Until publishers care...
The book market these days makes it challenging to do high-quality editing up front for republishing niche books in a new format. Publishers try to cut corners, outsourcing epub conversions to people who don't care and don't know what they're doing, or they OCR it, have an in-house editor (who also doesn't have a personal affinity to the subject) give it a once-over (maybe), and release it.
As an aside : Unicode support was still an issue in TeX last I checked, because most of the LaTeX tools don't support it (well, having been made before it was expected).
Now, there are some attempts to fix this situation by Xe(La)TeX and Lua(La)TeX, but since TeX seems to be so much tied to PDF these days, it should probably just be abandoned by most scientific publishing in favor of the likes of GNU TeXmacs (note : it's NOT TeX in GNU Emacs) and HTML with MathML.
Awful. One of the best things about Stewart is that (I thought) he was smart enough to step out when he was done. Now it’s going to be an old tired man making out of touch japes about two even older tired men.
I haven’t kept up but sad if so. Colbert was always at his best when he brought lots of himself to the show, in contrast with Stewart who was great at capturing public vibes.
Yeah, he was checked out by 2012. The only reason no one noticed how many jokes he was reusing or how many personas he was recycling was because his supporting cast was so unbelievably talented. For example, Jason Jones got an interview with Gorbachev[0] in 2014, something no one had been able to do in years at that point.
