Duion's blog

This is a new kind of series of blog posts and it is about bad game design choices that are used very commonly and hardly anyone pointing them out. I don't want to go nitpicking about minor design flaws, but about things that have the potential to ruin a whole game, yes not just parts of the game, but absolutely everything.

After writing the recent blog post "The dumbing down of games" I started asking myself the question: Is it the dumbed down games that create dumbed down gamers or is it dumbed down gamers that require dumbed down games?

It most likely is a combination of both, the question is more what is the bigger factor or the root cause.

This is a topic I wonder why not many people already talk about this, it is the dumbing down of games.

It is probably because most gamers today are young and they don't know how it was in the past and for the older people maybe because their memory is not working anymore. However let me tell you how it was in the past and go through each step you needed or did go through in order to play a computer game:

One issue leads to the next and the potato farmers kind of arise out of the denial of technological progress in the open source gaming community. Most often those are open source game developers or advocates and probably out of their denial of technological progress they use the argument "But it runs on old hardware" to justify, why they never improve or care to improve.

This is kind of a part two of the open source gaming community in denial. There are so many aspects to this problem, that I probably need multiple articles about it. The last blog post covered the problem that the open source gaming community is in denial of them failing in terms of market share and this one is more about how they do not even understand the concept of improving in technological progress, like most of the rest of the world does. You understand?

As an open source game developer I needed to search for methods to market my game and since the mainstream market is not my main target group I needed to search for alternative ways for marketing. So I searched what open source gaming communities there are and also what Linux gaming communities there are, but there were not that many active ones and the "active" ones I found basically all live in denial and therefore are as good as inactive.

This is a follow up to the follow up of the last posts. I thought more about the whole thing with the modern internet, social media and how algorithms now decide what people get to see, even what they like and what they consume and came to the conclusion that this all may be a huge contributor to the insanity of humanity.

This is kind of a follow up to my last blog post about how promoting popularity is insane. I thought more about this and the whole problem goes much deeper, since popularity nowadays is not even decided by humans anymore for the most part, but by machines, that supposedly know better what humans want, than the humans themselves. The algorithms itself may be intelligent, or let us say, they do what they do, the problem is more the human error that made them and the human error that is put into them, which then is turned into more human error by the computer.

There seems to be a strong and rapidly growing trend in our current society and on many platforms to promote only "popular" things or content. To many people this may seem normal and logical, but if you think about it more it looks more like total insanity.

Popularity as an argument is probably one of the biggest insanity that exists in this world. It seems that most people I meet are only able to make "arguments" based on popularity. One of their first responses in an argument is often something like this: