Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[prabe]

Sagan, I think, also missed the point of Beavis & Butthead, which was not a celebration of stupidity.

I think it's easy--especially if one doesn't watch much of it--to see it as just that. The jokes are (at least almost) always at the expense of the idiots, which does argue against it being a celebration of stupidity, but noticing that requires more attention than one might want to give.

 

[overgeeked]

I saw this sort of split as far back as the Usenet days. I think there have always been lots of different RPG gamers:

• The wargamers, who were there first
• The folks who want to play (including DMs)
• The folks that want to collect (overlap with the folks who just want to read, although they may not have a desire for a huge library)
• The folks that really just want to paint miniatures and scenery
• The folks who want to write to fanzines/Dragon/ENWorld/reddit and tell everyone else they're doing it wrong

Right. There's that split as well.

I was talking about other divides in the hobby like crunch level, new school vs old school, beer & pretzels vs serious business, thespians vs gamers, etc.

 

[prabe]

Right. There's that split as well.

I was talking about other divides in the hobby like crunch level, new school vs old school, beer & pretzels vs serious business, thespians vs gamers, etc.

Most of those divides--and the earlier ones you were responding to--have a lot of middle ground, IME, that thinking of them as "divides" tends to exclude.

 

[trappedslider]

so the full Excerpt

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the move Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential ) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning – not just of science, but of anything – are avoidable even undesirable.

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements – transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting – profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

 

[overgeeked]

I will die on this hill: The original Plants vs. Zombies is an almost perfect videogame. Every game designer should study it, especially the way that it teaches you how to play and handle increased difficulty throughout, moments before turning up the heat on the player.

A whole lot of video games do that particular thing quite well. There's so much our hobby could learn from video games. It'll always be wild to me that is apparently a purely one-way street. Video games freely borrowed from RPGs in the early days...and yet there's some kind of ingrained refusal of RPGs to borrow from video games. So weird.

 

[TiQuinn]

Well, the next lines in the book are basically looking down on people who enjoy fart jokes. And everyone should be allowed to love a good fart joke now and again.

It's almost like the idea of condensing the book to a meme would be contrary to ideals the author was talking about. "The decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less,)" ... now down to a single image.

Well, just because he missed the precise target, doesn't mean the general concept didn't come true. I'm sure he never knew who Joe Rogan was, for instance.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Right. There's that split as well.

I was talking about other divides in the hobby like crunch level, new school vs old school, beer & pretzels vs serious business, thespians vs gamers, etc.

Yeah, these categories definitely split into almost infinite subcategories. Just post "what do you consider 'real' roleplaying?" and stand back.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

A whole lot of video games do that particular thing quite well. There's so much our hobby could learn from video games. It'll always be wild to me that is apparently a purely one-way street. Video games freely borrowed from RPGs in the early days...and yet there's some kind of ingrained refusal of RPGs to borrow from video games. So weird.

It does seem to finally be breaking down, now that the videogame generations are in charge. The new Starter Set character cards have clear ancestry in videogame displays (as filtered through modern board gaming), for instance.

I think doing it in the clumsy top-down "make it more like World of Warcraft; the kids like that, right?" way doesn't work nearly as well as just having people who've lived in that world saying "you know, this is a solved problem -- let's just borrow the solution from Metal Gear Solid," or whatever.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm in the case were I liked beng aligned with the big dog, but now that it is slipping away from what I like, I'm just happy if I can find somewhere with enough people to play with that let's me do it. Unlike other kind of hobbies, community is very important in RPGs. Without the social aspect, it isn't any different from videogames, or just play pretend with dolls like when we were children.

No doubt. Its kind of a strange feeling for me to understand not being able to find players or GMs for a given game system because I spent much of my gaming career with access to a lot of players around who weren't wedded to one system (even D&D) so much they wouldn't try other things and potentially jump on board. Admittedly I spent most of that being a GM, but it wouldn't have been impossible to do it as a player back then. I gather things are a different beast now, even when playing remotely.

 

[Deset Gled]

I will die on this hill: The original Plants vs. Zombies is an almost perfect videogame. Every game designer should study it, especially the way that it teaches you how to play and handle increased difficulty throughout, moments before turning up the heat on the player.

Ironically, Plants vs. Zombies 2 is also a perfect example of a freemium game, designed to tantalize players with the illusion of progress through grinding and continual exposure to ads with the option to pay cash to advance faster (except there is no advancement, just more grind).

I will admit to putting more time into it than I should have, but luckily never dropped real money on it.