The site says: "People like a challenge and playing against other people is often how games provide this challenge. Competition by itself is not necessarily a dark pattern. Classic games like chess and checkers, and most sports have competition. It's when competition is combined with other dark patterns that problems arise."
And this is true. In particular, competition where you gain rewards for staying on top of leaderboards, and there is a pay-to-win element. Competition isn't necessarily bad, competition can be fun, "but how is this game using competition" something you should think about before you get into a new game.
Sure but they have no room for this level of nuance on their actual ratings, it's just a checkbox for 'game has competition' which always counts as a 'dark pattern' for the purposes of the overall score.
The person who wrote that text and the person that coded the website need to get relationship counseling; every page on the website except that paragraph treat competition as one more bad point ok the bad points scale.
It's all too common to make a taxonomy of potential problems and then when deciding how to sum it up just throw up your hands and say each potential problem is worth one point.
Solo/single player games are common now, but looking at pre computer history the majority of games are sports where you're competing against others either alone or in teams and board/card/dice games where you are competing against others (and probably gambling too).
Sure there are some solitaire card games, and toys like yo-yos, kendama and the like that could be classified as games. But competition defines most of what we consider "games" up until computers were able to simulate the other players in the form of hostile/friendly npcs, computer controlled 'players' etc.
See second paragraph. 'Basically all' may have been an exaggeration, but the crux of my argument is that the concept that human beings know as a 'game' up until the advent of computer games more often than not involved competition.
Computers didn’t introduce the notion of solo play and there are examples of games throughout history that are not about competition.
Archery, for example, has its roots in improving your skills for the battlefield. But archery as an hobby, which goes back as long as the bow was invented, is simply for the enjoyment of doing it.
Kids playing together with toys is not a competition. Lego/Meccano/building blocks. The list goes on.
You're allowed to like dark patterns. Doesn't make them any less dark. They manipulate you to get you to play more. But you are allowed to enjoy it. Trying to save your ego or pride by pretending is silly.
Creative Cloud and DAWs. Those are my only reasons and basically the only reasons I ever hear from people. A Linux port of Photoshop would probably put a small dent in Windows' market share at this point.
How would this prevent someone from just plugging ElevenLabs into it? Or the inevitable more realistic voice models? Or just a prerecorded spam message? It's already nearly impossible to tell if some speech is human or not.
I do like the idea of recovering the emotional information lost in speech -> text, but I don't think it'd help the LLM issue.
Or also a genuine human voice reading a script that’s partially or almost entirely LLM written? I think there must be some video content creators who do that.
Don't worry too much about distributions, they'll mostly just affect package formats and default settings, but imo Debian is the best choice for stable desktop computing, with the best overall support and community.
I still struggle to believe that some can't. There's just always been an abstract 'canvas' separate from the one signals from my eyes end up on and I can 'draw' on it by thinking about visual stimulus, and it's hazy but perceptibly there, the same way I 'hear' a song when I think about it. When this subject comes up I also always want to ask if people with aphantasia can hear sounds or music in their head. Or a taste or smell, etc..
I have aphantasia and cannot hear sounds or music in my head. I can't taste or smell things either, but I've also been going through life assuming most people can't either. From reading about it, it seems that some people can do hear things but not see them and probably various other combinations.
I have no abstract canvas to write anything on that I've ever seen.
My visual imagery is also "hazy" and somehow fleeting and unreal, but still very useful. I don't find it that hard to imagine (heh) that for some people it would be more vivid, and for others almost nonexistent – though a total lack of visualization ability is perhaps more difficult to picture (heh^2), similarly to how it's almost impossible to imagine what it is like to be born blind, for example.
It would definitely be interesting if there were more discussion on other imagined sensory modalities, too. For example, as a choir singer I'd guess that, say, keeping a given starting pitch in your head is easier for people who can mentally "hear" it. Myself I can sort of imagine sounds, but keeping a pitch in my head is more about the physically preparing my larynx to produce that pitch.
Sometime in the early 2010s there was a link to a livestream of an office fish tank (I think) in the site footer, but I can't find any mention of it online.
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