worse even, it killed off many vibrant quake 3 communities that had been going from 1999 to 2008 because half the people started playing quake live and the other half stopped playing alltogether
The community was on life support, and the attempt (Quake Live) wasn't enough to bring people back to good eSports, as the market had moved on from pure skill based games.
It was extremely difficult to play for newcomers. You almost didn't even get a chance to frag old school players once because of the skill discrepancy. I could hang with most of the higher tier guys, but there were some that just seemed nearly invincible. They should have had more resources for developing skills. After I stopped playing, I discovered that some were playing Q3 at ramped up physics speeds in single player. When going back to playing at regular speed, it feels like you're playing in slow motion.
>> It was extremely difficult to play for newcomers. You almost didn't even get a chance to frag old school players once because of the skill discrepancy.
I think games say a lot about generations.
In the old days you had to persist a lot and be a bit of a "hacker" to play Quake, or at least have basic computer skills. I remember how difficult it was to configure Qizmo for Quake World.
Nowadays everything is ready for you to play and even if you are a beginner you can play with the most experienced. In Quake you can spend 1 year playing and not win a single match.
>>Nowadays everything is ready for you to play and even if you are a beginner you can play with the most experienced. In Quake you can spend 1 year playing and not win a single match.
I mean......saying this as a game developer - this is a good thing. You want people to come in and enjoy the game, and not be frustrated by it. Obviously there should still be a mode somewhere where you can truly test your skills and where the top players hang out(in multiplayer shooters that's usually what the ranked mode is for), but new players should be able to just jump in and have a good time. I believe this is a huge part of why games like Fortnite are so successful - because no matter what is your skill level, you will always have a good time, but it also offers an incredibly high skill level ceiling for people who really want to put in the hours.
>>I think games say a lot about generations.
I'm not sure if that is about generations, more about the market - when Q3 came out the only other major game in that space was Unreal Tournament. Nowadays you have so much choice that if a game frustrates you you can always pick a different one. And the market has been completely "ruined" by gamepass and endless promotions, so people don't have attachment to games like they used to. Sure some of them do if they spent £50 on a game, but for an increasing number of games and people, that just isn't true anymore. There is no cost associated with trying a game on Gamepass for 20 minutes and abandoning it.
> I discovered that some were playing Q3 at ramped up physics speeds in single player. When going back to playing at regular speed, it feels like you're playing in slow motion.
That's amazing, like training at altitude but for e-sports.
it's not actually that helpful because a lot of the skill comes from muscle memory
and that's not just for aiming but mousemovement also has a significant influence on movement
for example there's something called a circle jump where you use precise mouse movement to get the most efficient angles so that your movement speed is maximized from your first jump
I read it that way too, even if he didn't explicitly say it. Probably because Takei is known to be very vocally anti-Republican or anti-right or pro-left or pro-liberal, not sure of the exact dynamic there. But the comment also said Takei is "liberal" and knows what it's like if "that kind of people" regain power.
To me, it's clearly an anti-Republic or anti-conservative jab, implying that "those people" shouldn't be allowed to regain power, else some poor minority will get put into camps. Using the argument that if Takei says so, it's because he's lived through it, so we should listen to him. Ofc, not to detract from what he went through, it's horrible.
Takei is so silly for not knowing which political party was in power during WWII. Thank God the internet exists to hold him to account for those crazy positions of his, which he so clearly holds that he doesn't even need to say them.
It's not a jab, rather the plain reality of the contemporary political landscape.
Speaking as a non-partisan libertarian - it is a fact that the contemporary Republican party has openly embraced white nationalism. Racism is a type of collectivism, which is attractive precisely because it's a lazy un-nuanced explanation for one's woes. The Republican platform used to have mainstream politicians that kept those urges in check, and while perhaps pundits courted those urges with dog whistles and the like on talk radio, they could still be said to have distance from the mainstream party. But part of Trump's "edginess" was openly saying what "couldn't be said", and so the dam holding it back has burst. This certainly does not mean that all Republicans are white nationalists, nor does it imply that Republicans with power will automatically enact white nationalist policies. But open white nationalism does now form a significant part of the mainstream Republican party.
Now since I must include an analogous analysis of the other political sports team, lest some partisan respond with "no that's not true and even if it is the other party is the same or worse" - It is certainly true that there is a large contingent of the democratic party that has openly embraced minority-favoring racism, and that is a terrible thing as well! But for the most part that discourse revolves around inclusionary racism (disadvantaged group #643 needs help) rather than exclusionary racism. We've seen the catastrophic results of exclusionary racism enough times to know where it leads, but it's much harder to know where inclusionary racism leads (apart from stoking more racism in general, these political teams are in ying-yang). Presently, the concrete results seem to be bureaucracy, language policing, and a new proto-religion to repeated if one occupies a politically sensitive position (and it's not clear how this could continue to snowball into society-wide exclusionary racism). These things are certainly not great dynamics, but they're a far cry from bottom-up lynchings and top-down concentration camps.
> It has very little to do with political parties directly, unfortunately those sorts of people tend to fall pretty cleanly into one in particular, at least in the US
FDR was a democrat. Jim Crow laws were put in place by democrats. Democrats filibustered against the civil rights act. Clinton was responsible for mass incarceration which primarily affected minorities. We’re currently witnessing the systemic destruction of minority communities in democrat run cities. It’s odd that Takei thinks that the liberals will do anything but exploit minority groups when in positions of power.
> President Lyndon B. Johnson, although a southern Democrat himself, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The evening after signing the Civil Rights Act, Johnson told aide Bill Moyers, "I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine", anticipating a coming backlash from Southern Whites against Johnson's Democratic Party.[5]
Southern Democrats of 1850s through 1960s were the racist southerners, historically aligned with the Confederacy.
After the Democrats signed the Civil Rights act of 1964, the racists got out of the Democrat's party, and started to align themselves to Republicans. By the 1990s, it has become obvious that Republicans were actively courting this large group and drawing upon them for political power.
In the most recent election, assholes were targeting Chinese, Korean, and Japanese shops in my area with Graffiti, breaking windows, and effectively blaming the Asian community for COVID19. These racists absolutely exist and continue to function today. And its somewhat horrifying to me to see the Republicans actively courting them to pad out their votes and increase their political power. Furthermore, the mainstream Republicans turn a blind eye to it and try to pretend that this crap isn't happening.
That being said, I recognize that anti-Asian hate, while it exists, is kinda minor compared to other ethnic groups. But even in my day to day life today, I'm seeing the racists (and literally those racists shake their anti-Asian signposts at me. Because I'm Asian)
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> It’s odd that Takei thinks that the liberals will do anything but exploit minority groups when in positions of power.
Did you even see the anti-Chinese hateboner of 2020? It wasn't the Democrats.
I'm not even Chinese. But you know, people can't tell that so I kinda-sorta get wrapped up in it. I'm glad that it seems to have died down a bit (at least, in my area of the country), but I'm still surprised at how quickly anti-Chinese hate turned into anti-Asian hate and a problem for everybody.
> After the Democrats signed the Civil Rights act of 1964, the racists got out of the Democrat's party, and started to align themselves to Republicans.
Note that this was the last of several splits between the White supremacists and the Democratic establishment; why this one stuck but others didn’t is that, unlike with, say, the Dixiecrat split in the 1940s, the Republicans actively courted and shaped their message to appeal to the disaffected racists after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In previous splits, the racists who wanted any influence had always coming slinking back to the Democrats because of structural duopoly and the fact that the Republicans were not welcoming to them. In the 1960s, that changed.
One politician flipped an entire party’s platform? What about the 20 democrat senators who voted against the act and stuck with the party?
A campaign of FUD regarding states rights (the basis of democrats own secessionist arguments) and conservative policies and blindness to continuing racist liberal policies is more likely (including the current president).
To be fair, no one caught the perpetrator who did the anti-Asian attacks in my area. But given the nature of the crime, it was obviously anti-Asian hate.
So now the question is: which party has more anti-Asian hate?
What I can say, is that about the same time, my sister who is a doctor was getting chewed out by her patients who wouldn't believe they had COVID19, they didn't want the "Chinese Doctor" (let alone a "Clinton supporting woman"), and were demanding to get useless ivermectin to treat their symptoms. Because "obviously" my sister being a female doctor proves she's a Clinton supporter or some bullshit like that.
Over, and over again. The anti-chinese hate (and again, we aren't Chinese. But bigots are blind to these issues...) was from people who were prouding proclaiming themselves to be Republican.
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I'm well aware of the anti-Asian hate of the African American community in the 90s too. Back then I will tell you that it was Black people who looked down upon Asians (and I understand the population dynamics associated with the LA Race riots). But 2020 is a different time.
This is absolutely, a right-wing thought process. They blamed China for COVID19 (and Asians who kinda-look Chinese to them, got wrapped up in it). Add on a bit of anti-Clinton misogynists and yeah. Its a pretty obvious which side of the political aisle was causing me, and my family, issues.
And again, I get it. Its not that "All Republicans" do this. But what I'm trying to point out that by ignoring these obvious truths and obvious realities of just 2 or 3 years ago, you're enabling these assholes to be racist again. So its important for me to talk out about it, and its important for the non-Racist Republicans to be aware that these things happened. And that you need to clamp down on the racists in your party.
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And the anti-Chinese protester who was yelling at me to go back to China and leave this country (and again, I'm not Chinese so this is completely insane... but whatever). Okay, I dunno which party he was part of, but I'm _guessing_ he was Republican. Sound like a safe bet?
> These bigots never disappeared. They just are being courted by the Right / Republicans today.
Normally, I’d respond to this with something addressing the chain of events starting with the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and subsequent electoral strategy, but just to mix things up I'll go simple:
This is the reason that when you see rallies of overt racists, or people storming a government building waving confederate flags, or people arguing about, how, akshully, slavery in America was good for the slaves and their descendants should be thankful rather than resentful of it, in the 21st century, they aren’t backers of the Democratic Party.
it's an uncomfortable topic for a lot of people because the idea that sapience/sentience is just a side effect of our brains being pattern matching machines with a giant knowledge graph of neurons means that we're not that special
No, it is emergent behavior. Pattern matching does not require that there be some sort of conscious recognition of your state of being. It simply requires you to respond to stimuli. But we have the ability to abstract our thoughts away from stimuli which allows conscious thought. This is an unexpected result.
In the 80s there was a javelin thrower named Jan Železný who was so good that they had to redesign the javelin because there wasnt enough space in the stadiums
if you frequently discuss these topics you should be aware that those were always just nice sounding soundbites that were never rooted in any kind of conviction
