#internet is rly polarized against Anthropic rn for. from what I can tell. basically nothingburger skill issue reasons
By all accounts Anthropic is in a brutal capacity crunch right now. They didn't expect the hockey-stick takeoff after Claude Code got big and then they got even more goodwill converts after getting ratfucked by the DoD, and it seems like there's just not enough processing power to handle it (because lead times are very long and you cannot just spin up more servers in this business). Their response has been to throttle pretty aggressively, and also crack down hard on things like using the flat-rate subscriptions to run token-guzzlers like OpenClaw, and a bunch of the HN and terminal-Twitterbrained crowd is pissed at this.
I have no sympathy for the OpenClaw people— they should be using API pricing and are just pissed that, essentially, an all-you-can-eat buffet is not allowing them to back their pickup truck up to the table and fill it— but the throttling complaints are real and valid. Unfortunately I don't know that there's any solution here other than just toughing it out until they can get more GPUs.
It's sort of fascinating, because it seems like for all the complaints about Silicon Valley and AI in particular being a place of irrational exuberance, actually Anthropic was too cautious and if anything should've spent more willy-nilly on hardware. I think a lot of founders, rightly or wrongly, will take away "spend, spend, spend!' from this fiasco.
It also kinda slams the door on the "AI is a bubble!" people. Anthropic is pretty severely supply-constrained at the moment, the demand is there and gobbling up every CPU cycle available, that's not what happens in a bubble.
They'd probably be losing less goodwill if they'd openly privileged existing subscribers over newcomers, and I'm saying that as a newcomer. People whine when they feel rugpulled, a new subscriber who doesn't know what the limits feel like yet will probably be more forgiving/adjust their workflow to ration sensibly. Understandable if it's not their first priority given everything else they've got going on, though.
I do not agree with veganism as a moral standard. If it is your personal moral stance, that is fine. If you think humans eating meat is inherently immoral, I don’t want to deal with you, you’re hopeless. Vegan ideology behaves more like a sect of evangelical Christianity than a dietary choice.
Veganism is better for the environment, but claiming that it's a morally superior choice ignores cultural and economic factors that make people eat animal products.
It is not inherently better for the environment. That is the thing. When you begin trying to explain that local, sustainably sourced animal protein is better for the environment than imported plant proteins that are farmed 3,500 miles away using slave labor, they start tuning you out. Down is better for the environment than polyester stuffing, leather is better for the environment than pleather. We should work on making animal agricultural practices more sustainable instead of trying to shame everyone into eating plant products that are also farmed unethically and unsustainably.
Preface: I'm not a vegan, I eat meat and cheese and eggs and fish and stuff. I'm wearing a leather belt and boots. I just try to be honest about the true cost here.
Local is irrelevant for most protein products. Land use, water use, feed conversion, methane production, and general operations give beef an enormous carbon footprint even if it came next door. Peas shipped from across the world are negligible. Shipping is an issue because of the phenomenal amount of it we do, not because it's not incredibly efficient per unit weight/volume. Perishables like fresh berries that are transported by air freight are an environmental factor, but aren't exactly a vegan thing.
Yes, an enormous number of goods, including things like soy and beans, are produced using inhumane labour standards. Most soy and corn is grown to feed livestock, to produce less food than went in, not vegans. And slaughterhouses, meat packers, and fisheries are hardly working environments free of labour abuses and exploitation.
Leather is not unambiguously better for the environment than synthetic materials. Raising cattle uses a lot of land and water, and if you're going to argue that leather's just a byproduct of cattle farming for meat and dairy, then you can just as well argue that plastics are just a byproduct of fossil fuel extraction. If you say that purchasing plastics still subsidizes the fossil fuel industry, purchasing leather subsidizes the cattle industry. And aside from raising cattle, the tanning process isn't exactly sunshine and rainbows. A full lifecycle comparison could put PVC as less harmful than leather (though it isn't clear-cut), and newer animal-free options like mushroom leather are almost certainly less harmful than either.
Transitioning to sustainable practices, even aside from animal welfare, is expensive. Farmers aren't using vast quantities of water, clearing forests, and dumping waste into waterways for the love of the game, it's so they can make more product to sell, which is a huge part of how animal products are so cheap and plentiful. Your vision still involves a massive reduction in availability and consumption of animal products, something that animal rights activists, who are commonly vegans, actively work towards.
I agree with you that a sustainable future in agriculture will still involve animals and animal products, but for now I reckon vegans are pushing harder in the right directions than basically anyone else.
*grabs america by the shoulders* we have got to lock the fuck in. south asia and the middle east are running goddamn circles around us. we have got to come up with a more dangerous way of cooking food now or we can kiss these quarter finals goodbye
My take on the 'private taxi for your burrito' discourse is that, for most people*, learning how to cook is really not that hard, especially compared to e.g. learning how cars or taxes work, and if you have some big weepy self-justifying rant about how you have to spend $400 a week on doordash and ubereats, because you're just so exhausted and broken and something something capitalism, I'm sure as shit not going to take your talk about revolution seriously because you'll obviously give up and start blaming everyone but yourself at the first sign of difficulty.
*-yes, yes, some people are disabled, or live in food deserts or have tiny little apartments with only a microwave or whatever. But most people don't.
No matter how lefty your politics are there's a minimum-viable level of just, competency and functionality and ability to handle difficult things required, that you can't just ideology away. And a lot of the stupider complaints about capitalism are basically "Why wasn't I born a prince/ss with the world catering to my every whim and need?" disguised as rabble-rousing. You do have to actually exist in reality. Ideology follows that.
Yup. If you really wanted to cook, you absolutely can do it in a hotel room, on a budget, and there’s plenty of people on Reddit who will explain it to you or help you figure out how to make it work with your particular food avoidances (rice or potatoes will probably do you for most of your calories). There’s many widely available cookbooks too. If you live in a food desert, get one grocery taxi for the week ffs instead of three burrito taxis per day.
So yup, if you just absolutely have to have burrito taxis, it’s a you problem, and you certainly don’t have the capability to do revolution.
what is the functional difference between "private taxi for your burrito" and "drive to burrito place to purchase dinner and then drive back from it" other than the writhing contempt
There's nothing wrong with getting food delivered if it's within your budget. People do that, it's fine, whatever. The thing being objected to is when people whine about how expensive it is to get a wide array of food delivered, and also whine about how cooking is just impossible, and how it's a conspiracy between their employers and the delivery apps to keep them poor and desperate for work because there's simply no way to feed yourself if you're not getting a private taxi for your burrito ten times a week.
there, you just did it again! "there's nothing wrong with getting food delivered but you shouldn't have a private taxi for your burrito"
also I have literally never seen "private taxi for your burrito" invoked in a way that suggests moderate use of delivery service is fine and it's only aimed at people who use it too much
also where is the writhing contempt for a private taxi for your pizza? pizza delivery has been a thing forever! somehow it escaped this notion entirely!
I get food delivered sometimes, all the "private taxi for your burrito" framing does is highlight that it's a luxury, not a necessity. It's not even about using it "too much," if you can afford it and you want to then fine. If you can't afford it then I'm not going to have much sympathy.
My take on the 'private taxi for your burrito' discourse is that, for most people*, learning how to cook is really not that hard, especially compared to e.g. learning how cars or taxes work, and if you have some big weepy self-justifying rant about how you have to spend $400 a week on doordash and ubereats, because you're just so exhausted and broken and something something capitalism, I'm sure as shit not going to take your talk about revolution seriously because you'll obviously give up and start blaming everyone but yourself at the first sign of difficulty.
*-yes, yes, some people are disabled, or live in food deserts or have tiny little apartments with only a microwave or whatever. But most people don't.
No matter how lefty your politics are there's a minimum-viable level of just, competency and functionality and ability to handle difficult things required, that you can't just ideology away. And a lot of the stupider complaints about capitalism are basically "Why wasn't I born a prince/ss with the world catering to my every whim and need?" disguised as rabble-rousing. You do have to actually exist in reality. Ideology follows that.
Yup. If you really wanted to cook, you absolutely can do it in a hotel room, on a budget, and there’s plenty of people on Reddit who will explain it to you or help you figure out how to make it work with your particular food avoidances (rice or potatoes will probably do you for most of your calories). There’s many widely available cookbooks too. If you live in a food desert, get one grocery taxi for the week ffs instead of three burrito taxis per day.
So yup, if you just absolutely have to have burrito taxis, it’s a you problem, and you certainly don’t have the capability to do revolution.
what is the functional difference between "private taxi for your burrito" and "drive to burrito place to purchase dinner and then drive back from it" other than the writhing contempt
There's nothing wrong with getting food delivered if it's within your budget. People do that, it's fine, whatever. The thing being objected to is when people whine about how expensive it is to get a wide array of food delivered, and also whine about how cooking is just impossible, and how it's a conspiracy between their employers and the delivery apps to keep them poor and desperate for work because there's simply no way to feed yourself if you're not getting a private taxi for your burrito ten times a week.
Google mapsing something and realizing it was within eyesight makes me feel like a baby monkey raised in a box of screens by an eccentric 20th century scientist.
Surprise! You’ve been Isekai’d into a D&D World… but it’s specifically a 3.5 Edition D&D world and due to a weird Glitch in the system you have been assigned not just a Base Class, but also one of that edition’s weird and wacky Prestige Class as well! Spin this wheel to see what you got!
(I added a short little summary for each Class explaining the basic gist of it. Although obviously you can also look them up to get more detailed info)
So…how are you feeling?
HELL YEAH THIS IS THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME
This class is perfect for me! (complimentary)
This is pretty cool!
Not bad but… could be better
Some parts of this sounds GREAT and some sound TERRIBLE
I’m pretty sure I’m gonna die but at least I’ll be cool as hell until then
Well, I’m gonna hate being this Class but at least I’m gonna survive
I feel utterly indifferent about my Class
This class is perfect for me… (derogatory)
This isn’t good for me, but… could be worse
Yeah, this sucks
OH MY GOD THIS IS HORRIBLE I AM GONNA BE MISERABLE AND THAN I’LL DIE
Not sure it's worth it to put the effort into getting onto a private torrent tracker. The wait times for redacted interviews are reportedly measured in weeks, trackers like torrentleech only accept people sporadically, lots of private trackers require interview processes that rely on references from /other/ private trackers, etc.
The amount of media I've been straight up unable to find on public trackers is miniscule.
I would be fucked for music without Redacted, thankfully I got an invite more than 7 years ago. I would find it much more annoying to download movies without passthepopcorn, which I’ve been on for twice that long.
I need a “humans are space orcs” thing where all sentient species are weird like that, but in their own unique ways
And a lot of them are aware of this (like we are when we make these “humans are space orcs” stories)
Maybe one species enjoys getting bit by something equivalent to mosquitoes. Maybe one actively avoids the hospitable places on their planet because it’s boring without a challenge. You get the gist.
I want to see a bunch of aliens (+humans) sitting around a table talking about how their own species is a bunch of freaks
The thing about "humans are space orcs" is it was originally conceived of as a response to science fiction tropes in which every alien species had its own special thing except humans, whose special thing was either Most Generic, Most Adaptable, or Most Je Ne Sais Quoi. Like, in a lot of science fiction, Klingons are Honorable Warriors, Vulcans are Logical Scientists, Romulans are Cunning Strategists, and humans are all of the above in a way that leaves us slightly less good than any of them at their shtick but better overall and able to triumph because of our lack of specialization and the assumption that we are, somehow, just destined to be the best. See this scene from Enterprise for what I'm talking about. There's a similar scene in Mass Effect where Mordin talks about how humans are more variable and adaptable and less predictable than all the other races in that setting, which is super annoying if you know anything about how much our species is defined by the genetic bottleneck we suffered during the Ice Age -- the generic bottleneck that has left us all so genetically similar to each other that we can do crazy things like donate blood and organs to each other, things other species can't tolerate.
@prokopetz proposed that humans ought to get something special of our own that isn't just "We are the bestest and specialist in some generic way that feels like a vague and unsettling metaphor for American superiority and manifest destiny amidst all the other cultures of the world," and settled on space orcs because "Pursuit predators with freakish endurance" was the ecological niche we occupied during our own evolutionary history up until we started doing the civilization thing. The assumption from the start was that every other sci-fi or fantasy species would each be freaks in their own way, and the point of humans are space orcs was to let us be our own sort of freak, too.
People who expanded on the humans are space orcs stories immediately turned it into a reason to write little stories where humans are the biggest freaks or the only freaks and we are, in fact, the specialest most manifest destinyest je ne sais quoi-laden metaphors for the superiority of American culture over all the other cultures of the world. I hate it I hate it I hate it.
Which is to say you've reinvented the point of humans are space orcs from first principles. That's pretty cool.
I think my mistake was failing to appreciate just how readily "humans have exceptionally high cardiovascular endurance due to our real-world evolutionary history as specialised persistence predators" could be twisted around into "humans have superior Will to Power", which is the other problematic special niche humans have historically been assigned in popular science fiction.
this post leverages both the "ancients humans were primarily/uniquely reliant on persistence hunting" and the "humans suffered a recent major genetic bottleneck" hypotheses, both of which AFAICT are pretty controversial and are relied on as scientific fact on sites like tumblr and bluesky, despite being rather contentious
in fact i think humans are kind of remarkably unspecialized, beyond being highly social tool-users, and we have good (though certainly not ironclad) reasons to expect other highly social tool-users to be similarly unspecialized. the problem is perhaps less that humans need their own thing, it's that Planet of Hats-style worldbuilding is dumb, and klingons and vulcans and whatnot ought to be as diverse and adaptable humans within the context of their respective evolutionary and environmental differences. but for doylist reasons involving the structure of popular science fiction, that kind of worldbuilding is rare.
I had this little one-page thing I made to prompt making up alien species which I should probably find and touch up and publish on itch or something. It started with a 6x6 table of different axes along which space faring species might vary, within which I tried to include some things we usually think of as correlated (so lifespan and maturation rate as separate axes, or parental investment in offspring vs r/k reproductive strategies, or ease of forming social bonds and preferred social group size). You'd roll like 4-6 of these axes off this table, then roll 2d6 to determine where each species falls on these axes, including humans. So if you roll a 12 on lifespan for humans, it turns out that humans are an outlier on that axis and most spacefarers are shorter-lived, etc. Then from these rolls you can roughly describe the ecology that might've lead to this combination of traits, use it as a jumping off point for world building.
(I never actually got around to it but I also wanted to have some kind of system for playing out like a history of the multi species society involving these but with the primary units being the rise and fall of various cross-species organisations and polities, rather than treating species membership = civilisation = culture = polity.)
Once knew a guy from LARP who told a story about when he had first gotten his hands on chainmail and was getting used to wearing it and maintaining mobility and balance with the weight of it (it was heavy stuff). So he started wearing it under his clothes when he was out running errands and stuff to practice for when he had to wear it in mock combat.
Then one night he was coming home late and got mugged by a dude with a knife.
Apparently the look on the dude's face was amazing when he went in to gut the guy for his wallet and found out he was wearing medieval armor under his hoodie.
So, you know. Pretty good argument for wearing it under streetclothes!
Fun story, i talked to two people who worked at a convenience store in the Kingdom of An Tir (SCA medieval society, An Tir's territory is WA, BC, northern ID, and OR, and in the past included AB and SK).
This convenience store was notorious for getting robbed in the evenings one or two times a month, so nobody wanted to work the night shift. The one fellow, he desperately needed a job, but he was also learning how to be a heavy fighter (sword & shield) in the SCA, so he had just finished a chainmail shirt, and asked if he could wear it under his uniform shirt, so long as it didn't show. The manager was just happy that he had someone willing to work nights, and said yeah, sure, so long as it doesn't show.
Guy starts working the night shifts, things are fine, he's getting used to everything, then late one night, a guy in a hoodie comes in, and asks for a pack of cigarettes. Our guy turns to get the pack, and feels a thump on his back. Turning around, scowling, he demands, "Did you just hit me??"
Guy in the hoodie widens his eyes, goes ash-gray, and faints. Clerk can't budge from behind the counter in case this is an attempt to distract and rob. But the guy remains out coold. Confused, our clerk calls the emergency services. EMTs come along and start checking out the patient, who is still out cold on the floor. While they're doing that, one of them comes up to the counter and asks what happened, exactly.
Our man tells the EMT, "Well, he just came in, looked around, came up to the counter and asked for a specific pack of cigarettes, so I turned to get them--"
And he demonstrates by turning his back to the EMT, who suddenly starts shouting, "--Sir! Sir! Are you okay? Don't move!"
Our man feels the EMT groping his upper back, and then the EMT asks,
"What the hell are you WEARING?"
"A chainmail shirt. I have to get used to the weight of it, so I wear it a lot. Why? Is something wrong?"
"You have a KNIFE in your back!"
"Uhh...no, I don't? I mean, I don't feel hurt? He only, like, punched me or something. There's no knife back there--I mean, I'd KNOW if there was a knife back there, right?"
EMT grabs the knife and pushes on his shoulder, yanking it out. "THIS knife! I'm going to need to examine your back!"
So they manage to get him out of his uniform shirt and out of the hauberk and out of the linen shirt under it (because chainmail bites suck, plus it's not nearly as fun as a Brazilian waxjob, because my SCA friend was hairy)...and it turns out he only had a very small scratch from the tip of the knife...which had gotten lodged in the riveted links.
...That was why the guy fainted. He'd stabbed the store clerk, who had turned around angrily, knife still lodged in his back.
Manager was so happy to have hired the guy, as that was the first time in like eight or nine months that the store hadn't been successfully robbed.
I Hope You Get To Live Your Entire Life As A Human Being
I thought this was going to be a review of my time with Santa Ragione's Horses, the controversial art game recently banned from Steam and the Epic Store. To some extent, this will be that but after playing the game I think the game itself is maybe not too interesting when compared to the situation surrounding it.
which is to say that a game about pressures of authoritarianism is fine but watching forces outside of the right align with captial and champion the decision to ban it from storefronts is perhaps even more telling than anything in the game. nominally lefitist gamers or vaguely progressive academics have found ways to decide that this game is simply something that should be dismissed. in doing so they align with the forces of mass capital and censorship, painting a picture of How This So Of Thing Is Allowed To Happen.
Horses is a violent game. it is a game about participating in torture and slavery. it is a game that deploys sexual violence with mixed clarity. but I think it deserves to exist and so watching as certain voices have emerged to contend that worthiness has been frustrating. so I played it and we're gonna talk about it.
but we're also gonna talk about how we talk about games...
In Horses, players control Anselmo. He is a young man working on a farm for two weeks who discovers early on that the horses on the farm are actually person who have been captured and forced to wear horse masks. They are, according to the farmer, mostly people caught having sex in the woods of his property and throughout the game Anselmo (and therefore the player) will not only tend to regular farm tasks but also the discipline of these horses.
This involves a variety of situations. In some cases, the farmer flogs the horses and asks you to clean their wounds. After one horses is found fornicating with another, in what's perhaps the game's mode defining scene of violence, Anselmo must hold the offending horse's legs open while the farmer castrates him. Afterwards, the player must quickly stitch the wound. Later, this horse refuses to work in the field and while you can try offering carrots to help them move, you are eventually forced to strike them with a club.
this is not every day. some days you wake up, set wood on a stump and chop some logs for the fire. maybe you prepare some food for the dog. functionally, which is to say in the act of play, Horses is a sort of first-person adventure game mixed with a farm sim. click item, click on thing to use itself with. sometimes this is normal, in other moments this mundane user experience is used to enact violence on the horses.
Beyond these acts that the player participates in, there's a variety of sexual violences that are implied. A sick female horse is tended to by a doctor who eventually takes her into a shed where he seems to rape her to death. this is not a kind game but the violence is at lest deployed with some kind of purpose. as players gain familiarity with the routine on the farm, learning the layout and how to do tasks, they similarly acclimate to the presence of extreme violence.
some critics, like megan farokhmanesh at Wired, have questioned if this violence (particularly the gendered sexual violence) is worth having. others have adopted a different approach; this is a game that invites comparison to a work like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and so the comparison goes "Well, there was worse in that movie" or perhaps even "there's worse stuff in many films" and so this violence, while not glossed over, is placed into a wider art context. many mediums have works more gratuitous that Horses! and the presentation of the violence, while gross, is not as explicit.
where you fall on the spectrum here is a personal decision. farokhmanesh is correct to say that much of Horses violence is deployed casually and perhaps without care. on the other hand, that casual nature is arguably the point. this is a story about slavery and sex and denigration. it is about the ways in which powerful people turn their enemies into something other than human beings.
does it all work? I'm unsure. the violence is neither explicit enough to truly shock and the content so broadly metaphorical that Horses message about authoritarian powers and how they cow us into accepting their grosses decisions is perhaps so wide reaching that it lacks a certain bite. regardless, this is a game which has been banned from many store fronts that contain games which often render up scenes of violence that are more detailed, more graphically raw than anything that exists in Horses. is it good? bad? that might not matter considering what else you can find on Steam with a cursory glance.
and yet, the conversation about the game is revealing. many people who are not of the right wing have found ways to decide that yes this game is somehow EXCEPTIONAL to all the other violent stories our medium has and contrived many ways to justify aligning with storefronts in their decision making. and this, I think is maybe more interesting that Horses itself as the game is a rather flat work.
One scene at the center of the discussion is one that Santa Ragione themselves calls attention to in explaining why they think Steam initially turned down the game. A few days into the story, after we've had time to be around the horses and understand the situation, a businessman and his daughter arrive at the farm.
the horses are stood before the pair, auction-like, and the daugther chooses one to ride. the player guides the horse (holding it by the reins) around a corral as the daughter rides upon its back. in the original version of the game, the daughter was supposedly a child. this has been changed in the final release where she is an adult.
but (i think correctly) Santa Ragione identified this scene as one that drew the ire of Valve. even now, as a scene that doesn't exist it seems to be used by some folks to justify Horses removal from the store. through a game of telephone, the story has spread that this is a game of pornography and perhaps even one with an underage character in a scene. this is not the truth but it has led some folks, even some who previously rallied to defend "problematic" games during their struggles with payment processors like Visa, which led to a decision at the time to delist NSFW content. in that case, itchio was out of line but here? well, maybe Valve's in the right! Or so the thinking goes.
and yet, I think this scene is perhaps the most important in the entire game insofar as what is happening in the text. The daughter terlls Anselmo that she KNOWS these horses are people. this is not merely some avant-garde absurdist twist; it is textual that the horses are human beings. they are slaves. she knows this. her father knows it. the priest that visits the farm knows. but it's okay.
you see, these people are degenerates! and maybe even if they don't don't deserve this treatment, they have dangerous ideas. we're never told why those ideas are but it doesn't matter. they are different, they are "others" and because of that... because of the implied deviancy... it is okay for them to be mistreated. likewise, although games are art... because Horses has become to some folks an example of some kind of degenerate art... we shouldn't worry about the storefront bans.
"I hope you get to live your entire live as a human being!" the daughter says. It is chilling, a threat without even meaning it to be one. For the moment, Anselmo is a "human being" in the eyes of the farmer but there is a suggestion that this could change. For whatever reason, he could become something else. Not a human being. And therefore subject to the same violence as all the other horses.
for many of us, this is threat we live with. to be trans in america is to constantly skirt the line between "human being" and something else, for instance. many people in my life still see my humanity but there's always the threat that could stop. that the propaganda will take hold and I will not get to live my life as a human being. so it goes to people of color, people with mental health issues. and more.
you are not always assured of your status as a human being. and in a less drastic example of this arbitrariness... you are not always assured that the thing you create, the art you make will be seen as art.
for many people, Horses is not art. and the discussions about its worthiness have, in some ways, the same tone as the discussions about the worthiness of someone's status as "human being." and it is in this that I think Horses has proved interesting. more so than anything that happens inside the game.
A curious blip in this conversation was the re-emergence of a voice whose weight in game's related discussions had certainly waned over the last decade: Ian Bogost. Known best for making Cow Clicker and embodying the kind of presence one might expect from someone wrapped in the warm cloak of academia, Bogost popped his head up first to debate market factors surrounding Horses ban before falling back to one of his tried and true lines of inquiry. that the game was, unlike games he made and he liked, not a serious work.
"Q-Up and Candy Crush, say, are more serious works of game than Horses (which seems fine and even innocuous!) or whatever embarrassing anime RPG trash is on Steam or Nintendo EShop," he said, referencing the clever competitive coin-flipping game
Many of us rolled our eyes but I am going to talk about it briefly because in relation to Horses I do think Bogost's bait is worth taking for what it reveals about the situation surrounding the game. First, I'm gonna do a very briefly history lesson. In the 2010s, there was a growing emergence of alt games and particularly queer games that heralded the growth of alternate critics.
I was one of them so I feel qualified to talk about this but we're talking writers like Lana Polanksy, Stephen Beirne, and in more mainstreams spaces this is where someone like Austin Walker emerges as well. It was a varied coalition of writers who had a holistic and emotionally-driven approach to their criticism. games as experiences synthesized by players living in a context similarly made by people living in their own circumstances.
In response to this, Bogost and some other tenured sorts start to write op-ed pieces extolling the power of games systems. Games, to people like Bogost and New York University Game Center's Frank Lantz, are only valuable for the systems they contain and the results of those systems. They embark in their writings to dismiss "childish make-believe, imaginary dragons, badly written dialogue." They stress games as *processes* and the only valuable narratives that emerge come from the collision of these processes. you don't need characters, you need mechanisms.
note that in the context of the 2010s what Bogost was doing and to some extent Lantz was doing was slipping briefly out of comfortable tenured spaces to essentially deride games made by marginalized creators and criticism made by women, blacks, and queers. we pushed back because why the hell wouldn't we?
This leads to what some people call "The Debate That Never Took Place" wherein many of those young alt-writers formulate writing in opposition to what's being written ultimately by comfortable white men with good jobs. Not all this writing exists but it is where terms like "ludocentrism" and "ludofundamentalism" are coined. Ways of describing a mode of thinking, born primarily from academia, which the opposition bloc finds too narrow to describe what games are doing and, importantly, why audiences enjoy them.
All this fades away as a gaming is eaten by things like Roblox completely rebuilds the landscape but Bogost seems to have held onto that position and I think it's interesting to consider and talk about re: Horses because something we failed to grapple with at the time of The Debate That Never Happened" was how ludocentrism is a chiefly neoliberal idea. one which easily aligns with censorship.
It's not a big leap to go from "games are only systems" to "markets will fix all of society's problems." We all understood this maybe but didn't quite attack for the foolishness it is. Because this urge, this impulse ironically aligns Bogost (a neoliberal professor) with forces of censorship and to some extent fascism. funny how that works.
Time and time again over the years when formalists talk about their derision towards games stories, this comes hand in hand with what is frankly a kind of racism. this is particularly true with Bogost, who often slips into orientalist jabs.
Bogost cannot help, for instance, tossing a jab at JRPGs often and I think it's important to identify that for what it is. Bogost doesn't simply believe that only certain kinds of games are games; he also believes that only certain kinds of developers can make those games.
there are people and there are fuckin' horses, y 'know?
developers are people like him or Lantz. They are men, they are white, and they are American. This makes them better designers, smart people, and therefore The Only Real Designers. Atlantic writers and such.
(the difference here BTW is that Lantz at least makes good games.)
understanding his opposition to Horses becomes an easier task viewed in this light. He's not still simply opposed to story in games; he fundamentally believes on some innate level that the artists at Santa Ragione are not worth the default kind of respect that he gives to certain peers and implicitly deserved to have their game banned.
They made the wrong kind of game! is it even a game? This emotional garbage? Couldn't this have been a spreadsheet?
Perhaps it could have but I think that playing Horses also reveals the ways in which that could have hobbled the story. You could totally make a suitable fascistic exercise in Excel but this does remove you from certain pressures that make Horses effective. proximity to the violence being done, proximity to potential danger that the farmer might enact on Anselmo. sound, music, movement. the theater of it all, that mix of sickening shock and comedy. breath in your ears.
the undeniable complicity of holding someone down as they are tortured. holding the button, waiting for your accomplice to bring the sheers close. close enough to cut it's coming soon just hold the button don't let him squirm at least make it clean. that's not easily turned into an abstract system. to hold a button in order to hold a prisoner down creates a more active and unambiguous participation in Horses' violence which serves the text.
and so in discounting these things —for instance, our multi-day bonding time with Linda the Horse (a character in a story!) shifting as we are forced to assist in violence against her—Bogost's neoliberalism sees him easily align with storefronts over artists. he aligns himself with capital over labor. and he deploys formalist language to the same end as he always has: to police creatives who are not "like him." he doesn't resent the market forces that led to Horses lack of support because he mostly agrees with it.
This is a key factor to discuss with Horses because there's a lot of people out there who are not devilishly right wing that are nevertheless finding ways to contort themselves into positions that defend this game's banning from storefronts.
the people who railed against itchio's payment processors missteps a while back seem fine with Valve axing Horses because it at one point contained something they maybe thought was icky which doesn't even exist in the text anymore. a former games writer defends to the death the decision simply because stores have the right (they're not doing anything illegal maaaan!) to remove whatever they want from shelves. a university professor aligns because this is happening not to people like him but people he doesn't respect. these are not villainous or "bad" people but they all reached the same bad conclusion
and suddenly, this game about fascism and complicity is interesting not for the violence or sexual content but because it provided a case study for how a range of people—nominally online young progressives, academics, others—will find ways to say "oh, well it's okay this time." when it comes to censorship.
Thinking about this helps underscore why I think Horses biggest stumbles come when trying to explain why the farmer is doing what he is doing to these people. We are told that this is an inherited violence; he is doing to his horses what his own father made him do to a family dog. He is pressured by forces of religion and sexual repression. some nights, he puts on a mask of his own and hovers around, particularly observing the sexual violence his dog Fido commits. her leers, chastity belt snug and secure.
I think Horses isn't terribly interesting when it comes to trying to track down where this cycle began and how much a victim the farmer could be in his own right. and I think the stumbling is interesting to consider when viewed side by side with the variety of ways in which certain people have decided to acquiesce to Vale and Epic. they don't need much reason! sometimes the reason for their support is as simple as "well, they're allowed!"
There doesn't need to be much of a reason for anyone to blindly align with power or else participate in violence. Many people who think themselves fundamentally decent will find all kinds of way to justify their behaviors. In Horses, this can be as simple as finding an excuse to lie when a priest asks if you believe in god. The priest clearly holds sway and is an ally of the farmer; if you say you don't believe will that change how they think of you? Will it make them turn on you?
Horses is full of these little justifications. I'm just lying to keep safe. I'm just playing along until the moment where I can do something else. I don't believe in this stuff but I don't wanna end up like one of *those* people. And in the discussion around the game, we see small versions of these arguments and justifications.
They technically have the authority to ban this game. Well, geez I heard from a friend online that there's some secret pedo shit in their. Oh, that's not true. Okay but there's still a reference to a blowjob and that's icky so I'm glad we banned it. Hmm, actually this game is not as worthy of consideration as the mobile powerhouses that steal money from children and grandparents alike. Why? Well, you see it simply is. I know because I'm a professor of this stuff!
The truth, the content doesn't matter. There's just a powerful market force and the many ways we decide to justify the decisions it makes. Be it casual moral judgements, legal technicality whataboutism, or anything else. People don't really need much reason at all. They'll invent any of several! and if they're doing this about a mid-quality art game, you have to ask... what else will they do it for?
and it's through *this* arrangement of circumstances that Horses becomes something else, something more interesting and more potent. life around the game imitates the absurdity within. oh, we put those people in masks because they were fuckin' freaks anyway. oh, it's fine to ban this game because it made me uncomfortable somehow. so it goes for art and beyond. and it's not just the fascists who will do it but the liberals and even some leftists too.
and more than anything, as I watch them align themselves in the way they have...
I hope these people get to live their entire lives as human beings.
computers can do more computations in a millisecond than they could 30 years ago. but in terms of responsiveness, it's not clear to me that they're faster. there's so much input latency everywhere. and i don't have the old machine on me atm to check this, but i feel like windows 3.1 took less time to boot than my phone
i do think different standards is part of the story. typing using a monitor with a 30Hz refresh rate was a painful amount of input latency for me in 2020. but also, half of companies are either de facto monopolies or it's super fucking annoying for users (who aren't exactly customers usually) to switch to competitors, so you optimize the bare minimum so your users don't get to the point ragequit and go somewhere else. you make software used by hundreds of millions of people and their wasted time doesn't show up on balance sheets, developer salaries do.
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