Seeing discourse on cohost design from people coming in from tumblr and a lot of it is like "Ah, but you see, cohost is designed this way on purpose! You gotta ask why you want those features to begin with!" and like that's great that's GENUINELY great I think cohost did a good job pushing things the other way with website design trends. There are some great decisions they've made to re...

Since everyone is doing their ... anti?? game design takes, let me do mine.

We'll start with the coldest take. Good Game Design accomplishes a Goal. I think that's... pretty universally uncontroversial? Like even if someone somehow disagreed, I don't think they'd say I was going out on much of a limb. But despite this, there is trouble!! Because not all goals are good goals and I feel like the majority of budding devs who go down the design rabbit hole start designing with two of the worst...

There has always been something weird to me that in a lot of the radicalized lefty spaces I hang in, that there is this weird resistance to a lot of bigger open source project solutions. But it's not necessarily that a program is OPEN SOURCE, but that it is made by FOSS minded people. Style a website or a brand like it's a tech startup and no one bats an eye. Instead. As long as it's... corporate enough. Which seems like... really effed up values?

And like okay I get it to some level. FOSS peo...

There is a bitter sweet feeling when I watch a Japanese wrestler or a Luchador get signed with WWE or AEW. With exception (there are more than a few. Classically Rey Mysterio and more modernly, Asuka), you often realize their best work is behind them. But you also know someone is getting a big payday. You can't work super hard forever so slowing down in the places that pay more seems much preferrable.

But it often feels like tourism, or getting food at all you can eat buffet. Sure it's stea...

This seems to be the type of cranky ass old person take that cohost loves so lets go.

There are a lot of shitty things about gaming. Exploitative and predatory micro transactions, terrible DRM schemes, addictive but shallow gameplay loops to feed point 1... But most problems we have in gaming are inevitable. Not that they can't be fixed, or overcome, but no one person or company could stop these things from initially happening. Ideas born from market forces.

... But Achievements, for something so unfortunately ubiquitous now... are kinda a weird idea? That we needed a... platform specific list of arbitrary accomplishments with their own, universal sound and popup message? It's easy to imagine a world where that didn't happen and arguably, it happened the only time it could happen.

When the 360 came out, we didn't have any idea what online services should look like. What did it mean to have a profile and friends on your console? Microsoft had an idea for "Gamer Score" (which, while it is a still existing niche is... something only weirdos talk about now) and needed a way to give that relevant, but neither of these things were inevitable. Nintendo still doesn't have them (Notably actually saying 'Achievements don't actually solve any kind of problem games have') and Sony seemed to only do it since it was a point used against them in the console wars. If Microsoft never added them, as they blindly stumbled around trying to figure out early online systems, it's easy to assume that they never end up happening. Despite this. Achievements are very much in the popular consciousness. And they suck.