Adding a reboot button is ONLY necessary if the game isn’t made correctly. There is otherwise no reason to ever need to restart the game. I would see the addition of a restart option as lazy or an admission of failure by the dev.

almost nobody has put an actual maximiser in a game.

Turn based games would certainly have one. Generally it’s easier to create an AI that maximizes utility for the AI, it’s more difficult to tune it to not trounce the player lol.

This reminds me of how L4D does have that sort of indirect dynamic AI that spawns zombies based on the player’s behavior. If the players have a lot of ammo and health, or are going too slow, the game cranks up the threat. If you’re barely hanging on, the game holds back. I guess that’s not quite adversarial though, more like the AI is trying to maximize the players’ perception of a fun/fair challenge.

Yeah, certainly, sorry if that wasn’t clear. Up above I tried to stipulate that I was speaking from a game theory perspective.

And yeah, you can model the AI in a game in whichever way is most useful. I said as long as they have utility functions that differ from the player(s), but then you also can recursively define games in terms of winning games.

Ex. the famous case of the US deliberately losing battles to not give away that they had cracked the German cipher. Each battle could be modeled as a game, and the war could be modeled in terms of battles.

Similarly, a single room in wolfenstein could present an contained “game”, the outcome of which is applicable to which ending you get in the larger “game” (I haven’t played it), and thus the AI would be agents at one level, but state/strategy at another.

Depends if you define game ais as “agents”, otherwise your definition of game only allows multiplayer games.

AIs are agents when they have their own utility to maximize that differs from other agents (including the player).

their “win condition” is overwhelming you with dirt and hiding it in weird places.

Is that a thing? Does the map create more dirt as a function of the player’s actions? Does the player need to account for this and adjust their strategy to counter it? That would change my categorization, yes.

coop breaks your definition too

It depends. If all players have the same motive and there are no competing agents, then it’s a simulation. If players have different motives, then it’s a game. If players compete against AI agents, then it’s a game.

Maybe a better definition of “game” is needed

The formal definition of a game is:

K_a, {x_K}K∈K_a, x,K_i, {≻K}K∈K_i

I’m arguing that if the size of K_a==1 then it’s not a game, but that page is generous:

For games with a single coalition of action, the set of all situations may be taken to be the set of strategies of this unique coalition of action, and no further mention is made of strategies. Such games are therefore called non-strategic games. All remaining games, those with two or more coalitions of action, are called strategic games.

Which would include a person standing in a room doing nothing as a game. I’m saying that’s not a game, hope we agree lol.

Well that’s not a good argument lol. That’s like saying doing quantum physics is just writing a bunch of shapes on paper and using words that most people don’t understand, so it’s basically the same as what a toddler does every day.

Most FPS games require developing a strategy or skill in order to reach the win condition. If it’s multiplayer, then the strategy development and execution require social interaction or deduction. It fits the definition of a “game” from a game theory perspective. There is more than one agent, they each have win conditions, and their actions prompt reactions from each other.

But this doesn’t, it’s a simulation. I assume it has an end condition, but the strategy is just “move towards it”. Maybe a game like Satisfactory is a more appropriate comparison. In both games you are making optimizations to move toward the end condition faster. You take actions, but there’s no competing agent with its own win condition responding to your actions.

Maybe there’s a compelling story to be had that the trailer is underplaying, idk. I don’t think Powerwash Simulator is hooking people with its story, though.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand why games like this are so successful lol. I guess it’s just the dopamine hits without the microtransactions? It’s not a “game”, though, not in a theoretical sense. More like busy work simulator.

Smaller makes it more expensive. I hope it’ll be under $1000, but I think I wouldn’t be surprised if it were $1200.

How does one even accidentally steal a texture someone else made?

The fact that you’re asking this is almost like…maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about? And should defer to an actual creative who does?

First off, it is a famously non trivial problem to compare every texture to every piece of art on the internet. It is trivial to add a bit of impercievable noise to deliberately foil even the best reverse image searching methods.

I think you may be taking for granted the number of artists and the level of autonomy they are given over their craft for a project of this complexity.

It’s actually more weird to me that you don’t understand why this is easy for a single dev to get away with. This is what happens when a studio trusts its artists to create something. No one is excusing it, but stop acting like Bungie did it on purpose. There’s no evidence of that. The only thing they’re guilty of is making a mediocre extraction shooter.

Roblox is making absolute bank. They have the resources to actually solve this if they wanted. They just believe the inevitable slap on the wrist will cost them less than they stand to make in the meantime.

Steam hardware has so far been pretty niche, though. If the user experience is smooth enough, a SM could replace many people’s xbox/playstation.

We’re like 5y into the PS5/XBSX, new games are jumping up to $70-100 each, and hardly any are platform exclusives. Msft have all but canceled the next Xbox, and if Sony tries to push the PS6 in a few years, I think there’s a world where a good chunk of people say nah.

And with the amount of attention Linux is getting from the win10 eol, we could be at the beginning of an historic inflection point in gaming.

Yes, and the best jokes are famously the ones you need to explain. Sometimes the audience is wrong and they need to be set straight.

Then Minecraft is what you’re looking for.

Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.

Can you explain why you would play a TTRPG if you’re not interested in role play? Seems like a battle sim like warhammer, or just a video game might be the thing you’re looking for.

As a DM, the cooperative story telling IS the interesting part. D&D has never been an airtight game system, it’s a bunch if hand waving to give just enough illusion of structure and randomness so you don’t feel like you’re just arbitrarily deciding everything yourselves. But at the end of the day, you are. The characters and story you’re left with is the only thing of value.

There are space games with procedural large scale galaxies to the point that the entire playerbase can only ever hope to see ~15% of the systems, but that’s why I put the >50% qualifier in there. That’s TOO big. Anyone can generate an effectively infinite procedural world, I want a large world.

When I had originally conceived of this, it was in the context of a pokemon MMO. You would have your home town, and as a trainer, or researcher, or rocket member, etc, you’d travel at a real-time pace akin to the show.

Alternative IP that it could work with are dragonball (imagine the playerbase on a months long search to find/fight over the dragonballs so they could awaken the dragon and make a wish to the devs), or Avatar (each player would have a chance to spawn in as a random bender. One player at any given time is the Avatar. Events happen to strengthen some benders and weaken others. Players make war and peace at will).

There would obviously be challenges in running these types of experiences, but currently it feels like the cost of standing up an MMO is so much that no one ever does anything interesting. Instead they just copy WoW.

I don’t consider NMS to be an MMO. If everyone went to the same location, at best, you’d most likely only see a handful of players you’re instanced with (up to 32 from what a cursory search gives me). That’s kinda the sad state of what passes for an MMO these days, but I don’t accept it. That’s not even a full raid group in WoW.

But yeah, you could squint and say that that otherwise effectively produces the experience I’m asking for. I am looking forward to LNF for sure.

I don’t think that means it didn’t work, I think that just means it’s not for everyone. I’m a firm believer that, “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. Small indie games take firm stances on their gameplay all the time, not every game is for everyone, and that’s ok, that’s how you get unique and interesting gameplay experiences. But that’s easy for and indie game to do because making an indie game is cheap.

MMOs have the unfortunate reality that they’re architecturally complex, and expensive to operate, and thus need to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible to justify their existence to investors. They don’t have the luxury of making the experience they want, which is why they all end up just copying WoW’s enshittified gameplay, but with less polish.

My hope is that this indie revolution we’re in expands to “large scale” multiplayer games. Not so massive that it’s prohibitively expensive to run, but not so small that it’s a ghost town. I think that’s when we’ll start to see interesting MMO experiences again.

WoW is objectively huge, but they made it feel tiny by putting fast travel options everywhere. I would guess that any two points in the world are no more than 5m from each other if routed perfectly.

I want there to exist one MMO where you “live” in a city, and traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to. Not because I want to make the trek, but because I want there to be a world just large enough that any one person has usually seen only ~1%, but the playerbase in entirety has seen >50%. I don’t know if any such game exists.

Hah, I had thought, well it’s not quite reincarnation, because you don’t come back as something new, you come back as yourself with the same memories. But I’m just noticing that it does seem like “the Big Problem” is very similar to what [my rudimentary understanding of] the Buddhist quest for transcendence is.

Rainworld

…but when you start the game, you are merely trying to survive and explore a living ecology full of hostile creatures. The game doesn’t care if you understand any of the lore, it doesn’t care if you “finish” the game, it’s just there to be experienced.

And you can build your own PC and peripherals, yet every aspect of the gaming industry is funded and driven by corporations. Always has been, and Linux gaming is no exception.

I specifically acknowledged the FOSS efforts to eliminate depenence on valve, I think it’s great, but even Bazzite uses the SteamDeck UI. Do you know if there’s a FOSS deck UI replacement that unifies all storefronts/repos, and works as smoothly? I want that to exist.

Steam is just objectively the smoothest linux gaming experience for the largest number of people right now. It’d be awesome if that wasn’t the case, but for now it is.