Well its not as bad as RAM or GPUs. You can still get almost e.g. 28 TB disk for around $1k which makes it a comparatively affordable hobby considering what you can end up spending on many others.
Imagine if there was a lift to the peak of Mt. Everest. That existing alone would undermine the achievement of having reached said peak.
Also, it's very hard to get multiple difficulty settings right. It's much better to have cheats available to make the experience easier and learn to get better at the game through those.
I would respectfully disagree that playing a video game is equivalent to climbing the world's tallest mountain peak. Sometimes I want to play a game to experience the story.
If they climbed it without a wheelchair, it was easy mode, so not a tru achievement. If there's an easy mode, there can be a hard mode too. I thought higher difficulty modes are interesting because they make an impression of a bigger work and provide a bigger dopamine reward. If the enemy survives longer it also mean a rich gameplay.
There are many, many mountains to climb. Some are harder than others. Each doesn't need to have an escalator so everyone can climb it.
Developers have limited time and all features, including accessibility features, take away from that time. There are many games I never beat because they were difficult.
I don't want to be uncharitable but the Mt. Everest analogy is not that far away from directly justifying not adding accessibility features in order to satisfy the ego of specific gamers.
I agree with you that in some sense it undermines the achievement, but tending to the ego of players that feel undermined by the existence of accessibility features is not high in my hierarchy of values personally.
> Imagine if there was a lift to the peak of Mt. Everest. That existing alone would undermine the achievement of having reached said peak.
It would not undermine the achievement of reaching the peak by foot.
> Also, it's very hard to get multiple difficulty settings right. It's much better to have cheats available to make the experience easier and learn to get better at the game through those.
Somewhat agree there and I especially dislike "harder" difficulties that just bloat HP to the point of wasting your time. But you can also expose some of those cheats in the setting menu which makes them a kind of difficulty option except its up to the player to choose where they need help and they are not forced to choose between e.g. ultra-tight timing or more reasonable timing but your character also tells you all the solution to logic puzzles if you take more than a second to look at them (non-made up example).
The default state should be adult. Kid devices should have something special on setup that makes them kid devices.
Or even better, don't have anything like that at all anywhere other than in front of the screen. I really don't see how it is a good thing for a six year old to interact with the Internet in any way.
this is exactly what these weird operating system age tracking laws are codifying which is terrible. it forces consumer operating systems to become trusted computing bases that don't work for the consumer.
upgrading to adult content when a credential is provided at the protocol level rather than forcing the operating system to track the state means that consumer operating systems don't have to be secured against their own users.
It won't be only facebook in the long run. Once this works for facebook more and more sites will be pressured to use age verification by law. Once that works well enough it will probably come for all sites, even ones that don't really need it. Take a look at the cookie law and how people handled that to see a recent example.
I've spent a hot minute trying to summarise Mat Duggan and failing, so please forgive a link drop in service of not botching the cookie banner argument:
I hold values which lead to conflicting views and opinions, which i therefore hold lightly and attempt to balance. No action or inaction is a perfect solution to a wicked problem.
- yes, people should be free to do whatever they want with their computers
- yes, people should have the freedom to exercise their independent choices
- unfortunately, there is no such thing as independent choice (unless, maybe, you were already living as a hermit)
- it is ostrichism to pretend that zuckerberg (to use him as shorthand) has not unilaterally and unaccountably engineered society to his own ends
- society has shown considerable appetite to rein him (etc) in, for legitimate reasons
- i do not, generally, support banning harmful things when stakeholders exist who favour those things
- i also do not think that the existence of stakeholders who benefit should excuse all harm
- therefore, this ugly compromise is approximately no worse than the least bad course of action or inaction
Things are shit. We are in shit. For all of history, we have always been in some or other grade of shit. We can sometimes choose between different piles of shit, but "not being in shit" is not an option. I find horseshit less objectionable than catshit, and so do many others; so here we are, actively jumping into horseshit.
I still think it is a better idea to ban children from the Internet altogether, but without enforcement. Then the parents can decide and if things go south, the parents are to blame and not whoever runs a website.
The proper thing is to strictly outlaw kids using the internet. There is nothing of value for kids on the internet, and even if there were, there are technical means of allowing users to use applications without generalized and ungated internet access, for instance roblox could be distributed through an age vetted app (including vetting adults too), the app could get internet access but disallow general internet browsing to arbitrary hosts.
Linux is also ready to support age verification through systemd. Luckily, there are still distros without it, like Void Linux. I switched to it recently and now my media PC boots faster than my TV takes to turn on.
Why was this downvoted? Lennart Poettering/Systemd project didn't even think for a minute before implementing this with nobody asking for this. I thought we were supposed to have good discussions here instead of ganging up.
I'd be totally fine to solve this problem by banning children from the internet altogether. Not that I'd enforce this or anything. Just so no one other than the parents can be liable when things go wrong.
There's more and more evidence that internet access isn't healthy to have for children anyway.
But we don't put barbed wire on random sidewalks and then blame parents if a kid walks over it and gets hurt. There is the attractive nuisance doctrine, among other things.
We don't leave the barbed wire on the side walk but require everyone that wants to walk on it to age verify first either. And the attractive nuisance doctrine some states have is absolutely bonkers.
Sure, a parent can release their child into the wilderness and when they inevitably hurt themselves, shrug their shoulders and say it's the kids fault. That would still be a failure of parenting.
Kids need varying levels of guidance until their brains mature and they learn how to navigate the adult world, which is why we have the legal concept of adulthood, and age-restricted laws for things like drinking alcohol and voting. Kids are not tiny adults, they're adults-in-training.
>Viewing the continuance of our race as only the responsibility of parents is pathological.
That seems to be a uniquely American pathology.
Everywhere where else in the world, and in non-white American subcultures, the community taking a hand in raising children is expected. But many Americans seem to consider it socialist and an attack on Christian values.
See Hillary Clinton getting mocked for saying "it takes a village"[0] or BLM being accused of wanting to "destroy the nuclear family" by encouraging community based parenting[1].
You have a kid, you have responsibility for that kid. In Germany we have a term "Aufsichtspflicht" for this, which roughly translates to duty of supervision. Up to a certain age of the kid parents will be made responsible for damages your kid caused.
One pretty funny example of that was a kid spending 1000s of Euros on a MMORPG because the MMO offered a payment option that allowed people to pay through their phone bill. Parents could've easily prevented any of that happening, but in that generation it was pretty common that kids were tech savvy while parents couldn't be bothered to learn about computers, which imo already is problematic.
Nowadays there are many many ways to supervise your children's online access. And yes, there are also many many ways for kids to work around that too, but ultimately if you buy your kid a device with internet access, you should try to supervise that. Parents need to care more about what their children are up to, instead of silencing them with a tablet for a moment of personal silence.
A small example would be to set the device into "kiosk mode" which many companies use for their employee devices too. Prevent app installs, check what pages ur kids visit with their browsers and whatnot. Just make sure to be open about it so you don't hurt your kids by violating their privacy and trust towards you. Hell we even got parents having their kids take air tags with them so the parents know where they are.
