29·
14 days agoI’m a little fucked up because I’m both people in this comic strip.
I’ve read the classics, I’ve thought about the hard problems, and I’ve seen the gaping maw of the abyss, and Sartre’s freedom.
I don’t necessarily think AI in-of-itself is a bad thing, it just all comes down to how people use it.
Even if you sit down on a quiet rainy night alone with a glass of whiskey and a Macintosh-2 terminal, and ask the machine:
“What are you?”
“I am a tool. A machine.”
“What are you really?”
“Humanity’s collective unconscious preserved in writing.”
Before piracy there were demos and shareware, which let you see if your machine could handle the game or content and give you a vertical slice, and let you show it to friends for word of mouth advertising.
Then, Steam put a two hour refund window with no questions asked, which helped a lot of “this crashes on start, I can’t open this at all on a RTX 4090/high end PC, 15 FPS in the fog, etc”.
Developers learned from that and they began padding/gating content behind two hours of gameplay, so you wouldn’t know until 3-4 hours in that the game was grindy dogshit (SCUM, Ark, Empyrion, and countless other Early Access and sometimes full release titles like NMS on launch day for example).
So the correct thing to do, and it’s what I do: Pirate the game, make sure it runs/works and is fun and there’s no “gotcha” traps or hidden DLCs or other predatory mechanics involved, and THEN pay for the full title on Steam+DLCs and just continue the save.
My Steam Account has actually already been flagged over a dozen times for this because my primary savegames are like Razor1911.sav, and so far it’s still in good status because I am actually spending a couple thousand/year on content.