The operative word there is “entirely.” We have philosophy going back thousands of years playing with the subjective nature of reality. There is some truth to this. However most of human history has been an exercise in “might makes right,” and truth was whatever the person with the biggest club said it was. Then the Enlightenment happened and it was suddenly considered virtuous to observe, document, and publish objective reality. See the early days of the conflicts with the Church to understand how uncomfortable it can make those who enjoy subjective reality suddenly being confronted with the concept of objective reality.

It’s only relatively recently (post Enlightenment) that large portions of society decided it was a good idea to disregard objective reality in journalism, science, and politics, in favour of subjective or “lived” realities. We can in part thank postmodernism for escaping academic containment, but I think that’s only part of the slide. Whatever the cause, I think it behooves all of us to attempt to steer into objectivism as frequently and clearly as possible. Depending on the metric, Western society has arguably never been this polarised. If we can’t agree on the definition of words, we aren’t even speaking the same language anymore. Our North Star needs to be shared language so at the very least we can have valid arguments with each other. That is how we progress.

I agree. Games feel like they’re designed by committee now (very much likes movies, in fact). I recall SkillUp’s criticism of Veilguard’s writing as, “every interaction feels like HR is in the room.” This nails so many design choices today. Safe and vanilla is boring. There are of course people who believe that nothing should ever be remotely challenging or offensive to anyone ever, but I just don’t think they represent the majority of gamers. Attempting to please them at the expense of the much larger player-base is clearly not working.

Howard has reportedly been championing procedurally generated content for years or perhaps decades. We saw echoes of this in Starfield. The result is quite expected: boring and vanilla. Especially when contrasted with Bethesda’s previously great storytelling with intricate characters and hand-crafted experiences. We see once again with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 how important that is. Yes, it’s time consuming and expensive, but it’s clearly loved by customers and critics.

Compounding this was Starfield’s mediocre writing. It took a clear and obvious dive from previous games. It felt incredibly safe. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it was AI generated.

I’ll preface this by saying I am/was a Reddit user since its first year operating in 2005/2006.

The notion that reality is entirely subjective is relatively new and I believe has led to a myriad of consequences across society from social media to journalism to politics. Even if we will never arrive at a future in which we can all acknowledge what a spade is, we should absolutely continue to strive for that. Common understanding is the bedrock of liberal societies. We need it for science and democracy to function.

The “Redditquette” the user above explained was the notion that disagreement isn’t invalid. By this I am referring to the philosophical distinction between valid and invalid arguments. For example:

1. Every dog is a reptile.
2. Every reptile is cold-blooded.
3. Therefore, every dog is cold-blooded.

This argument is silly and easily disproved, but valid. Flat Earthers often make valid but easily disproved arguments, and there is much to gain in the world by people having valid discussions with one another. Especially from a curious and open position.

On the other hand, invalid arguments are those in whose conclusion is not proven by its premises. That is, even if all the premises are true, the conclusion could still be false. For example:

1. Being friendly is the easiest way to make friends quickly.
2. Alana has a lot of friends.
3. Therefore, Alana must be very friendly.

The argument tells us that being friendly is one way to make friends, but is that the only way? And does having a lot of friends necessarily mean that you are very friendly? Although Alana might be very friendly, the author hasn’t proven that she is. There is nothing to gain by engaging with this, other than to potentially educate someone about valid and invalid arguments. However this rarely works out well over the internet. This is an opinion masquerading as reason or fact. Trolling uses some variation of this.

Reddiquette was intended to encourage healthy discussion without immediately devolving into insults and death threats. It actually worked really fucking well, for many years. In the early days, the administrators would enforce Rediquette, as crazy as that sounds. They would give out warnings for people downvoting earnest comments and submissions. Some of the better moderated subreddits still maintain a shadow of this, but they don’t have the tools to see who is up/downvoting what.

Unfortunately there is some game theory in this. If the rules are “downvote what you don’t like,” then both sides of any debate must use this rule, or their comments will be permanently hidden, and their ideas will never propagate. The evidence is that this rule is quite devastating for online discourse, and I miss old Reddit.

Thank you! Lemmy is basically unusable right now for those of us not from America. Every community from technology to gaming is wall to wall DAE TRUMP HITLER!? I get it, but some of us just want to talk about our hobbies. There are dedicated communities for discussing politics.