TheBananaKing @ TheBananaKing @lemmy.world

Posts

29

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843

Joined

2 yr. ago

Who says you need punishment at all?

The vast majority of misbehaviour is down to poorly-developed coping skills. Which kids have, because, y'know, they're kids.

We all do stupid shit we know we shouldn't, even when we know it will lead to bad outcomes for us, because fuck it.

Work is stressful, fuck it entire pizza for lunch. I'm sad and lonely, fuck it I'm calling my ex. I have a shitty headache, fuck it imma chew this stupid customer out. Omg I need to know what happens, fuck it I'm binging the rest of this series at 1am on a work night. Partyyyyyyyy fuck it lets finish the entire bottle. And so on, and so forth.

Emotion management and impulse control is a learned skill, especially when you have to integrate it with all the social stuff. People have decades of experience, and they still fuck up.

What the flying fuck do you expect from a little kid? They're hilariously incompetent at literally everything; why do you imagine that they'd be automatically perfect at probably the most difficult complex and nuanced skillset there is? They need strategies for dealing, they need experience recognising that they need to deal, and they need time to develop enough emotional resources to take the strain.

And since when did anyone get better at learning any skill when every slipup leads to some asshole deliberately inflicting pain and/or misery on them?

That's not how you draw a dog, Emily. :thud: You made me do that.

You missed the ball, Billy. Now you don't get fed.

No, Kate, 5 x 8 is not 42, now I'm going to throw out all your toys.

It doesn't work like that. People need to learn from their mistakes just as much as from their successes - which means a safe environment with support and feedback, not anxiety, fear, pain and shame.

When my kid was about 6, he had the worst time with video games. He would get frustrated when he lost, frustration would make him worse at the game, he'd start losing more and more, get even more frustrated and he'd spiral into a meltdown and storm off in rage and floods of tears and be absolutely miserable for ages.

Getting angry and melting down because you lost at a video game is entirely unacceptable behaviour, but just heaping more misery on him for doing it would have been not only highly counterproductive but a complete dick move as well.

So instead of doing that, I taught him how to manage the emotion - how to recognise the feeling of frustration, how to recognise when it was building up past his ability to handle, and then to step back and take a break until he was out of the red zone before getting back to it. It took trial and error and a whole bunch of practice, but by god it worked.

Once he got the hang of managing it, not only did the meltdowns stop, but the breaks got shorter and rarer as he smoothed out the curve and got to practice increasing his tolerance without catastrophic failure blowing the whole thing up. Before long he was actively seeking out the most ridiculous rage-games like Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV just to revel in it (and beating the shit out of me at them too, little tyke).

And this principle generalises across the board. Teach them to manage the gigantic emotions and impulses that assail them from all sides. Give them a strategy for dealing with them - and when something gets past them, acknowledge the failure, make restitution if necessary, then postmortem what went wrong and how to handle it better next time. They may not like the process, but that's worlds away from deliberately inflicting shit on them for the sake of it.

They absolutely do need the feedback, you can't just give blanket approval to everything and expect results - you just keep it constructive. It's that simple. Unconditional love and they need to do better than that what the fuck little dude.

And when they're too little to reason about stuff, that's what the Parent Voice and judicious use of Death Glare is for. You don't need to yell, you just go full Mufasa on them as necessary. There's a couple of cheap tricks you can use to de-escalate threenager tantrums, mostly by interrupting the self-talk loop.

And it works. My kid got all the way through the school system without ever getting in any kind of trouble; I don't think I needed to even tell him off about anything past the age of 10 or so. We have a great relationship, I never had to be a dickhole to my kid, and I never relied on intimidation to maintain authority through his childhood, it just naturally tapered off into mutual cooperation as he got older.

Oopsie-woopsie, we had a data breach, now every user's identity documents have been harvested by russian hackers.

Oh, if you don't know Local58, immediately go watch all their stuff. It's awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BD-ba-aXQo

• If you aren't old enough to use the word in full, you're not old enough to discuss it.
• If you're aiming your question at people who do masturbate, it seems you've already excluded people who've 'broken the cycle', so you're not going to get the answers you want.
• What cycle?
• Why would anyone want to 'break' it?

Knowledge is justified true belief.

You can't know whether you have it or not.

I eat it as I cut up the rest of the pineapple.

Same wih mango peels.

But they continue to suck his dick regardless.

Translators - ehh. I don't speak any other languages so I have no basis for comparison.

But closed-caption writers for TV shows.... all of the fucking rage.

I have some audio-processing issues meaning that closed-captions make life vastly easier, but I'm not actually hard of hearing per se.

Why do they always dumb down the dialogue? I can understand abridging rapid-fire chatter if there's just too much to fit on screen, or not enough time to read it, but they'll dumb down a six-word sentence with ten seconds of on-screen time.

You know hard of hearing people aren't fucking stupid, right? If I did lose my hearing and I were denied the actual writing as written by real writers, in favour of the rough gist supplied by some glorified typist, I would be absolutely goddamn livid. How dare they assume I'm semi-literate just becasue my hearing is crap?

Obviously ideas of fun vary; people are allowed to enjoy things I don't like :)

Also I'm not rampantly disagreeing with you here, just picking at the edges for discussion because it still doesn't sit quite right in my head.

It's just... sometimes I feel like the implementation of complexity in these things is just kind of lazy, comparable to adding difficulty by making enemy bullet-sponges. It's certainly more work to defeat them, but is that work rewarding?

Consider the annoyance that triggered this whole post.

In grim dawn, mid way through elite. I had some gloves with fairly miserable specs for my level, but they were providing most of my vitality res. Can I change them out?

Well there's some with better overall specs but no vitality but they do have a lot of fire res, so I could swap those in, then the ring I was getting lots of fire res from could go, and there's one with some vitality but unfortunately no poison, so let's see, I do have a helmet that ...

spongebob_three_hours_later.jpg

... but now my vitality is three points too low to equip the pants, oh fuck off. How is this fun?

Finding a reasonable solution doesn't make you feel clever, and making an awkward compromise doesn't feel like a justifiable sacrifice, it feels like you finally got too exhausted to search through more combinations and gave up. You can't really look forward to getting better gear to fill a gap, because you're going to have to go round and round in circles again trying to build a whole new set around the deficiencies that come with it.

It's like debating against a Gish Gallop - taxing to keep up with but without any real sense of achievement.

And honestly it doesn't feel like that's really intended to be the real gameplay. If the genre is really a build-planning-combinatorics game with a bit of monster-bashing on the side, where's the quality-of-life UX to go with it? Where's management tools to bring the actual problem-domain to the fore? Where's the sort-rank-and-filter, where's the multi-axis comparisons? Where's the saved equipment sets? Why is the whole game environment and all the interface based around the monster-bashing, if that's just the testing phase? And if navigating hostile UX is part of the the challenge, then again I say that challenge is bad game design.

And all the layered mechanics across the genre feel like that: bolted on and just kind of half-assed, keeping the problem-domain too hard to work on because of externalities rather than the innate qualities of the problem itself. I know, let's make the fonts really squirly and flickery so you can only peer at the stats for five minutes before you get a headache, that'll give people a challenging time constraint to work with.

Did you ever play mass-effect: Andromeda, with the shitty sudoku minigame bolted on to the area unlocks? You know how that just... didn't make the game fun?

That.

Also it seems to me that if the prep-work was really the majority drawcard, we'd be seeing a lot more football-manager-like tweak-and-simulate loops, if that's what they were going for. Build your character, let it bot through the map (or just do an action montage), then come back with a bunch of loot and XP to play with before sending it out again.

I think an ideal game would hit all three kinds of satisfaction: tactics/graaagh, exploration/harvesting and mastery/optimisation. And ideally, each of those three targets would be free of external complications and left to focus on their own innate challenge and rewards.

I know that's easy to say and hard to do... I'm just surprised that we haven't got signficantly better at it in the last couple of decades.

I've played the crap out of both; they're really good.

And that's entirely valid; like I say, stardew gameplay is immensely satisfying in and of itself.

I just feel like all these other mechanisms in arpgs are thrown on top to try and disguise the nature of the thing, and it's that disparity that leaves people jaded.

Stardew doesn't have an endless progression of increasingly fell and eldritch vegetables that need you to constantly grind for upgrades just to tend to them. You water things in one click all the way through, and that feels good; you don't need to chase a sawtooth pseudo-progression in order to be satisfied.

Stardew doesn't make you do NP-complete multi-knapsack-problems in order to even have a viable character, or drown you in overly complex interactions so you can't usefully plan in your head; there's complexity there, but of the kind that opens up more options.

It manages to be fun without those things, but ARPGs seem to overwhelmingly rely on them in order to be engaging at all.

Why is that?

Why does gory-stardew need all those external obfuscations, when the normal kind doesn't?

How could you make a gory-stardew that's comfortable in its own skin?

I have absolutely no wish to dumb them down.

As I said, if you just took away all those mechanics, you'd be left with a boring empty game.

What I said was that it would be nice if you could make the combat feel more like hunting than gathering, so you wouldn't have to make up for it with a:) number-go-up and b:) np-hard - then you could then go for much more enriching forms of complexity.

For instance, making mobs fight a lot more tactically as their level increases instead of just stacking on the HP and damage - and instead of your perks just driving stat inflation, they unlocked new tactical options on your part, giving you a series of new stops to pull out as the battles got more fraught.

If someone came into my home and started making derogatory racist remarks about me, I'd say that response would be entirely appropriate.

I dunno if it even needs to be difficult; even a bit tactical would change the nature of the thing. As it is the mobs in these things tend to be mindless converging waves; what if they set up set pieces, ran for help, dived for cover, used supporting fire etc etc?

Also perhaps overambitious, but what if the difference between low and high level enemies wasn't their HP or damage, but how tricky and organised they were? What if leveling up didn't make number get big, but instead gave you more options in a fight?

Ah, perhaps a slight miscommunication.

though I do enjoy traditional roguelikes, I'm not looking at the stakes or the intensity, but rather the kind of itch that's being scratched in diabolikes, and it feels a lot more completionist/procedural in nature than it does adversarial.

Both are good, but dressing one up as the other can lead to an underlying sense of disappointment.

When my kid started out using the internet, it was over-the-shoulder supervision to start out, then slowly dropping to in-the-room supervision (the PC in the living room), and progressively less over time, with the clearly stated proviso that I would occasionally be glancing over history just to make sure he wasn't getting caught up in anything horrible, but that I wouldn't be going into any kind of detail. At 13, he got his own PC in his room, and I left him to it.

I'm a very firm believer that you don't attempt technical solutions to administrative problems. Privacy is important and monitoring is shit. You equip your kid with the tools and the supervised-experience to make good decisions, and once they can balance by themselves you let go of the bike.

Teach them to do dangerous things safely, that's parenting in a nutshell.

(actually to clear up a misconception: to teach a kid to ride a bike, you hold the shoulders, not the bicycle. With the extra feedback they can actually compensate and learn to balance; if you hold the bike itself it just weirdly fights them and their cerebellum never gets it)

Entirely context dependent.

Who's cooking tonight? Me, and if it's sandwiches, salad, etc - still counts.

No cooking in the room. Combining sliced bread with sliced cheese out of the bag - doesn't count.

Anyone who pushes jira is a waste of fucking carbon, and I hope they never find happiness.

If you want twenty minutes of rage-filled ranting, ask me about vscode-server sometime.