u/Didsterchap11

With mixtape coming out and the buzz of supposed controversy around it i've been lamenting the way games get discussed and how IMO a lot of people seem to fundamentally miss what exactly a critic's role is in media.

I have no attachment to mixtape, from what i've seen it seems like a solid interactive experience, but its kinda the first example to mind of this particular outrage cycle that seems to have formed around gaming news media. When something that goes against the grain of the "standard" notion of a video game and gets decent reviews you see people wriggling out of the woodwork consistently that seem to think positive opinions have been bought and/or that the review isnt "objective" because it doesn't meet their expectations.

And i know the short answer to a degree is that a lot of this ire is a mix of gamergate priming people to see game journalists are the devil, and the genuinely sleazy practices a lot of outlets use like running adverts for games they're actively reviewing. That latter part is a far bigger reason than the former of why a lot of major outlets suck but people are hesitant to ever really acknowledge that because instead the kind of channels that perpetuate this kind of gatekeepy stance instead would rather continue their performative rage because pretending to be angry at games you haven't played can pay your mortgage if you do it right.

But the thing at the heart of this that bothers me is the notion that a critic must be an objective reflection of quality who must reflect my opinion. Obviously this is kinda ridiculous, games are art and like all art, the experience of playing one is a subjective and often deeply personal thing and a review can only capture what a single person experiences from it. With this position stated you see why i brush up against the notion of objectivity in art so profoundly frustrating in how its utilised to dismiss experiences people don't engage with, and by the same notion treat review numbers as objective arbiters of quality and not just a reflection of common consensus.

To me the relation you should have to a critic is that they are someone for whom you make an assessment of your enjoyment of a bit of media based on what they say about it in relation to your tastes. To can see why going to the most common denominator and being upset that it doesn't reflect your personal experience is foolish, it expects the most generic version of a take on something to bend to your specific opinions.

Yo, i posted a couple days ago about wanting to dip my toes into photogrammetry and after the responses i got i began to try to set up realityscan on my PC and run it there. the immedate issue I've hit is that it refuses to calculate the model on account of not having an NVIDIA GPU, citing CUDA drivers as the issue. If there's no way around that what alternatives would people suggest using? I cant exactly afford a new GPU on account of being a student, so my options are limited.

my hardware is as follows:

Ryzen 7 2700X CPU

AMD Radeon RX 7600 8gb

32gb DDR4 memory.

I did earnestly want to make this a poll and let people express their feelings on the matter but it appears Reddit won’t let me.

Regardless I wanted to make my case here, there’s a lot of chatter about this game’s survival, a not small amount of it is low effort shit flinging but I do think there is a lot of very valid frustration at the state of the game on arrival. Performance is something I generally have faith will improve with time but my current concern is the prevalence of low effort AI content and the tone that sets, this type of low effort gambling sims and other similarly vibe coded games worry me for the potential for it to overwhelm the platform and smother the chances of far higher effort games.

Edit: been informed that they intend to do something about this via the blog post, which is good, i feel they're gonna need to keep a solid handle on this game's community if its to succeed.

I say this out of a place of love, I earnestly want this game to succeed and thrive, I really do but it’s not a good look out of the gate. Obviously this is not easy to enforce, but I feel at least making a statement against it and shitcanning a few notable examples would do a ton to garner the good faith this game strongly needs right now.