Games of tag where you are “out” when hit, optionally with a mechanism for being revived are a staple game for young kids around here. Video games with shooting just seems like a logical extension of that into the virtual domain and with ranged “tag” of that.
Besides shooters there are many puzzle games as well.
Exactly this. Anyone who thinks that must have almost no real exposure to video games. The diversity of gaming experiences is huge, and shooters represent only a small fraction of that.
There’s a long tail of diverse genres, but is hilarious to suggest that the total numbers add up to more than games where shooting is the primary activity.
The most prolific violent video game is Minesweeper. The fidelity may be low but the little guy dies and mines are powerful weapons detonating all over in the game.
> The most prolific violent video game is Minesweeper.
By what metric, install base? That doesn't seem valid. And are you seriously equating minesweeper with a first or third person shooter? Minesweeper is almost humanitarian in comparison.
There are a lot of properties that game mechanics can have that make people invest in games. Legible rules, clear feedback, deterministic and discrete cause and effect, clearly understandable win conditions and game states, being relatively simple to implement in code, having properties that make discrete variations and permutations of gameplay situations easy to build and easy to parse for players, setting rules up in ways that can be structured with real-time pressure, often embedded in large spatial structures to organically pace an experience...
Shooting (and combat more generally) has proven to be pretty easy to make satisfy most of these criteria. There are other core styles of actions that do as well (say, 2d Platforming, or clean puzzle mechanics like in games like Tetris).
These mechnical factors matter, because it's often the case that people who don't like violence in games would prefer games to focus on other kinds of challenges that they find more socially good in terms of morality or ideology. But then they stomp all over the mechanical styles of issues I was just listing above, and the results is predictably game designs broad masses of players don't want to play.
I've worked on both AAA hyperviolent games, as well as with educators on learning games with what they saw as pro-social game play, so this is a divide I've had front row seats to.
And to make what I hope is a productive contrast, one of the really great things about Undertale is that the designer didn't make being peaceful in the game lame. It is (or was for me) actively fun to try to figure out how to not kill enemies, because you still have to engage in bullet hell dodging while you try to psychoanalyze your opponents, and that dodging (for players who like those kinds of mechanics) still maintained a lot of the properties I just listed above.
To make a more real-world comparison, my father-in-law was an extremely successful junior college tennis coach, and he has noted in passing that he couldn't personally see how anyone could invest in Olympic sports like figure skating, just on the level of taking the competition that seriously. And his argument (he wasn't being universalizing, particularly, just tying it to his experience as an award winning coach) was that the extreme subjectivity of judge ratings was really offputting to him, as a competitor. Obviously tennis can have bad line calls and other controversial judge issues, too - all human sports can. But I think his argument ties in with my original one here; a lot of game players really like clean, legible rules with clear good and bad states so they can invest in getting good at games and take pleasure in their good play. And, as I say, shooting and combat at this point often fulfills that well.
It's often just a part of a broader puzzle - you need to aim with precision, react quickly, properly chain your movements, be aware of your surroundings, know when to be offensive/defensive, apply your tools/skills to specific situation, manage your resources, etc. Shooting is just a subset of all that.
With that logic you could also dumb down chess to killing, because that's the core mechanic.
It's pointing and clicking. It's just one of the simplest things a game can make a player do. It's intuitive what sound roughly it should make and what visual effect to show up.
It's as if it was weird that most dancing has a lot of putting one foot in front of the other.
Humans have historically been better competition than AI. Writing AI that is evenly matched with a human so as presenting a challenge that is tough but not unwinnable is much harder than just playing against another person.
> Maybe it makes joining the military not too unappealing for teenagers.
> Writing AI that is evenly matched with a human so as presenting a challenge that is tough but not unwinnable is much harder than just playing against another person.
Also humans are uniquely... human.
I play one of those extraction shooters and even a much higher ranked player, who would normally have no issue downing my team of three in an open fight, will eventually get worn down if we hide around and harass them. Also they might just lose patience earlier and start making mistakes due to that.
Hard to model something like this because people are different and react in complex ways.
I'm not certain that shooting is a core mechanic in a strict majority of video games (may also depend on how you define shooting, is flinging fireballs around shooting?).
But aside from that, Campster argued in his video about violence in games (<https://youtu.be/wSBn77_h_6Q>) that violence is easier to program in an accessible way than nonviolence.
I don't think there's any purpose behind it, most like early on, game with shooting were just simpler to develop, especially with regards to limited processing power and storage. For example I remember an extract from a review on the original Doom, saying that it would be much better if they were able to talk to the monsters; but at the time, a talking game would have been nearly impossible to make, especially to the same level of polish as the original Doom.
And then it's a feedback loop: video games get the reputation of being violent (perhaps undeservedly so, like Myst was outselling the original Doom, IIRC, but violent games made for bigger headline in mainstream media) => only people interested in that buy them => violent games are the best-selling => games...
I think it’s more because point-and-click is suited to shooters. Look at thing you want to shoot, click on it. A simple premise that you can layer stuff onto to make a good game.
> "It has always puzzled me a little bit that shooting is a core mechanic in a majority of video games. Does this serve any purpose?
My personal theory is that violent video games (and films and other media) are encouraged in highly militarised societies to desensitise their populations to violence - if you normalise it so it all seems like a game or other form of entertainment, you get a lot less internal opposition when you go about killing real people in other countries.
I just don't see a usual team behind a violent movie or game having a though process of "how can we make people want to go to war more". My theory is sort of the opposite - people enjoy such media because it's violence without hurting anyone in the real world, a fantasy.
One thing I liked about Gothic 1 was how you could fight people and not kill them ( Kill was an extra action after you won).The NPCs reacted differently to winning vs killing, pushing you to let others live. In a brutal penal colony, this made a lot more sense than win=kill.
I mean, the really good ones can be beautiful, terrifying, balletic displays of dominance, skill and tactical intelligence. There’s nothing in all of gaming quite like being hunted by a human being. It’s a real thrill.
Yeah, though I would argue that we as a society would be way better off if the same scrutiny that was applied a few years ago due to the "woke panic" were applied to modern day content about pro- you-name-it propaganda (military, othering, etc.).
Nowadays, you see that in the masterful omission of facts when news are reported (e.g. why aren't illegal trade embargoes mentioned when talking about poverty and instability in certain countries? Why are there no reactions when the thing they were confidently showing turned out to be false or GenAI?), or the way things are portrayed in videogames (why are enemies in military shooters almost always middle eastern? why don't you have to fight off racists, fascists, and corporate militia?), or the movies (why do we get shown mostly content where a single individual carries the sole responsibility of taking on the single villain?).
Sorry for the rant; games are indeed beautiful... There's some things I've been starting to pay attention to where you have to swallow or brush aside some propaganda so that you're allowed to play with your friends... And that makes me a bit upset.
> If AI can do everything and gets everyone out of jobs
Not everything - Many things.
Not everyone - Many ones.
The people who cannot compete fade out, and the ones that are left reap the benefit of the machines.
Just like one farmer reaps the benefit of a tractor that replaced 20 laborers.
The earth population keeps reducing until it is kinda a vacation resort for 100 billionaires + others who work for them + machines.
Then some politician who promises to be a voice for the people uses force/army to kick the billionaires out, redistribute the wealth, and then the population increases and the cycle continues.
This has been happening and will continue to happen until the heat death of the universe. (and then repeat after it gets created again).
UBI feels like a natural solution to what I assume is a ubiquitous problem in the workforce: A certain percentage of people are absolutely worthless in their job, and everyone would be better off if we just paid those people to stay home.
Even if you’re competent and useful, work is an incredible sacrifice. Perhaps only 10% of workers (the most unattached and lacking in obligations) would voluntarily work. For example for parents there are only a litany of bad choices available.
If UBI is offered, why would most people suffer through their work sacrifices.
> Perhaps only 10% of workers (the most unattached and lacking in obligations) would voluntarily work.
That's not even close to true. Basically every study on UBI, everywhere, has shown that either more people work, or employment stays about the same, but in each case happiness and health go up vs the control.
Since it's very clear you haven't researched your claim whatsoever - why are you making it? Why would you say something so wrong with so much confidence?
All those studies are flawed because they are always a few years of sub-subsistence income. Of course most people rationally don't drastically change their employment in response to that - as expected per the permanent income hypothesis. A permanent, liveable UBI would be quite another beast.
If humans only work so that they can live, and wouldn't ever work if they didn't have to - then why do so many of our best inventions and advances come from people who didn't give a toss about profit?
If we have the technological means and capability to reduce employment to 10% - why wouldn't we?
Is it so impossible to imagine a world where people only work when they want to? Where the jobs that "no one would do if they weren't desperate" just pay very well instead?
Also, if you really think every UBI study is fundamentally flawed, feel free to design and run your own. Until then, maybe you could do better than waving a hand and invoking a hypothesis to try and invalidate literally every study that speaks against your claim, lol.
Lots of people enjoy working on high skill, fulfilling jobs like inventing things. Few people love working menial labour jobs. AI will probably take the former jobs but leave the latter, which will still need to be done. If everyone gets a decent UBI, how will we allocate these unfulfilling but necessary jobs?
> Also, if you really think every UBI study is fundamentally flawed, feel free to design and run your own.
All temporary studies are fundamentally flawed, because people act based on their permanent lifetime income. It's not like I can design it better, it's just not something that can easily be studied (on any reasonable time scale).
SIMD performance in modern Intel and AMD cpus is so bad that it is useless outside very specific circumstances.
This is mainly because vector instructions are implemented by sharing resources with other parts of the CPU and more or less stalls pipelines, significantly reduces ipc, makes out of order execution ineffective.
The shared resources are often involve floating point registers and compute, so it's a double whammy.
The comparison is often just plain old linear code.
For example, one simd instruction vs multiple arithmetic instructions.
x1 += y1
x2 += y2
x3 += y3
x4 += y4
We have fifty years of CPU design optimizing for this. More often than not, you'll find this works better than vector instructions in practice.
The concept behind vector instructions is great, and it starts to work out for larger widths like 512 bits. But it's extremely tricky to take advantage of that much SIMD with a compiler or manually.
For sure, it makes sense for nice well defined problems that execute in isolation.
Think of the situation where the string search is running on a system that has hyper threading and a bunch of cores, and a normal amount of memory bandwidth.
It'll be faster, but at the same time make everything else worse if you overuse vector instructions.
(also cherry on top: some modern CPUs automagically lower the clock when they encounter vector instructions!!!)
> It's not like CPUs are slow, in fact they're quite a bit faster than any single GPU thread.
This was overwhelmingly true ten years ago, not so much now.
Modern GPU threads are about 3Ghz, CPUs are still slightly faster in theory but the larger amounts of local fast memory makes GPU threads pretty competitive in practice.
Are you writing this from the future? The latest gen nvidia gpus sit at around 2-2.5 GHz and the latest gen amd cpus sit 4-5 GHz.
That matches my personal experience too, writing naive cuda code that doesn’t take advantage of parallelism is roughly half the speed of running it on cpu.
This or any other statistical play is only 'in front of a steamroller' if you do it with leverage, especially if notionally uncorollated bets suddenly move together. Bets on Polymarket have limited downside by design, and bets in different categories are obviously unrelated to each other.
Without having looked into this in detail, however, I suspect the problem would be limited capacity; markets that are both deep and so trivially irrational are probably fairly infrequent. You might pick up pennies but only pennies.
That's just the binary nature of the bet. You address that in a real trading strategy with (fractional) Kelly position sizes. Anyone doing this for actual money would also be well served by implementing continuous monitoring and active risk management over top, in order to limit maximum drawdowns if the trend evaporates.
Whether it's pennies in front of a steamroller will depend on the entry price, EV, time left to resolution and many other variables.
Though I agree it's bad math, even if 70% resolve to no, there's a high variance among all of them, and to know whether it's a good bet or not... you have to do your DD on that particular market. Even if you follow the Kelly criterion, randomly choosing bets will probably tank your bankroll sooner or later.
> Whether it's pennies in front of a steamroller will depend on […] many other variables.
No, all these variables cancel out.
If you were picking and choosing, yes. But this approach is basically betting no on all the markets.
The textbook explanation of this is the central limit theorem, proving this mathematically is a bit more involved for power-law systems like this but it’s empirically valid.
The math here isn't what you assume it is. It isn't "most markets resolve to no"; it's "markets consistently value 'yes' too highly", and there is some evidence for the latter.
I have no idea if the bias is strong enough to profitably trade on it (or whether it even exists).
But your statement seems stronger, i.e. that such a strategy is somehow fundamentally and inherently impossible, so I think it's on you to explain why that is supposedly the case.
For example, assuming a hypothetical consistent "yes" bias of 10%, would you still say it's impossible? Why? Basically, are you saying it's impossible because of the actual observed "yes" bias being too weak or for some other reason?
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