This happened to me in Roller Coaster Tycoon and The Sims.
The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an "easy button", it's hard to not use it. It's sort of like when you're at work and see the "quick workaround" effectively become the standard process.
I remember burning out on games because the cheats made them really fun in the short term, but afterward playing normally felt like agony.
BRO this is literally normal life now. No one wants to figure anything out. Its why I hate llms. Breeds laziness like never before
Man, I was recently working with another senior. The guy has been in this job like ten years longer than me. And to be fair, we were working with a language that he isn't familiar with, but I had a problem which wasn't language-specific (basically, I had a user-provided timestamp and needed to guesstimate whether that's winter or summer time).
And yeah, his first thought was to ask ChatGPT. On some level, it is a wrapper around Bing and I did a web search, too, so sure, let's do another web search in case I missed anything.
But ol' Chappity G spat out the same solution attempt, which I had also found initially, which wasn't actually applicable there. So, we told it what the problem with that was, and it generated another attempt, which didn't cover edge cases. The next time around, it generated a solution which used an entirely different time library. And so on.
The guy was absorbed for ten minutes trying to explain to the Magic 8 Ball what our problem was precisely and why its solution attempts were bad.
I'm not saying ChatGPT should've been able to solve this problem. Date/time handling is one of the hardest computer science problems.
It was more just that he was constantly pulling the slot machine, hoping it would suddenly spit out the perfect solution, when even just five seconds of independent thinking should've made him realize that there is no easily web-searchable solution and the spicy autocomplete cannot do the reasoning to come up with a solution of its own.
If you want to speedrun Idiocracy, an overreliance on AI seems a good way to get there.
Brawndo has what plants crave.
You spelled "RIP Civilization" in a weird way, but it tracks.
it was so hard for me to play grim fandago without looking up the answers but i did it! 10 hours later and lots of critical thinking and i finally solved the first puzzle!
We played Leisure Suit Larry with my brother at somewhere under 10 years old without knowing one full sentence worth of English, and it took hours to even get the game to start. There was a quiz about US history and politics or something for age verification, and it took a lot of tries to guess our way through and memorize the answers. Didnt get that far in the game either.
Police Quest 2 had mugshots.
You had to look in the manual and type the correct name to start the game. That was their DRM. I remember praying it'd be Jessie Bains, because he was the only one I memorized.
That was vintage copy protection. They would print the answers and stuff in the back of the manual, so you could only start the game (or get past a certain point), if you have a legitimate copy of the game (or just a copy of the manual lol).
There were all sorts of creative copy protection schemes prior to DRM.
Lol same here. I still remember one question was something with "apple".
Except game walkthroughs provide correct information, whereas LLMs can just make things up. So it's more like looking at a walkthrough where each step is from an entirely different game.
Y'all - For nearly a quarter of a century Nintendo published Nintendo Power, a magazine that was a combination of self-hype and how to beat their own games. In the 90s, it was indispensable for any game worth its salt.
Nintendo used to run a 1-900 number for tips on games. You'd call a real human who would walk you through where you were.
Looking it up online is only "cheating" in the sense that it's immediate and free. This stuff used to cost money.
Yeah, LLMs are like if you called the Nintendo hint line, and the person on the other end just made shit up.
Plus with games never explaining how some of their mechanics work and not giving you any realistic way to experimentally determine it, why wouldn't I look it up online?
A big one that comes to mind is stuff like attacks, armor, and HP. Games handle them differently and very rarely tell you exactly how they work.
Well, as far as the author is aware it's usually accurate.
OP attacks every subscriber to Nintendo Power magazine. It's super effective.
We were so bored back in the day we spent hours, days, months finding out how to get by stupid things in point&click games, it was better than not playing them but it was also not like the best time ever either.
I don't know if we "got smarter" by it really.
Being bored was the healthy part, developmentally speaking.
Not that there weren't overstimulating games back then, or healthy problem solving games today. But with enshittification, the shit is drowning out the gold.
As a horny teen, Leisure Suit Larry was the closest thing to smut in a game that I could get. There was no internet walkthroughs. You wanted pixelated boobs and innuendo? You had to try every item in your arsenal and every dialogue choice to get it. But damn was it fun!
Later, going back to the games and using walkthroughs, some of the solutions seemed rather silly.
I've recently been obsessed with a streamer called AboutOliver. He played Minecraft for the first time about a year and a half ago, played his entire first season with no wiki or external knowledge, got a little tour of the community server (which he 99% forgot at the time Season 2 rolled around) and is now on Episode 75-ish of season 2. Still no wiki, no guides. He has figured out some crazy things about the game (which I won't spoil), but is also completely clueless about some super basic features.
It's been incredibly inspiring to just watch him figure things out, because he is exceptionally inquisitive and methodical by default (I think he's a phd candidate in Astrophysics irl?). Made me realize the point of a game shouldn't be to produce the optimal output, but that struggling and finding things out is exactly the point. Incidentally, that mindset also noticeably boosted my performance at work because I'm now one of the few people who will happily continue to tackle a programming problem over and over again, even if there are no helpful guides on it.
Long story short, here's a link to watch the supercut of Olivers Season 1 Playthrough: https://youtu.be/ljemxyWvg8E
The total season 1 supercut is about 6 hours iirc
OR, if you are insane, here's the link to the full-episode playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL68V5Cxs_CvTpTY9o7KJ75nLPqlCRxze0
It's 50 Episodes á 3-5h, great as background noise when doing something else.
Ha! I watched him play Outer Wilds and it was perfect. It is the ideal game for someone like him because this game is all about exploring. But please play the game before you watch him play and don't research anything beforehand or during playing.
Well...
But considering in modern Minecraft you already have a crafting book that says how to craft any item it's not as needed anymore as before.
In the early times I believe it was to either know the recipe or to look iz up on the web.
I had a rule where I wasnt allowed to use a gameshark until I had already beaten the story mode.
So I guess the analogy there would be learn how to do the thing the old fashioned way and then only use AI as a tool to do it better.
One time I used a GameShark mid game for a Zelda game, I saved my file and came back later to find that by maxing out, I had ruined my save file and lost all my progress. I cried my eyes out and it took days to get back, boringly replaying the game.
I always wondered if that was an intentional lesson by the GameShark devs... ChatGPT seems designed to make you act against your best self interest.
I’ve had a similar train of thought. I work with a lot of people that have been doing their jobs for many years and know what they’re doing. They might benefit from an LLM since they already have the expertise to tell what to take or leave. A novice would benefit more long term from learning the hard way.
Continuing with that train of thought though, if someone has been learning and growing for years, is there really a point where it’s okay to stop, say “I don’t need to learn more,” and start relying on the easy method while their skills stagnate?
In the 90s I would go to the school library to print out walkthroughs from the internet, to supplement the occasional relevant walkthroughs I could find in magazines. Realistically there was absolutely no way I was figuring out most of the puzzles on my own as a child, games got way more user friendly and self explanatory since then.
Same with wowhead or runescape wiki. Really kills the video game wonder.
Good news is that you can just ignore that if you want to. I recently played classic wow without any external tools and it was such a fun, adventurous experience!
I've long argued that games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley with their seeming inability to actually teach you the game have become far too overreliant on Wikis and walkthroughs. Minecraft for example: its highly unlikely you will naturally discover the path to "winning the game" and defeating the Ender Dragon. Its arcane nonsense.
The official Guide expects you to do this in ways that are 1 no longer possible and 2 rely on innate understanding of the physics of the game (specifically that beds explode when used outside the overworld [excuse me what the fuck how am I supposed to recognize that can be a weapon?]).
Those are what's known as knowledge gated games, where your progression as a player is either wholly or mostly tied to your own personal knowledge of how the game world works. Indeed, many of the mechanics may make no sense due to being crude mockeries of how the real world works. But some of them have become so ingrained in the popular consciousness that developers of later Indie Crafty Survival Sandboxy games can rely on the notion that most players will reflexively begin their adventure by punching a tree, and can probably accurately guess what the crafting shape of a pickaxe will be. This is no doubt down to the Earth-shattering popularity of Minecraft itself.
If you ask me, these games refusing to handhold the player and letting them discover things for themselves is part of their appeal. Expecting to be able to dive right in and know everything right from the starting block really rather misses the point. You have to admit that if you've been playing, say, Minecraft since the alpha days, your experience and approach to the game if you spun up a new world right now would be vastly different from your first playthrough, and none of the wonder or sense of discovery would be present.
Gating progression by knowledge (byzantine knowledge though it may be, e.g. in the case of specifically knowing not only how to construct a portal out of obsidian but also activate it by lighting it on fire) mirrors real life in an ineffable way that skill or time/microtransaction/XP accrual gated games can't.
Some games do both. For instance, ask any Dark Souls player. The Souls games are both knowledge gated and very, infamously, exasperatingly skill gated.
There is no way the official way uses beds to kill the dragon
All of the Elden-Soulsborne games are like that but it never really bothered me. I would have missed tons of the game without the wiki as help, just because of how crazy their games are with hiding stuff
Agreed for wow, but for Runescape, many of the quests are just so arcane that I never in a million years would have guessed what to do for them
I actually replayed runescape classic as Ironman recently and surprisingly most quests can be solved without the wiki! It's takes much longer though but so much more fun. You get to explore the world more and its a really good world with most characters having some personality and little areas that have you'd never visit otherwise.
This is exactly it. I definitely used a lot of walkthroughs as a kid. I also feel like games in the 90s and early 00s were just plain harder, or sometimes poorly designed.
These days I only look something up when I have got to a point of near rage over how much of my limited gaming time has been wasted, and I need to know if I am just a moron, or if it's a bug, or bad game design. Of course, then I get mad that I can't find it written out, and have to skim around in some fucking YouTube video to figure it out.
For me it's the opposite. I remember getting stuck in a game for days or weeks in the 90s. I would get to a point where I would just try to click everything on the screen, use every item with everything else, try all possible item combinations, etc.
These days, if I'm stuck for more than an hour or two I'll just Google it. I'd rather move on faster and get to play more games in the limited time I have for such things.
Oh I had that same experience too. Especially with Mist. I never got far in it. I'm convinced the game was broken.
When the answer is to grab the fork seventeen levels back, and to not use it on the dog 3 screens before so that you had it to look at after answering a riddle written backwards in Spanish that is actually an in-joke from the devs childhood you’re damn fucking right I’m not wasting my time to “figure it out”.
Video games are not reality, I can’t look at an easily surmountable barrier and just walk over it like I could in real life to solve the issue, I have to take some deranged imagined route by a dev. I can’t logically work my way out of a situation that is some guys bullshit idea of a solution.
The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an "easy button", it's hard to not use it. It's sort of like when you're at work and see the "quick workaround" effectively become the standard process.
Or when you're diving somewhere, and drivers thinking there's an "easy button" gets people killed.
The point, I think, is that society seems to encourage "what can I get away with" while discouraging any consideration of "what should I do". Which, well, seems pretty ass-backwards don't you think?
Then again, we've never truly removed from power the progeny of those that decided beating the shit out of someone else was preferable to doing their fair share of the labor. "But what if someone tries to kick your ass? Then you'll be glad I'm here."
Uhh, like fucking hell I will. That kind of sociopathic fuckery has always been, and will always be, nothing but a drain on the collective effort of any society.
Tldr: I totally agree with you
Oh, and as an aside, part of me kinda hates that Re-Logic added "Journey Mode" to Terraria; I haven't put any significant time into even one classic mode playthrough since.
¯(ツ)/¯
There is a time and place for walkthroughs. I doubt I would've finished Portal 1 & 2 on my own without them because I absolutely suck at puzzles, particularly visual ones. But if I hadn't, I would have missed out on the great story and enjoying the craft of the game.
except walkthroughs are much more accurate...
Here's something I've been thinking about. I've been playing through some need for speed games on emulators for the past few years. Once I bound keys to save and load states it was over: I'd save-state before every turn and run them over and over until I got them perfect. Doing this I did eventually learn the maps really well though, and on more recent playthroughs I've barely used save-states, which was obviously far more satisfying. I realize this isn't the same thing as ai or walkthroughs, but I think maybe these tools do share something in that they lower the barrier to entry to different sorts of skilled tasks we may not yet feel competent to accomplish. Like training wheels or a helping hand, we can let go of them once we feel steadier on our own.
I like this analogy and it's a good way to think about this sort of AI help, but I guess the problem arises when people don't have the same awareness. If you don't realise it's more fun/satisfying, you might never take the training wheels off. I know it seems obvious to me or you but a lot wouldn't see that correlation.
I've been playing co-op games recently and half my group want to revert the save anytime anything goes south. I always refuse (I host) and we've had some really fun times digging ourselves out of the hole. Even the save scummers agree they were the most fun playthroughs, but then they still want to save scum next time.
Totally agree. It can be hard to let go of something you've grown accustomed to.
I decided to use GPT to help me with gaming, specifically when I had little to no clue what to do or where to go.
What I did was write instructions in my prompt, asking it not to be too specific and not to give me a straight answer. Sometimes, I even asked it to be intentionally cryptic. That way, I could still make progress without ruining the fun, since the vague hints still left room for me to figure things out on my own.
Basically you ignored out all the hints the game gave you, and asked Chat-GPT for it instead.
..., specifically when I had little to no clue what to do or where to go.
I think you missed that part of my comment.
I like AI because it will ruin next generations, so I will always have job as programmer who can use brain
It's sort of like when you're at work and see the "quick workaround" effectively become the standard process.
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix
To be fair, I needed some serious help in RCT. The under the hood mechanics were NOT intuitive to me.
I replayed it recently and the hidden mechanics are just bad game design. Not docking the game but there's no way to tell the reasons for certain scenario failures, even when addressing all the customer thoughts and using all existing information.
I haven't played rtc in 20 yrs, but I remember completing every park task except for dinky Park. I got really close one time, but was just short when the time ran out. Just a few months ago I randomly came across a video on how to beat it, and now I want to play it again but can't find it.
I grew up when solutions either were not available or cost money to get either by subscribing to a magazine, buying a magazine, or calling a 1800 hotline which cost ludicrous amounts of money for the time.
When gamefaqs and the like became popular it was great to get the answer instead of giving up. I couldn't imagine growing up always having the answer handed to you though.
Counterpoint, like, I can draw things, but I can't draw people, but I have used AI to generate pictures of people that I can then trace to learn how to draw people, and because it's a new person, and it's something I'm in control of, I feel more encouraged to fire up Krita and work on my drawing.
I still suck, don't get me wrong, but I have done more artwork since having access to AI art tools than I did for several years prior to that.
There's just something about having an idea of knowing what the finished output is supposed to look like that helps me figure out how to draw what I'm supposed to draw.
And eventually I will be fully drawing my own stuff from scratch, thanks to using AI as a self-learning tool.
I think that's more than a fair point. AI is a tool, and I'm personally (tentatively) optimistic about what it will be capable of helping us with.
I think the distinction to be made in this case is when the use of a tool undermines the desired experience without us realizing it.
Like "I want to enjoy playing this game." > (uses cheats for a little bit) > "Now I don't enjoy playing it normally anymore."
Or "I want to be able to think critically." > (consults AI for everything) > "Now I have a hard time reasoning on my own."
This argument says,"I use a tool as a tool." Which is valid, using a tool as crutch when you don't need one is wrong.
Like I sell AI art as a business.
At first I was going to disagree and say "hey at least they are still looking up information, unlike most people" but then I did a 540° on that idea when I realized that I myself was a great example of how the OP is right.
I have been building things in my back yard like crazy this summer. I am currently working on a purpose-built little lego/craft tray for my wife to use in the house. I have gotten to plan out every detail in my head and sketching on paper, including convenient geometry knowledge like multiplying by the square root of 2 to find lengths for 45° supports or the good old 3-4-5 triangle for getting a right angle in a pinch. I have been able to discuss the table's use with my wife to figure out the perfect features. It will be a little wooden table that's ~2'/60cm wide like a TV tray but it will be held up by cantilever legs that are long enough and tall enough to hover the table over her lap with the footrest up. And it will have other features like little segmented bins for pieces/parts, and an instruction holder.
It's a great activity for numerous reasons. It gets me outside, it gets me physical, it gets me interacting with my wife and excited to give her the finished product, it gives me opportunities to practice new skills/tools, and it engages the senses as well as the mind while I spend hours in a calm almost meditative state and not seeing anything that's happening on my phone (though it will read texts to me through my earbuds).
It's a pretty funny look. I'm wearing a big round brimmed sun/fishing hat that looks almost like Gandalf's but without the pointy top. From the outside the sound of the scene is 95% the sound of falling water and birds chirping, interrupted by the 5% of the time spent actively cutting or planing some wood. But if my earbuds are in my ears, they are blasting my playlist of various high-tempo Thrash and Industrial Metal songs! (at 45-50% volume. I'm responsible here, lol)
So if I take all that and compare it to some schmuck who pulls up ChatGPT and types something like "design me a sturdy two foot wide table, create a list of the pieces I need and the cuts to make them, and generate detailed assembly instructions with pictures." Yeah you might still get a functional table but your life has missed out on the vast majority of the potential benefit of the activity!
This is the way I started looking at these tasks once I really internalized the whole "life is about the journey, not the destination" thing.
I'd love to see a picture of the tray once you're done with it!
sure thing!
busy weekend for us but there's no way I don't finish it tomorrow. (right?)
The stuff I'm making right now is all just pine, with flat surfaces and 90 degree corners like you might get from ikea. But with visible wood grain and built so that you can dance on it or use it to hold the biggest aquarium you can find.
It makes sense for me too, and i like your cheat code version of it. I think it's also akin to the tutorial hell for devs and artists.
I played with cheats almost all the time when I was a kid, but I was rarely doing it for difficulty reasons. I just got used to the idea early on of game engines just being digital sandboxes and loved seeing how far I could push things.
I don’t really understand using cheats as a difficulty bypass unless you’re there just to get the story/explore.
I use ChatGPT similarly. If I want to explore an idea without consequence, I can use it to brainstorm, but it’s not going to be how I lay out an entire project.
I had a a guidebook for Desperados. I ended up using the "hide around corner, shoot, and then blast everyone coming around the corner"-tactic instead of the guidebook 80% of the time.
desperados and commandos were both just that kind of game. i revisited desperados recently and the amount of mileage you can get out of "lie down in tall grass, quicksave, stand up, shoot, lie down" is frankly ridiculous.
I've fallen into this exact trap when I played the HD remaster of Suikoden 1&2 a few months ago. The games still hold up pretty well but are a bit too dated to my taste to have more than a single playthrough, so I followed guides to get the perfect ending, which involves recruiting all 108 characters into your army.
At first I was just looking at a very light guide that told me which characters were missable and approximately when to get them. Then I got impatient and looked up their location and recruitment conditions. And then I ended up following a complete walkthrough step by step to make sure I wasn't making any mistake.
That completely took the fun out of the games and I burnt out halfway through the second one.
The bits I used gamefaqs guides for (btw I love they are still there _) are rarely fun anyway. Mostly, it's achievement grinding or 100%ing. If the game itself needs a guide to navigate it, I usually just drop it. If it fails at informing me about it's mechanics that much it's not for me.
Weird, I love problem solving. Its why im so upset with people complaining about computers when all they have to do is tinker with them or google about it. Walkthroughs are for when you need it, if you have an urge to use the walkthrough only instead of actually playing the game, then thats a you problem.
I mean, I guess, it was their realization that the walkthrough skips the fun problem-solving part. That it shouldn't be a tool you use during the problem-solving.
I wish there were more options for “hints” instead of just giving you the walkthrough. I keep getting stuck in Subnautica, but I don’t want to just make a beeline to where I need to be.
Cheating always made games boring for me. I remember doing a cheat in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life to get all items, and it just evaporated any fun I had.
The best balance was a GameFAQs I printed out for Morrowind that just covered the first handful of quests of the game. Gave me tips for class and race selection, and just enough guidance to get my bearings.
Beneath A Steel Sky has a help system now you can refer to, and I ended up using it a fair bit. The solutions often just pissed me off though, as they rely on you remembering a one-off bit of dialogue you saw (or skipped) days ago in real time. or were just nonsense.
When I walk around the floor at work now I often see other devs on their phones while they wait for the AI to do stuff. People are getting disengaged are forgetting skills already - this is unsustainable.
Me and Dk 64 but that game had so many little secrets that I got annoyed with trying to find them all. 😒
I hereby retroactively grant you a permission for committing the following action:
I commend you for your engangement in achieving the best possible result in the process of donkeying the kong.
Mods. Mod the games you want to beat. Then you get a smooth experience without looking shit up.
Console is a Google search, though.
What is the point of a walkthrough for sandbox games op???
sometimes you just wanna know what to splice to finish your gardening collection instead of brute forcing every single combination of the 40+ plants that exist until you learn that grapes and oats grafted together make elderberries or something weird like that.
I guess less of a walkthrough and more "here are the cheat codes".
Min maxing.
Im playing a bunch of soulslikes for the first time now. You gotta exhaust everything you can think of, then check a walkthrough just for the hint youre missing.
The process is the fun part. Looking it up is just a way to minimize frustration because you can't find the goddamn ladder.
In other words im with you
I think souls likes are just not for me. I just want a cool story told in a relatively linear fashion. I'd take a linear 15 hour game over an open world 150+ hour game any day.
Most of em are pretty linear, really. Elden Ring is the exception. But like Bloodborne for instance, youre gonna go pretty much in the same order till you have to return to earlier areas to finish stuff. You've gotta explore a lot though.
Not trying to be like "LOVE THE THING THAT I LOVE DAMN YOU", theyre totally not for everyone.
Soulslikes are great if you're looking to scratch an itch for mechanical mastery, discovery, exploration, etc., but stories are not their strong suit. I'm not saying the stories are bad, just the delivery of them, unless you're the type of player who wants to play detective.
I unironically think that The Witcher 2 is the best game in the trilogy for this exact reason.
Something something sense of pride and accomplishment
I dunno, I feel like I wouldn't use a walkthrough on souls like games until the second play through. Part of the fun is the discovery, and its fine if you miss shit the first time.
I just mean when youre banging your head against the wall and need a hint where to go. I do this less and less now though, I've still only beaten one of them.
I agree and don't typically worry so much about getting 100% in games, if i miss something that's on me and fine.