True, reading is faster. Narrating I find more pleasant, more engaging if done well. But that’s personal opinion. So having an option would be great. And yes to making dialogues or narration skippable. I think most games do that nowadays. To be honest, if I am really immersed and interested and the voice acting is top notch I may not skip at all. But that should be left to the player to decide.

I see. Happens to me too that I lose focus while listening to an audio recording. But not to the extent you describe. Have always had difficulty separating voices from background noise though, like when a few people talk in parallel or when loud music is playing in the background. I don’t remember what that’s called, but I remember a long time ago reading that it’s a thing. Doesn’t affect my gaming much though if at all. Anyway I’m always interested in things having to do with auditory perception, thanks for sharing.

Huh, never heard of this before. Does it affect music perception too?

Yeah I get it, but I like having the option of having a voice actor narrate the text to me rather than having to read everything. Especially as I mostly game on a TV that was not meant for reading.

I got carpal tunnel syndrome just watching this

No save option during stealth sequences or generally in stealth-heavy games. Allow me the option to either improvise and enjoy messing up or plan and execute and test every section of a stealth route carefully without having to replay the mission a thousand times, especially when the slightest hiccup will have the whole mission going awry. If that leads to some people save-scumming their way through the entire mission, so be it. Let them play their way.

Quests that demand that the player finds X of an unimportant item in a world which has exactly X instances of said item. Thankfully most games nowadays will offer up more of said item than needed to complete the quest, so that one doesn’t end up scouring the map over and over again, in search of that elusive last bottle/scroll/pigeon, because nobody got time for that. And not even talking about optional collectathon quests for those who want that sort of thing, some games would have this sort of quest in the main storyline.

Excessive reliance on audio recordings and written text for storytelling / world building. Oh look another game where I’m alone in this world and I have to listen to a ton of audio recordings or collect snippets of text throughout the entire game to learn anything about this world and what happened to it!

If anything, let it be audio, not text, I’m tired of reading through often very subpar writing, I just glaze over it. Better yet, have actual (skippable) voice actors read any text out loud. Ideally, weave all that info into the game’s main storyline or side quests, and have it communicated to the player via interesting NPCs. Also, use environmental storytelling more than info-dumps. Show, don’t tell.

Text/in-world notes/memos/books and found audio recordings have a place but don’t let that be the main way of learning about the world or my place in it.

I understand it’s also a budget issue, so I’ll cut indie games some slack.

Believe me I’m old enough to be set in my ways too. Trends come and go and the way I work hasn’t changed much. But that is also the force of habit. Even if the perfect AI were available today and I could talk to my computer for most tasks I’d have a hard time adjusting, even if I can see the potential and think that current workflows will someday seem very antiquated and inefficient.

I know it is very much de rigeur on here to bash AI but I’ve personally wished for a more ‘intelligent’ user experience for the longest time. Most tasks that are common for professionals or for private use on a computer have remained virtually unchanged for decades. Find file, open file, process, read, whatever, find another file, do the same, combine them into something new, produce a new visual or summary of that something new, stop to check email, go back, etc. Most people use a small number of popular applications that haven’t evolved much. Same with OSs and file management.

I am tired of the same old process, the endless stream of clickety clicks to get the simplest things done, and have often wished for a digital assistant that would offer up options, take instruction in natural language and have access to the file system, email, etc, to help me complete daily tasks, alert me to important things happening in the background, etc. I remember already a decade ago thinking surely this will be possible one day, just like in the movies. And now it’s here, it’s a privacy and security quagmire, because it can’t run local, not efficiently enough just yet, but it’s here, and it works only sometimes and many people are up in arms against it.

So what gives? I think the idea of a computer that is now an intelligent and maybe even proactive digital agent instead of a dutiful code execution machine is very compelling. So it’s natural that some people are super excited about it on a personal level. But it doesn’t work as well as advertised yet and accepting such a huge ugh… paradigm shift is not going to be easy. Not unless the AI proves itself equal (and completely trustworthy) or better than the user. But then the user may fear it or resent it for those very reasons.

Unpopular opinion: Apple could make it work better as a true OS-level all around assistant given their experience and control over OS and apps but they are lagging behind for now. And Microsoft is busy being Microsoft, angering its users by trying to push its own vision of the future down users’ throats without sufficient market or product testing.

Anyway, long post to say: If I am honest with myself, I actually have always wanted an AI to assist me in my work, but like in the movies, where it just works, seamlessly, and it just ‘gets’ you and you can delegate some busywork to it and rest assured that it isn’t spying on you nor messing anything up. Not like in the dystopian movies where it goes horribly wrong and you end up begging it for mercy. And right now we’re neither here nor there.

The moment we use the NIMBY label we prejudice ourselves against potentially legitimate local and global concerns and specific local protest movements. I do that too on some issues but do wonder sometimes whether I’m being unfair. I guess the determining factors would be how big a sacrifice a local community is asked to make, how great the greater good that sacrifice will serve, also who is protesting and what arguments they bring forth, what values they stand for, how these values align with yours, etc.

I focus on the hardware, OS and ecosystem which are all very good for my use and just shake my head at things like this and move on. It’s not like I approve or feel like I have to approve of everything a company does to use their products. Of course the more attuned they are to my needs the more I like them. And Apple has been a mixed bag over the years. Then again so has everyone else.

Yes, possibly, for the best of both worlds

Yes, you may be right, given how there seems to be some geographic patterns in the level of fluency. A map would show these better. A bar chart would be better for making visible actual absolute differences in scores. But yeah, a map would be good, I agree.

One of my best gaming memories from way back.

I look at this and I think you know, not everything needs to be a bar chart… this is different, it’s creative, but then again, it would be better as a bar chart.

Interesting. So the theory is that lead poisoning at childhood has had long term social effects? Seems like a very hard thing to establish(in terms of causality) with any certainty.

I wish they made a sequel already. Also so rare to have motorbike riding specifically as a mechanic woven into the protagonist’s story and not just an alternative to driving a car.