GlyphThere's been a lot of fretting recently—some of it from me—about there being Too Much Politics On Here, encouraging people to (A) stop posting so much about it and (B) post about other things. This is a valid concern but I want to take a moment to put a structural lens on this problem.
We don't have an (sigh) "algorithm" here, so we think of ourselves as liberated from the corrosive engagement-maximizing forces of social media. There is *some* truth to that, but in typical "humanity was the real monster all along" fashion, it undersells what these ML models are actually *doing*.
Twitter, Instagram, et. al. are maximizing engagement by showing you *more* of the kind of posts that'll keep you on the site longer. The kind of posts that distract people, deactivate our collective prefrontal cortex, make us anxious, and generally want to push the lever to get another pellet.
Opting out of the turbo-charging aspect where reactions beget more reactions does *not* opt us out of the fundamental truth that the anxiety-inducing, identity-affirming, mass-audience posts are just going to draw more attention and more approval. We want approval. This is human nature.
Case in point: if I write a long-form blog post that takes me 8 hours to write, that reflects my core competency (Python programming) I will usually get 100 or so 'favs' on it. An anxious (but pithy) post about a recent political development that I am peripherally aware of might do 10x better.
It takes me less time to write, it takes you less time to process, more of you will find it relevant, the whole reward system optimizes for this result. And, even here, there are structural things that reward this as well, although they apply in different degrees to different people.
If I want to take some pictures and post about finding joy in natural beauty, I'm going to get yelled at failing to put in alt text. The website will even yell at me automatically now, to prevent me from posting in the first place. Guess I'll just vent about anxiety instead.
Matt Campbell@glyph Damn, I guess I, and maybe others as well, do need to lighten up about that. Not all media is for everyone; I get that.
@matt FWIW when I see actually visually-impaired people, yourself included, asking for alt text that you're immediately going to _use_, it hardly bothers me at all. And I've extremely rarely felt particularly "yelled at" by you or by any of my other blind followers.
@glyph So, this subthread reminded me of your old personal website, 20+ years ago, where the alt text for the Glyph symbol was something like, "sorry if you're blind, but this is hard to describe, and if you're not, then just use a graphical browser." And that reminded me of the 2015 post where you finally broke down the symbol and what it means: https://blog.glyph.im/2015/01/the-glyph.html
My intent isn't to shame you for that alt text; that was clearly a difficult image to describe well.
@glyph I thought the post explaining the glyph was really interesting. If you do ever get back to Divunal, would it still be a text-based adventure game, or more visual?
@matt oof that is hard to say. I have not enjoyed the direction that the text-based game community has gone in the last few years in a couple of ways so I am pretty out of touch with the state of the art, and not really excited about the medium any more. I wish I were though and perhaps this question is a prompt to get me back into it …
@glyph I'm curious about what you don't like about the recent direction of the text-based game community.
@matt before I start criticizing I should make it clear that these are just ways in which the genre has failed to conform to my aesthetic preferences, not things that I think are fundamentally a problem. In fact many of these choices arguably made the genre more mainstream
@matt for one thing dark-on-light has taken over, as well as using dedicated launchers and executables rather than distributing e.g. .z5 files for use with frotz. I have some visual issues that make "light mode" pretty uncomfortable for me, and this very minor issue has unfortunately made it impossible to play any of these games for very long.
@matt parser games have fallen out of fashion and hyperlink-based games are much more popular. again, this streamlines the games and makes them more accessible to players who don't want to engage in frustrating "guess the verb" exercises, but it also removes the biggest thing that I appreciated about the genre of a child, the "anything can happen, anything is possible" nature of a blank prompt
@matt games have gotten shorter, both as a budgetary necessity (almost all text-based games are indie efforts these days) and as an aesthetic choice (games have leaned in to the literary aspects of their construction, making them much more short-story like and aiming for emotionally resonant gut-punches rather than big weird ambient world-building efforts)
@matt as a corollary of that, simulationism is in decline, and games are much more on rails rather than being the result of interacting systems or procedural puzzles. again, understandable: simulation systems can fail in lots of spectacularly un-fun ways and they never got very popular to begin with. "beyond zork"'s foray into stat-based adventuring was, honestly, kind of broken and involved all kinds of weird opportunities for stat-based soft locks
@glyph Ignoring the system-wide setting and forcing either dark or light mode is an accessibility issue, full stop, so that's disappointing. As for distributing launchers rather than bytecode files for an interpreter, I don't like that either, not least because being able to choose one's own interpreter is a way of working around accessibility problems.
@matt this is really the only thing I am looking for from the accessibility community more broadly: accessibility has big costs! It also has big benefits but we are so used to criticizing billion-dollar corporations who are saving like 0.01% on their gross margins by being shit at accessibility that we use the same language to confront people whose entire budget (in time, money, or both) would be immediately destroyed by even a cursory accessibility effort
@matt I am glad I wrote that post and I am glad you personally got something out of it, but as you note it took about fifteen years to get around to and if I had been required to start with it I just wouldn’t have a blog at all.
@matt Although, funny story, the reason the alt text was phrased like that is that (due to the fundamental nature of my audience) 99% of the complaints I got came from sighted people using Lynx and I just … did not really feel like investing effort into that particular trajectory of web technology. It did not feel like skating to where the puck was going
@glyph Yeah, I think I understood even back then that it was directed primarily to people using Lynx.
@glyph Yes, when it comes to visual media in particular, I'm aware that, for example, when I watch a movie that has an audio description track, the only reason we're able to enjoy that is because the likes of Disney can easily afford that extra work. The same goes for accessibility in video games; the big studios can afford to put extra work into accessibility, but indie developers often can't, depending on the kind of game.