MudMan

Well, I’m less black and white than you are on this, but I could agree with most of that.

That’s not what’s in the law, though.

The law outright bans any and all loot boxes in games aimed at kids or teenagers (meaning anything with any loot boxes is automatically 18+ rated) and sets an obligation for all stores to verify people’s age on top of having parental controls. I guess you could go to court and find out, but the way I read it, age checks are mandated additionally to parental controls and both are set as obligations.

So it’s great for you that you have this whole mental framework of why porn is cool but loot boxes are not, but that’s not what the law says, so I’m going to guess I can chalk you up as disagreeing with this whole situation.

Also, the idea that NSFW content in general, regardless of where you place the bar for “porn” has “never been marketed at children” is hilarious.

Whose point is that? Because I don’t think it’s the previous guy’s point, and it certainly isn’t mine.

I mean, the law (not a bill, this isn’t the US and it has been approved, as per the text) outright bans loot boxes in games “targeted at children or teenagers”. No qualifiers. Doesn’t even say “paid loot boxes”, so technically all videogames are now illegal if they have a loot table anywhere. I’m going to assume cooler heads will prevail and a categorization will come from courts or specific regulatory development, but it’s certainly not in the law.

So if you don’t like this for doing both at once… well, that’s weird, that’s why laws have multiple articles. If you’re worried that the inclusion is meant to stall the bill that’s irrelevant, this has been published and comes in force in six months. If you think they’re overreaching by outright banning loot boxes… well, I agree, but I don’t think that’s the point as the rest of the thread is defining it.

No, see, there is no logical mistake because at no point was there an argument about universal truths anywhere. There was a note that, despite the headline and article not flagging it, the same regulation covers porn and has some of the issues that anti-porn age verification has had in the past.

You’re just doing the thing where you read something on the Internet and it made you angry by not immediately reinforcing your preferences so you nitpicked a random bit you thought didn’t check out regardless of whether it was part of the argument or not.

I would much prefer to talk like adults, instead.

Once again, you don’t get a say.

They are the same in the law. They will be treated the same way.

Also, what is your point anyway? That porn should be accessible to children but loot boxes shouldn’t? Are you not OK with porn being for adults? The question here isn’t whether the content is adults-only, we probably should all agree that’s the case. The question is how that’s enforced.

I mean, if you want to tell me what you actually think about that I’m happy to listen, but going “these two things feel different to me” doesn’t bring anything to this conversation.

How are they different? They’re both activities we allow for adults but not for children. For, arguably, good reasons.

I mean, you can be into one more than into another, and you can argue whether or not loot boxes should qualify as gambling, but for practical purposes when it comes to regulation they are fairly interchangeable.

Not that it matters, because regardless of what you and I think, they are listed together in the law. I’m not mixing diffferent issues, the law is specifically, explicitly applying the exact same regulation to porn and loot boxes. Doesn’t matter how you feel about it, the Brazilian regulators think they’re the same here.

Also porn.

And it’s written in pretty much the same way as the UK anti-porn thing, where age ratings alone won’t cut it, so if you want to make smut games in Brazil you need to have some sort of “effective” age gating on top of parental controls to allow parents to close it off to their kids.

Art. 12. Os provedores de lojas de aplicações de internet e de sistemas operacionais de terminais deverão:

I – tomar medidas proporcionais, auditáveis e tecnicamente seguras para aferir a idade ou a faixa etária dos usuários, observados os princípios previstos no art. 6º da Lei nº 13.709, de 14 de agosto de 2018 (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais);

II – permitir que os pais ou responsáveis legais configurem mecanismos de supervisão parental voluntários e supervisionem, de forma ativa, o acesso de crianças e de adolescentes a aplicativos e conteúdos; e

III – possibilitar, por meio de Interface de Programação de Aplicações (Application Programming Interface – API) segura e pautada pela proteção da privacidade desde o padrão, o fornecimento de sinal de idade aos provedores de aplicações de internet, exclusivamente para o cumprimento das finalidades desta Lei e com salvaguardas técnicas adequadas.

So where are we on this one? We gonna be the “fuck free speech, I hate loot boxes” or “fuck thinking of the children, we like our smutty stuff”?

On the plus side, I keep forgetting that this game exists and they keep reminding me, so… yay, free marketing?

And you know, if wouldn’t hurt my ability to play more games if more of them were shorter.

From the article:

In 2024, a staggering 18,626 games were released on Steam, according to SteamDB, a website that tracks data on the popular PC platform. That’s an increase of around 93% from 2020, when 9,656 games were released.

By my count, if you don’t sleep or eat and only play videogames you need every game to be about 30 minutes long on average.

I mean, it wouldn’t hurt, but I’m gonna say it’s not enough.

In all seriousness, I’m more concerned by the competition from social media and on demand video. I’m typing this, which isn’t that interesting of an activity. Idling online is a huge time sink, and it’s getting bigger.

The answer to what?

I mean, that’s the problem, from the article’s perspective.

Hey, say what you will, but I do think the solution is technological. MS at least has an approach. About time, too. I don’t want to overplay it, because a lot of these arguments is very… terminally online, but it’s nuts that the DX12/UE5 combo of tech that has now been a thing for ages is still so poorly understood and unadressed on a wider scale.

Also crazy that dev teams don’t have enough systems engineers bitchy enough to insist on figuring this out.

I think for BL4 specifically the problem is the game is just… heavy. Not chuggy or stuttery on good enough hardware, but good enough starts kinda high here.

And yeah, it looks better than previous games, but it’s a stylized look and it’s taking shortcuts meant for photorealism into a space where a lot of stylization is going to cut into the extra bits of indirect lighting or vegetation or environmental detail you’re getting out of it.

Blend the confusing shader issues with the disproportionately high frame budget even when things are working fine and you get this stuff. But I’ll say that I was shocked at how playable the game is on higher end hardware given what the Internet was saying.

Supposedly that’s why it does things this way, right? Instead of the very long compile up front they do a smaller one up front and then run it in the background.

They seem to imply that because the game is heavy by default this is what’s causing people’s performance issues. I don’t know that I agree, but there’s probably part of it.

Yeah, the process will be different depending on CPU, so I’m assuming 15 min is the upper bound they’re expecting on the minimum supported spec or whatever.

My experience with it has been solid, but I do run high end hardware that is muscling past a lot of stuff.

I think as usual there is some confusion between compilation stutters and the game just being very heavy for the way it looks (which it is). People online seem to be scattershot about it.

And then there’s the people talking about it who don’t care but like to be mad online, which is also a thing.

And then there’s the weird dev that keeps mouthing off for no reason in ways that can’t possibly help.

Lots of things on this one.

Still I don’t think you’re expected to idle for fifteen minutes. That’s the point of the background compilation. You can still play more or less fine. Particularly on first boot the first fifteen of this should be a bunch of cutscenes anyway, and those lock at 30 (which I don’t like at all and so many games do now for some reason).

I swear, the online AI haters think AI is so much cooler than I do.

I get crap for being on the fence about it or for saying it’s useful for some stuff, on interesting on principle. They’re out there being exactly as bullish about its capabilities as the shills who invested retirement money in Open AI and are terrified it’ll all blow away.

That is explicitly not what I’m saying.

Can you bundle people consistently based on what age they had relative to specific events in history and the shared culture that results from it? Sure.

I mean, I don’t know how much clearer that can be about not saying what you say I’m saying. Yes, you can bundle people consistently on how old they were during the dotcom bubble or 9/11 or whatever else. That’s the same thing you’re saying. I mean, very clearly what you’re saying.

For the record, that doesn’t mean everybody will react to those events the same way. 9/11 didn’t matter as much in some places of the world as it did in the US or in the countries unlucky enough to be on the reciving end of whatever the hell the US was doing immediately after.

But insofar people of a certain age experience history and culture together, it’s a global-enough situation to tag the people that lived that period together. Under no circumstance are Polish or Romanian people who were young adults in the 80s and 90s “Gen X”, though. That makes zero sense relative to the reference Gen X is going for. They weren’t the aimless drones of capitalism seeking meaning in a lifelong peacetime, they were in “holy shit, stuff is going down” revolutionary mode in a way the US Gen Xers weren’t even in living memory of at all. That’s not Gen X. That’s the opposite of Gen X.

OK, but… you just said the same thing I said.

To reiterate:

Can you bundle people consistently based on what age they had relative to specific events in history and the shared culture that results from it? Sure.

Is the experience of each of those bundles of people homogeneous worldwide or even in any arbitrary slice of “Western world” you want to pick? Absolutely not.

Or, to go back to the very first post:

I’m annoyed by this on principle and across the board, but I do want to point out that “Greatest Generation” all the way to “Baby Boomers” makes zero sense in most of the planet. You can sooooort of get away with Millenials to Alpha because the Internet is a bad idea, and Gen X at least applies to probably most of Europe as well as the US and Canada, although it’s still weird across the board.

But everything before that? Super specifically US-only.

So… is there a point you’re making in addition to mine? Because you sound like you disagree, but what you wrote doesn’t seem to disagree.

Is it? I mean, to start with the obvious, not every Western country was on the same side of WW2, and not all of them had the fighting happen in their territory, which means not all of them were levelled. And not all of them were Marshall planned after. And of course not all of them were on the same bloc during the Cold War. Gonna guess the Polish have a slightly different recollection of the 70s and 80s. Which then means for a whole bunch of post-soviet countries the 90s played out very differently, too. And of course the 90s probably had a slightly different flavour if you were in or around former Yugoslavia. And that’s Europe, don’t get me started on South America, which is fairly Western, last I checked. I don’t even need to start thinking about Africa or Asia.

Post-9/11, maaaybe. Before? You’re glossing over so much stuff it’s hard to even conceptualize it.

Can you bundle people consistently based on what age they had relative to specific events in history and the shared culture that results from it? Sure.

Is the experience of each of those bundles of people homogeneous worldwide or even in any arbitrary slice of “Western world” you want to pick? Absolutely not.

I swear I have no idea why they let him talk. He doesn’t even own the company, surely someone at 2K could just go… you know… shush.

I don’t even think the BL4 thing is that bad, on the face of it. There is really no need to make it worse.

“We have been made aware of some performance issues in certain systems in our new release, we’ll be looking into performance improvements in future patches”. It’s not that hard. At this point just copy/paste whatever the other thousand UE5 games said, go fix the wonky precompilation boot step and stop digging a hole.

Hell, it’s even easier than that, because they have actually pretty much put that out. All he really needed to do was shut up about it.

Right. That’s my point, though. Depending on where you are in the world and how joined at the hip with the US you are culturally this particular set will start making sense at a different point. In some cases not at all.

Where I am millenials are the first that definitely sync up. Up until GenX we are in a completely different set. I bet in other parts of the world even with how fully online we all are even then it doesn’t click.

See, I kinda see it the other way. Generational demarcations used to be cultural and thus geographically determined back when different places had different media. Now we all have the same garbage social media, so since the 2000s it makes sense that we’re all on the same boat made of crap and hate.

For example, my parents had a moon landing, but it looked, sounded different and meant very different things. Also for example, I had no idea what Oregon Trail was or what it was about until the Internet told me it was a staple of US computer classes. If you think about it for a few seconds it may be no surprise that my equivalent was some combination of drawing dicks in LOGO, Defender of the Crown and Saboteur II.

We have local names for people born in the late 70s to mid 90s, too. After that we just use the US-designed universal names, though.