speaking of which and also crystals, sheldrake's books are actually interesting, for a bit. partly because crystallography is an important topic you don't learn outside of speciality
i guess i'd say the difference is crystal healing and pyramid power make empirically testable claims about physics which are easily disproven
memetics is a bad model, but it's modelling something outside the parameters of hard science, if you're not interested in psychology or semiotics the problems with that model might not be apparent
For me it was thinking pseudoscience was nifty, at however many years young, and then again from 999. Never did get to reading any of Sheldrake's books though.
for some reason crystal powers never attracted kid tach, that i can remember
might just have been the context i first encountered them in, i tended to be very credible of anything i read, so if my first encounter with the mystical properties of crystals was in a sceptical source, that would have coloured my perception of them
to be fair to whoever that person is, that sounds like a great idea for any given story
It was. People were wowed by the beginning stages and then felt betrayed as the game got increasingly dumb.
The developers like to say that they didn't have enough time to properly tell the story they wanted to tell, but I feel like this is bullshit because
1: The game is overlong and has too much padding as it is
2. There is no possible way to connect the "A" point of "A guy stabs another guy in a men's restroom for seemingly no reason" to the "B" point of "because the mayan aliens are using him to fight the war against the zombie internet" that isn't silly
It probably would've been amazing if they weren't so far up their own ass about it.
And came up with a play mechanic more interesting than four minutes of Simon Says.
Let's be honest here:
The gaming community considers everything that wasn't already present in Doom "up its own ass"
To be fair, I totally respect the guy's aim of making an interactive film and willingness to break from standard game mechanics. Shaking things up is a good thing.
He just replaced them with mechanics so inadequate and pointless that the game probably would've been better off as plain cutscenes, and the film you were supposed to interact with would have been up its own ass whether or not it was interactive. It takes itself so completely, earnestly seriously.
And for what it's worth, that was fine for the first half of the game when it was creepy paranormal. But when it got bugfuck insane paranormal and is still stubbornly convinced it's srs bsns it just falls apart. Once you add fight scenes with internet zombie goasts set to DDR gameplay you kind of lose your ability to be taken seriously.
Comments
well, of a sort
i don't think anyone here was planning on defending memetics, though
i guess i'd say the difference is crystal healing and pyramid power make empirically testable claims about physics which are easily disproven
memetics is a bad model, but it's modelling something outside the parameters of hard science, if you're not interested in psychology or semiotics the problems with that model might not be apparent
young tach believed in 2 out of 3
might just have been the context i first encountered them in, i tended to be very credible of anything i read, so if my first encounter with the mystical properties of crystals was in a sceptical source, that would have coloured my perception of them
all mysticism is highly redolent of jrpg villains tho tbh
it seems to me that video games can have more that can go wrong than any other medium, because of the whole user interaction component
and then you have the cultural issue where