Factually, that’s what he did during his time in office as well. I’m not sure what they thought had changed.
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Ever play an arcade video game from the 1980s? I’m talking about the ones in the arcades where you had to pop a quarter into the machine to play.
Here’s the thing about those games. The first 2 levels or so were usually pretty easy. Weak AI opponents. Easily distinguishable patterns. But then you hit level 3 or 4. And the difficultly skyrockets. With absolutely no warning. You go from “Hey, this game ain’t so bad” to regretting all of your life choices. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to get owned, hard. Only a few people could get past a couple of levels, and only the best of the best were skilled enough to be able to play as long as they wanted until they clocked the game.
That’s where we’re at now. Trump played those first couple of levels. Clinton was a divisive figure in her own right and treated the 2016 race like she could skate to victory too. Biden had weaknesses that Trump could easily exploit. The real game has begun and Trump has absolutely no idea how to actually play. So Trump wants to start the game over. He doesn’t want to make it to level 3 because he knows he’ll never beat level 3. He’s looking for a reset switch like on the Atari 2600 so he could keep playing the first two levels over and over and over. Because he knows how to beat those.
But he can’t. So he’s essentially stopped playing the game. He’s telling everybody in the arcade how rigged that machine is, the joystick’s broken, and you need to hit the fire button 10, 12, 15 times for it to fire. And he’s getting jealous that all the cool kids in the mall aren’t listening to him, and are circling around the new girl who popped her quarter in and has gotten to levels Trump hasn’t even seen before, while he goes to the corner of the arcade, pops a quarter into the dusty, old Pong machine, and wonders why nobody fucking cares.
It wasn’t like a switch got flipped, no one would keep playing.
They’d make a tiny segment super hard so you’d have to drop a couple bucks to get past it. Go back to easy for a little. Then hit another hard part.
It’s basically the whole reason for boss fights.
Once games started developing storylines, plots, etc. it was like that. It was an intentional strategy developed to keep you playing. But early developers weren’t thinking that far ahead. The idea was to give you a couple of easy levels so you feel you got your 5 minutes worth of entertainment worth, then start punishing you at level 3 or 4 so you’d lose and the next person would play.
And some were made by simple oversight. Space invaders’ increasing difficulty was solely the result of hardware limitations of the time that just happened to result in the exact difficulty spikes they were looking for. As a programmer, I could, for example, set level 1 vs. an opponent that was slow as festering dog shit, but be lazy and just double his speed with every level. As long as the player’s speed stays the same, it would become nearly impossible to win in a couple of levels.
Either way, the results were the same: 25 cents for about 5 minutes worth of entertainment. That was the goal of the day. As you mentioned, they fine tuned it by the mid 80s with games like Mario and the like. but those early games were meant to get you off the cabinet as quickly as possible so soneone else could pop in their quarter.
set level 1 vs. an opponent that was slow as festering dog shit, but be lazy and just double his speed with every level. As long as the player’s speed stays the same, it would become nearly impossible to win in a couple of levels.
Exactly, and long term people would stop playing because they always get stuck about the same time.
It’s like how humans respond to rewards, a steady consistent reward is kind of motivating, it’s why we go to work in the morning
But what works a shit ton better is sporadic rewards that have a tiny tiny chance of paying off.
That’s why people get addicted to slot machines and not working at McDonald’s. If a slot machine paid out 75 cents for every dollar everytime, no one would play.
Have them win $7.50 every tenth time they put a dollar in tho, and people will flush their entire lives away chasing that 1/10 of a time they “win”.
So if you really want to exploit gamers, you can’t steadily increase difficulty. Linearly or exponentially, it doesn’t matter. To hook people they need those “wins” and they’ll keep dropping quarters or spinning loot boxes.
In coin operated video games, that’s when things get easy
A better example with Space Invaders is once they beat a level, they get to the next one and it’s slow again due to the amount of enemies on the screen. Letting the player get that easy time again hooks them. If the next level they were all as fast as the last one from last level, it wouldn’t have been as addictive
Only semi-related:
Hunter S. Thompson took great pains to speak in sports metaphors, because that’s the language of “middle America.”
I’ve thought that, for a while now, video games have become the language of “middle America” and whoever can speak to the gamers in their language will capture their minds.
Steve Bannon also understood this, and that’s why he succeeded in capturing many young men’s minds through Gamergate.
We need people better than Steve Bannon speaking this language and leaving gamers with positive, healthy understanding of the world around them.
Anyway, I write this because I think your video game metaphor really works here, and I think that’s the way to speak to a large portion of our populace now.
Anyway, I write this because I think your video game metaphor really works here, and I think that’s the way to speak to a large portion of our populace now.
I don’t know that arcade metaphors really work for most of the population now, though. Even when I was young they were dying.
I think we might be talking about two different types of “arcades” here.
The arcades where you go and play pinball and pac man and street fighter are the ones we’re talking about. That was the 80s. Those of us who remember those days fondly would probably be between 40 and 60. I don’t know about the rest of my middle-aged community members, but I ain’t planning on dying any time soon.
If you’re living in a place where 40-60 year olds are dying on the regular, you’re probably living around methheads.
while he goes to the corner of the arcade, pops a quarter into the dusty, old Pong machine
Correction, he puts a quarter into a pinball machine in the corner, then shortly after gets the tilt warning because he once again tries to cheat instead of having skill.
Tilts are perfectly valid in pinball tournaments, though. As long as the machine’s setup only warns you instead of stopping the game, it’s OK in most leagues. And if it does stop you, then you can continue to the next ball.
Interesting. It looks like the older games did just stop when sensing some movement, while newer ones allow it to some degree or times, so there’s a fudge factor that I guess a professional would know how much to push things. Some might take away the power ups and just let you finish that ball on a “vanilla” setup.
But he lost on level 2. The only candidate he’s beaten is Hillary, who’s one of the least popular politicians in the US.
He lost the first time. Then he inserted another quarter to continue and (essentially) beat him the 2nd time.
And after the brief intermission cutscene, he played level 3. He doesn’t like level 3. He even tried to call the attendant over so he could play level 2 again. And when the attendant said “Um…you’re on level 3 now, what’s the problem?”, he stopped playing. Because level 3 is fucking hard.
Wonderful metaphor. Although it’s hard to suspend disbelief in a story about Trump wanting to / knowing how to play video games. He strikes me as the type that’ll buy an arcade but never set foot in it. And then remove all that is good about it and fill it with ticket games.
Although it’s hard to suspend disbelief in a story about Trump wanting to / knowing how to play video games.
Have you played those old games? Usually, the first level is easy. Easy enough where you actively have to try to lose. I mean, you get 3 lives. That means you have to make not just bad decisions, but the worst possible decisions, over and over and…oh.
Never mind. You’re right.
Trump is the kid who got good at PacMan. Then the arcade brought in MrsPacMan and no matter how high he scores and tries to get attention, the kid who scores well in Mrs PacMan is stealing his thunder because it’s harder. And he’s mad no one is paying attention to his New High Score because it’s irrelevant in the face of the new game. But he can’t get good enough at MrsPacMan, so he’s sulking on PacMan setting new scores and slowly filling the board while his friends try to give him the new Guide for how to score better or get farther in MrsPacMan. Trying to get him to take on the new kid. But he’s just broken from constantly being the loser every time he 2 players. He’s scared of it because it’s a new age where it’s not a solved game, the enemies react to you, and he’s not fast enough anymore to handle that and it scares him - no matter how much his friends try to get him to get good.
He’s has a mastery of gish galloping. There’s no way I could ever approach half of what he does.
But that’s about the only thing I can think of that he’s good at. And it’s definitely something he’s good at due to severe character flaws and mental development issues, not exactly a learned skill or intentional thing he applies. But good nonetheless.
Excuse me, but Trump would never play Pac Man. He can’t handle Kamala Harris alone. He’d be complaining about having to go up against 4 non-white opponents at once.
And he’d certainly never play Ms. Pac Man. Sure, it’s one thing playing an unidentifiable yellow mass that runs around popping pills and doing the same thing over and over while trying to avoid all the non-white people in town, but there’s no chance in hell he’d play as a female.
Trump and Harris have been very close to 50-50 on prediction markets for the past week. Harris was slightly ahead before that, and has lost that lead. It doesn’t mean Trump is winning, but Harris doesn’t seem to have gotten a convention bounce.
I saw some of the Dem convention on TV and thought it was terrible. I’m not surprised if it didn’t go over well.
hypothetically, if he manages to lose the election by a massive margin it’ll start looking more like Putin’s numbers, which will undermine the legitimacy of a democratic government
That’s not likely. There are a significant number of people that vote R every time (just as there are also those who vote D everytime ). Do some phone banking, you’ll quickly find out how many people vote a certain way because they’re a Republican/Democrat family.
Because of this, neither the Dems nor the GOP will ever be below 30% no matter how bad their candidate is.
I can imagine that this is a combination of his mental decline, his thoughts of grandeur that the people vote for him regardless and the knowledge that they won’t accept any negative election results and they have a better, bigger plan in place invalidating the results and a Jan. 62
I really hope officials are better prepared this time for the GOPs shady business. Because they basically publicly announced it several times. Believe them when they say they’ll fight the results, you don’t have to vote anymore and they’ll make the US an autocracy.
I really hope officials are better prepared this time for the GOPs shady business.
They have a bunch of poll workers to gum up the works. People who think that 2020 was stolen, so they’re volunteering for “election integrity”. They really think they have an ace in the hole with this. Be prepared for reports of “anomalies” in swing states.
