Believe me, no one gives a damn about a critic.

The game is deliberately pretentious? Okay. Then the negative reviews are justified.

Yes, it seems we do have different ideas of the word medieval. To me, medieval is not an abstract idea, it’s a specific period in European history. To be medieval a setting has to bear significant resemblance to that period.

This is not medieval. It’s very ornate but it bears no resemblance whatsoever to medieval art or architecture. If anything, it’s closer to Victorian than medieval. Everything I’ve seen in HK screenshots tells me it’s a fantasy pastiche of elements. It has no affinity with any particular period in human culture. Rather, it’s a cut-and-paste construction. (I hate the word appropriation because it implies theft. I do not want to imply that).

Like if a fantasy game is set on Mars with a bunch of green skinned Martians as characters then it’s not medieval even if the characters use Anglo-Saxon instead of English. It’s a pastiche of science fiction, fantasy, and medieval elements and it suffers from the same issue that a lot of bad Star Trek episodes had (see: planet of hats), which is verisimilitude:

Why did this society, which otherwise seems completely alien, just happen to evolve a conspicuous element that’s uncannily similar to an element in human history?

HK games are not set in China, but they are both firmly set in a medieval fantasy world

??!

I guess we have completely different ideas of the word medieval. This to me looks like a completely separate, unique fantasy world with no resemblance whatsoever to a historical medieval setting of the sort that games like D&D are based on.

It’s fine if they have created this wonderful unique setting of their own, but then it leaves me with the question of how the language aspects of medieval society ended up there despite all the other differences. I mean these characters don’t even resemble humans!

I have played plenty of other games where characters speak in a classical style. Unless it’s being done to mark the characters as old fashioned (or the world is literally set in medieval times) then it comes off as extremely pretentious.

Edit: I know Hollow Knight is sacred in the indie game community. I’m just saying this is something that annoys many people (including me) who prefer verisimilitude and authenticity.

It’s not about liking/not liking poetry, it’s about credibility and verisimilitude. When a character says something, is it credible for the character to have said that? A guy walking around in the Harry Potter wizarding world speaking Shakespearean English is not credible, he’s a laughingstock.

I don’t know much about Hollow Knight but from what I can see it is not set in a fantasy Classical Chinese setting. Having characters in the game speak in the Classical Chinese style is not credible. It does not fit the setting, regardless of the broader similarities between Hollow Knight’s setting and Wuxia novels. It’s culturally tone deaf.

I’ve never played either game but I’ll be honest: that English text looks really pretentious to me. I can imagine how bad things could get if that were carried over into the Chinese translation.

Everyday Chinese speech is very plain, blunt, and utilitarian. The Great Classical Chinese novels are anything but. They are as important (arguably even more so) to Chinese as Shakespeare is to English. Speaking in that style should come off just as pretentious in Chinese as a video game character speaking Shakespearean style would in English. Generally, in English fiction (especially TV shows), characters are brutally mocked for speaking in that style unless they are literally reading, rehearsing, or performing Shakespeare.

Entertaining sure, but entertaining for a specific (albeit large) audience. There are countless other audiences for movies that are just being increasingly ignored by Hollywood for the past few decades.

I guess not many people remember that Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violations against Netscape (which effectively destroyed that command).

AI makes it pretty trivial to vomit out large amounts of code. 250,000 lines is nothing. The code quality is garbage, of course, and will be hell to maintain in the coming years. It will likely just be rewritten again if the company is still around.

If there’s one thing high school students have a ton of it’s free time. When I was that age I put thousands of hours into video games and got nothing to show for it. I applaud this kid for turning his high school hobby into a paycheque.

It may be good for low speed applications like skateboard bearings but it’s not good for higher speed such as fan bearings. I tried using it with a fan and it seized up due to the heat. Once I cleaned it all up I used some motor oil instead. The fan has worked great ever since!

My argument isn’t about how we’re classifying and counting desktop operating system installs. I know how we’re doing that. I’m saying it’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense to count that way if your goal is to grow this community of Linux users.

Most desktop Windows users don’t belong to a community of enthusiasts. For them, Windows is just a tool they use at work and in many cases hate using. Microsoft doesn’t care about community-building at all.

For Linux it’s different. Linux has both a community of enthusiast users and a number of large companies who use and package Linux as part of a product and service offering. Valve and Google are 2 such companies. Neither of them care about the broader Linux community. Their goal is to make money using SteamOS and Android respectively. For them, Linux is just a tool to save them money on development costs: an off-the-shelf, royalty-free operating system to build on. The vast majority of Android and SteamOS users will never interact with the Linux underpinnings of their respective OSes, never mind coming to participate in this community!

The fact that SteamOS users count as desktop market share and Android users don’t (also: what about Chromebooks running ChromeOS?) should not matter at all to us, just as I don’t care that one of the printers at work runs Windows on its print queue server and the other runs Linux.

If someone buys a Steam Deck and uses it only to play games then would you say they’re acting as a desktop computer user?

No, I’m making a distinction between “Linux market share” and growing the Linux community. Nothing to do with purity and everything to do with what’s really important here.

That doesn’t really matter to the point I’m making. Some Android users do things like install AOSP after building it themselves from source or install one of many custom open source Android distributions such as LineageOS or YAAP. I would consider this type of person much more of a Linux user than a person who buys a SteamDeck and just plays games on it.

The key difference for me is that a Linux user is aware of the open source movement around Linux and at least engages in some aspect of the open source community. They don’t have to become a software developer or a contributor or even a hacker. They just have to be aware of the fact that they’re using Linux (regardless of the name of the distribution they’re using), that Linux is open source, and that they can (and do, at least in some small way) exercise some of the freedoms of open source that are afforded to them.

A person who buys a SteamDeck and merely plays games on it might be aware that it’s running Linux (they might’ve heard it from someone else) but if they don’t care about that and don’t engage with any of the things that make it Linux then they might as well be using a proprietary OS (or even using a dishwasher with Linux on it for that matter).

Yes but what I’m getting at here is much more cultural than technical. While we all applaud the growth of Linux that doesn’t necessarily translate into more people who are actually “Linux users” like the type of folks who would join this community.

Someone who simply runs SteamOS on a computer or handheld just so they can play games (basically a game console) doesn’t actually care that they’re running Linux and doesn’t actually learn anything about Linux, so I wouldn’t consider them a Linux user anymore than I would for an Android user.

Right and so is Android but we don’t consider people with an Android phone to be “Linux users” even though they’re technically using Linux.

Don’t Steam Decks get counted as SteamOS?

Article doesn’t actually explain what distribution people are downloading and installing. How do we know it isn’t the growth of SteamOS and the Steam Deck driving this?

It’s a cognitive dissonance thing for collectors. They want the preserved, playable copy but they don’t ever want to break the seal because that lowers the value.

I bet there are a bunch of collectors out there in possession of empty game boxes (with placebo weights) that have been expertly resealed and then submitted to grading companies for a seal of approval.