This is one of those Googleshngs that is so egregiously stupid I feel compelled to waste my time dissecting it.
Fat Sadsack Jake said:
No shit. It's the only thing you do besides bitch and moan on Twitter.
I particularly play a whole lot of RPGs, strategy things, survival games, and these all tend to be games that try to create an extra sense of immersion with hunger, thirst, and a day night cycle. And WOW do they ever end up doing the exact opposite with the implementation!
Like, let’s just start with food. If I am playing a survival game, and I choose not to eat for a while, my little hunger meter will bottom out, and I will start taking damage then eventually die. This tends to take like, one real life hour/in-game day, give or take to kick in, and then death comes within like, maybe 5 minutes if they’re generous? And I stave this off by… usually finding, killing, cooking, and eating, 2 entire turkeys per real hour/in-game day.
Second sentence in and we get a particularly annoying Jakism: Adding 'WOW' or 'YIKES' in all caps. Jake seems to be under the impression that doing this makes him sound quirky or fun. In reality, it's the written equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
Right after that is another Jakism: 'Like'. Jake takes after the literary styling of Shaggy Rogers, in that he often prefaces sentences with 'like', creating yet another obnoxious writing habit that makes his rants unreadable.
Jesus, the next sentence has another Jakism. He's just pouring them on like Jack Scalfani pours mayo on everything. Jake will frequently add size-based adjectives to things, even if it makes no sense. Why is a hunger meter in a video game 'little'? Compared to what? The screen? The health bar? Why is that information relevant?
And joy of joys, we get a double Jakism. A 'like', followed by a 'maybe'. Jake enjoys adding in these weaselly little 'maybes' in his writing. I think that, in his autism-riddled mind, it makes his writing feel more conversational. In reality, it just makes reading Jake's papers just as annoying as actually talking to Jake. You know that Jake is the kind of sped who inserts 'maybes' into every other fucking sentence, saying it in his autistic nasal tone. "Maybe you could, like, watch some Kamen Rider with me over at yon attic?" "Maybe you could donate to my patreon so, like, y'now, I don't have to sleep on the park bench?" "Maybe..." "MAYBE..." "MAAAAAYYYBBE..."
I'm sure that Jake's fucked up nose is partially due to being socked in the face multiple times as a child. Just reading this makes me want to punch him.
Compared to the obnoxiousness of 'maaaaybe', the random ellipses that Jake throws in to simulate dramatic pauses are downright tolerable.
Those are just the annoying writing habits that Jake uses. The actual point of this paragraph, translated from Googleshng, is something like this. Survival games require the player to eat. This is represented with a 'hunger meter', which consistently falls over time. When the meter reaches zero, the player's health begins to decrease, representing fatigue due to starvation. Jake then makes up a hypothetical example of a game where starvation is avoided by showing two whole turkeys down your throat. Because his argument is too autistic to apply to any real survival games, Jake is forced to create a dumb hypothetical situation that he can easily batter down.
JAKISMS SO FAR: 6.
So… what the hell is any of that!?
So we have hunger, and we’re representing it as this slowly draining meter you have to keep an eye on. Already, that’s just weird. In my experience, you can go an entire day, not eating a damn thing, and not feel a thing out of the ordinary. But when you do actually get hungry, it can be overwhelming and impossible to ignore (have you eaten yet today by the way? My meal schedule’s gotten totally weird). Nothing about that makes sense to simulate as a slowly lowering bar. If you want realism, you have absolutely no onscreen hunger meter, and then like every 4-24 hours or so you have some incredibly distracting hunger indicator kick in and stay kicked in. Like, activate rumble packs and leave’em going at a steady pulse sort of annoying. And it gets worse when you’re actually preparing food.
Good question Jake. What the hell was that fictitious example of a flawed survival game that you pulled out of your ass? Oh wait, I know, a textbook example of a strawman argument.
Jake attempts to relate to normal humans by relating his personal experiences. Given that Jake's only experiences are the life of a useless NEET, this fails. Anyone who does any sort of hard physical activity during the day is going to get hungry. And no Jake, walking to your Tardwagon pickup is not 'hard physical activity'.
And here we get to the core of Jake's argument: That a slowly lowering hunger bar in a video game is 'unrealistic'. Jake then presents a more 'realistic' system in which your character randomly gets hungry every 4-24 hours. When this happens, there's an annoying hunger indicator that kicks in.
The keyword that explains why this is a retarded idea is 'annoying'. Games are intended to be fun. If a game design choice comes down to 'realism' vs 'fun', fun will always win. Having the game randomly scream at you with no warning isn't fun. It's going to piss off anyone playing the game, and they'll stop playing.
Yes, a hunger meter may not be 'realistic'. However, it's a convenient abstraction that makes the game more fun. Being able to tell at a glance how hungry your character is makes the game less annoying.
Only two Jakisms in this paragraph: ellipsis and 'damn for emphasis'.
JAKISMS SO FAR: 8.
Also feeling hungry is not an early indicator that you are going to suddenly die of starvation, or even that you’re anywhere near that point. I had dinner 6 hours ago, I’m a little hungry now. It varies a lot, but actually starving to death can take upwards of going TWO WHOLE MONTHS without any food at all. Like if we’re representing that as a meter, “hungry” kicks in when it drops to 99% full. Starvation is not a particularly common cause of death. If you’re dying of starvation, either someone is intentionally starving you to death, or some horrific catastrophe has just wiped out completely absolutely every potential food source in an area you somehow cannot wander your way out of even if you have months to do so. Relevant real world fact- Any time you see stuff about people dying of starvation, that’s never “farming just is not a thing that works in this area,” it’s “some malicious tyrant is actively preventing these people from accessing food in a deliberate effort to cause them to starve.” It’s really not actually a concern in any sort of survival story, unless we’re going real long term.
And here we get a great example of Jake acting like an expert on something that he knows nothing about. Yes, Jake Alley that fat cave troll from a solidly lower-middleclass family is an expert on starvation. Let us see the depths of his knowledge on this subject.
Yes, starvation can take up to 'TWO WHOLE MONTHS' before it kills you. However, the muscle atrophy, organ damage, and fatigue are likely to disable you long before that. In the common survival game scenario of 'lone guy in the woods', this is effectively a death sentence.
"
Starvation is not a particularly common cause of death." BULLSHIT. Once again, Jake shows us his disgustingly sheltered life. Hunger is still a serious issue throughout the world. As of 2017,
820 million people worldwide suffer from undernourishment. Around
9 million die due to starvation or malnutrition related deaths. Shut the fuck up about stuff you don't understand you fat sack of lard.
"
If you’re dying of starvation, either someone is intentionally starving you to death, or some horrific catastrophe has just wiped out completely absolutely every potential food source in an area " BULLSHIT (with a grain of fact like a piece of corn in a turd). Yes, starvation is often used as a weapon in third-world shitholes. However, The Tendies Auschwitz also leaves out a host of other factors, such as bad infrastructure, poor storage, use of inefficient techniques, disasters such as drought, or chronic poverty. No Jake, the real world is not like
Minecraft, where you can just stick a few seeds in the ground and have dinner. Severe drought
will fuck over farms and
will cause mass hunger.
"you somehow cannot wander your way out of even if you have months to do so."
Oh wait, Big Brain Jake just solved global hunger. Why don't those all those starving people just walk down to their local 7/11. Someone give this man a Nobel Prize for this amazing solution. "just go somewhere else you dumb niggers'.
"It’s really not actually a concern in any sort of survival story, unless we’re going real long term." BULLSHIT. Doing any kind of physical activity, especially the kind required in a survival situation, uses energy. Energy comes from food. While you can go without food for some time, you will begin to suffer from fatigue, muscle atrophy, and other issues. This will cause you to work less effectively, which will decrease your chances of survival. But in Jake's world, people can do hard labor all day 24/7 and only eat once a week. Mind you, this is a man who has never suffered from any real hunger in his life, as his bloated wasteline quickly attests.
Meanwhile, have game designers ever actually, like, eaten food? Like I said, 2 whole turkeys per real hour/game day seems to be the going standard and like… have you had a turkey? I live in America, there is this tradition on Thanksgiving to go get a turkey, spend a day cooking it, and serving it as part of a meal served to one’s whole extended family. You’ve got that one turkey (granted, generally with a lot of side dishes) feeding like… a dozen people, easily. And at the end of the day, you’ve only MAYBE collectively made your way through like half a breast. You carve up a bunch more and send everyone home with a ton of leftovers. Then you’ve still got this giant mountain of turkey left, and you’re eating it for like the next week until you’re completely sick of turkey and throw the rest out, with plenty of meat entirely uneaten on the bird. Or hey, do you eat hamburgers? You know how the standard for a really kinda too big to responsibly be ordering it hamburger is “a quarter-pounder?” Which refers to the 0.25 lbs. of meat on the bun? Just quickly googling “beef weight” and copying the preview text from the oddly named first hit, on beef2live.com… “An average beef animal weighs about 1200 pounds and has a hanging hot carcass weight (HCW) of about 750 pounds.“ I can’t honestly say I know what “hanging hot carcass weight” is and I kinda doing want to, but I’m assuming that’s how much you have to work with after stripping out all the bones and organs and such. Multiply that by 4 to get how many oversized burgers you get out of one “beef animal” (why does it not say cow? I’m growing increasingly unsettled)- 3000 burgers. Give or take. You go smack that one Mnecraft cow with your sword, you should be fine for like 5 years. At least assuming we’re not simulating food spoilage. And if we are, HEY THAT TAKES SIGNIFICANTLY LONGER THAN ONE DAY, 2 IF YOU SALT IT!
I like that he's now bringing up his dumb hypothetical strawman as 'the going standard'. It's so obnoxiously disingenuous.
Shakespeare once said 'brevity is the soul of wit'. Jake seems to believe that the inverse is true. Good fucking god, he takes 5 fucking sentences to say "a real-life turkey will feed a large family for a week". This is literary equivalent of the Bataan Death March. It's like he knows that the point he's making is stupid, so he attempts to cover it up by spewing wordsalad so he can look smart.
Ah, my most hated Jakism. 'You know'. It's the calling card of Jake's whiny style, and it has a way of just irritating you. Writers tend to have a 'voice' in their writing. Unfortunately for Jake, his voice is akin to Urkel trying to wheedle money out of you.
Don't bullshit Jake, there is no fucking way that you have ever thought a quarter pounder is 'kinda too big'. The fact that you felt the need to include this description is 'interesting'. I think the gnome doth protest too much.
"I can’t honestly say I know what “hanging hot carcass weight” is and I kinda doing want to, but I’m assuming that’s how much you have to work with after stripping out all the bones and organs and such." Hey Jake, did you know that there's a thing called 'The Internet' where you can look up what terms mean? According to
this, 'hanging hot carcass weight' is the weight of the animal immediately after slaughter. BEFORE the internal organs have been stripped out. For fucks sake, that took me a literal minute to find. Know what a term means before using it you fat trashbag of mayo.
I've already put too much thought into this thing, but I'm going to check Jakes math. :autistic: A Quarter Pounder has about 400 calories. The average person requires around 2000 calories per day. That's a yearly intake of 730,000 calories. Which means that you would need 1825 quarter pounders per year. Jake's '5 year supply' would last for something around 1 year and 235 days. So no Jake, in this retarded fictitious example you created based on intentional misunderstanding and bullshit, you couldn't even get your fucking math right, you utter faggot. Hell, I probably didn't get it right. At least I tried, instead of spouting some bullshit and insisting that it's true.
Yes, who hasn't played 'Mnecraft'. It's up there with Skyrm and Ttris as one of the most popular games of all time.
JAKISMS SO FAR: 19
And I mean, on top of that, we’ve got this whole standard I keep citing of 1 real world hour/1 in-game day. That kinda seems to be one of the more common standards for the passage of time video games use. That or 1 minute=1 hour. And I… really don’t understand why we have these scales?
Like, the earliest example of a day/night cycle in a game is Dragon Quest 3, where 1 steps on the over world map=12 minutes passing, or 120 steps=1 day. That’s a weird scale I’m having to use, but that’s because as the most traditional of JRPGs, DQ3′s sense of both time AND space are super abstracted and walking a short distance across the world map is this super compressed and simplified conveyance of a big long epic journey through the untamed wilderness. The first games I can think of offhand to really do it as a real time elapsed ratio thing are like… The Sims and GTA 3? Let me look at each of those in turn in a bit here.
Another Jakism, 'I mean'. Jake likes to plop this in whenever he's trying to make a Big Boy Point.
Again, we return to Jake being too autistic to have fun. Time compression exists because forcing everything in a game to happen in real time would be
annoying. Imagine if
New Vegas forced you to walk between all locations in real time. Imagine if going from Goodsprings to Vegas took 13 hours of holding down W. Yes, it would be 'realistic', but it wouldn't be fun.
JAKISMS SO FAR: 20
So, The Sims has to pass days pretty quick, because that’s like, the whole idea. We’re watching this little household drama unfold in a compressed time scale… but the scale is really messed up? Like, we start off pretty simple. Sims work their shifts of like 9-5 on the in-game clock, need an appropriate amount of sleep… but then MOST things have timing based off having animations play at a reasonable pace, which is to say, 1 to 1 time, not 1 to 60. It takes like 3 in-game minutes for a Sim to get up out of a chair, several more minutes to walk to the kitchen and even start cooking, altogether just getting up, making a meal, cleaning up, and sitting back down is going to end up being this hours long affair, most of that being travel time from one room to another. It’s weird, and practically speaking you end up having them eat one meal, use the toilet once, and take a shower once per in game day, because less than that problems occur, and more than that, it’s a huge pain. And forget conversations. Those are like 12 hour commitments.
Another Jakism that I absolutely loath: ending a non-question sentence with a question mark. You can just hear Jake's whiny tone assaulting your eardrums whenever he does that. I'm sure that he thinks it's cute and helps contribute to his 'voice'. While it does contribute to his 'voice', it also makes his voice unbearable.
Jake is mad because The Sims uses two different timescales, and the passage of time on the in-game clock does not alight with the time it takes a Sim to do something. While I'm sure others have noticed this, Jake Alley of New London Connecticut is the only man with the time and autism to write an angry essay on it. For fucks sake, it's a video game.
It takes like 3 in-game minutes for a Sim to get up out of a chair, several more minutes to walk to the kitchen and even start cooking, altogether just getting up, making a meal, cleaning up, and sitting back down is going to end up being this hours long affair, most of that being travel time from one room to another.
First off, it does not take 3 real-time minutes for a Sim to sit up from a chair. Another classic Jake Exaggeration.
Second, holy shit that is three sentences strung together into a single Human Sentancepede. There should be a period after cooking, as that ends a completed thought. Jake, in his infantile wisdom, just tacks on his ramblings, and we get this unreadable monstrosity. Professional writer my ass.
JAKISMS SO FAR: 27
And then we have GTA3, where 1 real minute=1 in game hour… and this isn’t tied to anything in-game at all really. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, nothing really has business hours to deal with, the whole day/night cycle is just there to give you a nice cycling change of scenery… and also again, breaks immersion, because the animation speed is 1:1. According to a video I just watched, walking end to end across the map of GTA3 takes a full 48 in-game hours (121 in GTA5). And I mean… there’s races, and high speed chases, and all this other stuff that according to the in-game clock are at such slow speeds you can barely tell anything’s moving. It’s weird and arbitrary! And also unnecessary! Like, I’m pretty sure I sank at least 80 hours into my first playthrough of GTA3. I definitely spent enough time cruising around any given island that if time passed in a 1:1 ratio, I’d still see what everything looked like at every time of day. And hell if you rigged it up to a real world clock I could plan around that, do all the cool missions right at sundown.
MUH IMMERSION. For fuck's sake you blubbering crybaby, it's a fucking video game. The in-game time shift is there for scenery. The only people who care about it are losers like you who are too autistic to just say 'it's a fucking game bro' and spew out drivel like this essay. Guess what? Those races and high speed chases and shit? That's what normal people are paying attention to. Not the inconsideration of in-game time.
JAKISMS SO FAR: 31
But I mean, also, there’s these things called movies and TV shows? You may have heard of them, because it’s where games get a whole bunch of terms they use all the time. Like camera, and scene. So the thing there is, when, say, a movie switches to a new scene, they’ll often arbitrarily jump the day/night cycle ahead by several in-movie hours, or even days, so the lighting is appropriate to what’s going to happen in that scene. You can actually just… do that in games, too. It’s OK. Nobody’s going to stop you or say it’s breaking immersion. I talk to this guy to start this mission at what’s clearly noon, then we fade to back, and I come back out onto the street late at night so I can do this daring nighttime raid. That’s.. OK. You can do that. Honest. No need to have the sun doing crazy fast laps in the background.
Did...did Jake just use the term 'day/night cycle' to refer to the passage of time between scenes in a movie? And why is it 'arbitrary'? Changing the lighting of a scene to indicate passage of time or to set a mood is a deliberate decision. It's anything BUT arbitrary you mewling dipshit.
I think this paragraph is how he's angry that missions in GTA which occur at a specific time of day will include a brief waiting period if you show up at the wrong time. It's a shot of the surrounding area with a sped-up day/night cycle, to show that time is passing. It accomplishes the same effect, and if anything does it better than a fade to black. It's such a minor thing to get butthurt about. Why is this important Jake? Why did you feel compelled to write this?
JAKISM COUNT: 35
Anyway, other games since have all copied that time scale, because blindly copying things from GTA3 was kinda… how people made games for a good stretch of time (and yeah yeah yeah, Elder Scrolls was probably already doing it, whatever… hell so was Robinson’s Requiem I’m pretty sure, and Drakken I know was paced something like that). But anyway, we mixed that sort of time scale with Survival Gameplay and we’re just kinda mashing these problems together. We’re doing everything in this one to one time scale, but the in-game clock is running at like 60 times that, and our already ridiculous food intake needs are downright absurd, and suddenly we’re destroying absolutely all life on sight to sate our ever-present ravenous hunger (and possibly never sleeping).
All these words and we finally get to Jake's thesis statement. As best as I can parse it out, Jake is butthurt that timescales in games don't match up to real life. Or something? His classic Alley Exaggerations make his point near incomprehensible. In Jake World, all survival games run on Sanic Speed and the PCs are shrew people who need to eat every five seconds. I have no idea what fucking game he's playing, but I'm pretty sure there's no actual game like that.
JAKISM COUNT: 38
And like… survival games don’t actually need that? Like the interesting bits of the angle are finding sources of things like clean water and shelter so you don’t die of exposure once the sun’s down and stuff. And these are things you really just need to do once and you’re set. You could… basically set up a whole game, running in real time, where these are early potential fail states. Get some kind of shelter set up within the first 5 hours or so, sleep to advance straight to the next day after pulling that off, then you have like 3 days total to find drinkable water, and… honestly at that point we’re talking like a good 45 minutes of gameplay and you could really end it there, or start your last goal. But instead, no, we’re making some kinda crude axe/bow and killing everything to eat.
So Jake's killer idea is 'just make another survival game, but it runs in real time'. Check out the big brain on Jake. Do the same fucking thing, BUT SLOWER.
Here's where there's a problem you lardburger. Doing things like 'cutting wood' and 'building shelter' are not as easy in real life as they are in Mnecraft. They take time. Time that gets compressed in normal games to a bearable length. But in Gnome Simulator 2020, that insistence on a 1:1 time rate means that the player is going to spend an hour+ making a shitty
log shelter. That's not fun. That's the textbook definition of boring. Yes, it's 'realistic'. But if you really wanted that realism, you could just go out in the local patch of woods and make a real-life shitty log shelter.
I'm pretty sure most survival games include plants as a source of food. More Alley Exaggeration to muddle whatever point he was trying to make into hyperbole.
JAKISM COUNT: 42
Not only is it not realistic, not only does it take me out of the experience by checking the math, the whole affair feels kinda like I’m being put through someone’s weird hyper-masculine cargo cult fantasy of what it would have been like if they grew up Hunting With Dad and like…. OK people who actually do that still kill like one animal, then drag it home, throw it in a big fridge, and eat it for quite a long time, or sell it, or leave it to rot because they’re just really into ending the lives of innocent creatures and don’t want weird gamey meat at all.
So yeah, just let time be time, and don’t ever actually make me eat if we’re trying for some kind of gritty realism thing. I really don’t get hungry nearly that often and fill up quick.
And HERE we go, the whiny daddy issues that make up the core of this incomprehensible rant. A genera of games about playing Robinson Curoso triggers Jake's delicate feminine sensibilities. Oh no, not a 'hyper-masculine cargo cult fantasy'. Good fucking god, how big of a baby do you have to be where Virtual Gilligan's Island is 'too masculine' for you. It's pathetic. All of this rant boils down too is 'hunting things in survival games makes me angry because it reminds me of what a pathetic shell of a person I am'. All the shit about time, and realism, and whatever crap he could smear onto the keyboard, all of it was just an autistic, roundabout 'fuck you daddy'. Jake, it's your fault that you were too much of a tard to do anything with your dad. I'm sure that your dad actually did try to do things with you (which you disingenuously pass off as murder attempts). Unfortunately, instead of a son he got a fat noise making thing that tardraged over everything. I honestly feel sorry for him. I'm sure that he'd have a much better life if your mom aborted you.
As for that last sentence, nobody fucking asked you. You're a fat manbaby living in a tard apartment paid for by internet begging. You have never held a job. You have never earned a thing in your life. Your entire existence has been a haze of sloth and wailing. All your internet friends don't give a shit about you, and will dump you at a moments notice. Nobody reads your shitty blog in awe of your wisdom and knowledge. The only people interested in what you have to say are a bunch of autists who make fun of you. Nobody gives a shit that you 'don't each much' (pressing X so hard the controller broke). Shut the fuck up you obnoxious, pridefully ignorant noise-making thing.
FINAL JAKISM COUNT: 44
All in all, this may be one of the most autistic things Jake has ever made. Every sentence felt like I was having my fingernails yanked out with a pair of pliers. Jake, if you read this, here's some advice. Do a flip. I want to see if you burst like a waterballoon full of Crisco when you hit the pavement you whiny, pathetic man.
