Stupidity

F

Fins

It Wandered In From the Wastes
This topic is about stupidity of people, in general.

It increases, and last several years, it increases faster and faster. I worry what will be the end of this process. After all, some wits are needed to survive. Whatever way to look at it, both personal and collective.

I wonder what people here have to say about this. If anything. Especially NMA old-timers. In particular, am i right to be worried about this.


Here's why i am asking and what i think myself, if you wish to know.

See, i am playing F2 lately, and there are guides for it which i refer to for certain details. And so, there is that one "nearly-ultimate" guide, which i like very much. It was made years ago, and it doesn't spoon-feed its readers, respecting their freedom and assuming they are not dumb and will figure out trivial things themselves. And its style, overall, reveals one intelligent author behind all its text, too. But just few minutes ago, i accidentally found another guide, made less than 2 years ago. This another guide itself mentions how players became way less able to play the game, noting that unlike modern games, F2 "does not hold your hand". Noting that "many people have trouble beginning F2". And yet the guide itself has lots of silly bits and even plain wrong statements about the game, and its overall quality - especially in compare to the above mentioned nearly-ultimate guide, - is like pityful.

Example. "You will soon reach game level 12, at which point you will have your first opportunity to choose from the Perks that raise your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes. Later quests give better rewards if you spend a Perk to raise your Intelligence to 7". This is a quote, verbatim. What kind of person wrote this? "Game level 12" instead of character level 12; "you will have your first opportunity to" instead of simply you can - 5 more words which are simply dead weight in the sentense; and then there is this seriously stupid advice about spending a perk for +1 INT - stupid because doing this via a perk instead of having higher INT from the start means getting less skill points for all levels prior to 12, and there is always some other stat which could be reduced by 1 from the start to get +1 INT from the start; further, the author of this "guide" recommends to start with INT=6 and ST=6, and starting with ST=5 (to have INT=7) is like a no-brainer, even if using that perk at level 12 (which would be used to raise ST to 6, for the same result, except having more skill points prior to level 12). Or better, not using it at all, since starting ST=5 is exactly enough to have permanent ST=10 using items available in all versions of the game. And earlier in the guide, the author even notes quests _before_ getting to level 12 which require INT=7 for best results - which, of course, any player following his guide to the letter won't have, starting with 6...

I could go on and on about such stupidities in this guide, but i think you get my drift. And the guide overall is exactly "holding player's hand" - about 98% of sentenses in it (probably more) are exactly "go here, do this, then go there, do that" style. It is as if the author of the guide deems it right and proper to do it - to further stupidify players by doing exactly same thing "modern games" do...

In Fallout 2, there is that old Interplay logo: "for gamers by gamers". Reading this "latest" guide for F2, though, this crossed my mind: "for idiots by idiots". This sure scared the hell outta me. Because if i noticed, so clearly, how others' intellect deteriorates, then how do i know if mine doesn't? I bet it is always a subtle thing for "oneself"... Can notice it in others at times, but hardly about our own. And if the thing is so widespread and so intensive as beginning of this latest guide mentions, then may be we all are going that way, some folks faster some folks slower. If so, then it can't end well - for us all and for each of us in particular. Especially if we remain oblivious to the process. Can't counter-act, anyhow, something which you're not even aware about, i mean.

Please, discuss.
 
Last edited:
And I used to refer to myself as a bitter hate fuck, I think you've earned the right to inherit that title.

Perhaps the author of the guide isn't native in English and wanted it to come across as professional and in doing so it got a bit lengthy and redundant at parts. No need to go "OH MY FUCKING GOD LOOK AT THIS FUCKING IDIOT! I-D-I-O-T!!!!!"

I doubt people get stupider as the years go on, it's just that we're pretty fresh into the online world being mainstream and I fear it has had a negative impact on a lot of people, thinking that their voices are important somehow cause they got some followers on birdie or their vanity shooting through the roof cause of instant gratification. Hell, circlejerking over some weird off the walls subject in an enclosed bubble could very well warp your worldview to some extent. You're whining over the way a guide is written when there's far crazier stuff happening out there.

They aren't getting stupider, they're just given ways to cultivate their stupidity in ways that were never possible before.

Since I'm not native in English and just woke up I guess I'll prepare to be called an idiot.

Also what kind of a fucking pleb reads a guide anyway?
 
Pardon me, but where, exactly, am i "whining over a way a guide is written"? Please do refer here to know what i mean under "whining" term before trying to reply this post. Because i suspect you were thinking something different when you wrote that "whining" word. I did not complain about anything, i did not protest anything. If you think i did, then you're wrong. No quote from my previous post here can indicate otherwise.

I suspect you think i "need" guides to play the game; if so, nope, i don't. I probably know the game better than most guides' authors.

Also, i never call any specific person an "idiot" in public internet communications. That's bad manners. I did not call the author of that 2nd guide an idiot, neither. I asked what kind of person he is, yes. But i did not give an answer - so that everyone can decide themselves. Their judgement may differ from mine. So no, i won't call you an idiot neither. "Sorry to disappoint" about it, hehe. :D

And, thank you for your opinion. However different from mine, i still respect it for what it is.

edit: oh and about your doubts about stupidity increasing among the people - i quickly checked some sources and found this easy-to-understand piece. You see, it's not a question whether mankind is getting dumber and dumber as a whole - it's a fact. This topic is whether it's time to get really worried about it, or not. I shall not tolerate ignorance about the fact i just mentioned in this topic, because without knowing it, this won't be any productive discussion - instead, it'd be a sort of farce.
 
Last edited:
I am more worried about how people these days lack of respect for others, especially when it comes to the US.
Americans managed to survive in the past without insulting and demonizing those with different political opinions, I dont really understand how some americans would go wild when one has different political views.

The way some millennials judge people is also worrying; SJWs and other idiots would look at a person's color, gender, and race instead of that person's character; is it really that hard to look at someone for what he/she is?
 
A large segment of the human population has always been rather idiotic. The difference to how it was a decade or two ago is that due to the easy accessibility of the Internet nowadays, the whole world can see what idiots they are, and not just their closest friends (who are most likely also idiots).
But many people are getting dumber in a way, yes.
With the Internet making all sorts of information way more easily available, people have gotten (mentally) lazy. Memory capacity (or more likely, the capacity for recalling information) is decreasing due to the way people can just look stuff up. And they don't even need to think about how to look stuff up, either. Google easily understands plain language questions. And then there's the overreliance on touchscreen input devices where many that don't regularly write stuff by hand or on a real keyboard ruin their language skills by using autocorrect too much.
And Twitter, where people are limited to (now) 280 characters to formulate their thoughts. Some use it so much that their attention span dropped rapidly.
The Internet really was a mistake.
 
When I went to Japan we were in a tour with this group of people from Spain who were super racist, but the one that was stupidly clueless was the one who had gotten a Yakuza Looking tattoo on his arm and proudly displayed it to the tour guide who visibly flinched and then forced a smile at seeing this clueless fuckwad showing off that kinda thing in public on a temple.
 
Walpknut said:
When I went to Japan we were in a tour with this group of people from Spain who were super racist, but the one that was stupidly clueless was the one who had gotten a Yakuza Looking tattoo on his arm and proudly displayed it to the tour guide who visibly flinched and then forced a smile at seeing this clueless fuckwad showing off that kinda thing in public on a temple.
Click to expand...

That's what seperates tourists from explorers; explorers want to learn and discover while also respecting different cultures while tourists are just people who want to go around places to boast in social media and to have fun even if it could harm others.
 
Hassknecht said:
Personally, I shun both explorers and tourists and go for the conquistadore path.
Click to expand...
Atomkilla said:
I prefer Chicxulub impactor method.
Click to expand...
I prefer assimilation!
The+Borg.jpg
 
Fins said:
After all, some wits are needed to survive. Whatever way to look at it, both personal and collective.
(...)
Please, discuss.
Click to expand...
If that was true, there wouldn't be any stupidity left, as clearly stupid people are capable of surviving just fine. In the wild, and in society.

What you're talking about, has nothing to do with survival, what you mean is progress. There can be no progress be it social or technological without intelligent people. How much and in what capacity? That's a different question.

But just from an evoltionary stand point, it's still not clear what ever if intelligence is actually beneficial to a species or not. The game ist still out on that one, so to speak. let us say we humans mange to whipe us self out, for what ever reason like Climate Change (if you beliefe in that one), or nuclear wars or because we invented the Super AI that made us obsolete, as some scientists beliefe this might be our end by 2050. All of that has our ingenuity and intelligence as source, as you don't see crustaceans or jelly fish creating those kind of technologies, and they kinda existed for far longer than we did, and most probably will still exist after we're long gone.
 
Crni Vuk said:
If that was true, there wouldn't be any stupidity left, as clearly stupid people are capable of surviving just fine. In the wild, and in society.
Click to expand...
Any intelligent person can lost his mental abilities for various reasons, mind you. Also we are not immune to natural effects such as toxins, radiation, or whatever damging our DNA. In that case is up to the parents or legally assigned curator to look up for such person, protecting him from any harm potentionally caused by his mental condition. Such as sharing his personal details on :free: social network for no reason, only to being doxxed or threatened by some psychopath for example.
 
Valcik's line about intelligent person losing his mental abilities is exactly what i meant in the 1st post. So far this discussion presents nothing (to me) which could doubt such a process. But two key points were expressed in the above posts: the 1st one just mentioined here, made by Valcik; and the 2nd being this line by Hassmnecht: "large segment of human population has always been rather idiotic".

Now i find confirmation that both points have merit, expressed in this curious piece, which is about gamers in general. Namely, 1st point is expressed there with this line: "We used to enjoy being intellectually challenged, to consider more aspects than whether we wanted to use the bazooka or the grenade launcher. Now we prefer more escapist, laid-back gaming". And yet the 2nd point also expressed, by this line (which is about games made in 1980s): "When I was 6 years old computers were for smart kids, the rest threw rocks at each other".

Personally, my 1st PC game i played seriously, - was F-19 Stealth Fighter. By today's standards, the game is way too hard and way too unforgiving. Half the keyboard is binded to various functions of plane's avionics, noone explains to you any much about how to remain stealthy and how enemies operate, etc. The game is still being played nowadays, despite being originally released for commodore 64 back in 1987, so it's over 30 years old. So, on one hand, we could say that there are still gamers who got enough brainpower to _enjoy_ such complex games. But what i see in those modern videos, however, is that even among the few modern gamers who are capable to go through missions in this game in highest difficulty mode - pretty much nobody is doing them very well. Things like 1200...1300 score per mission are regarded as achievement - while it is possible, iirc, to pull off scores like 3000+ points per mission, still remaining undamaged with that.

So i think both points are true, and both interact. Practically important bit out of this, IMHO, is: more and more games made for "idiotic part of the human population" are around, and if someone who's not an idiot plays those, he effectively deteriorates himself, slowly shaping his mental ways to be much more similar to idiotic thinking those games are made to satisfy.

Beware.
 
Oh man, you lads aren't shitposting? You know, even the most misanthropic individual has some degree of self awareness with this kind of stuff, even if it's in regret of being infected with not-amazingness. You wish that even the most AAA and casual of the game industry was so simplistic and brain dead as big chunks of TV and film. Sure, the game is EZ PZ, where's muh real challenge which is only so because extreme obtuseness? Well, games don't work with s monkey on a hand crank. There'll always be designs, be it technical or visual and an intertwine of both, that people a lot less stupider than you and I made. Being able to appreciate such things is only one of the things you can go to elevate the enjoyment of entertainment, and it has equivalents in all mediums.
Fins said:
thinking those games are made to satisfy
Click to expand...
They are, though. You can unironically mimic the Rick & Morty fan IQ meme but it doesn't change that people don't get home to a second job. Sane ones, anyway.
 
So your calling gamers stupid based on the games they play?
You do know that games are supposed to be fun. The thing is everyone views fun differently, some find plane simulators fun, some find cRPGs fun, while others enjoy walking sims.
Different people have different tastes, you cant call someone an idiot just because he likes oranges.
 
SquiglyContiello said:
So your calling gamers stupid based on the games they play?
You do know that games are supposed to be fun. The thing is everyone views fun differently, some find plane simulators fun, some find cRPGs fun, while others enjoy walking sims.
Different people have different tastes, you cant call someone an idiot just because he likes oranges.
Click to expand...
No, it's different than tastes. It's true that there are great many highly bright people who will never play, say, any plane simulation game because it's simply not their taste to play those. The above example is not the only though. I am a PC gamer from early 1990s, and there are old games of all kind which are the same deal: complex, expecting the player to solve tasks no idiot could ever solve.

You mentioned cRPGs - sure, same thing happens in this genre also. For example, personally, i enjoy Jagged Alliance games very much, and they indeed expect that the player does not do stupid things. Like, in a Jagged Alliance game, you don't run straight to an enemy to shoot 'em dead, because if you do that, it's game over quite very soon. You'll fail. But modern games of the sort are exactly that. For example, try "Hard West", and i bet you'll see what i mean.

Grim Fandango, old Civilization (1st and 2nd), 1st Red Faction, Settlers 2, X-wing and Tie Fighter, Geoff Grammond's Grand Prix 2 - those are some more examples right off the top of my head. Each of those games expect the player to be rather bright, and i guess something like 99% of now-existing PC gamers will fail to progress any far in any of those games if playing on hardest possible settings. So you see, it's not just one or two games; nope, they indeed "don't make them that good anymore" kind of thing.

As for "walking sims", i can assure you that i can't imagive an intelligent person to enjoy this kind of a computer game. Please, englighten me about it, if there is something i'm missing. %)
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top