The Wii was one of the most successful consoles of all time. Half the games had people standing up and swinging at something. That doesn't track at all.
I think that was purely from the novelty factor and because it initially attracted a lot of people who weren't into gaming. Past the first few funny weeks when people would let visitors try wii sports and have a few laughs, the thing ended up collecting dust in most households with no kids.
Let's stack up all PC games and all console games and let's see which ones involve physical movement and then see how long people stick with those games. Do you know any gamers? I do. They don't want to move.
'Gamers' are now everyone. 1.7 billion men and 1.39 billion women - essentially anyone with a mobile device. One of the biggest gaming hits of the last decade was Pokemon Go, which literally requires a walk.
'Gamers don't want to move', is just nerd bashing. It's 2025, even amongst hardcore D&D playing, JRPG stanning, con attending 'weeb' adjacent ubernerds, fitness is in. Sure Americans, and increasingly Europeans are tending toward obesity, but suggesting thats a characteristic of 'gamers' as a class is just factually incorrect.
The main problem for Nintendo was that countless Wii buyers never moved beyond Wii Sports and maybe Mario Kart. Despite having over 100 million units sold, staple franchises sold pretty badly compared to the Switch.
Animal Crossing City Folk? 3 million. Animal Crossing New Horizons? 47 million.
Mario Party 8? 9 million. Super Mario Party? 21 million.
Zelda Twilight Princess? 8 million. Zelda Breath of the Wild? 34 million.
Basically, the Switch has 50% more units in the world, but you can tack on 200%-400% more sales per franchise entry in general; and some extreme breakouts. For this reason alone, Nintendo is never returning to Wii-era gimmicks, and we’ll probably never see “Nintendo Selects” again.
We’ve had widespread videogames for like a generation and a half or so, it is early to say there’s anything fundamental in our culture about them. If good VR were to come out, there’s every chance it could go in direction more like sport than game.
But “good VR” is this sense is really very far off. Like actually judging the devices as things you might want to use, instead of with the engineer’s perspective (yea we’re all very impressed by what Oculus pulled off with the limited tech of our day, but the devices actually kinda suck if you don’t grade them on that curve).
They need to be as easy to put on as sunglasses, need to be able to just pop them on without pre-analyzing your space, there needs to be good force-feedback (you can’t have a satisfying sword fight in VR). This isn’t possible yet, of course, so it continues to be niche.
FWIW, I like playing VR/MR games because they are "sports" that don't require me to drive anywhere or organize anything with other people. To me it's about equal fun as downhill skiing or skating at the roller rink but a lot cheaper than either, and without needing to travel.
Consume less, grow your people and community. It's a quiet, purposeful kind of rebellion. Just do anything that doesn't involve a corporation. It feels amazing and it has an immediate obvious impact.
That's how I feel about Reddit. They just keeping adding things nobody wants because otherwise how do they justify their salaries and their stock price?
I think code design can often cover just as much as actual code anyway. Just describe to me how your solve it, the interfaces you'd use, and how you'd show me you solved it.
As an interviewee it's insane to me how many jobs I have not gotten because of some arbitrary coding problem. I can confidently say after having worked in this field for over a decade and at a FAANG that I am a very capable programmer. I am considered one of the best on every team I've been on. So they are definitely selecting the wrong people IMO.
I have never been able to rid myself of my earlier career instincts that people who spend time debating the pros and cons of languages are not really builders. I am a computer engineer, I have very little respect for coding languages since ultimately they always come down to the same fundamental computing mechanisms: processors and memory.
Perhaps when efficiency is needed I can understand. But most of the time seeking efficiency is yet another non-builder priority. I have always found efficiency comes from good thought, not good tooling.
Im going to try do what you described. But if you happen to write down the steps I'm interested. I hate that to post photos or chat with friends I have to be exposed to reels.
I really do think we should just use the symbolic systems of math rather than trying to bring natural world numbers into a digital number space. It's this mapping that inherently leads to compensating strategies. I guess this is called an algebraic system like the author mentioned.
But I view math as more of a string manipulation function with position-dependent mapping behavior per character and dependency graphs, combined with several special functions that form the universal constants.
Just because data is stored in digitization as 1 and O, don't forget it's more like charged and not charged. Computers are not numeric systems, they are binary systems. Not the same thing.
It's a bit like being a teacher. You get paid terrible money which is not an abstract thing, that has a real life impact. And you have to deal with the politics of academia, which is like the politics of industry but with less leverage to you.
It's just not a great win in any way unless your main thing in life is your job being your main intellectual stimulant.
Trump and Elon are purposefully deconstructing the government offices that would regulate their business. Via whatever false promises and claims they made to the public, the net effect is that private corporate owners are dictating the law. If that's not regulatory capture I don't know what is.
Have you ever heard of lobbying? It's been around for a little while. At least the stuff this admin is doing is 1) visible and 2) has majority approval.
Your typical bigco buying a senator for laws is pretty well under the radar usually.
