I’ve been thinking about UI recently because of BG3 and Starfield.
Larian has a really smart idea with theirs by having a totally different UI when playing with a controller over M&KB. It’s not perfect, but they are so vastly different and perfect for either way you’re controlling. They seem to understand what does and doesn’t work for either way you would play the game.
Then I started playing Starfield and, you know… It’s Bethesda. The UI is what it is in their games, like always. Optimized for controllers, and just controllers. For viewing on a TV and not a small screen. It also was a bit confusing with the 4 square menu, the first thing you see when pressing escape/start. If you have to give me a tutorial on how to navigate your menus: your menus suck.
It's always seemed like such a weak take to just say Batman is a rich guy punching bad guys and nothing else.
He invests in infrastructure, supports the community, promotes people bettering themselves... it's just not nearly as exciting as battling a Joker who's sliced his own face off or a giant crocodile man or a guy who's theme is kites.
Batman’s nuts. Like everybody else in Gotham. He’s pathologically obsessed with beating the crap out of criminals with his bare hands because he needs to emotionally. The fact that he’s saving the world is incidental.
That actually makes his “no killing” rule make more sense. A person doing this for moral reasons would grapple with the continuous living trolley problem embodied by The Joker, and would likely eventually do what needs to be done. An otherwise-decent person feeding addiction to violence would draw a hard line in the sand that he will never ever cross no matter the cost. Which sounds more like Bats?
It also makes his choice of weapons make more sense – tazers don’t satisfy him the way his fists do.
Yes he might also do philanthropic things but that’s not what drives him.
A hero driven by dark needs is way more interesting than a boring paragon of virtue.
It also gives his emotional divide from Nightwing a more coherent moral centre than just “Nightwing didn’t like how Batman’s mean”.
Somewhere between (where he actually sits) is more interesting than both. He's clearly dealing with emotional trauma, but that doesn't mean he's not also still human. And trying to be more so.
We all got trauma. Trauma isn’t what makes Batman interesting. Obsession is. The maniacal motivation to make himself into the greatest DCU superhero by sheer force of will.
I keep trying to read the webcomic but I don’t have a good device for it so I make it a few issues past wherever the show is and lose patience with my failing eyes. But if we’re doing that game, Damien Darkblood vs Batman as worlds’ greatest detectives
I don’t really like the take that it is solely Batman’s responsibility to kill the Joker. Batman acts as a vigilante, and in order to not take actions that one cannot provide restitution for, he has a strict rule that he cannot kill. He enforces the law but he doesn’t act like he’s the judge, jury, or the executioner. He stops them and he lets the judicial system sentence them. The people he hands over the Joker to every single time has far more ample opportunity to kill him. The police, the judge deciding on capital punishment, prison guards, a random bystander with a gun. None of them carry the same extrajudicial responsibility that the Batman imposes on himself in order to remain accountable or at least not start taking charge of life and death.
The problem wouldn’t be that the Batman kills the Joker. The problem would be when he starts deciding whether others are better off dead than alive.
Both are interesting and both are generally how Batman is. It depends on the run. Sometimes he’s dark and grows into a paragon, and sometimes the reverse is true. Totally depends on the author.
I dunno. With enough money, “yes men” can be employed to tell me how much I deserve to be the boss, and books I’m uncomfortable with can be removed from my local library. /s
Edit: But I would never do that. Simple delusions of grandeur are easier to achieve and have fewer network externalities.
I knew this would come up, and you are absolutely right. But apart of the bourgeoisie who really have some parts of their brains wired differently, us “normal” people even if we are successful we suffer from imposter syndrome or burn out.
Perception is the hardest that destroy the equation. All have their personal own, there isn’t a universal right perception, common is living a lie to keep going.
The Bellman Equation describes a “principle of optimality" for decision making.
Essentially, choose the action that maximizes your expected future “value.” The problem is how you choose your value function, and how you estimate the outcomes of your actions.
That’s the short form equation that ignores environmental pressure, the long form has a separate term that accounts for shelter and sentience as a factor between 0 and 1, as well as a quotient for empathy with a numerator of associate happiness.
Oh I definitely need some strife. It can just be me vs situation like my current position trying to run an efficient dispensary, but I need the challenge way more than the perception of earning or owning. I gotta be solving problems and completing tasks. I can’t live idly.
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