Changed my blog's theme back to a white post background with black text. I was finding the white-text-on-dark-grey particularly difficult to read.
Dark theme works for social media sites such as Twitter because of the font and font size they use. Not so much for my blog, which is pretty much a heavy wall of text.
So I heard NY city is having a bit of an exodus. Combination of rising unemployment, crime, and COVID.
COVID and unemployment are basically "what else did you expect from America?" But the crime part is a little more interesting. In lieu of the George Floyd protests, NY city Mayor Bill De Blasio reacted as the people wanted US leadership to do - by cutting funding to the police and moving it to social services. The police responded by retrenching their officers, resulting in a spike in crime.
You see, people fail to understand how corrupt the US police force is. They know that as long as they keep up demand for firearms and military gear, the gun lobbies will take care of them. Force leaders would rather retrench their own men than stop wasting money on guns, knowing that the elected officials will be voted out if people are angry - and they will be angry if crime is high. And police officers are paid high enough to be retrenched with no issue and get rehired later.
But this also presents another piece of insight. The people wanted De Blasio to defund the police - it was literally the slogan. He did. Now they buried themselves in this problem.
What's the lesson? People are very good at identifying issues - this is why politicians should hold town halls, listen to their voter base, address issues directly. But people are pretty bad when it comes to solutions. Despite crowds in the thousands, few realized the solution needed to be more nuanced than just defunding the force - you must mandate a budget to limit unnecessary spending, particularly in the equipment and munitions areas. (Or maybe they did realize, but with the way the system works, everything has to be marketed down to three-word slogans.)
Anyhow, my prediction is NY will elect a Republican mayor soon, and he'll undo the work De Blasio has done, reducing crime and keeping him popular, but bringing the situation back to where it was before. It's all a big ol' circular road to nowhere.
Been exactly a month since I last wrote, and two months since I started my new job. My personal life is nothing much to write about as I have simply been working at my job for most of the last month. Workload has gotten slightly more lenient at least for the time being - I'm now clocking ~45 hours a week give or take, and my work-from-home commitment has gradually moved from nil to 2 days a week (which is more relaxing, but ofc I get less work done at home).
Friends and I have moved off from
our brief stint in Paladins (which was a terrible game, in hindsight) to
a mix of Overwatch and the brand new title Genshin Impact.
I guess I should discuss Genshin
since it's new and most of the gaming world is talking about it. It's certainly
not a bad game, but it's not a good one either - somewhere around a 5/10 in my
books. The problems Genshin has are really complex and not something I
can discuss in a short blog post.
If I could sum it up, Genshin
is both a mobile and a PC game. Mobile games are intended for
short spurts of gameplay - you can just switch it on during lunchtime at
work/school and play for 15-30 minutes for example. On the contrary, PC games
are generally intended for longer sessions as one has to sit down and dedicate
time at home to play. The problem with Genshin is that you've got a game
that is rigorous enough to require the precision of the PC's mouse-keyboard
controls, but the systems are designed for short periods of mobile gameplay. So
it doesn't really feel amazing on either platform, and that's where I see a
majority of complaints come from.
Also, the game is a gacha
(gambling) game. Not much to say in that area but I feel all reviews should
disclose this for people who are against gambling, who may have children
interested, or who are against pay-to-win games in general. I should also note Genshin's
rates are very expensive ($3 per roll and 0.6% for the rarest units), so even
people who do enjoy the occasional gamble may want to avoid it.
Anyway.
I've been really struggling with my
story. It's a bit weird since I've always considered myself a good writer. But
as it turns out, writing a linear story and writing a game are two very
different beasts.
My main line of thought right now
is that I should just scrap my old idea and work with something else from
scratch. I actually have a number of story/game ideas that I have no intention
of working on (as I don't think they are good enough to market to the general
public). But then I looked at the most complete idea and thought, "Why
don't I transpose this into my original game's story, since it kind of sucks
right now?"
My old story idea involved something to do with racism, which I figured was an important topic
that permeates the lives of many people around the world. But when I think
about it, I realize many game devs are leftist-type folk and so there's already
tons of stories with themes of diversity out there. If the gamer crowd can go
through titles like Overwatch, Wolfenstein 2, Mafia III,
or Far Cry and ignore the lessons in diversity depicted in those, then
why would my title be any different? What could I, an amateur dev with 0
experience, possibly do that would magically make an impact where bestselling
titles have failed? This direction feels like an exercise in failure.
I think it would be more effective
to tell a story that metaphorically references the region I come from. Not to
say that this is any easier. In Singapore we don't really have any national
dress like the Chinese or Japanese or Koreans do: we use the Indonesian batik,
the Malay kebaya, and the Chinese hanfu or qipao. Neither
do we have much history in war, so I would struggle to take any part of
Singapore's history and convert it into the ever-popular action RPG genre that
I am making. If I were to ask myself, "How do I take my ARPG and make it
'look uniquely Singaporean?'" I have no answer. (Perhaps for a good
reason. Why must we be so obsessed with fighting?)
But I set out to make an ARPG, so I
will. I think I would have to assimilate elements from other cultures. To my
mind, the coolest of the few extant depictions of Singapore in global media is Pirates
of the Caribbean, particularly Sao Feng. Seafarers in the South China Sea such
as Sao Feng identified as Chinese (and Disney calls him Chinese) but many would
eventually become Singaporean in later decades, or their children would. In
that sense, Disney was accurate with the movies (and also captured much more of
the Chinese audience that way). I can also use elements of British/European
culture as we were colonized by them.
If this new story idea is good I will achieve my original goal. Singapore has not "beat" racism - no one can - but we do alright as far as legislation and regulation is concerned, plus we are a minority voice in our own right. To tell something Singaporean to the world, then, is to tackle racism in a small way.
