Coelacanth

That was in my OP though, that most games can be thought of as puzzle games with extra steps.

I just don’t get where you’re getting “most games” from. If you would have phrased it like “many games can be viewed as puzzle games if you really think about it” you would have maybe had more people agree with you.

I understand your reductive approach - it’s just that there are so many games it doesn’t apply to that I can never agree with “most games”.

If you have 2 minutes to solve a puzzle, is it no longer a puzzle game?

Yes, clearly. It still behaves the way a puzzle - or puzzle game - would: knowledge of the solution trivialises the content. It’s just a puzzle game with a timer.

If moving certain colored pieces requires a button combo or sequence, instead of a simple action, is this no longer a puzzle game?

Depends on how the combo works. Is there an element of skill involved? If it’s like a rhythm game I would just call it a puzzle/rhythm game. Otherwise it’s just a puzzle game with extra steps.

For me, if the main challenge of the game is figuring out the puzzle, then it’s mainly a puzzle game. If a measure of skill is required in the actual execution of beating the game it is no longer a pure puzzle game - but it can still contain puzzle elements of course.

EDIT: I would agree that Tetris is not a puzzle game.

Knowing the optimal thing to do can be seen as but a higher order puzzle.

But knowing the right strategy and item build in DotA or LoL means fuck all if you can’t mechanically execute your hero properly, which - in my opinion - disqualifies them as “puzzle games”.

I think your definition of puzzle games is pretty flawed, to be honest. A puzzle does not provide additional difficulty once you’ve identified how the pieces go together, consequently a game should behave similarly to qualify as a puzzle game. The dichotomy is between conceptualisation versus execution.

Puzzle games can be solved or “won” by identifying the solution. Not-puzzle games require execution.

Guitar Hero and OSU! are not puzzle games. Games like RTSes and MOBAs can be argued to have puzzle elements in terms of strategy and meta, but knowing the optimal thing to do will still not give you victory which imo disqualifies them as outright puzzle games.

Yes, definitely! Using the !community@instance.tld works well for communities, but linking to posts is a bit of a headache honestly.

Sounds like programming.dev might be a good fit, or perhaps dbzer0?

It was definitely the go-to abbreviation during the early days of the internet, at least in my circles. Nowadays we’ve become so anglicised that everyone just uses English norms instead.

I remember using asg as a kid/young teen, and I remember people at the time were looking down on those using “lol” or “rofl” instead, calling them silly posers.

I love this. The evolution of the slang is so interesting. I read somewhere else that Japan started to use the symbol for “grass” to mean great laughter because the initial abbreviation “www” looks like blades of grass.

I did enjoy LivestreamFail on the other site being Northernlion-only for a day as April Fools this year. However, harmless, fun and wholesome April Fool’s are so few and far between.

We struggle with misinformation in our society already, and on a smaller, more personal scale I always found April Fools to be an extremely mean-spirited tradition purely existing to promote and encourage having fun at the expense of others. I never enjoyed humiliating others, and I don’t enjoy being pointed and laughed at either.

I think I’ll pass.

I’ve done loads of Wasgij jigsaw puzzles with family over holidays, they’re great. If anyone here thinks this sounds like a fun idea I encourage you to check them out!

It’s more like AI art in reverse, when you think about it. Instead of an AI spitting out images to our taste, it’s the YouTubers pumping out images to the algorithms taste.

The original poster was @mizu6079@lemmy.world who seems to have deleted his account and the original post. It was archived in various places though, sadly without the original comments (which had some back and forth with the OP that only increased the mystery). It was the top upvoted post on Lemmy as a whole for a while. Here is a link to an archived version of just the OP:

https://lemmy.world/post/616615

No-poop guy truly was a Lemmy moment.

It’s been years since I felt any satisfaction using a search engine, personally. Between the ocean of sponsored results and the ever-growing mountain of AI-generated Search Engine Optimisation-filled garbage it’s so much harder to find stuff than a decade ago.

Thanks for your efforts keeping the Poetry comm alive! I know I mainly lurk there but I appreciate your posts!

Its just that I see people use a lack of population in ‘niche’ communities as a failure of Lemmy overall, and using some subjective made-up number to justify Lemmy’s overall failure, when there’s obviously traffic to major communities and ‘life’/activity on Lemmy on a daily basis.

It’s not so much a “failure” of Lemmy as it is an assessment of the situation (at this point in time). I wasn’t suggesting Lemmy was or will be a failure, nor that it’s dead. I like it here and I’m active most days. There still isn’t enough activity in niche subs for Lemmy to have mainstream appeal, though. Even a broad subject like Poetry is carried by a handful of people, and that is a fairly lively “niche sub”.

We’re currently still in the phase where determined, committed individuals have to spend concerted effort into keeping small subs going, rather than them being self-sustaining.

I do like it here, though, and I really hope the growth continues.

Yeah, I feel that. Formula 1 does okay (maybe unsurprisingly due to it being tech adjacent), but even huge sports like soccer are mostly ghost towns.

To confirm, you don’t think we have a minimum population base currently on Lemmy?

I mean, depends on what you view Lemmy as, right? It’s a great place to hang around and chat (depending on your interests). The people here are generally polite and friendly, and most interactions feel meaningful. It does not currently have enough content volume and niche communities to provide a viable Reddit alternative to most people.

If so, how do you make that judgment? How are you measuring that? How are you quantifying that?

Completely subjectively, though I didn’t think it was an unpopular opinion. I thought most people agreed niche communities struggle here. The exact number of users needed to reach critical mass I have no idea on, just a best guess extrapolating between where we are now and where Reddit was a decade ago. You can use Mastodon as another data point. I’m not on there, but I’m under the impression that Mastodon, too, has a little low userbase to truly feed niche communities, and it’s noticeably larger than Lemmy.

Both sides have their benefits, and it’s a shame there is no good best-of-both-worlds. I get where you’re coming from, I never felt the urge to participate on Reddit because it was so often just shouting into the void and getting buried in hundreds of one-word replies and in-jokes and memes. Here I feel seen, and often feel like my contribution (although mostly just small comments) makes an impact.

At the same time, a huge critical mass of a userbase is completely necessary for niche communities to survive. Maybe not as overwhelmingly massive as Reddit’s, but magnitudes larger than Lemmy has right now. Lemmy has a very distinct userbase slant and if you’re in the target audience (tech, FOSS, Linux etc) you’re probably great here. But even common interests like sports struggle for traction, and true niche stuff has an extremely tough time.

God I wish you get that grant. Your Fediverser project is super interesting and promising, and I think could be a great boon.

Commenters were already counted, though, so this bump is really just the vote-only population getting added. Which is still important to maintaining a healthy and varied front-page, mind you.