I wonder if they have a new control technique up their sleeve. Innovative gameplay and pushing new control ideas is one of Nintendo’s signatures. That said, being the switch 2, not a new console, maybe they kept it the same and just upgraded the processing and graphics hardware.
Both controllers have optical sensors (visible in the trailer), confirming the rumors that they'll have mouse like functionality. Remains to be seen if games will actually bother to implement it or if it'll remain a curiosity that only a handful of titles support.
For action games doesn't look like a good option. But i think it will be used if it works well on any surface.
Probably there will be a resurgence of point and click adventure games pushed by the new mouse functionality (or even republish some old sierra/lucas arts stuff with mouse support).
Also may be useful for pc ports like simcity clones and strategy games (i could use that in civ).
Some propietary nintendo stuff will use it like mario maker or wario ware, some zelda dungeon probably will have a gimmick around it. And also some small indy third party stuff, like i don't know, mini motorways, things like that, will be built arround it.
It would be great if games implemented it for aiming, but I am not sure that they will for sure. Given how few third party developers add a gyro-aiming option when they release a game on the console when most first party games have it in some way.
It will make for an interesting dynamic for games with cross-play with other consoles where implemented though.
We could hope that Nintendo exposes a mouse like interface when it's in mouse mode, which could help a lot for adoption for cross platform third-parties.
Dealing with Switch specific gyro info, sometimes coming from two sources sometimes from one must have been a PITA, especially for games using a cross platform engine.
All it does it confirm that they have something there. The Wii used a sensor to detect where it was pointing, the Switch had an IR camera for a variety of weird gimmicks, the NES and SNES had light-detecting "guns". Hell, it could even be an IR blaster like the Wii U Gamepad had, and not a sensor at all. We just don't know yet.
The trailer shows the joycons sliding on that side with an additional attachment (see: 1:10). It seemed pretty obvious they were trying to hint at some kind of mouse-like optical tracking on a flat surface.
Yeah, definitely—it's my favorite thing about the company. Well, maybe second to their consistent level of quality. But seriously—the Labo piano used the IR camera to scan in waveforms to create new instruments. The VR kit had an elephant trunk mask to let you move around parts in a marble run game. Nintendo has a lot of wild experiments, and Labo takes that all to the next level.
And that's not getting into the quality of software for building the kits—way beyond any instructions that Lego has ever put out.
Innovation is their way, but they're still burned a LOT by the Wii U. Now they've managed to find something that works, I think they'll stick with it for at least the Switch 2, maybe the 3 as well.
The Switch wouldn't exist if they hadn't first experimented with that form factor with the Wii U. The innovation and risk of the Wii U paid off for them in the long run.
True, but I think they still wanted the U to actually sell better than it did. It was a case of too much innovation too soon, IMO — having an alternating "evolution/revolution" cycle makes a lot of sense.
Every company wants a product to sell better than it did, but it's pretty obvious that the WiiU didn't meet expectations.
It sold 13m units, but the clearest sign of it not doing "as well as expected" is that they discontinued it as soon as possible as they could once the Switch was out.
From my experience both with "gamers" and "non-gamers" - it was too similar in name for the latter and not exciting enough for the former.
How could someone write a post like this and leave off the great book “Metaphors We Live By” by Lakoff and Johnson?
Is particularly found the part about how metaphors “hide and highlight” information. In other words the metaphor we use necessitates how we think. We often frame arguments using the metaphor of war and that frames how we think. The other party is an enemy that must be defeated, its bloody, and there is a loser. However we could frame it as a dance, in which case they are a partner, and for the outcome to succeed they must move together in harmony.
Lakoff has written other fascinating books like how metaphors are used in politics as well as math (“Where Mathematics Comes From”).
I view it as a side effect of linguistic evolution. Sure you could have a bunch of complex rules to strictly type your nouns and limit the type of verbs that validly relate things in one type to another, but if you simply relax the constraint (or just not bother in the first place) metaphors fall out as a natural consequence. See, I just did it. "fall out". Words don't physically fall, but because there's no constraint on using this physical verb to relate non-physical concepts, I can make metaphorical expressions at no additional cost to grammatical complexity.
We do this all the time. We might say a certain fact or circumstance "tells us" something to mean its presence let us make a deduction. Eg "this equation tells us the flow is laminar in this regime". Examples of this sort of thing are abundant.
The first part of Metaphors We Live By is fascinating. It describes how so much of language is made of dead metaphors. But then you get to stuff like:
> We often frame arguments using the metaphor of war and that frames how we think. The other party is an enemy that must be defeated, its bloody, and there is a loser. However we could frame it as a dance, in which case they are a partner, and for the outcome to succeed they must move together in harmony.
That's just silly. The reason arguments are described metaphorically as wars is because arguments and wars serve the same function: they occur when we disagree about something and are means of settling the disagreement. Dances, meanwhile, have nothing to do with disagreement and they don't settle anything.
Its not silly at all. First, we're discussing metaphors, and it's certainly possible to use different metaphors to describe or model the same situation.
There are dances that decide disagreements.
Different cultures use dance for different purposes. What about dance contests? Break dancing? Krumping? People dance to attract partners, to establish social ranking, etc... all of which which are a forms of social contest.
I didn't say or, I think, even imply that "any metaphor will do". And I'm also not saying that war doesn't exist, or that dancing will somehow replace war.
I said "it's certainly possible to use different metaphors to describe or model the same situation." Then I described some situations where dance, not war or physical conflict, is used to settle disagreements.
I agree, it is not silly at all. It is worse, it is pandering. It is selling an agenda.
Conflicts are part of social interactions. The fact we use war metaphors doesn't mean we use violence, it is the opposite, we are replacing old-fashioned violence with social interactions.
No -- we have wars, arguments, and negotiations when individuals or groups disagree about things. All of these things are human activities that we use to settle a disagreement.
Dance, meanwhile, has nothing to do with disagreements or making a decision about how things will be. A dance resolves nothing; it's something people do for fun. It's silly to assert that we can simply "think of X as being like Y" and that will make it so. Sadly that is Lakoff's thesis.
A dance is a kind of negotiation. The "decision about how things will be" is what move should be performed next. Success is achieved by both parties, or neither - never just one or the other - and may even entail a "surrender" on the part of one of them.
The entire point is that metaphors can emphasize different aspects. This metaphor emphasizes ideas like:
-disagreements are not zero sum
-coming to a consensus is more important than getting your way
-we are ultimately all on the same side
-be graceful - carefully choose your moment to assert yourself
The suggestion of using metaphors for existential framing is nonsensical when one thinks of the ends of the activities, but it makes plenty of sense when one applies it to the process instead.
In a negotiation, as long as I know my boundaries and my decision calculus, then approaching it playfully and in a way that brings the other person into the game is a very constructive (and frankly fun) route. This is what is meant by dance rather than fight.
That's an improvement but is it what Lakoff meant? I don't know -- I read the book years ago but I very much got the sense that his argument was "words have no inherent meaning, essentially all meaning is circular, and so we can think of X as being like Y just as easily as Z".
Imagine that you know you are the author of that, but also you just woke up with amnesia and are now trying to figure out why you wrote that book and what did you mean there.
When I was in high school (ages ago) the boy’s bathrooms didn’t have doors. I guess it was to deter kids smoking, graffiti, and other bad things that happen. We were a middle class suburb so I don’t know how often this happened anyways. I was fortunate to never need to go but I always remember it.
Neither had toiler paper and toilet seats. Instead of weeding out bad kids who smoked and vandalized, all kids were punished. Negatively impacted nutrition and hydration habits during the following decades of my life.
I once had to use a bathroom so stopped in a shop, they said customers only, so I bought the cheapest thing they had, a coke. Then, while I was in the bathroom another employee, who didn't see me purchase the drink started banging on the door yelling customers only. I looked like a tourist, this was in London near Hyde park, so maybe a bad area.
In the US it's because the homeless population in most cities is rising, and they have few places to use the toilet.
Business owners perceive the presence of homeless people as bad for business so they don't want to encourage homeless people to stick around. And they think homeless people will trash their bathrooms or use drugs inside which is dangerous for other customers and brings police presence.
So business owners lock up their bathrooms. Result: Even fewer places for homeless people to use the toilet.
> Business owners perceive the presence of homeless people as bad for business so they don't want to encourage homeless people to stick around. And they think homeless people will trash their bathrooms or use drugs inside which is dangerous for other customers and brings police presence.
These things aren’t just perceptions or thoughts. It’s a real problem that anyone who runs a business in a location with a homeless problem can attest to.
You’re totally right. And it’s important to distinguish between the many forms of homelessness. There’s visible homeless, they are what most people think of. There are also invisible homeless, they don’t “look” homeless. Often you don’t know they are homeless except for carrying around some belongings and brushing their teeth in public places.
Businesses care about the first type because of the associated problems and are completely fine with the later.
The article has one good point: there’s diseases and conditions that cause people to need the bathroom, and even if you don’t have this upset stomachs are common enough that at some point it’ll impact you. Parents with young kids realize it too. So this is everyone’s problem.
However the article misses the point with statements like this.
Quite simply, Lowe was right: there is often no place to go.
There are often many places to go, it just might not be a public toilet. There’s restaurants and coffee shop, gas stations, stores. Don’t confuse no public places to go with no places to go.
Public toilets are one of those things where all it takes is one person to mess up a good situation for everyone else.
There’s no incentive for people to treat them nicely. There’s an asymmetry, people want to use public toilets but who wants to clean public toilets? It’s always “someone else job.”
I see no problem having a little friction as a way to help control it. A small charge to use the bathroom or social capital of asking can be enough to remedy the problems of misuse.
Some people literally don’t have money for a small charge and they shouldn’t be denied using a public bathroom because of that. You’re right about everything else though.
The words “public company” often carry a negative tone but ownership rules are complicated. It doesn’t mean much until you know the specifics. For example a non-tech example of a publicly owned corporation that people might not think of is the Green Bay Packers.
Another tech example of a charitable foundation funded by for-profit subsidiaries (both wholly-owned and publicly traded) is the Carl Zeiss Foundation[1].
“Addiction is a disease” is something I learned as a child of a (now sober) alcoholic parent.
It’s a strange classification at first because addiction seems like a matter of will and strength.
If we’re going to lump algorithmic addiction in with other addictions there’s a lot of interesting things that would flow from that. For example now that online gambling and sports betting is more common there’s disclaimers and commercials telling people to get help if they have a problem. Should the same thing be true for social media and Candy Crush games?
“Do you have a problem with social media, go to Facebook.com/gethelp for more information”
Obviously not all of this is true. I chatted to Amazon driver for my apartment about some local Chicago sports and he talked to me forever. Ironically I had to end the conversation by saying I needed to use the bathroom. He’s definitely not timed.
Can’t wait for Season 2 where he chronicles how to game the ratings system.
I feel 99% of the people on HN understand it but on the other hand there’s people like my 70 yr old mom who look at that and think, oh what a fantastic product. She is very susceptible to dark patterns, has no concept of sold by Amazon vs 3rd party sellers, etc.
> Obviously not all of this is true. I chatted to Amazon driver for my apartment about some local Chicago sports and he talked to me forever. Ironically I had to end the conversation by saying I needed to use the bathroom. He’s definitely not timed.
In the US and the UK (where the interviews were conducted) Amazon deliveries are mostly contracted out to Delivery Service Partners who are small businesses that work exclusively for Amazon, drive Amazon vans, and wear Amazon uniforms. Amazon puts a lot of pressure on DSPs while giving DSPs the digital tools to apply pressure to their drivers, but there isn't a fully direct link and you can expect variation DSP-to-DSP and day-to-day.
Also, trying to calculate something as complicated as delivery routes to the maximum a human can do is bound to have outliers on either side. Eventually Amazon will figure it out and fix it, or they won't because the driver is smart enough to intentionally slow-roll it and feed them route data that validates their prediction.
I might have miscommunicated my idea. I certainly think everything that documentary shows happens and agree with everything you say. No dispute there. I just don’t know what percentage it represents.
Maybe my driver is a corporate driver, not a DSP, and has different metrics etc. I don't know.
BTW I really like the term “partner” in delivery service partner. It’s a weasel word that covers up what’s really going on. They are not partnering in the common sense of the word like “my wife is my partner.” (Although on a long road trip she wouldn’t hesitated to make me pee in a bottle rather than stop for my baby bladder. Haha.)
nice little liability shroud there. Looks like a full-time-employee, walks like a FTE, but has no access to the same rights or protections as someone whose paycheck says Amazon on it.
It's pretty true. Here's a screen recording some guy took while working in the dispatch role. They're tracking every driver in real time and measuring against the expected progress
funnily enough I had never seen for myself the whole "Amazon truck just stops in the middle of a 1 lane street to start delivering packages" until yesterday evening while driving.
That driver may not have felt rushed, but certainly other drivers do.
Yes. He comes all the time. I haven’t been in this apartment for very long but he’s had this route for at least a year. I first met him on New Years Eve when ordering a board game to play that night. I came back from picking up last minute groceries and he was delivering packages. In the spring we talked NBA playoffs (he was very proud that he predicted the Nuggets to sweep the Lakers). During the summer when we talked about the Cubs. It’s coincidence we bump into each other but I see him driving the truck around.
