I've recently been obsessed with a streamer called AboutOliver. He played Minecraft for the first time about a year and a half ago, played his entire first season with no wiki or external knowledge, got a little tour of the community server (which he 99% forgot at the time Season 2 rolled around) and is now on Episode 75-ish of season 2. Still no wiki, no guides. He has figured out some crazy things about the game (which I won't spoil), but is also completely clueless about some super basic features.

It's been incredibly inspiring to just watch him figure things out, because he is exceptionally inquisitive and methodical by default (I think he's a phd candidate in Astrophysics irl?). Made me realize the point of a game shouldn't be to produce the optimal output, but that struggling and finding things out is exactly the point. Incidentally, that mindset also noticeably boosted my performance at work because I'm now one of the few people who will happily continue to tackle a programming problem over and over again, even if there are no helpful guides on it.

Long story short, here's a link to watch the supercut of Olivers Season 1 Playthrough: https://youtu.be/ljemxyWvg8E
The total season 1 supercut is about 6 hours iirc

OR, if you are insane, here's the link to the full-episode playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL68V5Cxs_CvTpTY9o7KJ75nLPqlCRxze0
It's 50 Episodes á 3-5h, great as background noise when doing something else.

At first I was going to disagree and say "hey at least they are still looking up information, unlike most people" but then I did a 540° on that idea when I realized that I myself was a great example of how the OP is right.

I have been building things in my back yard like crazy this summer. I am currently working on a purpose-built little lego/craft tray for my wife to use in the house. I have gotten to plan out every detail in my head and sketching on paper, including convenient geometry knowledge like multiplying by the square root of 2 to find lengths for 45° supports or the good old 3-4-5 triangle for getting a right angle in a pinch. I have been able to discuss the table's use with my wife to figure out the perfect features. It will be a little wooden table that's ~2'/60cm wide like a TV tray but it will be held up by cantilever legs that are long enough and tall enough to hover the table over her lap with the footrest up. And it will have other features like little segmented bins for pieces/parts, and an instruction holder.

It's a great activity for numerous reasons. It gets me outside, it gets me physical, it gets me interacting with my wife and excited to give her the finished product, it gives me opportunities to practice new skills/tools, and it engages the senses as well as the mind while I spend hours in a calm almost meditative state and not seeing anything that's happening on my phone (though it will read texts to me through my earbuds).

It's a pretty funny look. I'm wearing a big round brimmed sun/fishing hat that looks almost like Gandalf's but without the pointy top. From the outside the sound of the scene is 95% the sound of falling water and birds chirping, interrupted by the 5% of the time spent actively cutting or planing some wood. But if my earbuds are in my ears, they are blasting my playlist of various high-tempo Thrash and Industrial Metal songs! (at 45-50% volume. I'm responsible here, lol)

So if I take all that and compare it to some schmuck who pulls up ChatGPT and types something like "design me a sturdy two foot wide table, create a list of the pieces I need and the cuts to make them, and generate detailed assembly instructions with pictures." Yeah you might still get a functional table but your life has missed out on the vast majority of the potential benefit of the activity!

This is the way I started looking at these tasks once I really internalized the whole "life is about the journey, not the destination" thing.

Beneath A Steel Sky has a help system now you can refer to, and I ended up using it a fair bit. The solutions often just pissed me off though, as they rely on you remembering a one-off bit of dialogue you saw (or skipped) days ago in real time. or were just nonsense.

When I walk around the floor at work now I often see other devs on their phones while they wait for the AI to do stuff. People are getting disengaged are forgetting skills already - this is unsustainable.

If you want to speedrun Idiocracy, an overreliance on AI seems a good way to get there.

Brawndo has what plants crave.

Except game walkthroughs provide correct information, whereas LLMs can just make things up. So it's more like looking at a walkthrough where each step is from an entirely different game.

except walkthroughs are much more accurate...

This is a extremely apt take

OP attacks every subscriber to Nintendo Power magazine. It's super effective.

it was so hard for me to play grim fandago without looking up the answers but i did it! 10 hours later and lots of critical thinking and i finally solved the first puzzle!

Same with wowhead or runescape wiki. Really kills the video game wonder.

Good news is that you can just ignore that if you want to. I recently played classic wow without any external tools and it was such a fun, adventurous experience!

Im playing a bunch of soulslikes for the first time now. You gotta exhaust everything you can think of, then check a walkthrough just for the hint youre missing.

The process is the fun part. Looking it up is just a way to minimize frustration because you can't find the goddamn ladder.

In other words im with you

In the 90s I would go to the school library to print out walkthroughs from the internet, to supplement the occasional relevant walkthroughs I could find in magazines. Realistically there was absolutely no way I was figuring out most of the puzzles on my own as a child, games got way more user friendly and self explanatory since then.

There is a time and place for walkthroughs. I doubt I would've finished Portal 1 & 2 on my own without them because I absolutely suck at puzzles, particularly visual ones. But if I hadn't, I would have missed out on the great story and enjoying the craft of the game.

BRO this is literally normal life now. No one wants to figure anything out. Its why I hate llms. Breeds laziness like never before

I had a rule where I wasnt allowed to use a gameshark until I had already beaten the story mode.

So I guess the analogy there would be learn how to do the thing the old fashioned way and then only use AI as a tool to do it better.

Here's something I've been thinking about. I've been playing through some need for speed games on emulators for the past few years. Once I bound keys to save and load states it was over: I'd save-state before every turn and run them over and over until I got them perfect. Doing this I did eventually learn the maps really well though, and on more recent playthroughs I've barely used save-states, which was obviously far more satisfying. I realize this isn't the same thing as ai or walkthroughs, but I think maybe these tools do share something in that they lower the barrier to entry to different sorts of skilled tasks we may not yet feel competent to accomplish. Like training wheels or a helping hand, we can let go of them once we feel steadier on our own.

We were so bored back in the day we spent hours, days, months finding out how to get by stupid things in point&click games, it was better than not playing them but it was also not like the best time ever either.

I don't know if we "got smarter" by it really.

This is exactly it. I definitely used a lot of walkthroughs as a kid. I also feel like games in the 90s and early 00s were just plain harder, or sometimes poorly designed.

These days I only look something up when I have got to a point of near rage over how much of my limited gaming time has been wasted, and I need to know if I am just a moron, or if it's a bug, or bad game design. Of course, then I get mad that I can't find it written out, and have to skim around in some fucking YouTube video to figure it out.

The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an "easy button", it's hard to not use it. It's sort of like when you're at work and see the "quick workaround" effectively become the standard process.

Or when you're diving somewhere, and drivers thinking there's an "easy button" gets people killed.

The point, I think, is that society seems to encourage "what can I get away with" while discouraging any consideration of "what should I do". Which, well, seems pretty ass-backwards don't you think?

Then again, we've never truly removed from power the progeny of those that decided beating the shit out of someone else was preferable to doing their fair share of the labor. "But what if someone tries to kick your ass? Then you'll be glad I'm here."

Uhh, like fucking hell I will. That kind of sociopathic fuckery has always been, and will always be, nothing but a drain on the collective effort of any society.

Tldr: I totally agree with you

Oh, and as an aside, part of me kinda hates that Re-Logic added "Journey Mode" to Terraria; I haven't put any significant time into even one classic mode playthrough since.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When the answer is to grab the fork seventeen levels back, and to not use it on the dog 3 screens before so that you had it to look at after answering a riddle written backwards in Spanish that is actually an in-joke from the devs childhood you’re damn fucking right I’m not wasting my time to “figure it out”.

Video games are not reality, I can’t look at an easily surmountable barrier and just walk over it like I could in real life to solve the issue, I have to take some deranged imagined route by a dev. I can’t logically work my way out of a situation that is some guys bullshit idea of a solution.

I decided to use GPT to help me with gaming, specifically when I had little to no clue what to do or where to go.

What I did was write instructions in my prompt, asking it not to be too specific and not to give me a straight answer. Sometimes, I even asked it to be intentionally cryptic. That way, I could still make progress without ruining the fun, since the vague hints still left room for me to figure things out on my own.