Hate.

Subjective.

What we are discussing is already subjective in absolute terms, wich is why I would rather discuss, as I usually say, in terms of relevant and irrelevant variables for concrete topics and subtopics, as subjective doesn't mean unapproachable or impossible to analyze/argument.

The impact of the flaws.

In your first tweet you say: The game deserves the hate it takes.

Shortly below: You can have multiple objective reasons why reboot was an overall downgrade to the series in several fronts, especially with gameplay. Both in terms of the game itself and how it was handled by companies does warrant hate for the game, even with expectations aside.

If my inferences as to how you use these terms are correct, you imply that the mentioned reasons will have quite universal effects if properly understood, as they are relevant (analogous to the relevant variables I mentioned) in any Action Game, including the treatment of the company.

After some of my argumentation: It seems like you might as well say nothing deserves hate because everyone weighs the pros and cons differently.

While it's an ironic reply, the highlighted part makes you fall in a small contradiction because you indirectly admit that there will be a different emotional impact.

You say that the hate is deserved and warranted, because of objective reasons, but you admit yourself that everyone weighs the pros and cons differently at the same time to feel or not hate.

As I said, cognitively maybe you and I are aware of 5 flaws, yet we have different emotions towards them despite understanding them (mechanically) in the same or very similar way. If the interpretation is the same, or almost, then it's obvious that the differences can't be justified with the flaws alone. The flaws alone can't warrant hate if it's possible to not feel hate and still be conscious about such flaws. There must be other variables.

In any case the flaws may partially explain the hate, which is different.

If you would have said it deserves all the criticism or it's understandable to hate the game, I wouldn't have said anything. But it sounded like: people who hate the game have the most coherent feelings, unlike the ones who love it or just dislike it (for example). Technically (since you admit people will feel differently anyway), by your reasoning one could say: DmC deserves all the love it gets, and it would be valid as long as the game did at least some things right.

In any case neither of these feelings would have logical weight in a discussion about the relevant variables and flaws.

Another minor contradiction would be saying the hate for DMC5 is reasonable, yet you wouldn't say it deserves the hate. Even though it's a bigger assumption, and you can say yourself if you would or wouldn't say it. Same goes if you consider I misrepresented what you said using such terms (maybe we don't really use deserve or reasonable in the same sense), even though I consider I was fair.

As for:

Any achievement can deserve love, but it doesn't mean it should get it from everyone. The same is for the reverse, every failure can deserve hate, and in reboots case I think it was a failure and did massive damage to the series as a whole in a multitude of ways.

I wouldn't say achievements deserve love per se. I would say in non-deep conversations that they deserve recognition, visibility, etc.; not love. But I will talk later more in-depth about deserving. Also can deserve hate is a bit vague. If a waiter makes a mistake, and you see someone yelling at him, would you say he deserves it or that it's justified? We could argue about the waiter admitting or not his mistake, being cocky or not about it, but even in the worst case, you can simply go without paying and letting the owner know what happened. Hating on top of this doesn't add benefits.

Emotions, feelings and rationality.

Emotions/Emotional reactions are very universal, like: fear, anger, joy, etc. Non-human animals experiment them as well.

They are very quick, intense and tend to be short-term oriented.

You walk in the forest and a bear appears. Assuming you never were in such situations, that you never had any type of training, etc., probably your organism will start experimenting an emotional reaction even before you are totally conscious about it. There will be a first fast processing in some parts of your brain, like the amygdala, which will cause some physical adjustments after identifying the danger, and before a more elaborated processing in other parts that will make you truly conscious about the bear, your own physical changes that are already taking place (like increased heart rate) and the psychological unpleasant experience of fear.

Of course emotional reactions can take place from a conscious processing too.

Feelings are much more subtle and imply a stronger cognitive component. They are more stable, less intense and long-term affective tendencies, where thoughts, beliefs, internalized norms and the affective tone aren't independent. For example, you are more prone to develop certain feeling of love towards someone if you think his/her qualities are good, etc. And in a similar way, if you start to like someone because of more visual features before having a more elaborated opinion, you can be more prone to develop a positive one when having more info about said person.

Obviously your more general opinions and beliefs will make you prone to develop certain types of feelings instead of others, towards certain people/whatever, etc. Feelings also make you prone to experiment certain emotions in different contexts.

You can love your partner constantly, but you don't feel joy 24h/7. The feeling makes you prone to feel joy when being together or when you remember something pleasant with him/her, for example.

In a similar way, hate (feeling) can be related to anger (emotion). And while hate and anger can have communicative functions, or even preparatory ones in a context like a fight, they are much closer to an evolutionary trace than an actually useful feeling and emotion in a modern context, where we can elocuently explain why something is negative for us and even upsets us, without any need to hate it. Currently even in a professional fight it's most probably not the best emotional status.

Hating creates or increases a bias (if there was one already). As I said, there is a cognitive component in feelings. There can be a tendency to minimize the mistakes of your partner because of your love, and in the same way you can easily become more prone to magnify the mistakes of someone you hate.

Love, however, is a much more necessary feeling with many more benefits. It's much more universable, which means that (even if I am not saying something as simple as we should all love each other) the world would work more efficiently if people loved each other instead of hating each other. And while it could still create a tendency to minimize mistakes, it's much more useful to work on the way you love to, for example, mitigate such bias, compared to the way you hate (because of the potential of each feeling and related emotional reactions).

The utility of affective adjustments can be analyzed and applied to increase your default adaptability. Fear can prepare you to run away from danger, for example, but from what I know, it wouldn't be the best reaction in our example with a bear.

Astronauts, firemen, surgeons, athletes, etc., not only can, but have to make emotional adjustments.

Emotional reactions and feelings have an adaptive function and are key in our motivational system, but it's a rough adaption by default, very improvable with knowledge, rationality and training. And as I usually say, our brain evolved in a much different context than the current one, where something like hate and anger aren't actually useful in most contexts, let alone when discussing about the flaws of a video game.

Speaking of flaws, one of the biggest ones for me in many science fictions movies that imply some hyper developed AI, or however you want to call it, is the lack of any explanation regarding their motivational system. There is self-preservation, but why? Why is it assumed that a machine would want to keep existing without a motivational system analogous to ours? It's usually represented with some type of dark world where machines annihilate/annihilated humanity like in Matrix or Terminator... But then what?

Actually the only rational explanation would be to keep existing until an answer to the question why should I exist is found. Pure cognition doesn't guarantee any objective per se.

If such AI could re-design itself with a motivational system, affective modulators, the capacity to feel anything systemically pleasant, it would make much more sense. And assuming it could copy partially our own design, do you really think it would pick hate? Why? If something negative happens, it would be better to focus on what could be improved depending on the objectives. Hate doesn't improve the situation.

One could say that its function is to push you away from things that make you upset and indirectly prevent others from approaching you with such things, but I don't play DmC and people know I don't like it; you can accomplish this without hating. Actually it's more rational to let people know you dislike something, but without closing completely the door to any possible new counter argument or suggestion that may make you change of mind in the slightest, even if improbable. And if you let people know that you hate something, they will be less prone to approach you with such suggestions, etc. Let alone with stuff like:



It's fair to say that this creates a higher tendency for people to either ignore this person or in the worst case (if they lose their temper) to even hate/detest/insult him instead of educating or approaching him to discuss about why he thinks DmC is such a bad and hateful game.

(Since I know you agree that such comments shouldn't be posted under that video, imagine it's posted somewhere else after some mention related to DmC).

In essence, at no point I implied we should constantly act like emotionless creatures. But rather minimize and re-adjust the least useful emotional reactions and feelings. It would be actually irrational of me to imply that all emotions are irrational per se. Ironically, a rational design implies affective modulators or at least references (being/acting like a psychopath, even if not a violent one, is what's technically irrational).

All this doesn't mean it's easy to make such re-adjustments, to re-construct one-self (which is why I wouldn't have a problem with: the hate it gets is understandable). That's a different question. What matters is that we have the potential to optimize our rationality, but it's only that, potential.


Merit/Deserving and Punishment.


In our long discussion long ago I already mentioned why even the modern concepts of justice are rudimentary (you can skip this if you remember it).

Ojo por ojo is a primitive concept of justice, even though the modern one in most countries is also illogical anyway. Even if we could freeze the flux of causality in the moment somebody pulls the trigger of a gun to kill another person, and analyze his brain, it would be a non-isolated part of the causal flux, a combination of Synapsis. We could go backwards an analyze how each atom reacted with others, we could understand that his action can't be totally isolated; there is a path, a ramification in the causality.
...

If causality and the universe were a painting, punishment (or any archaic concept of justice) would be the equivalent of trying to extirpate the parts of the painting we don't like, re-paint them and patch again. Causality doesn't work like that. You can't compensate parts of the causality that have happened with new ones as punishment and consider you brought up balance and now it's fine. That's just our way to simplify causality and mitigate feelings such as hate, because of others' acts, resentment, etc. In any case what we should do is keep painting despite the mistake, but keeping in mind the feedback we received/perceived, and try to make fewer mistakes/be better, try to understand the acts of the other person, etc. Even the murderer should not be in jail for something as primitive as punishment. But to avoid immediate further harm and to try to understand him, solve his tendency to reach that combination of Synapsis, etc.


What all this means is that if the causal flux was a river, a murderer or Team Ninja are one of the particles pushing others and being pushed by others with momentum (the real causal flux is simply infinitely more complex than a river alone). What we should do is taking a logical reference (section of the river) and trying to analyze the river or a wide part from it, to see what could be improved/re-adjusted, etc.

Saying that one particle deserves some type of negative treatment, as if the actions could be isolated from the momentum and the rest of the particles, attributing exclusively and perfectly to them any mistakes and re-balancing them with a punishment, implies a contradiction with how causality itself works.

You don't improve or compensate reality by killing the murderer (assuming he is already harmless in jail) or insulting TN once the negative feedback and mechanical flaws have been repeated (assuming TN and Capcom are aware of the feedback).

The victim won't come back to life and it won't improve DmC in any way, or future Action Games; let alone ignoring how the murderer became a murderer or TN ended up making DmC. The origins, as the results, aren't isolated parts of the reality that happened magically out of nowhere.

This is why the concept of deserving isn't logical. I don't mean that they don't deserve the hate, I mean that talking in such terms is illogical.

Why do I still use the term myself in expressions like Edwin deserves more visibility? Because in quick interactions I can't write such essays each time to make people understand what I truly mean. More visibility means that more people will enjoy his content and benefit from his ideas, while he would feel a positive reward himself after investing effort. It's an overall improvement of the situation. It's not because he deserves it as isolated element in the universe that has to have a compensation, but it's logical to give him as much visibility as possible and feeling good for him when he gets it. Hating TN and DmC after having shared negative feedback is not. It doesn't have benefits. It even has some cons, like making the climate more hostile or prone to hostility. While recognition and rewards to what people perceive as merit, like in Edwin's situation, usually doesn't.

This is why rewards and punishments aren't necessarily simply the opposite in the exact same spectrum. I don't consider logical to not retweet Edwin's combos, or Geno's, as long as the person in question understands the effort and quality and is interested in DMC, has time, etc., regardless of loving them or not. Unlike hating DmC knowing its flaws vs not hating.

Additionally, the fact that I have done something doesn't mean I consider it right or rational. I have most probably said at some point something like this idiot deserved my reply, but I was probably venting. It can be understandable, but not the most logical option (and of course it's more complex than deserving).

Since I don't consider you were in a delicate emotional state when you tweeted it deserves the hate, I commented why I wouldn't include such feelings in such topic.

The part:

Same can be said if you love a game. Just on the other side of the spectrum.

Simply means that I wouldn't include how much I love DMC4 in a discussion about what makes it actually so good, mechanically, regarding relevant variables, let alone implying it deserves the love.

It deserves it? Why. Another person can totally understand why it's so good, but not love it because of plenty of reasons, making the term deserve pointless or inconsistent.

Additional hypothesis about hate.

This is a part of a text I wrote long ago for another person. It may seem unrelated at first, but I will explain later why it could be related to hate.

People have the need to self-perceive themselves/their understanding individually as consistent, regardless of the base-knowledge they have and its quality (or real consistency). By default, most will prefer the short and easy answer instead of the long and tedious process of constant adogmatic (but not skeptical) analysis (process vs state of absolute understanding, even if it’s just a perceived state). In an open natural system (opposed to formal/closed systems like mathematics and logic in its purest sense), any premise with some additional and simplified rule or rules are enough to absorb them as an answer and avoid the anxiety of not knowing/not solving X relevant issue/problem/dilemma for us.

Manicheism, mythology, prejudices, religion are examples of different strategies we have non-consciously adapted to solve the innumerable questions we would constantly have without immediate answers, again, regardless of their quality. Even fictional short answers can alleviate anxiety and of course save energy.

What's the lightning coming from the sky... It must be Zeus throwing it because he is in a bad mood...

Why did that pedophile abuse... Why did Hitler what he did... They were evil/bad persons...

This is much easier than understanding the physics of lightning and the retrospective analysis of Hitler's Ethics (it was the right thing for him and his logic, even if it's undeniably a retarded one) and how he ended up doing what he did, including social transformation, symbolic interactionism, etc., to understand why so many people supported or tolerated him, etc.

While the necessity or at least tendency to prefer quicker answers is overall obvious, the relationship with hate or emotions is much more speculative. But I will still share it:

Probably the preference for quicker answers applies in a similar way, however, it's obviously in a more emotional sense. When you meet someone new, prejudices and assumptions are the base you will start building your opinion on. What happens emotionally? As I said, feelings have actually a cognitive component, and while we build our opinion, we also build a more or less intense affective approach to people even from the first encounters. Liking or not a person can be very quickly established, even if not in an intense way.

It's much more comfortable to identify asap than remaining as emotionally neutral as possible. It helps to identify your identity and others'. When we vent insulting idiots, technically one of the factors is dismissing a deeper analysis of said person and alleviating our anxiety depersonalizing to some extent. It reduces our empathy for the concrete person, making things simpler and easier.

Hate would be a more extreme shortcut. Its role would be to dismiss quickly without questioning it even more, while keeping an easy objective to project negative further negative feelings and frustration. It probably also helps to make a clearer self-image, which would explain why so many people approach in more extremely emotional way many topics (there are many other factors in internet, like wanting to be heard among so many other voices, thus consciously or not exaggerating your own views, etc.).

Basically, before having a dilemma like DmC is bad in many aspects and TN did some wrong things, yet there are many awesome DmC players who made awesome combo MADs and pushed the standards, which means it's decent as Action Game after all, even if downgraded compared to DMC4's mechanics, etc... I am not sure how I should feel about this game...; it can be much easier to establish that you simply hate it, period.

(I don't mean you; actually I tried to not assume you hate yourself DmC during all this discussion).

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