Critiques – My Game Reviews

The Google Empire: Why we need more search engines other than Google

The usage of “network” effect to basically dismiss calls for other search engines or any other institution is a common phrase. The people who use it to say there is something transhistorical about Google and that people should be just accept Google. The thing that Google has is the ability to just control the access to information and also installing their search services on every Android device here. Microsoft got in trouble for the same thing, but now they are basically the underdogs here in the search space with Bing, which is good but is basically unable to gain traction because Google keeps people within their systems. This means that people only see Google and not other competitors.

I use Google’s products as they are not incompetent at making email services such as Gmail. However, they are often used as the only service and the “nerds” or power” users are trying to use other products. For example, think about DuckDuckGo or other search engines such as Bing as I mentioned earlier. However, Bing is the only one that is capable of challenging Google. In the early 2010s, its market share was higher than it is now but it is unable to get beyond a small percentage.

We need more search engine choices.

Why is that we allow people to congregate in the “best”

This best is being propped up with all sorts of trickery and manipulations. The most important thing that can happen now is that we need to break up the app stores of both Google and Apple. This duopoly has allowed for the ossification of many aspects of the internet. It has led to the decline in the quality of desktop sites. Previously, desktop sites had all their charm and qualities. Now it the same throughout and it is not interesting now. Even the corporate sites, the front page of a company’s brand have become little more than portals to their social media sites.

We need competition and while we may have alternatives, we do not currently have competition.

Search engines should be an area of competition and growth and not beholden to only one company. The internet is a space without any limit in space only bandwidth. We should have many choices.

Google Search and the Paywall: A consequence of near monopolistic power

Google is a company that has been controlling the search market in its grip for well over 20 years at this point. While the company offers many convenient services, it has also become a monopoly. Some people would disagree with that but the company is one and also is also dominating in mobile phones with the android operating system. There is a need for the internet to untangle from this monopolistic system that Google has made. Just for the interests of keeping the internet interesting and useful for many types of people, that is important. However, one of the main reasons why I am focusing on this issue is because of paywalls on news sites.

Paywalls used to be rarer in the past. Only really the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) had them in a significant way. However, as time has gone on and the internet went from a place for bragging rights to a necessity for someone to be able to have a journalism career, paywalls have been going up across cyberspace. The building of walls across the internet feels like an admission of failure of the internet’s ability to reduce the cost of producing news. I have seen it in real-time here; this is not a change that one sees through generations but it happened after 2008 and we have seen more and more paywalls.

Google’s inability to categorize paywalls is huge issue. Their unwillingness to categorize websites to make it more useful to the public shows their institutional inertia. The company makes billions upon billions of dollars on advertising, yet it is unable to even pay attention to its search engine that made it popular in the 2000s.

Why is Google so unwilling to change?

It’s because they are comfortable in taking ad revenue from sites. Changing that revenue stream would make them take a hit and they can only tolerate having more and more revenue streaming into it.

If Google was to take its search engine seriously, it would take a hit to its reputation. It would have to respond to all the calls about it having a monopoly on the internet and manipulating people’s minds. They would have to make the legacy outlets which seek to maintain their power have to play by the rules rather just allowing them to regurgitate what the ruling parties want to see.

Paywalled sites do need to not show up in the search results. Many of these sites are business sites that often hide their arcane language away from public view. The internet should be divided up into small kingdoms where you have to pay entry fees to get into the castle.

Google’s unwillingness to categorize such things show that monopolies that hold onto power for so long have a way of shaping the whole culture around them. The internet, once free and vibrant, is becoming yet another shopping mall where everything has a price.

Having free access to information on the internet isn’t a right but essential aspect to cyberspace.

Civilization 7 Review: The Worst Game in the Series.

Civilization 7 is the worst game in the series. There are some who want to say that it has new ideas and not recycled ideas. I am guessing these are casual gamers or people who are easily swayed by marketing because this is basically SimCity Societies from 2007 in a Civ Game.

The issue is that the players who played the older games before Civ V have been seeing the changes and that it is becoming very much like Angry Birds and other forgotten mobile games, just a brand to put on mediocre gameplay and hide it with marketing.

The UI is terrible and when compared to Civ 1, it shows the generational changes and the malaise we are currently in this culture.

The Civ switching was a concern of mine earlier on and I see that Fraxis was lazy and put in a bunch of leaders who are not leaders but Great People.

The game does not have England in the game but hides behind a DLC and puts in a person, Ada Lovelace, who was not a political leader, phlisophical, or spiritual leader in any sense. The leader of England should be a King or Prime Minister. I would recommend King Charles II of the Restoration Era.

The Shawnee were put in the game for politics and yet Confucius can rule them. Do not use the CIV has never been about history. It has a tech tree which contains many of the most important technologies in human history. This is not a very good argument to using here.

The crisis system is lazy and does not provide context for what is happening. Having every Civ move into the same age is silly and makes the game too easy. There needs to be consequences to not being able to catch up in tech or economics. Having a reset does not make the game challenging. The Civ Switching doesn’t even stop the snowballing that they say they wanted to not have.

It is clear that the game has increasingly become attached to politics in America more and not just a game about history.

The map generation is terrible and worse than 20 year old games.

The positive reviews are people who generally enjoy simpler, easier games. While Microsoft is no saint of a company, they have made AOE 4 into a game that appeals to casuals and power users. They even encourage people to improve their tactics while also being a great platform for teaching history about multiple cultures, without being myopic about it.

Civilization 7 is the worst in the series. Civilization V was a strange experiment on launch but they did not railroad the player into 3 mini games.