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Hello peeps! Tis I, Bucko Wheat, retro gamer and artist alike. Today on Brain Drain, I'll be discussing the infamous Scratch. Woo......

Now, on the off chance you don't know what Scratch is, allow me to explain to you. Scratch is, in theory anyway, a programming language meant for kids and folks who want to get into programming. That's the general idea, and on paper, it sounds pretty good, right?

.. in practice?

NO, that's why I'm making this post.

As a former Scratcher, I can say this without any shadow of a doubt that Scratch, as a programming language, sucks. Plain and simple. I'll use my experiences to, hopefully, help my statement.

But why?!

Well, let's start with something that is a bit of a hindrance in my eyes: the fact that Scratch primarily uses virtual building blocks to code. It doesn't sound so bad, but then you realize that this very well could have the chance to give some folks the wrong idea as to how to really code in other programming languages. I know I had this issue for a while. See, I've been working on learning C#, and I'm wanting to learn 6502 assembly code and BASIC as well. How's a bunch of building blocks gonna help with that? Really. In short? It doesn't do squat in my opinion. At the start of my quest to learn C#, I genuinely struggled because it wasn't the building blocks I was so used to.

Adding on to that, let me create a scenario for you. Let's say I have a really big game made up in Scratch. Things appear to be going good.. until the game doesn't work. How the hell am I supposed to easily debug the game? I feel like any programmer, beginner or expert, should know how to debug, especially for something meant for teaching the youth how to program! At the very least, since Scratch is so set on the already iffy "building blocks to code" method, they could've just put a little X over the problem block(s) to let the user know what went wrong! Or they could just not use the building blocks altogether! They could just have the site be a tutorial on how to code, and ACTUAL coding too!

Now for the community.. and the mods..

Oh god..

This really drives me up the wall. Scratch is honestly more of a social media platform than a coding site. It begs the question as to why it doesn't have its own dedicatied app yet, or if it does, I'm not aware of it. There's user profiles, there's a whole search page where you can select between the "popular" games and the "trending" games (I thought trending meant popular!) There are comment sections? Why? What was I even talking about again? Ohhhhh right.

The Scratch moderation, as I've heard about online, seems to be genuinely awful. I've heard and seen stories about them banning people for the mere mention of bullying, only for them to not bat an eye when a genuine problem game or something similar arises. I can't say I've ever experienced something like that, but I have seen their YouTube tutorials.. and good lort, they're bad. How to make a background, really? THERE WASN'T EVEN A LICK OF CODE IN THAT VIDEO!! Speaking of YouTube, why can't other people put links to their other stuff around their profile and yet Griffpatch can? Inconsistent at your own rules, eh Scratch Team?

As for the community, well.. oh boy.

The community embraces remixing others' projects over and over and over again. Remixing isn't inherently bad, but it is only bad if you don't add anything substantial to the game. Such is the case with those "add yourself" or "sign here" 'games'. Examples that I hope are strictly examples include "Add yourself in that elevator scene from Evangelion" or "Sign your username here if you're against entrepeneurs". I know I was real bad about it. I'd say a majority of my 'output' on Scratch was full of lazy 'add yourself' remixes. Again, good remixes that expand on the original idea or otherwise are able to tell apart from the original are great. I wish we could see more unique stuff instead of the same ol' same ol'..

Speaking of the same ol' same ol', allow me to introduce the currently dominant issue at hand: these platformers that always have a little cyclops cube running through technically well-drawn but samey levels, always avoiding spikes and poorly placed lava, running through the same set of level ideas, and always set to some pop song or something. There's so many of these things. I just gotta ask, why?! Why are there so many of these? I fortunately haven't made any of these, but still!

And to top it all off, apparently the community is toxic? (according to some folks at least.) I hadn't really seen any 'toxic' people there, mostly cause I was too busy drowning in remixes. My only guess is that some of the people talking about the community are referring to trolls, or those 'Scratch ban speedrun' people who try to get banned off Scratch as fast as possible. I never understood the point of that, why would you want to get banned off anywhere? Makes no sense..

So.. what is one supposed to get out of any of this?

In my opinion, just don't use Scratch. Period.

Well that was fun. Stay saucy peeps, I'll see ya around.