I highly disagree with the 2nd point
I hate RTS because there are so much going on everywhere at the same time that I just can’t handle it. You gotta master your production while scouting while repelling raids while strategizing to see what kind of army the opponent is building while exploring the tech tree and… damn how did they just send an army of 50 fellas??
MOBAs allow me to fully focus on the moment and whatever I’m doing instead of being perpetually late on the actions that need doing
Any game that requires regular playtime is a nope for me now. I switched to games that you can put off easily - games that are playable under a fixed amount of hours and that do not require dedication.
Typically right now i am playing Dark Souls on twitch - I can turn it on, play a bit (even just 30 minutes) then put it down easily.
I also switched to board games - my SO is not into video games but she is into board games so we can enjoy that together. We are playing Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion right now it’s a blast
My personal opinion on the subject is very different than the poster’s, which can be summarized to that I don’t oppose art because I don’t like the artist, I won’t stop reading Lovecraft or listening to Vivaldi because they were trash people, because their art is great. So I don’t in fact agree with what the poster said
OP did not say they did not want to play the games. They said they could not play their games because that would be giving money to the studios; that which is a form of support. The relevant sentence is here:
I can’t play them because it’d be giving those companies/people money
I am fairly sure that OP would love to play the games they cite. And that they love the art. But that is not the point. The point is whether or not they are willing to support the bad practices from the studio. Because if they did buy the game, indirectly it would be supporting those bad practices.
Your initial point (the “global average” of it) was that there are more serious things to care in the world - you were assuming that OP had to be doing something else such as buying non-local food which is bad for the planet, and you were more or less saying that it is stupid for them to care about what happens in the game industry when they most probably do not care about the food they eat.
My point was that you were doing moral assumptions about OP - I pointed your specific avocado example, but even more generally than that, you were assuming that OP had to be doing something wrong somewhere in the context of ecology.
Well, now, my last and final point is that OP may be someone who is careful about what they buy generally speaking (not just avocados), whether it be shampoo or whatever. Again, I do know people who are very careful about what they buy. They will try their best to never buy something new for instance ; buying from second-hand places for example. And they will try their best to almost never waste something. If OP were to be someone like that, then your whole point would not apply to them. Hence my initial point.
I did not get your meta-logical reasoning on your last paragraph. But I will leave it at that because I am not sure continuing this discussion is fruitful.
I love game mechanics that reward thinking or tactical decisions rather than rewarding how much time you spend grinding this or that. I do like having some kind of character progression - and that usually comes with grinding. But I hate it when the only challenge of a game is just how many hours you can sink into it. I much prefer when there are hard skill walls that you can’t pass until you really got genuinely better at the game.
I hate generic boring quests that feel like they came straight out of a story generator. It’s ok to have a few of them. But a hundred of them… You play one, you played them all… No incentive to do them. I much prefer a game that has only 10 hours of content but very solid content with well- designed narrative and places ; rather than 2 hours of human-made content and 48 hours of generated maps and quests.
One of the best games I have ever played is Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. That game has such an insane combat and a great narrative - I just couldn’t put it down, I finished it in just one or two weeks because it was so good! And at the end I felt an emptiness, like when you’ve just finished watching an excellent serie and wonder what to do next.
Inventory management is one aspect of Diablo 1 that I liked a lot. If you played MP, you could either transfer your gear to mules… But if you wanted to play “as the game is intended”, you had very limited space to carry between games and had to choose which items you want to carry with you to the next game. I did a playthrough through the 3 difficulties with Warrior a few years ago and I loved having to make these choices.
You make a point. If we were to relive the 90s both technology-wise and before corporations put their hands on it (so, assuming plenty of websites done by users), I am sure there would be quite a few websites filled with hate, racism, xenophobia etc…
It’s not just the corporate greediness that changed. It’s the mentality as a whole. We live in a stressful time period where being aggressive towards other people is more of a norm than, say, creating genuine content with lots of colors because that is cool. In the 90s I feel like people were just enjoying life and did not have to worry much. At least, that’s how I perceive it. Even piece of arts like music or movies felt more genuine and happier.
But the author also makes a point that corporations certainly did not make it better.
I understand that video games dev and Web dev does not overlap but the developer field is more vast than just Web. For example embedded development uses a lot of C/C++ so knowledge would be transferable there.
I would also say that even though the engines or framework is not the same, surely there are human skills that can be transferred like managing a project, solving problems, algorithms, performance analytics and debugging.
But that’s only my theory and I have no experience on switching field like that