That’s what I always say. Targeted advertising should be illegal. Contextual advertising is acceptable.

If I’m on the star trek wiki, serve me ads for star trek, sci-fi, and whatever. You don’t need to know anything about me specifically.

We’d still need to do something about like ads that take up too much space, hurt page performance, or introduce malware, but removing the stalking would be an improvement

This is what I always say. Put the tickets in order and we’ll do them.

Management always pushes back.

Yeah I don’t think this covers externalized costs

Out of curiosity, what about games that update? Crawl gets a new release like every six months where they often make big changes. New gods, species, other changes (like when they removed food, or added shapeshifting talismans)

I guess it’s possible you are correct and like the bulk of people who have ever studied film, literature, and art more generally are wrong. That seems unlikely. More plausible is that it’s common for people to experience a given work multiple times and get different things out of it.

That’s not even accounting for the “Reading Lear as an old man hits differently than reading it when I was a teenager” factor. That is, who you are changes over time and that affects how you experience art.

I don’t think that’s especially common for roguelikes. I played a lot of crawl: stone soup and it was pretty common for folks to go for a win with every species, god, and class.

I am going to get a lot of use out of that URL.

I’ve been telling people they need to put a dollar in the jar when they do that, but I haven’t actually been enforcing it.

Roguelikes.

Roguelites.

Chess.

Deck builders.

More broadly, games with different narrative choices (eg: Witcher 2 has two mutually exclusive middle acts).

And also more broadly, games with different mechanical choices (eg: many RPGs).

There’s also games where the process itself is fun (eg: Tetris).

Also, as many humans have imperfect memory, after enough time has passed a game may feel fresh playing it again. It may also land differently playing it at a new stage in life.

You’re not going to play any of your PS5 games in 5-10 years? You’re happy with some of your games aging out of your library?

You do you, but you might be an outlier.

You have discovered sturgeon’s law. 90% of everything is crap. Judging a medium or genre by the crap isn’t useful.

It has a library going back 30+ years.

It is useful for other things.

I understood that reference

They should probably limit how many swipes you get instead of having your swipes go into the void.

Opportunity cost is a pretty well understood concept.

Like, inagine you have 100 gallons of water. You could use all of them to water a single water intensive plant that will feed one person, or you could use them to water a whole farm that will feed a community, and also let people drink and bathe and stuff.

The resource is limited.

Sure, we could try to get more of the resource and make it less expensive, but we should also not squander what we have.

I only had the first one. I found it at a yard sale, and luckily they also had the instruction manual and hint book. The game had a check where when you tried to go to the second floor, it would ask you like “what is the third word on the page with a picture of an axe in the corner in the instruction manual?”. Early DRM. If you got it wrong, I’m pretty sure you couldn’t proceed.

The hint book was also written in character from the point of view of someone who had gone before you. It was like an idiot noble and his long suffering servant. Great way of doing it.

My PC game library goes back literally 30+ years. (I think the oldest game I play occasionally is Eye of the Beholder, 1991. The original doom is still good and from 1993)

That has value.

Been seriously thinking of switching to linux for my desktop. I mostly use it for games. Today I was looking at mods for Mass Effect, and the mod manager says in all caps - LINUX IS NOT SUPPORTED :(

There’s probably going to be a lot of that sort of annoyance for years.

Wait, I have another one.

Half-assed, cargo-cult, implementations of D&D’s long rest mechanic.

D&D’s long rest mechanic, where you have very powerful resources that only recharge when you “rest” for a long time only barely works in the original tabletop game. Most players in that context don’t even play by the books recommendations, but instead go nova on their powers and then rest anyway. It kind of works if there is a strong narrative pressure that prevents you from taking weeks to address the problem. But it turns out players in video games kind of hate timers.

Pillars of Eternity 1 just whole ass cargo culted it into the game. There aren’t any actual timers because players hate them. You can only use your cool powers a few times before needing to use “camping supplies” or return to town. Your max health eventually stops recovering until you take a full rest.

So a full rest is probably significant, right? A serious tactical choice? No, not really. At worst, it’s several loading screens to go back to the inn, a “resting” animation, and then several loading screens to get back to where you were. There are no consequences. Enemies don’t respawn. Quests aren’t timed. It is extremely tedious.

Dark Souls has a sort of long-rest mechanic, in that your healing and spells only recharge when you hit a checkpoint, but that respawns most of the enemies. Now it’s more of a choice, and the game is built around “Can you get from here to there this your resources?” PoE1 didn’t do that. It just felt like someone liked D&D but didn’t really understand anything about it.

I was pleasant surprised they changed the game design to be the infinitely more reasonable per-encounter cadence in the sequel.

Side note: There’s a difference between good and fun. Many players probably had fun with the d&d-like system, but players and customers are notoriously idiots. “A faster horse” and all that. Would they have had more fun with a better designed system? Probably, unless the nostalgia of “long rest” was weighted really heavily in their mind.

At least BG3 had plot stuff happen when you long rest, but that creates a whole separate set of problems: If you are too good at the game and don’t need to rest often, you miss out on the plot stuff.

Gods, I’m so sick of D&D and how much influence it has.

Tedious optimal play is probably a whole book you could write.

I remember one old RPG where you got XP from reading books in the world. But if you went three menus deep, swapped on a particular accessory, exited three menus, then read the book, you’d get double the xp. What the fuck kind of choice is that? It was super tedious to do every time, and annoying to realize I was a level behind because I hadn’t been doing it.

I think this has mostly fallen out of fashion, but some games would have a “your benefits from leveling are determined by your stats at the time of level up.” So if you’re about to level, you better swap on as much +wis +con +int gear as you can, or you’ll be significantly under powered at the end of the game. Extremely tedious. Takes you out of the gameplay loop. Trash.

Nothing that’s worth how much some of them are paid.

Google’s CEO made $226 million. Google has been circling the shitter for years. You could hire like 500 senior engineers with that money. You could do a lot of cool, useful, shit with 500 senior engineers on a project.