I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.

Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.

Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.

And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.

And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.

But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.

Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.

When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.

But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.

And don’t forget to do your dailies!

If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.

Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.

But then those sorts of countries usually have law enforcement that likes taking large amounts of “financial incentives” to do whatever a company like Nintendo wants them to do.

That doesn’t seem to apply to what you quoted, however. The section you quoted framed sex as a transactional obligation on the part of women, asserting that if women refuse to sleep with men who support their views and rights, they’ll become radicalized and turn into incels.

The logic in that statement is that men who care about women are entitled to a bit of quid pro quo, “I support your rights as a person and you have sex with me” even though that is entirely antithetical to the point.

If men care about women’s issues, then they are inherently fine with women making a conscious decision to not have sex. Otherwise, it means they don’t really care about women’s issues, and likely never did.

No one is shaming women for choosing to have sex with people they want to have sex with, just that the decision of those women who wish to stop having sex be respected.

No, I think the reply is appropriate enough. The comment you quoted is an extremely mysogynist take, falling right into the incel perspective of “if women refuse to have sex with men, they are inconsiderate.”

The value of women is not just for men to have sex with them—they have the agency to decide for themselves what they want to do with their own bodies. This is basically what the downvoted post is saying. Women choosing not to put out doesn’t “radicalize” incels any more than women showing a bit of skin creates rapists.

If there are men who can’t get over the fact that some women might choose not to have sex with them for political reasons, they can read Lysistrata or something.

All good. Admittedly weird times we’re in, like his presidency never even ended.

In a world that is controlled almost entirely by heteronormativity, policing straight representation in a queer-friendly game made by a queer developer does not seem like an equivalent situation at all.

If only I knew what that censored word was supposed to be. Flaking? Fracking? Flocking? Forking?

The world will sadly never know.

2022 doesn’t sound right for Trump to be hosting anything at the white house. Was this at Mar a Lago or was this earlier during his presidency?

Filed before, updated and approved after.

There were several. Why didn’t these hypothetical single-issue Trump supporters vote for Cornel West or Claudia de la Cruz if their priority is narrowing the income gap? Even Harris promised to implement at least a billionaire tax.

If people were pissed about income inequality, they’d vote for the “tax the rich” candidates. Donald Trump’s agenda is the exact opposite about that.

That is…something.

I think there are two separate but related metrics at play here. Addressing income inequality would certainly go a long way towards improving quality of life for the working class, but Americans don’t care about someone having too much money as much as they care about having too little themselves.

Despite large movements like Occupy Wall Street bringing the topic of income inequality to the forefront of news for a while, the fact that it petered out and has ceased to be an issue means that enough members of the working class were still contented enough by their bread and circuses, so nothing came of it.

These voters don’t care if their CEO gets a $10 million bonus at the end of the year as long as they can still afford groceries and housing, but they do start to care a lot when they don’t. Only, blame is being directed at the government (inflated cost of living) rather than their rich bosses (wage stagnation).

Do you have figures that include 2024? That data seems to stop at 2021. Not saying you’re wrong but the picture being painted is just Biden’s first year as president during the height of the pandemic.

Comparing things like rates of inflation and the consumer price index, we see the numbers drop dramatically within the past two years, which seems to have been improving cost of living somewhat (or, ruining less quickly, at least) for the average American, though there is still a lot more to be done.

Part of me blames the collective memory loss of the COVID years and a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect.

It’s like everyone forgot there was this massive global pandemic which absolutely killed entire industries. And even though the important parts were propped up during the lean times by government support, that support ended eventually, with the economy still a mess that couldn’t just be put back together like nothing happened.

I mean, people at that time didn’t even have a concept of what was going on. They have no idea how much money was spent keeping the lights on. People lost their shit over the billions it would cost to forgive student loans, but had no idea how many more billions were already spent on—and abused by—businesses whose pandemic loans were forgiven by the government.

Everyone forgot the pandemic was only as bad as it was in the US because it was so completely mishandled by the Trump administration. We could have had everything back to normal a lot sooner if there was even a little bit of national preparedness, not to mention if we didn’t have all the misinformation spread by his own administration.

So when the economy went to shit in 2021-2022 during the Biden administration, people shrugged their shoulders and put the blame on the old man in the white house, despite the fact that it’s been on a recovery trend during this last year. And so Trump’s first year is going to start with stronger markets, he’ll get the credit, and then things will get worse just in time for someone else to take the blame for it.

Careful EU, it’s contagious.

For me I liked it at first but ended up blocking it after it started doing “more stories like” which revealed that it was clearly there to turn a profit.

I’ve seen a few valid criticisms, which I get. It’s hard to make a choice-driven narrative in the post-BG3 market and not get held to a higher standard. “Written by committee” is one such descriptor I’ve heard.

For me, as a fan of Dragon Age: Origins, I also can’t say I prefer the dip into the actiony, grindy sort of combat mechanics the game appears to have now.

A $10M manufacturing investment? So they’re going to donate a few MacBooks to Indonesia?

KenM moment:

I bet they could have made a smaller 3D print if they printed fewer floors.