Thanks for the reply.

It feels to me like tech has been trying to remove humanity from every part of daily life it can. I don’t think technology is bad but I do think that goal is bad. It’s often done with good intentions, too, like making things more convenient. We lose a lot of opportunities for connection because of it.

It’s a quirk of human nature though, clearly. We need socialization but we don’t like to instigate it (at least many don’t). If you look at old photos of trains or busses everyone was reading the paper or a book. Phones aren’t that different, except the content never runs out. You can look at it forever and you’ll never see it all.

I heard someone describe looking at social media as a state of engaged distraction, and that really fits I think. A book is something you have to engage with and process in your mind in order to follow it. Social feeds are sort of the opposite. They take your attention, but it’s a constantly changing thing you’re looking at, often trying to get an intense emotional response. Your brain is just jumping all over the place (I’m using the general you in all this, so not trying to speak for you specifically). You can spend hours on a social feed and barely remember anything.

I think hearing takes like yours is a good thing for older people like me cause there’s way too much rhetoric about how the youth are phone addicted. You’re not the first person I’ve heard have this negative or mixed response to it, and your feelings about it are totally valid. I honestly feel really similarly. I don’t hate all of it, but I definitely think there are some major problems with what we currently have.

I hope eventually we create some apps that encourage human connection off the phone. There’s clearly a very human need for distraction and entertainment, so I don’t think abstaining from that is the answer. Pokemon go is probably one of the most successful examples of an app doing something like that. I never used it, but I’ve heard lots of people made friends that way.

I’ve wondered this too. I’ve seen more and more places where you’re supposed to use your phone with seemingly no other option. For instance restaurants that only have digital menus, or I’ve seen things like promotions or giveaways that require a phone as well. I know I’ve seen some other spots that seemed more critical too, like a public service kind of thing, but I’m forgetting now what they were.

I have a phone, so it doesn’t affect me, but I still always wonder what they do if someone doesn’t have one. It feels like another vector for wealth inequality. Not to mention the fact that if cell service and internet went down anything that’s phone/computer only will instantly stop working entirely. It just seems like a problem waiting to happen to me.

So I’m a millennial, and it’s interesting to hear what you said about every dull moment being phone time. I was just talking with some friends yesterday about that and trying to remember what we used to do instead. To be honest there were plenty of times where we were really bored, and I don’t know if that’s better or not. I do feel like there is so much stimulation now that my brain never gets a chance to rest and decompress without making a very conscious effort to take moments like that. Can’t say I’m very good at that either. So maybe the boredom was a good thing in a way? I’d be curious to hear your younger perspective on that if you read this.

This is a big moment for them. Can they redeem quarterly updates, or will we have another Nayos on our hands?

Gamers rise up /s

I thought I already responded to this, but thank you!

No. I’m not in a bad spot but definitely not as comfortable as I grew up.

I’ve had some similar difficulties in really masculine spaces so I can relate to that part. I think I learned enough about being “one of the guys” that I can sort of participate, but I’m not enjoying myself.

Honestly I haven’t had the same experience with women, though. I’ve always had lots of platonic female friends through my life and I sometimes find it easier to hang out with women than men, or a mixed crowd is generally fine, too.

Don’t get me wrong, I have male friends that I really enjoy spending time with, but they’re not stereotypical guys either so that’s probably why.

How do I cope? I just don’t spend time with guys I don’t vibe with honestly. Life’s too short to hang out with boring people.

I think it’s just purely generated content. If you touch it up a human was involved and it’s fair game afaik

You nailed it about the gameplay in your guess. It was very cutting edge when it came out. The animations on the plasmids were especially memorable I recall. It’s interesting to hear that part doesn’t hold up so well.

I’d highly recommend you play 2 as well. It’s quite different but I thought it was the best of the series gameplay-wise.

If you like the setting I would also recommend you go on to play BioShock infinite and specifically the DLC for it. I won’t say why, and I recommend you go through the base game first (very cool in its own right), but the DLC is really going to tickle your fancy I think.

No worries, and thanks for the reply!

Gesundheit

I did like fallout. I forgot that was amazon actually

Amazon is pretty bad at entertainment, aren’t they? Their games have tanked. Their shows are expensive and unoriginal. Am I missing any that were actually good?

What’s missing from start? I don’t actually use the start menu much so not sure I would miss anything anyway.

This is true for a lot of people but unfortunately there very much are some targeting the people losing their jobs. I’ve seen plenty of people, even some on Lemmy in the past, who hate individual devs because the game they were looking forward to wasn’t good.

Is it a loud minority? Probably. That doesn’t make it OK, though, and it doesn’t reduce the mental hit to these devs in an already bad moment of their lives.

The first one, the icy one, is just alright. It gives you another area basically that’s about as much content as the 5 base game areas. The new one the iron rig is pretty fun, though I thought. If you really like dredge I’d say get both.

This is a good overview though I wouldn’t know how to do the specifics like get pro (I have 10 home), or deactivate all the infringing stuff.

What’s the UK trick? Is that just a better version or something?

Have you succeeded in making things less crappy? I’ve been debating the upgrade for a while and I’m basically hoping this is possible by the time I do it. I already use shutup10 on win10, but I wasn’t if win11 kneecaps it somehow or not.

One example I like is Dredge. If you took away inventory management from that game, you would basically destroy its whole economy and progression system. It would also get rid of the interesting way they make having tons of equipment mean you can’t carry as much at once, creating a tradeoff.

I think one thing people get mixed up is the limitation side of a limited inventory – which is often a good thing for creating choices, tension, and pacing – and the physical action of sorting and arranging an inventory. This second one is a perfect place to streamline in my opinion because while the limitations on inventory create meaningful choices, having to spend a while rearranging your stuff to fit something in is very rarely good gameplay. You might already be making this distinction, but I wanted to clarify that just in case.

Inventory size/weight capacity is essentially a resource to manage, and I’m a big proponent of resource management in games (and this is coming from a designer who tried to get rid of and streamline resources for years – it has some major downsides).

To be fair to obsidian the distribution choices have nothing to do with the people who make the game part. You can have great devs with a greedy publisher.