There are multiple sources referenced to weave a new commentary about the relationship between video games and labor for both players and creators 🤷.

Because email federation is inherent to everyone’s understanding of how that service works. And perhaps more importantly, email “instances” are run by corporations. Laymen are not signing up on a “server” or “instance,” they’re signing up for Google, Apple, or Microsoft - the service they get aligns to a company that provides it. Nearly every single service that anyone has ever signed up for online has followed the same essential process: go to fixed url, create id and password, gain access.

It’s easy to underestimate, especially in communities like this, how enigmatic the entire infrastructure of the internet is to the general population. Think of those videos where people are asked what “the cloud” is: they pause and ponder and then guess “satellites?” because they’ve never even wondered about it. I’m guessing that for many people, something like Twitter is just something that lives in their app store that they can choose to “enable” on their phone by installing it.

People know that software is “made up of code,” but they don’t understand what that means. The idea that an “application” is a collection of services run by code, that there are app servers and web servers, that there are backends and frontends, is completely unknown to (I’d guess) a significant majority of people. And if someone doesn’t understand that, it’s honestly near impossible to understand what anything in the fediverse is.

And most importantly: this is not any user’s fault. IT and the Internet developed so quickly, and it was made so seamlessly accessible by corporations who at first just wanted their services to be adopted, and then wanted everything even more deliberately opaque so those users were more likely to feel locked in and dependent while the services themselves tail-spun in degradation.

We need more, and more accessible, and friendlier, tech literacy in general. The complexity of our world is running away from us (“I have a foreboding [of a time…] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues” - Carl Sagan) and we simply can’t deeply understand many of the things that directly impact us. But because of its ubiquity, IT may be the best chance people have of getting better at understanding.

An early proposal for The Last of Us 2.

Thanks for writing this up, never heard of the game and this was really interesting. I’m not sure how much of your write-up is explicitly textual, but the analysis is really cool.

I only beat Animal Well’s “first layer”, but I was pretty addicted for that period. It’s really, really clever and satisfying.

Is that a Trump “Tim Apple” reference? I wouldn’t have even noticed if you hadn’t called it out.

Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion.

But in the wake of deaths related to abortion access in the United States, leaders who support restricting the right have not called for any reforms.

My country’s aptitude for remaining entirely unmoved by preventable tragedies that utterly upend political trajectories in other nations has become one of our most globally defining traits.

Video clip of the comment and aftermath during discussion (via twitter): https://x.com/Acyn/status/1851085909435039789

“Are you a supporter of Hamas?”

“Are you a racist, violent person inciting violence against me?”

So close to great. I wish more developers were making environmentally detailed, high production value, single player linear games like Callisto Protocol. Just that little bit better executed to round out the total package.

I played the demo up to the first couple battles just to get a taste of how that works. No question, I am very excited to get my hands on it. I’m generally a sub-$20 patient gamer, but this is one I’ll be getting sooner. I’ll still probably wait for the holiday season to see if it drops down at all because I’ve got plenty to keep me busy in the meantime.

I gotta vent a little about Jedi Survivor - I really did not enjoy it much at all and am surprised it was so critically lauded. The combat aims for souls-like but is way too twitchy and glitchy to make it feel fun and rewarding. I came out of 60% of combat encounters feeling bored, 20% feeling relieved that some erratic imbalance or technical tomfoolery didn’t make me repeat it, and 10% feeling frustrated for the same reason but on the other side.

The same core issues affected the bosses too. I didn’t feel like the game earned my dedication to “solving the puzzle” the way games like Elden Ring and Returnal do.

Exploration was mostly fine in a zone-out kind of way but grew quite stale by the end, being the same vertical platforms and grapple spots on every section of every world. And the story too was just too out of focus. The whole Tanalorr thing was a late first-act development completely divorced from the course of the opening, and there was never a clear or necessary enough idea of why they wanted to get there to justify it becoming a priority to drive the story.

I still like the characters, but I was desperate to be done by the time I was fighting a notable turn-of-the-second-act boss, whose appearance elicited an eyeroll rather than excitement. I set the game to story mode at that point and just rushed the ending.

While that was going on though, I did play Animal Well all the way through (“layer 1” anyway), and that was extraordinary fun.

Oh, I also tried out the Metaphor Refantazio demo and that feels incredibly promising, especially with the incredible reviews it’s getting today.

Fatal Frame has gotten lost to history a bit, but I remember those games having the reputation as being the scariest that games have ever gotten when they were new.

The turn-based with real-time elements reminds me of Sea of Stars and Shadow Hearts, which are both excellent titles in my mind for this game to associate itself with. Looks really flashy too with the menu, camera movement, and slowdown effects (hopefully that wouldn’t get old with too much repetition).

Same here. Loved the setting and style, and the story and characters were admirably close to (the good) 3rd-person bioware stuff.

I don’t usually pay full price for games, but I was thinking of buying Greedfall 2 near release to support what they do. This puts a real taint on things.

It’s worth mentioning that article is from 2020, around the time she had started pivoting from TERF-lite to TERF-MAX. It was…reasonably possible to assume at the time, for someone who wasn’t paying close attention, that her opinions were still rooted in misguided concern rather than open bigotry.

She had only just posted her manifesto a few months earlier, according to Vox’s helpful timeline, which reads reasonably if you’re unaware of the multitude of false and misleading claims she parrots.

Same, though interested is an understatement. Prey is one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. I enjoyed Weird West, but it left me feeling more like a POC of what the studio wants to do than anything up to the actual standards of Arkane’s best.

If WolfEye fills the void of Arkane’s deplorable closure, they’ll get all the support I can give.

Tried The Ascent because of just how slick it looked in the previews I saw. And you’re right, the atmosphere is great. But I have a low tolerance for the looter shooter format and I don’t play much online coop, so I got real bored of it real fast.

I’ve been enjoying Pacific Drive this week. It’s a great survival crafting game in the vein of Subnautica, which is to say there is a linear progression path for upgrades and improvement, and a well-defined objective and end goal.

I just wish it was less stressful. Even just the normal act of activating a gateway to end a run requires a race through your current zone where one misstep can cause you to get stuck long enough to fail. And sometimes conditions just really stack up against you in a way that can be unexpected and frustrating.

Overall though it really hits the spot with its loop. I love returning to the garage and going through the ritual of healing, fueling up, recharging, transferring supplies, and checking on upgrades.

Oh…I also finished and platinumed 13 sentinels earlier this week. I enjoyed that one a lot more than I expected. It’s as compelling as it is eye-rollingly funny how many sci-fi tropes the main story burns through, but I i was frequently and pleasantly taken by surprise. And the battle system, which through the first area I thought was so easy it was basically a formality, really did become more challenging and tactical, especially when trying to get S ranks.

In searching for the video, (already provided in this thread) I amazingly found that this appears to be the same school where a selection of boys from the class of 2018 posed for a gleeful photo of them throwing up the nazi salute.

I kind of love Control’s navigation. The map is helpful enough to point you in the right direction, but also shitty enough that you have to pay attention to the diagetic signage. It’s uniquely immersive.