Pablo SB @iPabloSB@qoto.org

Why is gaming culture so damn toxic?

Blame marketing.

Picture this. You just come home from your very mundane job, switch on the TV, and immediately see an ad for a video game. It looks cinematic, tugs at your heartstrings, and promises a new world for you to immerse yourself in.

You don’t have to be Bob the accountant. You can be a dragonslayer or a cyberpunk hacker or a sniper.

But you have to pay C$80 for the privilege. Or, as it’s becoming more frequent nowadays, C$90. And that high price just gets you in the door.

Once you’re in, you’re pressured to pay more money. There’s new maps and costumes and loot. If you want to progress, well, you have to pay even more money.

Then you try to multiplayer. Right away, you die instantly. At first, you think it’s just because you’re terrible – but then you discover that cheating is rampant.

The problems aren’t finished, though. As you continue to play, you discover bug after bug, glitch after glitch. At first it’s quirky. But then you start encountering bugs that actually break the game.

After all these problems, do you feel entitled? Damn right, you do! After sinking so much time and money, you still don’t feel as immersed in a new world as marketing lead you to believe.

None of this is to justify all the toxic manbabies who rant and rave about not getting their way. But it is to say that if game publishers stopped marketing their products in a certain way, maybe there would be less angry and entitled gamers sharing their toxicity online.

Because right now, gamers look at publishers and developers as greedy, manipulative, and completely out for themselves. And what do gamers do? They respond to publishers and developers as adversaries – ready and willing to dogpile in a mass rage fest at the first sign of a misstep.

But here’s the thing. Gaming gets much, much better if you just shut off the marketing bullshit. Step away from the manipulation of AAA titles, and find your way over to indie gaming – you actually do encounter new worlds to immerse yourself in.

And why? Because there’s no promises. You start up a title expecting nothing. Then you realize that there’s magic.

This is what happened when I started Pony Island. When I began, I expected a simple retro title about ponies. Little did I realize I was about to challenge the Devil himself in a game of wits.

Pony Island didn’t promise me the moon. It didn’t pressure me into micro-transactions. There were no bugs and glitches. It was C5.49 for a full game – one that will give me wonderful memories for life.

This is the kind of experience that’s possible without marketing bullshit.

Good news. Looking forward to being able to read and vote on the proposed deal. Hope that they now can close an acceptable deal with SAG-AFTRA.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/09/24/business/hollywood-writers-strike-news?unlocked_article_code=LgL_T0mRX5_jVSu6uOLO4wC8wpQEwAnET8k6CKDfTjgSDB4CSgJqLO8M-N6zP6LGTVHIcSF7k1NbuyyuIqJMUHKbiJcV6l57YWJAeqNKSywmlCTjDMJZ70HP7NK1YHdJ8EAztPK-2d-o8uhvRbUHgjuUxfLltDXRbCRTbMpqVwmDCzSrGmd1yQYZqxq9qS6OecJDDtISvTrWgTBQui-Lr-0qAbi25t-8FrNghQzm2b4bp6ObhsHdFo0Zuwz_SayVvAoZ1LXKqE2YGPpgcaARANhat_nNLmC0tl2gBLMX7TO3xUq3irDRM3YFPWP4iLCJObCIUOPurhaibWyop9oXeeZ9BzSI9ybP6icDrlK-mqrnlA&smid=url-share

"Changing to the metric system is hard and would confuse people."

Has Armageddon ever sounded so good? 👼 😈

The main theme from @neilhimself's #GoodOmens, composed by David Arnold, was one of the delights performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra and Huddersfield Choral Society at the #BBCProms this year. The concert was conducted by Anna-Maria Helsing.

📺 Watch Fantasy Film Music at the Proms now on BBC iPlayer https://bbc.in/3LvUbba

#StarWars #LOTR #LordOfTheRings #NeilGaiman #fantasy #film #soundtrack #OST #movie #BBCConcertOrchestra #AnnaMariaHelsing

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Favorite meme of the day. #ElonMusk #twitte

Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.

In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.

Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..

TIP: Any fans of the excellent natural language calculator app Soulver? This action, and associated shortcut, make it easy to select text in Drafts, and have Soulver calculate a result and return it (works with Soulver on Mac and iPad). https://directory.getdrafts.com/a/2M1

The other day I was arguing with a colleague, & I said that I thought 95% of the funds getting thrown at AI would be better spent strengthening infrastructure to handle climate change. He said “AI will fix climate change.”

Now I think 100% of those funds should be redirected.

Due to global warming, Vivaldi's Four Seasons have been reworked so that the Summer movement is 30% longer and played fortissimo, winter is 10% shorter and played pianissimo, with some random bars played sforzando, to account for the slowing of the North Atlantic Current, and both Spring and Autumn are now played very quickly and with abrupt changes in key, indicating their chaotic nature.

this has been my favorite response so far

From Tumblr. I might as well post it myself...

a blockchain organization and an oil company collaborate to fix the climate

https://www.gitcoin.co/blog/gitcoin-shell-collaboration

#crypto #cryptocurrency #greenwashing

This is someting I wish I'd realized a lot sooner in life.

Corey Doctorow: "Mastodon is far from perfect. But I only have so many hours in the day, and only so many days left in my life. I would much rather spend those precious hours making a open service better than using a temporarily superior closed one. I have seen that movie. I know how it ends"
https://doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

Uhhhh yeah sounds good

Over-simplification, I'm sure, but it seems like the rhetoric of the right boils down to “things would be better if not for X” where to solve for “X,” someone needs to not exist...which leads to policy ideas that do not seek to solve the original problem, but to figure out how to eliminate “X” as if that's some panacea.

Is “X” immigrants? Black people? Jews? LGTBQ+? Pick your poison, it's all rubbish. We're all just people and the rhetoric is not about helping anyone. It's about control.

Happy people can't be monetized, this is why billionaires and tech companies need to keep you unhappy, angry, or scared. Resist. Be happy.

//hat tip to @Archie8