Dimensia Donny seems like a nickname that could fit

The article seems primarily focused on new games. And the article still makes some great points, but when you factor in older games the problem gets bigger.

I am not going to say that old games were better or that “they just don’t make them like they used to”. What I will say is that a lot of older games that are super cheap on Steam or out of print entirely are still great. There are occasionally new great games being released of course (I haven’t played Hades 2 yet but I expect it to be great, for example). But there’s a lot of new games being released where I think… “Why would I spend $70 or $80 on this when I already have this backlog of older games? Why would I spend my time playing 7/10 games when I have dozens of 9/10’s sitting in my library waiting for me?”

Back when I was on Reddit years ago, one of my favorite subs was the Patient Gamers one. There are a couple of similar ones on different Lemmy instances but they’re nowhere near as active.

I remember friends of mine assuring me I absolutely HAVE to get games like Atomic Heart, High on Life, Avowed, the Oblivion remaster, Starfield, Prey, the Outer Worlds, and many more. There are series that I have enjoyed in the last that have way too many entries to keep up with- 3D Sonic, Assassin’s Creed, Monster Hunter, Yakuza (with all it’s spinoff games like Judgement and others). I’m sure a lot of those games are great, but I just don’t have the time to play then all. And with hundreds of games in my backlog already, these games need to be on sale for dirt cheap and without anti-features like DRM and micro transactions and online requirements in order to get me to buy them.

So I think it’s worth asking- are there enough whales willing to buy these games for $70 or even $80 to subsidize people like me picking them up for $10 in five years? If not, perhaps these developers and publishers will need to move to a different business model. Maybe there are simply too many devs and too many games getting made.

Disney could have just looked at Target as an example of exactly why they shouldn’t have done this.

These games should have been like maaaaybe $5 each on the 3DS a decade ago. Maybe $30 for a physical cartridge with all of them bundled.

Source? The article only confirms that he is Israeli, doesn’t mention his religion at all. Because it’s not fucking relevant.

Russian citizens who refused to condemning the Ukraine invasion have faced similar consequence. There’s plenty of precedent internationally for these sorts of decisions. The only difference here is that Israel has been purposefully supplying propaganda for decades to conflate antizionism with antisemitism.

Why are you assuming the religiosity of an Israeli person?

The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.

I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.

Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.

You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.

Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.

A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.

I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.

By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.

I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.

Honestly there were some food points back then. A lot of people simply are not able to wear headphones responsibly. It’s only gotten worse with noise cancelling technology. The ability to ignore the outside world is great when you’re in a safe space to do so, but people doing it out in public or while driving are absolutely mad.

The quotes about “breaking societal connections” or whatever are funny to me though. Because that was happening at the time, but it had far more to do with the erosion of 3rd places and the rise of car-centric infrastructure than it did headphones.

At the very least, most of the Democrats are guilty of taking money from those ghouls.

To bring it back to Palantir, Biden himself was singing their praises back when he was vice president and the US government was using their surveillance tools.

As much as it is good to see MAGA turn on Trunk over the Epstein files, it’s not lost on me that Garland, under Biden, sat on the files doing nothing for 4 years. And maybe that would make sense if they were actively investigating and trying to prosecute people, but as far as I can tell Maxwell is the only one who faced any consequences.

I don’t want to distract the narrative away from Trump’s guilt. And also, when you stack up presidential accomplishments I’d still rank Biden near the top, probably top-5 in US history. But that says more about the other presidents than Biden.

I think Rupert Murdoch is involved too. And I think it’s good to mention Peter Thiel, the owner and founder of Palantir, any time they are brought up.

There have been a ton of governments swinging rightwards suddenly too. Not just the US- the UK has a long stretch of Conservative governance that was only barely broken by Labour in 2024, and the Labour party has drifted so far right that the Reform party was created. Germany is dealing with their own alt-right menace. Conservative middle-eastern governments like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been spreading their global influence. The Philippines had their stint with Duterte. India has had a right-wing Prime Minister, Modi, since 2014. And of course, we have Netanyahu of Israel and Putin of Russia.

Personally, I look to the downfalls of communist states. The USSR collapsing in 1991, leading to the absolute mess of oligarchs looting the publicly owned assets and turning them into private fortunes. The opening of China to the west started by Deng Xiaoping led to similar issues there. The rise of the oil age, which helped both those Russian oligarchs and middle eastern petrostates (and the US. And the Scandinavian petrol states, though they at least moved to social democracy instead of authoritarianism).

All of a sudden all of this power was concentrated in the hands of just a few hundred businesspeople and politicians. Reagan and Thatcher happened. Socialist governments everywhere were undermined by the US government. Then economic crash after economic crash after economic crash. The dot-com bubble, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, wars everywhere, Brexit, the invasion of Ukraine, the pandemic. Every earthquake that hit Japan, every hurricane that was horribly mismanaged by FEMA, the fires in Hawaii and California and Australia and Canada.

Every disaster a new opportunity for those few hundred people in power to tighten the screws, acquire more power, and distance themselves from the rest.

I don’t mean this as a conspiracy. The billionaires fight each other too sometimes. Trump mostly seems like Putin’s puppet, but there are some exceptions. Putin backs Iran while Trump backs Israel. Putin was on good terms with Musk, and afaik that has not changed while Trump has distanced himself from Musk publicly. Just that the overall trend has been towards power moving from the people into the autocrats globally for the past few decades.

And if anyone’s panicked about the immoral stuff going on in the porn industry (and there are plenty of things to be addressed and critiqued about a hystorically predatory domain)

You’re 100% correct, but I would also like to point out how weird it is that porn seems to be the ONLY industry where these religious nutjobs pretend to care about workers.

In the US, the same people who say they care about the porn industry preying upon women are the same ones rolling back child labor legislations to send 14 year olds to meat packing plants. The same ones who have kept the minimum wage where it is for decades. The same ones who want to ban abortion even in cases where the woman’s life is threatened. I know this is a BBC article about the UK, but I can’t help but see some parallels with the right-wing religious conservatives everywhere in the world.

They don’t care about women. They don’t care about children. They don’t care about workers. They care about having lots of cheap labor. They care about parents being too tired, too overworked, too risk-averse for the sake of their children to dare to fight back. They want a world where peasant girls get married at 14 and start cranking out more babies immediately. Any substitute which threatens that (birth control, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, sex education) is under attack.

All the good phones are dying. I still quite enjoy my 1 IV, and honestly the Xperia line would probably be my choice in a couple years when I am ready to upgrade if they are selling them in the US at that point.

I’m hoping Fairphone gets US support at some point because they seem like the best option.

It really feels like design peaked a decade ago. Headphone jacks, micro SD card slot, removable batteries, front-facing speakers. Everything good has been removed and the phones are 5x more expensive. The few phones left with some of those features are the cheap weak models for people who only use their phones to call and text.

https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/2531490/-/comment/11832636

You might be living in an echo chamber. Most Americans use AI at least sometimes and plenty use it regularly according to studies.

You literally are right here accusing me of being in an echo chamber for thinking Americans view AI negatively, then when I back that up with a source you are now… Claiming that the article says that.

Except that the whole “most demographics are positive on AI” piece that you toss in counters your own countering of my disagreement. You’re talking in circles here.

It’s also worth noting this article is using a sample size of 700 and doesn’t go all that heavily into the methodology. The author describes themself as a “social computing scholar” and states that they purposefully oversampled these minority groups.

The conclusion is nothing but wasted time and clicks. You’re in this thread telling people to “read the article” and I’m in here to warn people that it’s not worth their time to do so.

And this is part of a trend I’ve noticed on Lemmy lately: people posting obviously bad articles, users commenting that the articles are bad, and usually about 3-4 other users in the comments arguing and trying to drive more engagement to the article. More clicks, more ad revenue.

We could argue all day over who is experiencing reality or who is in an echo chamber.

Pew Research found that US adults who are not “AI Experts” are more likely to view AI as negative and harmful.

The thing is, EVERYONE hates AI except for a very small number of executives and the few tech people who are falling for the bullshit the same way so many fell for crypto.

It’s like saying a survey indicates that trans people are more likely to hate American ISP’s. Everyone hates them and trans people are underrepresented in the population of ISP shareholders and executives. It doesn’t say anything about the trans community. It doesn’t provide any actionable or useful information.

It’s stating something uninteresting but applying a coat of rainbow paint to try to get clicks and engagement.

Is there enough value in AI to justify burning down the planet for it?

Oh yeah it’s setting the table for a terrible hellscape.

I moreso meant that Elon won’t be the first. Whoever the first is will of course be a terrible precedent.