bvanevery

Can you do things that will get the other team killed, even if indirectly? Like get a particularly mean dinosaur to wander into their area.

Other people’s posts / content. What about the user’s own content? Sure plenty of people don’t care, but there is a working set of people who do produce content online, who care about the visibility and longevity of their output.

Well I can see one thing that kinda belies your point of view at present. Stability. Some people have presciently worried that their instance can implode, taking all content a user has made with it. Larger instances that are more stable, that have more backup infrastructure and ongoing commitment to operations, could out-compete smaller instances. Why this might arise, could be a historical accident of successful crowdfunding campaigns or something. I’m not sure how someone might do a better job of securing more server resources than others. Obviously a deep pocketed corporation who wants to influence the Fediverse, could do that.

Mechanized greater amalgamation carries a presumption of agreement and agreeability. This is not what I experienced on Reddit.

For instance there was r/gamedesign. It had serious problems of people staying on topic, and lesser but recurring problems of people becoming most uncivil. I started r/GamedesignLounge in opposition to this. I “ruled” with a firm hand unfamiliar to Reddit users, but quite to old guard Usenetters. All posts and comments required moderator approval. I would have been perfectly happy to share this in a double-blind comoderator system where I don’t approve my own posts, but such a mechanism doesn’t exist on Reddit. All subs are run by the “Lord of the Manor”. I was a nice, disciplined LotM and my job primarily consisted of hitting Approve. The fact of requiring people to adhere to the rules up front, rather than waiting for people to offend and be dealt with later, definitely elevated signal-to-noise ratio.

But I got no members and no surfacing. The incumbent name that anyone would look for, “gamedesign”, is already owned by someone else with critical mass. Opposing such a de facto group with “better moderation ideas” is pretty much impossible on Reddit.

Another example is the TV show fan sub r/TheOrville vs. r/USSOrville vs. r/OrvilleVSTrek . The last one died. The 2nd one is barely alive. I’ve refused to participate in the 1st, in solidarity with the 2nd and 3rd. Nobody cares though.

For awhile, there was only one r/vikingstvshow about the series “Vikings”. I don’t know about now; don’t care. Turned out it was not for fans of Vikings really! It was more for people to hurl rocks at Vikings and say this sucked, that sucked. Mods were totally down with that and fairly negative about the show. Somehow there weren’t enough Redditors interested in Vikings to support multiple subs about it, so the one dominated by negative leaning mods, ruled the roost. Anyone who actually liked the show, after getting the barrage of pissing and moaning over and over again, pretty much you packed up your stuff and went home after awhile.

In the case of Game of Thrones, there were enough people to support quite substantial, separate subs with very different moderator policies. And the different communities mostly hated each other. Tons of institutional inertia accrued to the sub that first managed to grab the “Game of Thrones” name though.

I got banned from r/CobraKai. I got a little wound up about what would really happen in the modern USA, if you had some karate jackass kicking you in the head on some beach somewhere, like in the original The Karate Kid. Someone would probably pull out a gun from their glove compartment and blow the other away. That’s fact, in the real world. Happens all the time. Happens between 12 to 15 year old kids in my city. Makes the newspaper headline regularly. Well that’s just too negative and toxic to be saying in the sub for some reason, so I get banned.

What if I want to go talk about this show somewhere else, where having a real sense of real world violence, and making comparisons to the fantasy world of the show, is ok? Not that CobraKai material is itself at fault here. They did their juvenile detention episodes. Its the heavy handed mods that were the problem, not the show. Well, r/CobraKai is reaping all these incumbent advantages of traffic shaping, having the name of the show.

So far from wanting to consolidate communities, I am thinking communities should not be allowed to monopolize valuable brand names for community participation. I’d like to think that “Game of Thrones” could have at least 5 different communities, all with “Game of Thrones” technologically part of their community name. I haven’t really thought through what the differentiator would be… the most trivial default designator would be a number. You might be on GOT 1, someone else might prefer GOT 2. Others prefer GOT 4. GOT 5 decided “5” wasn’t doing them any mindshare good, so they change it to the non-default “GOT - Icicles” or some such. But GOT would be a way that you quickly found all such groups, when searching.

This could admittedly lead to a long list of GOT groups, like 200 of them, and games to see how you climb to the top of such a list. But it might actually be a better circumstance, than just ceding all this valuable word territory, to whoever had the luck of first starting with the most obvious name.

Since when does Steam provide game installers “bare” that don’t need Steam whatsoever to do an installation? I thought they infected all games they sell with Steam, in essence being a DRM platform. I just checked on this issue, read some article somewhere, and they indicated this is true for the vast majority of titles sold on Steam.

GOG, on the other hand, provides both a GOG Galaxy and a standalone .exe installer for the games they sell. You can back up that standalone .exe installer and use it anywhere. If you want to sneakerware it over to an old machine, you can. Once GOG has handed you that .exe installer, they’re not involved anymore. They are not a DRM platform. In fact that’s one of their main selling points that they pitch: no DRM.

I’ve bought a few games from GOG. I have never bought anything from Steam.

Absolutely agree. One of many reasons I’ve never bought anything on Steam, is Steam infects games with their Steam software. You don’t get the game “plain”. You get the game totally dependent on what Steam does with it. Like not running on an old machine anymore.

GOG gives me a backup of the game installer that has no GOG at all in it. I can save that backup to a DVD as an archive. Yes I do own the game, independent of GOG. I can get it to work, anywhere that it can be made to work. That might be easier or harder depending on where I try, but I can do it. I can do it 20 to 40 years from now if I remember to copy my DVDs, keep them alive, don’t get them burned in a house fire, don’t lose them, etc.

I believe in piracy for “demo” purposes. If the studio “forgot” to provide an official demo, you as a consumer should take matters into your own hands and provide the ‘demo’. Delete it when you’ve played a ‘demo’s worth’, which did have a fairly industry standard meaning back in the day.

When I became willing to play this 1 older game that shall remain nameless, and pay for it, I went looking for a Game Of The Year edition to pay for or some such. For some reason, this particular game never released a comprehensive GOTY. They expected you to download a quite silly amount of expensive DLC for trivial features. Slightly more powerful items in a RPG, basically. Those items even had the effect of ruining the game balance, so I’m not convinced it was even a good idea to have the DLC. Yet they expected you to pay for it sight unseen.

This was all driven by some kind of big corporate trick or scumbagging. I think it was an EA published title. Because they were clearly being greedy with an older title, I said to hell with them. It is one of the only games I’ve played in its entirety, that I didn’t pay for, that wasn’t abandonware. If you’re gonna be like that and your price on goods is not reasonable, I don’t feel I have to cooperate with you.

Now that I know what’s going on with DLC games, and also the low level of quality that’s going to result when a publisher engages in such practices, I’m not likely to seek a ‘demo’ of such a game at all. I will probably retain my demo only, not pirating purity in that regard. But to the extent I’ve ever been impure, that once, it was directly driven by the DLC. I was like waaaat, srs, gtfo.

In real life some of these spaces I never did laundry in, and nobody was doing laundry, because the beer and music were far more important. Especially when the laundromat was in another part of town, so I’d never actually haul my laundry to it.
It was this weird business that various people would try to run. A friend of mine started up this laundromat that was also a whisky bar. He took us after hours to check it out. I had already had a bunch of Belgian beer and I got so sick on the whiskey, sickest I’ve ever been on alcohol in my life. Still can’t consider a smoke flavored whiskey to this day.

No I don’t. I find most people’s videos incredibly boring, even if they’re supposed to be on an interesting subject. Making videos is so common that lots and lots of people are terrible videographers. They just let things drag on, they waste people’s time. So making a video of a subject that is also boring, looking over the shoulder or listening to someone play a game, is even worse.

I’ll watch my Mom play a video game in real life for like 30 seconds. That teaches me something about what she’s doing, and that’s all it’s worth. I’m an indie game designer and developer. I see it; I get it; that’s all I need.

Games are interactive and are meant to be played. I can’t relate to people only watching games, at all. I know people do it. I cannot relate to it in any way. It is alien to me.

One thing I’ve realized about people’s YouTube play sessions, is they get their audience more from the audio they’re doing, than from the video. Because people listen to these videos, while they’re eating dinner or doing laundry and so forth. Their eyes and hands are on something else.

In the early 2000s I went through a whole period of mythological city building with the game Zeus. And there were real laundromats in Seattle integrating alcohol, board games, video games, and even music performances in them. I still see laundromats in other cities today with an arcade cabinet in them, and more than once I’ve thought, “Why can’t this be an arcade game that doesn’t suck?” They haven’t gotten any money out of me. So I can relate to the idea of building out a more swank laundromat, 90s / 2000s style. But by that same token, mythological city building is better than laundromat building, and more period.

I actually haven’t perused the builder game space in quite awhile. There was a long period where my extreme jadedness was justified. Minecraft Alpha for instance was terrible as a game. But it was a bunch of kids’ first game, that was a big part of it, that they had no preexisting concept of what should go into a proper builder game. Another was insider cult rituals of finding secret stuff to do in the game, how things worked. Went hand in hand with outsourcing “why you bother to play the game” to social media.

I spent 5 calendar years modding Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri to make my SMACX AI Growth mod. I solved many things, but one totally rubbish thing caused me more rage quits over the years than all other sources combined. Probe teams can take over cities for trivial amounts of credits, compared to the value of the city and the military units in it. The original game formula is completely overpowered and broken. My mod is .txt modding only, as anyone who bought the game could originally do. I was able to mitigate the problem but not solve it. It’s now down to goddamn irritating instead of absolutely infuriating. The only way to fix the mechanic short of making a totally new game from scratch, is binary modding the original game. People do that, and I have the technical skills to do it, but I studiously avoided any invitations to engage in binary modding. It took me 5 calendar years as it was to perfect my .txt mod to the degree it could be perfected. I’m done providing free stuff for the internet that way. Next gaming effort gets me a paycheck (I hope someday).