Feel free to replace “friends” with “anyone you know in real life” or even online groups you trust or are close with.

“They”:

WOM marketing is highly effective as 88% of consumers trust friend recommendations over traditional media.

and my own personal experience; most games I have bought in the past 10 years have been off of recommendations from r/gamingsuggestions before Reddit went to crap and Lemmy came into existence; and even moreso when it is a personal friend recommending things to me.

Mods, feel free to nuke if this feels too close to advertising or better-suited for [email protected] (my own community); I mean it more as a discussion piece but I don’t run the place.

EDIT: The “not” in the title is optional; I’m asking about both successful and failed recommendations.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    13·
    24 hours ago

    Deus Ex.

    … the original.

    Kid at middle school just burned it onto a CD-R, gave me a post it note with the install key.

    He kept saying this game wasn’t like anything else, it was a ‘roleplaying shooter’.

    I just had to provide him the blank CD-R to burn, and I think a brownie, or cookie, at lunch.

    I never even owned a legit copy untill it came out on Steam like a decade later.

    So uh yeah, that’s how I originally played ‘the most important videogame of all time’.

    Beyond the gameplay and game mechanics, uh, we are currently now more or less living in a world that more and more resemble’s its canon storyline everyday.

    Back in 2001, pre 9/11, it was a wild sci-fi/cyberpunk concept for… the entire internet to be routed through a centralized system for surveillance and archiving, for digital privacy to be wholly nonexistent.

    Now that building just exists in Utah and is run by the NSA, and… well you have to be exceptionally tech savvy to maintain any kind of what was 25 years ago the norm of digital privacy.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

    It was a wild concept to imagine the US being defined by external and internal terrorism, both real and as a widespread rhetorical accusation against your political opponents, to imagine the US basically being a dystopian economic nightmare defined by homelessness, paramilitarized police, openly and brazenly corrupt governments, corporations nakedly and obviously superseding the government.

    Now uh… well, uh, yeah, look outside, look at the news.

    It was a wild concept for a prototype AI to tell you:

    “The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.”

    “God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary.”

    “The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.”

    “You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.”

    So uh, yeah, that’s… basically currently happening, we sure are at least really trying to build a true, general intelligence AI, and more and more people are falling in love with AI bfs/gfs, tiktok/instagram/facebook/social media are the precursor data-mining algorithms that most people these days are addicted to, to feel observed and be judged, more and more people relinquish their cognitive abilities to some kind of ‘AI’ to just do all their thinking, their critical evaluating for them, their judgement formation.

    Anyway, 9/10 game, pretty good but kinda janky in spots, lol.