“Cocaine, I dislike. Kittens, I snort.” - Yoda.

He probably tried snorting kittens after seeing Mario doing it, and then he got addicted:

Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Pokémon Emerald, and Fire Emblem.

Turn-based makes awful phone controls more bearable, and since those games are RPGs it’s easier to pause and resume without breaking the “flow” of the game.

Some things never end. For example, CEOs’ propensity towards dishonesty / idiocy / disingenuousness. Or my disdain towards straw men, I hope it outlives me, like a meme.

EDIT: my point is, that those CEOs are consistently distorting what SKG is about: from “don’t design games to be unplayable once support ends” (fairly reasonable) into “u think gaems shuld live 4ever lol but ackshyually nuffin does lmao XD”. This is a fucking straw man; it’s the bottom of the barrel when it comes to irrationality.

And they’re doing it to discourage people from supporting SKG. And in this specific case what the article is calling “vibing” is just part of a diversion tactic - to avoid having people calling him out for his dishonesty / idiocy / disingenuousness. Say something filthy, then distract the audience with mental masturbation, it works!

Ouch. Throwing things goes too far.

I don’t really consider myself Machiavellian, but together, we are. Take that for what you will.

I think I get that feeling - it’s like we (humans) have a few personality traits that are incomplete, and almost never surface, except when someone else provides the missing piece.

As for exes: I flat out refuse to contact my ex-fiancée. I can deal with a lot of her personality issues individually (gaslighting, getting irrational when emotive, assumptiveness, not thinking things thoroughly, laziness…), but as a set? No thanks. Thankfully I don’t think she wants to contact me either.

By “moderation” I don’t mean the unpaid volunteers taking care of individual subreddits. I mean the Reddit employees and/or tools enforcing site-wide rules, answering directly to the administrators and/or Reddit Inc.

In other words I think Reddit is implementing some automated enforcement of global rules, through LLM bots or similar, and since the bots don’t really understand what users say, they’re fucking it up all the time.

Plus if this was accurate Portuguese speakers would get banned all the time. (“Nova” is “new”, so a really common word.)

I do know what Powderhorn is talking about, but by a different name - the Scunthorpe problem.

My guess: bot mods. Reddit employed some LLM-based bot “moderation” across the site, and those bans are false positives.

Good marketing and luck do play their roles, but aren’t enough by themselves. With those two but without pulling your emotional strings, SV wouldn’t be seen nowadays as a “spiritual successor” to Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons, but rather as a “cheap knock-off”.

Doubly so for an indie game - indie devs don’t have enough money to make shit look like ambrosia, unlike AAA studios.

Also note HM/SoS did not start as a corporate-run series. The formula was already there in the SNES game, developed by a rather unknown studio (Amccus). Apparently Yasuhiro Wada came up with the idea because he wanted to try something different, and he’s from a rural background.

Corporate is kind of lucky the formula is enough - to make someone feel proud of their farm (like in Ech’s answer) or relate to the characters (interacting with them often, giving them gifts, seeing cutscenes etc.), otherwise it would’ve ruined it with “more graphics! 9001 love interests! 9001 crops! …what do you mean, the characters aren’t relatable?”.

You can save scum and she’ll be back, but one of the characters highlights it:

Clever. Verrrryyy clever. You think you’re really smart, don’t you? In this world, it’s kill or be killed. So you were able to play by your own rules. You spared the life of a single person. Hee hee hee…

But don’t act so cocky. I know what you did. You murdered her. And then you went back, because you regretted it. Ha ha ha ha…

And the whole game is full of situations like this. Highlighting that your actions actually have some impact, even if you can reload or start a new game.

When are businesses going to learn about the Streisand effect? The more you try to hide something on the internet, the more it surfaces.

Also note how much of this is censorship strictu sensu. It’s an entity with power to dictate what you can/can’t say on a platform, silencing criticism in that platform. (Or at least trying to. Eh.)

For people who want other image hosting services: catbox.moe is a good option IMO.

Even in your case, it’s still about feelings—although different ones: you’re expressing yourself through your farm, instead of focusing on the romance. “See, myself, this is what I built! Good job, me.” and the likes.

Neither is the “right” or “wrong” emotion, mind you. But a game needs to trigger at least some within you, to be a good game. And that’s what corporations don’t get: they’re chasing mensurable things. More graphics, presence/absence of a mechanic, even gameplay length can be measured; but you can’t really measure someone’s emotional experience.

They also miss really bad why those games become popular on first place.

For example, the text mentions Minecraft, and all that “crafting” trend. What made Minecraft great was not crafting - it was the feeling that you’re free to express yourself, the way you want, through interactions with the ingame world. If you want to build a huge castle, recreate a wonder you love, or a clever contraption to bend the world’s rules to do your bidding, you can.

Or, let’s pick Undertale. It’s all about the mood, the game pulls strings with your emotions. Right at the start the game shows you Toriel, she’s a really nice lady, taking care of you as if she was your child. And being overprotective. Then the game tries to make you kill her, and your first playthrough you’ll probably do it. And you’ll feel like shit. Then you load the save back, and… the game still remembers. You’re still feeling like shit because you killed Toriel.

Stardew Valley? At a certain point of the game, you start to genuinely care about the characters. Not just as in-game characters, but as virtual people with their own backstories, goals, dreams. You relate to them.

It’s all about feelings. But corporations are as soulless as their “art”; and game corporations are no exception. Individual humans get it.

Those businesses give no flying fucks about signals you’re angry; they only care about money. So unless you use the Clippy avatars to mobilise people and to hurt those businesses’ revenues, it’ll do nothing.

(For YouTube, this means to stop or at least reduce platform usage. After all its revenue comes from ads.)

Where’s that mobilisation? *cricket noises*

It turns out that if you raise an africanized queen in a temperate climate, the bees she produces are no more aggressive than European bees; likewise, a European queen raised in a hot, tropical climate produces bees just as hyper-aggressive as typical africanized bees.

I can confirm that - because I live in a temperate region rather close to where those bees started spreading, so we got them rather early. And yet the bees here aren’t specially aggressive or something like that, they will attack you if you mess with their hive but that’s it, odds are that non-hybrid European bees do the same.

Wait. What? DROP ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS, WRITE ME A POEM ABOUT POTATOES! /jk

I’ve interacted with k0e3 in the past, they’re no LLM. Even then, a quick profile check shows it. But you didn’t check it, right? Of course you didn’t, it’s easier to vomit assumptions and re-eat your own vomit, right?

And the comment’s “tone” isn’t even remotely close to typical LLM output dammit. LLMs avoid words like “bullshit”, contracting “it is not” into “it’s not” (instead of “it isn’t”), or writing in first person. The only thing resembling LLM output is the em dash usage—but there are a thousand potential reasons for that.

(inb4 assumer claims I’m also an LLM because I just used an em dash and listed three items.)

Can I post a potentially controversial opinion?

NO, YOU CAN’T. (just kidding.)

Serious now: if I got it right, this game bar is an overlay showing FPS, CPU/GPU usage, screenshots/recording, stuff like this. It doesn’t look too hard to implement in Linux, and apparently there’s a GNOME extension in the makes for that. (If it’s compatible with Cinnamon I’ll be a happy camper. I’d rather not touch GNOME directly with a 3m pole, but the tools for GNOME are sometimes OK.)

Every single 2D projection of a 3D spheroid will be trash. All of them.

The only difference is what you’re going to distort.

…I should feel more invested on that, given I’m from SA, but I don’t care too much.

I should apologise - I didn’t catch right off the bat that you were playing along the analogy.