Yeah the “they’re ruining the integrity of video game journalism” argument was insane to me. What integrity? Companies routinely paid for good reviews and everyone knew it. It’s a really corrupt industry, but people only got upset because of some shenanigans by women? I think? I never actually looked into what it was about because the whole thing seemed nonsense to me.

I can also think of a few notable gay and disables villains.

Basically every Disney animated movie? Sure the villains weren’t boning other dudes or anything, but there was a lot of “queer coding” going on.

The trick is to not imply that someone is a villain because of their gender, gayness, ethnicity, etc. Villain that happens to be gay, whatever. Villain that’s gay and really creepy about it and seemingly motivated by their gayness to be evil… yeah that’s really bad.

But I think things have improved a lot. Giancarlo Esposito is the villain in basically everything now, and I don’t think anyone is complaining. The dude is just really good at playing villains, so why not? It’s not his ethnicity that makes him a villain, it’s just that he’s really good at playing a cold and calculating sociopath and people enjoy his performance.

Yeah it’s a weird thing about parasocial relationships. You like someone based on things you’ve seen about them on TV and then you start feeling like you know them. But really, nope you don’t.

I think it’s fine to like famous people, but just understand that you don’t really know them. If you later find out they’re a horrible person well then don’t like them anymore and it’s no big deal. You only like the things you know about the person, but if you avoid going down the road of feeling like you really know them, it’s fine.

Yeah and there comes a point where you know you can win, but don’t want to go through all the turns to get there.

I think most chess games don’t end with a checkmate, many games end when a player concedes because everyone knows the outcome and it’s pointless to play it out.

Yeah pretty much. You can’t copyright gameplay mechanics, so there’s nothing illegal about it. It’s just a dick move.

The three games I was most interested in last year were Kerbal Space Program 2, Cities Skylines 2, and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. Two of them had newly designed game engines. The third used the engine from the previous game.

Guess which one I enjoyed playing the most?

In software development sometimes you do have to rewrite some code to improve things. But if you have something that functions really well, it’s better to be just continually making improvements. A lot of what makes a game great is going to be artwork, story, creative level design, creative enemy design, etc. But all of that work can be wasted if the software is buggy, which will happen if most or all of the code is written on a tight deadline.

Well yeah, the platform owned by the richest guy in the world is the place to go to follow all the monetized socialists that are making millions playing video games on youtube and selling awesome socialist merch.

So of course all the cool socialists hang out there. Gotta be there to find out which products to buy to get socialist cred.

Have they come out with the new socialist NFTs yet? I mean the capitalist (eewww grosss, rite?) crypto market collapsed so it makes sense to buy MarxCoins now right? Vaush needs a new Luxury SUV, Hasan needs a new yacht, buy MarxCoins now! Dialectic NFTs on sale soon!

Block their IPs. Keeps happening? Block their subnet. Of course taking this approach we may end up blocking all of Russia, China, NK, etc.

Nothing of value will be lost.

This mod is taking away a choice though.

I’m pretty sure the vanilla game has the option to choose pronouns that conform to whatever your feelings about gender are. So choose that option and play the game.

Why should Nexus devote resources to a mod that removes options from a game? There’s no point to this mod for anyone that’s of sound mind. The only reason for it’s existence is some petty bullshit from people that hate trans people so much they will install a mod in a feeble attempt to feel like they hurt people in some small way.

The thing is it’s only just tangentially related to trans rights. I mean they’re making a character creation screen and they do need to know what pronouns to refer to the character as in game dialog as the player is playing it. So they need to know that for the game to work.

These fools seem to want Bethesda to add logic to restrict the pronouns on the character creation screen. So it’s not that they’re angry that Bethesda made an effort to be inclusive. They’re angry that Bethesda didn’t put in an effort to explicitly exclude trans people.

That and I think they’re just generally triggered over the word “pronoun.” Triggered by words that describe words. There’s something very wrong with these people.

Yeah I never except anyone on the internet to admit they’re wrong about anything. But randomly accusing someone of being ablest based solely on a disagreement over the interpretation of a piece of media is rather petty behavior (even by internet standards), don’t you think?

Enshittification is inevitable. All it takes is for one dumbass CEO to see a potential increase in revenue and they’ll do it no matter how stupid it is.

So we should reject an ally that has a shared goal simply because their motives aren’t pure enough?

It’s the old Stephen Fry quote “it’s more important to be effective than it is to be right.” We shouldn’t care so much about whether or not someone has the right reason for trying to affect a positive result. Gamestop’s motives are irrelevant, the effect of their actions are what matters.

You should at least want the option because it keeps them honest. If it’s digital only, there’s all kinds of shenanigans they can get up to. “Sorry your console is EOL now so we’re disabling it, but don’t worry, just buy our newest XBone720 and you can re-buy all your favorite classic games and play them on a shitty emulator!”

At least with physical option they know people would go back to buying physical media (which they make less money from) if they tried such a thing.

That’s basically what the Switch uses. Though they’re more like a memory card, but they kinda look like little tiny cartridges.

Of course making money is his motive, but that does that matter?

Digital distribution only means you can’t give (or sell) your games to someone else. So with digital only the copyright holders of the video games make more money. Once it’s all digital only, next step is to require a connection to a server for them to work, so then they can shut it down to force you to buy a new console and re-buy all the old games you want to play again. What are you going to do if the decide to go that way? It’s either stop playing video games altogether, or go along with whatever scheme they feel like coming up with when they enshittify themselves like every other company inevitably does.

A physical copy means more options for the consumer, why should we care how much of the pie this corporation or that corporation makes off of it? In fact corporations in general make even more money from non-transferable digital distribution.

It is nice to be able to give a game to someone else when you’re done playing it.

There’s an extremely long list of creative works made to be satire that idiots don’t understand. The Colbert Report, Starship Troopers, hell there are people that think Homelander is the good guy in The Boys. I think it’s a little too restrictive if someone can’t make a point that certain jokes are lame out of fear of how a few idiots might misinterpret it (many times deliberately). There are people right now arguing that the Barbie movie is actually “anti-woke”.

Also consider how many people actually did get the message. They heard how lame the jokes sounded and realized how stupid fat jokes are. From what I recall, the game really makes an effort to deconstruct these jokes. There is no audience within the game laughing at the jokes, and the evil AI explicitly states that it’s making the jokes solely to to negatively affect the protagonists psychological well being to prevent her from achieving anything. And the jokes are directed at the player, so someone that might have made these jokes themselves hears someone else directing these jokes at them and can hear how lame they are. The evil AI comes across as lame, petty, and desperate. Someone who made fat jokes before playing that game might have had the realization “is that how I sound?”

I feel like the people that didn’t get the context likely made fat jokes before playing the game, and would be making fat jokes even if they never played the game. So I don’t think there was any negative impact. Someone that committed to being an idiot isn’t going change in either direction from any kind of media.

But wasn’t that the evil AI very explicitly trying to psychologically hurt the protagonist and being really lame about it? I mean it’s the evil AI doing it and I remember the point of it being that fat jokes are lame.

Probably shoulda read the Revolution TOS before clicking “I Agree”.