Good lord. So glad my country has strict animal welfare standards for livestock. Uncomfortable that we still import and slaughter pigs from countries without those standards. (And yes, we import-and-slaughter because we don’t import pork itself. We do however, allow the import/export of live animals, so international trade buys our sheep for ‘breeding’, and sell us their pigs for ‘NZ-made pork’. I suppose it at least enforces abattoir health standards…?)

Absolutely. I hear Witcher 3 is good, and I believe that it is… but after playing it for 5 hours and feeling like I got nowhere, the next day I just genuinely didn’t feel like playing it as I’d felt very little character progress, and zero story progression.

Games are continuing to market towards younger people - especially kids - with spare time to burn. They consider their 120+ hour playtime to be a selling point, but at this point that’s the reason I avoid them. If I’m going to play for an hour or so at the end of my day, I want that game to feel like it meant something.

I prefer my games to feel dense, deliberately crafted, minimal sawdust padding. I’ve enjoyed open-world in the past but the every-increasing demand for bigger and bigger maps means that most open-world games are very empty and mostly traversal. Linear worlds aren’t bad - they can be crafted much more deliberately and with far more content because you can predict when the player will see them.

Open worlds that craft everything in it deliberately are very rare, and still rely on constraints to limit the player into somewhat-linear paths. Green Hell needs a grappling hook to leave the first basin, Fallout: New Vegas fills the map north of Tutorial Town with extreme enemies to funnel new players south-east.

And what really gets me is that with microtransactions, the number of games that make themselves so big and so slow that they’re boring on purpose, so that they can charge you to skip them! Imagine making a game so fucking awful that anybody buying a game will then buy the ability to not play it because 80% of the game is sawdust: timers, resource farming, daily rotations, exp grinding. Fucking nightmare, honestly.

Go out of the house and go… where?

In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home (“first place”) and the workplace (“second place”). [x]

There aren’t places to go anymore. There just aren’t. Libraries, but they’re underfunded and aren’t well-suited for socialisation. Parks, if you live in an area that has a planned/maintained one. There aren’t any nice pedestrian-focused city centres for people to visit just for the sake of visiting, to sit outside drinking tea while listening to the birds - just miles of thoroughfare and parking spaces, covered in smog and traffic noise. Who would ever?

Many countries (especially US and Canada) are so car-centric that they might not even have sidewalks at all in huge areas. Housing is sprawled in low-density suburbia. It’s hard to go over to a friend’s house and play a board game with them or host a party if it’s an hour and half driving commute to get there, so we’re not even visiting each other’s homes.

The only thing that exists anymore is the place you earn money, the soulless big box stores you spend money (if you have any), and home.

So, yeah. We’re all fucking home, because home is free, comfortable, and has a short commute.

Sounds like an interesting read; thanks for putting it on my radar.

One of many examples of how profit-driven platforms care about engagement quantity over product quality. A lack of stopping points feeds FOMO and keeps people trapped longer, but I doubt many people actively enjoy it.

I disable it on any platform that lets me - besides, pagination can be cached to return to later. Doomscrolling can be binged but not suspended.