Yeah, I think it's partly a coping mechanism and partly just the current drama that everyone's aware of, which makes it safe common ground to make jokes about, as well as pretty much the only thing most people can be fairly sure they have in common with others on a platform that is pretty new to them. A week or so ago Mastodon was pretty full of Titan stuff. Things will move on again.
bodmcjones
joined 1 year ago
I sort of feel sorry for them, having heard that they are good at what they do, which... isn't this (it's point and click adventures apparently).
Interesting one, this. I have a tendency to associate "Annapurna" with brilliant games because of titles like Stray, everything thatgamecompany did and so on, but thinking about it this is Annapurna's first go at running a game design studio themselves so honestly idk what to expect. Trailer looks good, at least.
IRC and eggdrops, or the equivalent. Okay so we spent half our time netsplit and pinging each other forlornly across gaps but you could do really worthwhile things with those basic tools, and most things were very portable across providers so you could straightforwardly move the whole kit and caboodle if a reason to do so arose, and you could self-host. I appreciate that this is probably more a commentary on slack/discord than forum culture, though.
It's usually at about this point that I resort to tearing at things with the teeth of an (unimportant) key. Sometimes works.
The standout example of this for me would be Qube. I was having a bit of a difficult time when I first bought the game and that soundtrack lured me in and getting through to the end just became a total compulsion. I was a lot calmer by the time it was over, too.
Kairo had a bit of a similar effect on me, except that the very last jump in the whole game just would not work, spoiling the zen. Quantum Conundrum also got a full playthrough in one sitting but tbh I think that was because I wasn't enthusiastic about coming back to it another day.
I think in part there's an essential misunderstanding of current events at the core of Reddit's behaviour (not yours, I mean - spez/investors/etc).
Historically the rule was supposed to be 'if it's free, you're the product', which is to say that our attention (and profiles and demographics) were on sale to advertisers. The big recent development is someone figuring out, or thinking they've figured out, how to monetise us a different way - specifically, by using the things we create as training data for AI. A sensible organisation would continue to balance these two possible cash flows and, since both really require user retention to remain profitable in the long run, seek a middle ground. But the perception is that there's more money in the training data than there is in the user attention, so they focus on maximising that and spit on the users. The obvious consequence is that they lose users and their source of training data dries up.