That’s the neat part, there isn’t!

But being more serious: I think I can express the feeling of things being particularly worse now in a way that isn’t just recency bias.

Sure, over time technology has improved and that’s generally speaking allowed for better standards of living, at least for the people at the right end of that technology. (Not so great if you’re being conquered because someone shows up with guns for example.) So you could look at the past and say it was worse because materially things like food availability and medicine have become better over time.

But key to this was that all of this was a struggle of humans over nature. To the extent things were bad, there were tangible things we could do to improve.

These days, so many of our problems are self-inflicted and technology and economic development mostly makes them worse. Climate change is the obvious big one, but then there’s stuff like:

• Weapons have become increasingly destructive and centrally usable. A small number of people can cause a lot more damage than they ever could in the past.

• Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.

• Automation, communications, and transportation technology have made workers less and less powerful and therefore more subject to abuse and artificial poverty. This is one of the more messed up things about capitalism. Technology gets better and rather than getting the benefits of that progress, it actually hurts a lot of people.

• Advances in science and technology, particularly data science, allow the powerful to hyper-optimize the bad things they were always doing or enables them to do things they’ve wanted to do.

• A financialized economy creates economic catastrophes where people go homeless or starve without any actual changes to material conditions. The numbers got screwed up or the investors panicked and now everything sucks for no reason?

• More generally, we can produce enough of the necessities of life for everyone, but capitalism ensures that those necessities won’t make it to people. Capitalism depends on scarcity. If you had a house you wouldn’t need to pay a landlord. If you had food you wouldn’t need to pay food companies. If you had both you wouldn’t need to go work and put up with awful conditions. We’ve solved our most fundamental problems and yet because of the interests of the system and those in power, that progress gets held back.

In the past, even if things were rough now, you could maybe look forward to them improving. Now it feels like the walls are closing in. Unless we actively do something about it, things are going to get worse for most people as more and more wealth accumulates in private hands, as we become subject to increasingly powerful forms of control, and as the powerful destroy the environment we need to live.

People are asses sometimes, but whenever these conversations come up, I wonder: What do you even want from us? How are random people on the internet supposed to hold random anonymous trolls on the internet “accountable?” You can call them asses, but so? What if they don’t care? They’re anonymous. You could get mods to ban them, but if it’s a free service they can always make another anonymous account. It’s even more confusing in the context of something like an online game as opposed to a forum. What are you supposed to do about someone being an ass when you’ve probably never seen them before and probably won’t see them again?

Clearly this just means that Silksong IS Half-life 3.

Elden Ring. Although that’s only because I didn’t want to start a whole new character for the DLC. Does Nier Automata count? All the extra playthroughs are kind of just part of the complete experience of the story. Then there’s harder difficulties of roguelikes like StS.

Beyond that, I tend to not end up being that interested in a NG+ unless there’s something substantially different about it like new story beats or I can play a cool build.

Game mechanic patents are such an unbelievable joke it’s hard to understand how any court could take them seriously. “Yes your honor. As you can see, we own the exclusive rights to the idea of throwing a ball at a creature in a video game.”

“I know, I know, but it was this or we’d have to stop bombing brown people and tell the poors we’d give them food. It was the politically responsible thing to do.”

It’ll be one of those photos from a ride at a theme park where everyone is screaming in terror.

The trains were just keeping with the metaphor of the OP. (Although we do need much better trains too.)

Acting like the only thing wrong is train schedules is really reductive. People who insist on voting as THE prime form of political participation will often say that not voting for a lesser evil is a privileged position because you’re not going to be impacted by the stuff the other party will do. But I’d argue there is an inherent privilege to being someone who won’t be materially impacted by US imperialism.

We’ve all been conditioned to view the violence the government inflicts on the rest of the world as normal. Maybe you don’t agree with it, but only as much as you don’t agree with, say, tax policy. It’s an abstract thing. We’re removed from the constant horror it represents. We’d like it if it wasn’t happening, but we don’t have to think about it most of the time and will clearly not do anything about it any time soon if everyone left of Hitler’s position is “vote for the Hitler that’s only going to do the bad stuff to other people.”

In general I take issue with people framing this as protecting democracy from fascism. The US is not a democracy.

• For starters, a constitutional democracy shouldn’t be able to end through a simple vote that doesn’t even include most of the country. If voting in fascists is an acceptable outcome of the system, it’s not a good system.

• From the ground up, the US was built to be as anti-democratic as possible while still technically having voting. Obviously it started with only land owning white men being allowed to vote. It’s expanded slowly over the years, but it STILL explicitly disenfranchises people such as prisoners. The electoral college, gerrymandered congressional districts, and the longer, staggered term limits in the senate, and the lifetime term limit for supreme court justices are all mechanisms which were explicitly designed to filter out the will of the masses from influencing government. To bring in a personal example: I live in NY. My vote doesn’t matter. I don’t say that as an excuse for not voting because I know I won’t have an effect of the election. I say that because I don’t even get a vote! Even if there was a candidate I cared about, just because of where I was born I can have zero influence on their election into government.

• Finally, I’d argue that an imperialist country is definitionally not a democracy. The core principle of democracy is that the government rules over only those who have consented to it. An imperialist state such as the US takes actions all around the world in other sovereign countries that have major influences on people who never consented to be subjects of US power. An Iraqi who’s house got bombed didn’t get a chance to vote against Bush. A person in Latin America didn’t get a vote on the US invalidating the vote in their country with a coup. Cubans, Vietnamese, etc. didn’t get to vote on the US making sure they couldn’t trade with the rest of the world.

As a related point to the last point: This is why I think it’s philosophically wrong to vote for candidates who don’t represent you in the US elections. In a democracy you are still considered to have “consented” to being governed even by an opposition party you didn’t vote for because you consented to the process. By voting you are saying that you agree that this is the way we will choose our government and that you will abide by the results even if you don’t get the outcome you want. That’s fine if the process was truly democratic and you can live with any of the outcomes even if you’d prefer something different. But if all outcomes are systematically unacceptable to you and the process itself is flawed, then still casting your vote within that framework is consent to the government and the process that produced it. When you go vote, there’s no box for “I’m only voting for this person because they’re technically better than the other one. I’m not actually ok with them.” You simply vote for Harris and the implicit choice of “I will not try to enact change in any other way.”

If you think Trump represents the rise of fascism and the end of democracy, then you shouldn’t be willing to abide by the results of the election anyway. But could you imagine any of the people telling you to vote against fascism taking up arms to storm the capital to protect that democracy and it’s people? Could you even imagine those people symbolically supporting leftists if they did this? I can’t. Because they didn’t do shit last time. Because they spent years talking about the right wing coup attempt in terms of it being treason rather than it being a problem because they’re fascists. Because civility and rules are more important than anything else to these people. If Trump won, the day after the election the same people who said it’d be the end of democracy will be saying “We’ll get em’ in 2-4 years.”

No. Clearly the solution is to continue to abandon anyone outside the US because they don’t matter. /s

But more directly: HOW are you going to work on it? Who is gonna do that? The capitalist/imperialist who you’ve pledged your vote to unconditionally?

…and you’ll be doing so with someone who is slightly more likely to be concerned with their image, and hence slightly more likely to listen.

Why would they be concerned with their image if people are going to vote for them anyway? We have a candidate who supports literal genocide and that’s not bad enough for people to do something. What exactly, precisely, practically, is the mechanism for holding a politician accountable when you will always vote for them and won’t take any actions outside the electoral system?

We’re here because people keep supporting a broken system. We keep getting elections with gerrymandering and candidates that don’t represent people because people are unwilling to take action outside of them or even exercise that power in its most basic form. Even if you maintain that things are genuinely good when Democrats win (we’ll circle back on that one), it’s such a brittle system. Any progress that has been made can be wiped out every few years due to elections which have been gerrymandered to create the 50/50 coin-flip when the actual population doesn’t support the right at nearly that rate. Plus, because of the messed up process of supreme court appointments, we sometimes lose rights even when Democrats are in office because of a fundamentally undemocratic institution. You could argue that’s all the more reason to have voted against Republicans in the past and why we should vote against them now, but once again: In a system that is supposedly based on constitutional protections, why are our rights contingent on the random time an old judge kicks the bucket? Or the supposedly illegal actions of a president?

Because there’s nothing to actually stop any of it. Rights are hard to establish and enforce and really easy to be taken away or ignored. Republicans will “break the rules” and then Democrats will decide to be bound by not only the rules their “opponents” won’t follow, but by the new rules that come out of their actions. If you truly believe your opponents are fascists, and you’re genuinely opposed to that, then nothing should be off the table for resisting them. At the tamest end of things the least they could have tried to do would be to break the power of the court or anti-majoritarian rules in the legislature. But again, if rules don’t matter to fascists, you should be willing to go way further than that to stop them. Instead, the “#resistance” under Trump largely consisted of tweets, protest signs, and a call to vote differently in 2-4 years while simultaneously questioning if we’d even have an election to vote in. If Trump wins are liberals going to get out there and do something about it? Are they going to storm the capital to boot out the fascists? Fight cops and feds from taking away minorities? No. That’s way too “uncivil” for them. We’re just gonna have to vote harder next time!

And if only all we had to talk about were the trains being on time!

Circling back to how things are under Democrats: Sure, maybe they’re a bit nicer to minorities publicly, but we still get:

• An ever expanding military, police, and surveillance state. Bush might have started the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and enacted the Patriot act, but Obama continued the wars, including the torture and indefinite detention he said he’d end. We also learned about the NSA’s mass surveillance program under Obama and when confronted with the public outcry about an assault on our fundamental rights or the war crimes being committed by the military, he chose to go after whistleblowers instead of doing anything about it. Since then has ANY president or major presidential candidate even talked about the NSA or given any indication that they’d cut back on surveillance or imperialism? In my lifetime over 3 Democratic and 2 Republican administrations, the military budget has tripped. And of course support for Israel’s genocide has continued with little more than hand wringing and empty promises.

• Anti-immigration policies continued under Obama and Biden. Biden in particular continued the detention centers and even allowed for the wall to keep being built.

• Climate legislation that isn’t good enough to meet the existential threat posed by the problem. Far from being “something is better than nothing,” these compromise positions obstruct efforts to implement the necessary changes. Plus whatever “advancements” are put in place tend to be fairly temporary in nature. A regulation can be easily overturned by a future administration or court. It’s a lot harder to go around destroying public transportation and clean energy infrastructure after it’s already been built. We are facing a global crisis and the system is going to get us all killed eventually, and poorer countries even sooner.

There are a lot of people who are hurt by US capitalism and imperialism even under Democratic administrations. It’s a decision to not value those people. And it’s not even like they’re always different people. The surveillance state hurts everyone, but in particular it makes it easier for the government to target undesirable groups like immigrants, LGBT people, or say, women who want to get an abortion. There are certainly LGBT people, disable people, women, PoCs, etc amongst those the US has bombed, sanctioned, or caused to live in chaos after a coup. Lack of adequate healthcare means that accessing abortions or gender affirming care harder even if they are completely legal.

But don’t worry, just vote for the Democrat then push them to the left! By… uh… holding up signs? Making tweets? You definitely need to unconditionally vote for them again next time, so you can’t pressure them that way.

It’s ok, next election we’ll talk about ~the trains~ the military, surveillance state, healthcare, the environment, etc.

4 years later: “THIS election is super important. We’ll talk about the trains in another 4 years.”

Because President’s Day is for buying stuff. Clearly what we need is to allow stores to set up in polling places to get it to be a holiday. /s

I played through the game long after it had been patched up. I enjoyed it enough. When Phantom Liberty released I went back to start a new save to play it and after playing through the different character background introductory bit I realized it just wasn’t going to be that different of an experience the second time around. So I just loaded up my endgame save for the DLC. I had fun with that, but going around with a maxed out character blowing everything up with a shotgun definitely trivialized things.

Not a niche game, but: day (???) of waiting for Sony to put Bloodborne on PC.

Also, this is a bit of a tangent, but I really wish Nintendo would start putting some of their games on PC. Not even so that I can play them, I do have a switch, but because there are quite a few of them that just don’t do well on console, either performance-wise or in terms of UX. For example, I’ve been playing the new Zelda game. The game’s core mechanic involves scrolling through a MASSIVE list of objects to find what you’re looking for and the best solution the game has for this is a handful of sorting options that only get you so far when there are just this many things. Without changing any of the gameplay, you could make the experience soooo much better by:

• Letting you use a mouse on the menu.
• Adding a basic search filter.
• Letting you hotkey some echoes.

Some games just deserve better treatment than what they got from the limitations of their original platforms.

Little known fact that dogs have a very unhealthy work culture. He didn’t even think it would be an option to go out before the work was done.

Yeah I think you’re right to some extent. It’s definitely harder to get invested in the ones with no or less VA. However, I think there’s also something to be said for the tutorials/starts of these games. The Larian games I’ve played had relatively punchy tutorials that lead into a nice amount of structured freedom very early into the experience. Disco Elsyium also gets you into the the thick of things without much explicit tutorializing because it’s so mechanic light your “tutorial” ends up just being gradual introduction to your main characters, the setting, and the case, which is what you’re here for anyway.

The other CRPGs have hit me with the double whammy of tutorials that lead me by the nose for way too long while also just dumping paragraphs of exposition on me that have almost nothing to do with the immediate characters or plot.

EDIT: Thinking about it a bit more: While you don’t need all the voice acting and cinematic to make good, dramatic, character focused story bits, I think the converse is true: It would have been a waste to get all these great VAs only to have them stand around and dryly deliver exposition. So it kind of had to be very character focused if it was going to work and be worth the effort.

Imagine how much worse the start of BG3 would be if you run into Laezel and you just stop for like 5 minutes while you exhaust all her dialgogue options so she can explain the entire history of the Gith and the Ilithid. Even fully voice acted that would have killed the pacing.

The funny thing for me with CRPGs: DOS2 was the first one I played and I really liked it. Followed up again with BG 3 when that came out. Since then I’ve tried a bunch of other CRPGs and… I don’t think I actually like CRPGs. I just like Larian. The one exception is Disco Elysium, but that’s so far removed from most others of the genre because it has no combat.

Did it really predict these things? We’ve had data surveillance and algorithmic targeting for a while before Watchdogs. A lot of “prescient” sci-fi is just writing about stuff that’s already happening but which people don’t pay much attention to.

I was thinking about this recently when I had to look at a website without an ad blocker. (Btw, does anyone know an Adblock option that works for iOS Lemmy? Memmy’s browser doesn’t block anything.)

The website was absolutely packed to the brim with ads. Animated, expanding, moving, etc. All competing for your attention. How can ANY of those ads be getting enough attention for it to be worth it?