Relevant XKCD.

This libertarian attitude only works for rational decisions. That’s essentially impossible, in the context of a game, because games make you value arbitrary nonsense. That’s what makes them games. All games trick people - into caring about points, or drops, or goals, or anything else that’s not real. There’s no ethical version of attaching a dollar value to that made-up desire.

Nothing makes this abusive manipulation more obvious than when people pay the price of a house and receive a floppy disk’s worth of static props.

We’re not bickering over whether games should cost $70. Nobody thinks games should cost $10,000. So obviously no part of a game should cost that much! If it’s even possible to dump that much money into one game, and still only have a portion of its content, something’s gone terribly wrong. Snipping over how we describe that problem is aggressively missing the point.

And that problem is half the industry. That problem is a multi-billion-dollar effort by an army of game developers, whose talents are being misdirected to convince people to open their wallets and look the other way. It’s inexcusable, which is why you’ve made no effort, besides tacitly blaming their victims.

Veblen goods can’t exist in a single-player game. There’s nobody to peacock for. A housewife who spent a month’s salary on gems in some mobile puzzle trash was plainly not purchasing luxury anything. Nor is anyone wowed by the ostentatious signalling of a virtual rasta hat for which you paid ten actual dollars.

This blatant psychological manipulation will only be replaced with covert psychological manipulation. The entire business model exists to funnel you toward throwing unlimited money at them for essentially nothing.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

Only legislation will fix this.

Nature is healing.

You changed it, from scam to fraud.

Synonyms are words that mean nearly the same thing. I’m not gonna jump through whatever hoops exist in your brain, to avoid describing how this is bad. A scam is a thing where you trick people for money. Fraud is a thing where you trick people for money. That’s what those words mean.

Nothing could possibly excuse all the content in a mundane video game costing ten thousand times more than any other mundane video game. If people are paying anyway - they were tricked. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Nobody’s ever forced to get scammed. That’s what the trick is. Victims freely choose to throw away their money, for some bullshit. The alternative is a mugging.

If the value of paying for all the shit in the game is obviously nonsense, then the value of paying for any shit in the game is obviously nonsense. It’s all worthless. It’s all inflated so arbitrarily - because of what makes games, games - that listing a whale’s ransom in geegaws proves that every last geegaw is equally worthless. Tricking a single person into paying for a single fake hat is an intolerable abuse.

I don’t give a shit if kids see porn.

If that’s the worst example we’ve got, whoop de shit. Monitor your sprogs.

What is up with those labels? Are they tangibly loose over the metal?

Oh god, what now?

It works better now than Discord will later.

Wrong.

People are getting tricked into spending money on bullshit. As a multi-billion-dollar industry, often for things with literally zero cost.

If you want to split hairs about why scam isn’t quite the right word for that rampant abuse, then propose an alternative or stop bickering. I’m not interested in prescriptivist semantics on this recently-invented intolerable greed.

If you have any serious defense of this abuse besides fixating on word choice then I’ve yet to hear it.

This was a really funny gag on Top Gear until that dandelion ponce somehow became prime minister.

Well, yes, now.

!ObscureInstruments@sh.itjust.works

Also, what friggin’ PeerTube instance blocks downloads? You already sent me the data.

It sounds like they already had a safe harbor even if they didn’t jump when a company said so.

Rejected.

Abigail Thorn is: James Bond. Like the time she was a naval captain in WWII, and went to space, back when she was the same guy.

I saw the entire original broadcast run of Clerks: The Animated Series. All both episodes.

Only six episodes were produced, and they eventually aired, but I did not find this out until years later. The internet ended a longstanding era where you could be aware of and interested in something, but know fuck-all about it, and have no sensible way of learning more. So I’d heard of Kevin Smith movies - but never seen any. Watching the Clerks movie would have taken a trip to a physical video-rental store, with my parents, and then convincing them (and myself) to rent a vulgar black-and-white movie for all of us to watch together. Wasn’t happening.

I was more likely to rent and watch any of the R-rated films that somehow got cartoon adaptations - which were part of that same impotent awareness. Robocop and Ghostbusters and fuckin’ Starship Troopers were advertised anywhere and everywhere, and kids liked the shallow cool parts in the trailers, so executives said “fuck it” and licensed no-budget G-rated spinoffs to sell toys.

Anyway. The Clerks animated series exists because Disney wanted an adult-ish show to compete with The Simpsons. Everyone did. Disney knew they had a gap in their demographics for twenty-something dorks with disposable income. Aaand then they handed the finished episodes to ABC, who used a focus group of old farts and children. Of course it bombed. The premiere was the fourth episode produced, which stuck the characters in a courtroom drama, and ended with a wacky consequence-free style change wherein the outsourced animators rebelled and delivered a lolrandom dance party. The second and final episode aired was a fake clip show full of flashbacks to episodes that did not exist.

At least Clone High got an entire season.

Over water: maybe. Over land: lolno.

Dook Nookim has been pushing it even further, to run on 286 and even 8086 machines. And monochrome fixed-font MDA graphics. And Amiga 500.

Personally, having utterly failed to get the game running on IBM 5150, I can attest this is all high witchcraft. If only to unfuck Open Watcom’s cross-platform compiler flags.

During development, DOS I/Os were written by id Software. This became the commercial release of DOOM. But that version could not be open sourced in 1997 because it relied on a proprietary sound library called DMX.

If I had a nickel for every time open-sourcing a Doom sequel’s audio code caused legal headaches, I would have two nickels.

[sad barhah]

“The strongest protections in the Act have been designed for children,” an explainer says. “Platforms will be required to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content.”

Fuck them kids. Monitor your children’s internet access if you don’t want them seeing weird shit. Same as unsupervised access to television, books, magazines-- anything. The world is not for children.

Since the dev team is A Guy, hopefully he chooses to hand off to someone in a slightly less stupid country. Short as that list has become.