No longtime gamer has failed to notice how much easier video games are nowadays compared to their early days. The New York Times Magazine recently speculated that today’s easier video games may be a reaction to the increasing difficulty and chaos of modern life. More to the point, we can Read more
The AI chatbot Replika has always been an inconsistent app, but its latest changes have upset and confused its many fans. I can see why. Constant course changes inevitably upset any product’s userbase, but these are particularly poorly considered. Over time, people have subtly but irrevocably shifted how they engage Read more
Many years ago, more than half a lifetime by now, I took my first steps into gamer girl territory. Except I didn’t really see it as being a gamer girl. To me, I was simply a gamer, full stop. Now that we’re nearly at the 40-year anniversary of the classic Read more
Nowadays, these games studiously court players who might only have a few minutes a day or a couple of days a week that they can spend ingame.
It’s not your imagination: games really have gotten easier over the years. The reason has everything to do with my generation’s fear of failure, and our need to get payoffs we can’t get in real life.
Excessive nerfing can lead to an erosion of trust in the playerbase. It hits at the heart of our sense of fairness. And perhaps more than anything else, gamers want games to be fair—or at least skewed in their favor.
In gaming as in real life, teamwork skills matter. When one player didn’t get the memo, the game master makes the kick.
Imagine this: It’s the 6th century. You’re a peasant toiling in the fields outside of Constantinople. It’s a mean and simple life. Most of what you see, all day every day, is dirt. But four times a year, you make the trek into town to the Hagia Sophia, the center Read more
One of her biggest mistakes might be how she views COVID denialists themselves. They are, in essence, griefers. And ignoring griefers does not make them go away.
To borrow a phrase and wreck its meter: ‘the time has come,’ the walrus said, ‘to speak of many things: Of shoes and ships…’ And narcissistic rage, of dysfunctional game admins and extremely seditious presidents. In the case of those last two items, these two groups have some very important traits in common: their narcissistic desire for attention, the mind-boggling extremes to which they are both willing to go in order to get it, and their catastrophic rage when it is denied. Today, Lord Snow Presides over how I learned to spot narcissists in a game I once loved.