I spent a bunch of solo time just building up a base and trying not to progress too far so I wouldn’t ruin the fun.

I have about 20 games where I stopped before getting too far “just in case they decide to join me.” Those games are now piled up in dusty, forgotten crates alongside the Ark of the Covenant in that same giant warehouse. I think I’m part of the slim margin of people who enjoy simulated hardships as a social bonding experience, I don’t know if makes other people too bored, or too anxious, but I can’t make people play hard, slow games where you have to rely on each other and talk through problems.

I used to be able to, I had great success running groups in SCUM and Project Zomboid but as more and more short-attention-span gaming has been released, people have migrated away from investment-gaming and now just want to “chill” with some colorful slop and fast battle royals or loot extraction. Now when I ask if someone wants to play something like SCUM, they ask if we can play a server where loot and experience gain is turned up to max, enemy robots are disabled, and you can order high level gear from discord bots in chat.

I do entirely mental work all day and it leaves me feeling like I’ve been digging trenches. I can’t really impart this to people who don’t have similar jobs, I get told I should be energetic and grateful I have a job I can do from my home office.

And I am grateful, that doesn’t make it easier when you actually care about your work and try to do it effectively. I’m just as tired doing a week-long analysis project for a big-ticket corporation doing it from my office as if I went into corporate and made use of their “first come, first serve” workspaces.

All that said, I will still be able to make a goddamn sandwich or salad and not spend $700 a week on take out.

I was fully expecting it to be an ad for hello fresh or some delivery service like that.

Yah I keep hearing fantastic things about the game, but I can’t connect with the “looping” mechanic and the weird ship/floating controls make it hard to want to keep doing the same planets or whatever again and again.

And I mean, I KEEP trying to get to a place where I’m like “Oh yah, here we go again, lets do this” like with other games and it’s just not happening. I can’t find the fun part. Maybe I’m too old.

Diablo 2 was one of the best games of its type ever, and everything after has just been desperately trying to recapture that feeling. PoE was kind of close, but got a tad grindy. I like when a game just wraps up and you don’t have an endless slog at the end to do completion sub-goals.

I was in that pit for a while, it took me years to actually sit down and play it long enough to kind of figure out what to do and how to play, when I did it was very good. I still never had the time to actually finish it, but I highly recommend just pushing through that first barrier, it’s worth it for at least a few days.

Arc Raiders took this trope and turned it on its head. The game is entirely about being a loot goblin around other people in a no-rules environment but if you don’t pick fights, you will gradually get matched to servers with other people who don’t pick fights, and you start to meet people and have adventures together, it happens very organically and pleasantly, and if you ever DO run into a PvPer the game doesn’t really give a huge advantage to sweaty try-hards, a newb with a basic gun can defend themselves just as well as some well-equipped player hunter.

It was marketed as a game, when really it’s an interactive novel. If you don’t like that kind of experience, you won’t like it.

(But as far as novels go, it was one of the best, the story continues to open up paths and deep-dives into lore and philosophy branching ever deeper and further, while telling a story of personal tragedy.)

I know a number of people who have motion-sickness issues with games like this, it’s almost entirely first-person games that cause this.

Some things to consider from my years of assisting managing it:

• You get motion sick because your eyes tell your brain that you’re moving, but your inner-ear gyroscopes say you’re not, so your brain assumes you must be infected with something so it starts measures to evacuate your stomach of potential poison.

• View bobbing, screen-shaking, depth-of-field, motion-blur and frame-rates have a huge impact on your sense of balance and visual processing of motion, so try to always turn those off. (Minecraft has had view bobbing since early on, it’s always “step one” to turn it off for everyone.)

• Framerates also can make you sick. If you’re playing an first-person game and the field of view isn’t moving smoothly it will be more likely to make you start to feel nauseous. Turn graphics settings down until your frame-rates are at least 40 or so. (You would have to look up the game and/or platform to figure out how to turn on FPS display on your screen to see where you’re at.)

• The brain is highly elastic for learning new things, but also learns negative associations. This means sometimes you have to train it like a toddler or puppy. Patiently and with persistence. This can take the form of only playing for 15 minutes instead of waiting until you start to get nauseous. You need to train your brain that the viewing experience isn’t actually harmful by disconnecting the association with feeling sick, by getting used to the game without triggering the motion sickness. So frequent, short sessions, not letting yourself get sick. (This is the most effective method anyone I know has tried.)

• Medication. Seriously, anti-histamines work pretty effectively. Motion-sickness pills are literally just anti-allergy medication. It will make you very quite groggy though so don’t plan on staying up late playing. Chewable nausea tablets also help a lot. Again, you’re just trying to let your brain adapt to a new perspective/activity without getting fully sick, so think of medications as a temporary measure to get to that adaptation point.

• Field of view is also a huge factor. Try turning it up or down, most 3D games give you the option. Additionally, playing on a smaller screen can help a lot too. Play in windowed mode and gradually work on making the screen larger and larger until you’ve adapted.

• Engagement in the game also helps. Once you start having fun you will often forget about the negative sensations and give your brain more time to adapt. If you’re not enjoying a game, don’t force it. Try a different one until you find some mechanic you enjoy that hooks you.

• After adaptation, you would likely also need to periodically “refresh” it and play a 3D game for a little while every day or you will slip back into motion-sickness triggers again easily.

I keep trying Civ VI and keep uninstalling it before finishing a single game.

I can’t put my finger on exactly what’s changed since earlier games, but it’s lost a lot of the addicting charm and intuitive flow that made me play prior versions for days. Also, the goofy-ass style and overly dramatic narrative starts to irk me.

If that’s the trend of the franchise I sure won’t be touching any of the later ones.

I’m also waiting for it to hit a low-enough price to justify the amount of time I will lose just trying to mod the thing into a playable, enjoyable state.

I’d love to play Baldur’s Gate 3 with a diverse group of real people and share an adventure together, but have no friends who enjoy games that aren’t mindless slop.

Same with other slow-burn games like Project Zomboid and other survival/crafting games.

I learned to do slop to hang out with others, I even got good at slop like Rivals just to keep social contact alive. But I can’t drag anyone into a game that doesn’t have 2-minute matches filled with flashing lights and colors and gambling mini-games.

Yes.

If you want high star rating from me, make a science fiction movie and make space silent and soundless, as it should be. Bonus points if the people in the spaceship don’t magically stick to the floor.

Even more points if it doesn’t just follow the “Aliens” formula with some stupid variations on the theme.

I used to have a higher bar, but shit has gotten so bad I can’t even. I don’t even know where to begin. I just want ONE good thing, is that too much to hope for???

Back in the old days, when we were young we did a thing where we would meet another young person in real-life, not chat or text, and we would go hang out together in their actual real-world house, and play and do stuff that was so much fun that we wanted it to go on and on, so we would sometimes do a thing where we would sleep at the other person’s house so we could spend more time together and continue to talk and laugh and play into the night.

Sometimes it required the permission of both sets of parents and often parents had concerns that we didn’t as children, so the trial of asking for this temporary arrangement was always one of stress and anticipation, and sometimes even bargaining.

edit: AI bots are reading this like “Hmnn, excellent data, this is important, we will encorporate this.”

I don’t know why but I’m reminded of the only moments of satisfaction I ever got in life fighting corporate America.

Wells Fargo, objectively one of the worst banking institutions in the world repossessed my vehicle despite me getting payments in, citing that they were late payments so they didn’t “meet contractual obligations” but apparently they REALLY wanted my truck that was already breaking down so I woke up one day and it was gone. The loan-agent manager that I talked to literally made implied threats against me, and we had weekly shouting matches on the phone up to that point.

Whatever, it was gone. Another massive wrench in my life I had to deal with. Cue my Uber Years.

Fast forward five years or so later and suddenly I start getting checks in the mail. First a hundred here and there, with notes that I was being refunded for “overpaying” and some vague legal BS.

Then I got like, $500, then $1000, now with wording that the whole department was facing a class-action settlement and trying to repay customers that had been wrongly overbilled and then I suddenly got a check for over $10k, which was the remaining balance of the loan on the truck, and basically an “apology” of sorts that my truck was “improperly seized.”

Apparently I had signed up for a class-action suit and didn’t even remember it, it was just one more thing to sign in a stack of bullshit, so I never really paid attention. I mean, last class-action case I decided to get in on, I got less than $3.00.

edit: entire 10k went into a family member’s cancer treatment so there’s that. 'murca.

You’re right, but the other groups are usually actually actively working towards and succeeding at saboating the US’s entire social discourse and putting oligarchs in power.

Tankies on the other hand don’t really want to work that hard, or get it all out of their system posting AI-written manifestos on lemmy.

I get exhausted on Lemmy in particular trying to explain to the nihilistic, cynical teens here that such an outcome would in fact, be a bad thing.

In the Hearts Of Iron IV store you can trade them to have your custom fursona painted on the side of your SU-122.

Technically the company owns it, I ain’t gonna burn out my good ones on work.