I always find gamedev discussion interesting because a lot of it seems to come at it from a very different angle from my own. When I think of the time I'm spent on "gamedev". Im reminded mostly on the time I've spent learning and producing art, stressing over writing, playing with music-etc.. Sure I can and I have programmed but that's not the.. Emotional? aspect of it all. It's just busywork that I have to do to tie the ends together. I'd pay someone else to if I had enough money.

So it's really difficult for me to see myself, so to speak in a lot of writing about gamedev. Which mostly-and especially here centers around the coding.

Sometimes I wonder if I have more the soul of like a webcomic artist but games are just so much extra clickety clackety...

Honestly I'm definitely within the "New Internet" age range (currently a teen), and my talking to internet strangers experience when I was 14 was not too different from what you've described- being effectively anonymous, sharing a photo/video of yourself would've been a pretty major faux pas, only difference being I wound up on Discord rather than forums/IRC.

Its anecdotal for sure (maybe I just got lucky? maybe I had more sense than the average kid? maybe the shift is US/Western Nation localised?), but I don't think the internet has gotten worse everywhere at once.

I'm pretty sure thats still how most people engage with RPGs, at least, I'm fairly whippersnapping and that was my high school experience too.

If you think getting used to TTS is a pain imagine playing by moving stuff around in GMod or Blender.

Physics is helpful because it limits possible positions to those you would actually be able to produce in real life.

Its interesting you say this, since personally the physics are the reason I prefer TTS lol. Everything sorta moving like it would in a table makes playing so much easier once you get over the hump of manipulating the controls.

But then again my use case is mainly RPGs rather than board games.

You should sign up for a fighting game tournament some time and see how far a few attempts gets you

Valve pioneered most of that stuff, just that they sorta let go of the accelerator at some point and let other companies who were initially following their lead surpass them in exploitativeness so theyre not too associated with it nowadays.

Although I suppose its dubious whether real world money gambling (valve) is more or less exploitative than the gambling directly implemented into game design that the rest of the industry took up.

I have a hard time accepting TF2 hats were exploitative. The cosmetic items have no impact on gameplay, and I played the game while completely ignoring trading items. It never felt like gambling, unlike in EA games.

Isn't there a pretty big difference between gambling for cosmetics and gambling for gameplay advantage? The former is like buying clothes... sure, you can spend as much money as you want on them, but it doesn't really affect anyone else. Whereas P2W gambling totally screws up game balance for all the other players because it monetizes the power curve.

As someone from around the region mentioned in the article. I find it reprehensible too. And at least, from my own bubble of the people I interact with I don't think anyone I know would find it not.

I like to think we're striving in the right direction too. Just at a different stage.

Spotify does have a lot of tracks on there that i cannot find elsewhere (not on any trackers, not on deezer, not even on youtube for that crisp 128kbps).

> at least you can resell your barbie and resell the hat but we don’t have that privilege because Valve determined we are not worthy of it

Isn't valve the only company that lets you resell cosmetics?