Video Games are a broad medium, akin to reading. Asking “should I get into books?” would be similarly difficult to answer.

Also, be mindful of sturgeon’s law. 90% of everything is crap. For every “Taylor Swift” that was widely popular and successful, there’s 9 meh bands no one remembers.

All of that said, it’s a wide and deep medium with a lot of experiences.

If you like card games, there’re related genres. Deck builders are popular. Slay the Spire is popular. Cobalt Core is fun and not as hard. Monster Train is pretty good.

Those are all also “rogue lites”, so you could make the leap from there to something like FTL.

Lots of options.

Probably don’t spend a lot of money up front. Stuff goes on sale on Steam pretty often.

Probably avoid “gacha” games that are free to play or have “loot box” stuff. Those tend to be exploitive and bad.

I get the impression that some people have such decision fatigue, asking them to do something seemingly trivial is akin to asking someone without limbs to pick up a spoon.

People’s brains don’t work good.

Most people don’t know much, and don’t care that they don’t know much. Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. They don’t care about and probably do not understand complex topics.

That’s it. They just want cat gifs, and that’s the end of the thought.

I knew someone who was smart and successful and politically aware. She didn’t care about any of this. She was tired from work and just wanted the familiar ease or twitter. Trying to figure out which server to sign up for and finding content was too much work.

A lot of people have executive dysfunction. Making a choice is hard.

“would you rather have nothing to eat, or poison?”

If you eat nothing, maybe you can figure out a better solution with your remaining time. If you eat poison, you’re probably going to be too sick (or dead) to improve things.

Trump is poison.

Also Biden did improve some things, so it’s less “nothing” and more “some crackers”. Sure, a full meal would be better.

t’s not stupidity, it was a clear option between something the American people know does not work, and something that might work.

There is no reasonable expectation that Trump would “work” for anyone outside of some very wealthy and grifters. So, yes, voting for Trump is stupid.

Accelerationists can fuck off.

Satire is dead. Unfortunately, this guy somehow survives despite his best efforts to get sick.

I knew a journalist who said she used it for work. Apparently that’s just where a critical mass of people refuse to leave.

But also she’d send me stupid memes from Twitter.

Never used Facebook much. Nor Myspace before it. Seemed like it had some obvious pitfalls that everyone else was ignoring.

Used Twitter for a little while, but it was just making me mad. Then horrible guy bought it, so I deleted the already abandoned account.

Instagram also seemed like a source of feeling bad, so I never used it much.

I left reddit recently. It had some good content but the ownership sucks. With general Internet search getting bad, losing reddit sucks. Like, I searched yesterday for how to disable a setting in some app, and landed on some AI slop website that told me to write a letter to my local news station.

So this is all that’s left for me. It’s frustrating that most people don’t give a shit and will just move on to the next private platform. I had a friend who was generally smart and successful, but she just didn’t give a shit about this kind of thing. She wanted her easy entertainment, so she was on all the major platforms. Mastodon “didn’t have good content” so she didn’t use it.

I switched to mint because ms won’t even let me upgrade to 11 if I wanted to. Other than some initial hurdles installing it, and losing some hd space because I kept windows on the other partition, it’s been fine. Proton and Wine are pretty low maintenance

One of the reasons I enjoy games with metagame currencies like Fate points or Willpower. I just don’t find it fun or interesting to lose due to bad dice most of the time. Especially if the bad dice just delay things instead of resolving them, like one time a D&D fight against some ghouls took like 45 minutes because no one rolled well. No tension or stakes. Just dice for an extra ten rounds. Absolutely flubbing a roll can be interesting, but I like when there’s more choice involved.

“I rolled a 0 to grab the thief? No, that’s stupid. I’m a Royal Bodyguard I’m used to acting fast. I spend a fate point and bump that up”

More generally “succeed at a cost” is just missing from D&D as a concept.

Yeah I don’t think anything will change until disruptive protests happen. Like, republicans resigning from office because they’re afraid.

Unfortunately, the far-right has almost all the money and guns, and a lot of bootlickers. And no one wants to throw their life away by shooting some red hats senators or billionaires.

There are too many idiots and bootlickers in the US for progress to be easy.

This is very plausible. And an argument for why we shouldn’t have the ultra rich. No one should be able to do such a thing.

I recently got scolded for saying we shouldn’t work nights and weekends for free at work. (Everyone is salary).

The boss was telling me it demoralizes my coworkers to say that. And it “doesn’t hurt me if they decide to put in extra time”.

The most naive theory of labor, or just lying?

Yeah… definitely conservative men and “not political” or “moderate” men should be shunned.

But how do you tell who’s actually a good guy and who’s a secret shithead?

I like to imagine that there would be uprisings, like the kind with molotovs, if a national abortion ban was passed, but I think the not-right is too disorganized. It’s all very handmaids tale.

And aside from infighting, there’s a lot of people clinging to “we should follow the rules.” Rules don’t mean much if only one faction is following them.

as an almost maximally privileged person (cis straight etc), i want my whining fellows to shut the fuck up. Just stop. Stop taking up all the god damn space. Just be quiet. It’s okay not to be included in every scene all the time.

Your point about not assuming people are straight by default is valid. But I mostly just want some cis-het folks to stop embarrassing me by being fucking insufferable.

I’m pretty sure monopoly was supposed to show how it’s a bad system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord's_Game

A dark souls kind of slow paced combat game, but built for co-op. Except I don’t have any friends who are on the same skill level and schedule.

More broadly, I really want more games that you can play co-op in where the players are vastly different skill levels, but it’s still fun. I don’t know how to solve this.

I can imagine like a game where one person is playing dark souls and the other is playing candy crush, and they interact somehow. Like making matches in one give estus in the other, and killing bosses gives stuff.

Basically I want to play games with my frienda that don’t play the same games, somehow.

I don’t think I understand what you’re talking about. Perhaps some examples would help.

I do think some people hold themselves to too low of a standard, though. There’s a song I like that has the line "I don’t want you to romanticize falling the fuck apart ". I think some people are just like “well, I ghosted my friend and didn’t do my tasks at work and didn’t feed my cat but life is hard am I right? No other way I could be. Time to go drink alone and watch TV”