dismallyOriented

Posted by Sortition Social

https://blazehedgehog.tumblr.com/post/806287456128368640

Entry syndicated from The Hotdog Laserhouse [feed link]

I don't do media threads like that. But, for, like, that post I made where I count up all the games I played in 2025? I didn't think it was so hard.

A game you finish is one you see the credits roll on. DLC is expansion content, so finishing the base game is finishing the game. It's when the story is over.

If it's a live service game like a Genshin Impact or one of those other f2p things? I personally could not and would not mark them as "finished," unless you are confident a specific story arc has come to a close. Regardless, in the context of a year-end wrap up like I did, I would at least note you played it.

Like I write at the top of that post, "more than once, for more than 10 minutes." Because there's a difference between browsing and actually dedicating yourself to playing an entire thing. I have a bunch of games on Steam where I installed them, played once or twice, and never looked back.

That's also why that post for me is more "games I played" and not "games I finished." I am an adult with a lot going on, and I only really play games for maybe 60-90 minutes per night most nights.

For example, I started Control in September and according to the PS5 I'm about 41% through the game. I haven't touched it in over a month. I will finish it, eventually, but it's the sort of thing I play in short bursts. Similarly, I started Final Fantasy 9 in October-ish and I'm about 12 hours into the game; somewhere on Disc 2 (I just reached Cleyra).

And, most famously, it took me four years to finish Mother 3.

If I ever did do a thread like that, I would simply log games I felt like I played for long enough to have something to say. Looking at things with the distinction between a "one night stand" and something longer term, you know? Longer term relationships would be worth logging. Finishing a game is something truly special, but it's not the end-all, be-all. I own 1,700 games just on Steam. I'm never clearing that backlog. Finishing games is not my goal anymore.

But you can know what a steak tastes like without cleaning your plate, you know?

https://blazehedgehog.tumblr.com/post/806287456128368640

Posted by fluffy

https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/3839-Could-big-tech-please-stop-ruining-enthusiast-things

Entry syndicated from busybee [feed link]

Back in the day, independent social media enthusiasts were building their own social spaces on RSS/Atom and self-hosted publishing. There was a huge ecosystem of feed readers and publishing software, where anyone could use their own choice of tools to interact with the space, and it was super cool.

Then Google got into it and made Google Reader, which was a really good feed reader, but they couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable and wanted to shove everyone over to Google+, so they shut Google Reader down, and then the tech press breathlessly claimed that RSS was now dead as a result, and because RSS was (in their eyes) dead, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nowadays, RSS is seen as an obsolete thing only used by diehards, and corporate social media has become the norm, with a relatively tiny faction of people settling on ActivityPub instead, despite it being a poor match for the kinds of things that people used RSS for.

And now the same goddamn thing is happening with Virtual Reality. It was a thriving enthusiast space taken up by people who had a lot of fun seeing what they could build, and making amazing games and social environments and so on in a very DIY-friendly way. And then Facebook decided they needed to get in on that and acquired so many of the manufacturers and game producers involved in the space, pivoted hard to trying to make corporate metaverse bullshit a thing even though literally nobody wants it (Meta Horizons is basically Zoom with extra steps and even less whimsy), and shoveled so much money at it.

Now they’re realizing they have no idea how to make it profitable and are shutting down all of the companies that were making VR great, including studios that were actually profitable but just not profitable enough to offset their misplaced ambitions.

And the tech press is now declaring VR dead, meaning that those of us who are continuing to thrive in virtual spaces using enthusiast hardware and so on are likely to be left in the lurch at some point.

Thankfully, Valve and ByteDance are keeping the hardware side of things alive in ways that are actually along the lines of what people want, but I still worry that “VR is now dead” narratives will cause people at those companies to re-evaluate that as well.

VR has been super important and helpful to me, both as a multiply-disabled independent musician and as someone who cares deeply about the trans community. Hopefully VRChat survives, and hopefully there continue to be hardware manufacturers who care about VR without caring about it being hyper-profitable, but I’m already very worried about the lasting damage that will happen from this. (And I was worried when Meta decided to get into VR to begin with, because I very much saw this situation coming!)

As always, I am frustrated and horrified at how modern capitalism doesn’t allow something to just be good and sustainably profitable, it has to get All The Money or else it’s seen as a failure. This happens over and over and over again and I’m so sick of it.

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https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/3839-Could-big-tech-please-stop-ruining-enthusiast-things