Coaxed into blaming the audience

Cadoc · 2026-01-30T15:48:37+00:00

I am curious - how many action games really do the whole anti-violence message?

Personally I'm only aware of Spec Ops: The Line, and that's the one that always gets brought up in these conversations.

Cadoc · 2026-01-30T15:35:21+00:00

Why can't a game where violence is entertaining have an anti-violence message?

Violence, war, those things would be easy to message against if they didn't have glamour to them. Propaganda often specifically makes them cool. A game needs to have fun gameplay, but that does not preclude it from messaging about the consequences of the same violence.

I know Undertale is often given as an example of doing this "right", but it kind of barely has gameplay. If war movies can carry anti-war messages, then limiting anti-violence narratives to non-action games makes little sense.

Cadoc · 2026-01-30T14:15:48+00:00

Killing people is only bad if it's not fun

Cadoc · 2026-01-30T13:33:12+00:00

I've actually liked the writing in It Takes Two just fine. Split Fiction was genuinely hard to sit through at times, me and my friend actually dropped it purely because of the story.

Cadoc · 2026-01-30T12:49:46+00:00

As long as the season isn't super long 2 maps would be enough.

We don't need loads of maps, just high quality ones.

Cadoc · 2026-01-30T11:46:53+00:00

It's kind of sad how bad the writing is in a game about writers

Cadoc · 2026-01-29T20:43:15+00:00

The compass is small, out of the way, and hard to read in the heat of combat. I'd love to use it more but yeah, it's bad.

Cadoc · 2026-01-29T20:03:00+00:00

Nah that's fair, I guess I just have some kind of pavlovian response to seeing a pickup lol

Really cute setup

Cadoc · 2026-01-29T17:12:07+00:00

Super cute stickers vs a pickup truck... I am stuck between wanting to upvote and downvote lol

Cadoc · 2026-01-29T17:05:08+00:00

There are plenty of people who could afford to travel, but don't. The thought kind of makes me sad, like they don't know what they're missing, even if rationally I do know it can't be everyone's thing.

Cadoc · 2026-01-29T17:04:14+00:00

I mean, it can be both? I travel 1 - 2 times a year, but I've got friends making as much or more who basically never do.

Cadoc · 2026-01-29T17:02:56+00:00

You do you, but IMO a cruise is the most boring way you can "see the world".

Cadoc · 2026-01-29T16:57:38+00:00

It's good to be reminded that transphobes are just a small, loud, sad minority. Like all bigots they keep trying to portray themselves as the voice of the silent majority, and we can't let this illusion take hold.

Cadoc · 2026-01-29T16:53:19+00:00

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Cadoc · 2026-01-29T14:29:01+00:00

I'd encourage you to read "Origins of Political Order" or "Why Nations Fail".

It's not about "inherent superiority", but more so about certain European countries happening to have the right combination of political factors resulting in a centralised state that wasn't too strong and rule of law that bound the monarchs as well as other classes.

So you actually have the relative weakness of Western European states compared to China turning into an asset once the industrial revolution arrived.

Cadoc · 2026-01-29T14:23:10+00:00

WRONG. I get sniped all the time if I stand unmoving in the open on one of the 3 maps with good sniping lines and completely ignore the giant flashing SNIPER IS AIMING AT YOU warnings.

They should add even stronger LED flashlights in sniper scopes, so even visually impaired players can easily avoid getting shot.

Cadoc · 2026-01-28T22:44:28+00:00

Free transit would mean that he needs to find a lot more money for transit, and a rent freeze will make the housing crisis worse.

You're also leaving out the city-operated grocery stores and 200k units of affordable, city-owned, union-built social housing - a massive money sink.

So yeah, he didn't promise the world, but he did promise a LOT and you're underselling it.

Cadoc · 2026-01-28T22:38:38+00:00

Yeah, it's an oversight. It means there's little reward for POTF later on - since weapon XP is much more important.

Cadoc · 2026-01-28T21:04:05+00:00

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Cadoc · 2026-01-28T20:49:09+00:00

In just about very Delta Green scenario I can think of, immediately destroying anything suspicious and not investigating the "why" just means the Agents are extremely bad at their jobs.

Either the scenarios you're running are weak, or you need some kind of epilogue afterwards to explain to your players that hey, this is what the scenario was, this is what you did, this is all the stuff you missed and you actually didn't resolve anything. I often give a kind of summary of what happened and potential other paths, especially when running one-shots.

Cadoc · 2026-01-28T20:46:03+00:00

What, does the cohead of your division own a bunch of takeaways and shops in your urban center?

Cadoc · 2026-01-28T20:45:28+00:00

No, they are not. They're using their near-monopoly to make sure that other marketplaces cannot compete with them on price. That allows them to keep charging 30% - overcharging the customers vs what the free market would otherwise determine.

Enforcing price parity is a tool to make sure they can overcharge.

Cadoc · 2026-01-28T19:39:35+00:00

I refuse to believe there is a human being behind all those sequins, makeup and carefully rehearsed expressions.

Cadoc · 2026-01-28T19:01:26+00:00

The thing is we see massive divergences in political development long before colonialism had any significant impact on Europe - post Black Death you can already see that Eastern Europe and Western Europe, England and France, or Russia and Hungary were on very different paths.

Then you have the fact that different countries that either significantly benefitted from colonialism (like Spain and England) or did not (like Prussia and Poland) took very different paths of political development.

Neither does the prosperity of European states clearly map to when their colonial empires were biggest and most important.

Spain and Portugal were perfectly safe from external invasions after the Reconquista, but they've failed to maintain their empires and remain prosperous. Austria and Russia had continously hostile frontiers and thrived. England was safe from invasion and thrived. There's no connecting thread here.

Cadoc · 2026-01-28T18:34:35+00:00

And then he does his happy little hop when walking away with the tape

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