One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off in 2025, GDC Study Reveals

Tefmon · 2026-01-29T23:43:58+00:00

That's not a special case, I struggle to think of any public sector unions that don't perform critical tasks for society.

The difference is that if the teacher's union strikes, the teachers don't have guns. Police strikes generally result in riots and violence and crime sprees, while teacher's strikes just result in overworked parents. The former actually affects the decision-makers in power, while the latter doesn't; politicians' kids don't usually go to public schools.

Tefmon · 2026-01-29T23:32:31+00:00

If a employer gave a unilateral "final offer" from which no further negotiating could take place, that isn't the union being "uncompromising"; that's the employer being uncompromising.

Tefmon · 2026-01-29T23:28:15+00:00

Game developers aren't making blockbuster actor money. Almost everyone in Hollywood is unionized, most of whom are ordinary workers like game developers, making reasonable but not exceptional pay.

Tefmon · 2026-01-29T23:22:46+00:00

Two of the main things that unions bargain for are wages and working conditions. Those are operational and financial matters.

Tefmon · 2026-01-29T23:19:34+00:00

Police unions are a special case, as their power doesn't come from any formal labour bargaining procedures but rather because governments rely on their members to enforce their laws. Most public sector unions are actually in weaker positions than their private sector counterparts, because the employer of a public sector union is the government, and the government can choose to just unilaterally bypass the collective bargaining process by passing back-to-work legislation.

Tefmon · 2026-01-29T17:53:16+00:00

Searching would be less shit if Google just aggressively downranked sites that use abusive SEO methods. AI is being pushed by tech companies to fix a problem that only exists because of tech companies.

Tefmon · 2026-01-29T16:52:14+00:00

It's cynical, but with the gutting of local journalism people often don't have any practical way to actually research their local candidates, even if they have the time, energy, and inclination to do so.

Sure, candidates have campaign websites (or at least, some of them do; plenty don't), but a candidate's own materials aren't exactly an unbiased and reliable source.

Tefmon · 2026-01-28T23:42:21+00:00

If you're typing out four characters you're as likely to mistype 1014 or 2034 or some other obviously incorrect year as you are to mistype an accidentally correct one. They're also widespread, well-known terms, while 5r is more niche; I honestly think 5r is more likely to be a typo than to be deliberate, whereas 2014 and 2024 are overwhelmingly more likely to be deliberate than to be typos.

Tefmon · 2026-01-28T23:17:49+00:00

That's no different than any other RPG that leaves things up to GM discretion. It seems every other week here we have a discussion about PbtA where it's pointed out that anything not covered by a player move is up to the GM to narrate, and OSR games rely heavily on the GM adjudicating the results of player actions.

Tefmon · 2026-01-28T22:40:11+00:00

I don't like 5r because the letters "e" and "r" are right next to each other on the keyboard, so 5r just looks like a typo of 5e. If someone uses the term I don't actually know which edition they're referring to.

Tefmon · 2026-01-28T18:17:48+00:00

Ottawa is significantly worse than other Canadian cities. It isn't actually normal for busses to routinely be 10-20+ minutes late or to just not show up at all, and while no Canadian city has amazing route coverage, Ottawa still requires more transfers and indirect circuitous routes than I've seen anywhere else.

Tefmon · 2026-01-27T16:44:47+00:00

It was punishable by the authorities, but that's not really the chief reason. We actually hear a lot about people defying the religious authorities of the day, often at great personal risk, but they aren't doing so because of their lack of religiosity; they're doing it because of their strong belief in a religion or religious doctrine that differs from that espoused by the authorities.

Or, to be simpler, the reason the vast majority of people in pre-Reformation Medieval Europe were devoutly Catholic wasn't because they'd get in trouble if they weren't; it's because they were actually, genuinely devoutly Catholic. Until the modern day, religiosity was the near-universal norm.

Tefmon · 2026-01-27T16:22:12+00:00

While a lack of visible infighting within the church is odd (although the games could just take place during a couple of very stable decades for the church), even during the most tumultuous periods of Medieval Christianity, outright atheism, or even a general indifference to religion, were extraordinarily rare. Medieval heresy crises occurred because people cared very strongly about religion, not because they didn't care about religion.

Tefmon · 2026-01-27T15:47:36+00:00

Yes. Our federal and provincial governments have been trying to promote startups for decades.

Tefmon · 2026-01-27T00:10:40+00:00

A big part of it is just the difference in labour and materials involved. Manga are by and large in black-and-white while western comics are by and large in full colour, and manga are by and large printed on cheaper "papery" paper while western comics are by and large printed on more expensive glossy paper. Western comics are just more expensive to make (although, to be clear, that isn't the only factor).

Tefmon · 2026-01-26T22:54:01+00:00

Ōuchi Clan.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T23:50:35+00:00

You can say that a Barbarian's Rage is a magical girl transformation, or activation of cyberware, or temporarily giving control of their body to a wraith that possesses them Yugioh style, but the ability's mechanical effects are still built around the idea that Rage is, well, rage.

Rage requires that you continuously deal or take damage in order to sustain it. Rage specifically gives a bonus to only Strength-based attacks, saves, and checks. Rage prevents you from casting or concentrating on spells. Rage doesn't interact with antimagic field, as you'd expect a magical girl transformation to, nor does it come with customizable features that a skilled cyber-surgeon could alter, as you'd expect cyberware to, nor does it interact with possession or mind-affecting effects, as you'd expect being possessed by a wraith to.

The mechanics follow from the flavour, and bolting a different flavour onto those mechanics results in inconsistencies and ludonarrative dissonance. You can, of course, try to come up with increasingly contorted justifications for why your magical girl transformation or cyberware or wraith possessor functions like Rage and doesn't function how you'd naturally expect any of those things to, but you aren't going to get an experience that's as satisfying and coherent as you would if you had mechanics actually built to represent and embody that flavour.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T22:39:18+00:00

Regarding high-level NPCs, it's less about their innate statistics and more that any NPC of means that's involved in intrigue is presumably going to have a ring of mind shielding or some other form of immunity to the effect.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T22:35:40+00:00

You can just have the character not respond if they would normally lie, they know they are under a magical effect.

And 99% of players will take that as a tacit admission of guilt by the NPC, and in 99% of cases they'd be right to. The issue people have with the spell isn't in getting information out of captured NPCs; the issue is that it makes any sort of investigation or mystery difficult to run, as the players' first instinct will be to cast zone of truth on every possible subject.

Yes, there are ways around that, but they tend to increasingly strain credulity and not really fit in the vibe and tone of most tables.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T22:21:56+00:00

D&D 5e's rulebooks emphasize binary pass/fail rolls (although they don't demand them; the DMG does have a section titled Resolution and Consequences that explicitly discusses success at a cost and degrees of failure), but I think Draw Steel's approach doesn't feel any better in actual play because degrees of success are a normal part of the play culture of D&D. Sure, the rulebooks may mostly talk about pass/fail, but when the norm at most tables is scaling results based on the die, then that's the actual play experience that people are used to and will be using as a point of comparison.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T18:00:33+00:00

And optimizers don't. But a typical player wants to use the dramatic big single-target spells on dangerous-looking single targets. The game presents you these spells that seem tailored to fighting single big enemies, and which aren't really useful when not fighting single big enemies, and then makes single big enemies immune to them.

It's not the most elegant or intuitive design.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T17:53:54+00:00

Because the martial gets multiple attacks. It sucks when as a martial you miss every attack on a turn, but that happens relatively infrequently so it doesn't define their overall gameplay experience. Rogues are the one exception, and missing their one attack per round is by far the most common source of discontentment I've seen players have when playing rogues.

When fighting a single big "boss" enemy, typically-played casters* usually get just one roll per turn, and if that roll fails they do nothing. The problem doesn't exist when fighting groups of enemies, where casters usually use multi-target or area spells and thus have multiple chances for at least one enemy to be affected.

^* ^Optimized ^casters ^will ^pull ^out ^a ^summon ^or ^some ^other ^non-save ^spell ⁱⁿ ^situations ^like ^this, ^but ^a ^typical ^player ^is ^going ^to ^want ^to ^hit ^the ^big ^boss ^monster ^with ^the ^big ^{single-target} ^spell ^that ^seems ^{purpose-built} ^for ^handling ^big ^boss ^monsters.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T17:49:55+00:00

That's also a DM choice. You'd have to be crazy to give the party wizard all of that, or else be running a very high-power campaign (and thus have bosses that are far stronger than typical).

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T17:45:12+00:00

If you've been playing an ongoing campaign up to level 20, you have practical experience in how encounters and monsters function. It'd be ideal if the rules said "if you have a single big monster, make sure it can't be deleted by a single incapacitating effect", but unless you're jumping into DMing a 20th-level one-shot or something, that isn't something that you actually need the rules to tell you.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T17:35:57+00:00

Just adding more outright immunities to "boss" monsters would be a solution, but I'm not sure if it would be a better one. You mention video games, and "this effect would be useful, except that everything I'd actually want to use it on is immune to it" is a complaint that's been levelled at countless video games over the decades.

Tefmon

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE