I mean, how is it any different than referencing movies, music, TV shows, stand-up comedy, or any other piece of pop culture?
Would referencing a movie somebody hasn't seen before make you terminally in-theater or something? Though, having said that, I am now going to take every opportunity I can to work the phrase "terminally in-theater" into my daily life anytime somebody mentions a Marvel movie or something.
I heard a city planner talk about why adding a new lane doesn't help, and the term they use is "induced demand."
Basically, people are going to take the route that they consider the most convenient, and that usually comes down to time and effort. Traffic hurts both by taking more time and being more stressful to deal with. When you add a new lane to a road, people think that the traffic will be easier there, so they take that route instead of their normal one. So you're just adding more cars to the traffic that match or exceed the throughput of your new lane, basically putting you back at square one but a few billion dollars more poor.
You've essentially added a single lane one-way road to help ease traffic across the entire city.
There's a big flaw in your logic.
The biggest portion of people buying this stuff aren't "gamers" in the way that it's often used around these circles. It's the millions of people who buy coins for their Bejeweled clone of choice and have never owned a console in their life. And there's so many new kids entering gaming all the time who have never known a better world. I remember a Twitch streamer talking about how heartbreaking it was when AC6 came out and gave you the full color wheel plus multiple channels to customize your mech, and their chat was full of kids shocked that you didn't have to buy skins or color packs. That's how it used to be. You'd unlock skins by playing the game, not buying them in the store, but that hasn't been the case in decades now.
And the often touted story of the whale with more money than sense is a myth. Do they exist? Sure. But the vast majority of money coming from mtx from gamers is from people who are psychologically vulnerable to addiction/gambling and people with a poor ability to comprehend finances like kids. These companies have hired psychologists to tell them how to best extract money from your wallet by probing your brain in just the right way. From lootboxes to battle passes and seasonal content to daily quests and washing money through funny money currencies, it's all been designed to prey upon people with addiction issues, ADHD, training young kids into gambling addicts, etc. It's the Lotto tickets and pumping extra oxygen into the air of casinos and making sure there's no natural light in there so you don't realize how long you've been playing slots of the gaming world. Look at WoW, with its daily quests. They train players using Skinner Box techniques to continue logging into the game and paying the monthly subscription long after they've stopped enjoying it because it's become a habit and they are afraid of falling behind.
Voting with your wallet isn't going to fix it. You'll never get your average Facebook mom to care enough not to buy Farmville tokens or whatever, and these companies will never stop abusing psychology on their own. Only industry regulation will stop this.
You nailed it. It's 100% inspired by Starship Troopers and is a criticism of US propaganda in the same vein while also being an incredibly fun co-op game.
The only thing you're missing is just how obtuse some people are. It runs into the same thing as the Warhammer 40k universe, where the humans are obviously just as bad as everybody else, but people praise their fascist military industrial complex society. Either people are so incredibly media illiterate that it makes your head spin, or they're wilfully ignorant because it supports their worldview. Take your pick, but I go for a little of both.
My first thought was this shirt so I was very confused:
One thing all these games share: not being made by one of the big companies like EA, Activision-Blizzard-King, or Ubisoft.
Hell, one of these was made by one dude, and another was made by the guys who made Magicka and was expected to have a player population of around 10k.
I have one of those 76 "canvas" (vinyl) bags sitting around somewhere. Anytime somebody I know gets excited about a new Bethesda game, I just send them a picture of it and tell them that I've got a great bag to sell them.
I think it comes from the other direction. Like, the trans and femboy communities are small, but a high portion of them are in tech jobs and FOSS. So this is a stereotype about trans women and femboys all being into Arch, rather than all Arch users being trans women or femboys.
Still overused, but I can see why since the 3 most active communities I see on Lemmy are Linux users, trans people, and Trekkies.
People with poor fiscal responsibility skills, such as children, people with ADHD, and people with mental health issues like depression.
They literally hire psychologists to make this stuff as enticing as possible by pushing the right buttons in your brain.
This is brilliant for them. They basically take the elevator pitches from the concept phase of design and toss them at players to see what sticks. Don't even have to get to the point of a vertical slice to playtest, just a conceptual animation of gameplay.
Starting a career has increasingly felt like a right of passage for Gen Z and Millennial workers struggling to adapt to the working week and stand out to their new bosses.
What the hell does this even mean. How is starting a career considered a "rite of passage" when the average American works 50-60 hours a week between 2 or more jobs? A career in a single field is straight up considered as unattainable as buying a house is by Millennials (46% of whom own a house, compared to the average of 65% for other generations). Plus Millennials have been in the workforce for multiple decades now. We're in our 30s and 40s. And nobody has "struggled" to adapt to the work week since the 40 hour week was created after unions fought for the right to 2 days off a week. Children are indoctrinated to this cycle in kindergarten! And it's a lie anyways with the modern culture of bosses demanding people be available to call during nights and weekends. The average corporate work week was closer to 47 hours even 10 years ago. Do they mean working at a single company for more than 3 years? Because that's often a loss in pay compared to changing companies.
We're off to a bad start before even hitting the paywall...
For those who don't get the joke, bagels are a Jewish food.
Also, I'd argue they got a good thing going there. Got the gravlax, bagel, and egg on top. Sounds like a delicious breakfast sandwich to me (just get rid of the silly kebab spear and give me some fruit on the side or something).