I think the genre you are looking for is "immersive sims". Notable historical examples are Thief, Deus Ex, and System Shock.

I don't know wtf "real communism" is, all I know is that the communism I advocate for is not that of Lenin, Stalin, or Mao

Meta Gear Solid -- a game about the metal gear series

Putting all the various "gaming" communities on kbin and Lemmy together on one page is a nice QOL feature but I'm not sure it's a good idea to present them to users as all the same thing. Gaming@kbin and gaming@lemmy and gaming@beehaw are different groups with different rules managed by different people and if users don't know that it's going to cause confusion in the long run

They also don't have sex in that play. It's a romance, not erotica

Its the same design but with 2020 aesthetics instead of 2005 aesthetics

MYST, and if you enjoyed that, Riven and Myst 3

Some of them are. IMO the best are Way of Life, Holy Fury, Conclave, and Old Gods. If you want to play some who isn't a Christian King, such as a Christian merchant or pagan/hindu/muslim king, you'll need to get the expansion for that. Respectively, those are The Republic, The Old Gods or Holy Fury (either will unlock Pagans), Rajas of India, and Sword of Islam. That being said, if you like playing a Christian, Sons of Abraham is worth picking up. Finally, if you're the type of person who really likes optimizing these sort of games, then you'll probably want Legacy of Rome, which adds retinues, customizable standing armies that let a skilled player solve the combat system to punch way above their weight

yeah, i guess i can see that. personally i never really grokked goodreads but honestly I feel that way about most social media platforms so its definitely a me issue

When I was in school, the bus route did not stop near my house, and it was too far to walk, and there was no good bike route (though one exists now). In middle and high school I would often walk or bike to a friend's house after school but that wasn't always an option.

This is a situation forced on us by car-centric city planning

it only serves to bias us and disort reality.

Ehh, i mean it definitely does do that, but political discussion is also important to guide action. We can see plenty of political action that gets nowhere and does nothing, because the people instigating it do not have a solid theory of how political change is accomplished. Political discussions are how that understanding emerges.

That being said the internet, especially platforms like mastodon that encourage short posts, is rarely the best place for productive political discussion.

There is a powerful network effect to overcome here, and I don't think "being federated" is enough to overcome it for most people. Reddit and tumblr and discord offered us "what if all your forums/blogs/chatrooms were in one place" which is massively convenient, and why people flocked to those platforms. Thats a transformative user experience. being federated is transformative, but the change to the user experience -- beyond a larger barrier to entry -- is minimal. The point of mastodon is that its functionally equivalent to twitter without being centralized. But there are no decentralized places left on the internet, beyond those holdouts who are either very attached to their old technology or want to maintain their unilateral control over their platform, and who are unlikely to federate.