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I'm not going to wade into escapism or the polysemic nature of language, but I can relate to what @Azdeus is saying and what @Hawke64 mentioned about pay to win (aside from exploiting gambling addictions, which is bad on its own terms). It would be very bad for players who regularly play a big multi-player game to have to deal with pay to win screwing everything up by shifting the meta towards paying for stuff (beyond the normal price or subscription) or get ****ed. It's bad design for the long term because it makes needing to pay for stuff having a much larger part of the game than skill and you'll end up with a shrinking base of players until you're only left with those dedicated enough to consistently pay for stuff or enjoy suffering. Thankfully I don't play much besides single-player and don't run into too much of it, but if I did play multi-player stuff I'd jump ship the second they introduced pay to win horse****.

I feel like you are the one using the term wrong. Escapism isn't usually considered unhealthy unless you are neglecting the real world while doing it. Most games are about constructing a new reality over the one you live in. It's a literal escape. Books and movies do the same thing.

Except it's exploitative as Hawke pointed out, and when it effects everyone else having their enjoyment ruined because someone decided to pay 2 games worth of money for an advantage it's not much fun. People buying gold in WoW used to be annoying but fairly uncommon, but now Blizzard has monetized that aswell, why spend weeks grinding gold for something when you can just chuck Bobby 25$? I remember how much fun it was in Planetside 2 at release when people immediately bought flyers weeks before tanks could grind out AA-guns effectively making them completely defenceless sitting ducks if that was your prefered playstyle, preventing them from getting even a chance at grinding for defences. So no, it's ****ing bad. Games are escapism, to have the rich people of the world get their advantages taken into escapism is ****ing awful.

Sure, it's all perspective in that sense. Ppl are free to do with their hard earned money whatever they want. It's tiresome re: game marketing at this point is all. Not simply the greed aspect but also for potential game design/creativity re: such games, when the main purpose is to create a game that funnels/motivates ppl right towards the cash shop. Bah. I'm too old and inflexible now maybe. 😛

any moderate republican candidate could beat biden w/o a sweat. the problem for haley and anybody else is that no republican will win w/o approval from the trump base-- republicans made a proverbial deal with the devil when they embraced trump. 'course it didn't start with trump. for years the gop was advancing the big tent metaphor while sarah palin, rush limbaugh and steve bannon were simultaneous appealing to the not-so-fringe elements o' the gop. working class white voters, many o' whom voted for obama, were facing decades long economic hardship and simultaneous they were being told they were benefiting from white privilege. in retrospect is not surprising marginalized and disaffected white voters chose to glomp onto an elmer gantry figure such as trump. those voters were looking for a savior from evil as 'posed to a President. elements o' the gop identified a group o' voters who needed a push to radicalize 'em, and that is exact what they did. gop big tent went in the dumpster and instead we see a platform o' outrage and grievance. republicans know they can't win without the radicalized base they took into the fold. is only a few years past, but seeming improbable, key is now full on supporting a candidate who promotes dozens o' demonstrable wrong conspiracy theories about covid, masks, the cia, and tainted water supplies turning your kids trans. doesn't matter how much proof there is o' guys such as trump and rfk jr being wrong 'bout covid deaths or cancer causing windmills, 'cause while the corrupt government and fake news media attempts to distract you with every little detail those guys get wrong, those complicit institutional supporters are ignoring the bigger and important truth that guard dog's They are indeed out to get you and is only individuals not part o' the establishment who have any chance whatsoever o' fixing the corrupt system... or some other nonsense. being angry isn't a crime and in 2023 there is more than a little justification for working class whites to be angry, yes? being told that systematic problems which has existed for a long time can't be fixed simple and easy ain't a winning strategy for getting the angry vote. political version o' flat earthers is no longer fringe, and is not limited to the right (if you want, we can post video from a recent oakland city council meeting where the lefty kooks were calling for oakland to condemn israel [serious] and many such individuals were insisting october 7 were a israeli false flag operation as justification for their outrage,) am not personal understanding why anybody would listen to trump, rfk jr trump and other sources o' endemic misinformation, but for some inexplicable reason, the anti-authority nutters seem to need just a little push from a recognizable authority figure to full embrace their anger and crazy. ironic. haley could easily beat biden... just so long as she has trump base support. it might be a smart movie for trump if he bargained support o' haley in exchange for a prospective pardon, but am barely able to imagine trump doing smart. also, pardons wouldn't get trump out o' his georgia or civil problems. HA! Good Fun!

I would suggest that you're probably using the wrong term here, i.e. instead of escapism you could or perhaps should be talking about simply having fun. Escapism as a phenomenon is not particularly healthy, while there's nothing wrong with having fun playing a game, even if it's an alternative to the constructive things in your life. As for your second point, fair enough: there is something decidedly unappealing about other people going for a wee in your cup of tea while you're drinking it. So I agree with you there.

The people targeted by MTX and lootboxes are slightly more vulnerable to addictive gambling*. The monetisation also destroys the design and quality of the original work, like can be seen with Middle-Earth: Shadow of War (currently available on GOG with 85% discount). Granted, most "games" that use those are trash with or without MTX. *https://www.ign.com/articles/heres-how-loot-box-addiction-destroys-lives Not the best example, as does not cite statistical research numbers, but suitable enough. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/please-stop-huffing-your-steam-deck-vent-fumes-valve-plead-as-players-obsess-over-new-deck-smell https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/how-does-time-dilation-set-exodus-apart-from-mass-effect-it-supersizes-all-of-the-choices-that-you-make Curious if they will be able to make it work. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/prince-of-persia-the-lost-crown-has-a-big-brewing-frenemy-battle-on-its-hands-and-it-cant-come-soon-enough

Flashlight (turns on/off with your chr's) and laser accessories. Not all fauna can wear two pieces. I've never had pets out during combat, no clue if they use the laser. Probably need an "aggressive" pet and even if they do, I'm sure it's not very effective. 😛 I found a - hyena? dog? - animal which had six legs and unicorn horn. Hadn't seen that before. Had to have it. The one on the right - don't you want a flying Dumbo tadpole, too? Red misty mountains, or something.

Isn't this kind of pay-to-win? https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/product/world-of-warcraft-service-character-boost Don't play WoW myself, but I heard there's lots of talk about that.

The Murder on Eridanos. In progress. Somehow surprised at the number of assassination attempts the victim had survived before dying. After spending 2 months on LinkedIn, the writing seems especially touching and thought-provoking, while remaining humorous. I also remembered that I was not particularly fond of the combat and items, though, the former has been mostly avoidable so far. Spirit of the North. It is a walking simulator with light puzzles, platforming elements, and collectibles (bringing staves to skeletons). The protagonist is a fox who follows a fox spirit across a northern landscape. It is an impressive project for 2 people - it is playable, consistent, short, and it looks and runs fine. On the other hand, there are no rebindable controls, the controls in general feel clunky, the last area was a navigational nightmare, and I had one soft-lock. I also was unable to launch the EGS version through Steam, so there are very few screenshots taken. Still, it is significantly better than Lost Ember, another game with a fox following a spirit, due to the spirit being a silent fox instead of a narrator.

Since all chaos marines are immortal, all those crusaders are the same anyway. Bad guys in 40K have such plot armour, if they were to get shot in the eye point blank, they would blink in the very last micro-second, the bullet would ricochet off the eyelid, out of the book and kill the reader.

The whole point of escapism is to get away from being constructive, I have enough of that. I do generally ignore games like that, but when you start to play the games way before they introduce pay to win mechanics you are still effected. For instance, I started WoW in 2005 and didn't entirely stop until they started to dip into pay to win with Cataclysm in iirc 2010 with that store mount /spit. Planetside 2 I was a beta tester for, and it didn't become clearly apparent until release how pay to win it was. I think I lasted two evenings or something before I lost it.

"Well, if they're having fun, guess it's nothing too bad." It is important to make ppl aware they're not really liking what they're liking when it's something we dislike.

Well, if they're having fun, guess it's nothing too bad.

Customers are like cows. They *need* to be milked. It's symbiotic!

In Swedish Ge mig smisk pappa Or more grammatically correct Smiska mig pappa/pappa smiska mig Not much better 😄

It's pay to win though, especially if they were to implement looting companions or "early access" to certain weapons/items Not a lick surprised though, they've been milking their customers for years and gamers deserve this for buying the **** from the start, gamers deserve the giant pecker heading for their rectum.

Huh, USA today is reporting they passed a bill with funds, but I'm not seeing many other reports on it. Weird.

Andre Braugher, ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ and ‘Homicide: Life on the Street’ Star, Dies at 61