“However, Coco noted that Koenig also urged the Holy See to not make public what he was revealing because he feared for his own life and the lives of the resistance sources who had provided the intelligence.”

Koenig, for the 99% of people who don’t read past the headline, is the author of the letter in question.

Violating an NDA is a civil issue, not criminal. This guy got arrested for stealing.

During Gale’s spell-teaching scene, you now have the option to picture a future with Gale that falls somewhere in between kissing him and kicking him in the head.

Direct reference to yesterday’s Zero Punctuation?

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In response to complaints about overwatch 2 removing free cosmetics, we’ve decided to make them purchasable only with uplay coins, which are themselves only buyable via Microsoft Rewards Points. See you on Bing!

The processor listed in the specs, Rockchip 3128 SOC, is a smart tv chip.

Present evidence that fake gambling causes real gambling. Not evidence that it actives dopamine receptors. Actual gambling.

Fantasy and fiction don’t cause maladaptive behavior. One day society will accept that this is still true for audiovisual media, just as it had to be slowly accepted for music, just as it had to be slowly accepted for books.

A review bomb is a collective effort to lower the score of something, abusing systems meant to reflect an average opinion by gathering people who would not normally leave a review, often people who haven’t even played the game. It is intentionally creating sampling bias. “Review bomb” is a meaningful term being applied correctly here. I don’t like modern blizz, but Overwatch 2 is not the worst game on steam as its review average would indicate.

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BG3 is one of my favorite games, but there is nothing technologically groundbreaking about it. As hardware improves, studios often prefer to use the new leeway to neglect optimization, which is a nightmare scenario for consumers who are forced to upgrade endlessly for no reason. It’s understandable that smaller studios may need to make that sacrifice, but there should be SOME penalty for it or it will get out of hand. The series S parity requirements provides some small penalization that I hope continues for generations to come.

Wow, so many Catan inductees here.

For me it was the notoriously shitty Civilization (2002). I was around 11 years old. Any designer board game is incredible if it’s the first one you’ve ever played.

The PS1 also sold the N64 3:1, But FF7, the highest selling FF game, only sold about 9m to OoT’s 7m. Relative to console sales, oot thrashed final fantasy 7. Of course, it helps that they cranked these games out way faster than Zelda back then.

The current situation is similar, except the switch is wildly more prevalent than the PS5. There is almost 1 TotK sold for every 6 switch units, which is utterly insane when you consider how many ignored/lost/broken units are probably out there. By contrast, there is about 1 FF16 for every 10 PS5 units out there.

I think too many people have tricked themselves/each other into thinking long games are bad because they are long. No, it’s because 95% of the time (moreso today than in the past), a high hour-to-complete time signals a game with 10 hours or content stretched out to an absurd extreme, often in support of MTX/live service type features available ay launch.

An 80 hour game can be good if it has 80 hours of actual content. A 25 hour game can be bad if it’s still just 3-4 hours of real game stretched out to 25-30.

The game’s original hype stemmed from it being a technical showcase for the PS5. Not exactly a selling point for the already more-powerful PC world. They also didn’t bother porting the previous game to PC before porting the sequel.

Left 4 Dead is like Animal Crossing. The sort of game that tricks devs into thinking “oh yeah that’s so simple, i can do that easy,” without understanding all the effort put into the little details that made the original shine.

Would former l4d devs understand that better? Maybe. But I’ve thus far been unimpressed with game offerings from “the team behind [bigger game]” projects.

Yep, my original source got it wrong, confusing the two dissenting opinions

"What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?”

• Justice Stephen Breyer*, somehow arguing the opposite of what you’d think this paragraph means.

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An early win is a well-documented technique known among gambling researchers and clinicians as a catalyst for addictive play, because it creates an early dopamine hit that gamblers are then eager to recreate, even as their subsequent losses mount.

You meant to say “Because it tricks someone into believing the continuing experience has more value than it does.”

I agree with the premise of the article, but the overuse of “dopamine” to explain predatory commercial behavior is exhausting. Your brain does stuff when you experience stuff. Dopamine isn’t some evil drug that you GeT a hIT oF. 90% of the time I see the dopamine used to describe some phenomenon, it is literally just a worse, more pretentious and sciency-sounding way to explain it. Like trying to describe how microsoft excel works to someone by describing semiconductors.

I remember more than a decade ago when (because popular things are evil) online articles were preaching the dangers of World of Warcraft vanilla, a game with a fixed subscription cost and no way to monetize big spenders. “When you level up there’s a big gold explosion, that’s to help with the DOPAMINE release and keep you HOOKED on your MMO DRUG.” Jesus christ people, it’s just strong visual design that made people feel accomplished.

These games are different, of course. They are predatory. But you don’t get closer to understanding why these tactics are effective by pretending you’re a neuroscientist talking about some highly objective medical phenomenon.

And before I get accused of being uneducated or disrespecting science, I’m a published researcher in cognition and cognitive neuroscience. I don’t have a phd because I left the field sick of a lot of the same fakeness I’m complaining about now.