It's all the cocaine. When I watched madmen I thought it was an exaggeration. Then I dated a guy who worked in marketing and met his coworkers.

God forbid the racist asshat doesn't feel welcome on the internet. Fuck asmongold, he is stupid and this argument is stupid, racist and made in bad faith. He is plain wrong, don't defend the racist.

The game industry was assaulted by the MBAs long ago. They have this financial concept of leaving money on the table. That if you aren't skinning your customers alive for all they have then you are losing money.

Then there was that infamous power point slide that got leaked where, basically, the plan is to use games to bring in audiences then use gambling techniques to hook on whales then cash them for eternity. Thus "live services games" were born.

It feels like uncreative, predatory shit because it is. It's a finance people idea, not a creative game developer idea.

Is this fish but with plants?

In true carbrain fashion, not only they ignore the existence of turn lights, they also ignore the existence of turn signals.

I think you are missing the point. The system is the monster. It's what creates, gives power, hides, and protects those people so they can get away with it. Sure, all societies have horrible people, but only one system rewards and protects the worst of the worst and guilt trips and kills anyone else who tries to reveal or oppose them.

The government lies.

It doesn't matter when or where you read this, it's always true.

I find it funny, because it is not required at all. You could be the most casual lazy ass gamer, and still see and accomplish every piece of content inside the game. The game doesn't penalize you, and instead goes out of the way to reward the player for everything they do, even if it is just loitering around and barely progressing stuff at random and by chance.

Then you don't engage with over 60% of the game anyways. Sounds to me like a balanced game that has something to offer to a variety of players, and anxieties, overfixation and stress with some gameplay and not other seems to be something the player brings in and is not caused by the game.

I might be remembering wrong, but I think it is entirely possible to develop relationships with the town characters and see almost all of the cutscenes without ever upgrading any of those.

You don't find out what that means unless you made it to year two and it immediately tells you that you can keep trying anytime you want.

It's not a one and done, you can literally retry the test infinitely. There is no crunch period at all, this anxiety comes from players misunderstanding things the game says in plain English.

Some people have a money anxiety built in that translates into the game. The funny thing is they bring it all themselves, the game makes absolutely no fuzz at all about making money.

The very first scene is the main character running away from the ratrace to a farm. Yet the very first thing some players do is bring in the ratrace with them. Everything in the game makes money and no money at all is ever required by the game from the player, except to advance the farming itself. It doesn't even have banks or debts like animal crossing.

It's bizarre how people, when left to their own devices, simply reproduce the worse habits of real life.