missingno

do you think that you are contributing anything useful to the conversation here

I'd say it depends on what kind of conservative - bigot, capitalist, or both.

Deprogramming a bigot can be done by getting them to interact with and make friends with minorities. On paper this doesn't sound hard, but bigots become that way in the first place because they don't have a healthy and diverse social circle, and you may not be able to just give them one. Hell, depending on how bigoted they are, it may not be responsible or even safe to make anyone else have to deal with interacting with them.

Deprogramming a capitalist has to be done very carefully, but I think for many people there is a lot of common ground that can be reached. I think most people feel the same frustrations that we do, but they've been too indoctrinated by the legacy of McCarthyism to recognize that capitalism is the underlying cause of most of what's wrong with the world today. So you have to be slow and subtle in coaxing them towards this, if you use the words 'capitalism', 'socialism', or 'communism', they will just shut down and stop listening.

I'll never forget when my conservative grandmother watched the primary debates back in 2016 and told me she actually thought Bernie made a lot of good points. And then she went on to vote for Trump in November. And I get why! The one thing Bernie and Trump have in common is that they tell people "I know you're mad at the world today, I'm mad too, and I'm going to fix it instead of leaving this status quo where it is." Even if they're on opposite sides of what they want to do about it, they agree that the world sucks, and that's really all that a lot of people need to hear. Start there, and then guide them towards why the world is screwed up and how exactly we fix it.

I think the best argument you can make is to talk about how the rise of automation is going to shape the future. We are moving towards a world where there will be far fewer jobs that need humans than there are humans who need jobs. A world where robots are gonna do all the work for us ought to be a utopia, leaving us free to enjoy life and follow our passions. But capitalism relies on the assertion that everyone must work for a living or else they starve and die - what happens when there aren't enough jobs to go around? The only way we can solve this is to rethink this premise of capitalism, that everyone must work or die. Automation can only be a utopia in a post-capitalist world, under capitalism it will become a dystopia.

Of course, this only works for people who are not rich enough to support capitalism for entirely self-serving reasons. If you're talking to someone whose job is likely to be automated away in the future, those are the people you have the best chance of reaching. If you're talking to someone who is going to own all the robots, hell they probably know and don't care.

I have a channel that I barely use once in a blue moon, and I watch players who are good at my favorite games so I can study from them, as well as following tournaments.

I'm not expecting to beat Daigo Umehara any time soon. I'm just aiming to beat the next guy in front of me. And the next. And the next. No matter what my skill level, there's always a challenge. That doesn't mean I have to be the very best, quite the opposite.

You'll find more close-knit communities in smaller games. I play a lot of fighting games, and the FGC moves heaven and earth to keep the one thing alive that very few other games are doing: locals. Go to locals and meet people!

I guess I just don't get the tribalism here. Both are cool in different ways.

Singleplayer games offer a more curated experience. A story and a set of hand-crafted challenges. But that generally means finishing one and moving onto the next, rather than really sinking my teeth in it.

Multiplayer games offer a neverending challenge. There's always a better opponent. And I've made a lot of good friends through these communities.

I play games that are so niche that the 'matchmaking' consists of pinging people on Discord. Because we don't have proper matchmaking, we struggle to retain new players because they come in, get pulverized into the dust, and give up.

The point of matchmaking is that even a more casual beginner can find opponents at their level, without having to grind a ton to catch up with those of us who have been playing for years.

It was a great game that I enjoyed start to end, but ending on a "this will only make sense when the 3rd game releases in X years!" note leaves a really sour taste in my mouth.

Well, one problem with ZTD is that it completely ignored the teaser in VLR's epilogue. Actively contradicted it even.

I don't think the teaser made VLR feel incomplete though, since it was also completely disconnected from VLR's otherwise self-contained story.

Ryujinx was released as open source under the MIT license. They can't retroactively rescind that license.

They already made Chrono Trigger 2, but I won't blame you for forgetting it.

Patient gaming is a budgeting technique, not a strict law you must always adhere to.

I separate upcoming releases into two categories: games I'm so excited for that I would gladly pay full price at launch, and games I'm willing to wait on. Which games go in which category depend entirely on you and your budget.

Requiring new releases to provide this information going forward makes sense. But I expect a lot of older titles have no one actively paying attention to go get this paperwork filled out, and will get blocked as a result. This law should've just applied to everything new released after the law takes effect, grandfathering in legacy content.