Actual writing chops aside, if I had to distill why I find myself not particularly impressed with relationship mechanics in any new games today, Japanese or otherwise, it's that in 2011, Konami released a dating sim by way of New Love Plus where you could play some of its very own arcade back catalog like Twinbee and Yie Ar Kung-Fu cooperatively with your date, either simultaneously or trading control as needed. [...] It was a quietly sublime demonstration of how the best dating sims can use familiar-looking language and even heritage to challenge the typical design ends of those traditions. If you want an example of how game design isn't a linear evolution and that lessons get lost, abandoned, or disregarded, the extreme cherry-picking of dating sim legacies is definitely up there for me.

Me watching some high fantasy shit: I would simply not be corrupted by the magical object. If it is actively harming you why don’t you just put it down. Idiot Me receiving psychic damage 23 hours a day from my phone: Ouuughhhh oouuuuwwwwaaaaaa ooaaaaghuuuuuhhhowwgahhhhh guuuuuwah

So, when I ask how he’d like to see the industry change, Taro’s outlandish response wasn’t as surprising as you might think — especially given his many remarks on the failings of the video game industry at large. “I would like to see aliens or something attack Earth in a way that destroyed all of the silicon-based technology we currently have, so the whole world had to return to the 8-bit era and game creators were forced to make a living developing games in that low-tech environment.”

2006 - 2022: Corporate content hosts are so cheap and easy that no one has an incentive to learn to self-host content, and people who were previously self-hosting content move over to big "social" platforms 2022 - … : Platforms close off in every imaginable way and start taking every opportunity to extract rents from users, benefits that originally got people to move over now gone, but the network effects are such you can no longer switch to open alternatives or convince other people to do so

The suggestion that patriarchy can be fought through the act of ‘waking women up’ to the unfair double standards they experience is obviously absurd. There is no sense in which the contents of the film, or the use of ‘Barbie’ as a role model, can serve to genuinely equip women to combat the patriarchy. the Barbie movie does not serve as a replacement for ‘talking about politics.’ Instead, it practically begs the audience to conceive of such useless political discussions as genuinely political. In a sense, I may have presented the causal order of this phenomenon backwards. It may be that the desire to ‘talk about politics’ is a cheap reflection of the form of (pseudo) political action roused in audiences through the presentation of consumption as a political act. The gradual transition from this form of consumption serving as a temporary ‘shield’ for forgetting about the political to constituting what defines the political may just be a product of the increasingly hegemonic role that large capitalist firms play within culture. And this phenomenon is, of course, predicated upon an intensification of powerlessness and a withering away of political agency