Buttflapper
The real question is why our government in the USA hasn’t stepped in and made any protections for our data, which would solve this issue entirely. Apps like Temu or Character.AI have very sketchy data management and privacy practices, you have no idea what they’re really doing with your data, it’s required to make an account for both of them. Clearly they are selling them and obtaining lots of your data to do all sorts of things with. Frankly, I don’t think it should be legal to obtain huge amounts of people’s data, specifying nothing about what it is actually, truly being used for
I agree that votes don’t matter at all. Now please, except my humbly casted vote for you in the upward direction :D But no, I think psychologically speaking, votes actually do kind of matter because of mob mentality. If the first thing you see is something overwhelmingly negative, you’re more likely to think negatively. This was tested and seems to be the case, if people see a bunch of negative comments on something, they are more like to join in on the mob and downvote or be negative
Having played most of these indie games already, I agree with you completely. Indie gaming is awesome, and I can’t wait to see what new games are developed. I’m also hoping to develop my own title, but I have first hand experience with development, and it’s a crazy amount of work. It’s going to take me at least 12 months Just to even get the first town or area in my game done because of how much learning I have to do, how much design and development, then coding. Truly astounding how much work goes into creating something incredibly small scale. These big massive companies with billion-dollar equity behind them, They have all these crazy resources to Create these games absurdly fast. They can just plop down a resource generated set of walls and textures, and in days, You have an entire town created. I’ve seen it done, makes me kind of jealous and hope that indie developers can get this kind of stuff later on
This problem would likely be solved if we simply implemented a new economic system in the USA revolving around employee ownership of companies. Having stockholders is what really kills passion and innovation at big companies. The only focus is to please the stockholders drive the stock value up, return on investment, stuff like that. There is zero incentive for these big companies to give anything back to the developers, so there’s also zero loyalty. Why would these developers put their heart and soul into something That requires them to work 60 hours a week, and provides almost nothing in return to them? That’s what I’m hoping to see soon, gaming studios that are for profit, with all profits being used to cover salary of the hard workers
A very obvious solution to groupthink is to do away with the silly voting system. I don’t know why they kept it. A very simple solution would have been to just assign votes to a topic based on how much attention it’s getting. In simple terms, If opposed has 10,000 people that have viewed it, 1,000 people have left a comment, compared to a post that has 100,000 views and 15 comments, you can tell which one should have more attention score. The upvote and downvote system is too easily used as a dislike or like system. Many of us have the maturity to upvote something because we think it’s a good discussion point even if we don’t agree with what the person is saying. But a lot of people don’t think that way mentally. They see something, they read it, immediately go into toxic hater mode and just downvote it for no reason
Honestly, some of the gaming community these days Is filled with the most revolting, incel cesspool I’ve ever seen. Look at zenless Zone Zero created by Hoyo, who also created Genshin impact. It’s filled with characters that look like they are 12 years old, highly sexualized and half naked, with jiggly boob and butt physics, feet pictures, the official community on Reddit that is run by Hoyo itself is bombarded with half naked pictures of these young girls. It’s truly disturbing. The way these gamers defend it is even more disturbing. They say things like “It’s fictional so it doesn’t matter if she looks like a child.” like what??? Bro
Point was, gaming community has never historically been filled with so many pervy people coming out of the woodwork saying grotesque things about characters that look like they are 12 years old like they are now. That stuff usually stayed on 4chan and other niches. Now, you have AAA studios developing games with so many thirst trap elements in them that it’s honestly disturbing. Activision Blizzard had to completely remove paintings and pictures of women from the game as a response to sexual abuse allegations within their own company. That’s a billion dollar company owned by Microsoft. More people aren’t taking a stand on this because they’re clearly enjoying the oversaturation of heavily sexualized video games nowadays. That’s pretty disturbing and that kind of stuff should never be mainstream because mainstream games are supposed to appeal to an audience of all ages, and makes it easier to get access to that kind of stuff for everyone which creates its own problems
You clearly don’t remember ye olde days when gaming companies would just openly advertise using misogyny because they believed it would appeal to their target demographic. There was a time when a game having a woman protagonist would be considered shocking, and all women characters in games wore bikinis.
I remember quite clearly actually, and as a kid, it was boring and kinda gross to me. Instant dislike and lost my desire to play any game like that
Spare me the puritanical bullshit. The notion that every game should appeal to all ages is monumentally stupid. Go back to the dark ages when people complained about violence in games causing school shootings.
What does this have to do with puritanical ideology, exactly? Games like Doom were terrific, I played them when I was 10. No misogyny, no sexualization at all. Duke Nukem on the other hand, instant pass. Felt like a slumlord game and way too gross. The amount of glorification of sexually explicit stuff was really strange to me. Like it’s ok if you want to call a game an eroge/erotica game sure there’s a whole target market for that. But when you have a company like Hoyo that makes Gacha RPGs and then lie blatantly about it being a regular action RPG and it’s a highly sexualized erotica game with jiggle physics thrown into your face every 5 mins, big nope from me, we don’t need that bullshit. Their false advertising and sexual explicit sub themes have driven a lot of people away from the game.
