Fwiw, that didn’t come off as a complaint at all. Things tend to be taken with very thin skin around here.

And THAT issue (the one with black pages. you know what I’m talking about.) of Saga deserves to go on here, too. Just a masterful use of the medium.

I am offended because you guys are treating something really benign as if the game was making rape jokes. If we overreact to something that isn’t a big deal this much, how will anyone ever take us seriously when it is something that really does need to be addressed?

Right there in the first paragraph, he calls a simple picture, an “insidious kind of peer pressure.” That’s pretty strong wording for something that didn’t affect him in a deeply psychological manner.

Well, as I’m not a gamergater, I’d say that you shouldn’t bet your house on your shitty betting skills. There’s a world of difference between being a misogynistic dudebro and being so ridiculously sensitive that you not only have your feelings hurt by a picture in a videogame, but that you think no one else should be…

No, he’s not. You don’t take a game option away from everyone simply because YOU dislike it. The only thing he was right about is that there should be a menu option to disable it.

Doing a switcheroo doesn’t make it less true.

I like that getting upset at a game calling them a baby is a thing a baby would do.

Right about what? He doesn’t even have a point to make. “Play games on whatever difficulty you’d like”. Wow, fucking groundbreaking.

For fuck’s sake, Ethan, really? This is dumb. Sorry, this is just dumb. How little self confidence must you have that a picture of a man in a baby bonnet somehow bullies you? It’s a picture in a video game. No one is watching you. It isn’t a form of peer pressure, it’s your own weird insecurities. Sack up, man.

In other words, you felt peer pressure from a game and now want all of us to peer pressure gaming companies into making game that doesn’t peer pressure you back?

No, they really believe it. As Pareene perspicaciously pointed out, Republicans used to sell magic elixirs to the public, but in doing so, they raised a new generation of Republican officeholders stupid enough to actually believe the bullshit that the Republican leaders of the past at least understood was bullshit in…

I’m actually going to disagree with you here. A collection can be finite, but for many people it just keeps growing and for some people it really is a problem. Collecting rare coins can be a never-ending search (and a really expensive one), collecting all the Beanie Babies is virtually impossible as there are over…

So then how do we have a system that balances people who are prone to addiction (because people will get addicted or already are) to the rest of the people who can handle buying a couple of loot crates for some cosmetics and then be done with it?

There’s no easy answer. Especially because gaming companies can’t survive…

ok then, since you’re equating loot boxes to gambling in casinos, classify loot boxes as gambling and regulate them as such. that’s the real issue.

I think there’s a larger conversation that needs to be had about the “value” of the games we buy.

Business has always affected design, but after “arcades” and before “DLC/microtransactions,” once the game was in your hands, it was out of developers’ hands. You’re right, they did sell strategy guides, but those were rarely necessary, and also once we got sites like gamefaqs, strategy guides became completely…

If the problem were a LOT worse than it was, sure. But the problem isn’t NEARLY as bad as you’re making it out to be, so it’s not a bad system at all. If anything, it empowers players to speak out about games they love or hate.

Pulling the plug is a really really stupid solution to a problem that doesn’t make up a very large percentage of the overall feature.

Wow, now im depressed and slighly aroused at the same time.