“There are so many different reasons why this kind of thing happens”

Although in this case, since the con is in February, they did know what the future held - still not being able to hold mass gatherings. There’s zero chance the situation will be any better than it is now (and, given the expected explosion in cases following the holidays, they’ll probably be much worse). For the first…

The thing is, when talking about the game industry, when we talk about “crunch,” it’s the bad kind. The productive kind doesn’t even register as crunch, often. Part of the problem is that part of developer culture is expecting to spend long hours at the office as a normal thing, as a default. (I know a lead who had to…

It’s also worth considering if this delay occurred specifically due to their original attempt to avoid crunch.

Yikes.  Not unexpected, but this means the poor developers get to crunch for an extra month.

Effective: more people doing more work = more work getting done.

Sounds like it’s more honest now, at least for that part of the game - that as a player, you aren’t the one changing the world (even if they pretend someone else is). A game where everyone lines up, slays the Big Bad and gets loudly hailed as savior of the realm, in turn, was always ridiculous.

Single player games can be really bad about that, too. The worst I’ve experienced was a game that I couldn’t get more than 15 minutes into. The game’s way of providing background on its completely alien setting was to have your character, an experienced part of that world, ask incredibly basic questions of NPCs, who…

Ok, so it sounds, in some ways, less theme park-ish than it used to be. Originally you’d be lining up outside quest areas, waiting your turn to go kill the not-so-big bad along with every other player, then clamoring around the NPC to all turn in the same quest in which you were each, in turn, lauded as the one and…

Having worked in MMO development, what you call a “technical issue” I’d call a “design approach.” The theme park MMO and the alterable world MMO are two different beasts.

That’s more or less what those narrative Disney rides already kind of do, though - the movement of the roller coaster gets tied to narrative events that the passengers get credited with, to some degree, even though someone else is entirely in the driver’s seat. (“Oh no, we’ve been captured” “Yay, we shot down the…

That is, in a vague sense, true, except it’s true for the players rather than the characters... (constant reward loops for endorphin hits to create a sense of player accomplishment). Though it would be funny to deliberately make a game with that premise, as a semi-hidden part of the game’s lore... a lot of games would…

I only ever played vanilla WoW, so that was what I based my assessment on - it may be even more so now, though. It was always a streamlined MMO, as you say, where players queued for non-instanced content and turning in quests - the theme park nature of the game was laid bare from the start. They may have further…

WoW is just a rollercoaster now.

An outright stupid one as well considering that the game’s main selling point is the fact that thousands of other people are playing the game at the same time.

Yeah. It’s all part of the more fundamental problem of pretending that every player is a ‘special savior,’ which always felt wrong to me in an MMO like Warcraft. (I’m not crazy about it in single player games, either, but at least they don’t tell you that and then blatantly contradict themselves.)

Yeah, he lies about everything, but often the lies are much worse - and just, well, dumber - than what we expected them to be.

These kind of mental gymnastics are no different than the crazy webs that inform QAnon conspiracy theories.

Yep. I mean, it’s looking like they are lying about the situation, but it’s turning out that what they’re lying about is when he knew he was positive (at least a day earlier than acknowledged) and how sick he is (much sicker than acknowledged).

California’s been a lot more evidence-based and consistent about the coronavirus response than the UK (or England, at least). As far as I know, there still is a statewide ban on large indoor gatherings right now, that would prohibit this. Which is part of what confuses me. Someone is assuming things are going to…