So, I guess I *would* try to explain that I'm not at all a xenophobic, 'ignorant' American, considering my world travel and foreign/minority origin and such, or that i'm basing this off of what non-Americans have told me about visiting, or what Americans teaching in other countries have complained about; but it's not…

I'll have to get to know some New Zealanders. I just know that a lot of young Americans really latch onto what's meant as a self-effacing joke, or self-aware ribbing, and they get this warped view of themselves, as if the rest of the world is much better than them, when the truth is few places are on the whole. …

Even if only a third of us are conscientious, polite, honest, creative critical thinkers, that's still 100 million people. I'd bet we have more people like that than any other country, and it's extremely easy to find them everywhere. I know of some otherwise developed nations where you can go months without finding…

Pretty much every developer is American. We preface some developers with "Australian" or "French" or "Canadian" only because we'd assume they were American by default.

This is actually one of the things that makes a country great. There are many other countries that don't joke about themselves, whether they're too thin skinned or because it's literally against the law.

That's actually true. Nazism was a rising political ideology in America, gaining in popularity among the common and educated the way it did in Germany. It's only due to heavy WWII propaganda advocating tolerance and fairness, and condemning even the slightest pro-nazi sentiments, that protected America from actually…

America is probably in the top five best countries on Earth, in terms of the actual legal freedom and opportunity for citizens, and a cultural/educational framework that produces self-effacing, analytical, critical thinkers more often than most other countries.

Say what you want about television, but American media…

I think we probably are, actually. Americans tend to be more savvy about where their freedoms should end and another persons' begins. And they have a greater percentage of highly-functioning critical thinkers than a vast majority of the world. Many of our health and education statistics are thrown off by our unique…

You sound a bit depressed O_O

the dev's are also generally regarded to be jerks.

I had the same experience. I was with a friend I don't see much, and we decided to buy a multiplayer game together as a way to keep in touch. And...it was just an awful, soul-crushing, pointless experience. Even if nobody is shooting you in the face, it's just.... If in real life we were all clones building…

The biggest problem with Rust is that trying to build or accomplish anything is pointless. It's like a social experiment designed to induce nihilism, or to subvert the player's will to live.

I think long difficult boss battles are a vestigial feature from the days when people wanted to 'beat' a game. Gamers felt an absurd compulsion to continue to higher and higher levels because the challenge would increase, *because* they got harder, and so the boss battle had to be the hardest yet, or the cycle of…

Disclaimer: the people of the modern 3rd world are currently much better off, and much more reasonable than either Westeros or their ancestors, but there are still many tricky, subtle, awkward wrinkles to civilization that another couple generations of education and global media to Iron out.

Unfortunately, now that videogames are being played by people who have jobs and deadlines, there's less patience for unforgiving games. It breaks immersion, and begins to feel an awful lot like work, when you really don't have time for video games to begin with.

Videogames are operant conditioning, and lots of them operate on positive reinforcement only. A game with a frustrating death system bears a real risk of being 'punishment' for participating, and if you actually prevent people from playing a game when they die, you'll cause 'extinction' of the trained response.

That…

There were many Holocausts in that era, because everyone was swept up in the concept of 'modernism', a turn of the century political philosophy that said a government's main priority is to tightly define what a proper citizen should look like, act like, speak like, and think. In Premodern times cultural and…

Peasants revolts are just more of the same; someone with some economic freedoms or interests wanted to protect what they had against the nobles by using masses of peasants as cannon fodder. Since there wasn't any standardized or higher education, people were really susceptible to divisive propaganda, whether it's…

Okay, i guess you don't know what exactly i'm going for here, but:

This thing you're doing now, how you're bringing things up to make a moral case about something, because you've thought about the injustice of the world a lot and you really care about?

It is actually *very* different now. I'm not saying that the capacity to think rationally will end all evil or create a utopia, although if everyone really *was* rational we'd be a long way closer to it (Entire political parties and social problems would cease to exist).

I'm saying that dysfunctional behaviors, poor…