But it doesn't work that way. They get lowered to the level of the customers who don't want to overcome challenges. All they want is a good feeling. And those brain chemicals that get released by being led by the nose around a level are real.

When you pay full price for a game, do you deserve to experience all of the content contained therein? Or do you have to spend hours of tedious frustration, feeling bad brain chemicals, just to get what you already paid good money for? You feel enough bad brain chemicals with your job and your family already, why are you spending your precious few free hours doing the same?

Uhh...😅 I did...

I thought it would basically be No Man's Sky. Fly around to planets and do stuff. But the designer himself flamed me on USENET so I quit following it and never played.

Battlecruiser 3000AD! By Derek Smart, Ph.D! Wow, that takes me back. The original "in development forever" game way before Daikatana or Duke Nukem.

to make people suffer in some way

Yes! That's it! You've hit the nail on the head. People don't pay $60 to feel frustrated. They pay $60 to feel good. If the game doesn't deliver what they paid for, why does it even exist?

Gaming isn't fundamentally about overcoming challenges. It used to be, but it changed long ago. Now, gaming is about generating pleasing brain chemicals. When gamers "win", they feel good. When they meet a challenge that stops them, they feel bad. It's just that simple. People don't shell out $60 so that they can feel frustrated and angry. You paid for the whole game, you get to play the whole game. With lighted signs pointing the entire way and a companion to overcome the challenges if you can't solve them in the first ten seconds.

I had never heard of them until Milo Yannopolous got popular in 2016. Back then, it meant "alternative right" as an opposition to GOP establishment and RINOs. Boy, they sure got a lesson in entryism as every piece of shit in America jumped on the train.

Children (overwhelmingly boys) who played vidya games were nerdy. There was a brief period during the Pac-Man era when vidya games were for everyone, and soon it went into hardcore weirdness. Games got hard and unless you had the patience to play again, and again, and again, and again...you can forget being a part of the crowd. Games with 45 levels when nobody ever got past level 4.

Wow, I came here to say this.

And for a supposedly hands-off Creator, Iluvatar sure gets involved a lot. Not just at Mount Doom, but he raised Gandalf from the dead and did a bunch of other stuff that I forget.

GOLLUM

WAS

PUSHED

In order for shame to work, you need to have respect for the person attempting to shame you. If you don't, it just bounces off you. This is why a six year old calling you poopy pants gets laughed off.

It's one of the few times you get a view of the Federation from two aliens.

The "root beer" scene has always stood for what the Ferengi think about the Federation in my mind.