Tobold's Blog
Mobile games are getting "better"
I have been spending more time lately playing games on my iPad, and not on my PC or Switch. One reason for that is that I have the impression that mobile games have been getting "better". Why "better" in quotes? Because I think what has been getting better is production quality and gameplay. What hasn't improved at all is monetization.
Now there are hundreds of thousands of mobile games, so I am talking trends here, and there are always games that are outliers. There are still mobile games you
buy once for $6.99 and that don't have any in-app purchases at all. And shoutout to Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent for inventing a gacha system for which it is pretty much useless to spend money.
But a more common example would be a game like Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus. On the one side, Tacticus is a much better game than let's say Raid Shadow Legends, because in Tacticus there are actual tactical battles with a hex grid and tactical decisions that matter. On the other side, Tacticus has the same underlying gacha system as Raid Shadow Legends: Unlike Octopath COTC, you don't get to choose where you want to go and what you want to fight. Instead there are linear campaigns. And regardless where exactly your skill level is, the difficulty of the campaign ramps up faster than the power of your characters does from normal play. So at one point you are too weak to beat the next chapter. And then you have the choice of either a very slow grind of repeating old content, or paying money for lootboxes which might or might not contain the new character or added resource you need to overcome the challenge. Only that if you overcome this challenge, you'll be stuck again some chapters down the road.
Having said that, obviously I prefer gacha games with good gameplay to gacha games with auto-battles. And then it becomes a question of self-control: Most of these games have a few options where a limited amount of spending money is opening up a relatively large part of the game for you, compared to a completely free player. I have a rough "dollar per hour" rule, where I really don't mind to spend about a dollar for each hour that a game is keeping me well entertained. If I play Tacticus for 20 or so hours and have spent around $20 for it, that is fine with me. But I am aware that this is a curve with strongly diminishing returns, the next $20 wouldn't buy me as much more game as the first $20 did. And yes, it happens that for a game like that I impulse-buy some offer for $50 and then regret that decision later.
What doesn't happen to me is getting anywhere close to whale territory. And that is where I think these games can get really problematic: The upper limit to what you could spend on a game is often in the thousands of dollars, and no video game should cost that much. I would go as far as to say that even if the person who spent those thousands of dollars can easily afford the expense, he is getting scammed. Technically, especially on the iOS system, in which Apple controls everything, it would be perfectly feasible to implement a spending limit of let's say $100 per month for any given game. A similar
system already exists for parents who want to set a monthly allowance for their kids on the app store. For me that sounds like a much better solution than a blanket ban on loot boxes like Belgium has.
The economics of recessions
By now it has become pretty evident that the global economy is heading for a downturn. Inflation fighting necessitates higher interest rates, which is turn lower demand, and make living on borrowed money less feasible. But in the 14 years since the last big global downturn, a lot of new things have popped up, and there are parts of the economy that have never been recession-tested. We are pretty certain that consumers in the coming years will be spending and investing less, but what will they spend their reduced discretionary income on?
The most basic theory is based on
Maslow's hierarchy of needs: You spend money first on food and shelter, before you spend money on aesthetic needs or needs of self-actualization. But past recessions have shown that actual spending isn't completely following that model. There is for example the
Lipstick Effect, the observation that cash-strapped people still spend money on small luxuries when they can't afford big luxuries anymore. Investments have their own pyramid of preference: In times of crisis, people prefer investing in value investments rather than in speculative growth investments. This is why currently crypto currencies and tech stocks are doing much worse than stocks of solid companies that pay dividends.
One area which is new to recessions is streaming services. Netflix just started the transition to a streaming service in 2008. Now
the average American household is subscribed to 4.7 streaming services, with the number already having stopped growing. It isn't too far of a stretch to assume that many people might well cut at least some of those subscriptions.
To me streaming without a subscription looks even more perilous: The economic model of YouTube is a mix of advertising revenue, and people voluntarily paying for channels they like, either by voluntary subscriptions or by tips. Advertising revenue traditionally declines drastically in recessions. And somebody feeling the financial pinch in his daily spending will surely be less inclined to tip his favorite YouTuber ten bucks, especially since he can still watch that channel without paying. With "YouTuber" these days being the most common answer
when kids are being asked what they want to become when they grow up, that idea might actually be even less viable tomorrow than today.
To me it is pretty clear that the economic headwinds will have consequences for some of these new businesses. Fortunately my income as an "influencer" is so close to zero, that I don't have to worry about it. :) But the idea that you can live of talking about your hobbies on YouTube has never been the most solid economic idea, and the percentage of people for who that actually works might well shrink dramatically in the future.
On the road to universal basic income?
Capitalism is the best system we know for the creation of wealth, but absolutely sucks at distributing that wealth fairly among the people that contributed to its creation. There was a reasonable equilibrium in the decades after WWII, but from the 80's on a combination of deregulation and globalisation shifted the balance: Capital now was globally mobile, while labor wasn't, and thus capital was able to claim an increasingly larger part of the created wealth. As a result, a great many people are living paycheck to paycheck:
56% of Americans can't cover a $1000 emergency expense with savings, and
in Europe one in three people are unable to face unexpected financial expenses. That is kind of a problem if suddenly all of these people at once are faced with the same unexpected financial expense.
The combination of post-COVID general inflation and huge increases in energy prices caused by the war in Ukraine has led to a general cost of living crisis. Due to American shale gas, this crisis is a lot more pronounced in Europe. That is easiest to see in the UK, where there is an
annual energy price cap for households set by a regulator, Ofgem. This price cap used to be a bit over £1,000, but
has now risen to £3,549, and is expected to hit £5,000 to £7,000 next year. While energy prices and regulation work differently in other European country, all over Europe households are hit with energy bills that increased by thousands of dollars/Euro/pounds. And as we previously established, a large number of those households are in a financial situation where they can't afford that.
Normally, if I can't pay my bills, that is my problem. But if a large number of people gets into a situation as dire as having to choose between buying food and heating, it becomes a political problem. So all over Europe
different governments have proposed different means to ease the financial burden of their citizens in this cost of living crisis.
Now energy is a particularly regressive cost: A poor 4-person household doesn't inherently spend significantly less on energy than a rich one. Which means that the percentage of energy cost in the overall budget is much higher for poor people than for rich ones. And it happens to be the richer people who are more likely to already have had the means to invest in lowering their energy bills, by investing in solar panels or better isolation. As a result, a lot of the political discussion on how to deal with the cost of living crisis has been to concentrate the help on those who need it most. A general idea is forming that somehow there is a human right to have at least basic heating in the winter, and somehow it is up to governments to provide that. Things are still sketchy, and governments aren't exactly sure where to get all the money to pay for this, but there is a very definitive trend towards governments in Europe making sure people don't freeze in their homes this winter.
That is very interesting, because government aid has a tendency to move from short term action towards some sort of established right that people expect. And while the Ukraine war is hopefully going to end one day, fighting climate change will exert upward pressure on energy prices in the long term. We use fossil energy not because we *want* to kill our planet, but because it is the cheapest option. If we establish now that it is the government's job to make sure that everybody has at least enough basic energy supply to not freeze to death, there isn't a huge distance anymore from moving from a universal basic energy supply to a universal basic income. In Europe, of course, not in the USA.
Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent
Imagine a team of game developers that have been making classical JRPG for consoles for all their life. Boss comes in and tells them they have to do a mobile game with maximum monetization now, because management wants to make as much money as the competition does with Genshin Impact or Diablo Immortal. But the team has no clue how mobile game exploitative monetization works, and so they end up making a classical JRPG on a mobile platform, with just a very thin veneer of monetization options that aren't exploitative at all. Now that is probably pure fiction, but Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent (COTC) sure feels like this.
At the core, COTC plays very much like the console Octopath Traveler. You gather travelers of eight different classes, and explore their individual stories by going through lots of dialogue and doing turn-based battles with an interesting "weakness" and battle point system. Only now there are 8 (I believe) times more characters, which you get in a Gacha system of random draws. And whether it is by not understanding Gacha systems, or by Square Enix just being nice to us, the Gacha system in COTC is so generous with free currency, and it is so unnecessary to have 5-star characters, that the game is best played completely for free. Believe me, I spent a bit of money on the game to profit from an offer that was only available for paid rubies, not free ones, to get a guaranteed 5-star character more; and it turned out to be completely unnecessary and basically a waste of money.
COTC in some respects is better than the original Octopath Traveler. And you can, and should, play it completely for free, while the console version on the Nintendo e-shop is still $60. Having said that, both games are for fans of the JRPG genre, and JRPGs are not everybody's cup of tea. There are a lot of dialogues to click through, and a lot of grindy combat, but that is par for the course in this genre. Apart from draining the battery fast, there isn't really much I could complain about in the mobile version. The controls work really great on the touch screen, and the gameplay feels just like a console game, not like a mobile game at all. So, if you like JRPGs, I can only recommend you check COTC out.
Difficulty in turn-based games
In the
Biggest Chess Games Database Online there are 1.8 million games registered in which white opened with e2-e4. In the same database there are only 32 games in which white opened with a2-a3. Clearly a2-a3 is a much inferior opening, and nearly everybody knows that, so that move isn't generally used. However, the database also shows that in games in which white opened with a2-a3, white won 40.6% of the games, which is more than any other move. So what I think is that sometimes when a far superior chess player plays against a much weaker opponent in a friendly game, the superior player deliberately makes this bad a2-a3 move, in order to give his opponent a better chance. Or the better player makes that bad move just for fun.
Earlier this month on Steam the game
Hard West 2 was released. So I was reading Steam reviews to decide whether this would be a game for me, and the top shown review is negative and says:
"Did not feel at any point that I was making any tactical choices, more like I was trying to puzzle out the solution intended by the devs, which made me feel a bit cheated on the whole "tactics" bit.". And I completely understood what the reviewer was saying, based on my experience with other turn-based tactical games: You might think that you have a lot of options, like you might think that in chess you have 20 different options for your opening move. But in reality some of these options are just way better than others. If you play at low difficulty, you can do sub-optimal moves and still succeed. But the higher the difficulty gets, the fewer and fewer options remain viable. Until at some point only one sequence of moves actually wins you the scenario.
I finished
Symphony of War after 40 hours at normal difficulty, and still wanted another go. So I started a new game, with a bit of apprehension because of the problem described above. But it turns out that you can play Symphony of War at higher difficulty and still opt to keep permadeath turned off. Which means that while the game is harder at higher difficulty, there are still enough different options left. I am now some chapters into the second campaign, and I was able to make different choices and explore different tactics without the game telling me: "No, you need to make this exact set of moves".
That is especially important when there is some luck involved. In my first game I never got a drakeling offered for recruitment, so at the end of the game I only had the two dragons you get from the main story. In this second go I found a drakeling in the bazaar of chapter 3, before I even got the first story dragon. That will change things in me experiencing the second campaign compared to the first. In the tactical game I played before that,
Battle Brothers, there was a lot of luck involved, and at high difficulty you could actually have such a bad start just by bad luck that the game became unplayable.
For me the fun of tactical games is to try out different things and see what works and what doesn't. But I prefer to fail forward, and not have to save scum until I find the one set of moves that the devs set up to work in that scenario. So I think I will give Hard West 2 a miss. As it turns out, at some point I bought
Hard West 1 in a Steam sale and never played it, so I can do that one if I want a cowboy tactical game. I played
Weird West for free on the Game Pass, but that game would have more accurately be called Weird Controls and wasn't turn-based, so I got tired of it quicker than I thought.
You kids get off my lawn!
I am a boomer in retirement. The values I hold are from decades ago. I am a centrist, somewhat left of center. This is my blog, and I will write posts here both about games, and about the cultural and political environment that touches those games, other media, and general news I come into contact with. As I am neither of the extreme left, nor of the extreme right, my centrist opinions will frequently offend the people who are. There is an extremely easy way to avoid being offended: Get of my bloody lawn! You aren't forced to read what I am writing. Feel free to make your own social media channel on which you can then complain about old foggies like me holding outdated values.
I am interested in intellectual debate with people holding other opinions. I am not interested in fighting culture wars with people who come here to call my centrist views "extreme right" / "fascist" / "MAGA" and the like, or who want to insult me because of the year I was born in.
You know who you are. Get of my lawn! You have a right to free speech, but not necessarily in my comment section. Go and write elsewhere! Stop reading what I write! I am not here to provide intellectual porn to those who get off on being offended. That applies to both the extreme left and the extreme right, but honestly, which of them is more likely on a gaming blog?
Races are racist
In the real world, advances in genetics have led to the discovery that humans are in fact *not* divided into different races. There are now various DNA ancestry tests available, and nearly everybody outside of Iceland is of "mixed race", if you wanted to apply the outdated racial classifications of the last century. In the real world, no other humanoid races like elves, dwarves, halflings, or orcs exist.
Humanoid races do exist in fantasy literature, and from there these races have been integrated right from the start into the first versions of fantasy role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons. And in the context of such games, it makes total sense that the fantasy race of your character has some sort of consequences. If you have a system that describes characters with numerical stats like strength, constitution, dexterity, and intelligence, and you have fantasy races that already visually appear very different, it is only logical to combine that. A dwarf *looks* as if he would have more constitution and less dexterity than an elf. An orc *looks* stronger and less intelligent than a gnome. So for over 40 years, Dungeons & Dragons had a character creation system in which your choice of race affected your stats, and that sort of system propagated to many other RPGs both tabletop and computer.
In the real world, discrimination and stereotypes based on origin certainly exist. As a German living in Belgium, people just assume certain things about me, based on their stereotypical thinking about "how Germans are". Stereotypes are frequently completely wrong, and when they contain a kernel of truth it is only of statistical relevance, and doesn't give you any information about any given individual. While many stereotypes are relatively harmless (e.g. "Germans are organized and punctual"), others are certainly not (e.g. "Mexicans are rapists"). People of different origins have been persecuted because of their origin at different places during different times, from simple internment to full-blown genocide. And stereotypes have usually played a role in that discrimination, as a means of justification of the persecution.
But fantasy worlds are not the real world. There is room for moral ambiguity in fantasy worlds (e.g. was Tyrion Lannister justified to kill his father with a crossbow on the toilet?). But there is a sub-genre of high fantasy which is all about the combat of good vs. evil. It necessitates the creation of an evil population that makes up the army of the big bad buy. And because this population has been *created* to play the role of the evil minions, them being considered evil is not a stereotype or a discrimination; it is their raison d'etre, the purpose of their creation. If you consider Sauron to be just misunderstood and the orcs he created for his army to be really nice guys, the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy doesn't make any sense anymore.
Nevertheless the thought police of the real world has been attacking Dungeons & Dragons for having fantasy races that are either evil, or have negative stat modifiers. Somehow an orc being described as evil and stupid is considered some sort of dog whistle or hidden reference to some real population which has been stereotyped as evil and/or stupid. While Tolkien certainly meant no offense (except possibly to Germans), and the actual populations in question certainly don't feel any offense when watching a Lord of the Rings movie, it is enough that some overly sensitive academic with nothing better to do with his life is triggered by a hypothetically possible offense.
It is a sign of the times in which artists live in constant fear of being attacked for slights they never intended that Wizards of the Coast in the first playtest material for One D&D removes stat modifiers from races. In the new version of Dungeons & Dragons, choosing your race is mostly cosmetic. Orcs aren't strong anymore, instead they "count as one Size larger when determining your carrying capacity and the weight you can push, drag, or lift.". And to avoid comparative negative stat discrimination, positive stat bonuses are gone as well. The "2-3 feet tall" halflings are now just as strong as the "6-7 feet tall" orcs, in order to avoid racial discrimination. We will have gnomish barbarians and orc wizards.
I am not sure what purpose races serve in a fantasy role-playing game if there isn't actually any difference between them. If they are all the same and lack profile, races have been effectively removed in order to appease the thought police. But races remain nominally in the game, because a much bigger part of the D&D customer base would be deeply offended if you'd just remove all fantasy races. It is a bad compromise that will make nobody happy. The thought police will still be triggered by the mere existence of the word "race" in the rulebook. And the players will have lost interesting options in character creation. Can't we just admit that the real world is complicated, and be allowed some refuge in much simpler fantasy worlds?
No orcs were hurt or offended in the making of this blog post.
Labels: Dungeons & Dragons
One D&D
In an extremely nebulous and unspecific announcement on YouTube and Twitch, Wizards of the Coast announced "One D&D". What is One D&D? I'm not sure. It is a mixed bag of an updated fifth edition ruleset combined with digital tools from D&D Beyond, and apparently even a fully 3D animated virtual tabletop software made with the Unreal engine.
There seems to be some physical/digital integration, so ideally if you buy an adventure module, you get a code which allows you to access the content both digitally in PDF format, and as a module in the VTT environment. But of course the lawyers didn't let them promise this so directly. But with me having bought some adventure modules 3 times (once physical, once on D&D Beyond, and once on Roll20), things can only get better.
One D&D won't arrive before 2024, but playtesting of the revised rules starts today on D&D Beyond.
[EDIT: The first "physical & digital bundle" was announced later in the video: Shadow of the Dragon Queen, a 5th edition version of Dragonlance. Annoyingly only the US version can be directly bought on the D&D Beyond website, while for the European version (which is more expensive) you are redirected to a different "Wizards Online Store". If you are European and buy the US version, you'll pay $82.99 shipping, so it's well worth switching and just paying €12.99 on the Euro store. I just hope the digital integration with D&D Beyond still works for the EU version, but I am willing to try it out.]
Labels: Dungeons & Dragons
Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga
Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Tactics Ogre, there is a range of role-playing war games on square grids series that are mostly present on consoles, especially Nintendo consoles. Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga is out on the PC and offers a very similar experience. The role-playing part is limited to cutscenes and dialogue without choices, and a forgettable story, but you can just skip through that and enjoy the 30 battles plus 4 arenas. In those battles you will control squads of soldiers, but between battles you can manage each soldier individually. Soldiers each have a class, and gain not only xp and levels, but also class mastery points that allow them to develop through a large
class tree. You can also apply various items to soldiers, equip squads with various artifacts, and spend your faction xp on a talent tree for your whole army. At the end of the game your army will be very individually styled to your taste.
The combat system in Symphony of War is pretty good. Battles are turn-based, and each squad can move and attack once per turn, or do another action, like healing. Battles between squads are automated. There is a bit of randomness, but results are generally predictable by seeing the threat rating of the two squads involved, and their composition, e.g. spearmen have an advantage against cavalry, rogues can attack from behind and take out the healers in the back, etc. You get some additional rewards for finishing battles within a certain number of turns, but it isn't as extreme as in some other games (e.g. Valkyria Chronicles), where you feel gimped if you don't rush every battle.
Normally the problem with campaign war games in which the survivors of each battle progress and are available for the next battle is the long-term balance: A series of pyrrhic victories can leave you with you best developed troops dead and your raw recruits unable to compete. But in Symphony of War you can play at normal difficulty with permadeath turned off, so your veterans will be available next battle even if they died in the previous one. And the recruits you can hire also go up in level over the course of the game, and you can even hire "rare" mercenaries with quite good stats. I enjoy normal difficulty, because it gives me opportunity to play around with the various options, even if some of them are suboptimal. I don't really enjoy tactical games where you can only play a certain meta build to actually win at hard difficulty. Symphony at War is interesting enough at normal difficulty, but forgiving enough without permadeath to not force me into save scumming.
The 30 battles in the game are all fixed, and even the bonus arena battles are always the same map. However, I do think there is some replayability, because the items and artifacts you find are random, and you might go for different builds on a second run. One negative point for me is that certain game mechanics (charge, ambush) are not well explained in the game, and you need to go and watch a
developer video on YouTube to see how they work. Personally I appreciate the pixel art, but the use of the RPGMaker engine certainly has some downsides, and you can't adjust resolution to something prettier.
Symphony of War currently has a 96% "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam, and costs just $20. Recommended!
Baldur's Gate 3
Shamelessly putting Baldur's Gate 3 in the title as click bait, but this post applies to other early access or beta version games as well, in my case for example Wartales. I have both Baldur's Gate 3 and Wartales installed on my PC, with Baldur's Gate 3 already played 66 hours and Wartales 79 hours. But the last played date of both games is from last year. There have been various content updates and patches since I played these games last, but I am loath to play the new content before the final releases, which won't be before 2023. The games are stuck in some sort of limbo.
The danger I feel is that by playing the beta/early access version of a game too much, on release I am already so bored with the early part of the game, that I don't want to play it again to see the new parts. I am all for Baldur's Gate 3 having added the bard class and the gnome race recently, but if I now try out a gnome bard, he is going to start the game in the same mindflayer ship and move on to the same druids' grove as all previous characters I tried.
This harks back to something I said yesterday in a comparison of World of Warcraft and Diablo Immortal: WoW has many different starting zones based on your chosen race. Most other games don't have that, which makes the notion of playing alts less appealing. But multiples starting zones are expensive to produce, and the typical reviewer won't play a game repeatedly before giving a review score. So the feature won't improve the game's score and thus the developers' bonus.
What are the games that you have already played a beta/early access version and are now waiting for the release version?
Diablo Immortal at the end of the main quest
I played Diablo Immortal to the end of the main quest, killing Skarn, the Lord of Damnation. I reached the “normal” level cap of 60, and gained a few more “paragon” levels of the progression after that, playing at Hell I difficulty. I participated in the Shadow Wars, and pretty much every other activity the game has to offer. I’m pretty much through with Diablo Immortal, and I don’t think I will continue much longer.
The main subject of most reviews of Diablo Immortal is its monetization, which is excessive in how much you could spend on the game to reach maximum power. However, outside PvP, all that power is pretty much wasted. Monster scaling means that your experience of your character’s power isn’t actually changing much if you spend money to increase that power. I typically don’t mind paying money for a game, as long as it remains in a typical “$1 per hour of fun” limit. So I played Diablo Immortal for free up to level 50, and then spent a limited amount of money on a battle pass and a few cheap bundles “for research”. It turned out that beyond the initial dopamine rush for getting a bunch of shinies at once, the effect of spending some money on the game was extremely limited. Most mobile games give you a better return in quality of life improvements from spending a bit of cash, but not Diablo Immortal. Diablo Immortal just gives you a few percent more power, which you won’t notice.
I am pretty bad at action RPGs. I was only able to play even basic Elden Ring by using cheat codes, because I don’t have the reaction time to dodge big boss attacks. Diablo Immortal I played through the whole story content and died exactly once, due to one instance of me just not paying attention at all. For the rest of the content, I felt barely challenged until the last two zones, and even then I was able to beat the remaining content on the first try. Diablo Immortal is a very easy game, and very suitable for playing casually on a mobile platform. And for a mobile game that can be played through absolutely for free without hitting a paywall, Diablo Immortal is actually pretty good. Of course if you play the PC version and compare it with the graphics and gameplay of other PC games, Diablo Immortal is a pretty mediocre game. But other than Genshin Impact I don’t know of a game that offers me this sort of complete MMO experience on a tablet.
While the massive amount of free content in Diablo Immortal is appreciated, the game is somewhat overloaded with different sub-game systems, many different types of various currencies and side-activities. While those are introduced gradually over the course of the game, the purpose is clearly to create enough repeatable content that you don’t stop playing after reaching the end of the main story. Sorry, for me it fails at that. I got far enough beyond the story end to know how a daily routine of side activities to maximize progress on the battle pass or some other scale of advancement would look like. But that daily routine doesn’t really appeal to me.
In World of Warcraft I had a bunch of different characters of different classes and races, starting in different starting areas and playing through different zones while leveling. Diablo Immortal is extremely weak in that sort of replayability. You can make alts of different classes, but they go through exactly the same story and same sequence of zones. And there is a rather extreme separation between characters, with very little possibility of your main passing on stuff to your alts. Features like the battle pass are “pay per character”, which further discourages alts. There is a weird option to change class, so I could switch my barbarian into a wizard, but then I’d have a high-level wizard without knowing how that class plays.
Overall Diablo Immortal is okay as a free mobile game for 20 or so hours. But I don’t see a future for me in this as a long-term “game as a service”.
The joy of being offended
I was watching review videos of board games on YouTube, when I came upon a video about Vagrantsong, a recent game that has vagrants battling ghosts on board of a train. 20 minutes into the 30 minutes video I realized that I hadn't heard anything about gameplay yet. Instead the video was a long tirade about how problematic vagrancy as a theme was, and how the use of certain monsters was cultural appropriation, as the Wendigo was originally native American folklore. The whole video was not a game review, but the application of a woke purity test on that game. The woke purity test has a 100% failure rate, as the very purpose of applying it is the joy of being offended, and if you dig deep enough, you can find something offensive about pretty much everything.
Now this is not completely new in game reviews. The board game Puerto Rico originally had brown cubes as workers, and one can understand that somebody reviewing that game would point out that this was a bad choice (which was then fixed in later editions). However, lately people don't even bother with reviewing the actual game, the gameplay, but *only* talk about anything potentially offending. And more and more, with game developers and publishers having already avoided anything really egregious, the criticism is about stuff that you can't even notice without an in-depth research. Like Vagrantsong showing the Wendigo having horns, which is totally in line with a Google image search of the word "Wendigo", but apparently the original native American Wendigo didn't have horns. What an outrage! I am sure Native Americans all over the continent are up in arms about this! At least if their socio-economic situation wasn't so bad that most of them can't even afford expensive Kickstarter board games.
If you can't find something historic in a game to be offended about, you can just make something up. Dungeons & Dragons is being criticized for racism against orcs, who are shown as stupid and cruel, and have green skin. So somehow woke people get offended by that, thinking it has something to do with racism against black people. As a German I would like to point out that I have a better claim to be offended by orcs: The modern use of orcs dates back to Tolkien, and the army of orcs serving Sauron has a much closer thematic link to the army of Germans serving Hitler than anything actually racial. But high fantasy actually *needs* evil as an adversary to overcome; there is no slight, intended or otherwise, to any non-fictional identity.
What makes me so sad about all of this effort being expended on the search for the joy of being offended is the political consequences: Right-wing populists undermine democracy, capitalism is creating more and more inequality, and the left, instead of fighting the good fight for more democracy and economic equality is busy with frankly ridiculous criticism of any artistic expression. They assume the role of Mother Superior in last-century Catholic school handing out punishment to kids for "impure thoughts". In a political system where voters are forced to vote for the lesser evil, the left is increasingly succeeding in becoming the greater evil. Actually evil people score easy points, because a lot of "anti-woke" measures are more reasonable than the woke alternative. The Democrats conceded so much ground that today the Republican party can get away with claiming to be the party of being "anti-war" and defending the interests of the working people without a college degree, a group the left now calls "deplorables". That isn't going to end well!
Finfluencers
Some of my blog posts are about specific games. And it happens that I recommend a game I liked to you. Thus it is at least theoretically possible that you buy a game based on my recommendation, because you have some trust in my judgement. And of course that could go wrong, and you end up hating the game I recommended to you. The good news is that the damage is somewhat limited: I mostly talk about computer games, where even a triple A title costs something like $60 to $70. And the most expensive board game I recommended this year was Return to the Dark Tower, with a $150 crowdfunding pledge.
Studies have shown that people trust influencers they follow nearly as much as they trust their friends, and much more than they trust brands or celebrities. That trust isn't always well placed. Yes, there are people like me who just produce content for the fun of it, and just say honestly what they think. But that is small scale, my blog only gets around a thousand visitors per month. Google Analytics helpfully converts viewer numbers into potential revenue value and tells me that my main page is worth $0.00. But modern influencers on YouTube or other social media channels can have hundreds of thousands of followers, and that can be worth a lot more money. So instead of promoting what they like themselves, they promote what they get paid for, with that hopefully having some overlap. Fortunately again, the potential damage of an influencer recommending an eyeliner to you is limited.
And then influencers discovered that you can make a lot more money by recommending financial products than by recommending eyeliners or video games. Even just running regular ads about financial products pays a lot better than any other kind of advertising on YouTube. And really popular influencers can make a fortune with sponsorships and "recommending" financial products to their audience for money.
For regular financial products, there is at least some legislation that will protect the audience. The "pump & dump" scheme for a share, where the scammer first buys something of low value, then talks the share up to get lots of other people to buy it, and then dumps the share before everybody realizes how worthless it really is, is illegal. You can see how perfectly this would work on YouTube, but the financial influencer ("finfluencer") doing that might easily get into all sorts of trouble with the financial authorities.
But then we have the world of virtual finance, cryptocurrencies and NFTs. These financial products claim not to be regulated financial products, and actually tout that as an advantage. But their functionality is that of any other financial investment product: You put money in for the sole purpose of hopefully getting more money out at the end. And because financial regulation of these products is still not established, there is nothing to prevent finfluencers from participating in pump & dump schemes, or Ponzi schemes, or all other sorts of financial scams. And now that the crypto / NFT bubble popped, a lot of regular people have been losing their shirts. And typically those were people who weren't highly educated in finance, but trusted some finfluencer. Crypto scammers made millions, the finfluencers were paid serious money for their services, and the audience was left holding the bag when the cryptocurrency or NFT dropped in value, some to being completely worthless.
So, the next time somebody (including me) on the internet recommends a specific product to you, be sceptical. Consider the size of the risk, how much you would lose if it turns out that your trust was misplaced. You can probably afford getting it wrong with that recommendation of the eyeliner or video game, but certainly shouldn't trust anybody on the internet with your life savings.
Monster scaling
The feature used to be called "role-playing game", but these days a lot of different genres of video games have you playing a character who by the accumulation of experience points, levels, gear, and the like is becoming stronger and stronger. The general idea behind that is that the game has certain challenges in the form of enemies to fight against, and that you overcome those challenges by becoming stronger. But what if that is all an illusion?
The typical gameplay has two things happening in parallel: Your power goes up, but you also progress through the story and meet stronger and stronger monsters to battle. In the end, the actual difficulty of each combat over the course of the game isn't all that different, because both you and the enemies become stronger at the same time. In games like World of Warcraft you *could* go back into a low-level zone and kill low-level monsters to better feel how much stronger you have become; but the reward systems are made in a way that this wouldn't actually get you anything. Cartman killing 65,340,285 boars in the South Park episode ‘Make Love, not Warcraft’ doesn't actually work in most games.
I am still playing a bit of free-to-play Diablo Immortal from time to time, now at level 47. One of the various game systems, Bounties, has you go back farming monsters in low-level zones you have played through earlier in the game. And it turns out that if you do that, the low-level monsters are *not* easy pushovers. In Diablo Immortal you can be too low a level for a particular fight, but not too high; because if you were, the game just scales the monster up and makes it stronger. Killing zombies in Ashwold Cemetary took 3 to 4 hits when you were level 8, and the same zombies still take 3 to 4 hits to kill at level 47. Of course that has certain advantages: High-level players can't easily outkill newbies in low-level zones, and the zombies are still available as content for higher level bounties. But it makes you question why you put all that effort into trying to make your character stronger, especially in a game like Diablo Immortal, where you might have paid a lot of money for that privilege.
In Battle Brothers the monsters you need to kill in quests scale with your level, while the monsters roaming in the wilderness scale with game time. If you have some serious setbacks, or lost much time exploring without getting stronger, you can get into a situation where killing monsters outside quests simply isn't possible anymore, as they have become too strong for you. In many JRPG games, monsters don't scale at all, so if you get distracted from the main story and get stronger by doing a lot of side content, you can end up being far too powerful for the challenges in the main story. As you can see, each system has its possible pitfalls.
Diablo Immortal has shown again that the players' wish for more power can be exploited by game companies for profit. Maybe we should keep in mind that monsters often scale as well, and that this pursuit of power is often an illusion.
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