To go the 100% enjoyable route, I need to know more things which naturally put people in this state. I do such things by experiencing them myself, and once they get there I know this is something which would fit in such a work.

Regarding this point, I think one of the most safe and efficient tricks to do this is to keep introducing novelty. If you have a game that has a fairly limited number of distinctive unique things that are introduced quickly and afterwards are simply repeated in different combinations it will less likely have such effect. For example a sandbox that introduces everything in 10h and then 90h you just play around with it will probably not have this effect, it can even become a chore. But a story-driven game which constantly introduces novelty on plot level but also sometimes introduces some new mechanics and content, have big chances to have this effect. In reality it’s more complicated, and there are many dimensions to this like challenge/frustration for example. There are games that use frustration as a tool to some extent to make winning certain fights feel exceptionally rewarding (soulslikes is the most popular example). But if you make it too challenging/frustrating there is a risk that player gives up and leaves in state of frustration which makes it a big failure. This particular thing is high-risk/reward type stuff.

Prey was very addictive to me. I think I beat it rather fast though, because I just couldn’t stop playing.

I played Morrowind multiple times in past, mostly aimlessly, only recently I decided to give it another go and actually focus on main questline. This way I beat Morrowind + Tribunal + Bloodmoon (TES III GOTY edition in Steam) in 96.4 hours. I don’t remember the price but IIRC I got it on sale very cheap. All those hours were very rich and enjoyable. I played with few dozens of visuals improving mods though, used this guide: https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Morrowind_graphics_guide

“Universal” means that it’s unconditional. As I understand it, by design of the concept, everybody should receive it.

I personally mostly watch gaming streams as a background for work, never as focus activity. As a main activity I definitely prefer to play myself rather than watch others playing, with a rare exception when I’m just interested to see a few minutes of gameplay of some new game to see if I’m interested in it.

There are so many things that look goofy yet you choose to post a perfectly fine dragonish character. This one looks good to me.

I use all three: mastodon, bluesky, and twitter. Mostly because people I follow are on different platforms. Personally, I would settle for mastodon alone. There is a recent big wave of artists moving from twitter to bluesky because twitter got new policy that makes it impossible to opt-out from using images posted on twitter as AI training material. Actually those new rules to me sound like they’re problematic in terms of author rights in general, not only AI stuff.

It has some cool features that aren’t available even in some of the leading industry DAWs like key/scale note highlight, but it also lacks some absolutely essential basic features like showing the playback position in beat mode (it means when you writing beats you can’t see where playback is at currently).

Yep, maybe it would benefit from more advertisement but I decided to not recommend it until I experience it for some time. It took me a week or two to realize that I don’t like moderation at lemmy-world for example, I would definitely recommend choosing other instances, and then, it takes time to figure out which ones are worth recommending. Some are extremist far-left/far-right, some are at risk of shutting down if admin gets bored and decides to stop paying for hosting from his personal money.

It’s the most popular instance with questionable politics and moderation and this move pushes people to other instances before they even discover deeper issues there. Most instances have zero issues with VPNs, and it doesn’t even matter what is the parent instance of community you’re posting to. Which means you can post the same stuff into the same place from almost any other instance using VPN.

Finished Mawaru Penguindrum - this one was a wild ride! I enjoyed most of it, but the way it jumps between genres and the plot and character development in the second half of the show are quite extreme and sometimes questionable. Some things were hard to follow for me, but core ideas are very inspiring and leave room for thinking even outside of anime context.

Silent Hill (Duckstation) - classic survival horror game

• great atmosphere, strong sense of mystery and dread
• oldschool approach to mystery/horror where everything doesn’t have to be explained or logical
• some outstanding puzzles
• combat is kinda annoying, but when you play with emulator you at least have saves everywhere

The Elder Scrolls: …

Now ask about tiktok vs games and about gacha mmos vs other games 😅

Today I started my day with two really nice ambient / noise / experimental podcasts:

• https://soundcloud.com/drift-radio/franciska-drift-radio-08-08-24
• https://soundcloud.com/radiosygma/expired-06-santebela

At the moment listening to Groove Salad at Soma FM.

Finished Pseudoregalia yesterday. Really a special platformer with iconic goat-bunny-cat lady mc, a lot of gradually unlocked trick moves, parkour puzzles, and zero hand-holding in freely traversable non-linear interconnected game world. It’s only like 10h of gameplay in average, but it’s perfect size for its format really. Not too small to feel really small and not too big for wandering around to become annoying.

Not much you can do other than researching the current consensus. And for the latter you can try to search discussions about its safety. Good query to start with is “is programname malware/spyware”.

To be fair, they were smart enough to get some exposure even without accepting the deal. This is not the first place I see this discussion and some people are definitely going to check their stuff now out of curiosity.

I’m pretty much happy with conversations I see here. Plenty of quality discussion threads in AskLemmy, Gaming and Technology and Anime. Would be nice to see even more ofc, but Lemmy’s not that big yet I guess. Questions is something that often starts interesting discussions.

By the way, imagine how Piper Perry would look if she was drawn as anime character. Would you consider that extreme lolicon? She’s almost 30 y/o and that is absolutely legal even in real porn.