For my personal games I am as well.
“Make friends with gamers, don’t make gamers out of friends” is an old tabletop adage that took me a long time to really learn.
For public stuff the best that can usually be mustered are safety tools and clear guidelines. But (rarely, thankfully) some people are just there to sabotage.
I GM public games and games at conventions, so sometimes it still crops up. People don’t always make it readily apparent ahead of game time that they’re going to pull shenanigans like this.
My fix has always been: that’s fine! They go off on their own adventures. Now please roll a character that’s going to play the game we’re running here tonight.
I run gritty low magic games with death and safety tools. Which group do I join!?
I’ve always maintained that it’s a library, not a backlog. A backlog is a chore, a task I have to finish.
A library is a catalogue of new, exciting experiences waiting for me to have them!
I also happen to live in a rural area with radio Internet so when I decide I want to play a game it’s many, many hours for it to install and be playable. Heck, sometimes I can order a physical game and it’ll arrive by delivery faster than I can install it.
Also some console games are still physically on the cartridge/disc and it’s becoming more and more of a rarity. As long as the media and systems hold up you can still actually own these games. It’s sometimes worth not sleeping on these because, as I’m sure we can all see, they’re a drying breed. Same thing with (most) GOG games: if you download and save the backup installers you can have actual ownership over titles purchased there.
https://www.doesitplay.org/ is a wonderful resource to find out if a physical game you buy is actually on the media it comes on.
And, unfortunately, some digital games are going somewhere. Delisted games have become a real problem for preservationists. You can find a whole list of them here: https://delistedgames.com/
All that said I support the notion of less consumption and more meaningful consumption when it occurs. Don’t let FOMO get the better of you, be aware that these corpos are not your friend, and take measures to secure the things you wish to have available to you! Host servers, seed torrents, and have backups.
I’ve been on and off with Linux for about 15 years and just want to counter some of the people trying to troubleshoot or criticize to say: it can be really tough.
We need our computers to work and we expect things to function correctly.
I’ve used dozens of distros over the years. I was a super early Arch adopter, mained Gentoo for about three years, ran my own BSD server for programming projects, and still maintain several small home Linux servers. And even I sometimes want to pull my hair out trying to get semi-new hardware working right in my distro of choice. I spent three hours today fighting Nvidia and sound drivers and eventually just had to give up on that machine after being told that what I want just flat out isn’t supported in Linux on the hardware I have.
Take a breath, set it aside until you’re ready to take another crack at it, and know that it’s a journey. You’ll get there or the software will catch up and meet you halfway. No shame in being frustrated :)
Fully agreed. This kind of thing drives me nuts and other people act like I’m crazy.
I don’t want a “base” game for $70. I don’t like the idea of spending so much and still missing content or cosmetics that in previous generations would’ve been unlockable in the game. It’s frustrating and disappointing.
The recent Space Marine did it and turned me off. Stop giving me tiers of products. It’s fatiguing!
This is a good take. I remind players all the time that even though I’m GMing I’m a player too. I’m just playing a slightly different game. I’m here to have fun and enjoy myself, not babysit.