What if Chuck E Cheese was in your bedroom and it was marketed to make you feel like you were missing out if you didn’t have the thing your friend’s had, but you can’t buy the thing, oh no that’s too easy. We’ll let you buy the chance to own the thing.
I’ll give you the proximity point, it is easier to access loot boxes when they are in a game.
But as for the missing out part, yeah that’s how it works. Your friend wins something from the claw machine or gets a bunch of tickets, now you want that. That’s part of the fun, your parents could just buy the toy but that’s lame
But your parents can’t just buy the toy. The only way to get the toy is through the element of chance - sometimes with a near zero win chance - by spending real world money.
The only reason it’s not de-facto gambling is that there are consolation prizes, but in most peoples’ view that doesn’t make it morally okay to push on children, nor does it make it completely not gambling either. It’s just gambling with consolation prizes.
I disagree that most people view it as bad. Arcades and stuff have been around forever, and are still being used by a ton of people. Just because you don’t want send your kids to chuck E cheese doesn’t mean most people agree with you
You keep relying on the Chuck E. Cheese anology, but it simply doesn’t work. At Chuck E. Cheese the prizes are a bunch of toys that your parents could otherwise buy, and the fun is in playing the games themselves which pay out tickets toward earning those prizes. That is in no way the equivalent of gamble boxes in video games.
Gamble boxes contain prizes that can’t be bought outside the game, and in nearly every case contain prizes that can’t be bought with the “consolation prize” (i.e. “tickets”) that are dropped when you otherwise win nothing or very little compared to the actual prizes. And there is no inherent “fun” in clicking an “UNLOCK BOX” button compared to actually… playing a game in order to earn prizes. Not comparable at all, really.
If you’re going to try to convince people they’re not gambling (and you have quite the uphill battle to fight), you’re better off likening them to blind bag grab-packs of card games / collector cards / toys, etc. - Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, sports cards, blind-bag toys etc. That is their closest real-world equivalent. Many would argue that those are also a form of gambling, as well.
There is no ethical consumption under this system, and there’s absolutely no hope for it.
The only thing we can do is set our own little moral lines so our hands feel a little cleaner, but it’s absolutely impossible to exist in this society while also caring about everything awful going on. There’s just too much of it. If I gave one dime to every cause that should be important to me (based on how I see myself), I would drain my bank account into the deep negatives. You absolutely must prioritize your time, money, and attention to a few specific things that you absolutely can’t sleep at night knowing you’ve supported.
For example, global warming is totally fucked. There’s literally no way to not fuck up and strip away most of the planet’s biosphere, even if everyone woke up tomorrow and said “Shit, we have to go 0 carbon right now!” and accomplished it before lunchtime. It’s too late. We’re just fucked. The best case is we’re fucked well after I die, but even that’s not looking particularly likely. So there’s no point in me moderating my purchases around so-called “environmentally friendly” companies, because there’s no such thing and, if there were one, it wouldn’t matter.
But LGBTQ people (like me) exist right now, and will continue to exist right up until we trigger the greenhouse gas cascade that turns Earth into Venus, and since I know we only have so much time left here, it’s very important to me to not support people who want to make sure LGBTQ people suffer as much as possible in the interim. Fortunately, the organizations that hate gay people are about as subtle as people who do CrossFit, so it’s easy to see them and not give them any money. Am I still giving money to crypto-facists who keep their mouths shut about it in public? Probably, but at least I’m kind of rewarding the behavior of “shutting the fuck up”.
Meanwhile, I financially oppose WotC’s bullfuckery only insofar as it affects me, personally. If One D&D weren’t a giant tire fire that grows with every UA playtest release, I’d probably suck it up and buy it. But since they’re also trying to shoehorn their virtual tabletop with AI DMs as the exclusive method by which people play their game, like some kind of half-assed MMO, I won’t. Not because I can be assed to care about AI or anti-consumer practices, but because it’s obnoxious to me and not fun to me and costs me money for shit I won’t enjoy as much. I simply don’t have the energy to care about WotC’s happy relationship with the Pinkertons, if for no other reason than literally every major company in the world also pays the Pinkertons to do fucky shit all over the globe, and if I care about one company doing it, I have to care about all the other companies openly doing the same thing, and then I’d have to, like, start making my own soap and stuff. Which I just don’t have the energy to do.
What it ultimately comes down to is this: honor is an expensive luxury that the vast majority of us simply cannot afford. Buy what you need to survive, spend the extra on whatever bread and circuses allow you to cope with the impending doom of society, and prioritize your moral focus on only a few things that loom the biggest in your mind, the ones that produce the largest amount of shame and guilt for supporting.
Everything is going to produce some amount of guilt, because it’s all fucked. You just have to learn to set a guilt-filter in your brain, so guilt below a certain threshold doesn’t register anymore. There’s literally nothing to be done about it: Even death can’t absolve us of supporting oppression and environmental destruction. After you die, someone’s going to give shady religious conmen money from your deceased wallet to dig up a big rock, scribble some words on it, put you in an unnecessary coffin, bury you with heavy diesel equipment, tell lies about a bigot-god over your corpse, and then hire someone for minimum wage (at best; more likely, they’ll exploit an ethnic minority from another country to do it for pennies) to mow the grass on top of you for the rest of society’s existence. Or the other option, which involves exactly as many shady religious conmen, but switches out the long-term grass-mowing for a short, massive burst of fuel and carbon to turn you into ashes, the button for which is probably also being pressed by an oppressed wage slave making a few nickles an hour.
BUT, there’s always the possibility that I’m wrong, and that things aren’t eternally and irrevokably fucked forever. As a hedge against that, I do two things: I stay employed and budget my money (so I won’t be the guy standing naked in a cornfield waiting for whatever apocalypse or second-coming that doesn’t happen, thus making myself well and truly fucked), and I vote in every single election I ever hear about, from the Presidential election to the August special election to replace the town dogcatcher.
It’s not a dumb idea per se but I’d rather play a version that’s been (allegedly) optimized for Linux computers, like GOG states on the game’s front page!
And to add to this, there's a Humble Bundle right now with the Steam versions of both of those games included. I've also been playing the Enhanced Editions on Steam recently, and they've worked just fine on Linux.
I had issues with the “enhanced” GOG version. Starting it requires an ancient openssl library which is no longer available on modern platforms. If you launch the game via terminal or check the logs Lutris provides you might see an error message similar to “openssl.1.0.0…so not found”. If thats the case I can dig up more specific instructions to circumvent the issue which got me into the game. Just to clarify, installation worked, it was just the game necer started or rather instantly crashed.
You're not totally out of options. Have you tried Heroic Launcher? I haven't really used Lutris since this thing came around, and it seems to do a similar job. But if not, there's a Humble Bundle going on right now with the Steam versions of both games included, and I can confirm that they work great via Steam.
As I understand it, even the most current version of the game links to a horribly outdated version of openssl that is no longer shipped by modern Linux distributions. The publisher has neither fixed this nor bundled the version they need, so you will not be able to start the program due to missing openssl-1.0.so. Most distributions provide a special package to install this legacy library, commonly named openssl-compat or similar. You could also choose any of a number of highly questionable sites that purport to host downloads of this obsolete library.
Meanwhile, Wine runs the Windows version of the game fine. If I recall correctly, I didn’t even need to adjust any settings in Wine to get it to work.
It’s too bad the review copies were delayed, but I’m glad reviewers are taking their time with it. If this level of positivity continues I feel like BG3 will be a serious GOTY contender
I'm absolutely loving it. I love that I can pace the game myself thanks to the turn based design, that my actions have consequences, that it's a proper role playing game.
I can finally play D&D instead of always being the default GM! Yay!
It’s a fantastic game and I am having a blast with it. It’d be neat if they found a way to incorporate a little more of the utility stuff (scrying etc.) but I can imagine how difficult that would be. The scope of what you can do in the game is definitely much farther than I thought they’d go!
Scrying type spells are not in the game as far as I know. There are a lot of non-combat spells in D&D that are not present, likely because they are based on creative liberties, and difficult to replicate on a computer.
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