First, shitting on folks who are new to left politics and (god forbid) harbor excitement for these new insights. At least we have folks leaving comments like this to grind that eagerness out of them.
Christ on a pike, “enthusiastic about politics” is probably the worst thing you could ever be, it only leads to pie in the sky idiocy and utopianism.
Yes, please let’s grind that down as fast as possible, politics is a pragmatic exercise like doing groceries and taking a shit, you shouldn’t be excited about it. The only people excited by politics are fanatics and zealots and we could do with a lot fewer of those on all sides right now.
Then, it failed a narrow expectation you fully put on it. Maybe it was using an a medium to express an idea in a novel way. What a concept. Let’s call it Art. It can be something other than homework.
Yeah, God forbid I use my experience of the medium to judge a piece of art.
All this is, is a more biased, more cut down version of games like Papers, please, Not for Bradcast, or The Westport Independent, that doesn’t even use its gameplay loop to really give any direct experience of the issue it’s trying to showcase.
Having played it until I got bored of it, the only feeling reinforced through the gameplay is “boy i wish I could read faster”.
It doesn’t even leverage the idea that you need to send newspapers to print, allowing you to plan your front page to build a more coherent narrative, you literally just need to constantly swap articles in and out of the paper as if people’s copies would change in real time. It doesn’t account for the appearance of bias or conflicting interests between the parties you want to keep happy. It lacks nuance and a proper understanding of how to evoke what feeling through gameplay.
So, yeah, I think it’s banal and aggressively poorly thought out, not even mediocre but genuinely bad. Are you going to argue otherwise or are you just gonna say I’m being too harsh or unfair?
And before you highlight that this is free, so is The Westport Independent, and it’s been out for almost 10 years (god I feel old).
But essentially saying “I’m above the target audience and it’s pointless”…cool, share something you made
LOL I’m not about to dox myself to prove a stranger wrong, if you want to feel like you have successfully defended your point because you want to think I couldn’t have pulled this crap off, feel free to do so.
My criticism stands on its own regardless of my own output or even of myself as a source for it.
Everyone consumes whatever they agree with with less critical thinking, it’s an absolutely normal bias to have and nobody is immune.
That’s why when you hear someone say “I do my own research” you don’t think “this person must be highly educated” but rather “this person listens to ‘alternative’ media.”
Just because you consume a different kind of propaganda, doesn’t make you wiser, it makes you have a different set of biases.
This feels very “just found out about politics and damn” tbh.
The game isn’t really teaching anything of note beyond “private entities have their own interests,” which anyone who would even find this compelling already knows.
It currently does, I still use mine both standalone, and linked with my desktop on the oculus platform and SteamVR, since i disliked how cheaply made the oculus 2 was.
Right now I’m waiting for a competitor to the quest to even appear on the market, since there doesn’t seem to be any other standalone option right now.
Speaking as a huge fan of firefly, I’m not even gonna pretend that the writing doesn’t have a very specific set of issues, and that cancellation might have saved it from becoming aggressively mid and boring.
If Serenity was more or less the intended ending to the season (specifically revealing the alliance actually created the reapers and are unequivocally villainous) I’m actually happy they didn’t get to put that in the show.
Same for the Shepherd Book backstory comic where he was actually a brown coat double agent in the alliance, because god forbid we have to accept that your enemy isn’t ontologically evil.
But the best criticism I’ve seen of Whedon is that all his dialogue has over time exceedingly forgone character voice in favour of funny quips.
So much of his later production’s quotable lines are almost impossible to attribute correctly just from the lines themselves.
Looking at the curator list, whatever the intent, it’s actually a very handy list of titles with mid to astoundingly poor writing, a lot of which apparently even SBI seems to disown, since they’re not on their website (but they are credited by the games themselves).
So yeah, I don’t think I need it cause I already didn’t waste my money on any of those on their own merits, but it’s funny to see there’s a common thread.