Back in my teenage days of vanilla WoW I was the sole Australian in an American guild. There was a girl who was about the same age as me who sometimes came to our 20 player raids, and I was friendly with her but didn’t really have a lot to do with her (and even if I had, I was on the other side of the world). However, that modest, friendly interaction was enough for one of the other guys (who was also about the same age as me) to message me in the middle of a raid to say that “she’s just pretending to be a girl for attention, you know”. I think I just replied “ok” but I was baffled by that apparent jealousy because the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind (again, I was on the other side of the world from them, and I had a huge crush on a girl at my school at the time that I never acted on).

Another unrelated anecdote from that time, I had one (different) guy tell me that he had assumed I was about 25 years old with kids, and was surprised to find out that I was only 16. I guess it was the accent?

True, but I was a child and was not old enough to remember how strict the Australian classification rules for video games were back then.

There was a time before the R18+ classification for video games existed that some violent games were refused classification (Left 4 Dead 2 being one of the most prominent examples; the gore and dismemberment were cut out, but the blood was still red and it was trivial to restore the gore), but that stopped being an issue about 15 years ago.

video games have to have green blood.

This is completely untrue.

It’s bullshit doublespeak that really means “we’re cutting costs (in the short term, the only term that matters)”. Reducing headcount doesn’t reduce the workload, it just means each remaining person has to do more work.

Australia made them offer refunds thanks to our consumer law.

Likewise, I’m enjoying it but it just doesn’t deserve any awards in a year when other games that are simply better came out. It’s a firmly mid tier game and it was (not) awarded accordingly.