Mama told me not to come.
She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.
- 4 Posts
- 3.02K Comments
Sure, and sensible things like barriers at bridges makes a ton of sense because doing that doesn’t negatively impact anyone and merely gives people more time to rethink their choice.
That said, even with those safeguards, tons of people kill themselves. I had a friend do it by hanging, others use drugs, and some use cops.
If we look at statistics, the US has 15.6 suicides per 100k, compared to 18.4 in Belgium, 12.9 in Germany, and 16.6 in France (not trying to cherry pick here, please look up the stats yourself). Each of those countries has (largely) banned guns, yet the US’s numbers aren’t all that different, so surely guns aren’t a major contributor here.
What we need is to address the core issues here, such as access to mental health resources, more social interaction, etc. Banning guns isn’t going to meaningfully impact suicide, it’ll just shift the statistics to other methods and maybe delay it a bit. People like easy solutions, and treating the symptoms is very attractive, but it’s not a real solution.
Idk, I’m not a psychologist, but I have looked at studies on video games and there hasn’t been a causal link between violent video games and IRL violence. You’d think that with so much focus on age ratings and whatnot that we would’ve found something, yet that’s not the case. My understanding is the largest contributing factors are childhood abuse, social groups (esp. anonymous online groups), and bullying. I suppose some of that could happen in video games (i.e. in-game chat), but then it’s not the game itself causing violence, but the interaction w/ other players.
So no, I haven’t seen any evidence that violent video games contribute to anything. The best argument is that people who have violent tendencies tend to play violent video games, but the reverse has little to no evidence.
Because those are separate problems with separate solutions.
If people use guns to kill themselves, will they stop killing themselves if we take the guns away? Maybe some will, if the alternatives take so much more time, but the impact won’t be massive. Instead of making suicide harder, we should be treating the root cause of suicide, which is desperation (i.e. have a decent social safety net) and depression (make mental health resources widely available).
If people get hurt due to gun accidents, I highly doubt they’d be happy if we took their guns away, since that’s like solving traffic deaths by banning cars. The better solution is to improve safety features on guns and teach people gun safety so they can use them safely, or in the car example, we should be improving road design and driving education (and making cars less necessary, but that’s a separate point).
Suicides and gun accidents are certainly interesting statistics, but mixing them with homicides just makes it harder to see what’s going on and arrive at effective solutions.
we have the most gun violence
If we look at “intentional homicide rate” (choice of weapon agnostic), the US is 66th and just above Greenland. I think this statistic is better than “gun deaths” since it excludes suicides and accidental deaths and looks at intentional murder.
The number is way higher than it should be, but probably way better than most assume given the news.
That’s not true, here are a few more:
- Steam Deck compatibility - not exactly fair, but it is what it is
- Steam Input - I tend to piggy back off Steam using Heroic Launcher
- library organisation features - I think Heroic has this now though? I use Linux, so I don’t know if galaxy has this
- family library sharing
That said, I think GOG is fine. But to say it has the same features as Steam is silly, I only mentioned the ones I care about, but there are plenty more.
Yeah, Inscryption is one of my favorite games, I just think the card game aspect is a bit basic. It seems to be designed to service the plot, not offer a ton of replayability, and I think it does that job well. If you want a replayable card game, there are tons of options, like Slay the Spire and Balatro, but none are as satisfying overall as Inscryption. I’m not saying the gameolay is bad, I’m I value storytelling very highly and if someone is only after the card game, there are better options.
I played through Pony Island and partway through The Hex, and I really enjoyed both (will probably finish The Hex at some point) and have the same feedback: the gameplay is just okay, but they both have gripping storytelling, similar to Inscryption.
I don’t play Daniel Mullins’ games for the gameplay, I play them for the overall experience, and that’s fantastic.
I loved it and recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in card games. The core gameplay loop was fun and the plot resolved before I got tired of the gameplay loop.
The dev’s other games are fantastic too, so definitely check them out.
I think Act 3 was my favorite, but I ended up looking up a guide by that point for some of the puzzles, but that was because I wanted to advance the plot faster. Act 2 was my least favorite, but it was still quite good.
I group my games by interest:
- probably never - games I disliked or games in genres I don’t like (mostly from bundles)
- maybe later - no intent to play, but there’s a chance
- soon - games I’m excited to play
- playing - up to 5 games I’m “playing”
- done - played enough that I’m satisfied and don’t intend to touch again
- replay - game still has replay value, but I’m done with it for now
- sequels - something in soon or playing must come first
This helps a bit with deciding what to play next and works well for me.
Just to echo the other comments about bundles, look at Humble Bundle right now, choice is $15 and has Persona 5 Royal and 8 other games, and P5R’s historical low is $20. I think some of the other games on the bundle are cool too, but I’m probably not going to play most of them right away, of at all. Likewise for Fanatical build your own bundles, sometimes one or two games makes the bundle worth it.
And there’s also free games from EGS and occasionally GOG and other stores. I haven’t spent a penny at EGS, yet I have hundreds of games and have finished maybe 3.
I only buy a game when I want to play it soon (next month or so), but sometimes it’s cheaper to get a bundle than just that game. I don’t spend a ton on games, but I have a ton.
There’s absolutely room for interesting LGBTQ and minority characters in a mainstream game. For example:
- femboy who happens to be really good at sniping or shanking people
- obese person as your tank or support
- trans (either way) as a ninja or shape shifter (maybe a little on the nose?)
And so on. Make them interesting to play as, and also include some “traditional” characters (hot, scantily clad women, muscular men, etc). Each character should be interesting, visually distinct, competitive to play with, and not too stereotypical.
Games should be fun first and foremost, then interesting, etc. Including minorities is a pretty distant nice to have, so if you’re going to do it, make them fun and interesting to play with.
Exactly!
In games like these, there’s absolutely room for minority or less “appealing” character design. Give them interesting abilities that match their character design and they’ll see play. But you should also have some conventionally “appealing” characters because it turns out people like to role play as someone more attractive than they see themselves IRL.
Provide a good mix so people can role play however they want, and keep things balanced such that some of the minority characters see play by the min/maxers.
Eh, I voted third party. Why? Because my vote literally doesn’t matter in my state, since Trump took it with >20% margin. Votes only really matter in like 8 states because the rest have enough straight ticket voters to secure the election for one of the candidates. And in those 8 or so states, the misinformation was real, so it’s understandable that many people didn’t know what they were getting with their vote, they just voted based on whatever smear campaign made them hate the other candidate more.
IMO, the fault here lies w/ Kamala Harris for running a mediocre campaign promising the “status quo” when most people wanted real change. If she ran a more interesting campaign with actual plans regular people could understand, maybe she could’ve cut through the noise and reached enough people to win.
I doubt the revenue from sales to cheaters is that significant compared to the risk of losing players. I think the simplest explanation is that catching cheaters is hard (read: expensive), so they’re happy with catching the most obvious cheaters with off the shelf solutions (i.e. the Pareto principle).
Sure.
However, most of the gun-related “solutions” I’ve seen wouldn’t actually solve anything, or there’s very little supporting evidence that they’re actually effective (see this Twitter post by the RAND Corporation, media bias for RAND Corporation).
When it comes to suicide prevention, the most effective solution I’ve seen presented and implemented are red flag laws, yet suicide and mass shooting rates don’t seem particularly impacted by that. It turns out people are really bad at taking advantage of those laws, and there’s always the risk that innocent people get hit as well.
We already have laws in place in most (all?) of the country that, if actually followed, would prevent a lot of these cases (not suicide, but access to guns). You already can’t own guns if you have a felony, if you’re on certain medications, or have a history of mental illness. The problem is that many people don’t actually get officially evaluated for mental health, don’t report medications, etc, so the laws end up missing the very people they’re intended to prevent from getting guns.
And then when we look at suicide statistics, the US isn’t all that different from European countries at 15.6 per 100k, France at 16.6, Germany at 12.9, and Belgium at 18.4 (IIRC, guns are largely banned in those countries). The US is higher than its neighbors (i.e. Canada has 9.4, and Mexico has 7), but I don’t think that’s a smoking gun here since Europe also has a wide range (UK is 9.5 and Spain is 8.7). Guns existing doesn’t seem like a major factor in suicide rates, it just happens to be the most convenient method so it gets used the most. If guns were effectively restricted from suicidal people, the biggest change we’d likely see would be shifting from firearms to other methods of suicide, not a significant drop in overall suicide rates (though maybe an initial drop due to delayed suicides).
Real solutions here are hard, and banning guns is comparatively easy, but I really don’t think it would actually solve the problem.