Which all added up to why marriage is a keen example of the issues I had with Skyrim. It’s a game with a lot of detail – huge numbers of things to do, sure – but no depth. No connection for me, the player. Everyone in the world is basically waiting for you to come along and solve their problems, be in the return of dragons or delivering letters to towns up the road. Skyrim is a single player MMO, and the in-game marriage system was a continuation in that vein.
Marriwage Bwings Us Togethwer, Skyrim-Style.
Skyrim is a great game if what you really want to do includes activities like collecting 2,000 lbs. of brooms. Not so great on the emotional connections.
This weekend, as I was taking a chocolate bunny from the remains of a land-going fish assassin, a man carrying 1250 ingots of iron in a belt pouch remarked to me that it was unrealistic that he could salvage wood from charcoal. I had trouble hearing him speak from a different continent, partly because of the way 13,507 gold coins were clinking in my pockets[.]
[GW] Tooth Enamel and the Aging Adventurer.
True story: I have encountered the “gold coins” problem when trying to write videogame-based fanfic. Sure it makes sense in a game that you can carry six suits of armour and five thousand gold coins in your inventory but, erm. When you’re writing fiction, the lack of that makes certain things that would be trivial in-game quests (“go to the next town and buy our camp a month worth of provisions”) become suspension-of-disbelief impossible. I mean, have you ever actually had to carry around a thousand coins (denomination/s of your choice)? I have, and let me tell you: It’s really, really heavy.
(See also: Homestuck.)
As you zoom about the galaxy, you’ll encounter many fat guys. They’re soldiers, wardens, shopkeepers, spies, smugglers, community organizers, and Jedi. You’ll see not a single flippin’ fat woman anywhere. They just don’t exist.
And if erasing fat women from the galaxy wasn’t enough, the protocol droid on my ship helpfully informs me every once in a while that he’s put my crew on a diet. My crew of athletic guys and one skinny woman; all of whom spend their time sprinting across strange planets, getting into fistfights with monsters, and kicking the forces of evil in the face. God forbid these folks exercise their own discretion about how much fuel their bodies need. Not when BioWare can get in a cheap shot at fat people and call it a “joke.
One day, someone will make a videogame and there will be nothing problematic in it. Noth–
Oh, who am I kidding.
Having a preference does not make someone entitled. Wanting to be catered to as a consumer does not make someone entitled. Seeking maximum value for one’s gaming dollars does not make someone entitled. Buying/supporting only the games you like is not being entitled.
“Entitled” is a loaded word, designed to shut down arguments in the same way “casual” and “immersion” are. No-one “wants” to be entitled (or be seen as “entitled”), so it’s an easy thing to disavow. But it doesn’t actually mean anything, at least not when dealing in the context of high-cost mass-market games in a saturated market.
Firefly still sucked, though.
[EVE has] become such an unpleasant realm that many of players simply leave, having formed deeply negative and totally preventable but at least partly justified opinions of the game and its worst representatives, opinions that haunt the game indefinitely and cripple mainstream acceptance of the game and the sandbox genre as a whole. Compounding the problem, the sociopaths among the EVE playerbase band together with their sycophants and hardcore-wannabes in large, organized, hateful, vileness-spewing collectives out of self-preservation, which further aggrandizes e-thug ideology, inculcating this culture of asshattery and locker-room one-upsmanship that seeks as its only goal to offend. A quick Google search on “harden the fuck up,” for example, conjures up a slew of disgusting EVE slang that is common even outside of the game. Rape-cage. N****r-fleet. Motarded. These are not good people. This is not funny.
The whole article is quotable. Go read it. Now.