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RE: Lord Of The Rings Online Feels Like Home
NeverWinter Nights for damn sure is my 2nd all time fav game, especially the player made custom modules. I follow a blogger on blogspot called Lilura1, and older gamer lady from the 80s who runs an excellent retro RPG blog.
https://lilura1.blogspot.com/p/baldurs-gate.html
Values are changing. People no longer play video games just to chill for an hour. It's now almost a half-day job. People no longer enjoy the experience of a well crafted game, but rather chasing the incentives and superfluous accolades (Steam achievements, loot-boxes, collectibles, in-game items/fashion/housing).
I saw this video the other day...i feels it in my ❤️ man
Look at how sad that is...this is the gaming landscape. People from my generation (Gen Z is it called? Millennials) managed to escape this trap, being born in a time when digital influence (from technologies) didn't have such a great effect on actual physical daily life...we remember playing football in the courtyard...we remember radios, TVs, technology that was specifically external to our entertainment consumption...meaning you actually had to get up and press a button, or dial a knob to make a phone call etc etc; sometimes you may even need to take a slipper to the TV box and do...
Now...the generation after mines are born co-existing with technlogy and the digital world. They don't know what the 90s, 80s and 70s, even the 60s must have been like. It's unfathomable and that life back then is not considered freedom to these new creatures (wtf is up with your new DNA ehh? Oh you didn't know???). The digital world, with all the flashy AI genearted images, or websites, or blockchains, or tokens, or whatever, that...is freedom to them.
I spoke with some people who played a game called CyberPunk 2077...a lot of these people actually wish for the future to be like that. They like that Fifth Element, BladeRunner type world. It's SAD!
Look at this shyte here...
https://guildjen.com/gw2-fashion/
https://www.valheimians.com/builds/tag/spotlight/
https://cosmeticlotro.com/
WHY????
Consider further back in the past, even before any kind of remote electrical communications, and even before the Pony Express and letters were possible because writing was invented. As you consider each iteration of the world that existed prior to the present, you discover greater freedom as communication of edicts from rulers was less possible.
The advent of recorded speech was a clinal boundary, because our brains are evolved to acculturate us, and can't natively differentiate between fictional speech and natural speech of our neighbors. Hearing speech informs us culturally. Visual presentations of people further created acculturation to fictional society. Such fictional presentations have always been created by Priests and Shamans, but were limited to local iterations prior to mass communication. The Catholic Church and Islam were evolutions of this acculturation that sought to become universal, global phenomena.
The more immersive such representations become, the more we are acculturated to fictional society. We are today trained to live in culture that includes extraordinary powers and strange beings riding flying turtles and laying waste to ancient civilizations to attain to magical boons.
How can trapping rabbits to consume their corpse compare? The extinction of the megafauna and end of the ability to create ~4k meals of ~4kcal each with one kill destroyed a way of life, an ease of production of wealth we can hardly even imagine today, about ~13kya. But even then people walked around imagining the fictional reality their shamans created, that enabled their local society to prosper IRL. The fiction we immerse ourselves in through watching TV or playing games is entrained and our real world cultures reflect our fictional acculturation.