MudMan

Consistent habits.

The couple of games where I got those types of playtimes were either things I had semi-perpetually running for long periods of time (because reasons) and one game that became my “one hour decompression post-work” for maybe three or four years. Turns out if you do a thing consistently for a couple thousand days in a row it adds up.

They will record full replays automatically you can use to practice and there’s an “undo” button in some modes where you can trade time to fix a mistake.

One of usssssss

Tetris Effect Master Mode

Have you tried Tetris The Grand Master 4? Came out a just a few months ago.

I’m sorry/you’re welcome.

I guess the car thing comes from the use of “pre-computerized”. Cars have had computers in them much longer than they’ve been connected to the Internet by default. I guess my mistake was taking the panel at its word there.

Also, man, I appreciate the alignment, but the “millions of Americans” really made me feel icky. Beyond the moral and political refusal to give Americans primary decisionmaking power on these things, these trends and companies are global. Even in the US you probably would need tens of millions to make a dent, but some of these userbases are in the billions. Millions of Americans decided Facebook was for old people and left it and it’s still the biggest social media platform on the planet by some margin. That’d be the collective inability to gauge scale in a dystopia of global monopolies I was talking about.

That last panel hit me like a truck because… yeah, that’s what people think happens when they do their little personal choice things to pretend they matter.

They really buy like a paper book once and go “ah, yes, Bezos is fuming right now” while he makes another billion.

We have lost all sense of how to influence society and all ability to gauge scale. For all the folksy traditionalism in this (which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?) the Internet has created this entirely disproportionate sense of our footprint on the world and this strip is as much a result of the hyperconnected dystopia as everything it’s complaining about.

In my experience this is extra bad for Americans who, frankly, didn’t need that much of a push to go from their individualist, self-centered perception of society to this vision of sitting on a couch listening to a walkman as activism.

1 hour?

Is this privacy, security or both? Because honestly, in one hour to normies I don’t think we’d ever get to proselytism of any kind. We’d barely get through explaining MFA properly.

I mean, all due respect to Firefox and adblockers, at that level you’re concerned with people not having “password123” as their single password across all things with no fallbacks. Depending on the demographic you’re talking to if you can get them to not do that and can explain to them what phishing looks like in a world of deepfakes and voice clones you’re doing work.

What suits?

We are losing the plot here. What lawsuit would you bring to these companies for doing this? As I said elsewhere, antitrust measures, maybe, but that’s the government’s job. These development companies complaining? Could be, but unlikely. There’s probably legalese in their deals to cover this.

What is anybody here getting sued for and who is suing them? People are just saying things.

“You took away my porn by telling a big company that they couldn’t manage payments of products made by a bunch of different tiny companies” is not a thing you can bring in front of a judge. Do we all realize this?

Do people on the Internet think that lawsuits are how you complain when you don’t like something?

In the way you spitting in the ocean hurts the landmass of Africa.

Cool, very free market liberal and stuff. It’s just that… you don’t sue companies to affect their stock. That’s entirely separate from the legal system and not civil liability at all.

What’s the civil liability of “going against the desire of their users” these days?

I mean, if you want to have a chat about antitrust measures in that space I’m game, but it’s waaay above my paygrade and has nothing to do with this particular thing pretty much at all.

Look, I don’t think anybody has an obligation towards constructive optimism.

I do ask that those who don’t at least take care to not be destructive in their pessimism, or at least not to let those who are deliberately destructive to get in a position where they can be more destructive out of being despondent.

That’s the thing, right? It may not be your turn to make things better, but if you are mindful in how you get out of the way somebody else may take things to the place where you can be. The part that worries me is how many people in that same spiral end up doing nothing when they get the chance, or so mad that they just want to tear things down without caring about what gets put in their place.

Well, if noone cares, then your issue maybe just isn’t that important.

I don’t think that’s the case, but we have to account for the possibility that your priorities just aren’t particularly good priorities that other people care about.

I say I don’t think that’s the case because plenty of people do care about some of this stuff at least to some degree, or at least agree with it when asked.

People tend to be very down on the system or on politicians or on the ability or willingness to do anything in the common interest, and that’s mostly part of the liberal lie as well. There’s plenty to be done and plenty of people willing to do it. Those people need the power to do it, though. Sure, getting those people to where they need to be is hard, particularly with leftie types who will immediately get discouraged the moment their politicians aren’t paragons of justice with a magic wand to fix every issue, but that’s not the same as saying nobody cares.

I’d much rather have people get motivated than discouraged, and I don’t need to win every fight, especially not right away. It’d rather move in the right direction than pout about it, even if the short term practical outcome is the same.

That’s why the intent matters. If your concern with meat is that you’re unwilling to inflict any suffering to an animal for food, then sure, that’s independent from the wider effects. If you don’t care about the larger impact beyond the small impact you have then by all means, your individual actions are all that matters.

But if your concern is systemic: how the meat industry functions, the climate impact, sustainability and so on, those things are a bit different. One, because you can bypass those issues and still eat animal products, on a personal level, but also because your not eating animal products doesn’t have much of an impact at all in the overall issue.

The other thing is misunderstanding how products, brands and commerce in general work. I mean, if you can go and fund the, what? Fifty to a hundred million dollars Mario Kart World must have cost, by all means be my guest. I have a couple of pitches I may want to run by you.

But even in that scenario I’m afraid people don’t particularly care for your open source knockoff. They want to play Mario Kart. Because it’s Mario Kart. For some it’s branding, for some it’s because their friends are playing and they want to play together, for some it’s nostalgia from their childhood, for some it’s just that they don’t care or know and that’s the name they recognize.

You could fund half the gaming industry to be free and open source and people would still play Mario Kart.

So if you want Nintendo to not be dicks about it you need to regulate them, not put your money where your mouth is.

We won’t indeed. And that’s why the neoliberal fantasy where the market self-regulates is bullshit.

We won’t because our set of incentives isn’t infinitely fluid to the point where every negative, hostile or illegitimate action is unprofitable. And we shouldn’t have to, because there already is a mechanism to account for that fact, and it’s the law.

We’re not meant to judge our spending money in fungible commodities and entertainment based on political stances and larger considerations about long term convenience. We’re not meant to weigh whether Nintendo has a right to disable our device remotely as part of the choice to play a cute racing game.

That’s not the sphere where those choices belong. We’ve been told it is by neoliberal capitalists who don’t want a government to tell them what they can and cannot do, so they keep insisting that they can be as crappy as they want because if they do something the public won’t like they will “vote with their wallet” and the market will settle in the optimal spot of profit vs service. And if it doesn’t a competitor will give people what they want and they’ll buy that instead.

But that’s a lie. It never worked that way, and it doesn’t work anywhere close to that way in a global online oligarchy. You’re meant to be able to buy whatever the hell you fancy because there is supposed to be a state regulating things to be safe, fair and protected when you engage in small commercial exchanges.

Because you need Office, Microsoft doesn’t get to be the Antichrist. Because Netflix has the show everybody wants to watch it doesn’t get to be the worst. The idea is those companies are supposed to be held to the level of being-the-worst-Antichrist we all deem minimally acceptable. Market forces can play within that space, and no further.

So you want Netlfix to not be the worst? Get a legislator to enforce it and watch Stranger Things to your heart’s content. Because whether you like Stranger Things isn’t supposed to be connected in any way to how Netflix conducts its business or how abusive it can be in the process of doing so.

To be clear, I agree that you don’t have to be into politics. Not caring enough is fine. Social media expressions of opinion are always black and white. AI is the end of the world, Nintendo’s piracy stance is a war crime, Windows is the antichrist… You’re allowed to be bummed out by any of those and not do anything about it because you’re not bummed out enough. That’s a refreshing degree of online moderation, if anything.

What I take issue with is confusing those sorts of market results with actual political action. A brand can decide something unpopular isn’t worth pursuing for PR reasons, but they can also decide it IS worth it. To my knowledge the people I shared Netflix accounts with that were impacted by the location checks are still impacted by those. Your EA and Uber examples were barely impactful at all until regulators got into the mix, and regulators got into the mix hard about those issues. I invite you to go look up how both of them played out, because, man, is there a difference between how fast the companies reacted once there was someone in a public position going “hey, maybe we need to take a look at this”.

Mistaking how a brand manages its public perception for effective political actions is dangerous. Letting corporations appease you through those means only serves to set up a bad precedent when those brands decide the time has come to squeeze and go hard on monetization. You need public institutions that are strong and vigilant enough to put some bite behind that public displeasure.

Can a boycott work? Sure. As a coordinated political action, the consumer-side equivalent of a strike. This takes just as much work and coordination as any other political activity.

But spending your money based on the outrage that reaches you through social media is not a functional way to generate change. It’s just you being part of the mass of consumers brand manage with their messaging tools. You’re a rounding error in a stat, part of the manipulation of the market that is built into every corporate action. When you do that you’re a focus group data point, not a political actor.

No, hold on, you get past the “other than get involved with politics” part very quickly there.

You can ABSOLUTELY get involved with politics. Go get involved with politics. Why are you not?

You can just vote, which is way more impactful than making purchasing decisions based on performatively affecting political involvement. That’s getting involved with politics. If that doesn’t do it then the next recourse isn’t to spend money for posturing, it’s to decide if you care enough about the issue to be activist about it or to break into the system in some capacity where you can implement change.

That’s what you can do.

What you can’t do is change how consumer protections work by spending money. That’s not a thing. Nintendo has literal billions to spend marketing their products and the vast majority of people who will buy them as a result would not care much about the edge case you care about, would never encounter it and don’t care enough about computing hardware to have an opinion in the first place You wanna change that? Go do politics.

This is why voting with your wallet pisses me off as a concept. It lets people say “but what else could I do besides getting into politics” and pretend they’ve done something by buying some shit over some other shit.

Nah, man, that’s not how that works. You can do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is fine. You don’t need to crusade for every single minor annoyance the legal system allows to enter the fringes of your life. You have no obligation to take on Apple or Nintendo or Google on any one specific crappy thing they decide to do.

But just to be clear, “voting with your wallet” is doing nothing. That’s the choice you’re making.

No, my suggestion is your buying or not buying stuff isn’t a political action. Your political action is political action.

If you want to make sure it is not an option for hardware manufacturers to arbitrarily brick hardware you own for monetization or licensing issues what you need is a law that makes it illegal.

How you get that law is very dependent on where you live and what your political system is, so hey, I’m sorry if you need some sort of regime change before this becomes an option. But the “voting with your wallet” thing doesn’t stop being a capitalist fiction just because you landed in a system where consumer protections have been written out of the lawbooks.

It’s not a terrible example. You can have delicious vegan food and you can have moral objections to the process of eating meat.

But if your reasoning is to enact some larger impact on climate or the practices of industrial meat production your own consumption habits are mostly irrelevant and you should focus on regulating those things instead.

The difference is that food isn’t a licensed product. You can have very sustainable meat at home. You can’t source sustainable Mario Kart.

No it is not.

Voting with your wallet does nothing. It’s a neoliberal fiction capitalism uses to pretend regulation is unnecessary.

Voting with your wallet is dependent on everybody else with a wallet even knowing that there’s something to vote about. Most people don’t.

And voting with your wallet means you have a tiny wallet in a world with a TON of tiny wallets and a few very big, huge-ass humongous wallets, so your wallet vote doesn’t count for crap compared with your one-vote-per-person vote, if you have access to one of those.

So no, voting with your wallet is barely useful at best, just the normal flow of the market ideally, entirely pointless at worst.

Because Banana!

But no, seriously, you can rage all you want about brands and corporations, but in cultural industries content is always king.

That’s why you need regulation. You can’t expect people to not play or watch cool stuff just because you’re aware of and latched onto some particular moral, ethical or economical transgression. It’s res publica to prevent the misbehavior so people don’t have to have a stance on the extent of licensing for software/hardware combo services whenever their kid wants the cute gorilla game.

And yes, I do own a Switch 2.