yet another Elevator7009 alt, now to mod [email protected]

  • 32 Posts
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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: March 27th, 2025

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  • Should I trust my police captain when he says crime is out of control, or should I wonder if he’s just protecting his own livelihood?

    The nice thing about most fiction (unreliable narrators exist), especially with video games, is that often you can trust what you are given. I’d think the SimCity police captain is just an NPC mouthpiece for which the game can report the crime frequency variable it has with no obfuscation, because that’s how games work—most are honest about stats. In real life I need to have this worry, to balance it with “am I incorrectly biased because I don’t see much crime and am incorrectly applying that to the entire rest of the city I don’t live in? Is it the police captain doing corrupt things? Is it both?” So much anxiety about what’s true and what is not, who’s twisting the truth, who genuinely intends to report truth but got something wrong by accident… but in fiction I can usually mindlessly trust the narrator, in games I can mindlessly trust the stats and the NPCs serving as mouthpieces for them. I am sure there are some games subverting this and having lying NPCs giving distorted stats, but in general, especially with older games…

    The main sentiment I relate to too. I think getting older and experiencing or hearing about others’ suffering makes me less inclined to fuck with the pixels onscreen, even though they’re just pixels. The wonders of empathy! Not meant to say people who do nasty things in video games are bad in real life, I’m still locking Minecraft villagers in stalls where they have minimal room to move and making mob farms where a mob is spawned/“born” only to die painfully seconds afterwards.












  • Educational, thanks for your perspective! I did have a mental flag raised by the mention of “politically correct” in the Steam description but wasn’t 100% sure if this was an offensive edgelord who whines about a politically correct world in response to being banned for slurs, or just a guy making a political sim and people getting mad that his particular simulation (dis)favors a particular political ideology. (I fully expect a politics simulator, a subject where people acting in good faith still have intense disagreements based on their values, to be chock-full of bias even with an attempt to be objective, fair, and even-handed, and for people to get very upset about that.) You probably were better able to clock that because you looked at more things he put out than I did.

    Few works have grasped informal settlement issues through the acknowledgement of the “natural” economic mechanisms specific to capitalism.

    I do not understand what he was trying to say there, but thanks for the reminder on economics. And thanks for the game rec!


  • Went looking for a city builder with politics and posted one fruit of my search. Commenters let me know it’s probably not a good game, so I tried again. I was looking more on the lines of local politics, who gets funding for what and whose project gets through and not being able to just unilaterally decide to build this building here the way you take for granted in most city builders, not huge ideology things, but hey. This has politics! I do think it was an interesting read and definitely tells you the kind of city builder you would be buying if you bought Citystate. Will continue on my quest for a city builder with politics.



  • Just subbed mostly because of the promise to avoid outrage culture. Some Lemmy communities for games I have seen are pretty good at slapping down any bigoted stuff (props to them!) but do engage in outrage that happens to be progressive-flavored. On one hand I get it, the post is bad news that probably impacts some gamers, on another, I’d like to enjoy my hobby instead of seeing the 388338th “the gaming industry is having serious troubles, billionaires are bad, short-term-profit-seeking shareholders ruin everything” comment. I agree with that position but I do not want to think about it all the time when I come on Lemmy for fun, not political anger.



  • In city builders you’re often not just a mayor but essentially a god, and Fata Deum leans into that. Command your mere mortal worshippers to harvest resources, grow crops, construct temples and monuments dedicated to you, and build a prosperous city. Guide them helpfully or punish them cruelly.

    I remember being a tweenager and specifically seeking this kind of thing out to be the worst possible digital overlord I could be. Now I am more the type who has trouble picking the dialogue option that would upset an NPC, but I still appreciate being given the option of being an awful, awful person in a video game.

    I also recognize some of the titles in the article from earlier posts here on !citybuilders, so good job to @[email protected] for hitting a lot of city builders!