Rowin of Win

I hear you, I feel you, and I want the same, but…

I want more. I want pedestrians to step off the curb a little early sometimes, to take risks when things seem safe. I want people driving to be distracted and run a red light or even hit a car or pedestrian. I want the grade of the track and rain to impact the acceleration and deceleration of a train. I want card driven late at night to have a higher rate of intoxicated drivers and to get stopped by police.

The simulation could go deeper. The angle of the track at a turn could increase or decrease the safe turning speed for a train. The time since the last rain would change how much current rain makes the road slippery due to oil build up. People going home from a football game at a stadium would start bunched up together and saturate public transport and roads unless you put extra services on. Maintenance issues caused by you penny pinching would manifest in a range of ways from a minor difficulty getting to speed to derailing a whole train. Neglected IT systems could have ever increasing outages. Outsourcing development of your infrastructure could lead to increased cost over time especially if the cost of switching was high.

At the same time the increased use of public transport would lower the number of visits to the emergency room for asthma attacks. Making extra services available for big events would reduce the number of altercations and following that incarcerations. Everything could have flow on effects not by having them hard coded but by having natural reactions in the way entities interact. Someone is more stressed because industrial noise is happening close to their house late at night? They are more likely to be hasty crossing the road and get hit by a car.

Most of this is too big for a single developer or even a fairly good team, but the description of the interactions could be done at higher levels by having summary interactions, more general things like good or bad mood, short or long travel time compared to expectations, and rates of interactions rather than actual events playing out. Still, it would be awesome.

Nebula has been quite successful as far as I can tell. A whole bunch of educational YouTubers have moved over or were part of establishing it and honestly it works well. Videos can download to your device, the quality is the same, the app is a tiny bit janky but nowhere near as bad as all the ads etc on the YouTube app, and the cost is actually reasonable and goes in a reasonable share to the creators. I strongly prefer direct access to creators like this and also like on Patreon. Direct support means there is no advertiser in between to demonetise a video or have it taken down because it is controversial. You can’t even have a WW2 documentary on YouTube but you can have actual Nazis, but on Nebula you get analysis and history without Nike or Surfshark being reticent to sponsor a video.

Lol, absolutely! Bigots gonna bigot, best we can do is not fall for it and be kind to each other.

I just love how utterly obtuse the TERFs sound when they say “Trans women are not a subset of women, and cis is just a slur, women are women and trans women are not” or similar, like honestly, the terms are all very simple, tall women are a subset of women, brown women are a subset of women, infertile women are a subset of women, and they are all women. They are just bigots who don’t want trans women to be part of that group, they want to exclude them. It is just hatred and bigotry, the symantics are just a cover.

I am glad this trend is becoming better understood. A more diverse audience means more diverse stories being told, and while another MCU or Street Fighter is a perfectly good game to release a game targeting that more diverse audience will give more options for me. I typically play games like Risk of Rain, Skyrim, Creeper World, and so on, but I have also lost many hours to Viva Piñata, so I would love to see some more diversity in the games on offer.