There is currently a very funny, kind of sad dust-up over Helldivers 2, in which self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers have previously heralded it as a rare game where they believe “politics” does not play a factor

The game does of course have a political message, but I think there is a slightly different take that could have merit. The “political” part of the game is to make fun of the interventionist foreign policy of the US. This was a major culture war issue from the 80s to the 2000s, but since the 2010s, the culture wars have shifted towards identity politics. The ‘self-proclaimed “anti-woke” gamers’ are right in pointing out that Helldivers avoids these topics.

The political ideas you can find on Reddit are much more diverse. There is usually at least some pushback against some of the most deranged statements.

If you want to shoot your teammates, you can do that just fine without an aimbot

Does this game need client-side anticheat at all? It’s not PvP, so if you’re cheating, you just ruin the experience for yourself and maybe your teammates. But as far as I know, there are no rankings and not really any competition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME

All console games have DRM that tries to prevent users from copying it or using it on different hardware

I don’t like DRM either, but this misses the point about ownership. For example, if a law says your house may not have more than two people living in it, you can still own it, even if you don’t like the limitations that it has.

It’s incorrect in the sense that the statement implies that there is a kind of ownership distinct from owning a license that is denied to users. But this isn’t possible. The only way to own intellectual property (games, books, music) is to have a license to it.

Technically, we’ve never owned our games.

I don’t understand why people make this point. You own the physical media and you own a perpetual license to the game. It’s like saying you don’t own your car because you have to follow the traffic laws.

More than 300€ per minute?

I’d be interested what people think he should be paid. Based on the downvotes on your comment, people say 200€ is too low? It was in 2009, so inflation adjusted it’s 300€. And the article has the complete raw recording, it took him less than a minute.

I like using AntennaPod for podcasts and Spotify for music.

What a weird article. It doesn’t say what was agreed and it doesn’t say what the voice actors want instead. Voice actor says the deal is “garbage” and the AI company says the deal is “ethical”. But what is the actual deal???

Obviously you can buy and not buy whatever you want, but usually if you’re going to boycott a business, you would pick the one whose decisions you disagree with (Unity), not the victims (game developers)

They made a decision that is bad for game developers and your response is to punish … game developers?

It doesn’t make sense for Lemmy (or Mastodon) to send your IP to other instances. Without that IP, all they have is your username. They can’t really track you based on just the username.

What a wild conspiracy theory.

Legally, they can’t collect and process any of the data unless you accepted a contract with them. Just by sending an upvote or a comment to their instance, you don’t agree to any of this.

And if they choose to ignore the law and just do it anyway, they still can’t, because all they have is the data that your instance sends them. They don’t have your geo-location, device Id, etc.

Interesting. It seems that Lemmy can see Mastodon users and send private messages to them. And I believe Mastodon users can create Lemmy posts, so potentially Threads users could do that too once Meta enables two-way communication.

I’m in favor of federation. The point of federated networks isn’t that there are no evil corporations, but rather that they can’t cause damage.

What Facebook can do:

• read your public data (they can do this wether anyone federates with them or not)
• let their users publish content to other Fediverse users

What they can’t do:

• serve you ads
• serve you an algorithmic feed
• impose their ToS or rules
• collect data for analytics/tracking/marketing
• force you to use a certain client
• make changes to the protocol or design

I think this is mostly relevant for Mastodon servers due to the format of the content, but the arguments are the same.

You can simply not follow people on Threads and you will have no Threads content in your feed

I’ve seen some people debate whether “meta” means “applying a concept to itself” or “most effective tactic available”. In gaming, both kind of make sense. But in the context of business models for twitch streams, only the second definition works. (even though it originated from the word “metagame”, where “meta” wasn’t an acronym)