The whole genre is hilariously incompetent. It SHOULD be easy for somebody to come along, make an actually good extraction shooter, and cash out, but every time they do something dumb to screw it up.
Marauders was a blast for a short period of time before they made the mistake of listening to their community and made it Tarkov But Worse
Pokemon is how a lot of people got into games to begin with. It was a new and innovative experience from their perspective. Pokemon Red/Blue was a competent game with some fresh ideas, but through luck/marketing it became the launch point for a massive population of people into the gaming industry.
So now you've got a few factors playing into Pokemon hype:
Nostalgia (you never forget your first)
Production value (this made money, pump more money in)
Incidentally a formula that favors expansion (just add more Pokemon)
These factors are enough on their own to carry a franchise for a while, especially for an otherwise ignorant audience that doesn't play anything else (just like the people who just play FIFA games and nothing else). But at some point, it becomes too obvious even to the most zealous supporters that the formula is, well, a formula, and it's not changing or improving, and even they finally begin to criticize the product. It's easy to have a favorite pokemon out of 150, maybe even 450, but now there are over 1000 and it becomes exhausting even for die-hard fans. Even the number of types has exploded to 18 without actually having any interesting interactions to justify them, it's just more for the sake of more.
Plus, the most recent releases have been impressively lazy, again so much so that even megafans can't nostalgia their way out of it.
All this together makes for a history of a franchise that was one vehemently defended but is now seen as an embarrassing phase one went through as a child.
Could still be a real European perspective. I've found a lot of people who are only casually familiar with North America will be able to tell you the broad cultural strokes and then one or two bizarrely specific facts. Like, "Oh yeah, America is all New York, Texas, California, Florida, and who could forget the iconic Egyptian Theatre of Boise, Idaho."
The crux of this is whether Us vs Them is instinctual or learned. I don't think we yet have a definitive answer, but certainly Us vs Them is so ingrained in our ways of life that removing it would be extraordinarily difficult.
Again, I may be excessively cynical, but my belief is that some people, maybe even most people, WILL take these mental pathways you describe no matter what, and the best we can do is provide distractions. Bread and circuses. At their best, these distractions channel our self-destructive tendencies into harmless oceans of impunity. At their worst, they are hijacked by ne'er-do-wells to transform the apathetic into frothing zealots of a cause they don't even care to understand. It becomes the responsibility of those who are paying attention to design a system that is resistant to abuse.
Presuming I am wrong, that means that there is a path for society to eliminate competitiveness from its apparent nature. I agree that would lead us toward utopia, but I am very skeptical such a path exists, and that those who attempt to follow it will simply be eaten by the wolves they believe they can train.
I basically agree, but I think we should also think about this in a solution-oriented way at a large scale, beyond just personally opening one's own eyes.
Tribalism is part of our nature. It's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's fun. It makes us feel good to belong. The sports analogy is frequently brought up and is the example of tribalism being leveraged for entertainment and social bonding. It's a clever way to us to short-circuit our instinct for tribal warfare and use it for something constructive and fun instead of destructive and tragic.
Politicians and media outlets have started using this insidiously for their own powergames. Maybe this is too cynical, but it seems to me that the circus has been poisoned. You hear about all these people who "aren't into politics" but will repeat their CNN and Fox soundbytes. There's nothing terribly wrong with being personally apathetic about politics, in fact that's the norm for those people currently benefitting the most from existing policy, but it's terribly dishonest and destructive to lure such people into the political arena when they have no sincere interest in the impact of their political decisions, but a few powerful people benefit and countless powerless people suffer.
How do we reclaim our circus? Do we really just need more ESPN and less CNN? Can we punish politicians and news sources for the pervasion and perversion of information as infotainment? Can we educate people to source their identity from their family and culture instead of from their senator?
Then it should be obvious to you that inflaming those emotions isn't a productive way to engage. What point are you making other than, "yeah, he's a moron! fuck him!" Good for you?
I've just been on the internet a long time and pride myself on writing with precision. I am a rather bot-like writer, Narrrz.
Hijacking to point out to both the dumb lefty lemmies and the dumb righty lemmies that this is an amazing case study in the failure of people to separate their culture from their politics. I apologize for using you as a prop, vector_zero, but you signed up in this thread so I assume it's all good?
Here we have a person who believes that are right wing, but lives in a decidedly left wing location. What examples do they provide to demonstrate their right-winged-ness? Gun culture, cooking, sewing, quilting, home projects. Note the absolute lack of policy. When pressed about actual politics further in the thread, we get things like "yeah we need to fix gun violence, healthcare, and the economy, but I don't think any of the solutions I've heard will work." Essentially we have here a person who is completely disengaged from the reality of politics, but places high value on their culture and identity, having confused one for the other in the process.
This is all reinforced by the fact that this person lived in left wing area and is active here on a left wing website, where their self-identification as "right wing" earns them demonization, along with some doomed attempts at political discourse. Since vector_zero only really cares about their identity and culture, the demonization is all they notice, internalize, and respond to. It provides a pressure that actually validates and encourages their perceived need to stand up for and defend their cultural values. The political discourse is entirely ignored because vector_zero does not actually care about or understand politics. Meanwhile, the attacking lefties are blind to this miscommunication, characterizing it as "convenient dismissal of the real issues." No, it's not convenient dismissal, it's literally a disability: Our supposed "right wing" friend actually does not have the capacity to see beyond their shoelaces and understand how their emotional reaction to being personally attacked translates into large-scale impact for the rest of the world. So they go out and vote red (or not, since they are "powerless") without any understanding of what the consequences may be.
Perhaps the lefties as well are so blind to the importance of identity and culture that they suffer from the same "convenient dismissal" of the content of the discussion that vector_zero values. That's harder to say, but it's an interesting supposition. If that is the case, then we're doomed to go around in circles and continue beating each other until morale improves. But maybe not, maybe one or the other can recognize the tragedy for what it is and learn how to engage with it in a more constructive way.
It's painfully obvious to me that everyone involved here actually wants the same things, and there's a very clear education plan to get us all together on the same track. vector_zero simply needs to be made aware that left wing culture and identity is actually almost the same as right wing culture and identity. That absolutely nothing of themselves would be lost or reduced by voting for a democrat every once in a while. The difference is the policies, and since vector_zero doesn't actually understand or care about those, there isn't really any reason for them to hold up the label of "right wing."
You can just be a guy who likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day.
Signed: A guy who also likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day, but also votes democrat every time because I don't want anybody else to get hurt along the way.
It's written that way to be as neutral as possible.
Replace "Elf" with "God" and you'll see how important it is to "dance"
The original song goes
Uno dos tres cuatro cinco cinco seis
It's stupid on purpose and makes sense if you listen to the lyrics
There hasn't been a "good one" since WW2.
Short explanation: The arms Iraqi forces fought with during the Gulf War were largely bought or built by Americans. Isn't that interesting?
Long explanation: It's all connected to the Israel-Palestine issues we are seeing this very day. Iraq was dealt a very nasty hand by the UN after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, becoming a landlocked country, with lines drawn such that they were made caretakers of ethnic enemies and forced to forsake much of their geopolitical power and resources to tribal rivals. It's difficult to say their claim to Kuwait was justified, but it's certainly just as difficult to say it was unjustified.
On top of that, we had just gotten done with fucking over Iraq due to their failure in the Iraq-Iran war. They had initially allied with the USSR to prop themselves up, and when that went to shit they turned around and tried doing the west and themselves a favor by grabbing a piece of Iran. We were directly supporting them (anybody taking a punch at Iran is a friend of ours!), and had been increasing our support, but when they agreed to a ceasefire we stopped, leaving them war-torn, deeply in debt, and with really nothing to show for their experiment of working with the west aside from all these shiny American weapons of course.
Medium explanation?: Iraq had been engineered to be an Israel-like anti-Arab agent in the region, but when they failed and sued for peace, we left them no other option but to wage another war to survive. When they went in a direction we didn't like, we got all our buddies together (including a surprising number of old enemies) and decimated them. Twice!
While I agree that Hunt is a great game, I think it's a bit dishonest to compare it to Tarkov. I guess it's my own fault for saying "extraction shooter" since Hunt IS a Shooter where the goal is to Extract something, but the economic component is paper-thin, to the point that it barely matters.
A strength of Tarkov is the frequent wipes. This isn't me saying Hunt should do the same - it's a different game. Rather that I want a game with an emphasis on economic risk, like Tarkov, but made by a developer with the competence of Crytek.