We had to read manuals for tutorials, maps, and story exposition. Try releasing a game nowadays that does that and you’re going to get slapped with a 1/10 because people nowadays have less patience than a goldfish.

I kind of get where you’re coming from but your dismissive framing means it comes across as out of touch, ‘old man yells at clouds’ type stuff.

The shift has far less to do with patience and more to do with designers getting better at integrating tutorials into the games themselves. Games now are designed to teach you how to play through playing, so reading a manual became unnecessary. That’s not a flaw, that’s an improvement.

The only reasons this wasn’t done earlier was because the field of UX was still developing, and because cartridges limited how much text could be crammed into the games themselves.

That said, there are still well-received games that rely on manuals, but it’s now an explicit design or aesthetic choice rather than something everyone has to do to make up for limited tutorialisation. Check out Tunic, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, or TIS-100 as examples.

I’d rather games only include a manual because they wanted to, rather than because they had no choice.

Thanks for fixing!

Please don’t post links that give no info besides telling me to download an app.

Only a problem if you outsource your reading & thinking abilities to AI

Yeah, they’re practically the same game and - frankly - they’re not very good in retrospect, but there’s something very appealing to me about ‘desktop games’ as a format.

AI slop cover art doesn’t bode well for the written content within. Pass.

Turns out people like to play inexpensive games with their friends!

The genre name is unfortunate but the movement overall is positive.

I’d be here for hours trying to list them all, so I’ll just do one for each category:

• Classics: Howard’s End by E. M. Forster
• Shakespeare: Henry IV, part 1
• Sci-fi: Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Really there were dozens that stuck out, and two of my biggest takeaways were that great writing is timeless, and classic literature is far more approachable and relatable than you might think.

If you don’t know where to start, I recommend getting a copy of The New Lifetime Reading Plan.

Clearly a love letter to Road Rash (1994) but nothing wrong with that.

Pretty fascinating! I would’ve expected the dongle to be doing something more complex but, as the author says, it’s possible that these developers underused it.

Create artificial restrictions.

One year I decided I would only read ‘classics’ (pre-1950), one year I only read sci-fi, one year I only read Shakespeare’s plays, in chronological order as written.

In all of those years I read more than I did normally, with the added bonus that it pushed me to read things I might not have otherwise picked up.

For video games, something I’ve enjoyed in the past is a gaming alphabet: for a year, you keep a list of all 26 letters A-Z. Every time you start a game, it should be something you: A.) haven’t played before, and B.) the title should start with a letter you haven’t used yet.

It encourages you to scroll through your backlog and pick something different because it’s a letter you need. Plus, over the year you’ll build a list of all the games you played (you can add short reviews too!) which can be a fun look back later on.

Here’s an article detailing the methodology.

https://newzoo.com/resources/blog/global-games-market-to-hit-189-billion-in-2025

Closer than I remembered, but console is still larger and projected to grow faster.

It’s hilarious that you think game development is a ‘cushy corpo job’.

Ah yes, all those game devs famously enjoying competitive salaries and rock solid job security.

Game development is hitting your head against a brick wall because you believe in the art form. Anyone who tells you they’re in it for the money is lying to you.

Yep. PC players tend to be very outspoken, but they’re easily outnumbered by the console market, and the mobile market dwarfs them both.

Eligibility criteria for the Irish version have not yet been announced, so at this point it’d just be speculation.

Game Changer is their flagship show, and has been consistently great at reinventing itself and surprising season after season. It’s a game show where the game is different every time and the contestants have to try and figure out what’s going on. It goes places.

If you enjoy long form TTRPG, they have dozens of Dimension 20 campaigns with all kinds of settings and genres.

Smartypants is a show where comedians get to give PowerPoint presentations on anything they want.

Play It By Ear is a personal fave - each episode is an entirely improvised musical, which feels like an incredible magic trick when they pull it off.

Um, Actually is a nerdy quiz show where contestants have to interrupt the host with factual corrections about video games, anime, sci-fi, etc.

Gastronauts is a cooking challenge show with professional chefs trying to fulfil unhinged requests from comedians.

There’s way more on there besides all that, but thought I’d share some highlights.

Not useless, but yes - they’re likely to be quickly found and discarded.

‘Eventually’? I sometimes get notified about people with AirTags sitting near me on the same train.

There’s almost zero chance they don’t find these in an hour or less, and the precise tracking feature allows you to find exactly where they are.

Considering the tags alone cost about $30 each this would just be an enormous waste of money.

Just don’t accidentally send 👉👌 instead