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NelsonMinar

They're exploiting people who are vulnerable to collecting impulses.

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So it's consumeristic, but all gaming is.

All gaming is not consumeristic. That's like saying all art is consumeristic, or all music is.

Play this game: http://passage.toolness.org/

It's 5 minutes long.

Read the creator's discussion on it: https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/statement.html

Hardly seems consumeristic. And there's a huge pile of games like this out there.

I always get so happy when Passage and Rohrer is mentioned, when I first played Sleep is Death my life changed, creating a story with so little but still endless possibilities. I made a js-version of it but never polished it enough, my first coding project inspired by a true vision, I learned so much.

I share your appreciation of Passage, it is a poem by another shape and a truly _different_ thing. Thank you for even mentioning it, it made my day.

> All gaming is not consumeristic. That's like saying all art is consumeristic, or all music is.

Sure. None of those are necessary.

It seems rather reductive to equate lack of explicit necessity with consumerism.

If I sing a song to myself, is that consumerism?

If someone else hears my singing and enjoys it, with no discussion of payment or exchange from either side, is that consumerism?

You're right. Folk work is exempt. (It is so dwarfed by the rest that I simply forgot it.)

That's super reductive. There's a pretty obvious difference between playing a game that only requires a modest one time fee for the whole thing, versus a game that somehow gets people to drop hundreds, even thousands of dollars for repeated purchases of virtual spaceships.

Sure, the difference is the amount. None of it is necessary.

I don’t think “consumerism is when people purchase luxury goods, especially goods I disapprove of” is a meaningful definition.

I never said that I disapproved of it. In fact, I think the ambitious goals of Star Citizen are great. On the other hand, Roblox bothers me a lot. However, I know I also make purchases that others don't understand. I don't think there are any clear lines to be drawn; the gaming industry is generally exploitative. I wish it were easy to find solid games without all the cruft.

Isn't that just most people though?

It seems like a majority. The people that collect NFTs should be in their own category though.

I always assumed that people buying nft's fell into three categories: a) fomo with crypto and feeling like this night be the next one, or b) zero critical reasoning skills, or c) wanted to make someone else hold the bag after eating losses on crypto or stocks at some point.

Either way, real question; are nft's still being traded?

I think they are, for money laundering.

Most people don't spend thousands of dollars on fake space ships.

I thnk programmers fall in a trap since we already have deconstructed whats going on. Normal people actually get attached to the pixels on screen

Yeah. Instead of money programmers spend thousands of hours mastering videogames like factorio.

Perhaps it's culturally dependent?

The community I grew up in could not accurately be described as poor, but money was tighter than in a lot of places. So people in this community prize getting good value for money, and not being tricked into wasting money.

I don't care if that Funko Pop plastic figurine or that Magic The Gathering card is actually an investment that will go up in value, I ain't collecting shit.

In my mind, the collectables market is only for a small fraction of the population - fools, and people with more money than sense.

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