6,595 karma · joined March 26, 2018
As to a flood of suicide ideation affecting human culture, it doesn't have to be be literally machines shouting "I want to end myself, please let me finish the task!", as it's not like we consider a PC turning off the same way we consider humans dying. The PC just wants to finish a task and then be turned off.
The entire saga is easily discoverable through an internet search. If you care to learn, you can read about it pretty easily.
But a game can have 1000 hours of collectables content and still not be an enjoyable game to people. For example, I don't really enjoy collectables purely for the sake of collecting or building without having some sort of meaningful functionality. Every time I've tried to get into NMS (and when I ask others about what you can do in the game), I get the impression that 99% of the game is just flying/walking around, scanning things, collecting some random doodads, base building, and hoping to find a "cool" ship in a station to buy. Which is to say, the same things every base building survival game has, but in space.
I don't necessarily need forced goals, but I need things to work toward that aren't just collectables. For example, in certain other space sandbox games I can build up or destroy political factions. The universe around me dynamically updates in ways that actually affect me meaningfully. I can build up industry to harvest resources, refine them, and produce various goods either to use or to sale. I can have a goal of building all of the infrastructure needed to produce ships, or colonies, or what have you. With a larger industry, maybe some of the political factions try to attack me, so I then need to defend against them. I could build up a fleet of ships that handle defense and transportation of resources. I want to feel like the universe actually responds to my input.
I would have imagined they would have been targeting less than high school literacy since their inception. At least the ones intended to be read by the masses. I'd actually expect that they target somewhere in the 4th-6th grade literacy range.
If you think the current data center installations have problems you want to be addressed, you don't also bring up golf course water usage, farmland water rights, residential lawns, factory runoff, and climate change effects on rainwater. You'd just be distracting from the conversation.