Would young men be rioting in the streets if they didn’t have video games to pacify them?
Hear me out.
We are seeing record levels of young men unemployed and living with their parents: The future for them is bleak. Saddled with college debt, they can barely get a job that pays miimum wage, while living independently is forever out of reach.
I feel like at other points of history, there would be more social unrest, but things are exceedingly calm given the economics.
I was watching a video by Healthy Gamer, a gamer bro-turned psychiatrist. He points out that video games are very addictive and seductive because they MIMIC accomplishment. You can grind to get to the next level, you can gain new skills, you are continually put on a treadmill of constant progress. It’s very satisfying in a hollow way, satisfying in a way that might make you forget that society has nothing to offer you but debt and homelessness after you followed all the rules.
Are video games weapons of mass distraction, the metaphysical equivalent of a million Christians being fed to a million lions every day?
I’m not encouraging people to riot, just saying society does have feedback loops that seem to have been neutralized–at least in the US.
Yeah, we’re running out of third spaces here, too. My only real hope of meeting kindred spirits is online these days.
I’ve been playing Launti Asuna wondering when survival actually kicks in. Why am I only running across slimes? The only thing that consistently kills me is falling through cavern roofs. Starvation used to kill me, but food sources are plentiful (I didn’t realize mussel nodes were food!).
Is there a good meeting point for Luanti/Asuna? The ContentDB is pretty damn bare.
Other questions: Are biomes based on X, Y or Z? That is to say, I’ve been digging down and down and down, but the biome remains the same, though ores seems to increase a little bit. Is it better to just keep walking horizontally and occasionally do some shallow digs?
I’m primarily looking for obsidian (assuming magma + water?), which I thought I’d get closer to by digging down, but I just kept running into more ice blocks.
i’m not sure about asuna. i’ve played mineclonia before which has exact same mechanics as minecraft. to get obsidian, you need to pour water on lava (and not the other way around, i.e. not pour lava on water). the lava has to be a lava source block, so flowing lava does not work. easiest thing to do is to just find an underground cave with lots of lava in it, and then use 1 bucket of water and pour it over it all. easily get 20 obsidian at once. you need a diamond pickaxe to mine it though, otherwise you don’t get any drops.
Fun fact (works in MC and Asuna): you can make a permanent water spring by building a 4-block square reservoir and dropping a bucket of water in two opposite corners.