You’re replying to a hexbear user. When they use the label “Liberals” it includes the folks you immediately think of but it also includes conservatives., as in economic liberalism.
Very true, in my experience lots of women like the idea of strength from big muscles but don’t really care to see the striated muscle fibers in a cut look. Hell some are turned off by the vasculature of my hands.
EDIT: Guys in comic books are ripped for the dudes reading them. I imagine the same is true for movie stars.
My friends who play PDX games with me and know my politics sometimes tease me about the game using currency or referencing profitability. And then I remind them that we’re all meticulously planning our economies with virtually nothing left for a privileged class to decide. And our decisions, though made in a context of imperialism, aren’t being made for personal wealth but state power.
I have thought about this for far longer than warranted I think it comes down to a combination of several factors.
The first is that substitutions among video games are indirect at best. Paradox for example makes strategy games but a fair portion of their fans call them “Paradox games” because of the particular connotations cultivated by their DLC campaigns, multi-year support and mechanical granularity. Also within the strategy genre are the Total War series of games produced by Creative Assembly, fans of that series are throwing fits on YouTube because the handling of the series has been dreadful in their eyes. No competitors have emerged yet to make an alternative Total War experience and several fans were excited about the final entry in a trilogy within the series so the sunk cost fallacy keeps them around.
The second is that any video game player born before about 2003 has witnessed the maturation of the video game industry as we know it. As the rate at which profit is earned in the industry falls, practices and standards change to recoup perceived losses. In video games this manifests in unusually tangible ways for the consumer. Instead of entering cheat codes left in for debugging purposes, you buy power ups with real money. Instead of unlocking alternate outfits and characters by completing challenges or secrets you buy them with real money. Instead of a game having to wait until it is finished to be sold, publishers leverage internet connectivity to ship first and patch later. Many of these practices are striking to the consumer because they are monetizing aspects of their hobby that they once enjoyed at no extra cost, and these practices are appearing in a context of escapism.
Yes they’re all liberals. That’s what I said. The guy was like ‘where blue states I thought you said libral’ and so I had to clarify that in this context the word applies to both not just blue.
Not only that but by necessity the money/credits in nearly all games (EVE Online a possible exception) is closer to a labor voucher of sorts than a commodity. And labor vouchers are a potential avenue for transitioning a society away from currency.
No there cannot be a fair form of capitalism because it is centered on exchange. You have to center your life on turning your time into a profit to afford the whole rest of society’s product also sold at a profit, at its most basic level it is unsustainable.
I rather enjoyed GTAO but then I remembered that I was bankrolled by a cheater very early on. Not sure I would have loved it if I had to grind for money instead of immediately buying everything I ever wanted.