There’s an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It’s in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it’s one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you’re into there’s at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It’s actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn’t have a community associated with it?
Dune was my go to scifi…now it’s popular and I feel like a hipster.
My dad got me into hard scifi, d&d, Tolkien…if I feel like a hipster, can’t imagine what he feels like.
Slinging. Like David and Goliath, but I’m better with the over the shoulder method than the spin it in circles method. Based on discord and other sites, there are dozens of slingers worldwide.
Bash scripting, firewall config, vpn tunnelling, and containerization ( rootless Podman ).
I’m into combining these in interesting ways.
While it could be argued that there are tons of communities for these, combining them to run secure apps or automate their setups don’t seem to be as popular.
It’s a hot topic at social events, as you can imagine.
I do calligraphy. Sometimes i meet someone who knows someone who does calligraphy. But I’ve never met another person IRL that does calligraphy. And the particular style I like makes it even more rare.
FoundryVTT, baby! Somewhere north of 70,000 downloads for a very feature rich virtual tabletop that you’d think more D&D / Computer Nerds would be into.
If you want to get even more bespoke, I’m the proud owner of a version 2 box of “Kingdom Death”, a $400 boardgame designed in the spirit of Monster Hunter or Dark Souls. You play a primitive band of survivalists, hunting horrifying monsters for their body parts, in order to slowly claw your civilization’s way out of a Lovecraftian dark age.
I’m right with you on both of those things. I just spent more time than is reasonable on a gatehouse over a chasm in foundry, and have a screaming antelope on the shelf next to me that I’m reasonably proud of.
I like retro programming, in particular Windows 2000.
Now I’m making a little 3D toy now that works with OpenGL on Windows with WGL and on X11 with GLX (also on Cygwin). No third party abstractions!
I want to keep adding backends, like DX 7, 9, Vulkan, WebGL, bare Linux KMS, and then stuff like screen space reflections, shadows, materials, ray tracing where possible, maybe get it running on a console or two too.
I like to contribute to various open-source implimentations of classic games from the 90s
It’s true that barely anyone is into actually contributing, but I assure you a fair amount of people are into the actual open source implementations and are thankful for your efforts!
Any game in particular you contributed to that you want to share?
I’m addicted to buying crappy antique and vintage shotguns and restoring them. Have so many now I can hardly justify another. I know, I’m ruining the antique value by stripping the metal and wood, but they’re ~$150 items, not exactly rare.
Look at this $119 ($160 by the time I get it home) piece of crap!
https://www.guns.com/used-guns/p/companhia-brasileira-de-cartuchos-151?i=571883
Never even heard of that brand, let alone the model. Bet I could make it dance and sing for a week’s worth of evenings. It’s a single-shot, can’t be too fucked up. Probably.
That’s pretty neat! Can you describe the restoration process more?
This is the first thing I’ve seen here that feels like it meets the OP’s ask. What a cool hobby!
I like to analyse stickers stuck on traffic lights and road signs.
I plan on making an app someday where people can contribute to a database of stickers and compare the sticker culture of different regions.
How to use game design for education around political and social issues and complexity science
Edit since a few people asked: I don’t have good answers for this yet, but some thoughts:
- According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
- Some excellent examples include Wintergreen and Bloc by Bloc. Basically any storygame can, if you want it to.
- Games are basically a voluntary and temporary acceptance of an arbitrary set of rules, with an arbitrary goal that you strive to overcome. They often include metrics that tell you how well you are doing. To some degree, the same can be said about modern bureaucracies (albeit less voluntary and temporary), where the metrics might be KPIs or money.
- Games can satirise this in educational ways, e.g. this was the purpose of The Landlord’s Game (the precursor to monopoly)
- This is another C. Thi Nguyen thing - really worth listening to his podcast episode on the Ezra Klein show.
- Some games show amazing emergent complexity. That is, complexity that isn’t due to underlying complexity of the system parts, but emerges as a result of their many interactions, like turbulent eddies, or bird murmurations.
- Go/Baduk is an extreme example of this. 2 rules that have produced 3000 years of culture surrounding one of the most difficult and engaging games I know.
- Tak is another example that’s a lot easier to learn (because it doesn’t require building up a bank of pattern recognition)
- TTRPGs are also super interesting to me, because narrative is one of the tools that the human brain has developed to help understand complexity. I don’t think they exhibit emergent complexity so much, but they bring in a lot of complexity via the players’ life experience, and via the setting/world.
- Different game mechanics and story tropes provide different affordances - that is, they allow or encourage some behaviours, and disallow others.
- No one ever forments a revolution in monopoly, right? Why not?
- Affordances is an excellent frame for understanding how agency relates to systems, because all systems have attributes with affordances (and constraints). What are the affordances of a capitalist democracy? I think games are an ideal vehicle for explaining affordances easily.
There are probably plenty more links. I’ve been playing some of those games for years, but am still relatively new to some e.g. story games. And I’m just starting out looking in to game design…
edit 2: also, a plug for !complexity@lemmy.world
- According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
At school, I seem to be one of the very few people who use Linux so there’s that
Don’t worry, when you graduate it gets more isolating.
When watching incest porn, I try to figure out how everybody can be in a step-relationship with everybody else there. How is it possible for step-mom, step-dad, step-bro and step-sis to all live in the same house with no one else?
That’s just porn with extra steps!
Well… I’m using an instance that has 10 active users according to https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list :)
I wanted to move from Lemmy to PieFed, because its development is faster than that of Lemmy’s and because its maintainers have values I have nothing against and because I want to help a cool project grow.
And then I had a bunch of criteria that I wanted my instance to fulfill, and piefed.ee was the only PieFed instance that fulfilled all of my wishes. So, now I’m apparently one out of ten :)
You’re one in a million to me
I play single player video games and I roleplay and tell stories about my characters. I’ve done it with BG3, Elden Ring, Skyrim, Oblivion, Fire Emblem, and Pokemon. I take notes and write little stories for myself. I cultivate a little headcanon universe for each game, and I even let my roleplay alter my gameplay in meaningful ways. I don’t know if anyone else plays these games like this but I haven’t found much community for it.
You mean you are actually role playing in a role playing game?
My my, you are strange.
Earlier this year I tried out a Steam demo of a game called “That Time I Found a Box” and got hooked on it. It’s a very unique card game where you create and enhance the cards as you play. I played it for days and eventually beat the demo - the devs told me I was the first person to beat it.
The full version just came out on Steam - I’d recommend taking a look. It’s a bit janky and not for everybody, but it does something unique that really clicked for me.
