My most Luddite opinion is that you must pick one

a) the ability to connect with arbitrary numbers of people simultaneously around the world

b) rich, multi-modal, interaction that mutually exposes vulnerability among participants

I was todays years old when I learned that Final Fantasy VII's Midgar Zolom is an exceptionally badly translated reference to Jörmungandr, the world serpent from Norse mythology.

The other name for Jörmungandr is Miðgarðsormr, which got rendered into katakana as ミドガルズオルム, or "Midogaruzuorumu".
But when it was translated back into English, the translator didn't get the reference.

So they split that into the city name Midgar and the rest as... "Zolom".
Which is not a word.

It was supposed to be a bit of a pun in Japanese. Midgar, the big city in FF7, is named after Midgard, the Old Norse name for the Earth (as opposed to the other realms of the Nine Worlds)

so obviously a big snake living near the city of Midgar would be the Miðgarðsormr, since that basically translate as "Midgard Serpent"

At Christmas, many of us are getting new computer games.

With the season, we also turn to nostalgia & looking back on the past. It's often hard to shake the feeling that games of our youth were simply better than games coming out now. Let's explore why that might be (1/22)

"Well, that's clearly because games in the 80s and 90s didn't have any politics and forced inclusivity"

Nope, that's complete bollocks, and nothing to do with why you remember those games so much more fondly

(maybe I should have started the thread with this, lol) (2/22)

For the purpose of this exercise, I'm going to arbitrarily draw the line between modern and old games at roughly the early 2000s.

For many, the 'golden age' of gaming is the era from the SNES/Genesis to the early years of the PS2, Gamecube, and Dreamcast. (3/22)

There wasn't just one thing that made games from that period feel so great. In my opinion, it came down to 7 interlinking key constraints. As development teams & players looked to overcome them, they had to either mitigate or innovate.

Let's look at each of them in turn (4/22)

First up we have:

'Just enough' hardware performance

Games were finally able to look *amazing*, as long as developers knew the limits of the platform they were working on. You couldn't push for realism, so instead you had to commit to an artstyle. Reply with your favs! (5/22)

Time to overanalyse the #BowsersFury trailer! :D

(This is a thread!)

To start off, the giant Super Bell has cat accessories that neither existing variant of the bell has. Funny. It also makes a meow, unlike the regular Bells.

Semi-open world? Guess this adventure is very much like 64 or Odyssey.

The Goombas are a different colour to the Cat Goombas in the regular game. Likely because they act like regular Goombas, and so are "cat Goombas" rather than Goombas with the Super Bell transformation.

Junior has his Paintbrush from Sunshine, which is cool. But it has a Junior emblem, just like in official promo art for Super Nintendo World!

I'm seeing a lot of echoes of the GamerGate phenomenon happening right now, so it is important to revisit this a little, quickly.

Thread:

GamerGate was a misogynist movement to harass women online who were in the gaming industry or interested in games. They organized on message boards in places like Reddit and 4chan and picked targets together.

GamerGate didn't appear out of thin air. GamerGate was a representation of white male entitlement that has existed in our culture forever. In particular, the mantra "ethics in games journalism" made no sense and they targeted people who noted how games have bad representation.

There, already, were weird online groups for angry men:

Incels: Involuntary celebates, guys who believe (stupidly) that they're incapable for having sex with women because women only like "alpha" guys (Chads).

PUAs: Pick-Up Artists, guys who use abusive tactics to wear down women to trick them into sexual relationships. They typically are only interested in women in terms of "conquest" and dehumanize women constantly in their forums.