Take the following premise. Bob sees Mike (who has blue hair) rob an orphanage, and considers him a bad man.
Bob exclaims in a public forum, "That blue-haired sneak! He should be found and put in jail."
Mike (wearing a mask while on the run) highlights this statement, replaying a record of it in another location, and adding: "I can't believe Bob would say such terrible things about blue-haired people! This is extreme bigotry!"
Jill, who also has blue hair, and Derek, who simply doesn't like bigotry, both miss the context of the robbery that happened earlier, and are shocked at the isolated statement.
When the town meets later, the issue of a robbery at the orphanage is downplayed, and the town instead spends the meeting condemning Bob's bigotry.

While a lot could be said about the whole sequence, I want to find out if there is a shortened term used to refer to the deception by Mike when deliberately misrepresenting the grouping of a targeted statement; eg, to build class solidarity the wrong way. The closest I've found might be "Strawmanning" or "Divide and Conquer" but it seems common enough I'd like to see if there's a name.

I tried to generalize by picking "blue hair" for the example, but I admit it'd be an odd, off-color statement by race or appearance. There are still other forms of grouping that are more common to state in conversation, like "gamers" or "voters", or "farmers", in which such statements could apply to all, or just some, of that broad group.

This site comes from some former Humble Bundle operators. They're also running a bundle of comics from authors that worked on the "Absolute" DC lineup.

Quite often, an indie game throws together some common gameplay, like roguelike shooter patterns, with little to explain it. eg, "You're here to explore for treasure!" Other times, even AAA games go this route, assuming most players won't care about the base story premise.

But there seems to be a significant contrast to well-developed worlds; like seeing the progressive cruelty of the Nazis in Wolfenstein before you start stabbing them, or seeing the Gommage in Expedition 33 before heading out to fight nevrons. Even more eldritch action-oriented games like DOOM benefited from establishing a "mood" of the Slayer being angry at demons and anyone who ignored warnings of them using just a few quick cutscenes.

This can be a bit of divergence from a game being "story-focused" or building up detailed lore. Some such games are often bad at motivation because the "story" is so confusing to players, most would just admit "I'm just going wherever bosses are to advance the story." Some very dialogue-heavy games don't necessarily captivate players on this level, since motivation can often be very simple. It goes back to the age-old strategy of arcade Donkey Kong; having 10 seconds at the beginning of the game where DK captures a princess who calls for help. The early version of the game likely didn't even have that, and the designer felt motivation was missing. (That decision spawned its own issue, the Damsel in Distress trope, but that's another topic)

As more conceptual ideas, and especially more perpetual live-service games, become more popular, I see this element of gaming going missing at all ranks of game development - which is a shame, because I think when written creatively, there are ways to set up player motivation through relatively few voice lines and short cutscenes; something going beyond "You are an amnesiac! This voice is telling you where to go. Don't die to The Corporation!!"

To drive discussion: What are some games you bounced off of, that you think may have been because they were missing motivation? What games found you putting up with a mediocre gameplay experience because you were invested in the given story turnout?

The announcement of the delisting is unclear why these Bandai Namco game are being removed. They were reviewed well, and run on Steam Deck. As long as you add them before the last day, theoretically they should be accessible afterwards.

This game is unlikely to make it to Steam, since it breaks the copyright on a popular anime. As a result of that breach, it's freely available to all, which is great since it's a very well-assembled implementation of the Ace Attorney formula, whether or not you're familiar with the cutesy characters on offer.

There's lots of custom music, a pretty decent visual presentation, and only a few "guide dang it" moments across the mysteries. Once knowing it was unlikely to feature actual murder mysteries, I lost a bit of interest, but gained it back when some of the cases developed more twists than I expected.

This game had some fun ideas to me; both high-level, narratively (it's not quite clear if the heroes are "animals" but they're sentient enough, and imply a rich history) as well as low-level. You control a small team of characters, each with unique abilities that can be used in various scenarios. At the game's most challenging moments, it asks you to swap mid-air in order to perform jumps in a certain way.

There's some good character moments as well, showing vulnerability and growth from each of the heroes. The only bit I didn't like as much is the navigation. Much of the game revolves around use of blood vessels to navigate, since it all takes place inside of a living being. As a result, when one character says to "head East", they sometimes mean "Wander in an indeterminate direction to unblock a blood vessel around the middle of the map so you can get an ability that will let you unlock a path that warps you out East."

The bundle also supports Whale and Dolphin conservation

The prompt for this one might seem wildly unexpected. To start with: Yes, some libraries let people borrow video games. Generally, the easiest system for them is just to buy Switch / Playstation carts/discs for people to borrow and return.

However, many great indie games have never really had the publishing resources to put out physical releases, especially with the Switch's printing expenses. Even those that have, don't always have them widely available. But, it's now common for many libraries to offer DRM-driven, digital services to account for their gaps and failings (and so people don't need to make so many trips in the dead of winter). Hoopla and Kanopy are examples of such services: Content providers can give bulk licenses for media, with an agreed price the library pays (presumably often just per item for infinite borrows)

So to bring back to the original point, if the logistic hurdles were cleared so that a solo dev could take their Steam-only Unity game, and sell it to libraries as well, so that lower-income gamers could run them anywhere, what games do you think could have the best societal impact for people to be able to play? It'd be great to have plenty of mindless, pure-fun games on offer, but I'm also thinking about introspective, social-literacy games that most people wouldn't pay money for just looking at the thumbnail.

This is a word that only exists in a language I made up for a story. But, I find it interesting. And, in this world, there's no direct translation in English (or, the book's stand-in for English).

Basically, the word means "one who fictionalizes their own enemies, in order to justify their violence." Imagine, say, a warlord who organizes a squadron to put on masks and uniforms of an enemy, and then raids a village - so that they can then publically condemn this enemy, and have support from that village for taxing them and gathering up their own troops to retaliate.

I could see the community deciding fictional words shouldn't count, but even should this be the case, it evokes the need for such a word in language.

The Quake community regularly performs map jams. While I haven't tracked the efforts of the previous ones, this jam results in a large, nonsequential set of maps on offer, combined with a full conversion that creates new enemy variants, and remixes Quake's known weapons into new forms (dual nailguns, a rebar cannon, a multi-missile launcher, and a gemstone that functions like Doom 3's soul cube).

When you load in, you're brought to a museum-like "gallery" with portals into each of the maps created for the jam, denoting their author and difficulty level; sorted into "main offerings", "new faces", and other sections.

The simplest way to set the mod up is as a mod for Quake (though ironically, you'll be replacing both the main paks, AND the engine)

The most common way this comes up is in "survival" games. You browse the environment for health and ammo, and then burn it all up facing massive hordes of zombies (or, ARC, or whatever monster of the day is). I've also seen it in other types of games, like in the newer Zeldas where you get dozens of types of weapons, none of which can be repaired.

Something I love about these patterns is that they get you to adapt and shift your playstyle naturally. You aren't granted transforming ammo that fits whatever weapon you hold - you must use what's available, even if every option from grenades to flamethrowers ends up being fun.

They provide the fun of looting, as well as a method to expend that loot in a way that maintains the cycle. Nothing irritates me more than the red "inventory full" message, so I make an effort to expend my resources quickly, and a lot of these games reward the player in turn for it.

So, this tends to fit a lot of major/mainstream singleplayer story-based games like Resident Evil, as well as traditional shooters like Half-Life in which all your weapons maintain an ammo count. I'm curious what other unexpected games come up that satisfy this itch, even providing creative ways to encourage "dumping resources" in a rapid way, just to give you empty slots to fill up again.

Hadn't heard much of this project until now. Apparently, Crytek, a previous holder of the IP, has at one point given their direct blessing for this project to exist, so it should be safe from immediate legal threats. The project aims to recreate multiplayer as well as the singleplayer. Great to have another awesome free game available, so it'll be reliant on natural social media spread.

What makes this game interesting to me is that it was one of the victims of a wave of censorship affecting many sites. It got blacklisted by Steam and Itch, but the creator started her own website (which I sadly could not locate in my bookmarks).

You're given an old iMac/Win95 interface, and try to guess E-mail passwords and correlate old terms to find information about a relationship with a content creator with a name like "Candy", who makes a certain kind of grim snuff video.

A way in which the game develops is that there's a message board trend where the audience for those videos increasingly wants content involving brutal harm that feels, or even "is" real.

The game's creator is also a woman, who hoped that the "grossness" of the subject matter, especially as it turns out you are playing as the PC's real owner, would draw attention to the sorts of victimization people in that industry suffer.

"Love finds you when you least expect it".

I've come to the feeling that romance isn't always that great of a back-box marketing topic. Dating sims are dime-a-dozen visual novels, often cycling some tiring tropes. Optional romances often treat people and relationships as "features" to be picked up as desired and discarded, rather than a give-and-take relationship too complex for numbers in a simulation.

One unfortunate result of making a thread like this is that by posting suggestions, they all immediately become spoilers. Sometimes, it's not that big of a spoiler, as someone might guess it anyway, or it might not harm the appeal of the game overall - especially if it's built around some generally enjoyable adventure.

So: What adventures have you been on where you were surprised by a romantic subplot, especially ones where it had a surprising effect on the rest of the story?