Judging by the stock price decline that didn’t start last week, but rather has been ongoing for monthsyears, you’re spot on. This is exactly what the market was expecting.

DEI has at least some roots in holding a positive connotation, a lot of companies that value an image/brand of diversity will have a DEI department/team. It’s not just an acronym they made up, though it’s definitely been co-opted by reactionaries as a way to describe someone they feel only got the job/promotion/attention because of a compulsion to raise up minority voices (a “DEI” hire is their way of saying the person wasn’t qualified for the job, but got it because they were black/a woman".

My initial take on the rant was to simply ignore it, but now I’m wondering if there’s maybe something to the idea that specifically in the shooter genre, the market is different enough that I don’t really know the space. Like BG3 was about as DEI a game as you could get, and no one’s arguing that game’s success. But I do know a couple conservatives that were specifically kind of turned off by games like cyberpunk and BG3. Apparently they couldn’t handle tasteful sidedick. Maybe for a shooter to be successful it’s got to coddle what the gun enthusiast crowd is demanding? I don’t know. Despite their popularity, I just don’t play that many shooters.

It feels like there’s a lot of potential here. One of the most loved colony sims, Dwarf Fortress, thrives on this concept of emergent behavior: yes, the descriptions of the individual characters, their motivations and backstories does have a sort of hollow, procedural generation to them. But the stories they enable, the wacky quirks like an engraver going nuts putting up murals to cheese on everyone’s walls, the fact that when you get an unlikely hero or battle outcome it isn’t the author’s giving them destiny but a true random fluke, the unexpected disaster of opening an unseen water or lava flow or awakening some ancient evil - that can create a wonderful sandbox where players encounter and create their own stories.

There’s a balance in story telling, especially interactive story telling, between romanticism and realism. Between what we want to happen, and what actually happens. And sometimes, oftentimes, it’s the things we didn’t want to happen that make a story more compelling and memorable.

I had a good laugh when I noticed this tag on steam yesterday.

I think the reality is, “boomer” as a term is here to stay and a moving target: as gen x ages into 40+, they’ll become boomers. One day when gen Z becomes old, they’ll be called boomers. At least here, there’s a fun double meaning to the term. For me, I came into the Doom franchise at Doom 2, at an age where what I played was still very much influenced by my parents and friends’ parents. So yes, Gen X were the primary player base, but it’s not unfair to say the boomers often paid for the game and maybe sat down to a round or two of it. And given that, it might have been one of the last games they were able to sit down and enjoy. I don’t know if anyone else experienced something similar, but my dad in the last 20 years of his life or so really locked in on the 1997 MTG: Shandalar game, and despite several computer upgrades along the way was never interested in any of the newer MTG digital offerings, preferring the cards and UI and experience he was familiar with. And while similar with Doom that game was played by many Gen X and Millenials, I think those demographics mostly continued to follow the franchise through newer releases: but maybe not the boomers.