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Gamer Brainrot
2025-Oct-29, Wednesday 15:26
I try not to be an old man yelling at clouds about video games, but something that happened recently in my work on Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is testing that.
So CDDA has a mod called Bombastic Perks that adds Fallout-style perks you can take. Some of them are generic gamer perks, like +5% HP or -20% falling damage, that kind of thing, and some of them are weirder. There's one that lets you randomly find soda cans, and one that makes you so bony that your skeleton counts as armor. We recently got the ability to visit other dimensions in CDDA, so I added a perk called Closetland--when you're in a closet, you can walk the secret paths to Closetland, where you can take a breather, bandage your wounds, drop some items, and then get back into the fight. As a counterbalance, you get a message about how tired you are when you enter, you rapidly become more and more tired as you stay (and get messages about the shadows growing darker as you yawn), and if you fall asleep, the Boogeyman gets you and you die. The logic here is that you're using the secret paths that the monsters that every eight-year-old knows live in the closet and under the bed take to get from house to house, and if they find you in their domain, well.
But boy did "Sorry, you die" bring people out of the woodwork. I had people complain that a dozen messages in the message log, a message when you enter Closetland, and a message that pops up asking if you want to keep doing whatever you're doing when you get tired were all not enough warning and I should let people just barely escape the first time so they know explicitly that falling asleep in Closetland can kill you. I had people suggest that I develop an entire separate gamemode where the Boogeyman is chasing you and you have to run. I had people asking to just take it out.
Keep in mind--this is a permadeath survival game about a zombie apocalypse. The intent is that you play it more than once, learning more with each death, and eventually develop survival strategies that will allow you to succeed most of the time while learning the common pitfalls and ways to die. You have to deliberately ignore multiple warnings that maybe this is a bad idea and stick around while you watch your character become preternaturally sleepy extremely fast in order for this to happen to you.
Rabble rabble gamers these days, back in my day if you don't hurl the pie at the yeti in three seconds you died! When you played Angband you'd turn a corner and get blinded, stunned, breathed on, and die in less than a turn! The game is about planning and avoiding these things, not about having the personal power to defeat all challengers. But people are so used to games being power fantasies that they can't handle a no-win encounter even in a game about the inevitable end of the world.
So CDDA has a mod called Bombastic Perks that adds Fallout-style perks you can take. Some of them are generic gamer perks, like +5% HP or -20% falling damage, that kind of thing, and some of them are weirder. There's one that lets you randomly find soda cans, and one that makes you so bony that your skeleton counts as armor. We recently got the ability to visit other dimensions in CDDA, so I added a perk called Closetland--when you're in a closet, you can walk the secret paths to Closetland, where you can take a breather, bandage your wounds, drop some items, and then get back into the fight. As a counterbalance, you get a message about how tired you are when you enter, you rapidly become more and more tired as you stay (and get messages about the shadows growing darker as you yawn), and if you fall asleep, the Boogeyman gets you and you die. The logic here is that you're using the secret paths that the monsters that every eight-year-old knows live in the closet and under the bed take to get from house to house, and if they find you in their domain, well.
But boy did "Sorry, you die" bring people out of the woodwork. I had people complain that a dozen messages in the message log, a message when you enter Closetland, and a message that pops up asking if you want to keep doing whatever you're doing when you get tired were all not enough warning and I should let people just barely escape the first time so they know explicitly that falling asleep in Closetland can kill you. I had people suggest that I develop an entire separate gamemode where the Boogeyman is chasing you and you have to run. I had people asking to just take it out.
Keep in mind--this is a permadeath survival game about a zombie apocalypse. The intent is that you play it more than once, learning more with each death, and eventually develop survival strategies that will allow you to succeed most of the time while learning the common pitfalls and ways to die. You have to deliberately ignore multiple warnings that maybe this is a bad idea and stick around while you watch your character become preternaturally sleepy extremely fast in order for this to happen to you.
Rabble rabble gamers these days, back in my day if you don't hurl the pie at the yeti in three seconds you died! When you played Angband you'd turn a corner and get blinded, stunned, breathed on, and die in less than a turn! The game is about planning and avoiding these things, not about having the personal power to defeat all challengers. But people are so used to games being power fantasies that they can't handle a no-win encounter even in a game about the inevitable end of the world.
