Kevin Connor, a spokesperson for Monterey Bay Aquarium, said Otter 841 is considered a danger to the public because it is ignoring its natural survival instincts, ABC reported.

"When we see this type of behavior exhibited by otters, it is a sign that they no longer have that healthy fear of human beings that allows them to stay safe in the wild away from us," Conner said.

I’m reading your words, Kevin, I am. But my heart is stronger than my brain. It wants that Otter to win.

“However, Coco noted that Koenig also urged the Holy See to not make public what he was revealing because he feared for his own life and the lives of the resistance sources who had provided the intelligence.”

Koenig, for the 99% of people who don’t read past the headline, is the author of the letter in question.

Age of Empires 2 skirmish maps are procedurally generated, in contrast to other competitive RTS games of that style. It’s done quite well and makes scouting meaningful for reasons other than rock-paper-scissoring your opponent.

An early win is a well-documented technique known among gambling researchers and clinicians as a catalyst for addictive play, because it creates an early dopamine hit that gamblers are then eager to recreate, even as their subsequent losses mount.

You meant to say “Because it tricks someone into believing the continuing experience has more value than it does.”

I agree with the premise of the article, but the overuse of “dopamine” to explain predatory commercial behavior is exhausting. Your brain does stuff when you experience stuff. Dopamine isn’t some evil drug that you GeT a hIT oF. 90% of the time I see the dopamine used to describe some phenomenon, it is literally just a worse, more pretentious and sciency-sounding way to explain it. Like trying to describe how microsoft excel works to someone by describing semiconductors.

I remember more than a decade ago when (because popular things are evil) online articles were preaching the dangers of World of Warcraft vanilla, a game with a fixed subscription cost and no way to monetize big spenders. “When you level up there’s a big gold explosion, that’s to help with the DOPAMINE release and keep you HOOKED on your MMO DRUG.” Jesus christ people, it’s just strong visual design that made people feel accomplished.

These games are different, of course. They are predatory. But you don’t get closer to understanding why these tactics are effective by pretending you’re a neuroscientist talking about some highly objective medical phenomenon.

And before I get accused of being uneducated or disrespecting science, I’m a published researcher in cognition and cognitive neuroscience. I don’t have a phd because I left the field sick of a lot of the same fakeness I’m complaining about now.

Notably, no nvme SSD required at any quality level. Just confirmation of what everyone knew already that you can eliminate loading screens without it. It just takes some heavy optimization.

The lead is actually buried by this headline. Denuvo is unironically claiming their DRM has no performance impact and that gamers are spreading a myth. And to prove it they will provide a test example, entirely controlled by them, to game journalists in the future.

The processor listed in the specs, Rockchip 3128 SOC, is a smart tv chip.

I think too many people have tricked themselves/each other into thinking long games are bad because they are long. No, it’s because 95% of the time (moreso today than in the past), a high hour-to-complete time signals a game with 10 hours or content stretched out to an absurd extreme, often in support of MTX/live service type features available ay launch.

An 80 hour game can be good if it has 80 hours of actual content. A 25 hour game can be bad if it’s still just 3-4 hours of real game stretched out to 25-30.

"What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?”

• Justice Stephen Breyer*, somehow arguing the opposite of what you’d think this paragraph means.

Present evidence that fake gambling causes real gambling. Not evidence that it actives dopamine receptors. Actual gambling.

Fantasy and fiction don’t cause maladaptive behavior. One day society will accept that this is still true for audiovisual media, just as it had to be slowly accepted for music, just as it had to be slowly accepted for books.

I believe South Park: Fractured but Whole

Jez Corden correctly leaked the Death Knight class in hearthstone prior to announcement. He seems to have sources at blizzard.

The game’s original hype stemmed from it being a technical showcase for the PS5. Not exactly a selling point for the already more-powerful PC world. They also didn’t bother porting the previous game to PC before porting the sequel.

Wow, so many Catan inductees here.

For me it was the notoriously shitty Civilization (2002). I was around 11 years old. Any designer board game is incredible if it’s the first one you’ve ever played.

Violating an NDA is a civil issue, not criminal. This guy got arrested for stealing.

In response to complaints about overwatch 2 removing free cosmetics, we’ve decided to make them purchasable only with uplay coins, which are themselves only buyable via Microsoft Rewards Points. See you on Bing!

In support of this suggestion, most dining tables are already too tall to comfortably play a board game where you want to see behind standing pieces. That’s why board game tables tend to use leaves that indent downward. All solutions that add height to the table make the problem worse, especially for members of your playgroup with lower sitting height. So I’m a big proponent of the playmat solution

Patrick Stewart?

Game companies will literally invent superhuman artificial intelligence to filter rude remarks sooner than they will admit their ranking-treadmill game design breeds toxicity.