Have you ever gone down a gaming rabbit hole?
Have you ever gone down a gaming rabbit hole?
That is, have you ever started getting into a game, only to discover that the community is much deeper than you initially ever suspected?
My kids and I started playing PlateUp! for funsies, it's a 4-player co-op kitchen/cooking/restaurant simulator that has you doing fun things like cooking food, taking customers orders, and washing dishes. We kind of play it for laughs and barely make any headway in it, usually as a result of all the chaos that comes from multiple people trying to run a kitchen. I started looking deeper into it because apparently there's ways to automate your whole setup and have the whole kitchen run itself. The amount of diagrams and setups that people have created are just insane, way deeper than I ever even considered with this innocent-looking game and it's made me reconsider what I thought was just a quirky little party game.
Hooo boy. Watch a speedrunner video. Every game is like that, especially older ones. There are people who exist to completely turn them inside and out to make their runs just a fraction quicker. Zelda N64 games are a good example. Halo CE has some good moments too
You need a PhD in particle physics to crack the next level of Mario64 speed run, and that's after you've mastered carpetless.
I know nothing of this world, but the energy in the community is infectious.
Yeah, no thanks. I'm just gonna stick with my fond memories of Mario64 and pretend it hasn't evolved into sheer insanity.
Factorio has to take the cake in this.
How hard could it be to make a rocker after crashing on an alien planet?
Simracing is a world of itself. I ended up traveling to Germany and attend simexpo. I eventually left it but I had a good 5-6 years in it. (5-6 years in sim racing not the expo)
I am currenly into space games, in particular Elite Dangerous that has a hugely active community behind it and it's own ecosystem of third party programs and even Voice Assistants with professional voice actors (Kirk, Q and Data from star trek) as well as many others!