Modding is a really under appreciated art form.
Downloading unhinged Morrowind mods in the mid naughts exposed me to new franchises, music, ideas… Like this banger, which plays at some point in the Underground 2 along with this one. (btw, Dawnguard is Emil or whoever wrote it ripping off story beats from a 20 year old Morrowind mod based on the Underworld series lol - play both and don’t tell me that the Soul Cairn sequence isn’t inspired…)
I play heavily modded Elder Scrolls, where my character never touches the main story.
My favorite Morrowind run was a princess who ended up creating an agricultural baron, buying up every plantation and owning probably hundreds of slaves. She also got into the skooma business on the side (needed money for all of her dresses). Morrowind had a ton of wacky mods that were just fun to play in general - people made Star Wars and LOTR questlines. There’s also the work of Tommy Khajiit (RIP), which is something unique and which has never gotten the respect it deserved. (Or Lady Rae - she liked to recolor the game bright neon colors, and basically got bullied out of the modding community.)
Skyrim is a hunting/vagrant simulator for me. I usually play a Dunmer refugee and avoid the in-game quests entirely. Survival and economy mods to make the focus of the gameplay getting enough gold to afford a room for the night, tweaks to loot to make things more “mundane.”
The Sims for me is either 1800s Utah polygamous Mormons, post apocalyptic Handmaid’s Tale scenarios, or prisons.
What scares me is that I’ve tried to hook multiple “geekier” teenagers on Linux, and they aren’t interested. Even the math-y ones don’t know the difference between an operating system and a browser. My main computer is Arch with xmonad and it disturbs and confuses them.
We have a lost generation when it comes to computers. Lots of the little geeks that would have been playing around in the registry or learning powershell 15 years ago are so stuck in walled gardens that they don’t even know there’s a world outside of them.
People meme about “q!” but it is super helpful to have that extra step, because sometimes your fingers are moving faster than your brain is. That quick switch back-n-forth vim - gcc - ./a.out loop and my probably ADHD mean that vim saying, “hey, remember you haven’t saved this yet” is a godsend.
You are right about the best part about vim - you can work as fast you type.
Hyped that Nintendo discovered gay people exist.
How does romance work in most video games? Select the correct dialogue options, memorize the correct answer to questions, give them the same gift every day?
The other main way a lot of young men “interact” with women is through porn, which is always made with a mind to what a woman would enjoy during sex…/s
They could make good money on the nostalgia crowd with reprints.
I’d love a print of the advertising and coverage for Morrowind.
The game’s soundtrack is soooo good. Everyone loves “Work Harder” and “666 Kill Chop Deluxe” but “Voices” is a perfect ending.
I think the things that make it as good as it is, are the things that also make it really difficult to play and recommend to people.
When I think of sexual violence being handled in video games, I think of True Crime: Streets of LA and the weird gross animation for you to interrupt, or the way that everyone laughs at the Daedra in Morrowind with the necrophilia line. (Or hentai games, but that’s a dark world) Drugs are minor joke items in most games, even with games that have addiction mechanics don’t make your time harder for not doing drugs.
The surrealism and comedic relief break up some of the despair. There is also a lot of catharsis in it. Probably the most important scene in the game is when you confront your father, who is an unspeakable monster, and the player is given a choice whether they want to kill him or not. Regardless of what the player chooses - the character cannot forgive him and will attack. It’s a false choice, which ties so well into the themes of trauma and powerlessness. There’s something about that that is so honest and validating.
The name is so stupid, and it is straight up a reference to the character in Pulp Fiction.
Pulp Fiction came out in 1994, GIMP in 1998. “Gimps” as we understand them came entirely from the scene in the movie - like yeah, full bondage suits have always existed but the term “gimp” and that style were invented for the movie (and then became a real thing later).
I like your definition of “vibe coding” better. Like, just hacking out some shitty c rogue-like, adding features as you feel like it, commenting out shit you don’t want to bother with.
Like “doodling” with code.
Did she make music? Holy shit - if you have a link I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to her for years. She’s genuinely a major inspiration for my painting and art.