Alternative title: what are you playing on your standardized linux-based laptop designed for efficiency and battery life over raw graphical power in an age of IP abolishment?
I’ve been thinking about what gaming would look like in a near-fully Socialized economy, and what modern games would fit the idea best. The biggest kicker here is that I don’t believe endless graphical improvements to push and sell more powerful hardware would still be driven as much. Efficiency over raw power. Essentially, the tagline from the perspective of a future Socialist being called a Revisionist online is infecting my thinking.
That brings me to some ideas: Minecraft, Celeste, Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight, Crosscode, Caves of Qud, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Dwarf Fortress, either open-ended or extremely tight and replayable games tend to fit my idea of what gaming would look like. Fallout: New Vegas, Disco Elysium, and other great games would be big too, as well as emulators. In an era with IP abolishment, gaming would look very different IMO. New Vegas, Minecraft, and other highly moddable games would likely thrive.
What are your thoughts? I’m imaging playing these on a standardized Linux-based PC designed to be repairable with commonly produced parts, haha.
Side note: board games count, too! TTRPGs and whatnot that don’t require excess waste and are based around standardized systems like dice and playing cards would be cool to hear about as well.
Kind of a ramble, needed to please the brain worms piloting my rotting corpse
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FTL was one of the best crowdfunded games of its time, and its modding community really expanded upon its premise, too.
Rollercoaster Tycoon I & II
FTL does a lot with a little.
Dungions of dreadmore is super cute I dunno if it runs on Linux.
I think if comunism ever hits it will be like it was with half life. A crew made a cool game, then everyone used the parts to make their own cool game. Then they used that expertease to make other new cool games. Counter strike, team fortress, a million small projects, natural selection, portal. Or Skyrim, where the game is now more about mods than the game itself.
Yep, that’s exactly what I am getting at! Games that excel at being modded and transformed would be incredibly popular and flourish in a system devoid of IP.
It makes me nostalgic for the first internet and the greybeards when everyone thought free information exchange would develop into an anarcho syndicalist utopia. It is wild how much work goes into a modern AAA game and is just thrown away instead of reused.
That’s why I have always adored the modding community and indies, less labor for the sake of a grander project.
Dungions of dreadmore is super cute I dunno if it runs on Linux.
It does.
Balatro would probably fit. I don’t know about performance though
I play Balatro natively on my phone I bet it would be ok
what are you playing on your standardized linux-based laptop designed for efficiency and battery life over raw graphical power in an age of IP abolishment?
Nekopara
Minecraft
as a minecraft fan i hear people say that the game needs better optimization to run efficiently and i agree
The bit on minecraft, it isn’t particularly efficient itself, but it’s so open-ended that it fills tons of roles, including multiplayer, without needing a high end GPU to run.
yeah they need to upgrade the fucking thing though, idk whether its just me but i cant even play it lightly modded without it slowing down my computer and sometimes crashing, cant even play it with acceptable quality settings without turning my computer into a frying pan, its so frustrating that i give up and just play nekopara or sthing
It’s probably hard to argue against Nethack.
Oh, great choice!
You might like Shovel Knight if you like Hollow Knight, though Hollow Knight is 10x better imo. I can go dig up metroidvania titles if you like, but the same criticism will apply. Timespinners is the next best one I know of that’s on Steam, etc.
Timespinners was great, glad to see it get mentioned. 9 Years in Shadow was another cool one
A lot of the games I like don’t need that much graphics power but they need lots of CPU, like RimWorld or KSP.
I have legitimately thought to transform The Socialist Calculation Debate as a Factorio or SimCity game.
If there is one thing certain, IP abolishment will make preservation far easier. I also think we’ve escaped the hardware limitations of previous decades. One can play complex and interesting games without specialized computers. This means games can float from machine to machine without endlessly repairing out-of-manufacture vintage hardware.
Another boon is one can constantly update and redevelop game engines, improving both older games and allowing deep modding. DooM is a glimpse of this possible future, both the original game and many other games built on top of that mountain of open-source development. Case and point: Selaco is built on GZDoom
Forgot about Doom, great example! WADs are fantastic and easy to use and share.
I’ve been playing a fair amount of Unciv lately.
Vampire Survivors and other games similar to it could fit. Very easy on the hardware + easy to develop solo or in small teams. Honestly the entire rogue-like and rogue-lite gerne.
If you havent played Vampire Surivors- go play it.
I play Civilization 3, 4 and 5 on my 3GB ram potato from 2008.
Generally agree that we’re rapidly approaching peak graphics and we’ll see a shift from graphics processing dick measuring contests to user-experience focused development.
I’ll say that roguelikes/roguelites as a genre would fit well into that new paradigm. Procedurally generated levels and emphasis on unique stat builds per run offer huge efficiency/return value. Only issue is roguelikes are rather constrained in terms of storytelling because there needs to be some plot device that rationalizes infinite runs so you can’t have an absolute ending.
For a not-traditional video game option, and was brought up here recently, variant sudoku. Historically not strictly a video game, but the advent of the fog ruleset has moved it into that realm of “not possible with pencil and paper.” Highly customizable, super low resource dependency, big community development angle, nerdy in the true sense instead of media consumption/brand identity “nerdy.”
Even Hades’ solution to that issue was kind of hamfisted tbh
Time to show my partner varient sudoku, legitimately the best Sudoku player I have ever seen
Check out Nova Drift! Super simple game that you can easily put hundreds of hours into, super light and they just made a full release with more optimization. I have made the game lag on my middle-end desktop linux setup, but that’s with some incredibly broken builds I’ve made after figuring the game out. I can’t really speak to how it performs with very limited hardware but I can’t imagine that a laptop that runs Minecraft would have any issue running it. Sadly, no mod support is planned for it AFAIK.
