MudMan

Yeeeah, the motivations stuff for game design is very popular right now with devs big and small. It kinda rubs me the wrong way, although it's hard to articulate exactly why.

I think it sits at an intersection of still wanting to look at players as behavioral data, but at the same time being sorta generic and too broad to inform much of anything specific. Still, that's not to say you can't do good work using it.

I recommend taking a look at the full original article, the summary linked here may be a bit misleading. https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/most-gamers-prefer-single-player-games

This breakdown chart, in particular is very interesting. https://www.midiaresearch.com/storage/uploads/paragraphs/dbdbaba91de72cd615d8be1a0119cfca

Turns out that yes, slightly more than 50% of the people they surveyed prefer solo, but that's distorted by older people going HARD towards that option. Every segment below 45 years old skews slightly towards multiplayer, although the split between what type of multiplayer is pretty even.

Gotta say, I HATE that PvP is the preference across all age groups among multiplayer fans. Outside of asynchronous competition, leaderboards and fighting games I profoundly dislike realtime PvP.

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dark

The reason I'm still tempted to go back is my kitchen has three heating elements, not four. I have other tools to complement it, but getting the pressure pot out of there is a signficant gain. Still, lots of money for that, and I'm also short on counter space, so I'm holding off for now.

Yeah, I am using one of those, mostly because I already had it in the place I moved to and I don't see the need to buy an electric one. It really causes me no anxiety at all to use it in terms of security. It's safe and reliable.

But also, if you're not used to them and you don't know what to buy and how to use them, I see the appeal of a programmable electric thing where you push a button, it stays to a set temp and pressure and it'll automatically vent and tell you to take things out. I had one of those precisely because it was small and fit my kitchen setup, and I used it constantly with no issues.

"Dedicated" is doing a lot of work there. Regardless, they are both a vessel with a small hole where you're heating up a gas. The difference is the pressure cooker has a valve that lets the pressure climb higher before it vents while the rice cooker is only up to whatever pressure builds up due to the vent cap foam filter being narrower than the lid. The old "exploding pressure cooker" thing is about that valve getting blocked, broken or clogged and pressure building indefinitely.

Only that shouldn't happen on modern versions of either because the electric versions of both are using timers and sensors to control the cook. My old-school stovetop cooker still relies on pressure building until the valve hits the pressure I've set and vents the steam, but the electric one I was using before didn't have to vent (at least when used manually, some programs had venting built in), it just went to temp and pressure and stayed there for some time, then released the steam at the end.

But even if my stovetop's valve failed, there is still a safety valve. And even if that failed again, there is a scored area on the lid that is designed to fail first and vent the pressure (although you wouldn't want to be in front of it if that happens).

I'd still default to an instant cooker if I was worried about safety. Not only does it not build up pressure indefinitely in the first place, but it also won't let you open it until it's vented, so you won't open it and get a faceful of pressurized steam. Which, honestly, is the real danger with old manual pressure cookers. Everybody freaks out at anecdotal reports of explosions, but from what I can tell "opened too soon or vented incorrectly, got a burn" seems to be the real scenario you should be concerned about.

Ironically, that can still happen with rice cookers. I've (lightly) burnt myself by popping the lid open while my rice cooker was still hot before.

I'm curious about how expensive. My last electric pressure cooker was a more expensive model (and I sold it after years in working order), but the stovetop pressure cooker I have at home now was more expensive than the entry-level Instant Pot branded electric cookers.

So are water heaters and we use those pretty confidently.

Pressure cookers get a bad reputation for safety from the times when they were basically a metal box with a tiny hole in it, but modern cookers have a lot of additional redundancies. Particularly modern ones with timers. It'd take a lot of work to get one of those to go catastrophically. It's more likely to get killed by lighting than by pressure cooker, at least in the US, and as far as I can tell from available stats, and most of the pressure cooker injuries the stats list are from people who got a contact or steam burn, not by explosions.

It's also interesting that people are often afraid of exploding pressure cookers when they think of them as pressure cookers, but you don't get as much anxiety from rice cookers (AKA pressure cooker - but small).

The Tyranids work well in strategy games which, of course, Blizzard clocked immediately. For other game types it's a bit trickier, and it still feels like "playing the bad guys".

It's crazy how much less of a factor the core concept of "fantasy races IN SPACE" has become for everything else, though. When Starcraft had the Protoss they stood in for the Eldar, which while still very much dicks and not-the-good-guys are still recognizable as a self-insert faction, but haven't been the main focus of a videogame adaptation, ever. The Tau then close the loop and slot in for the Protoss a little, but they are less of a PC individual hero thing. Pretty much every other faction they've focused on is either a variation on Space Marines or a monster faction for them to fight.

It kinda sucks. I liked 40K when it was all about "the future sucks and is full of dicks and you play them as they endlessly fight each other for no good reason". I am a lot iffier on "the future sucks and you play the space Christian Nazis who are apparently the least bad option, and if there is another we don't care about it because branding".

If the space fascists aren't the bad guy at least as often as they are the protagonists then you're not making a "grimdark future", you're making games about space fascists.

The thing is, these are just a pressure vessel with a timer and a heating element. They are all good unless they are very poorly made.

That goes many places in an attempt to justify enjoying an authoritarian power fantasy, but ok.

I mean, my very nerdy answer is I don't want to, I just don't get a choice. I actively did not play Space Marines when I was playing the board game and they are by far the most boring faction, even if the minis look great. I am endlessly frustrated by their elevation as the default POV characters of the entire setting and miss the good old days when 40K at least pretended to be about PvP competition and had an incentive to keep a facade of supporting multiple sellable, playable factions.

I mean... the normal speed for seeing behind your car is the speed of light, so that may come a bit short of expectations.

In any case, I agree that by itself it's not a big deal. After the broken windshield wiper, the pieces that fall off and the sticky accelerator one may... you know, infer a pattern. Which, really, is the news here.