re: #7 Dopamine Fish

Guns don’t kill people, VIDEO GAMES KILL PEOPLE!

Never mind the literal billions of peaceful video game players around the world, most of whom don’t even own guns. Or the shooters here in the United States who weren’t video gamers. Noooo, it’s not the guns that are the problem, clearly it’s video games and their oh-so-realistic depiction of *checks notes* elves shooting at orcs with bows that inspires gun violence.

(And yes, I’m aware of hyper-realistic first-person-shooters such as the Call of Duty franchise, but the point is still as ridiculous.)

Back in the 1990s, my favorite game was DOOM II. You know, on 3.5 inch floppies, because bandwidth was so crap then it took less time to run out and buy it or even get it sent by mail than to wait for it to hopefully download before timing out yet again. I loved killing monsters, just loved it. I loved playing the mods. And I knew it was a fantasy game. And at that time, I was a woman in my 30s. Not exactly the DOOM II crowd, but there was something just *satisfying* in eviscerating various types of demons on Mars with my chaingun.

I’ve since moved on to 4x space empire type games, and I’m thinking about buying a 4x strategy game with wargame elements called Shadow Empire. The attraction is that as part of the game setup, you get to generate your own planet from various types and characteristics, but every planet is pretty much guaranteed to be a challenge in some way or another to play. The planet itself might be hostile, there are other groups on the planet, there may be alien life forms, and so on. No garden planets or space Edens. Since my foot is pretty much nailed to the floor this weekend, I might do this for some fun.