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by Boxxed 636 days ago
A friend of mine was playing the game Slay the Spire and was loving it -- he said something along the lines of, "It's very well designed, and there's so much content!" That always kind of skeeved me out. I think because there's this odd self-awareness of it all?
2 comments

Ha. This is is exactly what turns me off of Slay the Spire. It's a filler game, full of filler content, designed to fill your time. And not, as far as I can tell, much more than that.

"Content" is a commodity. I don't see a huge difference between the folks who view creative work as "content" and talk about it as if it's fungible and can be valued per uni of weight, and art speculators who buy up works of art they've never seen and then leave it warehoused in some freehold somewhere.

I can't really blame people who do creative work for catering to folks who think about their work this way - everybody's got to eat - but I'll still gladly bemoan the pervasive cultural debasement.

Couldn’t really disagree more, although I guess I see where you’re coming from. Slay the Spire to me lacks “content” at least the way you’re using it - there are 4 classes that essentially have never changed and the levels are pseudo randomly generated and otherwise don’t change much run to run.

However, attaining very high levels in that game requires a depth of skill, strategy, and math that is constantly startling to me, and I used to play card games professionally.

I don’t even like deck builders and STS hooked me for solid 30hrs
This is exactly why my 12 yr old by likes Genshin Impact (a Zelda type game on the phone): "it always got these new characters" etc. Like infinite scrolling, it's an endless loop to get more gems so you can level up so you can get more new characters as they come up so you can get more gems so you can level up ad infinitum. It's basically like an advanced candy crush that you can just zone out and mindlessly do forever. I hate it.