So it was one of those heartwarming stories that are forgotten in five minutes, but the guys at HE INSPIRE are quantum shitting through the n-th dimension:

-Implication of UPS driver being a zoophile
-"Exploits" also implies that the dog owner is also some way at fault
-The alleged story of zoophilia exploitation is posted in the INSPIRE section of the website
-The website posting alleged zoophilia/alleging zoophilia for clicks is called HeartEternal (may have been thoroughly nuked from the internet by 2023).

This is all on track for clickbait sites that were, as my boss explained to me back then, aiming at the lower-educated 40yo+ house ladies as their target audience.

After all, you reel them in with outrage and then woo them with feel-good shit. And the ad revenue continues to roll in!

My friend group and I have a common term we throw around: "games for sickos". It's difficult to pin down an exact definition, but you know them when you see them: complex games that are fucked up in ways that make them prickly, or inaccessible, or frictional, but also fascinating to appreciate as a designer—and if you're the right kind of fucked up, maybe enjoyable to you too. It's a positive label, but it keeps in mind that a game is not for everyone. Armored Core is a game for sickos. Guilty Gear Xrd is a game for sickos. Pathologic is a game for sickos. Dwarf Fortress is a game for sickos. Final Fantasy XI is a game for sickos. And Space Station 14 is... well, you can guess.

Back in the early 2010s I played a lot of Garry's Mod DarkRP, which introduced me to the strangely compelling concept of working a virtual job in a role-playing environment where shit hit the fan every five minutes. I remember becoming a chef, decorating my cafe with my exquisite selection of props, and annoying everyone on the server by asking for money over the counter instead of granting direct access to the magic microwave oven that generated meals. Outside my front door, pitched gun battles took place and children screamed wild accusations at each other, but I was content to just be a background character.

Space Station 14 is that, but for absolutely terminal sickos.

So Space Station 13 (the game that Space Station 14 is an improved remake of) was made on the BYOND engine, and if you ever want to see the gritty insane underbelly of the Macromedia Dreamweaver era, go look up BYOND.

BYOND was a mid-2000s freeware game engine designed specifically for building multiplayer experiences. Think one part Bitsy, one part early Unity, one part Flash, and one part pile of decompiled Runescape netcode stolen from a dumpster behind Jagex' offices.

SS13 is by far the most elaborate thing ever built with it, but BYOND was essentially a whole treasure trove of games built in exactly these parameters: top-down, pixel art, debatably real-time multiplayer worlds for sickos and freaks who were too weird for the mainstream MMOs of the era but couldn't get with the preceding generation of MUDs and MUSHes.

Absolutely incredible era and someone needs to do a deep dive on it.

literally just typed byondinto my address bar and firefox pulled the post deep from the depths of my history

Anime Sickos: general pop culture/politics stuff, the ongoing decline of posting, occasional scripted projects.
All Gamers Are Bastards: general pop culture/politics stuff, Zephyr likes this one.
Citations Needed: focused criticism of media and coverage of politics.
Sleazoids: film criticism, guest-heavy.
Kill James Bond: film criticism, weird trans people version.
Boonta Vista Socialist Club: general exercise bike chatter, what's the deal with Dutch people this week.
Knowledge Fight: if you're morbidly curious about what's going on with the Infowars Zone lately.
Minion Death Cult: if you're morbidly curious about what's going on with the Boomer Brain Melt Zone lately.
Blowback: very good retrospective histories on the designated enemies of empire and conflicts with the imperial core, done in seasons.

rose et. al, 2022

ABSTRACT:

conception

ice cream had conceived of a similar idea previously, though it lacked the distinctive numerology that came to define the 10% rule.

ice cream went on to express this a number of other times, but the true inception of The 10% Rule did not come until later.

pictured below is the true origin of the 10% rule:

a secondary, better-worded definition would soon follow:

finally, i present an example, cut from a lengthy discussion about tunic, a frequent source of 10%'ing for the authors of this paper.

discrepencies in nomenclature

in both of these examples, this rule is referred to as the '90%' rule. this is due to the lack of a coherent name for much of the rule's existence. however, the authors of this paper have decided to call it '10%ing' rather than '90%ing' from here on out, just to be consistent.

conclusion

game grumps

The tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things, or in random and chaotic stimuli to seek and find patterns even though they are there by chance. There are 3 approaches to apophenia in games. The primary and oldest is to create guardrails; invisible walls, restricted terrain and movement options, etc. Prevent you from looking behind the curtain and exposing the truth of Oz. The 2nd most common, endemic to "open world" experiences like the above examples, is to neglect it as a possibility. Thus the 10/90 experience of disappointment. Finally, rarely done by comparison, especially in open world and never to my knowledge in AAA games, is embracing apophenia through a certain minimalism and things left to interpretation and imagination.

In the first case, inevitably players will break the bonds and end up behind the set dressing anyway. Glitch hunters and speed runners will strip this kind of game bare not just to the skin (intended cheeky secrets like the skull locations in the original Halo: CE), but to the bone, seeing undecorated exterior extraneous geometry and uninitialized extra stored assets and other backstage viscera. This experience ultimately reminds you that it's a game, a limited lie for your senses.

In the 2nd case, games such as the Horizon and Zelda games mentioned above, apophenia can't survive the exploratory impulse, even though the general game world illusion can. The result is disillusioning in an even more disappointing way, because there isn't even the satisfaction of dissecting the flayed bones of the experience. Only the sense of wonder is flensed away, leaving a raw spot which wanted but was punished instead of being satisfied.

For the 3rd case, I can only think of Elden Ring, Dark Souls, and other Miyazaki directed works. That is, in the AAA sphere. Loose ends are everywhere. Everything almost fits but not quite. It's intentionally set up to encourage people to make up wild shit, and glancing at YouTube, boy oh girl oh enbyfriend do they ever. This approach is more common in indie games where there is less of everything. It can be overdone and crash into the 2nd kind too, see five nights at Freddy's after too many sequels.