heavy metal scientist. sometimes literally. fountain pen enjoyer. queer and more than old enough to remember when you couldn't use the internet and your home phone at the same time
On Steam, by grinding away doing pointless shit for no reason, you can earn "Trading Cards". These can be converted into "gems" which are collected in "Sacks of Gems". The underlying javascript, though, calls them what they are:
barrels of game goo
It's a shame they didn't go with the glowing green barrel of nukage from Doom but someone did in their hearts at least
It's all in the browser side of things. If they don't obfuscate the code (turning functions and variable names into meaningless letters) you can see the names using devtools available in your browser.
(do not play with devtools if you don't know what you're doing though)
who on earth thought "gems" was better than "barrels of game goo"
in a group chat with a valve employee who will remain anonymous, we established that game goo is a substance with roughly the same properties as cosmoline that you can put video games into to preserve them
This kind of nonsense really makes me worry about Steam. It ain't broke, don't fix it.
