Feel free to replace “friends” with “anyone you know in real life” or even online groups you trust or are close with.
“They”:
and my own personal experience; most games I have bought in the past 10 years have been off of recommendations from r/gamingsuggestions before Reddit went to crap and Lemmy came into existence; and even moreso when it is a personal friend recommending things to me.
Mods, feel free to nuke if this feels too close to advertising or better-suited for [email protected] (my own community); I mean it more as a discussion piece but I don’t run the place.
EDIT: The “not” in the title is optional; I’m asking about both successful and failed recommendations.
Deus Ex and the Metal Gear Solid series both have some shockingly prescient plot points. In 2025 playing these is a trip.
Yes, particularly MGS 2 was absurdly prescient with the entire concept of… the vast majority of the internet being unordered and uncontextualized noise and chaos, and… there needing to be a way to structure it, but also, there is essentially no way to do that that is not also going to manipulative/exploitative.
We also now do pretty much live in PMC world, it just isn’t as… stylish? I’m gonna use that word.
Our world is agruably at least as absurd as the MGS plotline, but in different ways.
Basically… our technology has indeed surpassed the ability of the average person or government to understand it and use/regulate it responsibly, we are now addicited to it more so than intentionally using it, and that is all being driven by the capitalist machines that profit from it, and every day, they more and more overtly oversee the maintenance and direction of the torment nexus.
EDIT:
i will also throw in as a sort of esoteric lore detail:
Shadowrun particularly predicted that coffee would become an unaffordable luxury good, as economies and climate collapse.
Uh yep, thats happening, coffee prices are up 40% in the US, just this year.
I am glad I quit my coffee addiction a few years ago.