In my experience the most popular and fun “party games” are boardgames such as Top Ten, Time’s Up, Hot & Cold or Codenames (more or less in that order). They work best for 6 to 10 players. Though I don’t think they shine in a highly competitive tournament setting.

Randomness exists in all of these games but I consider it very balanced/smoothed out so it shouldn’t really affect the outcome. Not all of the games I mentioned have permanent teams, but that can easily be changed with house rules.

I feel like comparing OTTD to OpenLoco is a bit similar to comparing Freeciv to Freecol. OTTD and Freeciv just had so much more popularity and development. But OpenLoco and Freecol are still nice to try.

Of course! TTD and Locomotion were developed by the same person. From my understanding Locomotion is closer to the Roller Coaster Tycoon engine and UI. Also I think I remember reading an interview in which Chris Sawyer said Locomotion had the cleanest code out of the three.

On that note, considering the original engines are similar I wonder if OpenRCT2 and OpenLoco have any big similarities in the code base as well…

Very true, but only the fact that the game had such an incredible and easy to use map editor was the reason this was possible.

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I’m aware of that and also see the problem, but argue that that’s partially because most people just aren’t used to this. People’s actions depend a lot on what they consider the norm. Take waiters or other service people as an example - in some cultures it’s usual to tip them, in others it’s unusual or even frowned upon.

You would have to at least have a base minimum purchase price and then accept tips on top.

That’s also fine. If the initial price were lower than other comparable games then I assume that more people could be convinced to tip. Or even just if a company is very open about their work / income and dedicated to communicating to their players. I think there’s already some companies like that, though perhaps not necessarily the big ones.

That’s where work contracts can help. Any form of tipping and how it is split would have to be handled by a contract anyway.

He’s not talking about donations though, he’s talking about paying full price THEN tipping.

I’m aware of that. The “Pay what you want.” concept mentioned in my first paragraph was its own idea/suggestion/thought, since it kinda fits the topic. It’s a different thing.

It’s a blatant excuse to pay developers less while placing financial guilt on the people paying for the product. It’s the same way tipping at a restaurant works.

Not really, really good video games take months or even years to complete, so your developers will want to be paid for that time before they become profitable. At restaurants the initial investment isn’t quite as high, as far as wages are concerned. I’d argue that you get tipped before even getting your first monthly paycheck. That can not be the case for video game tips.

I assume software developers and other people in the IT sector are also in higher demand than waiters, so they don’t have it quite as bad as waiters. That’s why I think they’re not comparable.

That said, I do believe that a company that is open about the tips it receives could be interesting for developers. If I saw that tips were actually split evenly among all the employees and their work hours then I think it’d be worth considering applying there. Though I guess for fairness those tips should even be paid out if employees quit or get kicked out so you’d have to track how much each person contributed to each product and that could be a bit of a bureaucratic hassle.

I think the concept of “Pay what you want.” is a very friendly approach to this. It already exists on platforms like itch.io and some free to play games financed through donations, like Dwarf Fortress, also became extremely popular. Humble Bundles are also pretty famous for this. And of course kickstarters do something a bit similar to this.

Personally I’d love to see donation buttons/infos especially for all the free music and games that exist out there. But I want to make sure my donations reach the people who actually worked on it, so I dislike products like paypal or patreon where a portion of the money goes to men in the middle and their managers/owners, etc. A bank account number or something along those lines where I can transfer money a bit more directly would be nice, but some creators only provide paypal buttons, so I won’t donate.

Yay! It makes my-current-self happy that your-past-self said nice things about my-past-selves comment. Go, my-past-self!

With that silly comment of mine out of the way, there’s one thing I want to add which is that I think we should maybe show a bit of leniency towards our past selves. Keep in mind that our past selves had less experience than us. They didn’t have all the experiences that shaped us. For better or for worse. When we say “I didn’t know.” maybe to make things more interesting we could instead say “My past self didn’t know.” at least once, just for the fun of it.

Physically speaking, what our past selves did have though was a lot more potential than us. They had the potential to become our current self and at least in theory they also had the potential to become different versions of our current self. Some of them we might consider better, others worse. These versions would all have a different experience than our current self. Maybe even a slightly different thought going through ones head can be an experience with a big impact on the future.

I guess some people do say that they need to makes ones past self, or even another persons past self proud. One thing that I thought was funny was hearing another person saying “That will be future me’s problem.”. So in a way we really do take snapshots and project things onto them.

Well if you were to decide to take the two identities out of context and compare them to each other, then they would definitely be different. You know, some people do take their past selves and make fun of them, they can hate them, they can insult and loathe them. Similarly, if they could see us today, our past selves might be disappointed or even offended at what we have become. Imagine growing up in a very conservative family, perhaps adopting prejudice views and as you grow up, you change and maybe even find yourself befriending and loving the things or people you used to hate. Your past self might attack and kill you if you were both put into the same room.

I’m aware that that’s a very extreme example. It’s just an idea I wanted to bring across. Of course it can go both ways. I guess the topic would make for very interesting stories in media, I’m sure it was already used often.

You know that reminds me, this whole concept is already a very realistic daily occurrence. Say two people fall in love, but then years later they break up. Oftentimes people say things like “you’ve changed”. They fell in love with each others past versions. I’m sure we all know humans or mechanical devices or software programs that we used to love, but then they changed and we started disliking them. I might like my new comb, or my new phone. But when they break, I might get angry and hate them.

Maybe another way of putting it is “the information that makes you up remains the same”? As in, it doesn’t matter if one electron is exchanged with another, it’s still the same component? Assuming two things have the same physical properties, it doesn’t matter which one you use. You are not just the objects you consist of, but also the way they are positioned/aligned/etc.

Maybe a bit like binary code/data, if you copy a file then the copy will be able to do the same thing. Though I guess it’s more complex than that, because it all depends on where this data is located, so not only the building blocks but also the context in which they exist matters.

How about a different way of putting it?

Ones past self is a book with more blank pages than our current self. The blank pages represent things that are unknown, things that could be, different possibilities. Perhaps I dislike some of the pages of my current self and would rather not have experienced them. My past self would then be a clean version of the book, where the pages I dislike could still turn out to be different.

But then the question remains of whether the pages are blank because the author is still thinking about what to write or whether they just didn’t find the time to do it yet. Is it actually a book with blank pages or is it more like a folder where you continuously add pages - and furthermore, are the missing pages actually still blank or are they already printed and only need to be added to the folder? Is an incomplete version of a book still the same book? If you only read the first book of a three book series, is it still the same story? Are the pages actually missing or do they exist and I just haven’t read (=experienced) them yet?

I really like this topic and think the idea of ones past self is a very interesting concept to think about. Personally I’ve thought about it in a different way, specifically about whether I own my past and it’s also a question about how we own our body.

For example, let’s say ten years ago someone took a picture of me and I demanded that this picture must not be shared or posted online. Now if ten years later I ask the photographer to send me the picture and I post it online, then the photographer and I broke the rules. I certainly did not get consent from my past self. So now the question of whether or not I am my past self comes up. Most people would probably say yes, but it’s still an interesting question.

To continue this chain of thought even further one can be creative and add themes like time travel and meeting ones past self. That expands the idea to a crazy big scope of possible questions though and is perhaps a bit too unrealistic for most people to bother thinking about.

Coming back to a more realistic idea, would posting a picture of my baby self online and insulting the person in the picture be considered morally wrong? It would certainly be considered rude by people who don’t know the context. But how many rights do I actually have here? How about using it as a profile picture on social media? There’s many different possible interesting questions here.

I understand that this is opening a whole other can of worms and a different idea than the original post, but I feel it’s a similar direction and also brings up the question about the relationship between a person and their past self.

edit: Also I just now noticed that I tend to write “past self” as singular while you write it as “past selves” in plural. I guess that’s because you talk about the topic as a more continuous thing that happens constantly. That reminds me of a theory according to which the universe splits up into many different paths every time a random quantum thingy happens. I think it’s this thing: Many-worlds interpretation (wikipedia).

I do sort of feel like it’s lost something as the graphics have improved and animations were introduced

Have you tried Unciv? https://yairm210.itch.io/unciv It’s a free and open source remake of Civ 5 and already supports many of its features. I really enjoy playing it as it’s much less hardware intensive which makes for near instant loading times and keeps the computer nice and cool on hot summer days.

I recommend https://openrct2.io/ - it’s a fan made open source reimplementation that adds many changes, among them multiplayer, mods, UI improvements, bugfixes and so on. For installation you’ll need a copy of the original RCT2 game. It also supports RCT1 scenarios and graphics.

Sounds interesting!

I recommend https://davidnhill.github.io/JSMinesweeper/ - it has a no guessing mode, a fast mode to skip obvious choices, can show hints if you need any, is free and works in your browser.

I also recommend https://zblip.itch.io/mine-of-sight - it’s more complex than Minesweeper and has different types of Minesweeper-esque clues combined into a single game. It’s also free and runs in your browser.