I’m sorry, but ‘crash when pressing Ctrl+C’ is a hilarious bug.

Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that’s a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).

Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn’t just social manipulation at scale.

I really, really need people to grok the distinction between engagement and entertainment.

People huffing and puffing about other people not using words the way they expect: “God this wind is terrible, we need to abolish wind or at least make it blow in a different direction”

Honestly, the game is amazing 95% of the time. But Act 3 feels a bit too packed and a bit rushed at the same time. I’ve not been able to complete it because the game consistently crashes for me at a particular point on what amounts to ‘the final run’.

The fact that instead of just leaving the gsme until patched I instead chose to start over with a second character says something about how good the game is otherwise.

The ‘Another Realm’ series of self-insert fics set in the Mass Effect (original trilogy) universe, increasingly alternate-reality as it goes on. It no longer exists online as far as I’m aware, as the author adapted the story for his own original universe and has to date released eight books set in that universe. Six of which are rewritings of the original fanfic including a conclusion of sorts, two are a separate series (for now) set in the same universe, and there’s also another series written by another author set in the same universe which is also a rewriting of a finished fanfic originally set in the AR universe.

The original adaptation universe is called ‘Knights of the Compact’ I think, and the initial series of novels following Cieran Kean is called ‘The Lost Knight’, if anyone’s interested. They are quite good, I’ve enjoyed them immensely.