Jrockwar

But then also many people don't have credit cards - they're frowned upon in many countries with a more debt-averse culture.

Whatever the solution is, it seems like it would end up being something country-specific and not something that scales well across the internet. Probably credit cards work for the US, but then we'd need to find something that works for the remaining 95% of the world population.

As of 2022, 54 countries had implemented special taxes on sugary drinks and/or sugar in general: https://www.obesityevidencehub.org.au/collections/prevention/countries-that-have-implemented-taxes-on-sugar-sweetened-beverages-ssbs

In many cases that covers sweets, snacks, etc. as well. Food is usually quite heavily regulated (in the sense that there's lots of regulation, not that it's actually strict or as much as it should be), even if it's not immediately obvious to us as consumers. E.g. there are ingredients that get banned because of being addictive or having certain harmful effects.

Porn is age gated worldwide, and in some cases censored. I'd class that as regulated pretty much all over the world, regardless of how hard/easy it is to circumvent the regulations (e.g. for a 17-year-old to access a porn website).

I think that actually covers all of the items in the list!

Assuming you're including debit cards here (as most people do when they say "credit card"): you can get one under 18. In fact a few countries are already going fully cashless, with nobody (including kids) being able to pay with cash. If I open the Revolut app, I get right away on the home screen a banner for "Revolut <18".

I'm not sure what could be a better solution though.

Which is why many of these things are regulated, especially if they include addictive substances.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen

It's common knowledge? It's literally the second paragraph in its Wikipedia article. Volkswagen means "the people's car" and was founded so that people in Germany could afford a car.

This is actually written by a woman, who believes she can't even hope to care past her own needs or desires, or even pretend like an AI does.

I think it's the second. Even on No Man's Sky, with the bazillion worlds, they all exist "as they are" and are consistent from the beginning. If you revisit a planet, it's exactly as it was.

Now with what I know about this technology, I suspect the way this happens is every planet had a seed (a number) that you can pass to the "random planet generator" it will generate exactly the same thing over and over. Then basically when you load a new planet it goes "right, with this seed, what would we have in these coordinates?" And the answer is persistent.

However having seen how that looks in NMS, I feel they'd have had to add a bit of extra spice to be able to sell a single world. In my mind that involves manually crafted areas almost necessarily, as well as checking most of the planet manually to oversee the procedural generator and massage anything that doesn't pass a level of quality. If I were to make this game myself, I would use procedural generation for the different areas and not for the whole planet, so that I can give certain sections of the map a "reroll" if I don't like them.

I don't think you can handcraft a whole world with any reasonable team/timeframe for video game development. Looking at the (very short) video I suspect there will be handcrafted areas like cities, and they've put more emphasis on that than in NMS because the size is more manageable. But 80 or 90% needs to be procgen to make it something that can be delivered in years and not decades. Although being a single world, maybe that let them have more visibility of what was being generated (vs checking millions of planets) and then tweak manually large parts of it.

I've gone as far as to "downgrade" my desktop computer to a combination of MacBook Pro + Steam Deck. The MacBook is heaps faster for any workload other than gaming, so now my most powerful computer fits in my backpack. The Steam deck is such a joy to play with, and thanks to the microSD slot I don't have to worry about disk space requirements anymore. Yes, it's not as fast in terms of raw performance, but I don't care. I can play now on my bed, sofa, or garden. If it doesn't run on the deck, I don't care for it. I already have way too many games I haven't finished.