Musing on #CrueltySquad and it's interesting that the best way to actually make enough money to complete the game is to have made some very lucky decisions right at the start, when you didn't know what's going on, otherwise you'll be stuck doing in-game years of tedious work (in this case fishing)

Like no matter how gaming literate you are, unless someone you know helps you out at the beginning, you don't actually stand a chance. Like my dad used to say "it's not what you know, it's who you know"

In the end, once I figured out it was possible to get there with literal hours and hours of grind (canonically in-game it took you 30 years to save up enough money to buy a house) I don't regret simply hacking my savegame for the sake of stream brevity

I wonder if the metaphor here is: Faced with an inherently unjust society where it's simply not possible to succeed via "normal" legitimate means, is it really that much of a surprise when some people turn to crimes instead?

Especially a game like this, and IRL, where the rich and powerful commit horrendous crimes and get off completely scott-free. The classic analogy: If your boss pays you £100 below minimum wage (theft), they get a slap on the wrist and a fine, but if you take £100 out of the till you go to jail.

The former is a minor blip on a spreadsheet somewhere, the latter could be the difference between someone's kid getting to eat this week

(continued in reply)

I dunno where I'm going with this. I guess if you care about individual crimes, maybe we should create a society where people don't need to do this to survive?

As for the in-game fishing. I guess it weakens the narrative a little that it is actually possible (though unreasonable) to succeed in this way, when that isn't necessarily true for many in our IRL society. I get why it was necessary from a game-design standpoint though, forced restarts are unfun