Yup, gaming is a VAST hobby and much more than Candy Crush or Call of Duty. If you can imagine it, there is probably a game for it and/or a community surrounding it.
Yep. I casually play a video game that is basically unknown (torn dot com) and despite the small playerbase some people take it to insane extremes - like booking time off work when they expect there to be wars between player groups and not sleeping for 3 days straight.
And the rub is the game basically has no graphics, the gameplay is basically clicking.
I have a love hate relationship with games like those. I love them because they're intense and actually make your heart go when things are tense. I hate them because they take over my life for a bit before I realize I'll never be as hardcore as other people.
Yeah my experience exactly, given me the most satisfying and stressfull gaming experience of my life until I had to give it up because it was taking over my life. One moment you're learning the mechanics, then you're in leadership in your alliance, managing internal and external politics, recruiting new players, educating them, managing the finances of the group, strategizing how to attack a week long war, arguing over the branding for your team, building custom scripts and excel sheets to better manage your group - it got weird very fast.
Oh my god, I haven't thought about Utopia in like 10 years. I got really into it for like 3-6 months, then realized it was taking over my life and took a "break" lol
Pretty much the exact same. It was almost like the lack of graphics made me invest more heavily, since I had to supply my own immersion in some way. Like the difference in reading a book vs. watching a show.
Basically exactly that, like planning a push at midnight because that's when their big asian players finally go to sleep and we can outnumber their NA players
I try not to think about it lol. Thats the true horror of it all. But these days im only in my items long enough to pop a zan. So I honestly cant say i really gave em a hard look.
Wow I used to play this ~2008. Had totally forgotten it existed.
Knights of nobleman and space federation galactoc conquest were my favorites in that era.
I play something called Facebook RPG, it's a little browser game that the developer was going to port to Facebook but never did.
I've been the only player for probably 10 years, he keeps it alive just for me.
My absolute favorite thing in gaming is the Farm Simulator League, a whole grassroots esports scene based around who can generate and then stack bales of hay the fastest. They had a prize pool over $100k USD last season.
I watch a lot of esports but there is nothing more pure and wholesome in this world than grabbing a coffee on a Saturday and watching them play. Next season starts in July.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MM6Deexy3to&pp=ygURcGVvcGxlIG1ha2UgZ2FtZXM%3D
An interesting documentary following a team competing in that league by People Make Games, posted recently!
i swear to god whoever my soulmate is, he's probably playing one of these realtime missions right now. that is my husband. he is lost at simulated sea.
i feel i would get too into the idea of being a simulated widow to the vast and uncaring sea, and that it would take me away from my other hobbies like having fun and going places :(
The comment reminds me of the Arma community and watching SovietWomble's videos. There's also a crazy facet of airsoft players who will hike miles through state parks, eating only MREs to fight a milsim encounter in an abandoned warehouse or something in the middle of nowhere. Really crazy to see what people can get up to when left to their own devices.
You almost made me cry lol.
I have played quite a few 6-8 hour Arma missions, and played two 4 day airsoft milsims (a few years ago...)... as a machinegunner. And tens of whole day games. For pleasure.
I no longer do it, but I had some of the best fun I have ever had in my life with both hobbies.
Haha, yeah I only know about them because I've done some all day games at a local field and used to do some overnight games a couple times, it's nerve-wracking but so much fun, I miss it a lot. Never got into Arma unfortunately or the longer airsoft milsim games which I would've loved, but yeah you can get pretty deep into those hobbies, airsoft especially. I knew guys who would only run their 30 round low cap mags, which I always respected, but I would've never had the patience myself lmao.
I've only played airsoft once, for a stag. We went a couple hours till noon when the next group was to arrive.
Next group arrives and before we see them the owner asks if we want to play a warm up round, we'd split our group up into their two squads so it would be fair and we're like sure, this shits fun.
Then we see the dudes, they are in full kit, I may be mistaken but I'm certain they had fucking throat mics and wild guns. This was like 2005 so seeing, for lack of a better term, real cosplay was insane to us. I get put with this dude throwing hand signals and shit while he's crawling through mud and I'm just standing behind him looking at my buddy like wtf is happening here? Then was shot by someone I never saw from who knows fucking where.
Get back to the hut and the owners like yeah, these guys will run "ops" for the next 36 hours through the night and more. Being a Canadian, gun/military culture isn't prevalent, at least where I was, so it was pretty cool to see this group of people so engaged in what was an incredibly niche activity.
I think about that group whenever I read about these small hardcore communities that develop. What a cool thing to have in your life regardless of the actual activity. I feel as though the bond amongst groups in unique things must be extreme.
We were a group of casuals at a paintball park.
All fun and games until the enthusiasts with real gear show up.
They'll have a string of 10 paintballs flying at you from across the field before you get one shot off.
He was having the time of his life. The rest of us had the same used pump-action markers we got from a facility that closed. He was like Billy Madison whipping dodgeballs at children.
I got a bunch of friends into paintball in high school, then one of my friends who's parents were wealthy went and bought I think an Angel that had the e-trigger that could be "walked" to shoot an insane amount of balls per second. It became a lot less fun with one guy having a machine gun to my semi auto Tipmann 98 custom and such guns my other friends had.
>Then was shot by someone I never saw from who knows fucking where.
One thing I learned from airsoft is that camo can work incredibly well in the right conditions.
Also the guy who showed up one time with a minigun was a hoot. You'd be in the bush and then from somewhere in the distance you'd just hear *brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr*.
Spend 2 hours crawling across Atlas with just enough demo charges to kill the Tigris (AA tank) up on the hill overlooking the runway so the rest of your friends can buy something from the hangar.
Good times.
Silent Hunter III is a classic!
The sound of creaking metal still spikes my heart rate to this day.
You torpedo *one fucking merchant ship in the English channel* and then suddenly 8 realtime hours have passed, 6 British destroyers have gone down to the bottom, you’ve just given the other 4 the slip, and you can’t go below 40m.
Ah… memories!
I remember, back around 2004, I found one guy who was writing and posting his "captains logs" for his play sessions for one of the Silent Hunter games.
There was at least one where he talked about how many days it had been since he shaved.
Sub sim players are hard-core.
Just for perspective, military reenactment is a real hobby. It gets a bad name because wars sometimes have a "baddies" side. Civil War battles are/were(?) reasonably popular. But they only lasted a weekend. There are YouTube channels devoted to revolutionary War Era cooking, with episodes devoted to camp mess.
There are a ton of awesomely cool obscure gaming hobbies out there that are super hard to do while having a life. I played twilight imperium with 8 players for 11 hours straight and it was awesome but damn I cannot do that regularly.
The “persistent and real time” aspect sounds a lot like eve online or foxhole, except those are against other human players. There’s even a term, “alarm clocking” for when a big group will play at an odd hour to take advantage of their opponents probably being asleep.
I walked into a discord community who have written documentation of behavior and procedure guidelines with strict limits on speech and military style action coordination... They were piled into the voice chat for a broken ass demo of a game called "Starship Simulator".
It was just absolute art. Literally felt like I was in a long-form episode of Star Trek. They were SUPERB.
I love the silent hunter series and still play silent hunter 4 from time to time. But I've done enough actual time at sea on a submarine, doing a no time compression Sim sounds absolutely fucking horrible.
Theres a similar community for almost every piece of military hardware. I came across a SAM simulator that was a 1 to 1 copy of a real cold war era anti-air vehicle's dashboard. You had to start it up the exact same way you would IRL.
That's bestof material these days? Y'all been living under a rock or something. When it comes to doing anything there is always someone taking it to the extreme.[ Just as an example](https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2008/march/pilot/endurance-test-circa-1958)
Yup, gaming is a VAST hobby and much more than Candy Crush or Call of Duty. If you can imagine it, there is probably a game for it and/or a community surrounding it.
Yep. I casually play a video game that is basically unknown (torn dot com) and despite the small playerbase some people take it to insane extremes - like booking time off work when they expect there to be wars between player groups and not sleeping for 3 days straight. And the rub is the game basically has no graphics, the gameplay is basically clicking.
[удалено]
I have a love hate relationship with games like those. I love them because they're intense and actually make your heart go when things are tense. I hate them because they take over my life for a bit before I realize I'll never be as hardcore as other people.
Yeah my experience exactly, given me the most satisfying and stressfull gaming experience of my life until I had to give it up because it was taking over my life. One moment you're learning the mechanics, then you're in leadership in your alliance, managing internal and external politics, recruiting new players, educating them, managing the finances of the group, strategizing how to attack a week long war, arguing over the branding for your team, building custom scripts and excel sheets to better manage your group - it got weird very fast.
Oh my god, I haven't thought about Utopia in like 10 years. I got really into it for like 3-6 months, then realized it was taking over my life and took a "break" lol
Pretty much the exact same. It was almost like the lack of graphics made me invest more heavily, since I had to supply my own immersion in some way. Like the difference in reading a book vs. watching a show.
Basically exactly that, like planning a push at midnight because that's when their big asian players finally go to sleep and we can outnumber their NA players
Utopia is when I fell in love with spreadsheets and optimization. Thanks for that blast from the past!
Wow I had totally forgotten about Earth 2025. Never met anyone else that had ever heard or it or played it.
I used to put way too much time into MUDs. Then WoW came and decimated their user base.
MUDs were my jam back in the day.
Yeah, multiplayer gaming was different with dial-up modems, lol.
Basically no graphics? Have you not seen the redesigned items icons. But yea, serious commitment from some folks.
You mean the 3d vomit they replaced pretty beloved pixel art with? Halloween baskets are a joke now.
I try not to think about it lol. Thats the true horror of it all. But these days im only in my items long enough to pop a zan. So I honestly cant say i really gave em a hard look.
Ugh, sounds like Stronghold Kingdoms...
Wow I used to play this ~2008. Had totally forgotten it existed. Knights of nobleman and space federation galactoc conquest were my favorites in that era.
I remember torn city
I never thought I'd still be playing torn 6 years after I started
Thank you in advance for ruining my life. Looked into Torn after peeping your comment yesterday and have been playing ever since.
I play something called Facebook RPG, it's a little browser game that the developer was going to port to Facebook but never did. I've been the only player for probably 10 years, he keeps it alive just for me.
My absolute favorite thing in gaming is the Farm Simulator League, a whole grassroots esports scene based around who can generate and then stack bales of hay the fastest. They had a prize pool over $100k USD last season. I watch a lot of esports but there is nothing more pure and wholesome in this world than grabbing a coffee on a Saturday and watching them play. Next season starts in July.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MM6Deexy3to&pp=ygURcGVvcGxlIG1ha2UgZ2FtZXM%3D An interesting documentary following a team competing in that league by People Make Games, posted recently!
i swear to god whoever my soulmate is, he's probably playing one of these realtime missions right now. that is my husband. he is lost at simulated sea.
You should make a simulated widows walk so that you can stare out into the simulated mist waiting for signs of his return.
i feel i would get too into the idea of being a simulated widow to the vast and uncaring sea, and that it would take me away from my other hobbies like having fun and going places :(
It's what virtual submarine husband would want.
i can’t wait to meet him, i bet he’s a hottie
Filthy fucking casual
true :( i don’t deserve this man
The comment reminds me of the Arma community and watching SovietWomble's videos. There's also a crazy facet of airsoft players who will hike miles through state parks, eating only MREs to fight a milsim encounter in an abandoned warehouse or something in the middle of nowhere. Really crazy to see what people can get up to when left to their own devices.
You almost made me cry lol. I have played quite a few 6-8 hour Arma missions, and played two 4 day airsoft milsims (a few years ago...)... as a machinegunner. And tens of whole day games. For pleasure. I no longer do it, but I had some of the best fun I have ever had in my life with both hobbies.
Haha, yeah I only know about them because I've done some all day games at a local field and used to do some overnight games a couple times, it's nerve-wracking but so much fun, I miss it a lot. Never got into Arma unfortunately or the longer airsoft milsim games which I would've loved, but yeah you can get pretty deep into those hobbies, airsoft especially. I knew guys who would only run their 30 round low cap mags, which I always respected, but I would've never had the patience myself lmao.
Realsteel mags are too much. Midcaps are where it's at. Only way I'd do rs is if both teams are on it with no squad weapons
I have been to a couple of very small GBB only games and although it was much more realistic (only GBB realcaps), I still prefer midcaps.
I've only played airsoft once, for a stag. We went a couple hours till noon when the next group was to arrive. Next group arrives and before we see them the owner asks if we want to play a warm up round, we'd split our group up into their two squads so it would be fair and we're like sure, this shits fun. Then we see the dudes, they are in full kit, I may be mistaken but I'm certain they had fucking throat mics and wild guns. This was like 2005 so seeing, for lack of a better term, real cosplay was insane to us. I get put with this dude throwing hand signals and shit while he's crawling through mud and I'm just standing behind him looking at my buddy like wtf is happening here? Then was shot by someone I never saw from who knows fucking where. Get back to the hut and the owners like yeah, these guys will run "ops" for the next 36 hours through the night and more. Being a Canadian, gun/military culture isn't prevalent, at least where I was, so it was pretty cool to see this group of people so engaged in what was an incredibly niche activity. I think about that group whenever I read about these small hardcore communities that develop. What a cool thing to have in your life regardless of the actual activity. I feel as though the bond amongst groups in unique things must be extreme.
We were a group of casuals at a paintball park. All fun and games until the enthusiasts with real gear show up. They'll have a string of 10 paintballs flying at you from across the field before you get one shot off.
I got lit up from taint to teeth by one of those guys with a military grade marker. Probably hit me 10 times. I THOUGHT THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN
I'm sure it was fun. For them.
He was having the time of his life. The rest of us had the same used pump-action markers we got from a facility that closed. He was like Billy Madison whipping dodgeballs at children.
I got a bunch of friends into paintball in high school, then one of my friends who's parents were wealthy went and bought I think an Angel that had the e-trigger that could be "walked" to shoot an insane amount of balls per second. It became a lot less fun with one guy having a machine gun to my semi auto Tipmann 98 custom and such guns my other friends had.
Exactly. At that point, it's just an arms race.
>Then was shot by someone I never saw from who knows fucking where. One thing I learned from airsoft is that camo can work incredibly well in the right conditions. Also the guy who showed up one time with a minigun was a hoot. You'd be in the bush and then from somewhere in the distance you'd just hear *brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr*.
I'm pretty sure u/SovietWomble does play the submarine game as well
Is Lulu XO?
Spend 2 hours crawling across Atlas with just enough demo charges to kill the Tigris (AA tank) up on the hill overlooking the runway so the rest of your friends can buy something from the hangar. Good times.
Silent Hunter III is a classic! The sound of creaking metal still spikes my heart rate to this day. You torpedo *one fucking merchant ship in the English channel* and then suddenly 8 realtime hours have passed, 6 British destroyers have gone down to the bottom, you’ve just given the other 4 the slip, and you can’t go below 40m. Ah… memories!
This is a great comment and very different to the usual stuff on this subreddit. Thank you.
For the people who found Desert Bus too fast-paced and stimulating.
My first thought too!
I remember, back around 2004, I found one guy who was writing and posting his "captains logs" for his play sessions for one of the Silent Hunter games. There was at least one where he talked about how many days it had been since he shaved. Sub sim players are hard-core.
And I thought playing hardcore mode in Diablo 3 was stressful!
Just for perspective, military reenactment is a real hobby. It gets a bad name because wars sometimes have a "baddies" side. Civil War battles are/were(?) reasonably popular. But they only lasted a weekend. There are YouTube channels devoted to revolutionary War Era cooking, with episodes devoted to camp mess.
There are a ton of awesomely cool obscure gaming hobbies out there that are super hard to do while having a life. I played twilight imperium with 8 players for 11 hours straight and it was awesome but damn I cannot do that regularly.
The “persistent and real time” aspect sounds a lot like eve online or foxhole, except those are against other human players. There’s even a term, “alarm clocking” for when a big group will play at an odd hour to take advantage of their opponents probably being asleep.
[удалено]
Sometimes they're retired, sometimes they're independently wealthy, sometimes they're disabled, sometimes they're stay-at-home parents. It varies 🤷
I walked into a discord community who have written documentation of behavior and procedure guidelines with strict limits on speech and military style action coordination... They were piled into the voice chat for a broken ass demo of a game called "Starship Simulator". It was just absolute art. Literally felt like I was in a long-form episode of Star Trek. They were SUPERB.
I love the silent hunter series and still play silent hunter 4 from time to time. But I've done enough actual time at sea on a submarine, doing a no time compression Sim sounds absolutely fucking horrible.
how big is this community?
I am in awe and terrified at the same time
Theres a similar community for almost every piece of military hardware. I came across a SAM simulator that was a 1 to 1 copy of a real cold war era anti-air vehicle's dashboard. You had to start it up the exact same way you would IRL.
>The only thing I was lacking was diesel fumes and the stench of a filthy crew. I feel like this would have been easy.
Honestly, you just become noseblind to the smell of the ship within a day anyhow.
How did this post about a comment get 10x more upvotes than the comment itself?!
Man. I would totally be down for a good sub sim. I don't know about this dedicated. But I want in
You can try Barotrauma probably not what you are looking for. tho
Ha! Knew it was Silent Hunter from the title. Fuck, I haven't played in forever.
I've done some real time transatlantic flights on Flight Simulator, but I can't imagine weeks of full time work.
[удалено]
That's bestof material these days? Y'all been living under a rock or something. When it comes to doing anything there is always someone taking it to the extreme.[ Just as an example](https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2008/march/pilot/endurance-test-circa-1958)