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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8122561">Just an FYI, I don't do the text wall response thing. So if you want me to respond to every point you make, give me a paragraph response, and I will do so (edit: also just want to be clear that I am not intending to negatively characterize your post as a 'wall of text'---realized that sounded dismissive, I just dislike responding to multiple quotations from a single post)But here I will just say, I am not saying social media or the internet is simply bad, in fact I think it is good. Just like I think books are good, the printing press was good, radio was good, movies are good, etc. All I am saying is 1) There is an effect and 2) Humanity seems to have a learning curve when it comes to big changes in communication technology (i.e. propaganda posters used to be much more effective, now we are more resistant to them; or the spread of religious conflict in Europe, at least in part, being accelerated by the ability to widely distribute the bible in the vernacular). When it comes to social media, I do think there are good things about it and there are bad things about it, like any other media. And I think people ought to be honest with themselves about how much things like overuse of social media and over-reliance on other peoples opinions on social media impact them. In myself I can see when I use social media too much it makes me less intelligent and less creative. When I use it in moderation, it makes me more intelligent and creative than I otherwise would be. When I rely too strongly on the opinions of people online (for example when I assume the opinions of people in a forum are a perfect reflection the broader opinions in the gaming community, or when I give them more weight than my own instincts, I find it stifles my creativity). More broadly I do think when you have everyone plugged into the same medium, you are going to see a homogenization of things like art, games, etc. And that is what I was pointing to. I don't think any of these negatives mean we should condemn social media. It is an important technological advance. But I do think it is important to reflect on how it might be impacting us, how it is impacting table play, how it is impacting the design we are doing. I know personally I had to make a conscious effort to stop listening to much of the online gaming discussion to restore my creative edge. Maybe other people have different experiences, but I also see evidence that the problem is out there among people in the hobby (and I don't think it really matters what gaming clique or group or platform you are in/on, if you are in one or allowing one to shape your sense of what is good in gaming, you are going to start looking and sounding like the people who also inhabit that space).Also, in general, for gaming I think the internet and social media have been mostly beneficial. It has been a great boon to me because by being able to game online through platforms like Skype or discord, I have way more gaming opportunities now. It also enables me to communicate with more gamers. I just think being a bit cautious about its impact on oneself, especially when it comes to ones creativity, is useful.</blockquote>

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