And a hundred thousand tons of crude oil.

You are thinking of a different vampire game. Vampire Survivors has no elements of metroidvania in its design that I can think of.

It sounds like they had moved to a more restrictive system. It’s been a long time since I played KF2, so my memory could be suspect, but I recall your “character” being not much more impactful than a weapon skin.

The meat and potatoes was actually what class you picked, which perks you selected from that class (you got a new choice every 5 levels or so), and then what weapons you rolled with. This will be hypothetical because I don’t actually know the particulars, but I think it’s generally illustrative of KF2’s progression design:

Load in, select Demolitionist class, get a +1%/level damage bonus with explosives and incendiaries as my class trait. Hit level 5. Choose between doubling the AOE of my Molotov cocktails or being able to carry two extra frag grenade. And so on. Any “character” could be any class, and could freely tailor perk choices to their liking.

Don Bacon represents one of the most purple districts in the US, according to polls. He is continuing the proud Nebraska tradition, spearheaded by Ben Sasse, of making occasional headlines separating himself from the MAGA movement to appeal to “centrist” voters, while also doing nothing of consequence with his votes or committee placements to actually hinder the agenda he is “calling out” here.

Also, personally, interacting with Don is like sticking your hands in old dish water and rooting around for bit. But that’s neither here nor there.

This feels like a response to a question I don’t know enough to ask. What’s the context?

This isn’t a direct answer to your question per se, but if this a topic that interests you, I can’t recommend The Right Stuff enough. I’ve not seen the film from the 80s, though by all accounts it’s pretty good, but the book is an excellent overview of the early days of space exploration, when the exact sort of questions that you ask here were being bandied about by the fledgling, pre-Apollo program NASA.

The focus of the book is on the first wave of astronauts who, as someone else mentioned, were pulled primarily from combat aviation backgrounds. I recall several passages which detailed their reactions to the sorts of psychological testing that they were undergoing, usually complete with humorous anecdotes.

That’s because OPs article is citing the second annual Teens and Screens report from the UCLA Center for Scholars and Storytellers. Your NPR article from 2023 is citing the first annual Teens and Screens report.

It’s a holdover from the early days of Rainbow Six would be my guess. You had like a dozen or so operatives with mild differentiations in stats and traits. Each guy had a “service record” of sorts, which gave a little more context for what was, in essence, the games’ lives system. If I remember right, some of these names were either pulled from or incorporated into the Tom Clancy Universe of novels and adaptations. It was a practically free way to inject some story and character into games that were pretty light on those details otherwise.

Of course, modern Rainbow Six has no need for these things, but inertia is a bitch, and you can be sure some grognards would piss and moan about a “feature” being removed if they stopped including these details.

To be fair, if I were asked, “crashing or non-crashing?”, on my way through the terminal, I would also prefer non-crashing.

I think it might be helpful to really drill into what you want vs what you’re experiencing. You state you have a desire to grow socially, but your attempts to do so have left you feeling symptoms of burnout.

More information about what you feel is expected of you, socially, at work, and what the specific triggers for your negative emotional reactions are would be useful to identify strategies to ameliorate those responses.

Doing some real specious armchair psychoanalysis here, but you’re statement that you do not want to be somewhere where you might be recognized indicates to me, specious armchair psychologist extraordinare, that you perhaps have some self-esteem issues which are going to be a significant impediment to socializing in any context, let alone work. I’m casting aspersions from within my glass house here, but in the worst troughs of my depression, I rationalize self-isolation as a protective measure so that I don’t have to converse with anyone about my life, since I’m not proud of anything I’ve done in those moments. It’s only when I get myself back into a headspace where I have things in my life that I’m excited about and want to share with people that socialization begins to look attractive again. If any of that rings true with you, you might recalibrate your focus from trying to force yourself to enjoy your professional social life and instead focus on the thing that’s actually holding you back from making that a reality.

Good luck, and I hope you find a solution.

Complaining that Borderlands 3 has a juvenile tone, while praising the first two games great stories, feels disingenuous. Or, at the very least, it reads as excessively nostalgic.