I mean, that's always an option too! I've turned a lot of small communities into settings over the years with some name swaps and minor changes.

Good addition! I blur these and gardens together so I totally missed mentioning it!

3/3 It's also worth mentioning that garden games can exist within sandbox ones.

The Elflines Online MMORPG is playable within Cyberpunk RED for example. Solaris VII in Battletech does a similar job of offering a unique, focused experience within a larger universe.

2/3...and/or small scope setting.

And the trick is that these different approaches don't restrict the size of the game. You can have a multi book giant garden game, or a small zine size sandbox one.

The key is recognizing what the game is trying to provide you in terms of experience.

5/5 Wolverine #39 was the first Wolverine comic I bought and a hell of a storyline to drop into. But it went from 0 to 11 showing that Wolverine wasn't just some claw happy berserker, and I legit wish that the androids Albert and Elsie Dee got a better go and more attention.

4/5 Team 7 #1... It's '90s AF, and you can count the number of guns in it that might work on one hand, but it was gritty, a cornerstone to the Wildstorm universe, and all about over the top comics style black ops. And it did a decent job at what it was without trying to make it a crapsack world.

3/5 JLE #6 was a comic I got in a little bundle in the early '90s, and it made no sense. It was a weird humanization of superpowered beings. And it wasn't a one off. But the big thing with it was it showed me that there was more potential to superhero type comics than I thought.

2/5 Rogue Trooper was a series I read in the used book store while I was still in highschool. I was used to conventional North American comics, and the continuous storyline, actual character development, and the setting of Nu Earth were mindblowing to me. I still love this series.

But I mean, if he things the scientists are mean? Wait until the anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists weigh in with their full strength. They'll chart social impacts, mental health damage, and negative cultural impacts so hard he'll spend a week crying.

I wonder if they're part of an ongoing study?

That beat is 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

2/2 That last bit is a reference to recurring names in these stories. Marcus Webb is a common protagonist, and the Chen family are equally dominant.

I think AI has locked onto this because it's formulaic and now that AI is eating itself for material, it's become a self-reinforced loop.