I’m 17 years without alcohol, 16 without “le drugs”, and 15 without smoking. I still have issues in my life and challenges to solve but wow, all of those would be harder and more numerous if I still behaved like I used to. I had a fairly short period of massive excess and had a few lucky moments of clarity which resulted in me quitting it all one after another. My partner and I have been together since just after I quit drinking and I am really glad they never had to see me being my worst self.

My biggest takeaway is it really does get easier with time. The hardest times were within a short time of quitting. The longer I sustained the more ingrained the change became and now I would be stubborn and resist any sort of backslide.

If nothing else this is a different way of organising than what has been tried on most other systems. Will it work? Maybe, maybe not. What we do know is other methods have been tried and had outcomes that this team does not want to replicate, so trying a different method makes sense.

I am reminded of the difference between the spirit of the law and letter of the law systems. In letter of the law systems if something is not explicitly illegal it is permissible. It is the duty of the lawmakers to explicitly prohibit the behaviour by creating a prohibition and if they fail to do so correctly then the act is permitted. In spirit of the law systems things a little more interpreted rather than directly read, so if you have an act which fits very well the spirit of the law, being something the law was specifically intended to prohibit or limit, then the law will be interpreted as applying to that behaviour and that case will be used as an interpretation in future for other cases. This is actually what we use in most of the world and does make sense, even though it does mean that sometimes laws exist that are not enforced or some things that are not explicitly prohibited by law are prohibited by case law.

I think in the case of a system that has to change over time this will inevitably happen. Something new happens, people figure out what they will do about it today, then that becomes the rule going forward.

I am glad this trend is becoming better understood. A more diverse audience means more diverse stories being told, and while another MCU or Street Fighter is a perfectly good game to release a game targeting that more diverse audience will give more options for me. I typically play games like Risk of Rain, Skyrim, Creeper World, and so on, but I have also lost many hours to Viva Piñata, so I would love to see some more diversity in the games on offer.