Lielac

Huh! That's not really an argument I've heard about games, but then, I come at games from a very different direction. Namely, I like games for their potential stories. Like, yeah, interactive stories are a good way to practice what skills you'd need in a real situation, and not all games have so much as an excuse plot, but also... humans just like telling stories. Making up fantastical worlds. Telling tall tales. And The Sims is a virtual dollhouse, where the dolls can move on their own but also you can boss them around, and they make excellent stories. And from that perspective, losing being fun also makes perfect sense to me. Does getting torn apart repeatedly by wolves make for a good story? I mean, as the struggle that the protagonist must overcome, it's a great story. Vintage Story has so many potential stories to find in it. The desperate scramble to collect enough food before winter, scouring the hills looking for GODDAMNED CLAY, the frustration of falling down an unexpected sinkhole, the ingenuity required to retrieve your items within the limit of the ticking clock, the cleverness required to kite a bear away from your last death point, dying repeatedly in the process but that's all expendable, the point is getting your stuff back-- Stories where the protagonist just wins and wins and wins aren't interesting, to me. And to a lot of other people, too, which is why storytelling advice is always "there has to be tension and struggle or your protagonist will feel boring and overpowered". And there can be such a thing as too much struggle, where it stops being interesting and it's just tedious, but. When death isn't permanent, when it's just a setback, you can always recover. And that's a power fantasy too, just as much as winning and winning and never losing.

Do you use a VPN? I haven't experienced 8 captchas in a row, but ever since starting to use a VPN (ProtonVPN, specifically) I've been running into captchas everywhere constantly. If you are using a VPN, well, turning it off long enough to download things might help. If you're not, there might be another reason you're getting slammed with captchas but I wouldn't know it.