Reminds of the old pile of gold (empty) meme

I mean that is kinda exactly what the developers want to provoke with timed dialogue choices. Timed dialogue choices are a game design mechanic to try and get a player to answer on instinct/gut feeling, rather than over analysing and trying to optimise the dialogue.

You not getting to think about it long is very much the intended effect, and allowing a pause would entirely defeat it.

There are of course definite accessibility concerns that should be considered and worked around, such as people with dyslexia who may not be able to properly parse the dialogue options before the timer runs out, but as a game mechanic I think forcing the player to pick on instinct definitely has merit. It helps make the game more immersive, because it puts you under the same pressure to react as your character is in the story right now, and it can lead to more interesting and ultimately enjoyable games by forcing players to potentially make a mistake, and having to find out a way to deal with the fallout.

Games that don’t allow you to pause and skip cutscenes.

I don’t want to have to miss half of the cutscenes just because someone interrupted me or the phone rang or something half way through. Alternatively, when I’m on my 23rd replay of a game, I do not want to have to sit through every cutscenes I already know by heart.

Oh, and modern games that allow manual saving at any time, not having any kind of regular auto save (looking at you here BG3).

If you’re fine from a gameplay pov with having the player save whenever, then there’s really no good reason whatsoever to not have one or two auto save slots that get saved every 10-20 minutes or so, at least as an option in the menu. ESPECIALLY in open world games (like BG3…) where you can easily go literal hours at a time without hitting a checkpoint save. And yes, I am still salty over learning about BG3’s lack of regular auto save when I lost like 2.5 hours of progress on my first run.

Fun fact, basic ethanol works excellent as a fuel additive to reduce knocking, but because it’s already a well known compound, fuel companies couldn’t patent it as an additive, that’s why they invented leaded petrol instead, so they could patent it.

(E: For full completeness, it should probably also be noted that potential legal difficulties surrounding reliably obtaining or producing industrial quantities of Ethanol alcohol in prohibition era America probably also played some role, but the patent thing was definitely the main reason)

That’s like a principal letting the bully keep all the lunch money they stole from someone, let the bully chose what lunch they’re allowed to buy in future, in exchange for the bully pinky promising to stop bullying the victim, and then acting surprised that the victim doesn’t fall on their knees in gratitude for this amazing deal

“They’re extradonarily narrow” whilst literally talking about an apple patent that covers ANY type of digital display device whatsoever that has rounded corners.

That’s not even close to “extremely narrow” in scope.

Extremely narrow in scope would be defining a certain radius of curvature (within a small +/- range), in combination with an aspect ratio (again, with a small +/- margin) and for a specific class of screen.

That would be an adequately and acceptably narrow design patent.

And on top, there needs to be a limitation on design patents (any patents, frankly) that makes them unenforceable if the holder of the patent hasn’t had a product matching the patent on the marker for several years, and isn’t currently and actively working on R&D to develop such a product. (With some common sense clauses to prevent abuse, such as ordering one employee to spend 5 minutes a month working on a concept so that you’re technically perpetually engaged in R&D, or listing a depreciated product for an absurdly high price that no one will ever pay, so you can say technically it’s still on the market without needing to actually still manufacturer/support it).

Though I’d be happy to hear counter arguments for why this would be a bad idea.