Ixion comes to mind. You are in charge of managing a space station as you try to navigate the last of humanity to a new planet. Its more directed than most Sims, with a campaign split in to multiple acts but I found it quite challenging and engaging.
Looking back on it it was like it wanted to be an early Mass Effect. Full on space opera story, cool complex alien races, tons of cutscene story telling. I'm sure the game doesn't hold up anymore but man I was invested!
OG Xbox games like Alter Echo and Advent Rising. Those games blew my god damn mind as a kid. Doesn't helpt they were pretty early for the generation and never escaped the console.
I was a geek squad agent for several years and yeah the adults were usually more clueless than the younger clients. Computers have been a part of the work place for nearly 40 years... I'm not expecting most people to know hardware and maintenance but just being a competent user is rare.
Yeah the instances are really confusing for a normal user. Imagine if something like discord worked like that, where you had to have a separate account for every single channel you join.
A little intimidating at first but after finding a decent mobile app (connect) and following a few communities I think I'm getting it. The whole federation and indexing is really interesting to me and eventually I could see myself hosting a small instance.
As someone who is currently tutoring computer science courses for college, I think you greatly over estimate the average computer users ability to navigate a place like Reddit, let alone Lemmy. Most people I tutor for intro classes struggle to understand a file browser. Even for me Lemmy was slightly intimidating with how it jumps to the whole open source/ chose an instance thing before I could make an account.
Lemmy will need a basic app before it really jumps to the main stream.
The absolutely childish gaming default posts of "hidden gems" that aren't hidden, "ain't much but it's mine" and stale ass memes. Stuff like that makes my eyes roll. Not just the default gaming sub but it started to creep into most places.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1113120/IXION/
Ixion comes to mind. You are in charge of managing a space station as you try to navigate the last of humanity to a new planet. Its more directed than most Sims, with a campaign split in to multiple acts but I found it quite challenging and engaging.