I’ve tried to hide all the moes but it feels sisyphean. I hide cyber moe, military moe, office moe… but the next day someone is going to start taco moe and I will see a half naked girl with cheese hair and a lettuce bra. There is no escape.

I’m no biologist, but I’m pretty sure that this photo I took a while back has a lot of lichen:

That flakey & coral-looking stuff growing on the branches should be lichen.

I don’t think this can really be answered until after the fact. Anything that I (and I suspect most) people could say about an artstyle are going to be particular to an instance of that artsyle. If I’d give advice as someone who is neither an artist nor a game designer, what attracts me more than anything is a unique artstyle, which, if I’m gonna give a brutal opinion, starting from a vague category like ‘pixel’, ‘hand drawn’ or ‘3D’ probably won’t get you there.

I feel like I even struggle to answer your question at face value because it doesn’t align well at all with how I conceptualize game art. For example, Cruelty Squad is a game that I don’t think I’d have gotten if not for it’s artsyle. Like, sure, it’s 3D, but it’s a lot more like a PilotRedSun animation than it is a game like TF2. Or take a game like Factorio: most of the assets of that game are pre-rendered 3D sprites, so despite being artisticly unique in a way that interests me it doesn’t fit into the categories you’ve asked about. The best I can say is “I dunno”, and I don’t think anyone else can answer it further than that.

To be fair, that post specifically asks people who don’t have a technical background. It can be used to show that laymen have the capacity to use a federated platform like lemmy, but not that they are a significant portion of the userbase (albeit that post does have a lot of replies).

Huh. When I took Calculus II in community college, the professor introduced sum notation and like 2/3 of the class was like “wow that’s cool I didn’t know about that”. I don’t remember ever being formally taught it before that but it still surprises be how few people where already familiar with it.