i had to explain to a japanese lady a few months that some americans were obsessed with mishima and she was very confused so no i dont think so, it seems like they dont really think about him
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Thereās also a city called Mishima known for its view of Mount Fuji
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well of course it would need to be close to a Mountain, for him to, you know, colony drop and all 
He also was the antagonists in both Manhunt and Syndicate.
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sweaty brian cox telling me to GO FOR THE MONEY SHOT CASH is a videogame thing i think about a lot lol
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Dang, I played Syndicate and never registered this. I wonder if he caught any British press flak for Manhunt.
pictured showing Sean Hughes the Tekken plot video
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Valve single-handedly turning the entire videogame landscape into a garbage pile.
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Maybe my backlog is a blessing because I donāt actively need to seek out anything new in the increasingly crappy digital storefronts
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every single gormless motherfucker who complains about āasset flipsā deserves the deluge of endless AI slop theyāre about to get
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I literally just saw that exact complaint on a game trailer on YouTube
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i donāt know the impact this will have overall, but it could have a big impact like a lot of other changes to Steam have over the years. the space is becoming increasingly homogenized anyway, and this only is just a further embodiment of that. given how much of a monopoly Steam has and how much it already feels difficult to find new things you might like in a sea of increasingly identical looking games and just general market saturation especially. it feels like we live in an AI-generated culture in so many ways already lol. i try really hard to find the things i like, but it does feel like iām searching for the few gems in a sea of interchangeable mediocrity.
but yeah - this is the hot issue of the day that a lot of people obviously feel really strongly about. so consumer anxiety/panic around AI could have a significant impact on the overall market and slow a lot of things down. it could lead to a larger movement of people in games who are anti-AI and everything it might represent to them. which means even more intense āasset flipā discourse, lol. and we might have even more of a divide between casual consumers who just donāt care and people who are more serious gamers who are way more vocal about it and make their decisions heavily based around that.
or it could just never really catch on broadly. but i have a feeling AI stuff will end up slowly creeping into more games over time just like various monetization schemes have over the years, esp because they save on the cost of development in an industry where lots of kinds of dev are increasingly labor-intensive and formulaic. there will always be people who will do everything possible to avoid that part of games too. but itās hard to believe that this stuff wonāt have a significant impact in a lot of different ways.
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I think a lot about the inVerse(?) AI system that was implemented as a GTA V mod and a video of someone playing it. The dialog was absolute garbage nonsense and the AI Text To Speech was halting and artificial, but the streamer was acting like it was incredible and groundbreaking, or just ignoring the glaring flaws. I have a depressing feeling that people just arenāt going to care and will take unlimited slop because itās unlimited.
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i think thatās right in many cases, but thereās also way more of a broad sense of AI-generated stuff being cheap slop that didnāt exist even a few years ago, because of how much everyoneās been exposed to it lately. like most people know what this sort of AI is and know itās a primary reason why we had so many strikes in Hollywood (that were broadly supported in a way they usually arenāt as much). most people donāt have very positive views of the tech industry and the way they employ these things either.
esp if AAA games start implementing it a lot more in the future, that could be a thing that finally makes a lot of people disillusioned from that sort of āimmersionā fantasy of this giant world of crafted content. thatās going to be undercut by the obvious stench of cheap slop that feels incoherent and you can see through easily if youāve seen enough of it. even if youāre only paying for games to look expensive, youāre going to be way more on guard and feel way more anxiety about things that feel like cheap slop infecting that experience. how loud gamers are about this stuff might mean it never catches on more broadly, but weāve also seen the goalposts being shifted in the industry on so many different things over time too.
right now itās most likely that it would be used a lot in casual genres aimed at audiences who are just looking for time killers and donāt really pay attention to things beyond that. or stuff like horror games which are already filled to the brim with various shlock. whichā¦ a lot of that stuff already looks AI-generated to begin with tbh.
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I mean thereās already quite a big market of algorithmically generated slop aimed at duping the casual consumer like https://www.girlgames.com/ etc.
I think the big decider will be the collective media literacy of players but I wouldnāt be hugely optimistic about it. Itās partially why so many storefronts are the way they are now. A lot of other content is very disposable and I suspect that newer generations donāt necessarily see games as āworks of qualityā or singular experiences you sit with but aesthetically similar to Tiktok or gifs: quick, loopable, replaceable bursts of stimulation. Thereās not a lot of prevailing interest from younger writers or developers to really push the conversation or the games themselves forward, or at least not one that can compete with the technological progress rhetoric that is just bedbugging it up right now.
Edit: Iām getting dangerously close to saying tastemaking isnāt working in the right direction but itād be folly to suggest what that should be. I just know what Iād like it not to be I guess.
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agreed about a lot of things feeling extremely disposable right now, but i feel like iāve seen a good amount of younger people who seem fed up with the current ecosystem and are wanting something else. like when i put these kinds of thoughts out on twitter i feel like half the people who engage with it are like, 24 or under (also why do people feel the need to put their age in bios so much lol). theyāre just really drowned out by the obnoxious eye-catching stuff and like, people retreating into different like micro-communities. there is maybe an overemphasis on like, aesthetic sensibilities over other stuff. but there were a lot of cringey trends in the 00ās and early 2010ās too.
also i think the current online ecosystem being so hyper-commodified really emphasizes conformity and people prioritizing hustle and meeting demands of the platform over like, being honest. i think so much of this stuff is so completely shallow and stifling that it will change, and has to change eventually tho.
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Yeah I think this is why Iām resisting the thought that it was so much better back in the day
- It wasnāt really
- Today isnāt back in the day, itās today
Iād love to see a big sea change come out of nowhere and totally upend things with some awesome new wave that just make people forget about slurping the slop.
Edit: Come to think of it a firstyear student of mine recently mentioned that Kane and Lynch 2 was one of their favourite games. Perhaps the hope is thereā¦
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hell ya
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My general feeling these days is I think that forms of media go through these cycles of increased commodification -> artist-focused backlash to the status quo -> subsumption of backlash into commodification and that trying to point the finger at the current moment as though it is uniquely special (not that people here are doing that) or particularly hopeless isnāt productive.
Believe it or not, people get sick of slop (side note: I wonder why people started using slop more? Iāve been using it in conversation since around 2016 specifically because of Traggās Trough, but Iāve seen a big uptick in the last like 6 months). Videos like thisā¦
ā¦are impressive to people precisely because the fun they get from it is not the actual fun of playing the game. Itās the fun of ātinkeringā with the game / AI / LLMs / whatever. They donāt continue playing! They just want to demonstrate itās possible, because thatās what they find interesting. Then the AI evangelists slurp it up as the next revolution in gaming even though itās unlikely to find purchase outside a few hyper-specific use cases that are frankly not really worth the development cost to add LLMs to.
Games are already made by living breathing humans with thoughts, ideologies, skills, etc. that a computer could never replicate, and they STILL feel like gruel purely because of the demands of the market and the desire for success in a tough business.
And this is all stuff that has happened before, and is continuing to happen in other industries. Superhero movies, young adult novels, pop country music; these are all ātasteā bubbles that are collapsing, have collapsed, will continue to collapse, because at a certain point making something āfor everyoneā means making it for nobody, and people can tell.
And it will change. Weāll see the next rise of auteurs and trendsetters, and the trends will be incorporated into the system of cultural production. It happened in the 90s with shareware; in the 00s with doujin / western indies; in the 10s with horror micro-games. On and on, the cycle continues forever.
I think thatās why I generally stopped worrying / caring about what the broad culture is producing, because itās like trying to drink the ocean. Iād rather try to drink one glass at a time.
I also think that interesting things tend to circle back around into the cultural milieu long after theyāve become defunct. I like watching old movies and playing old games and reading old books precisely because the conversation has moved on from NEW NEW NEW and I can now experience them in a more historical context. I wonāt say that the deserving rises to the top because thatās patently false - rediscovery of lost media only happens thanks to the passionate work of dedicated enthusiasts - but there is something to be said for letting a piece of media age a decade before you dive into it. Distance provides clarity, I think.
None of this is to say people shouldnāt champion the games they love in the moment, by the way. I personally evangelize lots of small games that I really enjoy to people! But if I were to die in my sleep tonight, there are many other people who do that too. There will always be pop culture and underground culture.
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Same feeling about homogenized. I think less indie developers believe they could make a fortune on making games, they start to switch more conservative market strategy now. To cover costs, they could invest hundreds of working days into making a mediocre game that combines popular categories. The trend is already such popular that AI may just reduce the time they spend on this strategy and their products donāt really have so many differences from AI generated game right now.
I feel the group of traditional gamer is shrinking very quickly, especially the trend of nostalgic independent games shaped by veteran players in the past 10 years is ending. Meanwhile new gamers have completely different tastes which sometimes we will laugh at them.