I did just see a straight up knock off of vampire survivor describe itself as a roguelike. You’re way more like something else buddy
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Games as a Chore
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RPG
Recurring Payment Games
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i agree we can call it pnp for short
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already have pnp (Print & Play) in boardgame, almost fully opposite meaning (cheap, or even free).
Games as a disservice
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Pay and Pray (that it lasts more than 6 months)
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Gamehates
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I know I missed the boat on all the AI talk but I kind of find it hard to believe that it’s going to meaningfully change anything. I guess we’re gonna get even more shovelware? it will be easier to crank out shitty shit. but that’s like the whole deal with late capitalism, we’re already cranking out shitty shit as rapidly as possible. a lot of not-shitty shit still gets made! sometimes it’s even quite good! will this mean less of that will exist? I can imagine many genuine use-cases for AI generated content for making actually good games too.
the most immediate thing that sucks about AI is how it is taking jobs from working artists. but I don’t believe the new steam policy will have much of a direct impact on that. I don’t know.
I still feel like there isn’t nearly enough discussion about the ethics of how AI data is prepared, collated, and tagged for training. it’s often with underpaid slave wage labor outsourced to the third world. on top of the obvious ethical problems of scraping artwork and content for training.
AI sucks though. it’s still really rare for it to ever actually fool anyone en masse (the last time I can remember was the drip pope photo). Even the best looking, most refined AI images still have that “smell.” it’s even worse for generated text imo, which seems like it should be easier to get right. I don’t think the smell is going away. it hasn’t lessened at all despite the dramatic advancements in AI over the past few years. I’m honestly skeptical that it will improve that much from here bc where are they going to get more training data, and how will they filter out the reams of AI-generated content that’s already polluting those waters?
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Personally going from how much harder AI has made it to search for images or code samples online just by flooding the results, I’d say it was hard to fathom the magnitude of difference that actually exists between “as rapidly as humanly possible” and “as rapidly as possible”.
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before “service games” i used to call them “destination games” or “landing page games” because they want to be THE destination, THE landing page you go to.
first game i felt this way about was watchdogs, funnily enough.
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I recently saw a relatively unknown streamer get an AI powered game made about him by a fan.
It was an adventure game that was mostly a vehicle for jokes, with assets and AI providing everything else.
Feels like the barrier of entry to making this kind of heavily personalized game is now much lower
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yeah I think in the realm of just seeking information and assets that’s true but even before AI those had been fucked over by SEO word salad and content mills. that trend wasn’t going to go away or even be challenged whether or not AI appeared or not.
and with code samples at least GPT4 has generally been a better resource for me than the web, especially when you get to super specific issues that there aren’t a lot of posts about online. I’m working a job that’s using a react app built in clojurescript, and there are so many questions I simply could not answer by googling or combing stack overflow and reddit posts, etc., that it answered quickly and clearly. it’s been an invaluable teaching aid. but I still prefer to look at posts about stuff like this before turning to the AI because there’s so much useful context and additional information you can get by reading discussions and all that and it bums me out how that kind of online discussion is likely to further dry up as a result of it. and gpt 4 is still wrong about shit all the time so the idea of it or things like it being a singular source of information is really grim.
but I also can’t shake this feeling that this pivot to AI is this herd mentality thing and there isn’t much intelligence or reasoning behind it beyond this urgent sense that if you don’t get on board now you’ll be left behind. (I mean there’s also greed of course but that’s predicated on the belief that any of this shit actually works well enough which I still am deeply skeptical about). I have a feeling it’s going to blow up on most of the apps and services that are switching to it in such way that may make it difficult for them to recover. that might be overly optimistic but I feel like we’ve repeatedly seen scam after scam from the tech industry and sooner or later something’s got to give.
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I’ve been thinking about how much time I spent drawing pixel background art that I was unsatsfied with for one VN I made and how much more time I spent preparing and then taking screenshots of a meticulously crafted apartment in a 3D architecture planning program for another. Lately, I’ve been turning more to CC0 or other public domain images for the assets that I can’t adequately make myself. Point is, I’m never going to pay an artist for these things–if I need something specific I can’t find. If I need, say, a living room in a mansion with a shining blue portal to another world in it, I might try synthesizing elements from two or more different preexisting sources I am free to use. But then if that’s the case why shouldn’t I ask Dall-E or something to “draw” it up for me?
It’s not a settled question for me, actually. I generally think the current models of AI are a ghoulish phenomenon that’s being pushed on us and aren’t nearly so necessary or useful as they’re being presented. There’s the ethical questions of how this stuff is created. There’s the unsettled question of intellectual property concerns with “training” data, etc. There’s how taxing it is on our resources for us to run dumb queries by it and get fuzzy bullshit answers and for the thing to fail to draw me a picture of Richard Nixon passionately kissing Minnie Mouse. And clearly ChatGPT is wreaking havoc, accelerating the already quite abysmal state of information discovery and communication on the internet.
But also, if image generation can provide me with this thing I want at low or no cost… is it wrong? Assuming the tool already exists and the energy cost for a couple queries isn’t that terrible, is that bad to do? If the scale of my little hobby project is such that I personally am not good enough to bring this aspect of it up to my own desired standards and I was never going to pay artists a living wage to create things for me, what is the harm? Or should I just make my project look comparatively inferior because I’m abstaining from using this tool as a principled stance? I don’t know!
To my understanding, professional game developers are often coming up with programs, algorithms, etc. to remix assets and procedurally generate spaces, items, etc. in games. Is that cool because they’re making the tools themselves or paying someone to license the middleware that enables it? Those aren’t the same thing, but is it bad that they aren’t paying interior designers to handcraft all 9,000 interiors of an open world game? Is that a bullshit thing to bring up here? Maybe!
I’m not sure about a lot of this, though my gut reaction is to be hostile to, dismiss, argue against (despite the pose that porbably seems to be coming through in this post), and just not trust “AI.” I really don’t like it! “AI” is a nebulous, ill-defined thing that’s got people’s emotions running high and its discourse bleeds into all sorts of other political, economic, aesthetic, cultural discourses. I don’t really like it on several levels, but I’m also not sure the arguments against it for all use cases, like asset generation, have convinced me either.
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It’s technology that should not exist and should not be used and I have yet to hear a single good justification for it. Zero tolerance. Don’t feed the beast.
Have yet to see anyone who claims this trash is gonna make it possible for them to finally make things actually make things.
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I can imagine some valid use cases but that’s getting ahead of the massive ethical problems with how these things are trained. it’s rotten to the core.
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AI is bad because current models can’t keep up with the fetish content I need and desire, which
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No use. Just wait until it is your internet doctor prescribing you drugs or whatever.
All this AI is going for “as fallible as humans” then all bets are off and everyone is out a job and we’ll never be able to enjoy Destiny with gazillionaires.
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I mean, porno is probably a salient point here, since a lot of the downsides to AI — creates pointlessly specific work, obviates the joy of human craft — actually apply way less to porno (obviously some people like doing porn, but, you know, mixed bag)
people sometimes like to rhetorically call various technologies or phenomena “pornographic” but in this case it is fairly applicable