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In which Dean spends sick time writing a bit too much about a game about bugs.
TL;DR / Spoiler Warning: It is good, real good, and if you have any interest go play it for yourself before reading this. Spoilers ahead, and you’ll lose a great deal of the charm of the first-time experience if you read into this meta-analysis before playing and trying to figure things out for yourself.
Are you still here? Anyway, get a drink, kick your feet up, or pay less attention at work. This is one of those long ones.
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Introduction
So, in case you were living under a different rock last month, an indie sequel has been disrupting the video game industry recently.
Hollow Knight: Silksong came out at the start of last September, and made waves like few games do. The sequel of the independent developer Team Cherry’s breakout hit Hollow Knight, which released in 2017, the nearly decade-long wait for Silksong was so long and had so little news that the wait alone became the subject of memes, putting it in the same sort of forever waiting room as Half Life 3. Given how Hollow Knight itself sold over 15 million copies, putting it in the top 10 of indie games sold on steam, Silksong had high expectations.
Which, going by the player metrics it has been setting, it has been. In the first days after release, Silksong had over half a million concurrent players on steam- an exceptional showing for almost any game, but particularly for a game which did not send advance review copies to gaming media to build pre-release hype. In fact, the game only announced its release date 2 weeks before it actually released, announcing its 4 September release on 21 August. Even on such short notice, multiple indie games delayed their planned releases to avoid losing the overlap in the day one hype. While the game has its blemishes- or rather, the game is already notorious for its difficulty compared to its prequel, which itself has drawn more than a few comparisons to the infamously hard Dark Souls series. This is somewhat expected when games with deliberately steep difficulty curves hit more widespread audiences, but even then the difficulty is somewhat ‘priced in’ for a major commercial success.
So, all of this is establishing that there is a bandwagon around Silksong, and Hollow Knight as a franchise more generally. But why is there a bandwagon in the first place?
My position is that Hollow Knight’s success goes beyond the similarities it has with Dark Souls, but that it has natural thematic synergies with the classic metroidvania format mechanics of exploration, mystery, and limited lore that build upon the fact that this is ultimately a game about gods, civilizations, and bugs. The crawly kind, not the glitches. Plus, it is tied together by impeccable storytelling design that, while minimalist, effectively drops lore tidbits, uses environmental storytelling, and ties it together with exceptional use of song.
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Part 1: What is Hollow Knight, as a Game?
Hollow Knight is a metroidvania that combines platforming, exploration, and mysteries. It is also a game about bugs. This later aspect has a surprising amount of natural synergy with the tropes of the metroidvania genre.
Mechanically speaking, Hollow Knight is a metroidvania series, whose 2d platforming and exploration format draws more from the early console Metroid and Castlevania series than the more modern 3D games like, well, Dark Souls. Metroidvanias tend to be characterized by large, 2-dimensional, and maze-like maps of rooms connected by vertical and horizonal passageways, rather than separately loaded zones or linear corridors. These passageways tend to require a mix of platforming and combat to get past dangerous obstacles and enemies. The passages can be any sort of biome from traversing cave tunnels, climbing towers, trying to cross large bodies of waters by jumping between rockets, and what have you.
Hollow Knight works with this format by virtue of taking the typical 2-dimension conceit of a metroidvania, where complex 3-dimensional areas are 2-dimension solely for the sake of gameplay, and working within the real-world format of an ant farm, a common inclusion in many a natural history museum or child’s education center. These colonies present a nearly two-dimensional ant colony format by virtue of how the narrow looking pane serves as a wall constraining horizontal growth. Even though Hollow Knight practices the same premise of its levels being a small slice of a broader world, it does so with a framing that is both familiar and nostalgic to even non-gamers unfamiliar with the metroidvania genre.
Thematically, the metroidvania genre is also associated with exploration, isolation, and mystery. These themes owe some of their longevity to the eponymous early games that defined the genre, but these themes have stuck in part because of the natural gameplay synergy.
The theme of exploration is one of the most obvious, since most of a metroidvania is trying to find the parts of the map you need to get to in order to unlock the victory condition. These intermediary objectives may be where you find keys or rewards, but they are just as often the location where you get upgrades in tools or abilities that let you pass otherwise impassable routes. Since every metroidvania exploration starts with an unclear direction, unsure which fork to take, a large part of a blind playthrough is trying to develop a map, identifying the dead ends, identifying areas that look like they are passable but not yet, and trying to find the abilities that make those temporary obstacles into new branching paths.
This is a theme that is also, for better or worse, associated with bugs and insects. Like them or loath them, the ability of insects to move in ways that no human can, to places no human would be able to on the same scale, works well in the framework of a metroidvania. They unfailingly seem to hunt out and find rewards for them, even if it’s trash or rubbish to a human. Insect capabilities, such as exceptional jumping, limited flight, or climbing on walls, all make for analogous exploration mechanics. And insectoid hazards, such as pools of water, can present credible obstacles that a human would be able to swim through.
The theme of isolation is also a common one in metroidvanias. This is often because the nature of a large world puts the scale of the protagonist into a context that makes them feel literally and figuratively small. And the nature of a maze of corridors filled with enemies provides a literal and social sort of isolation. While metroidvanias can have areas of civilization and non-playable characters, these are by the nature of the game the exceptions rather than the rule. They are small havens of safety, not living civilizations. And since the gameplay of exploring often artificial passages or structures implies the prior existence of civilizations to build them, a civilization which is not here now to guide or protect you through the gameplay dangers, there is often a sense of civilizational isolation as well. Whoever built these structures is not here anymore, and it is often unclear- and thus unsettling- what convinced or compelled them to leave.
This, too, is a theme that works well for bugs. Bugs are amongst the smallest creatures we recognize as creatures, and many of them live solitary, isolated lives that are dangerous, small, and short. And while there are species that are hives of activities, these swarms of drones are just that- drones- such that the idea of thinking individuality would still be alone even when surrounded by an un-like things. These fragile and lonely lives are surrounded by dangerous and often dead past examples of bug life- the insect hives rooted out by predators, taken by blight, or overwhelmed by forces of nature and acts of gods, be they the flood-sending sort or higher beings like humanity that variously ignore bugs or exterminate them on grounds of inconvenience.
Finally, a classic metroidvania theme is the theme of mystery. Like many of the genre’s mechanical tropes, this theme’s prevalence derives from that idea of exploration. When you are building a game around exploration, you have a natural format for springling in secrets or surprises in those uncountable end-ways. If the story is to have a plot, it has a natural set of obstacles and known ways to overcome these obstacles that allow information to be doled out selectively and at a pace of your choosing, each no earlier than the unlock requirement that enables it to be found. Even though metroidvanias are by their nature exploration games, and exploration games allow the freedom of choice to try and make their own path, a metroidvania format lends itself to leveraging secrets, such as what causes the hostile isolation of the prior theme.
This, too, is a theme that works well for bug protagonists. As the ultimate underdog, and as protagonists not associated with free will or independent thinking, bugs are a natural starting point for an unaware protagonist. Bugs, with their literally small perspective, cannot see the bigger picture. They cannot at all times perceive the nest or nature of the place they are in. And even the format of the genre invites questions- why is this bug, specifically, a protagonist? Why does it think or act with will, when the tropes of bugs at large are to, well, not do such things?
So on reflection, a metroidvania about bugs makes a certain sort of sense, even if you know nothing about bugs and only a structural familiarity with the metroidvania genre.
It is not necessarily an obvious insight, and so it remains an example of creativity and imagination you might not think of unprompted, but there is an alignment of themes. The tropes of a metroidvania, and the associated aspects of bugs that transcends specific cultures, provides a… if not universal basis for embracing the game, at least an intuitive way to appreciate and relate the experience with other games and concepts the audience has a level of familiarity with.
But Hollow Knight works on a story level too.
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Part 2: What is Hollow Knight, as a Story?
(Biggo spoilers here. For reals, last warning.)
Hollow Knight is a minimalist dark fantasy about how the conflict of higher beings worshipped like gods is ravaging the hive that is the central civilization. Naturally, being a game about bugs helps here as well, making it into an example of the low fantasy genre as well.
To start with the end and work backwards, and using some very broad- and thus disputable- definitions that I will source from Wikipedia for simplicity…
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Low fantasy, or intrusion fantasy,
Low fantasy, or intrusion fantasy, is a subgenre of fantasy fiction in which magical events intrude on an otherwise normal world. The term thus contrasts with high fantasy stories, which take place in fictional worlds that have their own sets of rules and physical laws. Intrusion fantasy places less emphasis on elements typically associated with fantasy and sets a narrative in realistic environments with elements of the fantastical. Sometimes, there are just enough fantastical elements to make ambiguous the boundary between what is real and what is purely psychological or supernatural. The word "low" refers to the familiarity of the world within which fantasy elements appear and is not a remark on the work's overall quality.
Hollow Knight is an low fantasy akin to Watership Down, the story about rabbits trying to find a new warren that is a well-known for its rabbits-eye view of the human world as it is for a surprisingly disturbing animated film that possibly traumatized children unprepared for how dangerous the world can be for a rabbit. Which, conveniently, is how a lot of the themes and mythical structure of Hollow Knight works- a world of fragile, very mortal bugs who die to stronger, more dangerous things.
Which is where the low / intrusion fantasy works its way into the setting. There is a mundane world of bugs and nature, where bugs are dumb and act off of feral instinct. Then there is the world of bug civilization, where there is a kingdom that knows itself to be the kingdom of Hallownest, the self-proclaimed last and only civilization. While it is not in fact the only civilization of thinking bugs, hence the epithet of ‘last’ which implies a ‘first,’ the sapience of bugs is itself the magical intrusion into the world. It is as much an intrusion into the ‘normal’ as the other forms of magic, magic of the soul or dream of void, which exists in the setting.
That is because Hollow Knight is actually a story (stories, with Silksong) about species uplift. Its societies are societies that were brought up from bestial instinct by external intervention, in service of the desires of higher powers beyond their comprehension. The world of talking bugs who build societies, streetlights, songs and art- these are not the natural state of the world. These are the uplifting gifts of powers who relationship with their subjects, and each other, drive the plot.
But more on that later. Hollow Knight is not just a low fantasy, but also a dark fantasy.
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Dark fantasy, also called fantasy horror, is a subgenre of literary, artistic, and cinematic fantasy works that incorporate disturbing and frightening themes. The term is ambiguously used to describe stories that combine horror elements with one or other of the standard formulas of fantasy.
Dark fantasy is a notoriously difficult definition to agree upon, and it’s not automatically obvious that Hollow Knight would qualify.
While Hollow Knight’s art style often leads towards the gothic, or at least stylistic, at least for the architecture, it’s character designs lean far more towards the cute and adorable, with soft, smooth curves and uncomplicated faces (that are literally masks). While there are bosses designed to be more intimidating, [this is also that same boss in its vulnerable state](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/hollowknight/images/e/eb/Screenshot_HK_False_Knight_04.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20200103200805]. Hollow Knight is a series that treats even its enemies as cute character fodder, compared to the far more horror-movie monster vibes of the Dark Souls series. When one thinks of an eldritch abomination that haunts dreams, you typically think more Cthulu and less this. Hollow Knight doesn’t even try to lean into arachnophobia per see to unsettle you- this is their spider tribe.
But make no mistake- Hollow Knight is a dark fantasy, and it deals with themes that are just as disempowering and unsettling to humans as they would be to humanized bugs. To list just three: the matter of sentience, caverns of skulls, and the question of a justifiably wrathful god.
A Matter of Sentience
As was raised in the low fantasy section, hollow knight does not have a sapience-normative setting. This is actually a plot twist of sorts, as the player’s first introduction in Hollow Knight’s opening presents society and civilized bugs as normal, and the violent / feral bugs as the aberration. There is (deliberate) incongruity at this that can be passed off as cultural chauvinism at first- an early monument claiming Hallownest as the last and only civilization- but the hostile bugs are presented as sickly and succumbing to an infection that drives bugs mad. Even as we’re told bug civilization is rare, the presentation of the early game is that these bugs would be civilized as well, if they weren’t the victims of a mysterious orange infection. The framing is that these bugs have been lowered to a more bestial state. As you go across the story, you meet talking bugs, thinking bugs, very human-like bugs with amusing and understandable motivations. They are so human, and empathy is encouraged as you can identify with them.
This is a misdirection. Not just civilization, but sapience itself, is artificial. While there are bugs that are naturally capable of thought, others are not, and the degree of thought we witness is the reflection of a deific intervention by a higher power. A more magical bug called a worm, whose size was so monstrous that it is scenery setting in its own right, reincarnated itself into a being known as the Pale King, whose influence alone drew bugs to him like, well, moths to a flame as he brought the aspects of civilization like treaties and kingdoms and education.
But this uplifting was limited in space, for if a bug strayed away from Hallownest, their sapience diminished. To be sapient was a gift dependent on staying in the Pale King’s influence… and his desire was to be influential in many ways, as much political as spiritual. The Pale King’s ambition was to rule and be venerated by the bugs. The Pale King may have been a welcome uplifter, but it was as much an imposition on the natural order as the political order, not the natural state of things… even though that is how the Pale King wished it to be remembered.
But then this, too, is revealed to have been another sort of misdirection. Before there was the Pale King, there was another higher being who dominated a part of what would become Hallownest. This higher being, known as The Radiance, was worshipped by a tribe of moths, and in her era those under her influence were part of a hive mind, linked to her via dreams. But even the radiance was not the first. Just as the Pale King’s civilization and individuality followed the Radiance’s tribe and hive mind, the Radiance followed an even older, unknown ancient civilization. She was as likely to have pushed them out as she was herself pushed out… and as she is pushing out the current paradigm?
And that infection mentioned earlier? The one that robs bugs of their sapience and reverts them to bestial aggression? That is the Radiance re-emerging and re-asserting herself through the dreams of bugs, even as she remains partly trapped and certainly mad. Sapience is being subverted to a hive mind by outside will, as much as sapience was imposed in the first place.
Hollow Knight’s setting, in other words, isn’t just a setting where Kingdoms build upon the bones of prior civilizations. It is a setting where individuality, as we, the audience, know it, is a coincidental nature of how a metaphysical struggle for dominance plays out. The capacity for individuality and choice was a result of a proud king’s desire to be chosen over all others.
Your capacity for thought, in other words, is not special. But it isn’t even normal either.
Cue existential dread.
Caverns of Skulls
A second theme of the Hollow Knight games is whether the ends justify the means.
Again, this will focus on Hollow Knight rather than Silksong, though both have this theme. Both games present the ruins of civilizations that indisputably had culture and sophistication, organization and purpose. But both games grow increasingly blunt and brutal about how the societies they present, as sophisticated and civilized as they might seem, are figuratively and literally built on the foundations of those who were sacrificed to advance the social vision of the civilizational leaders. Bug Civilization is Not Nice.
In Hollow Knight, the original game, this discovery is part of what undercuts the established buildup of the Pale King as the father of civilization, sapience, and all that seems good in the bugs of hallow nest. In a setting where those who refused to join are presented as tribal, bestial, and violent- absolutely the sort of people to place skulls on spikes to mark territory- Hallownest is a place of treaties and laws and commerce. When the infection- the mysterious illness that players are initially introduced to as a mysterious force robbing bugs of their natural sapience- began to emerge, the Pale King nobly worked with sages and scholars to find a way to contain it, for the good of the Kingdom (and its people).
In truth, the Pale King’s plan- and the rise of the Pale King in the first place- were built on the sacrifice of others, including his own children. To quote his only line in the game, from a flashback-
No cost too great. No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering.
That’s him referring to the child he needs to enact his master plan that already failed before the game started. As for the children who did have a mind to think, will to break, or voice to cry suffering…
Remember that description about how Metroidvania levels can be any sort of biome or structure?
Yeah, each one of those broken masks represents a discarded child thrown to be forgotten in an abyss. There is an entire level where you are traversing over the corpses of your discarded siblings.
So yeah, the Pale King of Hallownest- who if you haven’t gathered by now has more than a few thematic parallels with the Warhammer 40k Emperor of Mankind- devised a plan that required breeding the perfect tool to basically serve as a sacrifice. He abandoned untold numbers of his children in the process of finding the one he could sacrifice, the titular Hollow Knight. But at least he built a memorial (that was cut/bugged content). A whole lot of bug blood, ultimately futilely spilled.
But it was to save free will and sapience, so its arguably for the greater good for the sort of moral ambiguity / necessary villainy that fans love to debate endlessly. Like Skyrim Stomcloaks versus Imperials, except with a threat to all sapience and civilization.
Except, again… the Pale King kind of buried the previous civilization through an act of godly unwilling sacrifice. To spoil / simply some stuff already raised, the infection that robs sapience is the re-emergence of the hive mind of the previous higher being, who lived through the dreams of a tribe of moths. Except this ‘living through’ is both literal and metaphysical- the higher being exists in the dream world and depended on the dreams / reverence of the tribe it was patron to.
So when the Pale King incarnated to become the Pale King, and proactively expanded Hallownest as far as he could, he converted that tribe as well. Who, in falling under the Pale King’s influence and individuality, forgot / abandoned their patron goddess, leaving her trapped and starving in the dream realm. Except- being a godly higher being herself- she was ultimately able to break through into the dreams of bugs, which is the source of the infection overtaking Hallownest.
Or, to put in other words- to build his Kingdom as the exclusive civilization of the region, the god-bug that was the Pale King sealed away a prior god-bug and doom it to death by starvation. Deific sacrifice, if you will.
And to reseal his prior victim, he bred and discarded a cavern of skulls of his own children.
And it didn’t even work.
The plot of Hollow Knight occurs because the Pale King’s plan failed. The Hollow Knight remains sealed, but the infection re-emerged. The Pale King ultimately fled, even as the infection tore down the intellectual (and sapient) scaffoldings of Hallownest.
Was sapience worth deific sacrifice? Was clinging onto that civilization worth countless child sacrifices? Would they have been worth it had the grand scheme not failed?
Is the subject of our existential dread, raised above, worth any cost of victimizing other, lesser, beings?
Cue ethical horror.
Justifiably Wrathful Gods
Hollow Knight has an interesting take on gods, or at least the higher beings that understandably worshipped as gods.
In the setting of Hollow Knight, all bugs are not created equal. It is not a particularly egalitarian setting. This is understandable as the variances amongst bugs far exceeds human divergence. Some bugs are small and fragile, others strong and massive. Some can think, some cannot even be uplifted. Some bugs are innately capable of feats of magic, magic of dreams or soul or silk, and others have no such gifts.
And then there are the higher beings, who are things apart. Capable of feats of magic no spell-casting bug could match. Capable of creating great and terrible things. But worst of all, capable of dominating the minds and will of the human-identifiable bugs around them. Even as they are beings that- in physical terms- a human foot could smash, they are also so far above the bugs around them that it understandable why they would be worshiped- and want to be worshipped- as gods.
Hollow Knight does not have a particularly positive view of such gods.
The best that is said of the Radiance, the old god of hollow knight, is that she was not malicious or expansionist in her era of bug tribes and a moth hive-mind. In the present, she is the source of a maddening and vengeful blight. The Pale King built a civilization, but the arrogance and self-gratification is shallower than the cavern of skulls, and that was before he fled and abandoned his followers to die. In Silksong, the kingdom of Pharloom is built around a religion both capable of great beauty and even greater cruelty, centered on the Grand Mother Silk who’s own daughters in spirit and silk betrayed her to seal her away in sleep and worse.
At no point in the series are you, the player, actively encouraged to side or align with the higher beings. There is no faction system, no secret ending, no alignment. Your ends may align, but only accidentally and never to a point of reconciliation. Higher Beings are beings that are- if not inherently harmful- naturally inclined to dominate others. They distort the world around them by their very nature, and those distortions- both by acts of will and by their absence- lead to great harm.
But the higher beings of Hollow Knight are not malevolent. They have understandable- if not acceptable- reasons for what they do.
Radiance acts for her survival. Her infection is both her reemergence and her revenge for having been sealed away without provocation. The Pale King acts for his kingdom. Having built a realm and civilization, he sacrificed his own family more than any of his subjects to try and end a collective threat. The Grand Mother Silk was betrayed by her daughters and sealed in her own silk by an entire religion. Her actions are to gain her own freedom, and understandable as her effort to reassert her agency and control after her trust was betrayed.
These higher beings, in other words, are very much ‘gods’ to the bugs beneath them, but if not relatable, at least empathizable to the human player audience. While human players are encouraged to identify with the lower bugs who most resemble the player characters and who most converse with us with human-like personalities, the reasons for the higher beings to affect the lower is understandably human as well. Even if their actions are morally wrong, they are understandable, in much the same way the harm they do the bugs is analogous to the harm the human players might do to bugs. Sometimes you stomp a bug out of malice, sometimes out of convenience, and sometimes merely as a consequence.
But this is where the incongruity sets in. Just as human players can associate themselves with the higher beings, we can associate with the lower beings as well, the sentient bugs with oh-so-human peculiarities and interests. And by analogy, just as the god-bugs are so far higher to the normal bugs we can understand why they’d dismiss or react angrily to those that wronged them… well, what about a higher-than-human being who is as high above us? What does it imply about us, if we are acting wrongly towards it? Would our loss be as dismissible as a cavern of skulls because we were so much lesser, or if it was for some grander cause? Or- worse- are we the targets of revenge for a wrong towards that higher being that we do not remember or understand?
Humans, as a species, do not appear in Hollow Knight. There are no direct narrative parallels between god-bugs and humans, or allusions to any sort of the Abrahamic God of an all-creator or morality-defining power.
But as a thematic parallel- something that can appeal to intuitive understandings without have to be explicit- Hollow Knight is tapping at something, crawling around in the back of the minds of people who would rarely want to confront what it means to make a higher power justifiably mad.
Cue theological unease.
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Part 3: Tying Themes Together With Minimalism and Music
This is the part of this review that makes me feel a little bad, because you can’t write a review like this without ruining the experience of a first-time discovery. Sorry about that, but you were warned.
Hollow Knight follows in the footsteps of the post-Dark Souls souls-like genre of having minimal direct storytelling, significant use of significant environmental storytelling, and using small amounts of flavor text or lore drops to flesh out a world through discovery. These aren’t directly related to the themes of bugs, but they do contribute to a broader community of fan engagement as fans compare notes and impressions to try and understand the setting.
For those less familiar, the Soulsborne genre pioneered by Japanese developer FromSoft was very influential in the industry in the 2010s, growing from the niche / cult classics of Demon Souls and Dark Souls to the AAA juggernauts of Bloodborne and Elden Ring. Aside from their notorious difficulty curve, proving there was an audience for higher game difficulty despite an industry trend towards lower difficulties in the name of accessibility, what FromSoft games also influenced was how the games delivered their narrative. For all that the original Dark Souls was once characterized to me as ‘The Legend of Zelda, except darker and hard-core,’ there were no companion character to explain what to do, no setting-establishing cinematics to establish elaborate geopolitical contexts, and no exposition dump characters to hand you the plot or plot twists as you progressed through the story. You could go through the entire game and quite reasonably not understand who you were killing, why you were doing it, or even if it was the right thing to do.
Instead, the Soulsborne series leaned far more into cryptic opening narrators, and more cryptic NPCs that had a few lines that established some aspect of characterization but not much else. Instead, the primary mechanisms of storytelling were environmental storytelling and flavor texts from discoverable items.
Item flavor text is often the most explicit narrator in these sorts of games, because the minimalist format makes them the most trustworthy of sources. In games where characters like Trustworthy Patches (he’s not) trick the player, or the meddling of gods are used to trick the populace (and the audience) as to their intentions, a lack of clear truth-teller often complicates the relative lack of information. Instead, items themselves become a narrative device, providing a bit of a lore. A trophy from a boss is a bit of insight into the boss, a mundane weapon may reveal some background lore of a nation that used it. Collectively, by tying together flavor texts that reference the same characters or places or key words used to related to shared concepts, these individual isolated pieces of information start to combine for a broader understanding. Due to how few words there are, you can often link even seemingly unrelated items if you can recognize the connecting key concepts whose words would otherwise not be used. This could be obvious, such as the name of a character or Kingdom, but it can often be more indirect, such as Hollow Knight rarely using the term ‘Pale’- especially when capitalized- except when referring to the Pale King. These [clusters] of key word usage are what organize and link lore tidbits.
In the FromSoft tradition, these flavor texts are basically always trustworthy, coming from an omniscient third-party narrator. While there is a good deal of Exact Words nuance, and what is there can feed a lot of theories, the nature of the medium is that most fan discussion falls apart if you don’t accept these out-of-setting descriptions as accurate. These are often the only sources of information, the primary sources if you will, and if you can’t accept them as a starting point, you can’t discuss much at all.
Hollow Knight… does not actually follow this approach, because Hollow Knight doesn’t have much of an inventory system. There are (extremely minor) item descriptions, but what Hollow Knight leans more towards in-universe lore stones, tablets or monuments carved into areas of the map to be read in-universe. For example, a public monument to the Hollow Knight in an abandoned city called the city of tears, where the monument in a dead kingdom praises the knight’s sacrifice for saving the eternal kingdom. In Silksong, there is a (now infamous) automated confession booth in a church which tells the petitioners that they must work for redemption. Such sources are filled with the explicit and implicit biases of the narrators, whether as obvious propaganda or raising personal opinions.
What these functions have in common, however, is how they tie the discovery of new lore to exploration and allow for the combination of small bits over time. In Hollow Knight, you can find monuments to the Pale King and his civilization heralding its glory, while on the untamed outskirts you can find the testaments of doubters and outsiders who either grudgingly accepted Hallownest’s domination, or refused entirely. Whether lore you find by looting an enemy, or lore you can only reach by pushing through enemies, both of these still require exploring and overcoming adversity just to get the preconditions of lore discussion.
Environmental story telling contributes something similar, but with even more space for (and burden of) interpretation.
In environmental storytelling, the positioning of key parts of the level architecture and characters / enemies in the game is used to provide non-verbalized narratives. This is something the Fallout series has long specialized in, using apocalypse logs and the arrangement of skeletons and items to convey the final moments of the apocalypse. Think of the skeletons of an adult and a child, with the adult having a 6-shot revolver with 4 bullets left. Or Elden Ring hiding a plot twist that the eponymous elden ring of Queen Marika the Eternal was not the first elden ring by hiding a mural behind an extremely late-game boss fight. No character or narrator actually verbalizes the actions or implications but leaves it to the player to find and recognize.
Hollow Knight doesn’t go into quite the extreme of Bethesda-style environmental storytelling, as it doesn’t have the sort of 3-dimensional set dressing or inventory medium to do so. This is part of why it uses the monument tablet style that it does, which is both lore-node and environmental story telling combined. The monument to the noble sacrifice of a knight whose sacrifice did not save the Kingdom has real Ozymandias, King of King, a lone monument in a place remembered as the city of tears, tells more than what the words say. A church who automates its castigations and demands for the faithful to toil says more about the callous exploitation of the leadership than just a dogma of virtuous redemption.
There is (far) more than these alone, of course. The stark disparities of the bug-filled wilderness and civilized areas tell their own narrative nuances. In Hollow Knight, the deep nest is a wild, untamed, and never truly settled regio that Hallownest at its peak never dominated. Compared to the wide-open hallways, large structures, and paved tunnels of the capital, the deep nest is tight, claustrophobic, and dark. Spiders cross skitter across the foreground and background, things never clearly seen or encountered. Ambush predators take the form of elsewhere harmless grubs that you seek to rescue, and massive centipedes crawl through the level as terrain obstacles in and of themselves. They are impervious to any weapon, show no reason, and both the literal and figurative enlightenment of the Pale King never reached here. Nor did civilization dominate the Mantis tribe, who fight out of pride and nature, but who go from dangerous obstacles to unthreatening observers once you earn their respect, even gesturing in respect as you pass but still accepting a challenge.
This is where Hollow Knights environmental storytelling shines (or darkens). What it lacks in that level of specificity of Bethesda body placement, or even FromSoft item descriptions, it more than makes up for in vibes.
And this is where we transition from not just narrative delivery, but sound design. Which I wish I had a better vocabulary to explain, but here we go.
Hollow Knight has a very good sense of song. Not just music, but song and poem in their written form, which is used in deliberate ways to build mystery, unease, and melancholy.
Take the opening of Hollow Knight, which delivers a poem. This is a first impression of the setting, meant to frame the player’s mindset as they start their path of discovery.
In wilds beyond they speak your name with reverence and regret, For none could tame our savage souls yet you the challenge met, Under palest watch, you taught, we changed, base instincts were redeemed, A world you gave to bug and beast as they had never dreamed.
With what I’ve told you already, you can see in it the allusions to the Pale King and his uplifting. It is the start of a poem that heralds and praises the Pale King (reverence), even as it sets the sets the somber undertone (and regret). It mythologizes and raises the Pale King above the lesser bugs, whose base instincts are ‘redeemed’- and thus somehow lesser- prior to the change and being tamed.
But the real hook- a foreshadowing of a conflict I already explained but a player wouldn’t begin to learn about for hours yet- is in the last line. ‘A world you gave to bug and beast as they had never dreamed,’ at first read, is a generous and magnanimous act. Upon (much) later learning of the nature of The Radiance, as a being who lived through dreams, and it takes a more sinister turn even if the speaker would not see it as such. Rather than ‘I will give you better than you could have dreamed of,’ as in surpassing dreams, the Pale Kings world replaces dreams. This is more explicit in the full version of the poem that can be found in the game files, but was never used in-game, whose later linens more directly allude to the conflict with between the Pale King and Radiance. (And, by being too obvious, give a bit too much of the plot away.)
This is the sort of deliberate two-impression approach, the initial first impression and then a new understanding after later revelations give new context, which characterizes a fair bit of Hollow Knight’s music. Hollow Knight is one of those series that supports an entire micro-genre of YouTube first reactions where composers do an (alleged) first-experience of music in isolation to try and identify the key themes, musical momentum, and tropes of the medium of music to try and identify artistic intent. And while I have a somewhat skeptical opinion of this micro-genre in general- it is hard to verify and easy for creators to fake- it is credible enough when it comes to Hollow Knight.
That is because the Team Chery composers were very deliberate with how they designed their music, just as they were deliberate with their written poetry or songs. Some of the deliberate uses of leitmotifs to build connections- including the background music linking the prior elegy to the Pale King even though he’s not identified by name- for non-explicit narrative links. The atmosphere of various ruins, such as the city of tears, is not just visual in terms of lighting or water effects but deliberately introduced by shifts in the musical instrumentation and transitions.. And then there are the [the different themes and compositional narratives revealed by the choice of boss fight chords and balance of instruments]( (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOVEmfXEEAUB0YPkuVn1PGy0Mhdzwsrfa) noted in the musician-review genre.
But- and to tie it back together with some earlier points of interlocking themes- the music in Hollow Knight is not ‘just’ good music in isolation. It’s not like the use of classical music in space epics to give a sense of scale or majesty, but which has no real role or recognition in-universe. The role and rise of music in-setting has strong tie-ins to the themes of cultural sophistication and what elevates bugs from beasts. Art and culture are cultivated, not inherent, and the sort of music for ‘civilized’ foes often differs in vibes from the music for fighting madmen or beasts. This is background framing for most of Hollow Knight and the civilization of Hallownest but becomes even more explicit and even a major plot point of Silksong, which is a Kingdom built on song as much as with literal silk.
Music in the Hollow Knight setting, in other words, doesn’t just sound good. It is a deliberate, and exceptional, method of storytelling.
///
Conclusion: Hollow Knight Is Good Because Its Elements Intuitively Reinforce
This will be a more rapid summary, because by god this is already long enough and I’m tired. In short, the various elements that have been discussed so far work as well as they do because they have non-obvious reinforcing synergies that make sense but won’t necessarily be obvious to most players.
In terms of pure gameplay, Hollow Knight’s use of bugs as the character medium works well with the tropes of the metroidvania genre. From the presentation tying to the familiar concept of ant farm, to small bugs having their own thematic parallels to the themes of exploration, isolation, and mystery, bugs are a suitably fragile protagonist for a suitably challenging game that skirts human-centric expectations.
As a low fantasy, bugs work well for much of the same reason as the rabbits of Watership Down, being small, fragile, and subject to powers beyond their understanding. The medium of bugs allows the link of a familiar and mundane world, that of bestial uncivilized bugs, and the magical hidden world, of magical bugs and god-bugs, which provide a contrast at smaller scale but not smaller stakes than a human-protagonist fantasy.
As a dark fantasy, the god-bugs as higher beings who both transcend the bugs humans are meant to identify with, but who have human motivations the players can understand as a fellow higher-sort of being, opens up non-explicit but troubling themes. By challenging the nature and value of sentience as a natural and even desirable thing, challenging utilitarian ethics by raising the great sacrifices of doomed efforts, and providing understandable if not righteous basis for higher beings (who humans can empathize with the desires of) to inflict suffering on lower beings (who humans are encouraged to identify with), the dark fantasy challenges a certain sort of human-centric assumptions. The darkness of the dark fantasy is in the existential dread, ethical horror, and the theological unease in a way few games do.
As a minimalist story telling narrative, Hollow Night uses exploration-based lore discoveries and non-explicit environmental and musical story telling to provide context it doesn’t do explicitly. While exploration-discovery and environmental story telling tie into the nature of the metroidvania, the environmental storytelling and deliberate use of music provides an indistinct style of delivery that encourages players to commune together and compare notes.
What makes Hollow Knight exceptional is not that it has any one of these elements, but that it deliberately uses all of these elements to lead into and support each other.
The character format of bugs leads into the gameplay of a metroidvania and the fragility of an animal-centric low fantasy. The low fantasy use of bug-gods leads into the themes of the dark fantasy. The elements of the dark fantasy are delivered by the exploration-linked minimalist lore drops and environmental story telling. The environmental story telling is supported, and in some cases linked, by the deliberate use of musical design and themes. The theme of music itself aligns with the theme of the civilized bugs who cultivate such culture, leading back to the low and dark fantasy elements.
It is good. It is deliberate. It’s attractively packaged together, and best of all to a casual consumer, it’s cheap, outperforming industry standards for a fraction of a typical sales price.
And I truly apologize if I have robbed anyone of the magic of experiencing it for the first time without preconditions, in case any of this review gave you a desire to try it for yourself.
That is all, and thanks for listening to my bug talk.
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Originally published on my substack: https://terminalvel0city.substack.com/p/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-tech-ceo I can't figure out the formatting in this place. Part of this piece is supposed to be in italics to differentiate past from future. You guys are smart---you can figure it out.
Jude Gabriel, enigmatic CEO of the mysterious yet seemingly omnipresent software company ‘Talos’, squints as the sunset light squeezes through a few buildings in the Seattle skyline just to assault his face at the perfect angle. Whoever thought up the idea of all-glass offices should be lined up against the wall and shot—with the sun in his eyes.
The whole gang is here: CFO, COO, CPO, CSO, whoever the fuck. He’d kill them all without a second thought in exchange for a glass of whiskey and a cigar.
He rubs his nose: one of his infamous ‘migraines’ is coming on.
It started on his 25th birthday. The whole thing is branded into his memory, for better or for worse, and will be until he dies, and for all his luck after he dies, too.
Craig had been the one who officially ‘suggested’ it, but it was really inevitable, with how into psychedelics they had all been. The moment he said it, it was more like it had manifested out of the whole subconscious zeitgeist of their friend group, and no one in particular took credit for it: Ayahuasca, that is.
One thing after another, and Jude ended up in some primitive canoe, floating his way down the shit-colored waters of the Nanay, muggy-hot and slathered in skin-irritating, carcinogenic bug spray. Nonetheless, nothing short of nuclear fallout could erase his good mood. He practically hummed with adrenaline and good spirits despite the downright horrific summer conditions of backwater Peru.
At the dock, a woman with a clipboard introduced herself as Isa and asked him to put his phone in a dented metal tin.
The intake hut was cooler. A ceiling fan wobbled, slicing the humid air into manageable pieces. The curandero sat in a plastic chair with his hands on his knees, white beard surrounding his chin, wrinkled eyes squinting cheerfully. He looked exactly like Jude had imagined: wise and ready to take them on the trip of a lifetime. He spoke, a hoarse but gentle voice, and a younger man beside him translated.
“...Why here? What do you hope to see?”
They went around the room until it landed on Jude. To tell you the truth, he didn’t know. It wasn’t like the others—he didn’t want to ‘find himself’, his life was fine as it was, he had had no traumatic experiences, and he was a perfectly productive worker: at the time, he was starting up a small software company, and it had just had its first angel investor. He knew he was outgrowing these people, and it was only a matter of time before they’d grow apart.
“I want to see if there’s anything I missed.” He said, simply, not sure if they were the right words after they came out of his mouth. The curandero nodded after hearing the translation, a long, thoughtful motion.
Well, that’s exactly what he found: the thing he’d missed, or more accurately, the thing that had missed him.
If only he’d told Craig to go fuck himself.
The air conditioning beats down on Jude as the CFO, Priya, prattles on about numbers, which is what she does—that’s why we all love her.
Jude’s assistant, Ness, leans towards him.
“The demo team’s set up,” she says, ‘You want them in here, or…”
“Yeah,” says Jude,
In a few minutes, Marty, the CPO, walks over to the wall screen, which switches from spreadsheets to a map of a few high-crime blocks in Seattle, colored dots pulsing like slow heartbeats.
“This is what we’ll show the folks in Oakland,” he says, “ It’s nice, elegant, you know? Makes it look like we’re just sorting the mess, not… playing god, or whatever the press likes to say about us, you know?”
He clicks through, and a route appears through the dots.
“Two patrol cars for nine urgent calls,” he says. “The system takes the pile and says, ‘Here’s the order that gets help to the most people fastest. The car goes here first because the caller keeps hanging up, then here because the second caller is trapped in a stairwell, then this one because it’s likely a duplicate.”
Mason drums a finger. “Why aren’t we showing the cool part where it noticed the stolen Civic from last week patterns back to—”
General counsel interrupts him. “Cool’s trouble. We want ‘boring and helpful’.”
“Come on, it can be a little bit of both,” he said
“Then it wouldn’t be boring, Mason,” she replies.
Jude tunes them out. This part isn’t interesting. Besides, a familiar pressure is blooming behind his right eye, a creeping static that makes it hard to focus.
He watches as the red line from the screen somehow moves, bleeding into reality, widening, taking weight, and spreading, soon becoming a red belt crossing the city. And then he sees what it really is: crossbeams, ribs, the sketch of an inhuman skeleton, barely under the thin veneer of the corporeal world.
He blinks. The thread is small again.
At some point, someone from legal walks in—a shy, mousey blonde. The way she does so, uncertain, not willing to look anyone in the eyes, tells him it’s going to be a problem before she says the words.
There’s mention of ‘Craig Hassel’. He knows right away what happened: the douchebag thinks he made the algorithm behind the route ordering that they’ll be showcasing. Idiot. He doesn’t get it, never did. No one made any of this; it was beyond that, beyond ownership. What he wanted was immaterial: we don’t get just deserts. This isn’t a fucking movie.
He closes his eyes.
His birthday happened to coincide with the first night of the retreat: everyone claims to have planned it, but it was happenstance.
The time before—the whole ‘wellness retreat’ bullshit—passed by in a blur. He remembers staring at Maya’s ass and listening to the curandero talk about mystic-sounding Mumbo jumbo: you were once pure, and culture sullied your soul, or some wacko nonsense. Jude didn’t care about any of that; he just wanted to see the world as it is, absent of everything additional, to gaze into the true reality as close as he possibly could.
Ironically, it was pretty similar to what the curandero was saying, minus the emphasis on personal growth, but he didn’t have the self-awareness to see it.
That night, they entered a featureless wood panel room with two bathrooms and a bunch of mattresses
It was strangely cold. Everyone bunched together in a circle, Maya to his right, leaning close, and Craig, who was practically vibrating with excitement, to his left. The Curandero made his last speech as he prepared the tea, and then everyone lined up to take it.
When Jude reached the end of the line, the translator asked how much he wanted. Jude suppressed a laugh and asked for the maximum amount. What was he, a pussy?
The brew tasted like burnt coffee mixed with dirt. He gulped it down as fast as he could and sat down where he’d been sitting, bracing himself for a ride.
It took an hour or two for it to actually work, during which he felt increasingly disappointed, watching people bumble around or chant like lunatics. Craig similarly didn’t feel anything. Then, it all came at once
Later, he would find out that his experience did not match most descriptions of the drug’s effects, that it was a wholly alien abomination.
Later, Craig would tell him that it had changed him for the worse, that he couldn’t stop striving towards some incomprehensible end, that it made him impossible to work with, that he was taking the company in a direction that was completely different from what they’d intended.
Later, Craig would be right.
“They intend to move ex parte for a TRO, citing emails from 2019 in which Mr. Hassel describes ‘probabilistic ordering—” begins the blonde from legal, probably because she didn’t know what else to say.
“Right, right,” says Mason, flicking his wrist. “It’s a bunch of bullshit.”
“Bullshit that could fuck us over in Oakland,” says GC.
“We can’t afford to deal with this in court,” says Priya, “any delay could punt the demonstration months, at least.”
“Sure, captain obvious,” says Mason, “What are you gonna tell us next, water is wet? The sky is blue?”
“Sorry. It’s hard to tell when you need things spelled out for you, Mason,” she shoots back.
He snorts, looking away.
“I just got a text from him,” interrupts Ness, “says he wants to ‘solve this like men’”
“The hell does that mean?” says Priya
“It means he wants to call,” says Mason,
“Should we?” a voice inevitably chimes. Jude rubs his eyes. The room goes silent.
“Put him on,” says Jude, finally.
They put him on through the speakers.
“I see you got my letter,” says Craig, the self-righteous smugness palpable in his voice.
“What do you want, Craig?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about recognition for my work, for starters?”
Jude rolls his eyes. “You wrote a few weights any freshman can get if you give them a few weekends and a public dataset. You’re not going to court over this—I know it, you know it, so let’s cut the bullshit.”
“Maybe I just wanna fuck you over,” he said, “shut down your little stint in Oakland.”
“Then file,” says Jude. “Let’s see if you can afford that fight.”
The room gets tenser. Priya gives him that stare.
“Wait—” starts GC.
He lifts a hand
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen in the next hour, if you choose that route. We’re going to file a declaratory action in Delaware seeking a ruling of non-infringement and ownership. We’ll append your emails in full to show how little they matter, and we’ll attach three pieces of prior art from 2016 to 2018 where strangers describe the same ‘probabilistic ordering’ that you claim to be yours.”
He looks at Marty. “Pull the patents, will you?”
Marty nods.
Then,” Jude continues, “we’re going to push a limited open-source module that replicates the banal one you’re fighting over. Just the skeleton. Nothing proprietary, nothing Oakland-specific. It will be clean-room documented and intentionally boring. It’ll look like we’re being magnanimous, and your TRO will look like a toddler padlock on a chain-link fence.”
There’s a pause at the other end of the line.
“You wouldn’t just open it,” says Craig, “this is your baby. I know you.”
“Yeah?” says Jude. “Try me.”
He laughs to himself.
“Jesus, Craig. You think this is it, that this is my ‘baby’? This is a step, moron. It’s a fucking brick. I’ll give you your goddamn brick.”
“But, the demo window…” says someone else.
“We’ll move it up,” says Jude. “Ness, call Oakland.”
“We should at least—” starts Priya.
“No,” says Jude, “I’m not dealing with this loser. If he thinks delaying my multi-generational project by another few months, or even a fucking year, is going to hurt me, then let him try.”
“Bullshit,” says Craig, “I can see right through this shitty performance—you’re scared.”
“You wanna bet?”
There’s another pause.
“I’ll make you look like a thief.”
“How’d that work for Eduardo?” says Jude,” Looks are cheap. Zuckerberg proved that.”
“Jude,” he begins, “You cut me out, and you didn’t have to. We could’ve shipped the same thing without this... cult you built around yourself.”
Jude laughs. “Craig, this was always your problem. I don’t think you’re an idiot, actually, the opposite, but you don’t have vision. You can’t see past yourself and your petty fucking problems. You can’t… You can’t see the future, Craig. The world that I see, it’s… Well, let’s just say we’re beyond ‘ownership’: a farcical idea, always has been.”
He looks back at the room. “Cut the line. I’m done talking to this idiot.”
“Wait—” says Craig.
Before he can say shit, the room dips into silence. No one says anything for a while.
“Let’s adjourn,” he says, and he’s already moving before anyone can respond. Velocity beats consensus. Ness calls after him, but he’s already in the elevator. The migraine feels like a lit coal behind his right eye.
He drives home without music, wincing at the glare from the piercing sun glancing off the windows, like a nuclear blast in the distance, stuck in the moment before the shockwave. The afternoon sky gives way to a bruised, arterial red, bleeding into the sides of the windows, the streets, everything the eye can see. The lights switch from green to red, the crosswalks blink, both playing their minute parts in a mechanical process leading to that inevitable future, streets like veins in some incomprehensible organism. He closes his eyes, but the glare still bleeds behind, omnipresent.
By the time he gets back home, it’s nearly dark.
He writes the babysitter a check. The living room smells like banana peels and markers. Jacob claims that Diego said a bad word. Naomi tries to negotiate staying up later, always the little lawyer. He puts them to bed quickly and sets up shop in the rocking chair by the window, cigar in mouth, glass of whiskey on the rocks.
The horizon stares back at him, at once the familiar city he knows and that unfamiliar landscape he saw, back in Peru, which he still sees to this day, every second a little clearer, every minute it converges closer—the landscape of the end of time, the barren plains, the arterial sky, the mechanical structures like ribs, protruding from the landscape.
He tried everything, every drug on the market: benzos, clonidine, weed, you name it. He tried Therapy, CBT, refining his sleep schedule, fixing his diet. He traveled the world, went back to Peru, begged the Curandero, who had nothing to say, signed up for experimental neurobiology trials in Israel, China, France, wherever the fuck, risked his own life so many times it stopped mattering to him. It did fuckall, none of it worked. For better or for worse, he had seen a glimpse of the future, and it hooked itself in his brain, a psychic parasite. He sees it when he closes his eyes, when he dreams—every waking moment he’s cursed to be an oracle, one foot in the future, one foot in the past.
The worst thing is that it never stops awing him.
That megastructure in the sky, a technological monster so bright it could be the sun, shines down at him, illuminating that landscape with all the more horrifying clarity. Waves of ecstasy and terror burrow through his skin: a feeling so strong that only the most spiritual experiences of his life had ever previously come close to.
The only reason he hasn’t killed himself is his unshaking certainty that eternity exists—he’s staring right at it. Death will not release him from his bond. He has been rendered a servant of the future. His only hope, a rapidly fleeting proposition, is that this horror will spare his kids.
He takes another drink—it gives him no comfort, the taste of the cigar has turned bitter in his mouth. The only thing worse would be nothing at all.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
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Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
I recently attended a seminar at work lead by openAI (whom my company is paying for tools) which was billed as an opportunity to learn more about using AI to do our jobs more effectively. I attended mostly because I assumed there would be some technical discussions about the technology (which was largely absent) and maybe some interesting demos showing how someone used openAI’s product to solve technical problems (also absent). Instead, I was treated to a bizarre presentation, which felt strangely paternalistic and maybe even a little desperate? In order of events:
- The presentation opened with a discussion of the (impressive) scale of the data centers that openAI will be deploying + a little bragging about sora 2 (I promise you none of the scientists or engineers present give a shit about sora 2)
- It proceeded to a gentle haranguing focused on how we should not resist using AI, and that in every organization AI will become more popular as a few high performers learn how to use it to get ahead (ok, some demos would be great, openAI’s tools have been available for months, now would be a great time to show how a co-worker has used it solve a complex problem)
- Some discussion about how scientists and engineers tend to be bad at using AI relative to manager’s/procurement people/ executives/lawyers and others with what I would characterize as paper pushing roles where accuracy isn’t actually that important.
- Which finally devolved into a q&a. The most charitable questions went something like the following: Hi I am a $tpye_of_physical_scientist I love using your tool to help write python code, but it is completely worthless for helping me solve any kind of problem that I don’t already understand very well. For example, here is a tomography technique that I am aware of people using in another industry that I am mostly unfamiliar with. Right now, my approach to using this would be to read papers about how it works, try to implement it and maybe contact some other experts if I can’t figure it out. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just upload the papers about this technique to your bot and have it implement the new technique, saving myself weeks or months of time. But if you try this basic approach you usually end up with something that doesn’t work and while the bot might be able to give some superficial explanation of the phenomenon, it doesn’t add much to me just doing the background research / implementation myself and comes off as feeling like a waste of time. The response to these questions was usually some variation of the bot will get better as it scales and that you should be patient with it and make sure that you are prompting it well so that it can lead you to the correct solution.
Which brings to my primary point: which is that I am someone who has consistently tried to use AI at work in order to be effective, and while it helps somewhat with code creation, it isn’t a particularly useful research tool and doesn’t save me very much time. Apparently my co-workers are having much the same experience.
It really seems to me that openAI and their boosters believe (or would have me believe that they believe) that transformers really are all that you need and at some point in the near future they will achieve a scale where the system will rapidly go from being able to (actually) help me do my job to being able to comfortably replace me at my job. And the truth is that I just am not seeing it. It also seems like a lot of others aren’t either, with recent warnings from various tech leaders (Sam Altman for instance, by the way what possible motive for making Ai bubble statements unless it’s an attempt to prevent employees from leaving to start found their own startups).
I have been very inclined to think that this whole industry is in a bubble for months, and now that the mainstream press is picking up on it, it’s making me wonder if I am totally wrong. Id be interested if others (especially anyone with more actual experience in building these things) can help me understand if I either just suck at using them or if my “vibes” about the current state of the industry are totally incorrect. Or if there is something else going on (ie. can these things really replace enough customer service or other jobs to justify the infrastructure spend outs).