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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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but are you entirely sure that the changes will be improvements as game writing?

Absolutely not. I'm just pretty sure games haven't perfected process and that there is for improvement by using AI during their creation. No game developer should trust the consumer's wisdom. I would recommend they ignore gamers the most.

do you want to let the AI rewrite your game on the fly, like a GM does, not just write things you can review in advance?

If it does it well because it's powered by the 200 million dollar Unreal Storytelling Engine, yeah, I'd try it out. I don't think we need procedurally generated stuff to have more choice and consequence in a game as mentioned. The best practices reasoning ignores all the limitations, constraints, industry standards, general audience, and on and on. Pressures that can be mitigated by an always on, if not always deferred to, modest writer.*

a world where ten characters have deep dialogue trees and are critical to the story while another hundred characters have deep dialogue trees but are still going to be plot dead-ends after those trees are finally exhausted

Can we not provides clues or even tell the player what they can expect from the 100 'non-essential' characters? Don't many games already do this when they choose to include such content in the experience?

I recommend playing the Half Life 2 Episode 1+2 with Director's Commentary

I don't need to they were clearly an innovator if not a pioneer in "show don't tell" for video games. I'm not saying to take creators, artists, and innovators out of the equation or to cede your storytelling role to a robot. Guard rails are good and necessary in many cases. Based on my experience with LLM (prose, given) and my experience with video games: there's already a role for tapping LLMs and it would be an improvement in many games-- including big budget titles. But I appreciated the perspective!