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.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Note that this post was written shortly after seeing the News so it's likely modestly incoherent, and only given the most basic of editing pass. As always, hopefully there's enough meat for discussion.
Link to article below, but today I was greeted by an IGN article titled:
That in the same breath IGN and Microsoft feel the need to announce Matt Booty's promotion, is... indicative of how they perceive the public reception of this announcement. Kiwi Farmers are likely feeling vindicated, and potentially mounting despair, as even under the most anti-DEI culture we've had in ages, a man retires and is replaced by a woman, chosen by the venerable Satya Nadella.
IGN provides this quote:
Now, I'm going to ignore all the fluff as it was incredibly well-prepared and likely approved by multiple PR people to have the just-right wording. I am be tempted to ask Satya: What was the point of letting (or directing) the closing of all those existing, profitable studios? You wouldn't need to back these ideas. Xbox has historically been a money-printer and the most present in consumers' minds, the one people would argue on forums and reddit and making youtube videos for days defending your honor? Such that even fanboys are rapidly admitting the rot has occurred under your feet?
And now, Gamers are left with shit on plates and eating it over the last 5 years, as Microsoft has done everything they can to push the limits of their fans' loyalties.
Xbox was already struggling under the thumbs of Phil Spencer, someone that actually enjoyed and was from gaming and gamer culture. Whether or not normies are going to Notice these canned and prepared responses and coincidental promotion alongside her remains to be actually seen, but even worse: the woman appears to have comparable-or-less Gamer Credentials than Zoe Quinn, so Sharma has to tap another person to be the internal "voice" of games. Probably already being talked about on one of the chans at any rate, so I'll leave that discourse to Those Places for the time being.
That said, unless I am blind and failed my reading comprehension like an average "Gamer", as far as I can tell, Sharma has done basically nothing related to games or gaming throughout her career. So the open-ended question is: why would Satya take that risk despite the general consumer climate?
Again, another quote:
So yes, I'm sure consumers, who have been finally pushed off the edge onto switching off windows, and upset that they literally cannot afford gaming hardware any more are extremely excited for the lady that put Copilot into notepad.exe and the beleagured and oft-derided Microsoft Recall.
Satya really loves his wordsoup that's for sure.
Loose thoughts that don't fit anywhere else in this already-eclectic post, and may be duplicated:
Notably, as far as I can read she does not have any qualifications or past interest in gaming.
Seems that Satya wants more wordsalad and wordsoup to throw at consumers to sound like they're Super Advanced and Definitely Things Will Get Better. Watch for more wordsoupification of the Xbox and microsoft gaming division.
More push into renting in order to play games.
CoreAI is one of Microsoft's largest money-sinks in the company-- they have done their absolute best not to discuss the cost vs revenue during earning calls.
Having been at both Meta and Instacart and head over the CoreAI department, means Sharma has some credible credentials toward running large teams and driving some level of product.
The incessant ai push means microsoft has gobs of compute, and gamers are being starved of what little compute they did have access to even a year ago
At any rate, if you're a capital-G Gamer, the sign was on the wall, but if you're actually invested in the future of the hobby, you probably want to migrate off Xbox before your xbox turns into an diffusion-ran agenticifed gas town, maximizing memory, entitlements, and workflows for such world-changing ideas as Microsoft has clearly been driving forward with such ... vision.
I think this is a good idea. It's not like many AAA games are acclaimed for their dialogue, characters and writing, people literally joke about how crap their writing is. Let people have conversations with in-game characters, why not?
Open source communities have gone out of their way to set up general-purpose AIs to play Minecraft with you in the crudest ways imaginable and it kind of works. Microsoft literally owns Minecraft and they have a ludicrous amount of compute. They could make a minecraft-specific AI model, special servers where the player (players?) could be warlords with whole armies they direct and manage. The sky is the limit. This is a GAAS subscription goldmine just waiting to happen if they can cut down the inference costs, which they should definitely be able to do with a specialist model.
The real problem Microsoft has is dysfunctional culture. It's really not that hard to make Halo Infinite and have it be actually good. They have the money but not the necessary organizational skills. How hard can it be to make Windows 11 run smoothly enough for people to risk their computers and 'upgrade'? Windows 10 was OK...
I think an your typical AAA game needs LLM-powered NPCs as much as a drowning man needs a rock. If nobody thought to give the NPCs more dialogue, filling the gaps with AI slop is not going to help.
I think an LLM might substitute for a mediocre DM in an RPG, though. Certainly in text-based formats, but possibly also in something with graphics (e.g. Neverwinter Nights). The benefit would be that it could accommodate player character ideas. So rather than saying "You can not play a lycrantrophic half-elf changeling", it would modify the setting. Perhaps figure out how the fey fit into the cosmology and the overall plot. Invent relevant side quests, just like a human DM would.
The problem with this approach is that presently, if I have to pick between a pre-generated character with a questline written by humans (BG3) and a character of my own invention with quests written by AI, then I would much rather stick to BG3. Likewise, even if I were totally into dinosaurs, it seems highly unlikely that I would enjoy a version of Tolkien's epos where all the non-hominid animals (horses, ponies, eagles, black wings, dragons, spiders, etc) are replaced by appropriate dinos better than the original, simply because AI is nowhere good enough to write something like LotR from the scratch.
Ah but the typical AAA game is not Baldur's Gate III.
Mass Effect Andromeda. Or Dragon Age Veilguard. Or Concord. This is what I'm thinking of: https://x.com/celestesangels/status/2003911076988260714
https://x.com/deadlock/status/2015887428964266047
An underlying issue is that the people who can't write good dialogue surely can't write good prompts or lora/finetunes for AIs either.
Still, some fun can definitely be had in a version of LOTR where Saruman is shilling NordVPN: "50% off with code ISTAR15". I saw an AI make a great pun about Isengard's no-logs policy.
Trying to replicate the peak of human literature should not be the target for AI gaming, better to focus on things that only it can do in terms of reactivity and dynamism to create new kinds of fun.
More options
Context Copy link
I was using chatbots to help me train dynamic Japanese vocabulary recall or whatever. Discussing random topics with it wasn't working, as those tended to focus on abstract vocabulary. I had the idea of trying to play RPGs with the AI, with the AI being dungeon master and posing scenarios I would need to use more concrete vocabulary to interact with. Should have been simple, right? It's got all sorts of RPGs in its dataset to crib from. Anyways, the results were one of the many things that totally dispelled any illusion that LLMs possess intelligence for me. I can't provide a total summary of its extreme and numerous flaws, but everything it tried to do as dungeon master ended up being cliché, nonsensical, unstructured, inappropriate from every point of view, and it quickly lost context of what was going on after only a few prompts. You could probably create a much better virtual DM through pre-LLM computer generation technology.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link