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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7561 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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I'd caveat that the numbers game here looks really goofy. It only takes one in a thousand people matching FCfromSSC's perspectives to more than double the number of game developers in the United States. Worse, these new people can be a lot more productive in the sheer output sense even if the median one falls behind on the actual quality side.

I'll put a marker down: I'd expect Iron Pagoda gets at least one of the games released and in an SNES/GameBoy Color-level or better quality enjoyable playable demo by the end of the year this year, and probably a playable (if alpha) release by this time next year.

Fanfic genuinely has seriously twisted a lot of fiction writing incentives and economics, and that's about the most degenerate case available and the lowest quality.

In the short term, I'm hoping that the high-profile examples tend to require some underlying skill, if only because the AI tools will quite happily produce high-effort and lovingly detailed terrible ideas, and it takes skill to recognize it. But that's still going to make modern automated content farms look like child's play.

Also a certain percentage of the people who currently actually get their shit together enough to make games will accept the AI-pill and then be able to shovel stuff out at 5-10x the speed they can now.

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