There are some existing video games that incorporate LLMs or diffusion models. So in one sense, that’s probably very doable.
But I think that it’s probably going to be a slow process. There are probably going to be dead ends. I kind of suspect that early games, even if they’re technically-novel, probably will suffer the same problems that past video games did before they matured. End of the day, a video game needs to be fun, and just throwing a new technology like a powerful graphics card or a fancy natural-language parser or whatever at it doesn’t get you to that fun game. I think that it’s going to take quite some years of game developers iterating to incorporate generative AI stuff well.
That being said, there are some things I’d like to see tried.
My guess is that it’s probably possible to create to develop some sort of social-media-based video game that generates a choose-your-own-adventure style video game, remembering story branches generated by other users to take advantage of human-assisted creation, and trying to show “top” story forks. Like, make the bar low, use voting or link tracking or something to determine what story branches people like, and show those.
I’d like to see some kind of system for tracking world state that isn’t purely based on having an LLM look at the entire preceding text for context. That’s a pretty inefficient way to store world state, and implementing game logic at the LLM level is, I think, going to be problematic. Think of something like, oh, a game system like Inform/TADS/glulx-based interactive fiction. You have objects and properties and a game engine that handles tracking them and their interactions. But you try to get an LLM to generate text for those objects.
There are some games that use diffusion models, either statically or at runtime, to generate illustrations, where the number of permutations would be impractical for a human artist. The ones I’ve seen have been adult-oriented; I don’t know how the field has developed, and there may well be a lot more out there now.
One thing that I think could be done today is to start using procedurally-generated voices. Generative AI can do pretty decent voice synthesis. Video games are good at doing procedurally-generated text, but if you do that, you don’t get voice audio. That’s not really a game genre, but it’s a way in which one could provide some neat added functionality. I think that to really take advantage of this, there’d need to be a training corpus of text annotated with emotional information and such, but I’ve seen people doing this in a usable form for game mods.
I honestly can NOT wait for this to be delayed forever or we actually get to see a steaming pile of garbage it actually is. Then Musk will blame the woke left for it sucking somehow.
I seriously don’t see a situation where it releases and it’s even OK. If it does happen then I’ll do something. Like say I was wrong or something else impossible on the internet.
I don’t think that that’d be very analogous. He explicitly said that he wasn’t going to do the Hyperloop himself, just proposed it as an idea that someone else could implement.
That being said, you could dig up something that Musk had said that he would do that he didn’t. considers FSD on Tesla vehicles is probably the prime example.
Yeah he also went on to admit that hyperloop was a deliberate misdirect to draw funding away from other rail and other public transit projects, since, you know, he’s the ceo of a car company
The forums are to be avoided. You can't even have an honest non-political discussion in them because it is filled with immature asshole trolls with somehow too much time on their hands. I'm permabanned from Steams official forums because of just suggesting we get rid of the jester award. Cue in legions of fuckheads storming in 16 pages worth of my reviews and flagging nearly all of them with jester awards. Fuck that shithole.
It's even astounding how one of the trolls, was married and has a kid. What a life that guy has to find so much time to be an asshole online while having a family. "Uh sorry honey, I'm too busy owning someone online because they had an opinion I don't like, I'm not going to have dinner with you tonight."
I’ve never considered even using the forums and am only vaguely aware of them. It’s a store, not a social platform. I buy my games, I run the games. Anything else is…kind of weird honestly.
I understand the importance of actually performing rigorous studies (haven’t checked their methodology) but… no fucking shit?
GabeN is a pretty established Libertarian Tech Bro and Valve only moderates to the bare minimum requirement. Of course chuds are going to thrive under those circumstances.
Its why I STILL laugh my ass off when people go on an anti-Epic rant about how EGS doesn’t have forums or whatever. Like… you REALLY telling on your ass if you think the steam forums are something anyone should want more of.
I dunno. I increasingly think the answer is to burn it all down (on a lot of subjects). The idea of going to the store to ask questions or get recommendations feels like one of those “remember yesteryear?” that never actually happened. I NEVER had a good experience talking to a sales person in a Circuit City or Electronics Boutique (I’ll never stop being annoyed over going to pick up KOTOR 2 on launch day and having to tell the cashier, five different times, that I would not be buying WoW or Starcraft…).
Back in the day? I looked at boxes and if the price was right just got it. Otherwise I read through PC Gamer or EGM to find out what games were good.
These days? I look through the store front and if the price is right, I do a quick skim of the review scores and get it. Otherwise I have a few influencers I “trust” to review/showcase games for me. What IS new is that sometimes I go to a message board (generally reddit for volume) and ask if someone can point me at a youtube that goes deeper into a feature. But even that isn’t dissimilar from a schoolmate who probably became a neo nazi who couldn’t stop talking about how good IL-2 was.
So get rid of all the social media bullshit attached to store fronts and just require devs to put a link to their social media of choice for reporting bugs or whatever.
Like… you REALLY telling on your ass if you think the steam forums are something anyone should want more of.
idk man I only use them when a game isn’t gaming right and there’s usually some posts about how to get the game to game correctly, sometimes even posts by the devs, let’s not pretend it’s all /v/ shit
Wonder if having the game dev for their category on the steam forum have moderator status would be a good medium (could promote staff or community members to mod status)
I have no idea how Steam’s forums work since I only go there if I can’t find a solution to an issue elsewhere, but for that use case it’s totally fine?
GabeN is a pretty established Libertarian Tech Bro and Valve only moderates to the bare minimum requirement.
Isn’t that kind of what you want from a distributor? Looking up “Gabe Newell political views,” the top results were about him refusing to ban games, partly to avoid the Streisand effect, but also because he doesn’t believe in censorship. If Valve banned things based on company views, they’d quickly be at risk of an antitrust lawsuit.
I personally agree that Valve shouldn’t be involved in the forums. But I do think the publisher should be able to take over moderation if they so choose. Maybe that’s a thing, idk, I don’t know very much about the forums.
I do a quick skim of the review scores and get it
I’m the same way. I skim the first ten or so reviews, skipping low effort (one sentence) and try-hard (massive checklists and essays) reviews, and try to find a negative review or two. I’m looking for what the game is good and bad at to see if it likely justifies the price.
but also because he doesn’t believe in censorship.
Which is the problem.
Games have been banned (even before the current round of christofacist hell). So what rule says we can’t have “AOC Torture Sim 2025”? Is that the same rule as “Musk Torture Sim 2025”?
Okay, so unwritten rule that you can’t sell games about murdering actual human beings.
What about “Trans Raper 2025”?
The reality is that “being apolitical” IS being political. It is an inherently libertarian and conservative standpoint where you “don’t believe government should intervene” and “things are fine the way they are”. And creating an environment like that inherently benefits chuds who are much more detached when they talk about “I identify as an attack helicopter” and are super quick to criticize people for “getting emotional” when they care about their fucking right to exist.
Which is what the steam forums ARE. I had the misfortune of trying to debug Dragon’s Dogma 2 on Linux when it launched (actually ended up doing a LOT of testing and bug reporting). The forums were a cesspool of dog whistles and bigotry because the game had the audacity to have a character creator. And in between sifting through the hate to see who else had figured out what triggered a DRM activation, you know what I found getting moderated? No, not the bigotry and hate. The people who finally said “shut the fuck up”.
“Wheaton’s Rule Of The Internet” is the kind of thing that privileged white boys love to parrot around. But once you actually spend time giving a shit about anyone other than you, it all goes out the window and you start needing actual rules. And Valve have continued to not do that until there is a threat of legal action involved.
Okay, so unwritten rule that you can’t sell games about murdering actual human beings.
I assume those would be illegal, which seems to be the metric Valve uses when deciding whether to ban something. That means you could have different bans based on region, so China will have different bans than the UK, which will have different bans than Russia.
Which is what the steam forums ARE.
Which is why publishers should be able to take over moderation if they don’t like how the community is acting. I don’t know if that’s the case, because the only time I go to the forums is from an internet search looking for a fix to a specific issue. I don’t see 99% of the nonsense here, nor do I know how moderation happens (or doesn’t happen).
Libertarianism isn’t about leaving things alone, it’s about protecting rights. Valve has every right to moderate, but if was a government, it would not, outside of speech likely to directly incite violence (e.g. planning an assassination or terrorist attack) due to the right to free speech. It seems GabeN is holding Valve to theore strict standard of a government than the looser standard of a private company.
If Valve sees the platform as similar to a government, it should see a game-specific forum as a private space controlled by the publisher. If the publisher doesn’t want to take that responsibility, they can leave it up to Valve’s standard.
I think the hands off position is correct, provided the publisher can take over moderation. Players can choose with their wallet and their engagement and decide whether to buy a game or engage with the forums based on its community moderation.
Steam has a lot of value to me partly because there’s a ton of stuff there I find distasteful, which makes me feel like there’s a better chance things I like that others don’t will be allowed on the store. If a game isn’t on the store, that’s because the publisher didn’t publish it there, not because Valve blocked it. Platforms like Steam shouldn’t be opinionated, they should be as inclusive as possible, and that includes criticism of public figures the platform may like.
Which is why publishers should be able to take over moderation if they don’t like how the community is acting.
Mordhau is a game where the official forums had a long standing “show us your kni**a” thread and was full of bigotry and hatred. They only began to moderate after enough articles about it were getting popular at a time people remembered Chivalry 2 existed.
Let alone the Black Myth Wukong dev who was “mistranslated” when talking about all of the long history of misogyny and sexism coming from a studio that outright banned reviewers from talking about “feminism”
At the end of the day, it is Valve’s house. If there is a room full of nazis then clearly they are okay with it. End of story.
Libertarianism isn’t about leaving things alone, it’s about protecting rights.
At the end of the day, it is Valve’s house. If there is a room full of nazis then clearly they are okay with it. End of story.
Would you rather Valve, with their dominant market position, be opinionated about what games and speech they allow? Or would you rather they act more like a public market, where publishers decide what is allowed in their corner of the market? Does this preference change depending on whether they align with you?
If a publisher wants to attract Nazis, let 'em. If they want to attract leftist extremists, let 'em. If a publisher wants to discourage all forms of extremism according to their own opinion of what “acceptable” means, let 'em. But the choice should be for the publisher to make, not the platform, especially if that platform has a dominant position.
Steam Forums are one of the worst hellholes I've seen on the modern internet, and Valve does nothing. Any game that gets declared a target by the post-Gamergate crowd ends up having its board seiged until it's unusable for any kind of actual discussion.
If they would, no one could ask anything pre purchase.
But I also don’t like the forum in there because of the bad atmosphere. Also I don’t know whether it is because of a special group or because the general communication style in games is toxic, dumb, aggressive and egoistical as fuck… Like in almost every ingame chat.
Every discussion board has several categories by default
General/bugs/events/trading
Simply moving the default category or locking it massively decreases trolling and appropriate category use.
The main problem with discussion trolling is that valve never deals with the rampant spam bots or people who continually post egregious material. I've seen bots last years posting update edits on every large game news post.
The only way to fix it is to lock it to game owners/account age/community engagement. But valve will never do this unless it negatively affects their image because their leadership have become deluded weirdos (exempting art lead and gabe newell)
Valve’s hands-off philosophy with almost all of their social components is one of those massive double-edged swords, as anyone who trades steam items will tell you as well.
It allows anyone to take charge in participation, but that’s EVERYONE, including those who enjoy belittling others, which sucks.
Yes, but they are almost never exercised unless it involves legal requirements - Valve’s ideals are very much “We will not bother anyone unless we have to”, which is nice for people who want to forge spaces but sucks when people show up to be shitheads.
It’s not Valve’s job to provide a liberal education and loving community for the young’uns, the only thing Valve can do is censor discussions and ban people for what they are saying. Like tiktok is doing with “Israel is controlling the U.S. through AIPAC”.
the only thing Valve can do is censor discussions and ban people for what they are saying
Except they don’t, which is the problem. Moderation of the forums is pushed off on developers, publishers and volunteers, and Valve only gets involved if they absolutely have to. It makes effective moderation of the forums dedicated to games made by small and solo devs functionally impossible, and allows for rampant abuse of the systems by publishers, such as Take Two marking negative reviews as “off-topic”.
I don’t see how it’s Valves problem. They are a marketplace and essentially rent a store front to developers. Forum moderation for a specific game should be up to the developer/publisher.
It’s like if you rented a spot in a stripmall, and you want the stripmall owner to come clean the floors when people come into your shop and piss on your floor. Don’t want to manage your own forum, then disable user posts entirely.
Now I wish Valve would implement Bluesky’s idea of blocklists.
Basically, the community would pool together to make voluntary lists of “Anti-woke mobs” that just troll through forums with rage bait, and add them to that list. It would require a level of trust, and tools to confirm each addition (eg, highlight a worst-case post from that user) but could start to clean things up.
They could also let users choose to hide posts from users below a certain Steam score, making it hard to occupy space with brand new accounts.
Argo Tuulik was a minor shareholder part of the coup of Ilmar Compos who ousted the original creators and inventors of the elysium universe using legal exploits.
Robert Kurvitz the actual creative force behind disco Elysium has been barred from telling stories of this own world because he no longer holds the copyright.
The people who are trying to sell this “successors” are the people who robbed us from learning more about this world.
Argo Tuulik along with Martin Luiga were players in Robert Kurvitz’s Elysium TTRPG sessions, perhaps less important than Robert in the creative process and world building but still definitely participating enough to be considered co-creators of the setting. Torson and Mcclane were characters created and played by Argo and Martin during the tabletop sessions, for example.
Argo Tuulik was also a writer for Disco Elysium who was hugely important to the game, and wrote several iconic parts of it like the Hardie Boys. His involvement in trusting the people who betrayed Robert is something he personally regrets, and has talked about in his extensive interviews with the 41st Precinct YouTube channel.
Love this so much. Sure the price is steep and I need to check whether I can afford it, but I love them starting off with such an artsy product rather then a game. It seems much more in common with what the ZA/UM art collective originally was
This is the stupidest game with some of the best game design ever. It’s like a purposefully crafted B movie that is so bad it’s funny, except that it’s not even actually bad, it’s just offensive and completely off the fucking wall batty.
The movie is equally stupid, bad-but-not-bad, and it was made by Uwe fucking Boll. Literally the director’s best work.
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