Hmm do y’all still believe the video game industry needed to make cuts and fire workers to the degree they did this year because of overshooting growth with covid? Yes I am sure it is part of it but why is nobody talking about the AI elephant in the room. The video game industry is in the midst of trying to strong arm workers into accepting a fundamental reduction in their quality of life because they can use the threat of replacing workers with AI. It doesn’t matter if it actually works to replace workers with AI, it only matters that it appears fairly plausible for it to pay off for massive companies trying to extract every bit of profit from video games they can.
heck no but I just googled it and check this out there is still a midtown madness mod file website! its got tons of cars and levels www.mm2x.com pretty cool people take the time to preserve this stuff and keep it up
There was a lot of custom modded vehicles for a Midtown Madness 2 and I loved digitally hoarding them and trying them all out as a kid. There was one modded vehicle that was an 18 wheeler tractor that had its speed adjusted to be totally borked fast (not just “that’s cheating” fast, more like “I’m not sure the game engine can handle this” fast). You would hold forward on the truck for a second or two and then let go and then you would zoom forward and get launched half way across the map. Some of my formative experiences in life with the world of janky mods that do hilarious stuff.
Ok, well retailers are also all saying shoplifting is destroying their profits and causing them to close stores and that is all nonsense. Why should I take these video game companies at their word?
The layoffs are largely because of the class war going on, they are a part of essentially a broader collective threat to labor from the ruling class, but also I think the video game industry is blatantly trying to do what the movie industry tried to do with AI it is just there isn’t an industry union to fight it. The execs are saying “we can train AI on all the past and present labor of our artists and then just fire the artists!”. They aren’t stupid enough to commit fully to this strategy so soon after the labor strikes in the movie industry, but mark my words this is just testing the waters.
I think they can particularly get away with this because gamers tend to be the kind of people who will scream “skill issue” or naively parrot a talking point at you if you bring up the political consequences of AI being used to consolidate power in the ruling class. As a result there is almost zero actual solidarity between fans and creators in this industry.
Either workers in the video game industry will lose a historic amount of power (and thus benefits, job security, pay etc…) in the next couple of years or there will be a historic amount of labor organizing. Those are the two possibilities. It doesn’t really matter if the AI actually functions as a replacement for the artists for this happen, the narrative not the truth is the important part in undercutting the quality of life of video game industry workers. Once the damage is done companies will say that they maybe oversold the potential of AI to replace artists to their investors but even when they do they will never reverse the cuts they made to their workers. It will just become the new norm.
Even if in the best case for workers, using AI ends up being a frustrating waste of time for video game development, massive video game companies will force their workers to use shitty AI tools as part of their development process in order to jam reality into fitting the narrative they used to justify cutting investment into their workers. That is a small price to pay for the opportunity to fundamentally change the power dynamics between video game industry workers and the owners of the companies.
People really really reallllly want to believe there are laws of grammar/language like there are laws of physics and it is honestly kind of hilarious.
The power of language comes from there being no rules or laws, language is just the sum of what people choose to write and say. You can impose patterns on what people tend to write and say, but ultimately it is no different than looking into the night sky and deciding a couple of stars makes the shape of a lion and believing you have determined something fundamental about those stars.
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead with the Sky Islands mod Absolutely best survival game I have ever played by a long mile. There is just so much time and love behind this game.
Deep Rock Galactic A flawless game
Halo Infinite multiplayer it is actually good now!
Battlebit So good to have a battlefield not owned and ruined by EA
One of most insufferable aspects of video game culture (pc gaming in particular) other than the relentless toxic masculinity from insecure nerds is an obsessive focus on having powerful hardware and shitting on people who think they are getting a good experience when they don’t have good hardware.
The point is to own a computer that other people don’t have so you can play a game and get an experience other people don’t have, the point isn’t to celebrate a diversity of gaming experiences and value accessibility for those without the money for a nice computer. It really doesn’t matter if these people are intending to do this consciously or not, this is a story as old as time. It is the same exact bullshit as guitar people who only think special exotic or vintage guitars are beautiful, claim to absolutely love guitar but never once in their life have stopped to think about how much more beautiful it is that any random chump can get an objectively wonderful sounding guitar for a couple of hundred dollars than it is that they own some stupid special edition guitar with a magic paint job that cost as much as my shitty car.
Good thing these people don’t fully dictate the flow of all of video game development, but they will never ever learn because this is the kind of pattern that arises not from conscious intention but rather from people uninterested in critically examining their own motivations.
It is the same damn nauseating thing with photography too….
I think it takes significantly more mental extrapolation between frames and general adjustment to your eyes not receiving frames at as quick of a rate but if the frame rate is fairly stable the human brain adapts.
The brains visual processing is so powerful that the difference between 30fps and 144fps on paper is much smaller in reality, especially if your brain has already learned the muscle memory of “upscaling” a low framerate to work with its perception of a 3D environment.
Competitively, for games like arena shooters or rocket league the frame rate is real but for most games it is a matter of the smoothness occurring on the physical monitor screen or it occurring on some level of mental image processing. What someone sees who has let the mental skill of processing a lower frame rate atrophy is a temporary sensation like putting on colored glasses for awhile, then taking them off and seeing everything washed out in a particular color. Weird, uncomfortable, but temporary.
The real problem is inconsistent framerate where the clock your brain has gotten used to receiving new visual information with the arrival of each new frame of visual information is slow enough to be on the edge of perception but keeps speeding up or slowing down chaotically. Your brain can’t just train a static layer of mental image processing to smoothen that out. Time almost feels like it is slowing up and speeding down a little, and it becomes emotionally discouraging that every time something fun happens the framerate dips and reality becomes choppier.
I have been recommending Farm Together as a co-op game a lot lately because it is so damn simple but so good. The controls are immediately accessible, the game doesn’t give a flying fuck about stressing you out but at the same time there are a lot of systems to discover (making money isn’t trivial in this game) and the crops take realtime to grow so it naturally sets up a simple ritual with your co-op partner to play. There is not really any story to get into, but at the same time this makes it a bit more accessible to someone who isn’t already invested in video games since the gameplay loop is so immediate and unframed by any cutscenes, story setup, long tutorials or forced activities. You pick it up and start playing immediately, you decide completely how to interface with the game whether it be crunching out the numbers to figure out which crop, fish etc… to go for to maximize money, just zoning out watering, planting and harvesting or spending all your time placing cosmetic buildings and props to make your farm look cool. Want to take a break and just watch your partner play? Sure! Walk away for a half an hour if you want, you will probably have a bunch of crops waiting for you to harvest once you come back. The game really doesn’t have an opinion on how you should play it and it is great.
(It looks like a game like farmville, but there is zero manipulative microtransaction crap, just buy the game and play)
If you want more story and thematic framing, you absolutely have to try Stardew Valley, it is a co-op classic for a reason.
Also if you liked the idea of Overcooked but found it too focused on stressful energy that isn’t necessarily fun for everyone than check out PlateUp! YOU design the kitchen in plateup and add various components to it as you progress. It puts a lot more agency in the players hands instead of throwing players through a chaotic theme park ride that overcooked feels like in the harder levels. It also brings strategizing about kitchen design with your co-op partner into the gameplay loop which is great fun. You can also automate some stuff, so players can dig into that if they want to avoid feeling like the game is so focused on stressful action.
God I miss Unreal Tournament, why can’t we have multiplayer games like this again? Just a silly fun multiplayer shooter with lots of options on how to play and no greedy shit on top.
well we do it is called xonotic and it has the best rocket launcher in any game hands down, it comes out of the quake lineage tho