millie
@millie@beehaw.org
- Comment on GamesIndustry.biz: Microsoft's mystifying mismanagement 2 days ago:
Unfortunately, a lot of people blindly believe in systems and authorities. It doesn’t matter how many times they’re shown that companies give zero fucks and will light everything on fire at a whim, they think they’re rational actors who will do what’s responsible for their product, their customers, and their employees.
Clearly, that assumption isn’t remotely true, but they’d rather roll their eyes at anyone who doesn’t take it on faith than risk having their world view altered.
- Comment on A cyberattack forces a big US health system to divert ambulances and take records offline 3 days ago:
I drive a cab. Yesterday I was trying to take a credit card payment and the square app kept screwing up, so I literally had to drive somewhere else for a signal and reset my phone. While waiting for it to reset, my fare and I commiserated on how much easier it would be if I could just take an imprint with a carbon sheet.
It made me think about all the ways that it’s not necessarily a great idea to digitize everything and make it all dependent on technology functioning properly. There’s a lot of stuff that simply didn’t need power 30 years ago that absolutely requires it to function at all now.
I keep notes in my phone for my taxi fares. I’ve convinced myself that it’s easier because I don’t need to keep track of a notepad, but I’m realizing that it’s not. It’s actually easier and preferable to have a single-purpose analogue device than it is to have to take the time to access another device that has all these other conflicting distractions and go get my notebook app. Then I have to wait for it to load and sync, then I have to wait for my keyboard to come up. Then, depending on how my phone is feeling, I have to wait for it to catch up with my typing.
It’s needless complexity and bottle-necking at a single device, and the more complicated it gets the worse it seems gets at actually being a phone.
Maybe we don’t want everything to be hackable, traceable, power-dependent, and susceptible to data loss.
- Comment on Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together? 1 week ago:
I’m going for very specific look of stylized visuals that’ll play well into my animation experience with Flash.
But yeah, on the music side of things, I honestly think I want to try to find some folks to play with some time soon. I’m still shoring up my performance end of things, but playing some bass and/or keyboard and/or guitar with a band would probably help my ear a lot and also give me some folks that I could have a musical understanding with who could help me with the soundtrack.
I’d honestly love to release a sort of grungy album. Most of what I’ve been composing seems to lean into experimental guitar stuff, but it’s all still pretty raw.
- Comment on Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together? 1 week ago:
I use Trello a bit, but not consistently. I’ll use it at the beginning of a project to kind of map things out, then come back a few times to kind of check in with where I’m at and see if there’s anything I’m not thinking of. I also have a ton of note files just laying all over my computer, my discord, and my notesnook account. I used to use Google Docs, but I don’t really want them scraping my stuff for their AI before I even get to finish it.
Honestly I just kind of operate like a blob. I expand in a bunch of different directions on a project a little bit at a time until it starts to come together. Stuff percolates and another piece will fall into place and I’ll get a burst of momentum. Eventually I’ll notice I’m banging my head against something that doesn’t work and I’ll realize I’m looking in the wrong place or I don’t have the right thing yet and I’ll work on some other component.
A lot of stuff just kind of comes to me at random times and I try to get it out before I forget it. But it also involves a lot of like sort of flow state thinking keeping track of how different pieces of a thing connect with one another.
But also like, I feel like you kind of have to be comfortable just having a bunch of files full of concepts that don’t necessarily go anywhere immediately? Like, you need to be ready to just throw some shit out there, see how it works, chop massive pieces off of it or throw it away entirely. The moment you let yourself be self-conscious about your work or worry if you’re “really going in the right direction” you’re fucked. I mean, you can have that moment I guess as long as you don’t stay in it, but it’s the drive and the confidence that gets the actual thing finished whether anybody sees it or not.
Once it’s done I feel like that’s its own other game entirely. Like, I have some guerilla marketing ideas and some former contacts I can try to get on the radar of, but that’s another phase of things. I can’t worry too much about that while I’m over here in playtesting, tweaking, and adding play-informed mechanics.
Like right now we’re just basically playing a game and I’ll stop suddenly in the middle of it and be like oh I need to add something, and I take some notes and then we keep going. A lot of the time at the end of the session I know pretty much what I need to do; whether a mechanic is too complicated or fiddly or not robust enough or needs something else to compensate for it or whatever, it becomes evident when you watch it play out.
I’m not really sure how I’d ever get anything done if I was too focused on the organization of it, to be honest. I give myself enough hats without trying to also be a hat rack.
- Comment on Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together? 1 week ago:
I drive a cab and get paid very little to basically drive around and help people. Like, the job is to drive people from point A to point B, but I try to do more than that, and help people who need it along the way. I carry a lot of stuff around that I’m not really paid for and I try to go the extra mile for people.
If the projects I’m working on pan out and I manage to get to a place where I have more resources, I plan to use that as a way of making other small steps. Setting up a coop instead of chasing money, releasing a game license that allows independent producers to do their own thing. Things like that. Literally just leaving the door open for people instead of slamming it shut.
I don’t really have any intent to code software outside of games, but I’d like to empower others to be able to make the things they want to make and not just feed some big parasitic company with it.
- Comment on Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together? 1 week ago:
Grow a bunch of labor bushes and make it incredibly clear that it’s not about them being owned, but about them being labor bushes.
- Comment on Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together? 1 week ago:
People literally buy into the idea that they wouldn’t know how to do anything if they weren’t being told what to do. They think that value comes from above.
They think that when a company sells them raspberries, they invented the raspberry bush. They don’t realize that the raspberries were already there. They certainly don’t realize that they themselves are another kind of bush. Or that the labor bush operates without a company to own it and sell its labor berries.
- Comment on Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together? 1 week ago:
The tabletop system is intended to be modular, with subsystems that can easily be added, removed, or tuned for different genres. The initial playtest I did was in a zombie survival setting, currently we’re doing a campaign that’s got a bit more of a Shadowrunny type feel, mixing technological dystopia and magic. The idea is to put out a core book in those settings as well as a fantasy setting and a space opera setting, so people can mix and match subsystems and do whatever they like with it.
I applied programming concepts to the design of the mechanics themselves in a way that I hope makes them more intuitive and tries to maintain a steady flow of tension and release without a bunch of pausing to check stuff once you know the system.
I don’t want to give too much of the details away, but I do plan to release a system resource document. And it’ll be released under an anti-corporate license, so other small creators can make modules for it, but big companies will have to shell out if they want to play ball.
Once that’s ready to go I have a couple of video games planned using the same system. One of them ties heavily into themes of abuse and autonomy, the other is about time travel. I have some of the early stages of the art and some shaders and stuff done for these, and have set up a few mechanics, but they’re still kind of on the back burner. I’ve been teaching myself music theory and composition so the soundtrack doesn’t become an afterthought, and I feel like there’s still something conceptual I’m missing at the core of the visual design. I’ll get there, though.
- Comment on Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together? 1 week ago:
Tryin’! I gotta put out a tabletop RPG first. Smaller market, plus I need to finish the rule set to use it in my games!
- Comment on Am I the only person that feels that retro games are better? 1 week ago:
I dunno. I pulled Septera Core out of a bargain bin shoved together with some forgettable mech game for $10, and it was pretty great.
I don’t think effort is what makes the difference. Games now are designed increasingly in ways that are less ‘risky’ in terms of corporate measures of user satisfaction than they used to be. It’s the kind of measure of satisfaction that sees a quest marker constantly showing your destination as clearly preferable to having to actually look at the world and find your way around.
I’ve run into this with friends of mine who are into modding before. When they see one mechanic that negates another mechanic, or that degrades the output quality of another mechanic, they see it as wasted code. To me, that’s the essence of the tension and release in a game. You create a state the player wants to get to, then you put shit in their way and provide them with various ways of solving your obstacles. That’s basically narrative driven gaming in a nutshell, an interaction between barriers and ways of negating those barriers.
But like, I think that may be part of what’s missing sometimes in pushing these more like real-world convenience-oriented features akin to a GPS app. If you’re making a GPS app, you want it to work perfectly, but in a game it’s kind of more fun if it’s got a little bit of jank in it. Not the actual code, obviously, but the player’s interaction with the mechanic in the game world. A straightforward trip from point A to point B isn’t much of a story.
Honestly, I think it’s just more of the kind of watering down that’s inevitable as you get too much money wrapped up in a project. Corporate infrastructures and IPOs aren’t conducive to art. Or quality in anything else, for that matter. It doesn’t just affect what decisions are made in a game’s development, either. It affects how people are educated, who gets hired, how labor is divided.
There’s definitely something to be said for the effects of nostalgia and survivorship bias on the appearance of retro gaming in a modern context, but there also have been major changes that aren’t just about the decisions of individual companies.
- Comment on Am I the only person that feels that retro games are better? 1 week ago:
There definitely is a lot of crap that came out back in the day that we tend to forget, but there were also very different popular strategies for game making.
One of the most significant for me is the degradation of choice in RPGs. Many, certainly not all, of the RPGs I played as a kid and as a teenager would have elements of their story that could diverge to some degree based on your actions. The most typical results were things like a different ending or an otherwise hidden scene. Silent Hill was a good example of this. But you’d also have a lot of games where your choices immediately and totally altered the way things play out, like Planescape: Torment or Baldur’s Gate. Your choices could affect not only the ending, but a whole lot on the way. Hell, the first Fallout game served up some major unforeseen consequences for an action that on the surface seems like a pretty straightforwardly good idea.
But ever since Mass Effect I’ve noticed an emptiness in choice making, and recently I saw an article that showed me why.
If you follow the branching choices in those early games like a flow chart, the choices on it were often significant divergences that don’t ever meet back up with the original iteration of the quest. But modern design techniques try to be efficient, so you’ve got a branching point at the point of choice, then it rejoins the main quest, and then later on it branches off briefly to check what you did and react to it, before going back to the main quest as though nothing happened.
It’s such a letdown. If you only play once and never save scum it’ll seem fine, but the lack of depth becomes readily apparent so quickly. It’s not like nobody’s still doing big branches too, but you can tell when they default to this and it feels so empty.
I’ve enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3, but one of the things I notice, especially in act 3, is how slapped together some of these branching choices are. Also, as cute as the die rolling mechanic is, the constant clear and random success/failure state of all branching choices just leads to endless save scumming. The game doesn’t handle it like a divergence in one way or the other, it straight up tells you you failed.
In D&D the die rolls are fun and tense, but they don’t become this totally separate gambling subgame. Sometimes it’s important to get a bad die roll, and sometimes the result in terms of fun is way better than getting a good die roll. I never got that impression from BG3. It felt like a bad die roll meant missing content rather than getting different content, and I think that’s largely because of the literal framing of the die rolling UI and the associated sounds. A more neutral UI where you don’t know the DC of what you’re rolling for and it doesn’t scream at you that your roll wasn’t good enough might let people RP out the failure a little better. Comedy doesn’t hurt either, and is a great tool for DMs seeking to alleviate some of the pain of a bad roll.
Anyway, point being, I think there are some problems with modern game design philosophy that stem from seeking efficiency and greater visual fidelity and audio complexity over engaging game design. Shitty graphics and limited processing power mean you have to make decisions to bring the player into the world and get them to forget that their character’s head is like 8 pixels or whatever. So they have to exploit humanity’s adeptness at pattern recognition, but they also have to make what they’ve got count. They’re not overloading it with bloat and random branches just for the hell of it. A branching story was a branching story because they really wanted it to be.
I’m probably like 50% talking out of my ass, but I feel like if we had Tim Caine here with us he’d agree with me. :D
- Comment on ESA says members won’t support any plan for libraries to preserve games online 3 weeks ago:
If they’re bring ripped and preserved, it doesn’t really matter if they work yet, in an archival sense.
- Comment on ESA says members won’t support any plan for libraries to preserve games online 3 weeks ago:
Only the ones that don’t get cracked.
- Comment on The Man Who Killed Google Search 3 weeks ago:
I wonder if we’ll figure out how to stop the constant reaching for quarterly growth before it causes our civilization to collapse.
- Comment on Tales Of The Shire's First Trailer Reveals It Is Middle-Earth Animal Crossing With Hobbits - Game Informer 3 weeks ago:
This looks adorable. The character models are a little weird looking, but I wanna play a little hobbit skipping around the Shire! :D
- Comment on Fallout Show, so bad that no one will remember it in 3 months 4 weeks ago:
I couldn’t wade through the first episode of the Last of Us. I watched this entire thing in one sitting and have now seen most of it twice. It deserves a decent score on RT.
- Comment on Fallout Show, so bad that no one will remember it in 3 months 4 weeks ago:
This person has zero IMDB credits. Call me after making literally anything even remotely approaching the quality of anything Bethesda has ever sneezed out.
Does he maybe have some semblance of a point about NCR and New Vegas? Sure, but if that makes it a ‘bad show’ that ‘no one will watch’, please let me point you at Star Wars, which jettisoned its own extremely substantial extended universe to the chagrin of long time fans and is doing fine.
Can’t you just, like, look at it like anime or like Douglas Adams?
Yes, we get multiple iterations of more or less the same story in different mediums. No, they aren’t exactly the same. Is that a problem? Does the Ranma 1/2 TV series have to match the OVH or they’re both shit?
Do I have to choose only the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide books, or the radio series, or the show, or the movie? Am I not allowed to enjoy both?
It’s it really more economically viable to make a living being an entitled and cynical jackass about other people’s work than to go make your own?
- Comment on Why Large Language Models Like ChatGPT Treat Black- and White-Sounding Names Differently 4 weeks ago:
Granted, I don’t assume that LLMs are currently equivalent to a lesser general AI, but like, won’t we always be able to say that they’re just generating the next token? Like, what level of complexity of ‘choice’ determines the difference between LLM and general AI? Or is that not the criteria?
Are we talking some internal record of tracking specific reasoning? A long-term record that it can access between sessions? Some prescribed degree of autonomy within the systems it’s connected to? Introspection?
Because to me “find the most reasonable next token for the current context” sounds a lot like how animals work. We make our way through a complex sea of sensory information and stored information to produce our next action, over and over again.
I was watching Dr Kevin Mitchell discuss free will with Adam Conover recently, and a lot of their discussion touched on consciousness as basically the choice-making process itself. It’s worth watching, and I won’t try to summarize it, but it does make me wonder how big of a gap there is between ‘come up with the next token’ and ‘live’.
It does make me suspect that some iteration of LLMs may form the foundation of a more complex proper AI that’s not just choosing the next token, but has some form of awareness of the process behind it.
- Comment on The race to decarbonise the world’s economy risks repeating the mistakes of the colonial era by building industries on forced and child labour, rights advocate warns 4 weeks ago:
Or maybe shouldn’t come into being in the first place?
Billionaires are a symptom of a system that’s eating itself. Taxation might be able to offset it, but the actual power needs to be broken up, and both laws and attitudes about unchecked growth need to change.
We’ve ended up in a situation that’s fundamentally tainted by capitalism. Every company, every product, is being slaughtered like a pig for quarterly profits. It happens over and over again. Some new thing comes out that seems great, it gets bought up or goes public, and it turns to shit.
We have to have the nerve to point at it, call it out, and figure out how to stop it before it kills us all.
- Comment on Why I Lost Faith in Kagi 4 weeks ago:
The responses kinda remind me of Linus Sebastian.
- Comment on Kobo's new color E Ink eReaders start at only $150 5 weeks ago:
Only. Cool ad. 🙄
- Comment on Open world games, need recommendations 5 weeks ago:
You might really enjoy DayZ. The public servers are pretty brutal, but if you find a comfortable RP server you can settle in and really enjoy exploring the landscape. Once you’re used to the mechanics it’s so smooth.
Stereo headphones or even like monitors make hunting a lot of fun, listening to distant sounds trying to find a deer or boar is a lot of fun. And once you’re used to dealing with zombies and the sthough.l mechanics, crafting and all that, it really opens up.
Plus the ability to expand it with modding is pretty extensive. We’ve got some neat stuff on our own server (though not much pop atm), and I’ve seen others that do some next level stuff like player vampires and werewolves and stuff.
Even just the vanilla game is absolutely gorgeous though. If you like exploring, scavenging, and crafting, especially with friends, it’s kind of perfect.
- Comment on Still wondering why people from Alaska didn't post about the eclipse 5 weeks ago:
We mustn’t dwell. No, not today! Not on Rex Manning day!
- Comment on "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." 5 weeks ago:
Honestly, if I could get Kagi to slurp up all my Google data I’d probably switch. I don’t like having it sold to third parties, but it saves a ton of time when used for the actual reason they ought to have it in the first place.
- Comment on Roblox Studio boss: children making money on the platform isn't exploitation, it's a gift 5 weeks ago:
It seems like they’re not just profiting on children, they’re setting up a system in which work is exchanged for a roblox company scrip and then charging them that same scrip to advertise their game. They also take a cut. So if a game gets a little traction but doesn’t immediately blow up, there’s a built in incentive to put the money right back into roblox.
Shady. Is it not enough to brush uncomfortably close to child labor laws with an army of child modders creating your value? You really have to turn around and loop them into an exploitative model where you get paid like 3 times before they see a cent? And even then they hold their money hostage until the kid manages to save $1000 rather than spending it on ads and more roblox stuff, that or they need a premium subscription so roblox gets paid 4 times.
Like, it’s illegal to have child labor so therefore it’s a foregone conclusion that whatever you’re doing won’t be child labor, so you might as well do some crazy shit that an employer could never get away with?
Honestly tracks with modern-day capitalism.
- Comment on "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." 5 weeks ago:
- Sounds like an extra step
- Damn. If only you knew how to ask politely.
- Comment on "No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again." 5 weeks ago:
Okay, but it doesn’t know where I am. When I type ‘dunkin’, Google doesn’t just know I want hours for a dunkin donuts, it knows which two or three stores I’m probably looking at hours for and it does it without me having to specify.
If I’m looking stuff up on my phone or just want a quick answer, I actually do want the context of all that data on me. I like that when I type the word ‘glamour’ it knows I’m probably thinking of the bard subclass, and that when I type ‘Conan’ it knows I probably mean Exiles, not O’Brien. I mean like, I know it doesn’t know these things, but it fills in that gap much faster.
I do like the way their search is layed out for doing something more complex, though. It really is a better designed search engine, but I feel like a search engine is the one place I want data collection of some kind, literally because it benefits me.
- Comment on Cable lobby vows “years of litigation” to avoid bans on blocking and throttling 1 month ago:
Yeah, that makes sense!I’ve typically found that most of the opportunities I run into that have some promise are through connections more often than directly applying somewhere. Whether that be for housing, jobs, or whatever.
That or like local places that want local hires; but the bigger the job pool the iffier.
Funny how we seem to be learning across the board, in every sector, that the thing we’ve all been sold on being a measure of positive economic activity is actually incredibly toxic to ever being able to have anything nice.
- Comment on 60 Percent Of Playtime In 2023 Went To 6-Year-Old Or Older Games, New Data Shows 1 month ago:
Also, like, with every game with private servers, the private servers are pretty much universally better than the public ones. Someone close to the server has to care enough to put the thing up, which goes a long way past some company opening a few hundred for money.
- Comment on Cable lobby vows “years of litigation” to avoid bans on blocking and throttling 1 month ago:
Ahh, okay. I think I missed or inserted a negative!