mrmaplebar
@mrmaplebar@fedia.io
- Comment on Vince Zampella, video game developer behind 'Call of Duty' franchise, killed in mountain road crash 6 days ago:
Fuck man...
- Comment on Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. 6 days ago:
Ooof. And it's only going to get more expensive when the AI industry is no longer able to afford to subsidize it with buttloads of investment money.
- Comment on What free to play games can run smoothly on my old laptop? 1 week ago:
Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart - A super fun and challenging Mario Kart style game made in the original Doom engine.
CatsEyeXI - An unofficial, custom Final Fantasy XI MMO server with fast leveling, solo play and many quality of life features. (Following guides is still recommended, because it's a complicated and vague game at the best of times!)
ETLegacy - A free to play version of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a fun and fast team-based first person shooter.
- Comment on Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. 1 week ago:
To be perfectly honest, I'd still be against it as long as it is trained on the stolen work of regular people.
Not only is it devoid of artistry and creativity, generative AI as it is today is cultural exploitation and plagiarism on an unprecedented industrial scale. It's incredibly unethical on top of being slop.
- Comment on Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. 1 week ago:
We were told that games were "art", and that this new "creative" medium that we grew up with really mattered. Many of us (gamers and gamedevs alike) happy agreed...
But where is the artistry in outsourcing your assets to the big tech slop machine? What is creative about outsourcing your design, code and storytelling to an LLM?
Is it easy? Sure... Quick? Maybe... Cheap? For now, while big tech is happy to prop it up with other people's money.
But it's not cool and it's not "art". Like every piss filtered Studio Ghibli knockoff, there's no artistry or creativity in it whatsoever. (They know that too, which is why companies are trying to hide or understate their use of AI.)
I just hope that they aren't naively expecting people to pay full price, or even at all, for AI slop games.
- Comment on Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage 1 week ago:
Putting aside the massive ethical and legal implications of blatantly exploiting human culture and works in the name of corporate profits...
I really hope they aren't expecting us mere mortals to pay for AI generated games and media.
Because if I end up losing my job to a robot that was trained on my own stolen words, images, code and sounds, paying $70 for some slop is right down at the bottom of the list of things I want to do.
- Comment on Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage 1 week ago:
Sure, they could have used Mickey Mouse, a gray box, or a low poly model whipped in Blender in 5 minutes... After all, that's what people have been doing for like 30 years. None of those things would have required the mass industrialized exploitation of millions of people's work and culture. None of those things would add value to some tech bros business.
As a side note, something tells me that if they had used Mickey for their placeholder art it wouldn't have "accidentally" found its way into the final game.
Plus... how do I know they didn't use AI as the basis for all of the art in their game? For all I know, AI was central to setting the aesthetic of this game due to being at the very front end of their production pipeline. Hard to know, especially when they are so sketchy about it. (At least Larian were bold/stupid enough to admit that the concepts for their game start with AI.)
It cheapens the game and undermines whatever work they actually did.
Calling your game "indie" when you're actively exploiting artists to make it is like calling your Etsy store "diy" despite knowing that it's a bunch of Chinese dropped shipped junk made by children in a sweatshop. It's disingenuous at best.
- Comment on Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage 1 week ago:
Unless the model that they used was trained entirely on artwork that was public domain, creative commons, licensed or owned, then its basically certain that it wasn't used responsibly.
You cannot make something on a foundation of someone else's exploitation and be considered responsible, ethical, original or independent.
- Comment on US government uses Halo images in a call to 'destroy' immigration, Microsoft declines to comment 1 month ago:
- Comment on 1 month ago:
All signs are that we are getting the new VR headset first.
Yeah :(
And it is probably in Valve's best interest to let other people drive the HTPC consoles. They are not going to be cheap since "1024 at 40 FPS" doesn't scale all that well to a 50 inch 4k display. So let other integrators deal with that. Just release the steam controller 2 already.
I'm not sure this is a good idea, personally. The original Steam Machines and the ROG Xbox Ally are pretty good indicators that it's not very smart to rely on OEMs to drive major change in the PC market.
The current gen consoles are basically already just standard AMD x86-64 PCs that just happen to be running locked down proprietary OSes. So it really seems like low hanging fruit to me for Valve to just put out a price-competitive Steam Machine "console" akin to the Steam Deck that boots into SteamOS and otherwise is a normal PC that with a normal UEFI bootloader. That seems both technically easier and cheaper to do than putting out yet another prohibitively expensive VR/AR device.
As a fan of Linux and FOSS, my main concern is that Valve misses a big window of opportunity by failing to capitalize on the current weakness of Xbox and Windows during this awkward transition period from traditional consoles to PCs.
When Valve put out the original Steam Machines, people didn't understand why they would want a computer in their living room that didn't run Windows. But now the Steam Deck has shown people that Valve can deliver a console-like PC gaming experience that gives people the best of both worlds. SteamOS has a compatibility disadvantage, but a huge UX advantage. They've finally sold people on the concept that Windows is not the alpha and omega of PC gaming. But I think Microsoft understands that too, and the only reason that they're doing what they're doing today is because they clearly see SteamOS as a huge threat in the living room.
But as the saying goes, you gotta "strike while the iron is hot".
So if Valve sits back and allows Windows to continue to catch up to SteamOS in terms of gaming UX, then I think it's very possible that Microsoft could sell a lot of Windows-Xboxes, killing a lot of the interest in Steam Machines.
And I'll say that you can get a really nice AMD NUC HTPC for under 500 bucks that can handle "steam deck games" on a TV. And I THINK I have a way to get Display Port -> HDMI 2.1 that I need to sit down and test.
True, I can build my own Steam Machine by just throwing Bazzite on just about anything that's reasonably capable. I've been tempted, I'm just waiting to see what Valve has up their sleeve.
But it's not me that I'm worried about. Mass appeal comes from a company like Valve or Microsoft putting out a dedicated gaming box for a decent price that comes preinstalled with a gaming OS. I just hope it's Valve and Linux, and not Microsoft and Windows...
- Comment on Microsoft's OpenAI losses hidden as part of $4.7 billion 'other' expense — stake in AI company still doesn't turn a profit as companies grapple with ongoing contract negotiation 1 month ago:
Putting aside my ethical and cultural issues with training generative AI for a second, I have no idea what the appeal of this stuff is as a product.
Like, if they want me to pay a monthly subscription, what do they expect me to do with it? I have zero interest in chatting to a computer that's not thinking and is just stringing together words based on probabilistic bias, and I have zero interest in making or consuming AI-generated media. I don't want an AI "girlfriend", nor do I want an AI to play a video game for me. Finally, I don't see the value in having an AI tell me things that it summarized from various internet sources when we all know that the chances of it "hallucinating" (aka: making shit up or generally being totally wrong) is extremely high and basically unavoidable.
So, aside from the basic novelty of talking to your computer, what the hell is the point of all this?
Personally I wouldn't pay $2/month for LLMs, let alone $200/month...
- Comment on 1 month ago:
It's starting to get annoying waiting for Valve to announce a Steam Machine and having to listen to Microsoft's future Xbox-as-a-PC plans instead.