Week round-up: Feb 2
It's been a BAD fucking week, folks!
disinformation, deepseek, and you - Vogon
Colin's post about US reporting on DeepSeek is a good read. It's long past time for people to start considering generative AI as a tool of war and empire in the same category as, like, arms manufacture. The willingness of every major tech company to not only pivot into LLM/GAN work but also to adopt the fascist principles of the current US government should tell you everything you need to know about the future goals of these tech oligarchs. And, of course, you should consider any news article comparing the relative qualities of various nations' chatbots to be highly suspicious. This is embarrassing and stupid and I am certain that you will shortly see these tools wielded more and more often in service of the US government's various other fascistic campaigns, including the persecution of immigrants, trans people, etc. You should treat every AI company and its self-promotional materials the way you treat a military contractor.
Chemistry in Project Amble - Harris Powell-Smith
Harris wrote a great breakdown of all the ways they've simulated attraction and romance in their past narrative games - and their plans for the next project.
On quality, polish, fidelity - Bruno Dias
I've seen a lot of indie devs and indie dev fans over the years rail against "polish" on social media. I've found a lot of these conversations frustrating, because the people having them frequently use the word "polish" to mean different things from one another. While I can understand and appreciate the punk desire to avoid "putting the money on screen" - to avoid the kind of graphical fidelity that "looks expensive" - I've always found the insistence that polish is itself somehow evil or not desired to be ignorant and frustating. These are different things. Many of the games that you might consider to be a perfect punk indie game are extremely polished - but they have different artistic and ideological goals than, say, Horizon Zero Dawn does.
So I really like Bruno's breakdown of the difference between a highly polished, low fidelity game - like Undertale, for example - and a highly polished, high fidelity game - which I think encompasses the type of thing that people online are really complaining about when they complain about the expectation of "polish." I think a lot of this discourse comes from people who haven't actually seen a commercial videogame team break down bugs and polish tasks at the end of development. Going through that process myself taught me a lot about goals-setting. What are your fidelity goals, actually? Why are they your goals? Do you have any fidelity goals which the player would never be able to perceive? I personally love it when a game has a ton of visible artifice, so a lot of my artistic goals tend in the low-fidelity direction.