Neir Automata had pretty good graphics, but nothing groundbreaking.

The soundtrack is fucking phenomenal.

The few times they’ve pursued more gritty realism (Twilight Princess, for example) are all the times that haven’t aged as well.

Twilight Princess came out after Wind Waker, but Wind Waker obviously aged far better.

Maybe it’s just me, but I like the style it’s presented in, and I have major adblockers in service so I’m not sure how it’s a drug fueled hellscape. It basically becomes a normal NYT article after a half-page of scrolling. Not all their readers are familiar with these games, so the NYT is doing its diligence by trying to show what they’re talking about, so their readers have a frame of reference. (Remember the NYT is actually aimed at an investor class who owns a second house in the Hamptons and may not be gamers at all. Go look at their Lifestyle section sometime.)

I think it’s fine but I guess I’m in the minority, but also maybe it’s less worse for me because of uBlock/Pihole/Bypass Paywalls Clean.

The worst thing is that some brilliant sound design is held back by some folks who will buy a top of the line video card but some cheap shitty headphones.

I’ve seen a lot of cool indie games pop up out of heavily modified classic idTech engines like the DOOM and Quake engines. They’re definitely not high fidelity, but a lot of them scratch an itch that slower paced modern games can’t seem to scratch.

Shout out to Borderlands 1, one of the last game to have some of the best comedy delivered by text, instead of audio.

I actually am in the minority of preferring 1 over 2 because 2 is just so fucking loud. Handsome Jack in my fucking ear for hours on end, refusing to shut the fuck up and let me play the game.

I much much much preferred the quiet reading of Borderlands 1.

Capitalism is just feudalism with fancier technology.

Probably is, but I get why the other fella was confused by this.

Until right this moment I was under the impression that Genshin was literally just a phone game. Looks like I was wrong.

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/genshin-impact

Look, I’m gonna be real with you, the pool of writers who are exceptionally good at specifically writing for games is really damn small.

Everyone is trained on novels and movies, and so many games try to hamfist in a three-act arc because they haven’t figured out that this is an entirely different medium and needs its own set of rules for how art plays out.

Traditional filmmaking ideas includes stuff like the direction a character is moving on the screen impacting what the scene “means.” Stuff like that is basically impossible to cultivate in, say, a first or third-person game where you can’t be sure what direction characters will be seen moving. Thus, games need their own narrative rules.

I think the first person to really crack those rules was Yoko Taro, that guy knows how to write for a game specifically.

There are a number of theories why gamers have turned their backs on realism. One hypothesis is that players got tired of seeing the same artistic style in major releases.

Whoosh.

We learned all the way back in the Team Fortress 2 and Psychonauts days that hyper-realistic graphics will always age poorly, whereas stylized art always ages well. (Psychonauts aged so well that its 16-year-later sequel kept and refined the style, which went from limitations of hardware to straight up muppets)

There’s a reason Overwatch followed the stylized art path that TF2 had already tread, because the art style will age well as technology progresses.

Anyway, I thought this phenomena was well known. Working within the limitations of the technology you have available can be pushed towards brilliant design. It’s like when Twitter first appeared, I had comedy-writing friends who used the limitation of 140 characters as a tool for writing tighter comedy, forcing them to work within a 140 character limitation for a joke.

Working within your limitations can actually make your art better, which just complements the fact that stylized art lasts longer before it looks ugly.

Others speculate that cinematic graphics require so much time and money to develop that gameplay suffers, leaving customers with a hollow experience.

Also, as others have pointed out, it’s capitalism and the desire for endless shareholder value increase year after year.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a perfect example. A technical achievement that is stunningly beautiful where they had to cut tons of planned content (like wall-running) because they simply couldn’t get it working before investors were demanding that the game be put out. As people saw with the Phantom Liberty, given enough time, Cyberpunk 2077 could have been a masterpiece on release, but the investors simply didn’t give CD Project Red enough time before they cut the purse strings and said “we want our money back… now.” It’s a choice to release too early.

…but on the other hand it’s also a choice to release too late after languishing in development hell a la Duke Nukem Forever.

Turns out when you purposefully let it become infested with bots and make the system of proving who is real and who is fake confusing and backwards, it becomes known for that and slowly becomes useless to even the bot peddlers as more people leave and more bots arrive.

The bots are for people, not for other bots. So, if the bot to human ratio is skewed, they have to leave to where humans might actually see their disinformation.

Further, the kind of people that they need to see the disinformation aren’t the rubes who are still somehow on Xitter and are easily influenced by it. Those people are already captured and need less effort put into keeping them captured. (Not to imply the only people left on Xitter are all captured MAGAs, but they’re clearly the majority of what’s left of the human userbase at this point)

Like all good Linux users, he piped the output of the presents into the house.

Elmer’s Glue because it’s already supposed to be safe enough to ingest without toxicity problems.

I’m not seeing you specify the late 80’s as your reference timeframe anywhere here.

OP really is mixing metaphors is the bigger issue. Microsoft didn’t build their OS on Open Source, they only embraced it later, after getting in trouble for Embrace Extend Extinguish. Google built their OS on open source tech. Then more recently Microsoft followed the same path forged by Google.

Genuinely the best use of this meme format ever.

Just an example, in 2020, Microsoft acquired npm, the Node Package Manager.

Exactly.

Wozniak did the real work, he was an actual computer engineer and programmer.

Jobs was literally the fucking marketing guy who made his entire career about how marketing guys ruin companies.

https://huggingface.co/datasets/defunct-datasets/the_pile_books3

This dataset is Shawn Presser’s work and is part of EleutherAi/The Pile dataset.

This dataset contains all of bibliotik in plain .txt form, aka 197,000 books processed in exactly the same way as did for bookcorpusopen (a.k.a. books1). seems to be similar to OpenAI’s mysterious “books2” dataset referenced in their papers. Unfortunately OpenAI will not give details, so we know very little about any differences. People suspect it’s “all of libgen”, but it’s purely conjecture.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220522050247/https://huggingface.co/datasets/the_pile_books3

I emphasize “well known” because it was literally in the description when it was initially uploaded to the internet. It was always right out in the front that this was all the ebooks from private torrent tracker Bibliotik. Shawn Presser/books3 never lied about where it came from. As you can see with the archive.org link, that description about it’s sourcing was on the page in May 2022.

Bibliotik is a well known private tracker for ebooks and even peddles tools for removing DRM from ebooks. So, arguably, not only are the books pirated, but at some point, a DMCA criminal violation occurred when the DRM was stripped from them. So OpenAIs willingness to use it without question to get their company started should be evidence they’re not concerned about where the data came from or getting it in more legal ways.

What I think a lot of people fail to put together, is that this is the end-game of the early ideologies of the internet. The ideologies of the tech nerds now are directly descended from earlier, more decentralized ideologies.

Think about internet piracy and the change from Napster to Bittorrent.

In the tech world, even since the early days, tech was seen as a way to route around bad laws. In the early days, copyright laws were viewed as overly draconian (they are, but that’s not the point), so piracy flourished by routing around the legal framework.

What has happened is the power and wealth of some people with those ideologies have grown so big, they now view all laws that prevent them from doing whatever the hell they want as “bad laws to route around.” That’s why you have Musk buying Twitter and forcing his opinion’s down everyone’s throat (routing around traditional media). That’s why you have Jack Dorsey dumping his money into Nostr, because he thinks the worst sin on the internet is censorship (routing around attempts to rein in disinformation/misinformation).

It can be seen at OpenAI where they knowingly used books3 to initially train their AIs, which was well known to have been sourced from piracy. OpenAI doesn’t care about the provenance of the data as long as they can legally route around the copyright issue and make a fuckton of money in the process.

Anyway, it’s a deeply libertarian ideology that was accidentally spurred from earlier, more anarchist ideologies, within the tech community. I would peg tech nerds from the 90s as more anarchist, and tech nerds of the modern era as having bought into the technolibertarianism that began to grow out of it.

Like Steve Wozniak is your standard real tech nerd from the 70’s who was the actual engineer behind Apple products, while Steve Jobs was literally the marketing guy yet only the marketing guy got remembered.

Graphic designers suffer from similar customer issues as well… or did until the whole AI art thing came along.