Jank Mail: Stabbing hands and firing Huangs

We made it through another week, everybody. Good work. Let's kick back and review a new crop of Jank posts, starting with Brendy's ongoing struggle to escape the increasingly seductive call of nostalgia:

I don't like this way of thinking, and I never have. I don't want my tastes to calcify, to harden to the point of closing off new possible joys. (Have you tried Into The Spiderverse? Have you watched Blue Period?) I want to totter off the neural pathways I am stuck within, and yes, even to have the patience to give terrible shit another chance. I know it can be done, if you have the energy, time, and commitment to do it. I know, because I do it already, just not with games.

Jay Castello reviewed 500 Finger Fillet, and mused on the nature of fun:

"Fun" is a bit of a dirty word in games reviews. A colleague-friend and I still laugh about a dismissive comment left on their work years ago, in which the aggrieved reader said they had Ctrl-Fd for the word and, not finding it, could not understand the value in the article. And that's because it is such a flattening way to analyse experience. If I tell you I didn't beat the game's second difficulty level (out of 10!) because I didn’t want to, will you misunderstand me as saying I think the game is bad? Don't. I think the game is genius.

Rick Lane looked into what asset streaming like that in 007 First-Light's much-celebrated training mission means for game design:

The introduction of SSDs has basically made this process significantly faster, meaning developers can make bigger, more detailed games with less segmentation than was possible a decade ago. "You get into these games now that are loading tons of assets, entire worlds, I guess the word would be asynchronously," Willow says. "While things are happening in the background, or just over a completely imperceptible amount of time, you can load in things that would have required a loading screen ten years ago." 

Our latest set of reading recommendations came from Forbidden Solitaire's Nick Lives:

One of my favorite anecdotes so far is Roger [Corman] demanding the sound guy create a last-minute monster costume for Creature From The Haunted Sea, who is in no way equipped to create a monster, so he puts together what he can with ping pong balls, pipecleaners, moss and a wetsuit. Ironically, very inspirational for the kinds of things we make.

Ana Diaz outlined the joy and shame of playing League of Legends while being old enough to have a real job:

I am not doing this because it is popular. There is no one shouting at me online telling me to try a certain character or play the game a certain way. I am not a long-term player, so I don’t have a sunk cost fallacy or feel dedicated to it in any way. I don’t pay attention to random internet chatter around the game. I am certainly not playing it because it's "cool." (I am pretty sure I get negative ten thousand aura every time the game comes up in conversation.) I am playing because I genuinely enjoy playing and learning more about its world. 

Graham's collection of the best writing about videogames included choice prose about the Ocarina of Time remake, despite this being emphatically a blog about PC gaming; we regret the error. This week’s Total Playtime saw Nate’s triumphant but cheese-light return, and delivered a discussion of overpriced GTA 6 swag and what proved to be a highly controversial classification of Shrek.

Outside these walls, a simmering debate about the use of AI in finishing Big Walk graduated from IGF comments thread to the wider world, after a selection of jurors issued a statement saying they would not vote for any game that used generative AI. House House explained themselves in a statement to Aftermath, which sounds fairly reasonable, but it is not possible to have measured conversations about this topic so it just spawned days of Discourse that achieved little but made everybody very unhappy. Claims that all developers are using generative AI were at least swiftly dashed by the GDC survey confiming that actually only 40% of them are, although 55% say it's having a negative effect.

The other main event - as discussed in Total Playtime - was the downfall of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who "resigned" for being too horny and self-regarding, which in hindsight was very predictable for a career nerd who ended up running the world’s most important corporation. As the FT pointed out, probably not the first tech CEO you'd have expected to be brought down by a government leaking kompromat after internal factions became concerned about his company's alleged support of an adversary state, but a helpful reminder there's still at least another one in the tank, and that's something to look forward to because the posts were extremely good.

Xbox's latest sweaty attempt to make people like them is the promise of Wolfenstein 3 and confirmation of a new game from what remains of id, announced during the finale of their celebration of 25 years of Xbox that doggedly avoided mentioning all the layoffs. Asha Sharma's post on the topic put a bow on the year's mass of unexplained-meeting-invites-with-HR by looking to a future in which "a small team will be able to build worlds that today demand hundreds of developers and hundreds of millions of dollars," without explicitly saying what that actually means.

Then, of course, Xbox Live was included in the huge number of Microsoft services that stopped working for a day, alongside more important things like healthcare and police services. On the plus side, it wasn't caused by AI or hackers and lots of people got to skive off work and joke about it.

This week’s post-big-company folks doing their own studios, with blackjack, and hookers, and crucially quite small numbers of staff and no shareholder obligations, are refugees from id and THQ Nordic. The latest big-company laying people off because it’s carrying far too much debt is Skydance (although apparently Amy Hennig's Marvel game is continuing). You can now play the lost Elder Scrolls game for Nokia N-Gage.

Jeff, from the Overwatch team, quit because he was having constant fights, with the executive team. Humble Bundle relaunched with a new website and some old security issues. Katsuhiro Harada wishes it to be known that developing games for the Xbox Series S is a huge pain in the arse. Sony killed another live service game, although at least it didn't fire anybody.

Down there in the comments, JimJamJimajesty embraced mortality:

I've spent some time considering my gaming taste in relation to Brendy's article this week about the trap of nostalgia and have come to the conclusion that I'm old and it doesn't matter. 

treelo has a less rosy view:

We are doomed to relive the mid-90s to the mid-00s forever, trying to reclaim our youth and giving the actual youth no culture of their own.

You will be unsurprised to hear Sin Vega's rallying cry:

WE NEED TO GO WEIRDER

Words to live buy. That’s all for this week; go and play some PC games.