The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. This week's main story involved Big Walk's use of AI and the IGF juror's who have publicly stated they won't vote for a game that makes any use of LLMs. The Lie-In isn't for recapping the news - Jonty did that yesterday - but lots of people wrote interesting articles and blog posts about the situation. So let's round up some links worth clicking.

AI researcher (and Jank pal) Mike Cook wrote In Defence Of Giving A Shit, which properly frames much of the discussion around the IGF.

The worst takes I have seen on this matter attempt to frame it as an extreme position on the part of the jurors who released the statement, or unfavourably compare this issue with another important issue, or toss around phrases like 'purity test' or therapyspeak. I really feel like we've lost all sense of perspective on AI as an issue. The IGF has no AI policy. It explicitly is asking people to draw their own lines. This group of people drew one. That you disagree with where the line is doesn't make it somehow extremist or unreasonable.

There were a lot of people angry at House House on social media, but I prefer the takes that broaden the discussion and try to move it away from finger-pointing and name-calling, as narrative designer Damon Reece did in their post.

From the moral position I stand from, as do most of the people I'm proud and appreciative to call my friends and colleagues, being consistent with those morals includes letting people take accountability for their fuckups and leaving the door open for redemption and improvement. The callout is not the end goal; the goal is to stop the behaviour.

Meanwhile, academic and critic Brendan Keogh argued that "AI is history", placing the technology and debates around its use in a historical context. I appreciate a blog post unafraid to just mention Marx in the first sentence, and then to quote to Marxist scholars at length.

I am likewise skeptical that generative AI represents a profound cut from history. That somehow, unlike every previous contradictory technological innovation of the past couple centuries of capitalism, generative AI is just simply 'evil'. Instead, I would suggest it represents the same profound contradictions of technological innovation under capitalism as all the previous ones, just now on an even larger scale. The potentially useful byproducts are larger, as is the possible profits that are the actual goal and the undeniable harms.

Let's start to move away from AI discourse. Ana Diaz - who made her Jank debut this week - wrote for Mothership about the need to think about locally made video games. I used to be tapped-in to the UK-based indie game development scene 10-15 years ago, and would like Jank to do that kind of coverage, one day.

Her artistic practice went on to enrich my life in ways I don't think any major AAA title or other thoughtfully made indie games have. And it's because of her that I think we need to start thinking through what it means to play and support the development of video games on a local level.

Over at the future vibecoded cautionary tale, Luke James wrote: "There were 47 graphics chip makers in 1998. Where did they all go?"

Each of those companies went under or sold up for one reason or another, but what's striking is how most did so within a few years of one another. In the four years between 1998 and 2002, the graphics business essentially stopped rewarding whoever had the fastest chip, instead favouring the companies that could iterate the fastest. A new chip every six months or so for the same APIs everyone used, backed by enough capital to ride out the dot-com crash. Nvidia was built for that; almost nobody else was.

For Unwinnable, Jay Castello - whose review of 500 Finger Fillet we published this week - wrote about two particular side characters in Nighthawks and how they subvert the narrative arc of the rest of the game. Expect spoilers for both Nighthawks and Fields Of Mistria.

But the "almost" in the preceding paragraph is loadbearing, because it's impossible to forget about Maze. A bookshop owner who conducts seedy rituals in the basement, draining people of both blood and money with his vampiric charisma, he is introduced alongside Hazel, a human woman who is in his thrall and clearly unhappy about it.

The YouTuber Noodle learned level design so he could torment his friends with a Half-Life 2 map made at real human scale.

Music this week is the sound of me cursing Tidal's shuffle feature, because it plays the same 17 songs over and over when offered a playlist of over a thousand. So here's Teenage Birdsong, an old track by Four Tet. I'd never seen the video before. Like the song? Consider supporting him on Bandcamp.

Sleep well, videogames.