The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I have been bone tired all week in a way that I couldn't shake until Friday morning, when I employed the best remedy for such a feeling: I got a haircut. Properly restored, I've been on top of everything ever since. Let's celebrate with some words worth reading this Sunday morning.

I've complained many times that business analysis, or some amateur impression of it, too often replaces arts and culture conversations around videogames among both journalists and the game-playing public. Mikhail Klimentov therefore gets the top spot this week for writing a thing I already agree with on that theme. Not everything is Concord:

A year and a half after its collapse, the prominence of Concord as a cautionary example represents a retreat from talking about games in favor of talking about business and marketing — a sort of rot in the culture. Has a developer successfully sold me on XYZ new game? Did the trailer rollout make sense? What’s the view count on somesuch marketing material? And how will all this redound on player counts and units moved? These aren’t my favorite subjects, and I look a bit askance at people who really care about this sort of thing, but I’m resigned to the fact that even in saying so, I’m trying to hold back a river with just my hands. Still, no matter how you feel about sales figures, it does feel like those subjects have squeezed out discussion of games themselves in most of the places “gamers” congregate or pay attention to. To put on my best YouTube video essay voice: We don’t talk about games anymore. We just talk about Concord.2 (See disclaimer above about the “unserious and vaporous and slippery” nature of defining the “we” here).

The Verge's Tom Warren published the inevitable article about the change of management at Xbox, as perceived by anonymous sources within the company. This has rightly invited scrutiny of the motivations of those quoted, who seem to blame Sarah Bond for the many ills of Microsoft's gaming division. That doesn't make a lot of sense given Bond was never in charge, although it is fairly commonplace to blame an outgoing regime for any and all problems.

This was all part of the “Xbox everywhere” strategy that Bond had been pursuing, a vision to move the Xbox brand beyond its roots in console hardware. Months later the “This is an Xbox” campaign launched, with commercials that positioned a phone or a tablet as an Xbox instead of just a console. It was a confusing campaign, and I’m told it offended many Xbox employees internally.

Every crusty old Xbox veteran also found their way onto a Zoom call this week to weigh-in on the management change. Seamus Blackley, one of the creators of the original Xbox, gave the boldest quote to GamesBeat.

Seamus Blackley: Satya Nadella has made an incredible number of bets and invested an incredible amount of money and credibility in the transform model AI future. Xbox, like a lot of businesses that aren’t the core AI business, is being sunsetted. They don’t say that, but that’s what’s happening. I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, her job is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.

Nic Reuben's Resident Evil Re9uiem review for The Guardian is a good one.

There’s often an undercurrent of existential fatigue in games that look back at their legacy. Dark Souls III’s dying kingdom, Metal Gear Solid 4’s decrepit Snake. So when Capcom showed us an ageing Leon Kennedy entering the ruins of the police station that marked the start of his journey from rookie cop to hardened veteran, it felt tinged with ennui as much as nostalgia. That self-reflective swansong for this 30-year series may still happen one day, but Requiem isn’t it. Even at its dourest and most pensive, this is less a song for the dead, more a knees-up in honour of the rocket launchers and typewriters that came before. Leon may be getting on a bit, but this is Capcom as energised, devious and goofy as ever.

Polygon's review of Re9uiem was a bad one, but far worse was the internet's cruel and mocking response to it. I desperately crave critical discourse within videogames, but the social media quagmire in which we all live makes respectful disagreement and meaningful discussion all but impossible. Instead an industry of grownups and professionals is forced into a pose of defensive boosterism, which leaves the entire field impoverished. Or it does normally. To my surprise, some people said as much in response to this particular shallow pile-on, and Steven Santana did in his newsletter/blog what you can't in 140 characters: meaningfully challenged the arguments in the Polygon review and explained his criticisms of them in detail.

This review made waves online due to its opening paragraph in which the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States using the newly invented atomic bomb is the lead in to talking about Resident Evil 9. Specifically how Leon Kennedy "is a survivor too," "has lived through hell," and, "never reckoned with the anguish he experienced there. He never stopped to remember the thousands that didn’t make it out in time. That is, until Resident Evil Requiem." The text of the review never backs up its claims and comparisons to justify bringing up one of the greatest atrocities of the past century.

Polygon's wasn't the worst Re9uiem review. That honour went to Videogamer, former stalwart of personality-driven games journalism, who had an AI write their review. Brendy made our views on this matter clear in our first week. Metacritic apparently agree and quickly excluded Videogamer's review from the site.

Whatever spiritless knave runs Videogamer these days would have done well to read Rusty Foster's straightforward post: AI isn't people.

Karpathy’s first frequently asked question is “Does the model ‘understand’ anything?” “That’s a philosophical question,” he answers diplomatically, “but mechanically: no magic is happening.” Does 200 lines of Python code understand anything? My siblings in Christ I hope it’s clear how utterly bizarre this question is. And it translates directly to the same question for Anthropic’s Claude, which is not doing anything different. If we make the input file bigger, if we make the way it gets mathematically processed more efficient, if we prepend a long document describing how we imagine a helpful robot might act to the user’s input, at which of those steps does “understanding” happen?

Or perhaps they could have read author George Saunders in The Guardian on what writers really do when they write. This is from 2017, and I don't know how I ended up reading it this week, although it's probably because Saunders' book mentioned within, Lincoln In The Bardo, is now being adapted into a live-action/stop-motion hybrid movie starring Tom Hanks. Really anyone should read this if they want to understand the method through which good writing and thinking is produced by the "repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference":

Revising by the method described is a form of increasing the ambient intelligence of a piece of writing. This, in turn, communicates a sense of respect for your reader. As text is revised, it becomes more specific and embodied in the particular. It becomes more sane. It becomes less hyperbolic, sentimental, and misleading. It loses its ability to create a propagandistic fog. Falsehoods get squeezed out of it, lazy assertions stand up, naked and blushing, and rush out of the room.

If you'd like a more specific explication of bad writing, and one way in which it occurs, author Lincoln Michel tackled "TV brain prose" in a recent edition of their newsletter, Counter Craft.

Which, lest anyone feel frightened, is not an article about TV writing being bad. Calm yourself with this Vulture article about "gay hockey show" Heated Rivalry. Many terrible articles have been written about the Canadian phenomenon's fandom in recent months, but this one puts in the legwork and admirably lays out the context, managing to respect women, queer people, culture and several decades of history in the process. This ought not to be so rare.

“The Ring of Soshern” was an early, legendary piece of Kirk/Spock slash fiction (named for the slash between their names) that still exemplifies the genre: a homosocial world without women in which platonic chemistry turns romantic. Kirk/Spock was the ship that launched a thousand ships. Over the ensuing decades, K/S slash fiction would grow in scale, starting as conversations that became chain letters and eventually zines. Women formed a “Spock Underground” where they wrote Vulcan erotica.

Paul Ford wrote a New York Times article about AI, which I haven't read because I only need so many sense-making articles about AI in my life, but I appreciated his insight into what it's like to become the locus of public opinion about a controversial topic. Also a little sad, as a former Metafilter reader who also liked to imagine it as a surviving friendly outpost of the old web.

I recently wrote for the big paper and it was with deep inner reluctance. I wish I could decide whether to be in the world or pull back from the world. The paper asked me to explain vibe coding, and I did so, because I think something big is coming there, and I’m deep in, and I worry that normal people are not able to see it and I want them to be prepared. But people can’t just read something and hate you quietly; they can’t see that you have provided them with a utility or a warning; they need their screech. You are distributed to millions of people, and become the local proxy for the emotions of maybe dozens of people, who disagree and demand your attention, and because you are the one in the paper you need to welcome them with a pastor’s smile and deep empathy, and if you speak a word in your own defense they’ll screech even louder.

Let's swing back to an arguably less troublesome sort of AI, the kind that allows physicsy locomotives to ambulate in Anlife: Motion-learning Life Evolution. Christian Donlan wrote about Anlife for The Guardian. There are many such projects, although this one has an extra claim to infamy in that Hayao Miyazaki called it "an insult to life itself" in a documentary, a clip of which has been much shared and meme'd since 2016. I wouldn't read too much into that - Miyazaki hates everything (and was more specifically referring to a video of attempted human movement, rather than the underlying technology) - but Donlan teases out all that's interesting about Anlife, in that way he does.

The oatmeal problem, which was first formulated by writer, developer and academic Kate Compton, hinges on the fact that every single bowl of oatmeal in the universe is unique. Just not in a very interesting way. Similarly, when Anlife’s creatures discover a new way of rolling or bouncing or flapping their bodies towards food, they’re still just moving towards food. It makes for a game that’s either about really, really paying attention to tiny variations in detailing, or about completely zoning out and just enjoying the floaty aesthetic. Over the course of my time with Anlife, I’ve generally started with the first approach and then discovered, after 10 minutes, that I’ve slid into the second.

Jonty mentioned this in yesterday's Jank Mail, but former comrade Matthew Reynolds has launched One More Catch, his own independent website about Pokémon. I hope he covers the fangame scene.

Frank Howley explored the resurgent Dance Dance Revolution for Noclip_2, speaking to ardent fans and newcomers at arcades across the west coast of America. This is a wonderful documentary, full of oddball characters, every one of whom has personal reason for dancing to Eurobeat in public. I spent a full hour searching for arcades and DDR machines in the UK after watching it. "Being cringe will set you free," says one player, and I believe her.

I feel like there's a lesson to be learned from all the thematically overlapping stories in this week's Lie-In. Good writing is an output of human consideration, best rewarded with consideration in kind? AI sucks? Don't be a dick and dance freely? I'm not sure. Best support Jank just to be safe, though.

Music this week is The Sim featuring Kasane Teto by Jam2go. I saw this as soon as it went live, because I'm subscribed to digital artist and game maker Jam2go on YouTube. Why? Once again, I've no idea. I scrolled back through their previous videos and I've seemingly never watched any of them. I'm glad I do, however, because this song and The Sims 1-inspired music video are excellent.

Sleep well, videogames.