I disagree about Soma being an isolated setting, there are actually lots of characters, it’s just that they’re all insane cyborgs who mostly happen to have their own personal reasons for attacking you.

I can’t seem to find them, but before the game came out there was a series of live action video shorts made in association with it to help establish the concept and setting, I’d imagine a show being along the lines of those but fleshed out more.

There’s a game menu with a diagram of a military hierarchy of named enemies, and their strengths/vulnerabilities. When you find the named enemies in the game and interact with them in some way (iirc it’s basically limited to winning/losing a fight or mind controlling them), it affects their traits and their place in the tree, and you’ll get a short cutscene where they say stuff referencing your past interactions.

What’s the scope on that though? I bet someone could get away with a game that does a somewhat similar thing, just not in the exact same way.

could you explain, what’s the point of the song

But if they aren’t protected under copyright, then any asset flipper can use your main character - taking the model right from your AAA game - and throw it into their 99-cent asset flip scam, and you can’t do anything about it.

They could send a DMCA claim and Steam would probably just take it down right? Again, really hard to prove it was 100% AI, and in the case of a full usable 3d character model, with current technology it definitely was not. I guess what I mean by “why it matters” is, it doesn’t seem like it would practically make any difference to how things will go or what will happen.

When it gets to be possible to just about fully autogenerate games, yeah then they might have a reason to wish they could have more copyright.

I believe Steam has the policy on AI that they do both because of public opinion about the use of AI (and the way it’s being used to steal from creators) and because AI generated games tend to fall into the same category of outright scams that NFT games do, and games containing NFTs are straight up banned from Steam.

Games using AI used to be banned from Steam, but they changed it to allow them. Requiring tags seems like a nice compromise.

I don’t see why this stuff even matters. Like say they fully AI generate a loading screen for their game, and therefore they don’t have copyright on it. That doesn’t stop them from selling the game, it would only stop them from suing someone copying that specific part of the game for their own purposes. But such a person would have no way of knowing whether the image was fully AI generated or not, so even though in actuality they couldn’t be sued successfully, they will still be taking the risk. And there isn’t much reason to anyway that I can think of.

So why would a company like Activision even give a shit?

lol ok

Google is usually evil but are you really going to just decide what technology is good or bad based on who made it instead of what it does?

If it’s really what is described (an app that other apps can use to classify content without querying a server), seems like a good thing to me. There is a clear need for people to be able to filter spam and things they don’t want to see. Imagine a Lemmy app where you can set it to not show you US politics related posts, where it will work regardless of whether specific keywords are in the title. Couldn’t that kind of thing contribute to a more decentralized web?

From the article:

“Classifying things like this is not the same as trying to detect illegal content and reporting it to a service,” GrapheneOS said. “That would greatly violate people’s privacy in multiple ways and false positives would still exist. It’s not what this is and it’s not usable for it.”

That seems kind of shitty, if he only cheated to qualify but otherwise won the prize without cheating

This has got to be a South Korea specific thing right? I thought game concepts were generally fair game

I like reading books, but with any other medium than games you are limited to a passive role. They can’t make a story your story the way a game can.

What does this mean practically? Are they not allowed to sell it some places anymore if it’s 18+?

There reaches a point with vaporware projects where it’s like, actually release something or I don’t care anymore, it doesn’t deserve to keep getting press

Even if they tried I don’t think they have the leverage to make that work. What games or publishers are big enough that such a move would go worse for Twitch than it would for them? Most of the time indie games make for better content anyway. Twitch could just ban games that don’t include an unconditional free streaming license in their terms of service and not lose much of any popularity, while the game publishers trying to extort them would absolutely lose popularity.

Each server would likely have to utilize a payment service.

Yeah but that would mean each server has to take custody of funds, have their own individual contractual agreements with game companies, handle refunds, bear all the legal and tax burdens of this, and get people to trust they won’t scam them. It’s just too much of a burden, these are all things that benefit heavily from centralization and economies of scale, due to the legalistic nature of payments. You would end up with one dominant instance and unused federation, if there was even anyone willing to deal with all that stuff to begin with.

I feel like you could solve this stuff pretty well with crypto, having payment go directly to the game devs, and a no refund policy or something to simplify things, but crypto is too hated so that wouldn’t work right now.

hm that is a good point

Why don’t people? Because steam is just better

I am skeptical that this is the main reason (even though it’s true and is a reason). I think people don’t like the idea of having their games library split across multiple services, and don’t like using/learning software they aren’t familiar with, or that other people aren’t using.

Main problem I see is payments

Otherwise why would anyone use software they aren’t used to? Steam is really good, they’ve been putting massive resources into making it better for many years, and it has all the network effects.

I don’t mind it, Steam is nice but I don’t want them to have a monopoly on PC games

My point is just that it doesn’t make sense to criticize the question for not reading the article if the article doesn’t answer the question, and what’s really needed to answer it is additional context. The broad scope of Riot’s statement could be construed to mean they could do more than just ban streamers for using hateful language.

Makes sense. I played Dota for some time and honestly that was one of the things I enjoyed about it, unreasonable people being furious with me while being totally helpless to do anything about it other than lose their shit. Although it’s a dirty sort of enjoyment and makes things extremely awkward; on an emotional level what you want out of the match is for your teammates to fail, but you’re obliged by the rules and a sense of sportsmanship not to throw, so even if you don’t want to be dishonest about what you’re doing it’s hard to play seriously.

I think it would be cool if there was a moba that somehow formalizes the adversarial relationship you have with your team. Maybe like a Survivor esque battle royale setup; in the beginning it’s 5v5, and you’ll be advantaged by the success of your team, but ultimately you are going to have to betray them to win, and also the losers will have an opportunity to influence the outcome.

The article focuses on streamers and doesn’t unambiguously answer this question

What about the genre itself produces toxicity?

So we ended up hiring most of the original Steam team from that other company to build initially this sort of in-game advertising streaming model but then [Steam]

Wow it could have been so much worse

Do we know how big the file is?

Why does a flight simulator of all things need to be a live service game?

Seems reasonable, at least it’s not a ban and probably won’t be

Itch.io hasn’t yet addressed that inquiry directly, but one possibility is simply that generative AI is already in widespread use: 31% of respondent to a GDC study published earlier this year said they’re personally using generative AI in their work, and 18% said they’re not using it themselves but have colleagues who are—though not necessarily to create anything players actually see. Given those numbers, and the fact that they’re inevitably going to grow, a straight up ban on generative AI may not be workable.

But I think the point is, the OP meme is wrong to try painting this as some kind of society-wide psychological pathology, when it’s rather business people coming up with simple reliable formulas to make money. The space of possible products people could want is large, and this choice isn’t only about what people want, but what will get attention. People will readily pay attention to and discuss with others something they already have a connection to in a way they wouldn’t with some new thing, even if they would rather have something new.

I have an Index also, one thing I find frustrating is that because the Quest has such a dominant marketshare and packages games differently, some smaller VR games and experiences I see seem to be only available as an apk file for Quest sideloading and there is no straightforward way for me to play them.

The main reason I don’t use it more though is I never got past the physical discomfort, I still feel nausea playing most games for more than a few minutes, and headaches from the pressure on my scalp/face if going longer than that, ie. trying to watch a movie with the headset. So that basically means I’m not going to just spend a lot of time passively chilling out in VR, it has to be some specific thing I want to do that feels worth it to push through the discomfort involved and can be gotten through relatively quickly. Mostly that ends up being just Beat Saber.

I guess there are probably a lot of people trading that stuff dumb enough to be networking on facebook and instagram with their real identities

The listing notes that special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used.

Any chance that’s the real reason and not just a flimsy excuse? What kind of information would you even need a fake identity to gather from a public forum?

Seems like a good thing, 3 chances one of them will get it right

I know that’s how it works in the US, but the lawsuit is in Japan, which you always hear about having stricter copyright laws. Not really sure how this one will play out though.

This is the good kind of AI that’s actually useful instead of the BS AI like LLMs

lol, trying to hedge against downvotes from the anti-AI crowd?

So this is a request made in the context of emails sent out gifting streamers promotional copies of the game, not a condition of paid promotional streams, am I getting that right?

it may be moral in some extreme examples

Are they extreme? Is bad censorship genuinely rare?

but there are means of doing that completely removed from the scope of microblogging on a corporate behemoth’s web platform. For example, there is an international organization who’s sole purpose is perusing human rights violations.

I think it’s relevant that tech platforms, and software more generally, has a sort of reach and influence that international organizations do not, especially when it comes to the flow of information. What is the limit you’re suggesting here on what may be done to oppose harmful censorship? That it be legitimized by some official consensus? That a “right to censor” exist and be enforced but be subject to some form of formalized regulation? That would exempt any tyranny of the most influential states.

I’m going to challenge your assertion that you’re not talking about

You can interpret my words how you want and I can’t stop you willfully misinterpreting me, but I am telling you explicitly about what I am saying and what I am not saying because I have something specific I want to communicate. When you argue that

I believe each country should get to have a say in what is permissible, and content deemed unacceptable should be blockable by region

In the given context, you are asserting that states have an apparently unconditional moral right to censor, and that this right means third parties have a duty to go along with it and not interfere. I think this is wrong as a general principle, independent of the specific example of Twitter vs Brazil. If the censorship is wrong, then it is ok to fight it.

Now you can argue that some censorship may be harmful because of its impact on society, such as the removal of books from school hampering fair and complete education or banning research texts that expose inconvenient truths.

Ok, but the question is, what can be done about it? Say a country is doing that. A web service defies that government by providing downloads of those books to its citizens. Are they morally bound to not do that? Should international regulations prevent what they are doing? I think no, it is ok and good to do, if the censorship is harmful.