He/Him Jack of all trades, master of none
Proudly banned from lemmy.ml for a) being critical of the CCP and b) being against the unlawful deportation of American minorities
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My only gripe is that the game gave me all kinds of freedom choose my character’s backstory, but I had to treat Owen like he was some kinda moron. Motherfucker let me give him my Colossus, I never use it and he will be impervious in it
No, he’s not ready, and my character does everything in her power to ensure that he never will be. Owen did nothing wrong. He “stole” the Javelin of Dawn, and surpise surprise he’s a competent pilot. I only wish I could have supported him the entire time
Damn, guess I’m writing a whole response anyway
Nope. Procedural generation requires a lot of creative and technical input on the part of the developer. It’s not used to offload creative or intellectual work, it creates creative and intellectual work. The intellectual work is something I forgot to mention in that reply, but the loss of the intellectual effort is just as bad as the loss of the creativity.
Let’s compare the topic of this discussion with the game I’m currently playing, Kerbal Space Program.
Contracts in Kerbal Space Program’s career mode are (for the most part) procedurally generated. There are a few mission types, usually asking the player to bring a part or set of parts to a particular location and perform some action with them. Attach a part to a satellite in orbit around Duna, take pressure readings in flight over Kerbin, plant a flag on the Mun, etc. This is not offloading creativity onto the machine, this is using procedural generation to provide the player with an endless variety of objectives. Producing this system of procedurally generated missions required creativity and forethought from the developers. I don’t work at Squad, but I imagine it took a number of manhours to set all of the parameters and limitations for the system, and to test it to make sure it works, and that it doesn’t generate any missions that are impossible to complete.
Contrast that with the AI generated text that is the topic of this discussion. The creative input for that text up there was something along the lines of “generate some sci-fi technobabble that would fit in a starship’s event log” and “do it again, but don’t talk about the ship, just talk about astronomical data.” I know this for certain, because I generated a nearly identical passage using those two prompts exactly. They could have gotten a freelance sci-fi author to write these few bits of text, or even just sat down for 10 minutes and wrote it themselves. It would cost them nearly nothing, and in exchange they would have a piece of text that fits within the world and was written by a human. Instead, they offloaded that creative work onto a machine. They didn’t make more work for themselves like a developer that uses procedural generation, they made less work for themselves by asking a machine to do it instead.
I could make a similar contrast between this and basically any procedurally generated system in games. Minecraft, Daggerfall, Borderlands, FTL: Faster than Light, Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, all of these games use procedural generation to complement the creative and technical work they put into the games, not to avoid having to do that work in the first place.
I’m willing to grant literally all of this. I have a deep-seated hatred of generative AI that clouds my ability to have productive discussions about it. It turns me into an asshole, specifically to people who defend it.
When did I demand an equivalence? That’s what I asked 37 minutes ago, and what you’ve spent several replies now pivoting away from answering
I was about to type out a whole response, but I need to learn when to cut it short.
Generative AI is demonic, using it offloads your creativity, humanity, and soul into an unthinking, unfeeling machine. Anything that uses generative AI is inherently worse because it was not made by someone with agency or creativity. You’re advocating for putting artists and writers out of work.
If it doesn’t make games bad, then the complaints are simply invalid and bandwagoning, and developers cannot be faulted for using it. LOL
“If slavery doesn’t harm the economy, then the complaints are simply invalid and bandwagoning, and plantation owners cannot be faulted for using them. LOL”
I know Lemmings have a lot of trouble reading, so I’ll get this out of the way now: no, I’m not saying that generative AI is slavery, nor am I saying they’re equivalent. I’m drawing one similarity to make a point. That’s called a simile. The point being, that one supposed criticism isn’t valid doesn’t mean that no criticisms are valid.
There’s a number of reasons, not least of which being that generative AI works by processing vast amounts of prior work (without their creators’ consent) to make a facsimile of it, while procedural generation only manipulates assets the developer creates. Procedural generation isn’t putting artists and writers out of business. Procedural generation isn’t making Idiocracy a reality, with fucking English majors unable to read Dickens without asking OpenAI to interpret the text for them. “They do similar things” doesn’t mean they’re equivalent. My point being, it’s not inconsistent to be okay with procedural generation and not okay with generative AI.
I feel like it does. theunknownmuncher thinks it’s somehow inconsistent to be against generative AI while being ok with procedural generation, which implies that they think they’re equivalent in some way. As if the reason people don’t like generative AI is because it makes bad games.
Edit: throughout this discussion, my opinion has evolved somewhat. Procedural generation is fine, because it only uses things created by the developer, and it will necessarily generate a better product than a generative AI, because the developer is the one who tunes it. An AI will generate any text that might fit within the genre, with no consideration for what’s canon to the work it’s being inserted in.
Edit to clarify: what I meant was, if you don’t understand why procedural generation is acceptable, and generative AI is not, you are not qualified to have an opinion on the subject. Leaving the original text for context.
If you don’t know the difference between procedural generation and generative AI, you are not qualified to have an opinion on the subject
Hot take: gamepass is preferable to a digital storefront. Any game you “buy” digitally is only somewhat less temporary than gamepass. At least gamepass doesn’t fool you into thinking you own the games you’re playing
Buy physical. If you’re buying digital, only buy from GOG. Pirate everything you can, and seed that shit forever
Judging only by their job titles, the COO & producer Francois Meurisse, marketing & release producer Benjamin Demanche, associate producer Vincent Constantin-Turki, admin and office manager Emilie Perez, and happiness manager Monoco might not be considered “developers.” Even if only 27 of the Sandfall team are devs, the main point of this article is that there were also many many external developers from outside Sandfall working on the game
I was just pointing out my frustration at their team size
Basically my metric for finding a game to play lately is “how much did they spend on marketing?” My favorite games I’ve played in the last 5 years were Project Wingman, Hi-Fi Rush, Atlas Fallen, Eternal Strands, The Finals, and now Clair Obscur. The first time I’d heard of any of them was when I was downloading them.
Crazy how good a video game can be when it’s made entirely by people who like video games
You still haven’t responded about the real money part lmfao
the point of a slot machine from the players perspective isn’t colors moving, which is the only common theme between the two.
This is how I know you’re full of shit. The only common theme between a slot machine and a gacha game/loot box is that colors move? How about the fact that it’s a device that heavily incentivises you continuously spend real money to attempt to get a randomly determined result, with the most desirable results being the least common?
Whether happy meals are a form of gambling could be an interesting discussion, if you were a smarter and nicer person. Lootboxes and gacha games super duper duper duper duper are though
It’s like saying a horse is a tree because they’re both brown.
No, it’s like saying gachapon games are gambling because they let players spend real money to get a randomly determined result, with the most desirable results being the rarest, triggering the same reward system in the brain that other forms of gambling do, which is harmful to children not just because it triggers those reward systems, but because it entices them to spend real money on more rolls.
The reason I don’t consider Diablo a form of gambling is because you aren’t heavily encouraged to try to get every legendary item, and even if you really want a particular one, you can’t just pull out your credit card and spend minutes at a time dropping real money on more rolls. You have to put in effort. You have to play the game.
ETA: I’m going to go ahead and say happy meals aren’t a form of gambling, because a) results are all equally likely, b) you aren’t heavily encouraged to collect any particular reward, and most importantly c) you can simply ask a cashier for a particular reward. Imagine if you could just ask the dealer to give you 21 in blackjack, or ask the slot machine for a jackpot
If player characters in Diablo were locked inside a digital slot machine that you could pay real money to spin, and players were heavily incentivized to do so because you can’t reasonably expect to get all of the best characters without spending a bunch of real life money on spins, you would have a point.
You should really try to seek out other viewpoints. Literally every discussion about this topic overwhelmingly agrees that gacha games are gambling.
❌ Incorrect
An analogy is not an equation. If most of a movie is G-rated, but it incorporates 10 minutes of hardcore sex, then the movie isn’t suitable for children. If most of a game is E-rated, but it incorporates gambling, then the game isn’t suitable for children.
Most of the game isn’t gambling, to pretend otherwise is just silly.
Just because most of the [game/movie] is suitable for kids doesn’t mean the [game/movie] as a whole is suitable for kids. Do you see how both of those things share that similarity, despite not being morally equivalent?
*Edited to more precisely and concisely make my point
The reading comprehension situation is crazy
LaLuzDelSol does not think cosmetic loot boxes are comparable to porn. They were making an analogy, not an equation. “A is like B in that C” does not imply that A is morally equivalent to B, it means that they share a similarity. In this case, “putting 10 minutes of hardcore sex in an otherwise g-rated film” is like “incorporating gambling into an otherwise child-friendly game,” in that “even if the majority of the work is child-friendly, the not-child-friendly aspects make the work as a whole not child-friendly.”
I give websites as little personally identifiable information as I reasonably can. It takes 33 bits of personal info to narrow you down to one individual, and I’m already open about the fact that I’m a white guy in my late twenties living in the north side of Wichita Kansas. That already narrows me down to one of like 50,000 people
For real, it was legitimately a fun game. I still love the Interceptor. I should redownload it and take some pics before the servers die.
I have the same feelings toward Outriders. It’s fun, it has an interesting premise and serviceable story, and the player character is a cocky bitch (or son of one) who knows they’re the main character in the best possible way