If Gabe finished your Call of Duty campaign, it must be pretty fucking good. The last time around was functionally a playable meme that didn’t line up with the milspec fantasy they typically offer, i.e., a three-story combat knife might fall out of the sky. He says that he spent way longer than strictly necessary inside of a Korean convenience store, and if they’re anything like konbini you can spend a very very long time in one. Comparing a 7-Eleven in Japan to a 7-Eleven in Seattle is like comparing an eight ounce, medium-rare filet mignon to roadkill. Now, Gabriel would like to inoculate you against a specific type of content in the game but beyond that he grants whatever wastrel seal of approval he can muster.
He also tells me that he has installed some kind of mod for Steam that clearly identifies which games in NextFest do and do not feature AI assets. That’s probably better than what I was doing, which was seeing something I was curious about and then scrolling all the way to the bottom of the offering to find The Scarlet Letter. I was already miffed about the last NextFest, PreviousFest I guess, because its main purpose for me was to act as Exhibit A for why discovery is the only problem worth thinking about.
I was glad to see Demos make a return, as a way to stand out – depending on the era, demos have been a magazine incentive or a sales lure, until they were considered to cannibalize sales, which lead to them falling significantly out of favor at the top. Indies always kept the tool in their back pocket. But AI or no, I have no idea what to do with this many games. I really, really like this stuff and I get redlined a couple minutes in.
I’m not gonna make you listen to some long harangue about AI or Slop, I’ve been doing that for years and it has had precisely zero effect. Gamespot has a good article on some of the concerns specifically as they relate to the ‘Fest. For me, ultimately it comes down to the bandwidth of the channel. I don’t know if Steam constitutes a “public commons,” but it is where tens of millions of people work and seek good work daily. It only has so much functional throughput for the user. I might be able to buy games from there, but I certainly can’t find them.
The amount of time it takes to create work was once a limiting factor that could retain the legibility of spaces. I already don’t like work that isn’t made by people, purely on its own demerits, but the fact that it also chokes out the native life of every social environment we construct on here is something I feel in the pit of my stomach.
(CW)TB out.