Sundays – well, very early Sunday morning – are meant for watching a whole line of hungry wildlife pass by your kitchen window because a neighbor has decided to leave a terminal-sized cat food dispenser outside the block’s entrance while he’s on vacation. I’m pretty sure the neighbor’s cat wouldn’t eat from the feeder even if there was was not a badger impatiently burrowed inside. He is a distant and disdainful creature, who hates going near the front door because that’s where those stinky humans come from.
Am I going to try to feed poor Moggy, who was denied her dinner by a bunch of Farthing Wood scum? No, I won’t, because I’m too busy reading articles about video games and things that are vaguely in the video game orbit. Here are some of those articles. Listen, please stop worrying about the cat. She’s perfectly plump and shiny, while this badger looks like he hasn’t had a good meal since August.
Chloé Mashiter writes about the labyrinthine question of security protocols when you play a live roleplay in another live roleplay.
The best place to start is with how The Castle works: set in contemporary England, it focuses on a group of people who live as if it were a medieval court. Each player therefore has a “character” – a figure on the field – and a “character” – the modern individual who claims to be that “character”. (I will continue to use this gaming language to help distinguish between the two, with “player” meaning the actual person participating in the larp.)
So, as a player, you pretend to be someone (the character) who in turn pretends to be someone (the character).
It is entirely possible for you as the player to play in a safe, respectful, conscientious, etc. manner, while your character plays in a dangerous, abusive, exploitative, and manipulative manner. It’s also entirely possible that The Castle as a game is (relatively) safe, while charade (the in-world name for medieval court pretension) is not.
For NaughtyThomas Manuel writes about the 30-60 player game of Band of Blades that took place across an entire school, explaining how troop play and character sharing can become a kind of institution building, with a final aside about Covid and Game of Thrones.
By asking you to refract every step of this experience through dozens of different points of view and sympathize with them to some extent, it results in a story full of people who cannot be categorized into good and evil, loyal and disloyal, weak and strong. It makes you appreciate diversity. You need both a polite person and a person who gets to the point a little too quickly; you need both the person who follows the rules and the one who does whatever it takes to get the job done. You need the person who will take leadership and the one who is skeptical of it.
When was the last time you read something depressing about generative AI? Five minutes ago? It’s Time to Move On: Maggie Harrison Dupré and Jon Christian of Futurism detailed report on Brown Brothers Mediaa company that buys established media in order to turn it into lakes of stochastic mush.
Their wreck-laden funhouse mirror of a respectable media company has masqueraded as a purveyor of authentic news and information, enjoying enormous success in capturing readers’ eyes and attention through platforms that real journalism relies on — while publishing oceans of garbage that would get a real journalist fired immediately and answering questions with empty, contradictory platitudes about transparency, accountability and the responsible use of AI.
It took you at least five more minutes to read this, I think, so how about one more? Here is a report from 404 Media on unexpurgated court documents in which the executives of Microsoft and OpenAI unambiguously declare that generative AI is, as one of them, the “greatest theft of labor in the history of humanity”.
OpenAI’s policy director, Jack Clark, wrote that the company was “creating systems that replace the labor of the people who define the company’s ‘culture'” and Microsoft, in a policy document, wrote that generative AI could “significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the base model was trained (…) LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain.” OpenAI has called itself an “existential threat” to news publishers, and an OpenAI software engineer testified that “no matter how we show the links, users won’t click.”
Let’s fight GenBoredom with this extensive StreetView survey on the beginnings of MicroProse from Where Were They Now – a blog dedicated to visiting the offices of some of the UK’s leading video game developers. The article includes some cheerful mentions of embryonic video game journalists, busy plying their trade in a prehistoric utopia when articles didn’t have wacky comment threads underneath them.
The British press seemed wary of MicroProse in its early days. Perhaps it all started to go wrong with the company’s official launch at the American Embassy. It had been the scene of a memorable riot against the Vietnam War in 1968 and the flat-roofed modernist building (with a 35-foot gilded facade)
aluminumaluminum bald eagle looking down from above) seemed to give some hacks flashbacks.
In the same way that a billion typewriter monkeys will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, it is said that if you throw enough Jank.cool writers into a video game, you will eventually have a good article about that video game. Not this group article about trying to play Wardogs without spending money on equipment, mind you. This article is a document of shame. Here’s Jonty making the most of it:
As I begin my fourth life, I’m lucky with an SUV. I try to praise the passengers, but apparently my zero-budget outfit gives off a one-star Uber rating. Eventually, someone launches and immediately crashes a helicopter, earning me a presumably desperate passenger and a decent amount of money to deliver him. I drive a bit and stop to drag a downed co-worker off a hill and get the $500 for bringing him back to life. I try to turn this into a regular ambulance gig, but there’s no one around, so I resort to my established tactic of following other people to checkpoints and getting shot at. A nice man with a Scandinavian accent bandages me, which makes me realize that I’ve been playing for half an hour with a red-tinted screen. I tip him, warn him about the sniper, then we both go out and get killed.
As for this week’s music: please scream like Pink Floyd, throw like Pretty SickOr dance like it’s Final Fantasy 9. Have a good Sunday. Don’t let the badgers get you down.
