#the whole thing looks like an oversaturated videogame

[neonriser]

For those who can't see the screenshot post, for whatever reason it may be:

@sillyrookie posted:

Ok, since @hairiclilred asked, I'll start my dumb rant.

Over here in the US, the videogame market fell off a cliff in 1983 due to a reckless oversaturated market flooded with low quality dreck that killed player interest. So many unsold Atari games ended up filling landfills.

Revenue dropped by 97%. It was catastrophic. Videogames died in America for a couple years due to short-sighted business decisions by major corporations.

The American market was revitalized when Nintendo came over and instituted limits to third parties to keep quality up, while also ensuring that quality was their brand. America only has a video game market today because of Nintendo.

I think the current environment of constant remakes, mergers, layoffs, diminishing returns on blockbuster products, and corps thinking they can use "AI" to regurgitate their once valuable IP will cause a similar crash.

What I find interesting is how many classic IP will end up dying in the wake of this.

At the moment so many distinguished studios with established IP are getting bought up by corps, only to lay off the workers and shutter the studios.

The workers don't just lose their jobs, they lose the IP they created. Even if the team can regroup, they can't use the stuff they made anymore. The IP dies with the studio.

So stuff like this makes me feel like we're right at the brink of a collapse that will kill ALOT of once profitable IP when audiences are made sick and tired of alot of stuff they used to love.

These IP owners don't understand the products they own, the workers that make it, and the audience that buy it; and many in the c-suite have actual contempt for all three things.

When an IP stops being profitable, corps shut it down, lock it away unless somebody has the capital to buy it from them.

The only thing they understand is that an old movie made by humans generated billions of profits for them because an audience enjoyed it, and instead of taking new risks it's "better" business short term to just rehash the stuff that made money before. And if they expect "generative AI" to make more content even faster, expect a sea of endless remakes, each shittier than the last one.

Things are bad now, and they're gonna get way worse real fast.

I expect a cultural massacre. What does that look like?

It's obviously a different world today than the 1980s, but Nintendo's core business ideology has stayed consistent, and they'll weather a AAA crash with no problem because they don't play the AAA space at all.

They make a sustainable lower-tech console that's sold at a profit (the traditional model before the Wii was to make a powerful console and sell it at a loss so that you made your money on software sales) and their brand still means quality even 40 years later. Not every game they do is amazing, but their batting average is high and they go out of their way to avoid dropping anything half-baked.

I think every other industry is gonna need their own Nintendos to rise from the ashes. The more I learned about the history of the industry, the more respect I have for them.

And they are NOT perfect. But it the broad strokes they're the example I think most should follow to have a sustainable industry that keeps everyone happy.

Heck, I'll define "everyone happy:"

Artists properly paid, having job security, and able to BE creative.

Players having quality games to enjoy.

Businesses being sustainable for the long term, properly using the revenue from successes to experiment with new ideas, and not screwing anyone over.

[Image: Sonic saying "I WANT SHORTER GAMES WITH WORSE GRAPHICS MADE BY PEOPLE WHO ARE PAID MORE TO WORK LESS AND I'M NOT KIDDING".]

If the collapse I'm imagining does actually happen, the only possible thing to grow out of it are new IP from all the artists that got laid off.

New stuff would be the only things coming out for a while and the only things people want if the big franchises burned them out.

Depending on how audience sentiment is by that point, public domain stuff might become suspect as well, which is also an interesting scenario to me.

I think about how the current remake ecosystem is targeted at millennials (which I am) while the pendulum is already set to swing in the other direction.

Sorry for not talking about this part first. 😂

74% of that survey wants new stuff. The major IP holders are about to commit suicide if they go through with the "AI will make us 30 remakes per second" scheme.

One thing I hope DOESN'T happen is a backlash against honesty in the creative process.

We were culturally at a point where the average joe could understand that new ideas don't come from nowhere and are all mutations of old ideas.

Game of Thrones exists because Lord of the Rings came first, which owes it's existence to Norse myth and Beowulf, ect ect.

We're at the point where youtubers make games out of seeing what a song sampled from, the references a movie made, on and on.

But right now a popular spiel from "AI" charlatans to justify IP theft is the assertion that there's no difference between stealing copyrighted media for an LLM to regurgitate and a human being inspired by the ideas and experience they felt from another creator's work and creating a new thing under the established rules of copyright. It's a lie, but it keeps getting repeated to justify theft.

As the scam cycle winds down, I think they might be poisoning the discourse in a lasting way. We could go back to people lying about how ideas work, and that has only negative effects on human expression as a whole.

I want a world where everyone understands the difference between inspiration and a ripoff and can appreciate human creation better than previous generations have. We were right there before the scammers showed up.

So yeah, another rant out of me. 😂

So when people want new IP, they also need to understand what it means that Dragonball was a goofy parody of Journey to the West.

Dragonball is alot of things, it's inspirations are loud and obvious (even the Terminator is in there), but it's also a unique work created through the mind of one talented individual that nobody else could have made, because nobody else was Akira Toriyama, and ALL the subsequent works inspired by Dragonball (One Piece, Naruto, Hero Academia, Sonic the Hedgehog, ect) are their own original works that stand on their own, but still owe their existence to Toriyama's work as much as he owes his work to the things that inspired him.

The best ecosystem is where everyone encourages new IP and also fully understands how they come into being.

(Using this example for obvious reasons.)

Discord Post Reaction: [☝️ 1]

To go back to the topic of videogames, Toys for Bob recently made themselves layoff proof by going full independent.

With the level and volume of world class talent being laid off in the industry, I think we'll see more and more indy teams pop up if they can organize the means to do so.

There is too much high pedigree talent out there right now to just disappear or eventually go back to the people that screwed them over. The current ecosystem allows smaller teams and projects to flourish.

I am 100% down for an industry with less games like Immortals of Aveum and WAY more games like Pizza Tower.

[leashade]

about degrading content

I told it multiple times before and will say it again here: I don't like where the content is going these days. It feels like it turned into a giant stream of stuff, which nobody asked for or cares about.

On one hand we have YouTube, which can be used by anyone, so it kinda turns into an endless well of content and knowledge (this is also why any YouTube competitors are doomed to fail and why any attempts to block and censor it won't go well: it might work, but the losses will be much MUCH bigger). This, combined with algorithms creates a situation when a user gets overwhelmed by content, which you can't even consume in a lifetime. Every single person and their dog has a channel, podcast, show or whatever.

But if it would be just YT it would be fine. The platform is diverse enough and content is made by people. It balances itself.

The problems start when big corporations start to do the same.

We have Netflix, a very successful streaming platform. But to keep it at the top they "have" to pump out a lot of exclusive content and lure people in -- offer something of value so it would make sense to pay.

Content costs money, and creating content all the time burns through your money rather quickly, so you have to get rid of expensive stuff and stuff that didn't perform too well.

But even better approach is to just create an endless stream of shit which people will watch once and forget it ever existed. You can even play with modern trends or whatever, make a nice looking preview, etc.

And platforms like YT and Netflix had a giant advantage: they didn't have competitors, not really. YT doesn't really have a real replacement, and Netflix was the first successful streaming service (to the point when people would use the name as a verb meaning "watch something on TV"). You could find a giant supply of great shows using just one subscription.

But now every big studio has their own streaming service, and this kind of defeats the whole purpose, why Netflix became so popular in the first place.

Now you have 10 streaming services with their own exclusive content, and nobody wants to pay for every single subscription at once. But they all still want to stay afloat -- and it's really expensive.

So we have Disney+. The Mouse has their own streaming and started releasing a lot of unnecessary and empty content in big batches, one after another. Marvel Cinematic Universe movies turned from important cultural events to yet another shitty thing, overwhelming people and oversaturating the market with low quality content. It becomes too much, you can't watch all these shows, and most of them are not even worth it. All the nostalgia baits, remakes, reshoots and reuses of the old franchises are all there too.

And all this subscription system turned into the giant evil monster which makes this problem even worse. I wrote about movies and shows, but it applies to podcasts, videos, books and videogames too.

The biggest problem: important cultural events and modern classics just blend in with the endless conveyor of stuff. Today you get something new and forget whatever was yesterday, then you get another tomorrow. Social discussion about a project ends without even starting. You just get so many things coming out that they lose all their importance and meaning.

"Classics" and "cultural phenomenons" didn't really disappear, but they just get lost with whatever is out there, the "classics" just becomes a part of this content soup.

Why am I saying all this and what's my suggestion? Dude, I don't know, absolutely no idea. But I really don't like it.

[ipsomaniac]

dialogue in Rings of Power is like

[ipsomaniac]

watched the first 2 eps of Rings of Power yesterday and it was basically what i was expecting - a sequence of clunky, overproduced videogame cutscenes - but despite my low expectations i was still surprised by just how bad the writing was. here’s my post bitching about it.

caveat: several years ago i attempted to read The Silmarillion but found it boring and only got about a third of the way through. i’m less interested in how faithful Rings of Power is to its source material (though i do care about faithfulness-of-vibe) and more concerned with critiquing the show on its own merits or failings as a story.

so first off: the aesthetics. i’m not gonna mince my words here, rings of power encapsulates a recent aesthetic tendency in tv and film which i despise. i’ve seen some reviews praising it as “visually stunning” and i’m like, are we watching the same show? are there some people who like this horrible modern fantasy aesthetic where nothing looks real, everything is CGI and has this oversaturated, sort of shiny quality; where even the physical costumes manage to look computer-generated and even “gritty” scenes like battlefields or a rustic tavern are uncannily sanitized? people enjoy this?

the overall shiny videogame aesthetic is compounded by some truly bizarre character design. number one is giving all the male elves a hairstyle that can only be described as “80′s corporate prepster quiff”, sometimes bordering precariously onto greasy mullet territory. each individual elf has a metric tonne of gel holding his quiff in place. apparently this is the standard for male elf beauty in the Second Age:

it is inherently untrustworthy and undignified hair; the only conceivable explanation is that the director wished to evoke the atmosphere of 1980s boardroom dramas and douchebag frat boys to convey that the elves of the Second Age are dumb political animals. 

beyond elf hair, the costuming is not great overall. stand out sins: a general plasticky quality to the costumes (the show seems to have a proclivity for a particular mottled-metallic fabric which looks very odd; at one point galadriel is outfitted in a fully sequinned dress; the prosthetic elf ears look like fleshy plastic protruberences. all the characters are caked in highly visible makeup: the only thing that looks materially real in the whole show is galadriel’s over-highlighted pores and the stark delineation of her smokey eye.

Bonus hair issue: no beards on the dwarf women. cowards!

a few positives: there are some cool sets and landscape designs. i thought Lindon was well-conceived and pretty (although undermined by the greasy-ass elves inhabiting it) and i loved Khazad-Dum: they captured the cavernousness of the space, the sense of constant productive motion within the dwarven stronghold, the pulleys and technology and the clever ways of bringing light underground. also loved the geometric Dwarven design sensibility.

basically, the heavily CGI’d approach does in fact work quite well for landscape-establishing longshots, and the sets themselves are generally decent. i could more easily appreciate the backdrop, and be more forgiving towards the videogame aesthetic, if the characters inhabiting the world didn’t have such a consistently jarring appearance.

As for the actual substance of the show... where to begin.

First off, for a show with so much exposition, it really does a poor job of orienting the audience in the world. For a general audience with passing familiarity with the cast of LOTR and The Hobbit, there are a lot of new characters to get to grips with, and the show is bad at basic things like telling you characters’ names and how they are related to each other. Galadriel’s dead brother - who dat? Galadriel and Elrond are clearly friends/relatives but what’s the connection, when did they meet? Elrond used to be friends with Durin but again, when, how? I have the background knowledge to recognise the elf-king (i.e. the only male elf sporting appropriate hair) as Gil-Galad, but I would not know this just from watching the show. And then there are large clusters of random supporting characters where i just have no clue who these guys are.

this leads to the biggest problem, which is that not only do i not know who half the characters are, i also do not have much of a reason to care. the only character with a clearly laid-out motive is galadriel: she is haunted by her brother’s death and wants to find and defeat Sauron. ok, so far so good. but then the next thing we see is her free-soloing up an icy cliff - this apparently has something to do with finding sauron, but how? what is she looking for? why should we be invested in this wild goose chase? we don’t know and neither does her mutinous elven troupe. she is framed as a warrior girlboss, but by episode 2 she’s had a lot of action to very little purpose. and this is the one character who does have a backstory and motive - with every other character it’s like, who are you and what do you want?

another issue is tone. the problem with having an elf-centric series is that the tonal baseline of elves is heightened, serious and formal and this gets to be a drag pretty quickly. in addition, the writers of Rings of Power simply do not pull off the tolkienesque register very well. exchanges like the following are characteristic:

Elrond: After all you have endured, it is only natural to feel conflicted. Galadriel: Conflicted? I am grateful you have not known evil as I have, but you have not seen what I have seen. Elrond: I have seen my share. Galadriel: You have not seen what I have seen.

the whole thing smacks of bad pastiche. the word “conflicted” is anachronistic (i did a quick ctrl+f of LOTR and i’m correct, there is not a single instance of the word “conflicted” in the text, it’s a jarringly modern usage). then the rest of the exchange is just redundent repetition and tautology, and i guess we are meant to be very impressed by the weight of galadriel’s trauma here but it’s so lamely expressed. and it’s meaningless because, actually, we don’t really have any idea of the horrors they have seen - we had one shot of galadriel wandering around a wrecked battlefield and mourning her brother, but we haven’t really witnessed her suffering beyond that, and have literally no idea what Elrond has been up to prior to the start of the story. so this exchange carries absolutely no weight. this is clearly meant to convey the high seriousness of tolkienesque dialogue but it’s amateur hour! it's just unclever, bad-sounding dialogue. this is basically the level throughout.

the writers occassionally try to lighten things up with jokes:

Medhor: ...or do you think me blind? Arondir: I think you talk too much. And you smell of rotting leaves. Medhor: No, I don’t! Arondir: Yes, you do.

Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!

Harfoots are naturally the designated comic relief race. the harfoot scenes are constantly gesturing towards mischievious frolicking but no one ever does or says anything actually funny. the harfoots are also unfortunately landed with the role of “spiritual primitives”; there are a few circle-of-life speeches, lenny henry plays some kind of hobbit shamen, it’s annoying stuff. the one positive thing i’d say is that at least with the harfoots we actually get a sense of how far in the past we are vs. LOTR; it’s basically impossible to convey the passing of millennia when your focal characters are elves because they live forever and never change, but with the harfoots we see a recognisably more primitive ancestor-culture to the hobbits, so that helps to locate the series in time.

other bad things: - the voyage to valinor, fuck that was weird, are we supposed to infer that the elves just stand there clasping their swords in armed formation for the whole journey? - celebrimbor... :’( he has such strong willy wonka vibes, why would they do this. i think they deliberately made him off-putting to pre-emptively thwart the celebrimbor/annatar shippers.

good things: i like that they depict Olorin/Gandalf as deliriously disoriented by the experience of corporeal manifestation, looking forward to seeing baby’s journey of learning how to use limbs and process sensory input. i am also keen to see more dwarves.