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beardedmrbean · 15 days

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Ah the rumors are true (and these gaming companies coordinate)

https://x.com/xbox/status/1785308276063633588?s=46

I already figured out given last year Xbox revealed Star Wars outlaws and next day we had a gameplay reveal at the Ubi forward

Remember that leak AC red menu I sent? Well that was taken down to copyright, but I think that was a Xbox not a Ubi move.

Because the leak show the build being April third and most press conference game builds are usually a few months old as they are the most stable

So I heard original red would have it reveal in May 31st…hmmm if that still true

May 31st- a press event where we get a pre render cgi trailer, proper Yasuke and Naoe reveal, details, in game screenshots. And title reveal

June 9th- Xbox will have a gameplay demo showing off the capabilities of Xbox (and if Xbox bribed them enough. Ac red will be the first day one ac game on gamepass as the last three ac rpgs on it)

June 10th- a story trailer and “bts” video where they show how yes finally we are going to Japan and their ideas and inspirations for it

With probably the nice explanation why Yasuke was chose for the second playable character

Because people want red to be reveal at Ubisoft forward…but people need to digested Yasuke at first

Like my theory craft on how to use Yasuke in a what if continuation is interesting…but modern writers are not exactly smart.

Also there a fundamental difference between my black teen dad Jrpg idea vs writers who have critical theory plaguing their minds

Not to mention they think having more non whites will bring black people into fantasy games.

When the last time they went to the cookout? The vast majority of casual players only enjoy playing Cod, GTA, tekken and other fighting games, and the occasional license hero game

Okay okay fornite

Like here my pitch

Hey casual black gamers (who barely desire to play Normie games. WHAT I still deal with it) you remember Afro samurai? Well here a game where you play as the weapon bearer Yasuke in this game Assassin Creed Shadows (that is what some people saying the game is going called) where you help a secret ancient order unify Japan. And there more it’s a RPG where you can spend over 100 hours into and explore the beautiful recreation of feudal Japan!

Warning your dumbass might become a pseudo historian and desire more knowledge

(Or you might be interested in more ac games. Hmm here an Egypt one! Now might give you more! HEHEHEHE)

And noting bad wait- okay probably will be 70 dollars…..oh great a season and battle pass!….wdym online only?!

Ubi you now got 5-6 months to reform red market system (most ac game comes out on October or November) because you seen how your own game skulls and bones and SS kills JL flopped

Ugh why I had to be born during the hard times of gaming?

Maybe in May I get more leaks

Also college educated students, people do like organic diversity.

But white people don’t like the demonization of themselves from people who make more money they do in their lifetimes

Seriously what the fuck is the culture in California and New York where it socially acceptable to treat white people like fictional characters

June 10th- a story trailer and “bts” video where they show how yes finally we are going to Japan and their ideas and inspirations for it With probably the nice explanation why Yasuke was chose for the second playable character.

This all was the official timeline then, nice of them to post it, probably gonna be a few more leaks tho

Like my theory craft on how to use Yasuke in a what if continuation is interesting…but modern writers are not exactly smart. Also there a fundamental difference between my black teen dad Jrpg idea vs writers who have critical theory plaguing their minds Not to mention they think having more non whites will bring black people into fantasy games.

They need to stop with all the tokesism crap, even a MC can be a token if it's all just stereotypical nonsense. Then again certain parts of the audience that's all they want.

Gay guys need to be flaming, lesbians are lipstick or mega dyke, Latinos are gardners, and black people are thugs or you're doing it wrong.

If Yasuke breaks into a Undercover Brother type monolouge at some point I would laugh and cry.

When the last time they went to the cookout? The vast majority of casual players only enjoy playing Cod, GTA, tekken and other fighting games, and the occasional license hero game.

Oh I miss the cookouts, had a few friends that would invite me to different ones, damn fine food. Sometimes I acted extra white just to be funny too.

Prev and Warning your dumbass might become a pseudo historian and desire more knowledge (Or you might be interested in more ac games. Hmm here an Egypt one! Now might give you more! HEHEHEHE)

I like it, I also like tricking people into learning, makes things fun and interesting.

And noting bad wait- okay probably will be 70 dollars…..oh great a season and battle pass!….wdym online only?!

Grrrrrr

Ugh why I had to be born during the hard times of gaming? Maybe in May I get more leaks Also college educated students, people do like organic diversity.

There really was a golden age for it, late late 90's till the 10's when things all started to go online, get really good complete games and y you could hit up gameFAQ's if you needed help with something (used to have to know someone who knew or call the Nintendo Power hotline at $1.99 a min if you were stuck.

Think most college educated people like that too, it's just the loud ones that are the issue.

Seriously what the fuck is the culture in California and New York where it socially acceptable to treat white people like fictional characters

Speaking as a Californian let me say, fuck those guys doing that.

youtube

this is more like it

#zoomer huey anon

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ciaranswritingportfolio · 3 months

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Every Cancelled Zelda Game [YT Script]

INTRO

Ever wanted to learn about canceled games in the Legend of Zelda series? Find out in this episode where we will discuss Every Canceled Zelda Game: Game Facts Special!

We’ve got info on 2 cancelled Wind Waker Sequels, a “terrifying” Tingle horror game, and a bunch of cancelled spin off titles. If you are looking for your cancelled Zelda fix, then we’ve got you covered in this episode!

Wind Waker Sequel for Gameboy Advance

To start us off, we were almost graced with a Windwaker remake for the Gameboy Advance. Two talented Ubisoft developers Davide Soliani (who was working as a game designer at the time) and game artist Fabio Pagetti both designed a working prototype of Wind Waker to pitch to Nintendo. A tweet by Soliani details that the videos of the demo were completed and ready to be pitched in 2003, but while ambitious, the pair’s plans were halted by their managing director. Although the GBA Wind Waker never came to fruition, fans were treated to some of the concept art that was made. David Soliani went on to direct ‘Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle’.

The Wind Waker 2

Another Wind Waker project, this time coming from Nintendo itself! At the Game Developers Conference in 2004, the project manager of the Zelda series, Eiji Aonuma, included in his presentation, a tease for a new mainline Zelda game! With an expected release date, and a promise of more information to be expected at that year's E3 expo.

Not much was leaked about the canceled sequel, but it was said to have taken place on land with extensive horseback exploration and combat.

During E3 2004 fans were treated to a realistic trailer, with visuals far from those seen in the original Wind Waker. Eventually this game would be titled Twilight Princess and a proper console sequel to Wind Waker never materialized. The decision to replace Wind Waker 2 with Twilight Princess was influenced by the popularity of big budget fantasy at the box offices with productions such as The Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately the fact sales figures were not as high as the team hoped for the original Wind Waker, with Nintendo of America telling the Zelda team that the ‘cartoonish’ look alienated older players and led to low sales in America.

In many ways Twilight Princess carries the legacy of the Wind Waker 2 project. It also takes place on land and features extensive horseback riding and horse based combat.�� It's easy to see how the company efficiently transformed Wind Waker 2 into Twilight Princess.

Four Swords DS

After the popularity of the previous Four Swords titles, the Nintendo DS was bound to get one, with its wireless connection, allowing for multiplayer. Game designers Hiromasa Shikata and Shiro Mouri were pushing hard to get a multiplayer title for the DS, however, these efforts were stifled by Shigeru Miyamoto as he said that the ideas ‘felt too stale’, perhaps feeling that the games had been done, wanting to move onto more original projects. They eventually made their multiplayer debut with Tri-Force Heroes on the 3DS! Which offered a totally new take on multiplayer Zelda.

Retro’s Sheik Spinoff

Did you know that Retro Studios almost made a game solely about the Sheikah tribe? Said to be a much darker iteration in the series, the game was to be based on the last male Sheik after the bad ending concluded in Ocarina of Time. What remains are some stunning pieces of concept art from artist Sammy Hall’s now deleted artstation. With themes of ethnic cleansing and genocide, it certainly would have expanded upon a darker side in the Zelda lore. The concept did not get very far in development and was canceled around the time many of Retro’s Leaders left the company in 2006.

Twilight Princess Side Story

Twilight Princess was a staggering success, and it was a no brainer for the team to begin development on a sequel. For reference, it sold almost 15,000 copies during its first two days of release in Japan, and 240,000 copies in its opening weekend in Europe. It had critics gushing over the title in reviews, and after 9 million copies in worldwide sales, it definitely warranted another story with this iteration of Link. Development on such a game was originally to be similar to what Majora’s Mask was to Ocarina of Time. To many fans' disappointment, it was canned by Miyamoto early on, who began to complain that the scope of the game ended up become too wide. In the end the game was replaced by Link’s Crossbow Training, which utilized the Wii’s Zapper peripheral.

A Sequel to Link’s Crossbow Training

Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma was so keen on the idea of utilizing the Wii zapper peripheral that he wanted to make another game based around this mechanic, this time, in multiplayer. It would have been a First Person Shooter (FPS) with a much stronger emphasis on multiplayer gameplay using the Wii’s built in Wifi. Eventually the game was rejected by Nintendo executives.

Third Oracle Gameboy Color Game

The duo of the Oracle games on the Game Boy Color were originally intended as a trilogy, reflecting the 3 sections of the tri-force; power, wisdom, and courage. During planning, the developers found it difficult to link all three games using the password system. This led to the cancellation of the third game, due to be titled ‘Mystical Seed of Courage’, and subsequently renamed the Oracle games to what we know them to be today. Information is limited, but it would have involved the Oracle Farore, who was featured in both games.

The Adventure of Link SNES Remake

The Nintendo Gigaleak gave fans a plethora of tidbits for unreleased games, and information about their productions. This included sprites for what could have been for a remake that was planned on the SNES for The Adventure of Link, the second game in the series. The sprites are characteristic of the SNES.

There were also 3D models designed to work with the FX Chip for the SNES. These models are confirmed to be from a potential Zelda 2 remake. Eventually the Zelda 2 Remake was canceled but it did inform the development of Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64.

Ura Zelda

This game was planned as an ‘additional content’ patch for a new piece of Nintendo hardware named the Nintendo 64 Dynamic Drive or Disk Drive, which would have held an additional disk, expanding the memory of the Nintendo 64, and altering the Ocarina of Time. The cartridge would have added new dungeons, altered existing ones, and even included new enemies. Ura Zelda is likely to have eventually been ported onto a bonus disc included with Wind Waker. This bonus was called ‘The Master Quest’, but likely didn’t include the full scope of the original expansion, and didn’t include any new enemies.

Because of Nintendo Gigaleak we have even more information about the development of Ocarina of Time which included some work for Ura Zelda. You can see even more of that in our Zelda Gigaleak Episode!

Zelda 3 Alternative

While not exactly canceled, we know that Zelda 3 could have turned out very differently. Concept art from the planning stage of the third Zelda game shows Zelda in a futuristic style of armor, showing that a sci-fi Zelda game could have been a reality. The game would have had a futuristic backdrop and taken a different design by having a hub world, and a multiworld structure with time traveling elements in its gameplay and story, not dissimilar to the later Crash Bandicoot games. Early on Miyamoto wanted the game to have a Final Fantasy-like party structure with a magic user, and a fairy character. The game might have ended up more open ended like the original Legend of Zelda with multiple ways to complete the game.

Heroes of Hyrule

This spinoff was going to be similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, or Fire Emblem, but set in the Zelda universe. It would have featured Goron, Zora, and Rito as playable heroes set 100 years in the past. It would have also featured a boy in the present named Kori who was also playable. and the game would have involved our band of heroes adventuring to save Link from Ganon.

Being developed by Retro Studios the game had been fairly fleshed out in terms of narrative, but ended up being canceled in the concept design phase. In an interview with one of the Retro Studio Developers, we found out that the main game mechanics would involve exploration and puzzle solving.

The existence of this game was revealed through the youtube channel Did You Know Gaming. Unfortunately that video is no longer available as it was taken down by Nintendo’s Copyright Ninjas allegedly.

3D Classics: The Legend of Zelda

This remake was teased at E3 in 2010 as part of Nintendo’s 3D Classics line by Shigeru Miyamoto. Unfortunately even with excitement from fans it never came out.

Tingle Horror Game

Japanese development studio Vanpool, is best known to have developed Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love and Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland with the Majora’s Mask’s Tingle character.

They were also developing a horror game with the jovial, and let's face it, incredibly creepy guy. Nintendo producer Kensuke Tanabe dropped casually in an interview that the studio they had worked with on other games were developing a Tingle Horror game, but mentioned that they eventually canceled it for more than a few reasons.

A Rolling Game Starring A Goron

Vanpool weren’t just working on Tingle’s debut horror experience, but also a rolling game for the Nintendo DS. Its gameplay would be similar to the Goron minigame from Ocarina of Time, but it would utilize the touch screen of the DS. Nintendo eventually rejected their pitch for this game, but the concept helped Nintendo develop their touch-screen rolling mechanic for a new IP called Dillon's Rolling Western.

We could have also mentioned the Zelda Tech Demos for Game Cube or Wii U that never became games. But we’re saving those for an episode on Tech Demos that never became games.

Which of these Canceled Zelda games do you want to play the most? What canceled mechanics do you think made it to the latest Tears of the Kingdom? Let us know in the comments below.

Make sure to checkout our episodes on Zelda Gigaleak finds and Every Canceled Dragon Ball games!

Voice Actor Say Goodbye

Thanks for watching!

This has been a Game Facts Special [20 References Available on Request]

Content Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-TE_36qtZs

#gaming #zelda #content writing

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gameforestdach · 1 month

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Evil Empire, bekannt für ihre bahnbrechende Arbeit an Dead Cells, betritt mit ihrem neuesten Projekt "The Rogue Prince of Persia" Neuland. Dieses Spiel bringt eine Roguelite-Wendung in die beliebte Prince of Persia-Reihe und soll im Mai 2024 auf Steam Early Access starten. Das Studio hat kürzlich einen Aufruf für Alpha-Tester gestartet und bietet Fans damit einen frühen Einblick in die dynamische und herausfordernde Welt des Spiels. Einblicke in die Entwicklung und Spielmechaniken Initiale Entwicklung: Gespräche zwischen Evil Empire und Ubisoft auf der Game Developers Conference im Jahr 2019 fungierten als Katalysator für dieses Projekt, was kurz darauf zum Start der Vollzeitentwicklung führte. Das Spiel ist seit ungefähr vier Jahren in der Entwicklung und spiegelt eine tiefe und durchdachte Integration von Roguelite-Elementen mit den klassischen Spielelementen der Franchise wider. Künstlerische Leitung: Inspiriert von frankobelgischen Comics, verspricht der künstlerische Stil des Spiels ein visuell atemberaubendes Erlebnis, das an die komplexen Designs in Kultcomics wie Die Abenteuer von Tim und Struppi und Asterix erinnert. Spielablauf: Das Roguelite-Format bewahrt die traditionellen akrobatischen Kampf- und Rätsellösungsmechaniken der Serie, erhöht aber den Reiz durch prozedural generierte Level, Permadeath und eine Vielfalt an modernen Gameplay-Schleifen. https://twitter.com/princeofpersia/status/1778452987574206815 Kommende Veröffentlichung und Einbindung der Community Steam Early Access: Für Mai 2024 geplant, wird The Rogue Prince of Persia die erste Steam-Veröffentlichung von Ubisoft am ersten Tag seit 2019 markieren. Diese Strategie erhöht nicht nur die Zugänglichkeit, sondern ermöglicht es der Community auch, aktiv durch Feedback am Entwicklungsprozess des Spiels teilzunehmen (Video Games Chronicle). Kontinuierliche Updates: Nach dem Launch wird das Spiel regelmäßig Updates erhalten, die neue Funktionen und Inhalte einführen, alles ohne zusätzliche Kosten für die Spieler. Dieser Ansatz zielt darauf ab, die Spieldynamik basierend auf Community-Feedback zu verfeinern und sorgt so für ein ständig evolutionäres Spielerlebnis. Strategische Bedeutung und die Zukunft Wiederbelebung eines Klassikers: Dieses neue Unterfangen ist Teil der breiteren Strategie von Ubisoft, die Prince of Persia-Reihe wiederzubeleben, eine bei vielen beliebte Franchise. Mit der Einführung von Roguelite-Elementen zielt das Spiel darauf ab, nicht nur langjährige Fans, sondern auch neue Spieler anzuziehen, die auf der Suche nach einem herausfordernden und stilistisch einzigartigen Spielerlebnis sind. Die Vorfreude wächst: Während die Gaming-Community gespannt auf die Early-Access-Veröffentlichung wartet, deuten die lange Entwicklungszeit und die Beteiligung eines erfahrenen Studios wie Evil Empire auf einen hochwertigen und fesselnden Beitrag zur Serie hin, der die Wahrnehmung von Roguelite-Spielen neu definieren könnte (GameForest). Bleib dran für "The Rogue Prince of Persia" Mit seinem Versprechen auf kostenlose Updates und einer frischen Interpretation des Roguelite-Genres ist The Rogue Prince of Persia bereit, ein fesselndes neues Kapitel für die historische Franchise zu sein. Halte im Mai auf Steam Ausschau nach dem Early-Access-Start und schließe dich den Reihen der Alpha-Tester an.

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loopsh · 2 months

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Ubisoft's Neo NPC Tech and Partnership with NVIDIA

Ubisoft’s latest innovation, the Neo NPCs, marks significant progress in video game interaction, revealed through a partnership with NVIDIA. This development opens a new chapter in the evolution of non-playable characters (NPCs), offering players unprecedented levels of engagement in gaming narratives. During the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Ubisoft showcased the groundbreaking…

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civildisorderstream · 5 months

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E3 is dead, for real this time.

Citation first, then thoughts:

So uh... Mixed feelings eh?

E3 definitely had its problems. Coerced audience reaction, weird choices by Ubisoft in who to have give the presentations, etc. Plus, as the internet was more normalized for content delivery, it didn't make sense to have an event locked mostly to the press happening in a physical space. There could have been ways to adapt the event to fit the times, but the ESA just never chose to. And no, I don't have those ideas, but I do know that people still do attend other sorts of in-person events which is evidence enough.

Still, I'm gonna miss E3. There were a lot of years where the conferences were a spectacle that would be community watched. I remember in one particular year I was running back and forth from my computer to the living room since E3 was being broadcast on TV, exchanging view time and frantic internet posting in reaction. It's a nostalgia thing.

The obvious replacement people are talking about is The Game Awards, as sold by Geoff Keighley. This guy.

Cringe.

Look, I don't mind a decentralized, non-walled-garden replacement for E3 showing up. A neutral zone for video games. But the Game Awards - awards intrinsically suggesting that it's about the celebration of games already out and the people who made those games - should NOT be it. We've all seen how the TGA (yes, the The) has increasingly gone toward commercial time. This year was probably 40 minutes total of awards and speeches, with the other 3 hours dedicated to game announcements and related promotions. Oh, and let's not forget Keighley's habit of giving Hideo Kojima all the time he needs to talk about... a movie or game or whatever the fuck.

A star-fucker worshipping a star-fucker. A match made in heaven. But I digress.

It's the end of an era in video games. The writing has been on the wall long enough that it's not a sudden blow out of nowhere, just a sad as hell whimper.

#E3 #the game awards #geoff keighley #video games

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ailtrahq · 8 months

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Colleen Sullivan, who is in charge of Brevan Howard Asset Management’s crypto-venture arm, recognizes the potential of blockchain technology in the gaming industry. However, she also acknowledges the current technological limitations. In particular, she highlights concerns about the public ledger’s throughput, particularly in networks such as Solana, which can only process approximately 2,000 user transactions per second. This capacity, in her view, falls short of what is required to host high-quality gaming experiences. “That’s still a fraction of what it would take to put a game like Monopoly GO, its game logic and game state fully on-chain.” Colleen Sullivan, at the Mainnet Conference Ubisoft and Square Enix, the creators of “Assassin’s Creed” and “Final Fantasy,” respectively, positioned themselves as pioneers of blockchain technology in 2021. Despite internal and customer reservations, the sentiment was strong when crypto peaked in 2021. However, as the digital asset market declined, some, including Sonic the Hedgehog creators Sega, abandoned plans to incorporate blockchain into their gaming projects. Horizon Blockchain Games received $40 million from Sullivan and Brevan Howard Digital in October 2022, but Sullivan cautioned that the technology’s maturation process to accommodate large-scale games would likely take several years. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evnKJurUFzg[/embed] She highlights the current limitations of blockchain in the high-stakes world of video gaming, revealing a gap in the market that has yet to be filled. Source

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kamreadsandrecs · 10 months

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By Anna Wiener

Earlier this spring, I took the bus to the Moscone Center, in downtown San Francisco, where almost thirty thousand people had gathered for the annual Game Developers Conference (G.D.C.), which I was attending as a journalist. I had spent the previous few months out on maternity leave, and I was glad to return to work, to have meetings, to temporarily exit the domestic sphere. Participating in public life felt incredible, almost psychedelic. I loved making small talk with the bus driver, and eavesdropping on strangers. “Conferences are back,” I heard one man say, sombrely, to another. As my bus pulled away, I saw that it was stamped, marvellously, with an advertisement for Taiwanese grouper. “Mild yet distinctive flavor,” the ad read. “Try lean and nutritious grouper tonight.”

On the G.D.C. expo floor, skateboarders wearing black bodysuits studded with sensors performed low-level tricks on a quarter-pipe. People roped with conference lanyards stumbled about in V.R. goggles. Every wall or partition seemed to be covered in high-performance, high-resolution screens and monitors; it was grounding to look at my phone. That week, members of the media and prolific tech-industry Twitter users couldn’t stop talking to, and about, chatbots. OpenAI had just released a new version of ChatGPT, and the technology was freaking everyone out. There was speculation about whether artificial intelligence would erode the social fabric, and whether entire professions, even industries, were about to be replaced.

The gaming industry has long relied on various forms of what might be called A.I., and at G.D.C. at least two of the talks addressed the use of large language models and generative A.I. in game development. They were focussed specifically on the construction of non-player characters, or N.P.C.s: simple, purely instrumental dramatis personae—villagers, forest creatures, combat enemies, and the like—who offer scripted, constrained, utilitarian lines of dialogue, known as barks. (“Hi there”; “Have you heard?”; “Look out!”) N.P.C.s are meant to make a game feel populated, busy, and multidimensional, without being too distracting. Meanwhile, outside of gaming, the N.P.C. has become a sort of meme. In 2018, the Times identified the term “N.P.C.” as “the Pro-Trump Internet’s new favorite insult,” after right-wing Internet users began using it to describe their political opponents as mechanical chumps brainwashed by political orthodoxy. These days, “N.P.C.” can be used to describe another person, or oneself, as generic—basic, reproducible, ancillary, pre-written, powerless.

When I considered the possibilities of N.P.C.s powered by L.L.M.s, I imagined self-replenishing worlds of talk, with every object and character endowed with personality. I pictured solicitous orcs, garrulous venders, bantering flora. In reality, the vision was more workaday. N.P.C.s “may be talking to the player, to each other, or to themselves—but they must speak without hesitation, repetition, or deviation from the narrative design,” the summary for one of the talks, given by Ben Swanson, a researcher at Ubisoft, read. Swanson’s presentation promoted Ubisoft’s Ghostwriter program, an application designed to reduce the busywork involved in creating branching “trees” of dialogue, in which the same types of conversations occur many times, slightly permuted depending on what players say. Ghostwriter uses a large language model to suggest potential barks for N.P.C.s, based on various criteria inputted by humans, who then vet the model’s output. The player doesn’t directly engage the A.I.

Yet it seems likely that “conversations” with A.I. will become more common in the coming years. Large language models are being added to search engines and e-commerce sites, and into word processors and spreadsheet software. In theory, the capabilities of voice assistants, such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, could become more complex and layered. Call centers are introducing A.I. “assistants”; Amazon is allegedly building a chatbot; and Wendy’s, the fast-food chain, has been promoting a drive-through A.I. Earlier this spring, the Khan Lab School, a small private school in Palo Alto, introduced an experimental tutoring bot to its students, and the National Eating Disorders Association tried replacing its human-run telephone helpline with a bot dubbed Tessa. (NEDA suspended the service after Tessa gave harmful advice to callers.)

Chatbots are not the end point of L.L.M.s. Arguably, the technology’s most impressive capabilities have less to do with conversation and more to do with processing data—unearthing and imitating patterns, regurgitating inputs to produce something close to summaries—of which conversational text is just one type. Still, it seems that the future could hold endless opportunities for small talk with indefatigable interlocutors. Some of this talk will be written, and some may be conducted through verbal interfaces that respond to spoken commands, queries, and other inputs. Anything hooked up to a database could effectively become a bot, or an N.P.C., whether in virtual or physical space. We could be entering an age characterized by endless chat—useful or skimmable, and bottomless by design.

Online chat is distinct from conversation or talk, and tends to have its own flow. It can be cacophonous—participants spraying one another with bursts of short text—or totally asynchronous, with souls hitting Return into the void. The stakes are usually low, and opportunities to partake are ubiquitous: one can chat in direct messages, on dating apps, in video games, on video calls, in word-processing software, and so on, to say nothing of dedicated applications such as WhatsApp or iMessage. Chat tends to adapt to the features, constraints, and conventions of a given platform. Chatting on Slack is different from chatting on Tinder. There is always more to say, and somewhere else to say it. Silence—stillness—can feel like a miracle.

In 2011, the editors of the journal n+1 offered a baroque, funny treatise on chat in an essay called “Chathexis.” In particular, they explored the unique pleasures of Gchat, that era’s discursive software of choice. “Gchat returns philosophy to the bedroom as, late at night, we find ourselves in a state of rapturous focus,” they wrote. “So many of us feel our best selves in Gchat. Silent, we are unable to talk over our friends, and so we become better and deeper listeners, as well as better speakers—or writers.” Chat, they noted, can be cozy, intimate, casual, revelatory, expansive; it also has an emotional undercurrent. “Chat’s immediacy emphasizes response, reminding us that we do not simply create and express ourselves in writing, but create and express our relationships,” the editors argued.

What chatbots offer isn’t chat, exactly—it’s a chat simulation. Some of the chummier models, such as Replika (“the AI companion who cares”) or Bing’s semiretired Sydney, can produce a rhythm that’s close to the real thing. ChatGPT encourages anthropomorphism, even with its dry, intentionally mechanical “personality”: it issues apologies when it makes a mistake, returns text in the first person, and has a typing-awareness indicator—a line of dots, climbing from one to three and back again, that suggests thoughtful, halting composition on the part of the computer. (Kevin Munger, a political scientist at Penn State University, has proposed regulating the use of first-person pronouns, to “limit the risk of people being scammed by LLMs, either financially or emotionally.”) But ChatGPT’s prose style remains almost uniformly stiff and elliptical; although it can be prompted to rephrase its utterances in different emotional registers and affects, using it still feels like conversing with equations. Compared with the immediacy of my own Gchats with friends—“omg american apparels website is out of control right now,” one friend wrote, in 2011—ChatGPT offers data-processing masquerading as conversation, a server farm humming at the frequency of speech.

By making L.L.M.s conversational, their developers enlist human interlocutors in training and refining the software. But adding conversational interfaces to consumer-facing L.L.M.s is also an appeal to familiarity, to existing habits and activities. “Chat” evokes what search engines and databases cannot: a sense of personal involvement. It implicates one’s selfhood, which helps cultivate certain behaviors. Earlier this year, in a Medium post titled “Who are we talking to when we talk to these bots?,” Colin Fraser, a data scientist at Meta, wrote that ChatGPT’s “chat-shaped interface . . . guides the user towards producing inputs of the desired type.” When users stray from their intended role, he went on, the L.L.M. is liable to deliver undesirable output—sentences, or sentence fragments, that betray the “mindless synthetic text generator” operating beneath the surface. “A big reason that OpenAI needs you to keep your inputs within the bounds of a typical conversational style is that it enables them to more effectively police the output of the model,” Fraser went on. “The model only acts remotely predictably when the user acts predictably.”

With today’s chatbots, human users are not really speaking; they are prompting. Prompting, in this context, is the term used to describe deliberately prodding or nudging the software toward specific outcomes. OpenAI’s documentation has a page on “best practices for prompt engineering” with the company’s A.P.I.; these include steering away from negation (“Instead of just saying what not to do, say what to do instead”), and offering details about the “context, outcome, length, format, style,” and tone of the desired response. Some companies working on A.I. products have hired “prompt engineers”—people who develop and document fruitful prompts, or sequences of prompts. A job listing for a “prompt engineer/librarian,” posted by the company Anthropic, whose chatbot, Claude, is marketed as “helpful, honest, and harmless,” describes the role as “a hybrid between programming, instructing, and teaching.”

If certain prompts produce higher-quality data—content that is more legible, thorough, and sometimes more accurate—then prompt design becomes its own form of literacy. Earlier this spring, the Times published an instructional article, “Get the Best from ChatGPT with These Golden Prompts,” that advised using the phrase “act as if” to guide chatbots to “emulate an expert.” Users, of course, are also acting “as if.” They, too, must engage in acts of emulation—playing along, chatting in ways that are computationally friendly, suspending any disbelief about the expertise of predictive text. High-quality inputs are rewarded with high-quality outputs; the software is a kind of mirror. What’s happening is data exchange between user and bot—but it is also a mutual manipulation, a flywheel, an ouroboros.

At G.D.C., during a break between meetings, I went around the corner to the Metreon, a mall, to pick up lunch at a fast-casual Vietnamese restaurant. I had frequented the restaurant regularly about a decade ago, when I was twenty-five and working in customer support at a startup nearby. Back then, I spent my days writing e-mails that said things like “I’d love to reproduce this error for myself” and “Let me know if that helps!” In those years, Tony Hsieh’s book “Delivering Happiness” was popular, and there was a lot of talk about how to administer “surprise and delight.” It was strange to think about a future in which this work might be completely automated—in which L.L.M.s, rather than liberal-arts graduates, would be tasked with transmogrifying frustration and human error into something useful and charming.

The restaurant looked about the same as I remembered, but with more screens. Bowls are an intrinsic part of cuisines all over the world, but in corporate lunch culture a “bowl” also signifies drop-down-menu food—food reduced to first principles—and people wearing G.D.C. lanyards stood behind two tablets, waiting to select bases, proteins, sauces, and toppings. On the other side of the tablets, a line of employees transferred fistfuls of rice noodles from cold metal troughs to compostable containers. When it was my turn, I quickly selected the allotted number of components, almost at random, and immediately felt remorse. As the workers assembled my bowl, I read Yelp reviews of the restaurant. “For outright value, you just can’t beat the bowl,” one reviewer had written. “They really stuffed the bowl,” wrote another. “My bowl was brimming to the top!” a third claimed.

I have always been fond of Yelp, not as a service but as a literary corpus, documenting nearly twenty years of sociocultural desire and thwarted expectations—a chronicle of a generation’s pursuit of optimized experience. The site, which was founded in 2004, is a perfect artifact of Web 2.0, a version of the Web that produced new styles of user-generated content: tweets, shitposts, comments, memes, reviews—forms of public writing with their own conventions, shorthand, and lexical tics, each unique to their platform. (Yelp: “I would give zero stars if I could”; “I am very surprised by the rating”; “Really a 3.5, but rounded down because of presentation.”) It was almost poignant that many large language models were trained on content from Web 2.0. Those corporate platforms, and the text that animates them, seemed quaint and homespun by comparison.

I wondered whether chatbots and other natural-language interfaces would produce new shapes of conversation, new forms of talk, new types of content. Just as Yelp affected the way its users thought about certain offline experiences—a trip to the chiropractor, the customer service at a gas station, the size of a lunch bowl—L.L.M.s had the potential to affect the way people sought and processed information. Already, despite generating text riddled with factual errors, chatbots were being positioned as information-gathering tools. How might they affect the expectations users have about knowledge, or their attitudes toward expertise and authority?

Carrying my bowl, I found a seat in a plaza adjacent to the Moscone Center. People leaned against the building with cigarettes, or gathered in small groups, vaping. The air was fragrant, polluted and evocative, and my face grew warm in the sun. I poked at a matchstick of jicama, nostalgic and happy, consuming the lunch option of my youth. I thought back to working in customer support: how I would occasionally repair to the server room to take video calls with customers; how they sometimes seemed surprised to meet the person on the receiving end of their e-mails; how the tone would shift. Transactional conversation—speaking, and being spoken to, like a bot—can be efficient, maybe even nice, depending on the context and on your disposition. But it can also feel condescending, flattening, manipulative, and generic—like being treated as an N.P.C. I ate my Proustian lunch bowl. The Yelp reviewers were right: the bowl was large.

Back inside the Moscone Center, after another saunter across the expo floor, I took an escalator up to the lobby, turned several corners, walked down a flight of stairs, and found two “lactation pods” in what appeared to be the basement. The pods were freestanding structures, manufactured by a company called Mamava, and looked like teardrop trailers. “Hello, Mamas!” a welcome note, printed on the back of the door, read. “Relax. You deserve it.” A small plastic plant sat on a ledge, next to a mirror, and I checked my reflection: turtleneck, backpack, conference lanyard, tired eyes. “Looking good mama!” a decal running along the bottom of the mirror chirped. It was all too cozy, a little debased. Talk was feeling very cheap.

Language can contain an entire world, revealing its speakers’ history, values, or pathologies. It can also be obfuscating, diversionary, slippery. Chattiness, with its personality-driven appeals to familiarity, can conceal or elide false promises, banality, emptiness, controversy, and the context of its own existence. (In 2022, Taiwanese grouper was banned by China, its primary market, leaving its producers in dire need of new consumers.) In this vein, simulated chat obscures the reality of what it takes to create, train, update, and maintain large language models, which are, at least for now, hugely expensive and resource-intensive. It is a tremendous undertaking to make computing more personal and intimate: behind every chatbot is a server farm, or several. Prompting a large language model to call up and arrange data involves activating a vast network. Chatbots, for all their ostensible personalization, are in the business of mass production.

All of this infrastructure buttresses a fantasy. Technologists have long dreamed of having interpersonal relationships with programs. Recently, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, reminisced to the Wall Street Journal about being a child, peering into his Macintosh, and having the “sudden realization” that “someday, the computer was going to learn to think.” (The Journal’s use of the word “realization” suggests fact, rather than conjecture; it’s not yet clear whether L.L.M.s, or subsequent technologies, will be able to “think” in any recognizable or meaningful way.) Last week, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published an essay in which he envisioned a world of empathetic, well-informed, motivational bots, “maximizing every person’s outcomes” and working alongside artists, scientists, heads of state, and children. “Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful,” Andreessen wrote. “The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.”

When I sat alone, at home, looking into the expectant portal of ChatGPT, I wondered how far even the most sophisticated synthetic fondness, or “intelligence,” could take a technology like this—whether it could ever feel transportive or trustworthy. Maybe the future did hold infinite knowledge and infinite love, or at least the “machine versions” of those things, manufactured, marketed, and sold by corporate monopolies and venture-funded tech companies. Meanwhile, around the edges of my screen, notifications flickered and slid; my phone buzzed as my in-box expanded with headlines, work logistics, personal news, banter, commiseration, gossip. In the near term, the future seemed to hold infinite chat, not between friends, or even strangers, but with server racks in Altoona and Ashburn—a world of kaleidoscopic interfaces waiting to be prompted, ready to say just what users wanted to hear.

#technology #artificial intelligence #ai #internet

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kammartinez · 11 months

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By Anna Wiener

#technology #artificial intelligence #ai #internet

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xtremeservers · 11 months

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While most of the bonanza of summer gam... https://www.xtremeservers.com/blog/ubisoft-forward-star-wars-and-avatar-surprised-us-with-a-proper-next-gen-vision/?feed_id=78307&_unique_id=648bc494522a1&Ubisoft%20Forward%3A%20Star%20Wars%20and%20Avatar%20surprised%20us%20with%20a%20proper%20%27next-gen%27%20vision

#PS4 #bonanza #most #PlayStation #While

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beardedmrbean · 1 month

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Hi thank you for dealing with my rambling, now back to my ac stuff

Well Ubisoft confirms their E3 summer style event Ubisoft forward will happen on June 10th. Maybe more ac news by then

*Hug my copium tank*

Now people think that they will properly reveal red name and mcs there….but sorry red is targeted to be ubi biggest moneymaker this year (especially after skulls and bones)

But I would be PISSED as a dev on another game that would have to deal with red overshadowing them

I think they are going to do a press event for Red in May where they are going to show of a cinematic trailer for red

Also pssssst Ubi, just put Yasuke in marketing. Fuck have the cinematic trailer shows why he stay in Japan for the final sengoku civil war

And do press conference and articles with screenshots, hi res models of the MCs make more sense

Then Ubisoft forward is with we are going to get the gameplay demo and story trailer

Oh and the pre orders, ugh it’s going to get a bitch get my copy isn’t it?

But thank you for these past months for dealing with my ramblings.

I like the rambling, it's a good insight into perspectives I wouldn't get otherwise.

Well Ubisoft confirms their E3 summer style event Ubisoft forward will happen on June 10th. Maybe more ac news by then *Hug my copium tank*

Fingers crossed for all kinds of good news

But I would be PISSED as a dev on another game that would have to deal with red overshadowing them

That does happen as we've seen before

How do you beat this

I think they are going to do a press event for Red in May where they are going to show of a cinematic trailer for red Also pssssst Ubi, just put Yasuke in marketing. Fuck have the cinematic trailer shows why he stay in Japan for the final sengoku civil war

Personal opinion I think something like this for the teaser would be rad

It also might drive you and a few other people that are sitting on pins and needles mad, probably a naginata instead of the 'vibroaxe' lando has here, but you get what I'm saying.

They are called teasers after all.

And do press conference and articles with screenshots, hi res models of the MCs make more sense Then Ubisoft forward is with we are going to get the gameplay demo and story trailer

that could be fun too

Oh and the pre orders, ugh it’s going to get a bitch get my copy isn’t it?

Is there a limit to steam orders or is this one with a physical disc?

But thank you for these past months for dealing with my ramblings.

I like getting the excited nerd out asks, angry asks too. It's nice to be able to lend an ear to folks that have stuff they want to share good or bad.

Happy to provide that if I can

#zoomer huey anon

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nerdishfeels · 11 months

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I have never cringed as much as I did watching that Ubisoft conference lol 😂

#I really wish they just showed us the games and spoke less #they didn’t really show much which was disappointing #ac mirage looked awesome #Star Wars outlaw looked alright too #that’s it #I was excited for Prince of Persia but now I’m not sure lol #Ubisoft #Ubisoft showcase

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fukutomichi · 11 months

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*Ubisoft conference in an hour*

*Capcom a few hours later*

#i wanna see if there's some gameplay for the new star wars outlaws game from ubisfot...#capcom better have some surprises!! 8D #summer game fest #2k23 summer game fest #ubisoft #capcom

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news-ld · 11 months

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the program so you don't miss anything from the annual video game "festival"

The Summer time Game Fest is a web based competition devoted to video video games. SUMMER GAME FEST The (more and more unlikely) return of the Digital Leisure Expo (E3)? It is nonetheless not for this 12 months! Essentially the most well-known video game honest, a should since 1995 and in issue since the Covid-19 pandemic, has once more been deprogrammed this 12 months, onerous hit by the lack of assist from the giants of the sector. Since this disappearance, the traditional June conferences of impartial publishers and builders have taken place in the wake of the Summer time Game Fest, a promotional night launched in 2020 by Canadian host Geoff Keighley and broadcast on the Twitch video platform. If this collection of summer time conferences thus technically started yesterday with the Guerrilla Collective On-line Showcase, it's certainly tonight's occasion that can kick off what guarantees to be a busy week for video game information. . Here's a information to seek out your approach round the fifteen occasions that punctuate it.

June 8

- Opening of the Summer time Game Fest - Future Video games Present Summer time Showcase - Xbox Video games Showcase + Starfield Direct “Starfield” is an motion role-playing video game slated for launch on September 6. Airs at 7 p.m. on Twitch and YouTube. Right here is the second essential course of this collection of conferences, after the Summer time Game Fest. The eyes of players will probably be notably riveted on the bulletins of the subsequent Xbox exclusives, nonetheless uncommon for 2023 and 2024, in addition to on the house role-playing game Starfield from Bethesda, the flagship launch of the 12 months for Microsoft's gaming division. Airs at 10 p.m. on Twitch and YouTube. gaming laptopthe British journal of reference for PC gaming, returns with a web based occasion that always shines with its revelations regarding demanding or cutting-edge video games, but in addition with a number of bulletins about pc {hardware}.

June 12

Airs at 7 p.m. on Twitch and YouTube. The French writer is touring to Los Angeles for its main convention of the 12 months. To seduce, Ubisoft intends to depend on two blockbusters: Murderer's Creed Mirage And Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Making an excellent impression is essential for the firm, lately shaken by a disappointing monetary outcomes, the postponement of the exit of Cranium and Bones and the obvious medical loss of life of the undertaking Past Good and Evil 2. Airs at 11:59 p.m. on Twitch and YouTube After the surge road fighter 6 and the uppercut from the remake of Resident Evil 4, the Japanese Capcom doesn't intend to take a break in the locker room. A thirty-six-minute convention was introduced at the final second by the studio, which is at the moment getting ready Dragon's Dogma 2 and an augmented actuality undertaking in the universe of monster hunter.

June 14

Broadcast at 8 p.m. on YouTube and on the IGN web site. So as to not be crushed by the bulletins of "AAA", the massive finances video video games that entice all eyes, the technique of the VR professionals is easy: arrive first, like the Meta Quest Gaming Showcase of the 1er June, or shut the festivities, like this convention of the American web site UploadVR.

June 16

Airing at 5 a.m. on Twitch and YouTube. Ryu ga Gotoku (RGG) is the Sega studio chargeable for licensing Like a Dragonbeforehand generally known as Yakuza. A convention geared toward a small viewers of followers, on the lookout particularly for unseen sequences of Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Titleanticipated this 12 months, or Like a Dragon 8scheduled for 2024. Pierre Discovered Source link Read the full article

#annual #anything #don’t #festival #from #game #jeux-video #miss #program #the #video:#you

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