Everything Everywhere Once A Week (7/21/23)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the goings on in the video game industry over the last week. This week, at the grocery store, I overheard two men talking about Tears of the Kingdom. The only reason I noticed (aside from forgetting my headphones) was that one of the men was making fun of the other for going in a different order with the dungeons. He remarked, with a joking sense of smugness, that “You really messed up, unlike me, by helping those stupid Gorons.”

A.I. is Ruining Everything

This week, two stories about AI — artificial intelligence that has been around for quite a while but has made large strides in the last few years — in the gaming space that are a little horrifying. In one, a World of Warcraft subreddit noticed that information from their community was being scraped by an A.I. and turned into news stories on a less-than-scrupulous site. The subreddit decided to make a post about the introduction of Glorbo, an entirely fictitious fan-requested feature that the original poster was happy and excited to see finally implemented. The things that Glorbo does and opened the door for as described in the post are complete and utter nonsense, but a site called ZLeague did write a story about it. Moreover, they did so under the name of Lucy Reed, so not even telling readers that it’s a bot-written article based on misinformation.

The other bit of AI-in-gaming we’re discussing actually dovetails with the recent SAG-AFTRA strike commencement, wherein union actors in Hollywood have decided to strike after not being satisfied by answers from studios about on-time payment and use of artificial intelligence to steal an actor’s likeness rights and use it for free in perpetuity. Victoria Atkin, the voice of Evie Frye in Assassin’s Creed, talked with IGN about how fan mods were using her voice for new content. In essence, A.I. creates a voice print of someone through listening to their lines, then it can generate new acting for the dialogue. That sounds great if you’re some dude making a mod and want it to seem legitimate and a dystopian nightmare if you’re anyone else, much less the person whose voice has been stolen.

These stories represent kind of a tip of the iceberg in how A.I. is going to change a lot of creative work around us. Infamously, G/O Media — the parent company of Kotaku and its other sister sites — has been publishing articles written by A.I. with no intention to stop. If you want to protest this at least as far as G/O goes, you can write a letter to them here. In both these situations, A.I. is just a tool that crooked people use, even if they somehow had the best of intentions in using them. But that tool scrapes from actual work that people have made in order to learn or, to say it better, copy the homework from.

The modders behind the Assassin’s Creed Syndicate content were never going to pay Atkin for the voice of Evie Frye in their mods and Ubisoft would not have let her do that in the first place. But, like, oh well. Them’s the breaks. You don’t just get access to someone’s voice because you really want it. Especially as we’ve already passed the meditation point wherein people have used A.I. voices in pornographic game mods, that’s something you need control over or it will go fully off the rails.

Sites that are scraping the internet for potential A.I.-written stories are embarrassing, but there’s no shaming the people who issue these edicts because all they care about is how much less money they have to pay real humans. But it’s quickly becoming a snake eating its own tail, because you need human writers for the A.I. to have something to steal and getting rid of all the human writers for the A.I. articles means you’re going to end up with a recursive loop of misinformation.

As we move into a more modern and present internet that only exists to show you things made in the last six months, using A.I. to replace people means losing foundational knowledge and skills that make these things interesting. I would hope that people subscribed to a patreon about games writing understand how important it is to think about the human rather than the tool but there’s plenty of tools out there with money that don’t care about the human aspect at all.

Bandai Namco Shuts Down Gundam Evolution Within a Year of Launch

You might remember Gundam Evolution as that game you would see during gaming showcases where you would go “Huh, looks like a Gundam Overwatch” and then you probably forgot all about it. For a small group of others, it was a fun enough multiplayer game but not really anything that took over anyone’s life. Unfortunately, live service games can’t really exist in that realm, and Gundam Evolution is sunsetting in preparation for a full shutdown.

Maybe a Gundam multiplayer shooter was not poised to takeover the world, but it feels increasingly like companies are making these things under the assumption that they have a year. I think, in some sense, that’s actually kind of realistic and probably keeps these games from being major investments that become difficult to extract themselves from. On the other hand, it makes it difficult for players to want to jam another live service game into their already busy schedules when they know it will likely end in tears.

There’s probably no good solution for everyone here. You just kind of have to hope you hit on that next big idea and that gives you enough runway to build on it. But how common is that, really?

I Love It When Non-Gaming Celebrities Don’t Understand the Gaming Industry’s Secrecy Part II

We talked about this before with Tony Todd and we’ll talk about it again with composer Gustavo Santaolalla. The Last of Us maestro mentioned in an interview with Blender last week that he will be making an expanded cameo appearance in the “new editions” of Part II to play certain themes. He seemed to quickly realize he should not be saying anything and clammed up.

There’s been no official announcement, but it seems likely that Sony is going to put The Last of Us Part II on PC and PS5 if only to take advantage of the groundswell of new fans from the TV show. Sony’s quixotic relationship with PC ports notwithstanding, titles do eventually come, and this is a good chance for the already-successful TLOU Part II to get another bite at the apple.

Other Things:

• Materia Possessions is taking a small break while I plan my wedding. It should return in late August. Apologies for the inconvenience!
• Apparently Pikmin 4 is good, which is great, but I’m still playing FFXVI. After that, I want to finish Rain Code. There’s just too many video games and not enough time in the day to play them.