It's All just A Game To You, Isn't It?

Not that I want to act as unpaid hype man for Neverness To Everness but damn! Have you seen the latest trailer? 

No? 

Well, here it is. 

Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Not actually a trailer. 

It's better than that. It's the opening sequence of the game itself, apparently. More annoyed than ever about the lack of beta invite now. Grrr.

The only problem is, I want to watch that anime quite a lot more than I want to play that game. It feels like the game is the consolation prize because there is no anime. Maybe that'll swap round when I do get to play it. I hope so but I kinda doubt it. 

Raises a question, though, does it not? All these very-to-extremely successful anime-inspired games... wouldn't it make sense for them all to spin off into actual animes? Movies or shows, either way. Is there really not a Genshin Impact movie in the works? Surely there must be...

Wait...

I'll check...

Well that was more confusing than helpful. Maybe all that guff about the death of the web does have some validity after all because it certainly is full of nonsense these days. And I don't mean AI halucinations or deep fakes or any of that trendy buzzword clamor, either.

Has anyone actually tried to use IMDB for anything meaningful in the last, oh, five years, for example? Nothing there has made much sense since at least the pandemic. I used to be able to go there and get solid, straightforward details on movies, just like looking them up in a book. Now look at it! 

Case in point: do a simple google search for "Genshin Impact movie" and the top result is IMDB - Genshin Impact (TV Series 2019...) Hmm, interesting, you think... how did I miss that? And did Genshin Impact really come out that long ago? 

No, it did not. It launched at the end of September 2020. So, what then? The game is an adaptation of an existing IP? How did I miss that?

No, it isn't. There was no "TV series", not in 2019 or any other time. The entry lists 250 episodes but it looks as if what IMDB has chosen to do is list every cut scene and trailer for the game as if it was an episode in TV show. 

That's not nearly confusing enough, though. We can do much better than that. It seems HoYoVerse has been hyping a TV show based on the game for years. Or a movie. Or both. There are plenty of links to times they've said one in the works, complete with a few details on which studio might be producing it. No actual show has yet appeared or even been scheduled.

Well, except for that one that one that ran from September 2020 to August 2031, of course. I mean, we all know about that one, don't we? It was "one of Netflix's most streamed Asian programmes" and it won "Anime of the Year Award in 2022 at the International Anime Awards". 

Don't say you didn't hear about it? It's right there on the web in black and white (Actually white on black because in some parts of the internet it will be forever 1998.)

Someone put a lot of work into that Fandom Wiki entry. That is not AI. I mean, I'm not saying whoever did it didn't get an AI assist but I'm pretty sure that's all one person's fantasy there. And if they'd not chosen to project it all the way through to 2031 as though we were past then already, it would have been very convincing indeed.

So, no, as it happens I don't think AI is going to render the world-wide web unusable for any practical purposes when it comes to research. Humans got there first and are already making a pretty good job of that.

None of which was really what I was going to write about but now I've started, I might as well throw in something else I've been meaning to say about AI. Has anyone noticed how some of the AI applications that started out as services or resources are slowly turning into games?

It took me a while but once you have your eye attuned to it, you start seeing it everywhere. NightCafe, the AI image generator portal I've been using by preference for a long time, has slowly morphed from a sort of curation point for multiple models to a social media platform for enthusiasts and now it's made the full jump to becoming a game by adding... quests.

They've been using pop-ups to suggest ideas I might want to make pictures from for a long time, as though I'm going there to kill a few minutes, not to make specific images for a defined purpose, but now they're amping the casual gaming approach up to offer two-week-long challenges they've chosen to label "quests". 

Suno hasn't gone that far yet but it's well into its social media stage, with its own star creators and featured performers. It has rankings of a kind, too. I'd guess it's maybe one more iteration away from going full game.

This is the beginning of how it's going to be. AI is still bloody awful at the things the big tech companies are demanding everyone uses it for but it's tailor-made for casual time-filling. Forget the supposed danger that AI could replace the creative work of actual artists and musicians and writers in true video games. It's nowhere near ready to do that and even if it was the pushback from a very vocal segment of the audience is going to delay the (Still inevitable.) drafting of the technology into mainstream entertainment production for quite a while longer. As something for idle hands to do when there's nothing better, though? For that, it's perfect already.

The threshold for game-like entertainment at that end of the market is orders of magnitude lower than  in games aimed at console or PC gamers. It's not as though the standards of human-made games there are stellar and the expectations of the audience are infamously relaxed. If it kills thirty seconds at a bus-stop it's likely good enough.

Or  maybe that's just the view of someone who doesn't understand the market or the players. Easy trap to fall into. Still, I have heard enough about the way the Suno mobile app's being used already to understand that for many of its users, typing in a few words and having it make a song you can laugh about is considered a decent enough way to pass a lunch hour. Especially now it will happily use rude words.

Luckily, for now anyway, these apps do still retain the backend that lets them be applied to the purpose for which they were originally created, namely as creative tools. How long that will last is another matter, which is one reason I'm getting as much done now as I can before I log in one day to find the whole thing has been turned into a game. I suspect the window of opportunity for doing much other than the AI equivalent of quizzes, word-searches or sudoko may not stay open that much longer.

And once again, that won't be because of anything AI has done. It'll be because some people actively enjoy making things worse. 

Let's hope that's overly pessimistic. I'm certain there will still be professional tools using AI tech. You'll just have to pay professional rates to access them. The free stuff will be aiming at an entirely different demographic.

One thing I will commit to: it'll be a long, long time before we see anything from an AI to match the Nevernesss To Everness cut scene at the top of the post. Humans may use AI as the tool to create something like that but the AI will have about as much say in the finished product as your pen has in the words you write.

I'm not even saying I'm happy about it, either. Who wouldn't want to be able to type "Urban post-apoc magitech anime TV show with animorphs - sassy dialog, lots of explosions" into an AI app and get ten twenty-five minute episodes as good as that trailer in thirty seconds? Geez! The phrase "I'd never leave the house" would really come into play then, wouldn't it?

It's the 2020s equivalent of the 1960s jetpacks and flying cars though. Always going to happen, never does happen. 

Speaking of which, where is my jetpack? I've had it on order since at least the nineteen-seventies...