I Guess That's What Everything Is Now.

I certainly wasn't planning on making any political statements today - or any other day for that matter - but sometimes it's harder to avoid than you might think. Like when you're browsing your media feeds after lunch and this comes up. 

I was pondering a response when Roger at Contains Moderate Peril beat me to it. Thanks, Roger! Saves me having to formulate any kind of reasoned, rational response, something I'm not sure I'd have been capable of, at least not just yet. 

Games Industry chimed in after that with an assurance that gaming wouldn't be affected, which I'm sure was the first thing on everyone's minds but kudos for staying in your lane, GI. Rest assured, the kids will still be able to play Minecraft and Roblox, apparently, although there needs to be some clarification on what the exemption actually means. Supposedly it excludes games but  not "gaming platforms" and media, so expect to have to supply Google and WordPress some ID any day now, if you want to carry on reading your favorite UK-based gaming blogs. 

Seriously, on that last point, I don't see why blogs wouldn't qualify as a form of social media, unless the legislation is only interested in some form of direct messaging, not conversations carried out in public. I guess we'll have to wait for the exact wording, although now I come to think about it, the ban includes YouTube, which I've never even remotely thought of as social media anyway. 

Who knows? If blogs really aren't included, maybe we'll see a revival of interest. For a couple of weeks, until they get added to the proscribed list, that is.

I can't make much sense of it yet. Livestreams are banned. But does that only mean livestreams like on Twitch, which have text panels where everyone talks at once in real time? Or is it also livestreams like sporting events or music festivals on Amazon Prime or Netflix or the fricken' BBC, where no-one talks at all and we all just watch like it's television? Who knows what the hell they're talking about. I guess we'll have to wait for the paperwork.

This has to be an overstep, doesn't it? I mean, I'm pissed off by it and I am very much not one of the annoying crew that keeps bleating on about the daed internets. I'm not even all that especially bothered by the current fad for supplying "identification" to all and sundry, although I was pretty pissed off by the time I'd had to send selfies of me holding up my passport five times in one week (Almost true story. Only slightly exaggerated.)

Every medium has its Wild West era but it never lasts. Enjoy it while you can is my advice but don't expect it to stay that way. We had some fun. Now it's over. Teacher came back into the room.

That said, this blanket ban seems like a response on the level of John Major's infamous Dangerous Dogs Act. I was tempted to go a lot further back, compare it to King Cnut holding back the waves, but as we all know, I'm sure, he was trying to demonstrate how he couldn't do anything so ridiculous, not to prove he could. He was trying to make the point that just because he was King didn't mean he could do anything anyone wanted him to do. Our currently elected overlords seem not to have taken that lesson to heart.

I guess, since I'm nearly seventy now (I need to keep saying that out loud in a vain attempt to get used to the idea. I do still have a couple of years to go...), I ought to be able to stand back and ignore this nonsense. It's not going to affect me, after all. Except I'm sure it will. Not sure how, yet, but I'll bet it won't be anything good.

Perhaps the most interesting thing will be to see how the target demographic responds. Are they going to welcome it? Accept it? Ignore it? If it works, will teenagers genuinely feel they've been given their childhood back? And if they have, will they want it?

I didn't think "childhood" was anything most adolescents particularly valued but maybe that's changed. It's been a long time since I was a child or a teenager, although you might not think it to read this blog. When you were in your teens, did you think of yourself as a child? Did you want everyone else to see you that way? I didn't. At least I don't think I did. As I said, it was a long time ago.

And come to think of it, wasn't the current government talking about lowering the voting age to 16? Is anyone sensing a degree of inconsistency? 

Oh, well. No point going on about it. It hasn't happened yet. It might never happen. If it does happen it might not work. Anyone from Australia reading this? How's it working out for you over there, so far?

I was going to leave you with a final word from Astryuuna on one of my favorite YouTube channels. She's  a lot closer to the target age bracket and although I think she'd probably just escape it, she's having some problems of her own with people trying to tell her how to use the social media and technology she grew up with.

Astryuuna's widely praised for flying the flag for how the internet used to be before it got ruined by a devil's handshake of censorship and commercialism. She's also very NSFW, so be warned. She makes a lot of good points in her latest video, though. She usually does. You don't have to be sane, rational, balanced or reasonable to be right. Or, as the proposed legislation suggests, very, very wrong.   

And then I thought, no, why take the risk? She does go in hard in the latest rant. I don't want to get into trouble by association. Which is indicative of how a moral panic gets to you, isn't it? Go look her up yourself if you're interested. It'll be worth your time. 

Instead, I'll go out with a nice, safe option. Here's a Voice Of Today saying something vaguely relevant. 

Chloe Slater, aged 23, already waxing nostalgic about the good old days of her Southern Youth, although from the video it looks more like she grew up in the '80s. It's not quite jumpers for goalposts but it's not far off. The camcorder's a particularly nice touch.

Cracking song though. I wonder how all the new Chloes out there will get to see videos like that, when YouTube's banned?

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

Just the two images, both generated through NightCafe as usual, although I'm typing this listening to some songs I made last week on Suno. Does that count?

I made the second image first, using the prompt "King Canute on his throne on the beach with the tide coming in. He's  surrounded by sycophantic nobles. Canute is checking his mobile phone to see what people are saying on social media about his attempt to hold back the waves. In the style of a stained glass window in a medieval cathedral." You'll note I spelled Canute the way it was spelled when I was growing up, not the way it's usually spelled now. I don't know why I thought an AI wouldn't recognize it otherwise.

For that image I just used whatever model was in the chamber, which happened to be Flux 2 Klein 9B Fast. I was pretty happy with it, too, but when I needed a second image I thought I'd run the same prompt through one of my Pro freebies, in this case GPT Image 2 Low. Blimey, Charlie! It's a lot better, isn't it? So I used that one for the header and relegated poor old Flux to the body. Maybe there is some point to paying a sub after all.

Vibe Blogging

Today's post is going to be a bit of a mixed bag, I think. 

Not a Grab-Bag. I have a sort of format for those and this isn't going to fit it. It's just a few things I wanted to post about that probably won't make full posts of their own. 

Then again, maybe one will blow up into something bigger as I write, in which case I'll just come back and delete this introduction and no-one will ever know! <Twirls mustachio. Supervillain laughter.>

Always On

First, something that definitely isn't worth a whole post. I just want to moan about it. Unlike some people, Nimgimli for one, I've had absolutely no technical problems with Nevernesss To Everness so far. No bugs, no UI glitches, no performance issues. For me, playing on PC, it runs as smoothly as any viscous liquid you care to name. 

Playing is no problem. The problem comes when I stop. In the last few days - I bet since one of the frequent updates, although I couldn't nail down exactly which - whenever I log out of NTE, about half a minute or so later Windows tells me it's "run into a problem" and needs to reboot. That would be annoying enough but it turns out Windows can't reboot and I end up staring at a black screen until I switch the power off and restart, after which everything works perfectly until the next time I stop playing NTE.

Apart from being annoying, I worry all this sudden stopping and starting will damage something, so I googled for explanations and fixes. First, I did it the old-fashioned way. I checked reddit threads and watched YouTube videos but no-one seemed to have the exact problem I did and nothing they suggested seemed particularly helpful, so I thought I might as well let Gemini have a go, since it kept on offering.

Gemini was extremely co-operative. It asked pertinent questions, gave me lucid explanations, offered fixes, walked me through what to do when I had difficulties implementing them and basically acted like the best kind of IT department I've ever had to speak to (And I've spoken to plenty.)

All of which would be great if the solutions Gemini provided had worked. They did not. Oh, they worked in the sense that all the commands and instructions were accepted when I followed them and they did what they were supposed to do. It just didn't stop NTE crashing my PC on exit.

But then, neither did any of the non-AI fixes and suggestions I tried. If it was a football match it'd be a no-score draw. (But then, I just used Gemini to fix a perpetually annoying issue I have with Blogger getting the color of links wrong and it sorted it out perfectly in ten seconds, so I guess AI wins in injury time.)

Of all the various possible reasons offered, by far the most likely seems to be a conflict with the Anti-Cheat software NTE uses. From long experience with online games, the most likely fix is going to be putting up with it until the developers patch again and it magically goes away. Until then, I might just try shutting the PC down immediately I log out to see if I can beat the crash. That'll be fun. [Edit: Tried it and it works so that'll be my temporary solution for now.]

Had Gemini's fix actually worked, I might have been here today singing AI's praises. That'd be a popular post, I'm sure. If anything, anti-AI sentiment seems to be growing. It used to be mostly in my gaming and music feeds but now it's increasingly present in just about anything I read. As for positive sentiments regarding our would-be artificial overlords (That's Google and Amazon and whatever Elon Musk is calling himself today rather than the inert and blameless software itself, of course.), those seem to be very thin on the ground indeed. 

 

Search Me 

All of which does make me wonder, even more than usual, how this is all going to pan out. I heard the rumor that Google plans to replace search entirely with some kind of Agentic AI (I do love that word - Agentic - don't you? Doesn't it just ooze futurity? Algorithms never had that kind of PR.). It sounded a bit worrying so I checked (Using Google Search, inevitably.) and it turns out to be the usual kind of hyperbolic over-exaggeration humans have been using to get Eyeballs or Clicks or whatever the metric is these days since at least the day Buzzfeed went live. Which was exactly twenty years ago. I just checked. (Google>Wikipedia.)

In fact, Google Search continues as before, according to a statement Google gave USA Today, who bothered to ask them, but there will be a new All-AI front end as well. That, inevitably, will be Google's new focus and I'm sure it will be the first/main thing you see, which means most people will use it without thinking any more about it. I imagine their hope is that Search itself will wither away from neglect and disuse and they'll be able to discontinue it at some future date when no-one cares any more.

Will that happen? Hard to say. How did Google take over from all those other search engines - AltaVista, Netscape, Yahoo and the rest - in the first place? It was faster, more accurate and more comprehensive, that's how. People used it, found it did the job better and stopped using the older search engines. 

Have people changed that much in a couple of decades? If they find the new AI Agents are worse than the search they had before, will they not move away from Google to something that gives them what they want? Isn't it just handing a huge opportunity to a new "Traditional Search" provider to come into the market? 

Or, much more likely, will most general internet users find AI means much less fiddling about and reading websites and a lot more getting quick answers that work well enough, often enough, which will be plenty to keep almost everyone at least happy to go along with it? Too much effort just to get back to something they probably won't miss anyway.

So, yes, I imagine AI Agents are going to replace search if only because I'd bet the huge majority of users never really liked searching to begin with. It was always a necessary inconvenience for most people and I'll bet they'll be glad to see the back of it. People who actively enjoy searching as we've known it have to be a pretty small minority of web users, surely?

I'm kind of on the fence about the whole thing. I definitely don't hate AI. I just wish it was better. Maybe it will be, one day. Or maybe the current technology, which seems to be part brute force and part black magic, is a dead end and it'll never be entirely reliable. I suspect that's more likely but it's too soon to jump one way or the other. 

You Want Me To Draw You A Picture? 

All of which brings me to a little discussion that took place in the comments on a post over at The Friendly Necromancer, where Stingite was talking about feeling guilty for using AI art to illustrate his (Other.) blog, rather than, for example, hiring an actual artist to do it.

I said in the comments that it's a notional argument. No hobby blogger is ever going to commission an artist to provide illustrations for posts except on an absolutely exceptional basis. I must have read tens of thousands of blog posts now and I can't remember ever seeing it done. It didn't happen before AI so AI isn't stopping it happening now. No artist is starving because a blogger stopped commissioning spot illustrations for their posts. 

Very, very occasionally I have seen someone commission a piece of art to be a permanent feature on a blog. I remember Belghast doing it for a masthead a couple of times and I have a vague idea one or two others may have done something similar. But no-one who posts several times a week is going to pay a commercial rate to a professional artist for even one illustration per post, let alone the half-dozen or more most people who use pictures at all like to throw in

And that in turn got me thinking about The Olden Days. I'm not talking about Ye Olde Webbe of Yore that so many people, most of them barely old enough to have experienced it the first time around, seem so struck on bringing back. I'm talking the way things were before the worldwide web even existed.

When I came back from college in the early 1980s, one of the first things I did was start a comics fanzine with my then-wife, a friend of ours and the guy who owned the comic shop I worked in. We put out seven issues over two years and then our friend took over the editing and publishing of a bigger, more successful 'zine, which he eventually turned into a semi-pro operation. I switched to writing for that and we pulled the plug on our own zine.

Every issue of our original zine was stuffed with what we called "Spot Illos" - either decontextualized images, used to break up the text, or more targeted images, intended to support it. We also had comic strips sometimes and full-size cover art for every issue.

A minority of the pictures were drawn by my wife, who was a great comic artist and should have made a career out of it, but most were done by people who read our zine and who were active in comics fandom at the time. Some of them already had a foot in the door of professional comics publishing, some went on to be professional comic artists later, but most remained hobbyists and amateurs.

Whatever their status and ability, no-one got paid a penny. No-one expected to be paid. Paying people for art that wasn't going to be sold for a profit was not a thing anyone did, wanted to do or even thought about doing. All people wanted was to see their work and their names in print. If they did have professional aspirations, they'd add it to their portfolio so they could at least show potential employers something they'd had published but most of our contributors weren't even that ambitious. They just liked to draw and enjoyed sharing the results.

If something similar was part of blogging culture, the way it was always part of the 'zine culture I grew up with, no-one would need AI to draw them a picture. There'd be no shortage of people happy to provide it for free. We always had far more submissions than we could use. 

And we had a smaller readership than many hobby blogs, too. From memory, I think our print run was about 300 at the peak although the semi-pro zine my friend ended up editing and publishing ran to ten times that eventually. And I don't believe he ever paid anyone anything, either, until a bigger publisher picked him up and gave him a budget to go pro with an actual comic.

There could be a place on the web where bloggers could ask for images to illustrate posts and artists could supply them for nothing more than credit and a link. The technology has been in place for years to allow something like that to grow into a global free exchange of talent. Granted it would never be quite as instant and frictionless as generating an AI image but the results would be so much better it would be worth the wait. Probably. Although now I think about some of the pictures we published, let alone the ones we didn't...

Maybe something like that does exist already. I know it does for paid, commissioned art. If it does, though, the evidence has never shown up in any blog I ever read. And I'm certainly not offering to set up any such kind of website myself, although ironically I imagine I could get an AI to to code it for me if I was. They're supposed to be good at that sort of thing.

And even if someone else did all the donkey-work, it wouldn't be great for me as a user anyway. It would better suit people who write their posts with at least a little lead-time. I tend to bash mine out on the day and I don't think there are many artists out there who'd be happy to get a request after lunch asking them to knock out half a dozen pictures before tea. 

That's how AI wins, I guess. It may be soulless but it sure is fast and it never complains or makes excuses. It never says "Do it yourself. I'm busy." Or fobs you off with "I've just got to walk the dog and do a bit of shopping. But I'll get to it as soon as I can. Promise!" 

And yet, I don't use a lot of AI art here any more. It's not even because readers don't like it. When I do drop a few AI illos into a post, most people just ignore them, I think, assuming they even notice. As Stingite says, AI's much better at doing art than it used to be so it doesn't stand out the way it did.

No, it's more that I find it a bit dull, now the novelty value isn't there any more. I'll use it if I need to but it's purely functional, not the crazy thrill-ride it could be a few years back. I get better results dicking around with images in Paint.net, anyway, and that feels a lot more creative than writing prompts. I'm not at all sure it is but it feels that way.

Hmm. I seem to be wandering away from whatever point I had. Not that I expected the post to go anywhere but at least I got a few things off my chest. I had a couple more somewhat-related topics to talk about, too, but since this has clearly gone on long enough already (More than, probably...) I'll save those for another time. 

Now... shall I use AI to illustrate this post? Would that be ironic? Post-modern? Provocative? 

Or just plain lazy? 

Badgers And Bears

As longtime readers will most likely have realized, I'm in the infatuation period with Neverness to Everness right now. Not so much the honeymoon period, although that too. 

The honeymoon period is where you want to spend all your time playing the game and everything about it seems amazing and wonderful. The infatuation period is worse because you also want to tell everyone about it.

And no-one wants to listen. Honestly, who wants to hear someone banging on and on about their new crush? Who wants them bringing it up in every conversation, at every opportunity, shoe-horning it in when it's not even remotely relevant? 

So, in an attempt to inject some much-needed variety into what would otherwise be a stream of posts about a game most people aren't remotely interested in, judging by the page views (Seriously, I was expecting a spike but what I got was a slump.) I'll see if I can't come up with something else, just for a day. God knows, we'll be back to Hethereau soon enough. Oh yes.

And guess what? Today just happens to be one of those very rare days I already had earmarked for a specific topic. I hardly ever do that. 

It's not that I marked Friday 1 May in my calendar or anything. It's that I was always planning to post something about the day I earned my next badge in NightCafe and today just happens to be that day.

Yes, I was a Horse and now I'm a Bear! 

Don't look at me that way. I didn't make these titles up. If I had, I sure as hell wouldn't have called anything a bear. I like most animals but I make an exception for bears. Bears are not nice at all. They just have inexplicably good PR.

MassivelyOP today has an Overthinking column on the pernicious nature of log-in rewards, dailies and similar schemes. I posted a comment that's mighty ironic when you consider what I'm about to say next, which is that not only do I do the NightCafe daily every day, without fail, but that I treat it like it's one of the most important things I do all day. 

If I even suspect I might be about to miss one I come out in a cold sweat. I did miss one - actually several - way back in last year and it still gives me the shivers thinking about it. 

Nightcafe has a lot of badges you can earn. Win. Get. Whatever you call it. I mean a lot.

When you get a badge it gets crossed off the list. As you can see, I don't have many. Which is fine. I don't want any of them except for the login streak ones. Those I do want.

Why? Beats me!

This is the thing with streaks, isn't it? You get stuck in one and you don't want to break it. For reasons.

I got started on the streak for an actual reason. One that made sense at the time. Every day you log in and do the log-in daily, you get credits. It used to be ten but now it's "at least five" because they halved the guarantee but they also added random bonuses. 

You can get as many as fifty credits if you're extremely lucky. I've only had that happen once. I often get more than five, though.

Credits are obviously what you need to use the service, so if you don't want to pay a subscription or buy credits directly, you'll want all the free ones you get.

Except you won't. Not really. Or I don't, anyway. 

I use NightCafe fairly regularly. Mostly it's when I need an illustration or two for a post that doesn't naturally generate its own in the form of screenshots, videos I can embed from YouTube or photos I can take myself, any and all of which I will use in preference to an AI illustration, now the novelty of AI has long worn off, along with the gilt, the glamor and the glitz.

I don't have too many posts like that and usually it only takes me a handful of prompts to get something suitable (Useable, anyway.) so I don't need a lot of credits. The first generation each day is free, anyway, and often one shot is all it takes.

I'd guess that in an average month I might get through twenty credits, tops. Some months I don't use any. I currently have 6,517

Earlier this year, there was a move to have free credits expire but the idea was received so badly the plan was canceled. Instead, some changes were made to reduce how many free credits you can get and how you can use them but I can't honestly see it's made much of a difference. I still get far more than I'm ever likely to need and I can still make as many AI images as I ever did and as fast as I ever could.

And yet I keep on doing the dailies, even though I don't need the credits. It's all because of the streak. And the titles. Badges. Whatever you want to call them. 

I was a Bee, then I was an Owl, then a Horse and now I'm a Bear. Why those particular animals? No idea. 

Next comes Eagle. I want to be an Eagle. I like Eagles more than I like Bears. Not that I especially like Eagles either but they're better than bears. Everything's better than bears. Well, nearly everything...

Getting to be an Eagle means logging in another 165 days without a single missed day. I'll be an Eagle in October or I'll be mightily pissed off because if I'm not, that'll mean I missed a day and I'll have to start all over again. It's a brutal system but then that's how streaks are. Streaks are pure evil.

For a while I was using the daily log-in to run an experiment. I posted about how I used the same prompt every day to see what variations I could get. After I got bored doing that, I started making up prompts on the fly but that soon got to feel like too much work so I slumped into just clicking on one of the suggested prompts each day.

The suggested prompts are weird. I've used today's and it won't reshow the window so I can't give a specific example but it's always much the same.

 There are maybe a dozen prompts, almost always revolving around the same themes and subjects, some combination of spacecraft, spacemen, dystopias, cities, dirigibles, noir, neon, art deco, badgers, foxes, aviators, explorers and detectives.  

For a while I thought it must be pulling ideas from the prompts I've submitted. I still think it probably is doing that but if it is, it's making a very odd selection and it's certainly nothing even close to random or even varied. It's broadly the same set of prompts every day with some mild variations, with the very occasional, extremely left-field entry, like last week's "vintage toaster aggressively ejecting a perfectly browned slice of toast, all rendered with the exaggerated colors and graphic intensity of 1970s pop art magazine illustrations"

There have to be more prompts in my back catalog that mention dust bowls, corn-fields, line art and retro-futurism just from the aforementioned experiment alone but none of that seems to come up at all. Nor do superheroes, hedgehogs or dogs, all of which I must have prompted for at least as often as badgers or foxes. Not to mention line art, which I prompt for almost every time.

The only input I have to the whole sad, sorry process is flipping through the options and picking whichever takes my fancy. I tend to take the fox option every time it presents itself and most of the badgers. 

In NightCafe's world, Badgers are all grizzled old P.Is or crusty academics. Foxes lean towards aviation and space travel and also sometimes present as animals rather than anthromorphs.

There is absolutely no point to me doing any of this, of course. It's even less a valid use of my time than the Overseer missions I do every day in EverQuest II. At least those occasionally give me some reward I can actually use, even most of it just takes up space. 

Arguably, running even a single AI image every day might even do harm to something more than just my sanity and self-respect, although I can't say I'm able to make myself feel all that guilty about the five or ten seconds of processing time it's taking.

The really sad part of all this is that I enjoy it. OK, maybe not "enjoy" but I do sort of look forward to it each day and I do sort of feel pleased with myself when I'm done.

It's part of my routine. I feel very slightly good about things when I remember to do it, as if I've done something I ought to be doing and someone is going to be pleased with me because of it. I haven't and they're not but that's not the point.

If I stopped doing it, though, I'd almost certainly not miss it. Well, not after a week or two. These are lightly ingrained habits, nothing etched deep. They fade fast Or I hope they do. Not that I'm about to test it.

Are they also harmless? Maybe. 

I do have a lot of pictures of badgers now, anyway, so that's something. I mean, you can't have too many pictures of badgers, can you? And now I've shared some of them in this post, you can have pictures of badgers too. Granted, they aren't very good pictures of badgers but then that's AI for you.

I bet you wish I'd posted something about Neverness To Everness now!

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

Nah. Not going there. I didn't write the prompts, I didn't choose the models, I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything, and anyway it was all the fault of those pesky NightCafe kids...

Getting Into The Zone

Remember when I said that if I ran out of things to write about, I might start an irregular series on The Zones of EverQuest II? It's time to make good on that threat  promise! The question is... where to begin?

First of all, how many zones are there in the game now? Yeah, like that's an easy question to answer. I suppose I could go round the game and count them. Maybe we could meet back here in a few months?

Or I could look at the wiki. They have lists by various definitions there - level, tier, update and more - and none of them is either complete or up-to-date. The wiki, once transcendent, is fading slowly away.

Still, it's a start. I count 68 outdoor zones on the "By Level" list, which doesn't include the last two expansions so let's say about 75ish. That's way, way more than I'm ever going to cover even if I run this series for the life of the blog. But it isn't even all the outdoor zones, not really.

That count collates the Freeport and Qeynos starting zones into two bundles for a start. And it doesn't include any of the open dungeons, which I'd say count as "zones" rather than "instances", even if they aren't always outdoors. Although some of them are outdoors anyway.

Those are listed separately on the wiki as "Shared Dungeons" and there are 34 of them, a count that stops at the Terrors of Thalumbra expansion, which came out a decade ago. I know shared dungeons have been out of fashion for a while but I'm pretty sure we've seen a couple of new ones since then.

Just sticking to open and shared zones and avoiding any mention of solo, duo, single-group or raid instances then, and the count is already over a hundred. Except that for most of the life of the game the bulk of content has been instanced. 

I'm not about to start counting all of those but maybe one of our friendly AIs could do it for me. That's exactly the kind of thing they're meant to be good at, isn't it? 

I asked Google "How many zones are there in EQII in 2026?" and the AI Overview, which I assume is powered by Gemini, replied instantly

"Based on information leading up to early 2026, EverQuest II has hundreds of zones, with some estimates in previous years exceeding 900, including overland areas, dungeons, and instances."

Previous years? Just how previous? And even at that Gemini wasn't convinced, covering its imaginary backside with the caveat 

"For the most precise number, players typically rely on community-maintained wikis like eq2.fandom.com to track specific zone counts across the numerous expansions."

Well, shoot! That takes me right back to where I started, doesn't it? If I wanted to check the wiki I could have done it myself. I did do it myself! And these things are going to take all our jobs? Something, something, keep a dog, something, something, bark yourself...

How about Co-Pilot, then? Certain bloggers I follow claim Microsoft's AI is better than the rest. Let's give it a chance to prove it. Same question:

"Short answer: EverQuest II has hundreds of zones, and by 2026 the total sits at roughly 867 zones, based on the most complete public listings available. This number comes from the major zone index used by the EQ2 community and continues to grow with each expansion and event update."

Okay, that's a lot more specific. I'll let that fatuous "roughly" slide. It's just trying to pass for human, I guess. A lot of people would give a highly specific number like that and then claim it was approximate. You literally cannot have "roughly" 867 of anything unless you can also count that thing in fractions of a unit, which certainly doesn't apply to zones of Norrath, either before or after the Shattering.

And now here's a twist. I'd finished the post, added the pictures and was about to do the final edit when I noticed Blogger was idling and not updating. The Preview Panel was working normally, showing the complete post with pictures but there were no screenshots in the edit. 

If Blogger fails to update to its cloud servers, it always gives an error message and there hadn't been one so I figured something was glitched locally. I closed the Preview and the Edit and guess what? When I reloaded I'd lost the second half of the post. Everything above the last screenshot was here. Everything below was gone.

Usually I keep a copy of the text outside of Blogger but nothing like this has happened for several years so I'd gotten slack. My bad. Still, it was a pretty short post. I could remember most of it. Just needed to bash the second half out again. 

Only I'd also closed the AI result tabs and apparently Co-Pilot, unlike Gemini, doesn't automatically keep a record of the ongoing conversation, not if you aren't logged in, anyway. I just ran the query in Firefox anonymously and it was as gone as the rest of the post.

Never mind. Easy enough to ask the same question again. I have the exact wording there in the text that didn't vanish. Just need to run it past Co-Pilot again and... get a different answer.

"Short answer: There’s no authoritative public source that states the total number of EverQuest II zones as of 2026. The game has hundreds of zones accumulated over two decades, but no official 2026 count exists. The closest reliable figure comes from large fan-maintained databases."

Hmm. Look at that. The whole very specific, not rough at all, "867" is gone, replaced by the much more wooly "hundreds of zones". And there's a plain statement that "no official count exists".

So where did the 867 come from? Co-Pilot is only to keen to explain:

🧭 What We Can Say with Evidence

📌 1. The largest maintained zone list shows 867 zones

The Fanbyte/ZAM EverQuest II database lists 867 zone entries in its public index. This is the most complete zone list available, though it is not guaranteed to be exhaustive or fully up to date for 2026.

For some reason, Co-Pilot thinks ZAM is the resource most EQII players use. I'm certain that's not true. The ZAM EQII zone database , linked in Co-Pilot's reply, ceased updating with the Age of Discovery expansion, which came out in 2011. No regular EQII player is going there for anything after that.

That "867" number is the count that appears on the first page of ZAM's thirty-five page list of zones, where it warns you you're "Viewing 1 to 25 of 867 entries. You may want to add some filters.". A quick flip through the pages shows quite a few of those "zones" aren't adventure areas at all. The list includes Housing and the Dungeon Maker for a start.

Co-Pilot is happy to build on that shaky foundation all the same:

📘 Best Estimate

If we combine:

• 867 zones listed in the major database (pre‑2026)

• Dozens of new 2024–2026 zones from expansions and updates (e.g., Rage of Cthurath and 2026 map additions)

…it’s reasonable to estimate that EQII has well over 900 zones by 2026, though no source confirms an exact number.

Yes, I guess it is reasonable to assume that, especially given there have been fourteen expansions since ZAM last added any new zones to their database. Not to mention at least twice as many biannual Game Updates.

 

It is interesting that both Gemini and Co-Pilot come up with the same estimate of something over 900 zones, although neither really makes a convincing case for it. Still, it's probably about right. And even if it's not, I sure as heck don't plan on counting them, so I suppose it'll have to do.

 

This wasn't intended to be another post about how flaky AIs can be, even after all the supposed improvements and Great Leaps Forward, but it's always useful to remind ourselves just how unreliable they still are. I do sometimes get sucked into believing the AI summary at the top of the results although never for anything that isn't totally trivial. Convenience trumps caution, occasionally.

 

Then again, as this seems to demonstrate, even the trivial is well beyond the AIs. In fact, the more trivial the topic, the worse the information. The problem with the question I posed isn't so much that the AI's can't answer it; it's that it can't be answered. And since AIs don't like to admit when they don't know something...

 

Someone must know, of course. It's not ineffable. I imagine Darkpaw know how many zones there are. Maybe some players do, too. I bet there's someone out there who still keeps a ring-binder file with every map printed out. And speaking of maps, I guess someone at EQ2Map might have a pretty good idea.

 

Whoever does know, they're keeping it to themselves but it doesn't matter much anyway. It's not like I was going to write a post about every last one. I'm not going to live long enough to do that, even I was crazed enough to try.

 

What I'll most likely do is cherry-pick my favorites and the ones I have something to say about. If I get through a couple of dozen I'll be surprised. In fact, since I'm only likely to post at all if I have absolutely nothing better to write about, I guess the fewer I get through, the better.

 

Not to mention so far I've managed two posts about the feature without ever saying a word about any of the actual zones! I wonder how long I could keep that going?

 

I'll try to close that worrisome possibility down by saying here and now that the first post in the as-yet unnamed feature will either be Antonica or The Commonlands. I did think of starting with the old neighborhoods and city-based starting areas or the two major cities, Qeynos and Freeport, themselves but if I went with that idea, I might never get out of the cities at all. 

 

In fact, now I think about it, when I first thought of this project, if I'm going to glorify it with the name, I was in Antonica. So that's where I'm going to begin.

 

When? That's entirely another question. 

Sorry, But I'm Going To Have To See Some I.D.

So, what about that Discord then, eh? Age verification? Not likely, matey!

Except, why? Or, rather, why not, exactly? Because we don't trust them with our data?

But who do we trust? Who hasn't had a "breach"? We give this stuff out and it gets stolen or sold all the time. 

I used to have an app (Well, it was before we called them "apps" so I guess it was a program or maybe just a service.) that was supposed to tell me every time one of my many, many email addresses turned up in some Dark Web fire sale. It was a bit of a concern back then, which must have been a decade ago. Haven't thought about it for years. Certainly haven't had any updates in as long as I can remember. Of course, they might be going to one of those email addresses I never look at any more...

It's not just the security, though, is it? It's the principle. Who are these people to question whether we're old enough to be looking at adult stuff? Why do they get to be the gatekeepers of our maturity? It's the thin line at the end of the wedge. Or the thick end. The something end of something, anyway.

It's not like it used to be, that's the point. And how it used to be was better, wasn't it?  Back when the internet was the the internet. When there were no rules except all those rules we made for ourselves and yelled about (Not in CAPS of course, never in ALL CAPS!) whenever we saw anyone not doing things the way they were supposed to.

People knew their place then. Or, rather, most people didn't even know the internet was a place. It was all 14.4kb dial-up modems and we were happy! Then in came the Worldwide Web and there went the neighborhood.

I may have got some or indeed all of that wrong. I was there but not there. I certainly wasn't paying attention. I was an incomer to the just-born web in the very early '90s but not a digital native. I strongly suspect some of the people making a big to-do about the good old days were barely born when I arrived in about 1992. A lot of the nostalgia seems to come from a decade later by when the digital fields had already been marked out for redevelopment.

Getting back to Discord and its plan to enforce age verification on all users, except for the users it already can somehow just tell are old enough, although no-one's saying exactly how just yet; if it's not incompetence or the breaking of tradition we're worried about, is it some basic objection to the concept? Should the internet at large be free from mundane concerns like who exactly uses it? Ought it to be a free-for-all where, as the old New Yorker joke has it, "nobody knows your a dog"?

I guess not or we wouldn't all be making such a fuss all the goddam time about Roblox and X and all the other reprobates messing with our kids. We love to give them a hard time about it, don't we? Only it's a bit different when someone tries to do something.

Except, is it? I seem to hear a virtual round of applause every time another government or court passes a law restricting the sale of lockboxes. All that EU legislation concerning digital safety seems to get a lot of praise. Well, some of it does. It depends.

Only it's a bit different when the lawyers and policemen come around peering over our fences into our walled gardens, apparently. It's all well and good for there to be restrictions on who can do what so long as they don't get in the way of those of us who know what we're doing, humming along, minding our own business. Nothing to see here. Move along please, thank you very much.

It's all a bit fuzzy, too, because it's Discord. Do we even like Discord?  I mean, we all use it. It's the default now, isn't it? We pretty much have to. But do we want to?

There's a sentiment I've seen that says if Discord thinks it's so special, can do anything it likes and we'll all just have to put up with it, Discord just might have another think coming. Elon thought he could do what he liked with Twitter and look how that worked out! Watch out, Discord! Don't push your luck!

How did that work out for Elon, come to think of it? Didn't he sack 90% of the staff and rebrand the whole thing so the value of what he'd bought vanished overnight? And didn't everyone say the whole thing would fall apart and no-one would be able to fix it because everyone who knew how had been sacked? Wasn't Twitter finished?

Except X is still going and I keep seeing links to it in my news feeds every day just like I used to see links to Twitter. And while there are alternatives, have any of them replaced X/Twitter in the big world outside the tech-insider niche? Doesn't feel like it.

Are we going to have to go through that whole "Alternatives to Discord" phase like we did with Twitter, until eventually one winner emerges, proud possessor of a fairly distant second place to Discord itself, as it carries on as if nothing much happened? Does anyone care enough about Discord to bother?

I belong to... wait, let me count them... thirty-three Discord channels. In a good month I look at two of them. Blaugust, in which I link my posts here and TAGN, where I check what's up with the Fantasy Critic League. Very occasionally I visit one of the others to check some specific gaming announcement I've heard about through other channels but that doesn't happen often.

According to MassivelyOP, Discord has reassured everyone that 

"For most adults, age verification won’t be required, as Discord’s age inference model uses account information such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord communities."

In other words, if you've been acting like a dog for a while they'll assume you are a dog. And anyway, as some wag in the comments puts it, if you don't live in the EU or the UK, where there are enforceable laws about this sort of thing, you might just find you're an adult automatically, no matter what you've been up to until now.

If you don't pass that test, which is probably being administered by an AI agent, I just bet, you get marked down as a teen. What does that mean?   

Well, it means you can't join age-restricted servers, talk in some audio channels and you might get some filters applied whether you want them or not. None of which is going to affect me since I have never once considered joining an age-restricted Discord channel (Nor, until this all blew up, knew such a thing existed...), never speak in voice chat and generally switch on every filter I can see as soon as I join any new service. 

Oh, that's nice, isn't it? Doesn't affect you personally so you're fine with it. Very socially conscious. Bloody solipsists. You're only one step up from narcissists, you lot.

Yes, fine, okay, sure. Only I am kind of in favor of age restrictions on the internet, by and large. I mean, I'm in favor of them offline. Aren't you? Don't you think there should be some age limit on when you can drive a car or join the army or get married or vote? And don't you think you ought to have to be able to prove you are the age you say you are before you can do any of those things?

Maybe you don't. Maybe you're that much of a libertarian or an anarchist you think the only rule ought to be no rules. 

Probably not. Some of the people I've seen complaining about this seem to have quite firm views on other kinds of rules and restrictions. There are all sorts of things they think people shouldn't be allowed to do or say. They just seem to think rules ought to apply differently on the internet, particularly for people who, you know, belong there.

That does tick me off a little. I removed someone's blog from my RSS feed yesterday after reading a rant about age verification. It was the repeated use of the pejorative "normies" that did it.  I'd be very happy to have a filter that caught offensive slurs like that.

I hope this doesn't come over as a rant in the same way. All those rhetorical questions are a rhetorical device (Is that ironic?) designed to dilute the rage. I'm pretty sure there are bigger things to worry about than whether you have to send Discord a selfie. Is it really worth getting worked up over?

I'm not that bothered about it either way. It certainly doesn't feel like any kind of hill to die on. Discord is just an app. If people don't like the terms of use they can just stop using it. I'd guess for most people having "teen" filters would make next to no difference anyway. Or maybe I underestimate how much people swear in Discord channels.

Personally, I propose to do absolutely nothing about it. I'll just carry on as I am. If all the fuss hadn't kicked off I very much doubt I'd even have known anything had happened. 

What I do think, though, is that maybe there should be some requirement for all internet users to prove their age at a much more basic, fundamental stage than through individual apps. Something akin to a driving license, perhaps, that could be incorporated into the education system and verified in a much more practical way. In person. 

Why the internet should get a pass on it, when so many other aspects of life don't, beats me. 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

Just the header image, produced at NightCafe using QwenImage SD. The prompt, taken directly from the text, was "Discord and its plan to enforce age verification on all users." To this I added the further instruction "1980s computer gaming magazine cover illustration. Full color, line art." 

Because I keep forgetting to stop it, NightCafe always throws my prompt to an AI to re-write it in a lot more detail. The full version it used was "1980s computer gaming magazine cover illustration of Discord characters debating age verification. Full color, line art style. Vivid colors with a dramatic, cinematic lighting setup. Emphasize retro sci-fi aesthetic, with glowing neon accents and geometric shapes, in the style of Syd Mead and Moebius. ..." I really need to remember to stop it doing that. 

I can't say I can see the Moebius influence and I don't actually know who Syd Mead is, although the name rings a bell. Looking him up, I probably should have known who he was. 

Out of curiosity, I ran the original prompt through the same model again but with the AI "Prompt Magic" that expands on the prompt switched off. That got me the image above, which appears exactly as it was generated. It looks like I cropped it, badly, but I didn't. 

Looks like I either need to keep Prompt Magic switched on or write longer, more detailed prompts. 

 

Yesterday Project: Gorgon, Today Project Genie

 

The release of Google's Project Genie has generated a certain amount of attention, almost all of it revolving around the apparent lack of concern expressed by the tech giant for the basic concepts of intellectual property rights and copyright. The news items I've seen so far all focus on how famously defensive IP owners like Nintendo and Disney are likely to react to an app that supposedly lets anyone clone and iterate on their copyrighted properties for the low, low price of $124.99 a month.

According to IGN, some investors are already marking down stocks in other game-making platforms like Unity and Roblox, presumably on the basis that their day is done and in some bright future we'll all be our own game-makers. Or something.

All of which is twaddle, obviously. As all the reports make clear, Project Genie can't make games. It can't even make frameworks for games. Neither can it make virtual worlds. 

What it can do is generate a sixty-second interactable snippet, a fuzzy glimpse into a notional, imaginary, three-dimensional environment that has neither persistence nor purpose. It's a curiosity that would probably help a few idle hours pass happily enough, a bit like making paper planes and throwing them out the window or having a tea-party with your stuffed toys. 

Personally, I wouldn't pay $124.99 a month for the privilege but if it was on Steam for less than $10 I might give it a go. I imagine it'd be quite amusing to play, with for a while.

Of course, that's ignoring the legal issues. As I said, the first thing everyone seems to have tried to do is replicate their favorite video game, mostly with very limited success. 

Even if the results are useless in any practical sense, though, it's hard to imagine the companies currently milking those IPs for every last cent feeling particularly sanguine about letting unlimited, bad versions loose into the community. There's such a thing as tainting the brand, after all.

Let's imagine the famous characters aren't up for grabs. You can't make your version of Mario or Sonic. You have to stick to an original idea of your own. Is anyone but you going to be interested?

One day it may indeed be possible for you or I to type a couple of paragraphs in plain English into an AI app and get a finished game out the other end. I'm close to the end of a book called Supremacy by Parmy Olson on the development of AI and if there's one thing that comes through very clearly it's that the software consistently outruns the expectations of the people behind it. One day you're crowing about some really not very impressive development you've just made and the next thing you know is someone else has jumped ahead a couple of orders of magnitude, leaving your seven-day wonder looking like yesterday's news.

If that does happen with the game-making AI, though, it's unlikely Project Genie will be the name on the box. Everything in AI seems to move forward in a weird, leapfrogging dance. Whoever starts something rarely gets to finish it. 

Even if it does become possible to generate fully functional virtual worlds from plain English text prompts, the history of gaming doesn't entirely suggest that would wipe out everything else. Roblox is an outlier. A very, very big outlier, true, but an outlier all the same. There's clearly a sizeable market for making your own video games and selling them to other gamers and Roblox has mostly cornered it.

 For as long as I've been gaming, which is getting on for fifty years now, there have always been game-making programs that purported to allow gamers with imagination but little or no technical skill to create and sell their own games and those have always been niche.

In the 1980s I wrote text adventures with  a utility called The Quill. Lots of people did, then saved them on cassette and sold them through the back pages of gaming magazines. In the '90s I made a full-length RPG scenario with Neverwinter Nights and uploaded it to one of the dedicated, online repositories along with many thousands of others, where it probably remains to this day.

I've dabbled with many other game-making packages, none of which required anything less than a huge amount of time and effort to create anything recognizably game-like. There have even been programs to make your own MMORPG, none of which seems to have resulted in any MMORPG I ever heard of. And of course there are the semi-pro, cut-down versions of the real thing, like Unity or Unreal, that you can buy into for an almost not unreasonable investment.

If anyone with some minimal degree of skill and a very much larger amount of time and enthusiasm wanted to make a "playable world", they have and have had for a very long time, the means to do so. The appeal of AI is that soon no-one will need any appreciable skill or time to make a really impressive video game. It'd be nice to think you'd still need the enthusiasm but honestly that's probably optional too.

Except I'm not sure all that many people really want to. Imagine for a moment a scenario where Project Genie actually works. Imagine you could type in a brief description of the sort of virtual world you'd like to see, the kind of characters and plot you'd want to engage with and the general gameplay you'd enjoy there. How about...

Setting: A High Renaissance setting in which the industrial revolution happened a couple of hundred years early. Some Steampunk trappings but not too many. The game is set in a small city-state with a coastal border and some mountains, a lot of forest. Low magic, some werewolves and vampires, grudgingly integrated in the cities, not tolerated in country areas. 

Plot: The high king is ageing. He has no obvious successor. He wants to leave a legacy so he makes covert moves to back a potential candidate who wishes to improve the status of the non-humans in the state. This is potentially popular with the urban elite but could cause rebellion in the countryside. 

Gameplay: RPG mechanics with hierarchical magic and skill development. Dropped gear. Turn-based combat.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Took me less than ten minutes, straight off the top of my head. Imagine if I could drop that into an app, go make a coffee, then come back and download a complete game.

It'd be fun once. Just like writing a game with the Quill and NWN was fun, once. I even enjoyed playing through my own games. Again, just once. 

Did I send off for anyone else's self-written Quill games, though? No, I did not. I didn't even download any of the myriad, free NWN adventures. Maybe a couple, just to have a look. But even then I never played them for more than a few minutes.

What about Second Life? All the games people made there? Did those take over the market? Not hardly.

And even the supposedly ubiquitous Roblox hasn't exactly wiped every other game off the screens, has it? Sure, a lot of people, kids mostly, play it but is it all they play and do they mostly play it because it's what they have access to and what they can afford? Like Runequest, famously the first MMORPG of so many people when they didn't have the money or the technology for anything more impressive, are these games really successful because of how good they are or how accessible and available?

It's really hard to be sure. If AI output was demonstrably not slop but really top quality, indistinguishable from very good human-made work and you could generate whatever you wanted on the fly - books, movies, games - would most people move over to it? I'm not sure they would. 

I think they'd still need to be marketed to. I think there'd need to be a buzz. People like to watch, read, play things lots of other people are playing, so they can talk about them, argue about them, share the experience. At that point, it might not matter that the product was AI-generated but it would still very much matter that it was high-profile and being talked about, out there in the media.

If it was something no-one but the person watching or playing it would ever hear about, I suspect the potential audience would be somewhat limited. I think there's certainly a demographic that'd be happy to sit at home, alone, playing reading and watching the insides of their heads acted out by imaginary characters but, like VR, I just don't see it becoming normative, mainstream behavior.

In the end, I suspect that even were AI ever to reach the point where it can produce high-quality entertainment with almost no human input, it's still going to be only a certain, very small percentage of that work that gets the attention of a human audience. And it won't be for it's AI qualities but for the human-to-human interactions it facilitates.

In other words, we may all end up playing AI-generated games but we'll still be playing the same ones or else we won't be able to talk about them. And more importantly, no-one will be able to sell them to us.

When They Talk About The Meta, I Don't Think This Is What They Mean...

I'm finding it increasingly awkward to come up with ideas for game-related posts when I'm really playing just the one game. Yes, still that one, Played Time now just nudging into three figures according to Steam and still very obviously nowhere even close the end. 

One odd thing I notice as a blogger is that if this was a new MMORPG I was playing, it would feel completely legitimate, not to say expected, for me to post a dozen or more times in excruciating detail about the gameplay. I've done it countless times with any number of MMOs, the great majority of which I've ended up playing for considerably less than a hundred hours and I've rarely thought to ask myself if anyone really cares, let alone whether it's a reasonable use of my time.

With single-player games, though, it feels like the way to go is maybe one or two posts at the start, just to announce what game it is I'm playing and what sort of a first impression it's giving, then nothing more until I've finished and it's time for a full review. It's an approach that works well for most of the single-player games I actually finish, nearly all of which are likely to be point&click adventures or narrative-driven games of some kind and which, crucially, are unlikely to take more than ten or fifteen hours, tops.

Survival games and the currently vogueish action-rpgs like Wuthering Waves, even if they're not multiplayer or I'm not playing them as such, slew much more to the MMORPG end of the spectrum. They frequently feel like MMOs even when they aren't, which makes it very easy to write about them as though they were.

Really, ridiculously big single-player RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3, though, (And I'm not sure there are all that many others...) don't fit into any box. It would be very easy for me to do whole posts on what the characters look like, on the dress-up options (Not least that there are some.) on inventory management, on the combat, the stats, the skill trees... all the standard topics I'd fall into talking about out of habit if I was obsessed by a new MMORPG.

Only, doing the same for Baldur's Gate 3 feels at best self-indulgent but mostly just pointless. Who even cares? The game's two years old and developers, Larian, have made it extremely plain they're done with it, want no more to do with it, won't be making any more content for it and are more than happy to move on from it. Sometimes I get the impression they wish they'd never gotten involved with it in the first place. 

With an MMORPG or any live service game that's still getting updates, commenting on how the game looks and plays feels like a conversation. With an RPG that's final and complete, talking about it feels more like hearing an old recording playing in an empty room.

But what's the alternative?  Hah! I'm so glad you asked! I can tell you that!

 

Since BG3 is still literally the only game I'm playing, as far as gaming goes I could post about:

• Games I'm Not Playing But Might If/When I Ever Get To The End Of This Bloody Monster
• Games I Used To Play Long, Long Ago
• Games I'm Looking Forward To Playing If/When Someone Gets Off Their Backside And Finishes Them
• Things Going On In Gaming In General

Or I could post about non-gaming topics. I always do plenty of that. Except, just now, I'm really only playing this one game, reading the usual random selection of books and slowly working my forward through the Dr. Who Archive on the BBC iPlayer. I'm not listening to enough new music to put a solid playlist together or watching enough new TV shows for a full post about anything. (I did watch the second episode of Haunted Hotel last night. That was good...)

Does anyone really care what I think now about the Dr. Who seasons I last watched when I was in my teens, though? That's how far I've got so far. There's really a shit-ton of Dr. Who, isn't there? I never really appreciated the sheer voloume of the franchise before. 

I do have things to say about the show but again it seems like the world has probably had to put up with more than enough old men droning on about the things they thought were so great when they were young already, especially if the only conclusions they come to is that those things were pretty great after all.

Most of this is happening because I have so much annoying, difficult real-life stuff going on at the moment, not helped in the slightest by Mrs Bhagpuss and I both suffering form a nasty and persistent cold-like bug that makes getting any of it done a real challenge. It means all I really want to do with my free time is as little as possible. 

BG3 is a drug, basically, and so is old, familiar television and, for that matter, the kind of books I've been reading lately. (I might argue all reading is a drug-like experience but that would require me to put a coherent argument together which, as must be obvious from this post, is not something I'm up to doing just at the moment.)

It's not that there aren't things to talk about. Actual, gaming -related topics I may or may not find the will to discuss this week include:

• The Official Launch of Project:Gorgon
• Daybreak Games' decision to abandon Roadmaps
• The Return of Jack Emmert to Cryptic
• The Unexpected Signs of Life in Rift

I'm listing those out in the hopes it might induce me to write something about them later. I don't suppose it will but you have to try, don't you?

I could also just stop posting for a while but as you can see I'd rather bang out a few hundred words of waffle and blether rather than let the post count fall to danger levels. I can get one of these done in an hour, provided I don't attempt to say anything of import.

This is the exact time AI would come in very handy, isn't it? I could just feed those bullet points into Gemini or ChatGPT and have the glorified predictive text apps knock out the first draft. Then I could edit that to make it look less plasticky and who would be any the wiser? 

Did I do that already? Aha! Wouldn't you like to know?

Alright, I didn't. The AIs just aren't that good yet. It'd be even more work than writing one of the damn posts myself. 

I will throw in a couple of AI illustrations though because I have fecking hundreds of them stored up and I might as well use them for something. I have them because I do the daily challenge at NightCafe every day, so as not to break my streak, which is over a hundred days now, and I've gotten so blase about it I just click on whatever they suggest and let the AI play with itself.

Now, that is a post I do want to write: what the hell do the people behind NightCafe think they're playing at? How does it benefit them to give away orders of magnitude more credits for free than I find it possible to imagine anyone ever needing? Aren't they supposed to making money selling them? And why are all the prompts virtually identical? Robots, airships, decaying jungle ruins, explorers...

And now, since I seem to have wandered entirely off-topic, not that it was ever all that clear just what topic I was on, I think I'll call this post done.

Hope you enjoyed it. I enjoyed writing it but then I love free-styling. It's always fascinating, finding out what I'm going to say next.

A Ghost Of A Chance - Is Sony Trying To Buck The AI Trend?

If you follow any gaming media at all, you've almost certainly heard about Sony's AI assistant, Ghost. I remember reading about something similar last year, when Microsoft was talking up its AI companions. I don't know how far along that project is now but Sony has just taken out a patent and the story's all over the gaming press. I got my heads-up from GamesIndustry but it's on Kotaku, IGN, Eurogamer, TechRadar...

It's a curious development in many ways. Any mention of AI still brings gamers out in hordes, waving their pitchforks and flaming torches, so it's relatively unusual to see any development in the field being received with anything less than complete revulsion. Reaction to this has been at least a little more nuanced.

According to Sony's press release, Ghost will provide "real-time assistance to a player that is encountering some difficulty with a specific scenario of gameplay" by "analyz(ing) a player's game state data to identify the scenario they are trying to progress through." Having figured out how to do whatever it is you weren't able to do from its intensive pre-training on Twitch streams and YouTube videos, Ghost would then "provide the player with visual illustrations of how certain game scenarios are played in order for the character controlled by the player to be able to achieve progress in the game."

This is being presented by Sony as a much more sophisticated and versatile alternative to what many players have been doing for years, namely looking stuff up on the web, reading guides, following walk-throughs, watching other players on video or livestream and then trying to copy whatever it is that works. 

Put that way, it seems eminently reasonable. I've been making the point, repeatedly, not just in my recent posts about Baldur's Gate 3, that an awful lot of games just aren't as much fun without some kind of online spoilers. Having the same information available inside the game without having to tab out or look at a second screen seems like it might be less intrusive and disruptive to gameplay.

Certainly , that's how Sony seem to be selling it. Underselling it, really. All of the linked articles use some form of Sony's formula "assistance during gameplay of a video game." Assistance is such an inoffensive word, isn't it? You'd feel like a jerk, complaining about someone else receiving assistance when they were having problems, wouldn't you? I mean, no-one wants to be the "git gud" guy in this scenario, do they?

I imagine Sony would like to avoid the kind of backlash that faces every company admitting to seeing value in AI. By presenting such an nonthreatening option, they presumably hope to get a partial pass. The gaming press seems, by and large, to be going along with the narrative.

The NME, not being a gaming journal as such, takes a somewhat more populist view. Their headline doesn't mention "assistance" at all, going instead with the much more click-worthy "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." 

Which made me wonder, would that be such a bad thing?

Let's take one example: Wuthering Waves. I really like Wuthering Waves. It has a strong storyline and memorable characters. I'd like to keep up to date with it. 

And yet somehow I can't seem to manage it. I've caught up twice but in both cases it took so much out of me I immediately fell behind again and now I'm so far adrift I doubt I'll ever have the motivation to try again.

I've been thinking about just watching the story on YouTube, where I'm sure I'll be able to find both full playthroughs and cut scenes edited to make full movies. Alternatively, I could do what millions of people do and watch someone else play the game on Twitch.

If there was an AI assistant as capable as NME imagines Ghost to be, though, I could log into the game, set it running and sit back to watch my own character play the game. Of the various options - play the game myself, have an AI play it for me, watch recorded highlights or watch another player - I'd put having an AI play my character second out of the four in terms of involvement and immersion.

Playing BG3, I can also think of other ways AI might improve the experience without inducing the player to resort to online guides or videos. When I was running around the Goblin Camp for hours looking for those damn Warg Pits and getting nothing but vague, unhelpful responses from any goblin I asked, it would have made a huge difference if there had been a conversation option that would have triggered an AI-assisted search and generated an in-character response from whatever NPC I was speaking to. 

What's more, if any of those responses turned out to be hallucinatory, that in itself would just be entirely in keeping with the quality of information you'd expect to get from asking a random goblin for directions! It's a win-win for the AI and the role-playing player.

The ironic thing about the current knee-jerk opposition to the use of AI in games is that before this kind of AI existed, the accepted view for as long as I've been gaming had always been that one day we'd have this amazing technology that would let all the NPCs talk like real people, react to our characters in convincing and realistic ways and generally make games feel like they weren't games at all. Remember StoryBricks and all those unfulfilled promises? 

And now here we are, looking down the barrel of the future we all said we wanted and now we all agree it wasn't what we wanted at all. Are we quite sure about that? If a game appeared that did everything AI promises to do but managed to do it without using AI, would we object to that in the same way? Or are we just cutting off our own noses in an entirely understandable but self-defeating attempt to spite the billionaires' faces? 

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Two illustrations because what else was I going to use? Both done at NightCafe. 

The header image is by the ever-annoyingly-named HiDream |1 Fast from the prompt "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." 1970s Comic book panel art. Default settings. The original has three speech bubbles, two of which were gibberish. I removed those at SnapEdit but otherwise changed nothing. 

The second image is by Google Imagen 4.0 Fast from the prompt "I was running around the Goblin Camp for hours looking for those damn Warg Pits and getting nothing but vague, unhelpful responses from any goblin I asked" 1970s Comic book panel art. 

In this case, the gibberish speech bubbles actually make sense. Well, they don't... they're gibberish... but goblin speech is traditionally rendered like that and it fits the context, so I left it in. 

It's worth noting that NightCafe calls on AI to expand on all prompts of fewer than sixty words. It's on by default but you can toggle it off, which I seldom remember to do. The full prompts, as gussied up by some AI or other, probably Gemini or ChatGPT I'm assuming, are as follows:

Image 1: A 1970s comic book panel depicting a retro-futuristic robotic avatar playing a PlayStation video game, with thought bubbles above the robot and a PlayStation console. The robot has a determined expression as it manipulates a joystick. Text reads "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." Vibrant, slightly desaturated colors, bold linework, and dynamic action lines in the style of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.. 

Image 2: "A determined adventurer, clad in worn leather armor, navigates a chaotic Goblin Camp under a hazy, ochre sky. The adventurer is actively searching, with a slight frown of frustration. Vague, speech bubble-like glyphs emanate from bewildered goblins, conveying unhelpful responses. The art style is a 1970s comic book panel, with bold, thick linework, a limited, earthy color palette, and a slightly gritty texture. Inspired by the dynamic compositions and character designs of Jack Kirby and Bernie Wrightson. Dramatic lighting casts deep shadows, enhancing the sense of urgency and the grimy atmosphere." 

I really do need to remember to switch that AI assistance off, given how I go out of my way never to use named artists in the prompts. Maybe you can have too much AI assistance after all... 

Also, that second panel looks more like Wally Wood to me, although if you imagined Kirby inked by Wrightson...and the tails on the speech bubbles are all pointing the wrong way...