Owning The Problem

Sony's recent decision to abandon the physical format for Playstation games kicked off a frenzy of hand-wringing and name-calling across the gaming media but, perhaps surprisingly, there didn't seem to be much of a reaction here in this neck of the blogosphere, other than this excellent post by Yeebo, to which I'll return later. 

The main concerns I've seen revolve around three quite specific issues:

• Archival
• Income
• Ownership

The first seems like a very niche problem indeed from where I'm sitting. It pre-supposes a future in which academics are sufficiently interested in the social, cultural, technical or creative history of video games to feel they need more than a broad, historical overview. It also assumes academic institutions won't have the capacity or the will to arrange storage for themselves, outside of stockpiling commercially available disks. 

We know there's already a huge problem with archiving always-online, live service and digital-only titles. It would seem Sony's opt-out from physical media just adds their future catalog to that vast, intangible pile. 

You might think the onus for preservation would fall on the preservers rather than the producers, in either case. It's not as though Sony is asking for the games to be archived. I'm sure if they wanted to keep an archive of the games they've issued, they'd be perfectly capable.

I find it hard to worry unduly about the convenience of notional professors in twenty-second or twenty-third century universities, too. If I was going to try to work up some kind of concern on their behalf, even as a life-long gamer I'd be more likely to be bothered that they were fussing about two hundred year-old video games in the first place. I'd like to imagine there'd be better things for them to spend their time and energy on by then.

The whole "Everything Must Be Preserved" attitude, which really only goes back maybe fifty or sixty years, bothers me more than the blasé "Let it all rot" attitude that preceded it. Even for the purposes of academia, representative samples and contemporary accounts usually suffice to recreate an era. Why we need to keep one of everything, in working order, like a gang of crazed, technological half-Noahs, beats me.

That may just be my lack of sympathy with the whole concept, of course. One thing that seems to have gone out of currency during my lifetime is ephemerality. We used to talk about some things being "built to last" and others being "throwaway" and pop culture was firmly in the latter category. Now it seems every last flyer and graffito must be saved for posterity.

There used to be seven day wonders and five-minute fads. There were trends that came and went. There still are, of course, but at some point we seem to have decided, collectively, to assign lasting value to them, meaning they need to be saved, cherished, preserved for future generations and studied in schools and universities. 

In a way it's a welcome recognition and celebration of the work that went into creating these things as well as the pleasure and joy that came out of them. That's nice. On the other hand, it's dead-wood strewn all over the floor of the cultural forest, getting in everyone's way and stifling new growth. 

It's pretty much a truism now that popular culture feeds on itself but the scavenging goes wider and deeper all the time. I'm always moaning that no music I hear any more fails to remind me of something I heard years ago. It's not old geezeritis or not just that. 

Musicians wear their influences not just on their sleeves but as badges of honor. Music critics are all but incapable of describing any new song or act other than in terms of who, in the great back catalog of their memories, it most reminds them. I try not to do it myself but often I just can't help it. Everything really does sound like something else, now.

As for movies, almost all the successful ones are are either sequels or adaptations of familiar IPs from other media. Originality is almost a commercial flaw.

And games are in perhaps the worst state of all, when it comes to living off their past. Most of the most-successful games now are old. We're constantly celebrating the 10th, 20th and even 25th anniversaries of MMORPGs, but mainstream gaming is chock-full of decade-old hits that won't quit. The most ironic thing about Sony's decision is that it's not impossible that, in a hundred years' time, some of those diskless games might still be in the top twenty!

I wonder, more and more, if it wouldn't be healthier and more aesthetically satisfying to let everything have it's natural run and then slip away. That way, one day, a decade or a century from now, maybe some diligent researcher would write a paper and a new generation could marvel at how the elders and ancients amused themselves. And, I hope, think themselves lucky that their own entertainment is so much better! 

So much for the archivists and their problems. On to the developers.

I was quite surprised to learn that developers, who put out games for Playstation, rely in part on sales of physical collectors' editions and the like. The last console I owned was the Atari 2600 and if there were any Special Edition cartridges for that, I never knew about them.

I do know something about online games, though. Digital online games. With no physical editions. All MMORPG players know about those. We have no choice. There used to be boxes but they went away. I have a whole row of them on the shelf of a bookcase next to me right now. I don't think there's anything there less than a decade and a half old.

I remember there being a good deal of angst about the end of physical media for online games. People liked their boxes. I liked my boxes. And honestly, if games came in boxes now, with manuals and posters and cloth maps, I might still buy them. They make nice keepsakes.

The question, though, is did MMORPG developers deny themselves the revenue that comes from being able to sell people a bunch of tat in a box, when they went all-digital? No, they did not!

I refer you to Daybreak's near-infamous Collectors' Editions of every expansion for the aging dinosaurs in their stable, EverQuest and EverQuest II. What were they asking for the top-end imaginary boxes last year? Let me see...

Two hundred and fifty fricken' dollars! That's what! Makes all that fuss about GTA6 costing $80 look a bit wet, doesn't it?

And did you get a disk for your $250? Hell, you did! 

I'd call that precedent. I'd imagine any games with an actual fanbase could make out like bandits, selling digital special editions, always assuming Sony would cut them a deal. Although maybe there are console-specific technical considerations there I'm not seeing. As I said, not a console person. 

But even if there are, there's always merch. Bands worked out years ago that's where the money is. Daybreak cottoned on late but they're all-in on it now. Want a mug with the symbol of your class? A poster? A mouse mat? A T-shirt? Any of the extras they might have bunged into the Collectors' Edition box, back when there was a box?

Anything, in fact, except a disk with the game on because you can't fit the fricken' game on a disk! How small would your game have to be now to fit on a single disk? EQ is ancient and quite small. The installation on my drive would fit on three DVDs. Neverness To Everness, though, would need a dozen. And what's actually going to be on these disks the archivists want to preserve? 

Sorry - we covered archival already. Let's move on.

And so we come to ownership, which I'm now realizing probably ought to have a post of its own. Ironically.

That was Yeebo's main concern, I think, and so it is most peoples', for very good reason. Some very, very big businesses are hell-bent on converting the capitalist system to a quasi-feudal Lords and Peasants arrangement, where at best we're all tenant farmers on the Lord's lands and most likely we're merely digital serfs.

It's not an appealing prospect although, just as it was in the middle ages, it does depend on what sort of Lord you've got lording over you. If it's the typical squeeze em 'til they bleed then feed what's left to the hounds type, you're pretty much screwed but if it's the responsible steward of the land sort you might at least hope for a quiet life with Sunday mornings off for church.

Badly thought-through metaphors aside, we are clearly slipping into a rental culture without necessarily being aware of it. When I was pondering the virtues of playing my games on someone else's servers on Tuesday, Angry Onions, the appropriately-named regular commenter (The angry part, not the onions...) popped into the thread to point out the shortcomings, namely that NVidia could switch the servers off any time they felt like it and I'd be S.O.L.

That, though, is a somewhat bad example. GeForce Now only lets me play games I already own or games I don't need to own because they're free to play anyway. It doesn't pretend to sell me games that only exist on their servers for as long as they care to keep them running. No, for that you need to go to Steam.

We all talk about our Steam libraries as games we own but ownership there is predicated on Steam a) continuing to exist and b) not morphing into something else. As everyone always says, if you want to own your games, you have to go to GOG. 

But do you want to own your games? Some of them, sure. The ones you know for certain you'll play again. The rest, though? Not just the ones you bought in a sale and never played or played for an hour and didn't much like or even the ones you finished and were glad to see the back of? 

Not all games have much replayability and not all of those that do actually get replayed. I can count the number of games I've replayed on the fingers of... hold on... yes, one hand.  

Re-experiencing entertainment is a bit of a niche hobby anyway. Most people don't do it or that's been my impression. 

I re-read a lot of books, often more than once, but when I talk about re-reading at work, in a bookshop, with people who read obsessively, nearly everyone thinks it's a downright weird thing to do. I was thinking about movies the other day. I re-watch those as well, or I used to, but I doubt there's any movie I've seen all the way through more than three times and not many of those. For most people it's once and done and then maybe once more that they didn't plan on, like when a friend drags them to see a movie they saw already.

And that's probably the right way for everyone other than the poor old professors and students who have to study this stuff. I'm in the process of clearing cruft out of my house. It's going to be a year-long job, if I'm lucky. I have a lot of comics, magazines, books, DVDs and VHS cassettes. That I own. Most of them I read or watched once, if that. 

Would I have been better off to have rented them? Then rented them again, if and when I ever wanted a second go? I'd sure as hell have a lot more space in my house now. And probably more money in the bank, too, assuming a rental culture priced itself appropriately. 

As for games, of which I also have quite a few boxes from the old days, I was delighted when I could just download the damn things so the only space they took up was hard drive space. And even that's a pain, frankly. Cf. my current enamorment with playing the things on someone else servers.

The real problem I see with the current push to get us all to rent rather than own is the blatant dishonesty behind it. I'd say a big notice you absolutely could not miss, right at the point of purchase, saying "YOU ARE RENTING THIS ITEM. YOU ARE NOT BUYING IT AND YOU WILL NOT OWN IT" would solve the problem altogether.

And I'd be happy to rent. I'd prefer it, honestly. The only hard copy media I use these days are CDs for music and physical books, the former only because I have to have something to put on wish lists for birthdays and Christmas and the latter because I work in a bookshop and I get a shit-ton for free.

I'd love to drop both and go all digital. And also I wouldn't. I'd hate it.

Because physical objects feel nice and look nice. It's not about ownership for me. I really don't care about ownership all that much. I care about access but that's a different talk. 

No, it's about tactility. Touching stuff is hard-wired into us. You can't touch your digital games which I'm guessing has as much to do with the furore over Sony's decision as anything else. How many people really go to Gamestop to sell their old disks or hand them on to their friends or descendants? I bet most of those disks sit on a shelf to be looked at and sometimes taken down and handled for the sheer pleasure of it.

That's what I do with my old PC games, anyway. The question is, do I miss not being able to do it with the new ones? 

Hmmm.... well, I didn't until you asked me but now I'm thinking wouldn't it be nice to have a box with Neverness To Everness on the front and a cloth map of Hethereau inside that I could pin up on the wall.

As I knew before I started, there's no answer to any of this. I like it and I don't like it. I think it's important and I think it's trivial. I think we should keep everything and I think we should let it all fade away. 

But what I really think is I'm glad it's not me that has to decide. Well done to Sony for pulling the plaster off. Let's just hope too much skin didn't come off with it. 

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...

 

Taking The Loong View

What a lot of MMOs there are. I downloaded yet another one yesterday. Kaozz's fault. She mentioned that she was playing something called Loong Online. "Smooth as butter and polished", she said. I'd never heard of it, which was provocation enough without the praise on top.

I googled and found it on the Gamigo portal where I had a choice: sign up for Loong alone or make a Gamigo account to play any of their games. They host a lot of MMOs including a few I'd heard of. Fiesta, which certainly gets a lot of advertising, none of which has ever made me consider trying it, King of Kings, which I did once play for about half an hour and Black Prophecy, which crops up on Massively now and again largely to my complete lack of interest. They have several more and others in development. They even have a Golf MMO, and they're welcome to it. Obviously no real point starting a Gamigo account, then.

Quit hogging the camera, cat!

Having made my Gamigo account, when I came to add Loong to my list of games I planned to play on it I noticed a familiar name: Otherland. Otherland is the MMO based on Tad Williams' sprawling, disturbing cyberpunk/fantasy noir. It's an MMO I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, looking forward to giving it a run whenever it appears. Haven't heard much about it for a while, although there was a video recently. I had no idea Gamigo were involved but now I'm signed up. Pre-ordered, I suppose you could say, if you can pre-order a game you don't have to order in the first place. Ah, sweet serendipity.

Gamigo is a German F2P gaming network.  Seems to be the week for those, what with the PSS1 thing and all. There's an awful lot of MMO activity in Germany, now I come to think of it. Bigpoint are another. They host Drakensang and Nadirim, both of which I've tried, and Battlestar Galactica, which I haven't, it being a shooter. Germany is a big, rich country and one where MMOs seem to be very firmly established. Once you factor out the "sold like chattels" part of the PSS1/Sony deal the whole thing begins to look a little less disturbing. If they can get the IP block sorted out and restore freedom of choice, who knows? Maybe something good could come out of the wreckage.

Slot in top of head is not for litter

Leaving that aside for now, pending the supposed SoE/Allaplaya statements due later today, what is Loong like? Well, I only played for an hour or so but it was a good hour. It certainly looks fine. The world is lush and detailed, the views are stunning, the creatures are quirky and that's just in the starting areas.The interface is a bit too gritty for my taste and I can't say I'm keen on the fonts but the functionality is all there. Compared to, say, Eden Eternal, a game I like a lot, Loong appears to be several notches higher in quality. Gameplay, at the starter level, is identical.

Will I play it much? Ah, that's the question, isn't it? There are just so many MMOs. It's all very well downloading them and trying them out, but how often do I get much further than the starting area? Is looking great and playing smoothly enough? Well, no it's not. Even really top-notch gameplay doesn't set the hook deep enough. Zentia, for example, is a first-class game in just about every respect. Gameplay there is as good as any MMO I've played. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were on it all weekend when we first found it and we played sporadically for a fair while after that, but in the end we drifted away.

I told you once. Shoo!.

I think, for me at least, it comes down mostly to character. In Loong I can be a good-looking young man or a good-looking young woman and that seems to be about it. It's not like being a giant tiger in NeoSteam, is it? Or even a mouse in Eden Eternal. I just don't find playing good-looking young people very involving. If I can't be an animal, at least let me be a dwarf or a gnome, something with a big, bushy beard. Zentia let me play a fat old man, which may be why I lasted a few weeks there rather than a few hours.

Do my feet even touch the ground?

It's not just how the characters look, either. It's also how they move. My Loong character travels in sudden, fluid leaps and bounds, so slick and fast that he's sometimes on the far side of where I want him to be before I can make him stop. Rift has a very dull selection of races but movement there is stolid, steady, firm. I can feel every footfall and that really does matter. The more solid the character feels, the better I am able to associate.

I'll plug on with Loong for a bit. On and off. Here and there. Now and again. The world very much looks worth exploring. I'll be surprised if I become more than an occasional visitor, but that's fine. There are so many MMOs after all.