The most striking thing for me about AI art debates is not that people don't get how learning models work, it's that AI defenders keep saying that human creativity has layers of nodes assigning weights to semi-random decisions based on a dataset of things a human artist has seen. I know we have a long and silly history as a species of conceptualizing ourselves as being like our tools (my hand strikes a hammer blow, my heart beats like a clock, my brain is processing information and multitasking) but this is a little silly even for that trend?

I've gotten so leery of recommending that up-and-coming developers jump on the bandwagon for "hot new platforms with funding to give out." I mean get that money but expect a rug-pull? The suddenness of this is a huge and characteristic facepalm kotaku.com/stadia-google-… 3.5 years ago, @MIDImyers asks Phil Harrison "will this disappear in a few years?" All his reply proves is that of course large companies can and do pour thousands of people and billions of dollars into a massive project and then yank it! Don't believe the hype.

Complaining about D&D and complaining about people complaining about D&D is more or less the TTRPG equivalent of arguing over whether Marvel movies take up too much room. Obviously people like these things in part because they’re enormous, adequately fun and comfortingly familiar But the complaints have a point too; long market dominance absolutely makes it harder for new or less pablum ideas to flourish, keep taste hovering around “fills my basic need…” You can enjoy a sweet mush (I do) without insisting it’s actually a great flavor

It's been a while since I did a deep-dive comics thread. Wandavision ends soon, so let's look into the gender politics of the stories it adapts! There's a lot of "hysterical pregnancy," forbidden fruit and android dick down in the past. How's Jac Schaeffer gonna re-wrap that up? If you missed the penultimate Gross Joss News, days before Charisma Carpenter disclosed his PoS behavior on Buffy/Angel: Paul Bettany said that Whedon initially demanded full frontal Vision Peen for Age of Ultron. But what if I told you this topic goes back decades in comics?

An 18-year-old trans girl who organized a peaceful protest was just kidnapped by NYPD officers in an unmarked van. She's allegedly suspected of... wait for it... putting stickers on police cameras? #whereisnikki, @NYCMayor? We demand her immediate release.

https://twitter.com/MichelleLhooq/status/1288253381883113475?s=20

The NYPD's explanation does not fit with what's shown in multiple videos recorded by eyewitnesses--videos which don't show any bottles, rocks, or police identifying themselves in any way before grabbing Nikki off the street. Also: "damaging" with stickers?

https://twitter.com/NYPDnews/status/1288270680614739968?s=20

We're going live in just 15 minutes with our showcase of dozens of incredible and ground-breaking games created at the @NYUGameCenter! Tune in between now and 8 PM ET!

https://twitter.com/metasynthie/status/1262047052147671040?s=20

Whoa I just finished stage-managing the first hour of this show, with 16 different guests... one amazing game after another, and great banter too? Now @MituK and @auriea are talking with another half-dozen game teams, check it out. twitch.tv/nyugamecenter

People keep asking my opinion of Stadi. But it literally does not matter how bad or good the experience is; it is just a tech demo to show the $$-men how many adopters jump aboard a new logic of control, subscription, distribution, bandwidth and data that they’re bandying about. You can tell when industry is gearing up for this as new suggestions of “needs” and what real “quality” is start to sprout. Now you need gaming convenience between your couch and phone! Now it’s just not good enough if it’s not extremely high-res at high framerates, etc.

If you want to know what Kojima was actually trying to communicate in that tweet, here's my attempt at a de-mangled translation
(and for the record, I've been credited as the lead designer/writer/producer on a team project or two, but have never supported the idea of auteurism) This is basically just "I haven't and won't let Konami put my name on the games they own that I just worked on the early stages of / same will apply to other collaborations going forward" right?

Have seen job-seekers get cut this way and 100% endorse it as an easy interview technique that should be widespread. “But if it becomes widespread or standard won’t people know to watch out for it?” Yes! It would benefit anyone who struggles with basic skills like “responding to a woman” to grow more conscious of their bias, with strong incentives to practice different habits and improve.

Glad to see threads like these; connections between spread of political ideology and games|culture keep coming up but it's a complex topic that needs much more discussion, especially as large "apolitical" companies fearfully put their heads in the sand.

https://twitter.com/ellaguro/status/1146689613483925505?s=20

I keep seeing two knee-jerk reactions: first, insisting studies have failed to support links from game violence to violent behavior. Games->violence is such an old and hoary question, and not even the right question anymore! There are any number of ways games can affect humans.

At #GDC2019 @bombsfall and others are about to talk about starting and running workers’ cooperatives for indie games. A coop is: a business owned and controlled democratically by workers (one vote each) who share in the profits. Now @cleodee continues with Co-ops 101. Traditionally associated with industrial, craft and agricultural labor, not startup businesses—but there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be, beyond some companies’ reluctance to be egalitarian

Something's going unremarked in media coverage of Friday's nights Charlottesville-esque brawl on NYC's Upper East Side: why did the local GOP campaign HQ invite Proud Boys to re-enact the 1960 far-right assassination of an elected left-wing politician? newsweek.com/violent-far-ri… Inejiro Asanuma was the head of Japan's socialist party when my mother was in college there. He was further left than any US politico today (criticized for kissing up to China)... but closest equivalent? Imagine if Bernie Sanders or Dennis Kucinich got killed during a TV debate.

Can't wait for the Shadow of the Colossus HD remake's first round of DLC: "Time Savers" that make your horse gallop much faster, taking you right to the big fights. It's all empty plains between them anyway, right This tweet occasioned by the divisive grind in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey? You can buy "Time Saver" options that speed it up, but which is the "actual game?" The slower, more laborious base-price version? Or the boosted version where you're powerful at a quicker pace?

“Tom Nook is a nice landlord/rent-to-owner/market overseer” is such a failure of utopian imagination, which ought to play a part in Animal Crossing? He’s nice compared to horrible actual banks and landlords. But there are no other AC landlords to compare him to, which is telling. As someone who’s been an actual landlord: it’s only possible for Tom Nook to be “nice” if he has other non-player options to occupy and pay for his unused, unrenovated property, which is otherwise a depreciating liability. No such other options ever appear, to my knowledge?

Just days after it’s revealed that IBM used NYPD surveillance cams to develop skin-color-profiling using unsuspecting New Yorkers, Insomniac’s Spider-Man game unlocks its map by... requiring you to get all the NYPD’s surveillance towers back online. How heroic. Literally me just now: “Hey honey, here’s my college dorm! Look there’s your work! Oh wait... a surveillance tower like the one that was parked in the middle of Crown Heights for years ominously watching everyone... and it’s... my mission.”

This piece on the sketchy (“trying to sound authentic but intelligible to US audiences at the same time”) use of Jamaican patwa comes on an interesting day: I was just looking up what Bushmaster’s accent was like in 70s and 80s comics! vice.com/en_ca/article/… Except wait! Bushmaster’s dialogue, as originally written by Chris Claremont, isn’t written with an accent. (The first time we see him, Misty Knight is on undercover assignment to seduce him, in a plot ripped from a pulpy crime novel.)

PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail is starting at the @NYUGameCenter with some opening comments by @flantz! I’ll be live-tweeting a bunch of talks on game design over the next couple days. Feel free to mute #Practice2018 if you’d rather opt out? First up, social psychologist Daniel Ames of the Columbia biz school on roleplaying exercises for learning how to negotiate #Practice2018

Is there ever a good reason to be a “fan” of anything? You can make deep connections over shared interests or be inspired to creativity without constructing a fan identity for yourself.

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I remember realizing, as a kid, what distinguished “fans.” It’s not time spent, or knowledge, or positive feeling. It’s the emotional intensity of the connection, often greater than (and prioritized over) human relationships. See where this ends up?

The prelude to Ta-Nehisi Coates' new Captain America series came out on Saturday. It's a bounty of political / historical / comic-book allusions. Gonna go (and revisit) some interesting places. Let's take a close look into where Coates might be taking Marvel's most venerable (and consistently political) series. This story was free last Saturday, and you still might be able to get one at your local comic shop!

At #GDC18 @danctheduck is talking about how so many naively-implemented social systems (like say, twitter dot com) are deeply dehumanizing, and that we could do so much better at creating spaces to foster friendship He’s presenting a framework, based on psych and sociology research, on how games could do better at helping players make friends.

Next up: #gdc18 microtalks hosted, as every year, by the ever-kindly @rich_lem . This year’s theme, “playing with 🔥” Opening question from Rich: why are the people in charge of running this world so terrible at running it, and at endangering marginalized people? “Yes, it’s a shitshow, but we have opportunities to spread hope.”