/v/ - Video Games

I have a hard time getting worked up about sociopolitical messaging in games. What I care about a lot more is technology, game design, whether a game is fun, immersive, innovative in some way, or really cool to look at. What I'm eagerly anticipating is the next big thing. I think it's going to be AI-generated visual content and behavior, like using GANs to spawn a world-full of unique NPCs and a new class of algorithms to drive NPCs around in their game world. Imagine a game like Skyrim or Fallout or GTA where instead of statically-scripted NPCs, they have their own goals and understanding of the game's rules and are themselves playing the game. When you interact with them, they generate dialog on the fly in accordance with what they're trying to do in the game. Maybe they want to kill you. Maybe their inventory is full and they want to sell you stuff. Maybe they want to suck your dick for money so they can buy meth.

Maybe it'd be moddable and the messaging people could go to town: Maybe an NPC wants to separate you from your parents and sell you to a for-profit prison or recruit you to join them in a plot to assassinate the head of a pharmaceutical company, a student loan scam corp, or a corrupt internet service provider. It just needs to be fun. Bonus points if it looks good and doesn't crash all the time or make you sit through 30-second loadscreens that pop up in the middle of combat so you get killed without ever seeing how or what or why like in that buggy-ass elder scrolls online.

 >>/11537/
t. child of consumerism

 >>/11538/
t. agenda

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> Thoughts?
Leftist here, Jacobin is a little too socdem for me, but I agree that developers need to unionize or form worker cooperatives to escape the profit-driven/publisher menace.

 >>/11537/
> What I care about a lot more is technology, game design, whether a game is fun, immersive, innovative in some way, or really cool to look at.
Then you should care about the above two things, because profit-seeking is literally killing video games.

 >>/11534/
> implying games made by marxist kikes are worth playing

 >>/11543/
> Leftist here
Cool, we just can't escape you fags, can we?

 >>/11564/
Guess not, this time you don't have a corrupt coward for a board owner and his cronies willing to ban any post that disagrees with their narrow world view.  Looks like you may actually have to argue in good faith here.

 >>/11574/
Are you describing leftypol?

 >>/11534/
Video games themselves have nothing to do with leftism in action. Video games are about pushing buttons, getting things to happen, and seeing results of the button presses. The only way you can shove political alignment into that is as a background to the actions you perform in the game itself. Any notions of 'shifting games towards socialism' is just cramming it with propaganda for the sake of pushing an agenda or moral standpoint.

 >>/11543/
Profit-seeking is literally killing video game COMPANIES, because they make retarded decisions to try to get sales, and that's including shit like Lawbreakers who's draws were gender neutral bathrooms and characters with mystery meat faces, or otherwise blow loads of money on mediocre or worse games that, depending on how much they advertise it, may or may not succeed. Games will still be made by small companies and smaller groups, and things like Cuphead will come out that have unquestionable passion and care put into it that people love. Video games, especially at this point, will never die, or at least not any more than card games will like Uno or Mille Bornes.

 >>/11587/
dont argue with the lefist he's dumb as bricks and doesn't know.

 >>/11588/
Education doesn't happen without teaching, and we can't expect people to teach themselves.

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 >>/11581/
Sure, but Mark/v/ is even worse.

 >>/11587/
> The only way you can shove political alignment into that is as a background to the actions you perform in the game itself.
I suppose one thing you could do is build networked multiplayer games that in some way teach people they can make work decisions democratically...  So basically community self-management, found in a lot of persistent-world multiplayer gamers or in managing libre game projects.  It's hard to teach that kind of lesson without it actually involving productive work though, which stops being a game..  I wonder if Molyneaux's shitty 'Curious: What's Inside the Cube?' "game" could be an example.

> Profit-seeking is literally killing video game COMPANIES
I don't feel like you're actually disagreeing here.  The fundamental problem in video games is a phenomenon that hit movies a long time ago as well: the natural industry-wide tendency for profit rates to decline as work-reducing innovations are discovered.  When a developer or publisher discovers a labor-saving technique they can temporarily beat their competition by selling the same product for less work or selling the same product at a cheaper cost.  But eventually the rest of the industry catches up, and the socially-necessary labor required to make a certain kind of game is reduced overall, pushing down prices.

Ask yourself this: When was the last time video games had a price hike?  In fact they've been falling into the ground for decades as inflation has reduced the value of money in the same time frame.  Publishers (and profit-oriented developers) are dealing with a profitability crisis and their solutions are to trick people to buy shit games with advertising, nickel-and-dime customers for everything, or work their employees to death.  The really big publishers see huge budgets as as reason to justify huge advertising spending, and predictably huge budgets make shit games because developers are terrified of taking any creative risks when they have all their eggs in one basket.

I used to think graphic whoring was the root cause of all video game maladies, but it's really just one symptom of the problem.  The problem is profit.

 >>/11588/
Yes, good anon.  Don't confront challenging ideas with an argument--just shut down!

 >>/11591/
> implying mark ever banned you fags enough
I've seen people eat a ban for posting a picture of hitler when m*rk felt like it, I haven't seen leftykikes get banned nearly as often as they should be.
> Yes, good anon. Don't confront challenging ideas with an argument--just shut down!
> implying leftists ever give up their marxist madness in response to logical argument pointing out its flaws

 >>/11591/
> implying vidya prices have gone down
Nigger I don't know about you but I'm pretty certain games used to cost way less than 120$ + DLC + microtransactions, and I'm also pretty sure AAA companies aren't pushing all these shekelgrubbing measures as a reaction to inflation.
No competition has ever kept prices down because everyone quickly realises that they can make more profits by simply co-ordinating their prices and all fixing them high.

 >>/11591/
You're focusing too much on companies and not enough on the games. It's the big companies that care about profit and it's them that push things to a point of shit. Who gives a fuck if companies die? My only worry is if the serieses i like end up eating shit, but most of them are either dead or warped beyond recognition at this point so i don't really have a lot to worry about. Maybe you should stop looking at the AAA games, despite all the advertisements making it difficult or impossible, and look for games that aren't quite as heavily funded by established companies. None of which i can personally name, of course, because as much as i love games i'm woefully out of date, but i think that Castlevania clone made by someone famous-ish, Bloodstained, got good reviews; i also recall Penn and Teller had a VR game out but nobody ever mentioned anything about it.

 >>/11543/
> profit-seeking is literally killing video games
I agree. It's destroying all the good franchises that virtue-signaling leftists don't get to and ruin first.

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Virtue-signaling leftists also like to resurrect old games that were killed by profiteering years ago, and ruin them, too.

 >>/11941/
 >>/11942/
> liberal idpol is leftism
Do you ever get tired of this dull canard?

 >>/11943/
> that's not real leftism
how about you, does that ever get old? once you straighten out all the SJWs who profess to be Marx-loving leftists, then you can come complain at us.

 >>/11534/
Killing them is the best course of action.