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...

 

Never Mind The Music, Just Look At The Pictures

Here we are, in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year. Seems like as good a time as any to post the recap no-one needed. Or wanted. Yes, I'm going to debrief myself on how the 2025 Inventory Full Advent Calendar went. If you're ever in need of an example of pointless, self-indulgent navel-gazing, feel free to re-direct to this post.

As I may have mentioned before (Oh, I definitely have.) the one thing I don't enjoy about doing the annual musical door-opening extravaganza is not being able to keep up a running commentary as I go. It's hard work staying quiet, I can tell you.

I have a little leeway to offer passing observations, thanks to Redbeard commenting every day. It's turned into something of a regular double act after several years and at least it gives me the opportunity to say something about the songs. 

While I'm on the subject, thanks also to Tipa, the only other reader to leave any comments at all this year. Jolly good ones, too. 

Even if only two people enjoyed it, I'd feel it was a worthwhile exercise, but of course there were three because I had a great time putting it together. I imagine it's no secret I'm mainly doing it for my own amusement. 

It's so much fun every year that I'm always tempted to consider creating a new blog just so I can go on doing it. One where I'd post a song every day of the year. It would be so easy and so much fun. I imagine. Maybe the reality would be a bit different...

It's not as though it was just the three of us having our own private door-opening party all December, anyway. Page views for the Calendar were very consistent throughout the run; lower than on regular posts but still close to three figures, most of the time. I have no way of knowing how many of those page views also incremented the relevant YouTube counters but let's hope a few people clicked through out of curiosity, at least.

I'm not actually going to say much about the music in this post. I might cover that separately at some point, although that might be a self-indulgence too far. What I'm going to go into here is the way the posts were illustrated.

I can chip in a bit about the song choices but no-one ever mentions the pictures so I rarely get the chance to talk about them when replying to comments, which is ironic, given that's the part of the whole thing that takes me the longest and requires the most effort. 

Let me take a step back and outline my methodology. The way I tend to compose the calendar most years goes like this:

Stage 1. October going into November: trawl the internet for Christmas songs and find more than I'm ever going to need.

Stage 2. Mid-November: Mentally sort them into Possibles and Probables. Check I haven't used any of them in previous years. Start thinking about images. Decide on were and how to source those. Begin collecting and/or producing them.

Stage 3. Late November: Begin putting the first week's posts together so as to have at least a week in hand, going into December. This means picking some of the songs, finding appropriate images to go with them and editing those images if needed.

Stage 4. December: Keep producing posts, trying to stay at least a few days ahead but also start swapping everything around, bringing in new songs that weren't on the longlist, pairing songs thematically, developing themes on the fly and basically winging it more and more the further into the month it gets. This is when it starts to be really fun.

I never stop looking for new Christmas songs. Any good, new ones I find can always be added on the fly. Pictures are open to a certain amount of serendipity but it's a lot more constrained. Once I decide on the aesthetic and the source, that has to stay consistent for the whole Calendar. 

Unlike music, the use of images on the blog is fraught with concern. For music and video, YouTube covers all the liabilities automatically. So as long as I just embed videos correctly, using the tool included in Blogger for that purpose, there's no risk. Everything stays firmly inside Google's eco-system, where the issues of copyright are handled by the terms of your YouTube account. 

It's why, in the rare instance when I want to use something that isn't on YouTube already, I prefer to upload it to my YouTube channel and link to it from there, rather than upload it directly to Blogger from my own hard drive. It's a form of data-washing, I guess.

With images, it's riskier. Even with screenshots from games that you may have taken yourself, ownership is often unclear. Blatant "borrowing" from the web is like skipping across a minefield.

The most important thing is not to step heavily and inconsiderately on anyone's copyright, while also not paying anyone any money. Harder than you might think, especially when it comes to finding a couple of dozen Christmas and winter pictures to stick at the top of a post. 

I've used my own photographs in the past, which is probably both the safest and the most aesthetically satisfying choice, but I only have so many suitable shots and I've pretty much run through them all now, so that was out for this year. If we'd had any snow, I might have taken some new ones but we hardly ever get snow here before January, if at all. 

We do have one hell of a lot of sparkling lights up all over town, though. Next time, I might take some pictures of those. I could probably take twenty-five unique shots just in the cul-de-sac across the road.

For the first Advent Calendar, which I put together without a great deal of thought, I used copyright-free stock images. They were really not very pleasant to look at but I leaned into the cheese and tried to make it a feature. 

I did consider doing that again this year but if you search for "copyright free images" you may be surprised to find how little "free" choice you actually have. Nearly every site that offers them requires at least some kind of sign-up and some want some kind of subscription, too. I looked at it and decided it wasn't going to work.

The absolutely blindingly obvious solution was, of course, AI.  Artificially Intelligently Generated Images are de facto not copyrightable in most jurisdictions (Yet.) so the whole question of rights becomes a non-issue. Well, legally. Ethically, maybe not so much.

Better yet, you can very easily tailor the image to the music, either by prompting specifically for something you think would go with it thematically or by using an extract from the lyric as a prompt. I do like to do that. It's like a parlor game.

In 2023 and 2024 I used AI for the Calendar, either exclusively or partially. The models weren't as good then as they are now, but looking back at those pictures today, I still quite like most of them. Honestly, I'd be happy to have used AI again this year, too. Prompting for AI would have been easier, faster and at least as entertaining for me than what I did end up doing.

But using AI is not without controversy, as you may have noticed. And the Calendar is supposed to be a bit of holiday fun, not a seasonal wind-up. Why piss even a few people off unnecessarily by summoning the specter to the feast?

That's when I hit on the idea of going Pubic Domain. That would be safe enough, wouldn't it? And easy, too.

Yeah. Not so much as you might think. Most of the sites offering "PD" images also want you to make an account before you can get to the good stuff which, judging by the samples they let you see, might not even be that good anyway. Plus they often have a lot of small print about what you can and can't do with the images, too. I did use a few of those sources at the beginning but it was not much fun at all. 

And then I stumbled upon Wikimedia Commons. That's where about two-thirds of the images I eventually went with came from. 

It was a very lucky stumble. Not only does the site have a huge archive but it's user-friendly and very well-organized. There's a search function that really works, the images are displayed in a way that makes it very easy to spot something suitable right away and best of all, they've done all of the admin for you.

They tell you everything you need to know about the provenance of the image, what you can and can't do with it and what credit you need to give if you use it. Not only that, they provide all of that information in various formats, including html code ready to drop into your post as-is. All I had to do was cut and paste into Blogger and it worked perfectly every time.

That's why the latter half of the calendar has those neat attributions tucked away at the bottom of every page, where the earlier ones have ugly, fudged attempts, all done by me. The premades saved me so much time and effort.

Once I discovered that mother-lode, the mechanics were easy. What wasn't was matching a suitable image with the music. Geez, that was a thankless task, alright. 

First I had to figure out what sort of image I wanted. 

For example, on Day 10 I wanted to pair two songs that name-checked specific American retail outlets and restaurants with an image of a named American retail outlet or restaurant at Christmas or in winter. Didn't have to be the ones in the songs, Denny's or K-Mart. Any name I recognized would have done.

Could I find a public domain image to fit that brief? Could I Christmas!

Eventually I did but it took me ages and in the end I had to settle for a store I'd never heard of - Pick 'n Save. It sounded right and the image was certainly seasonal. Just as well. I couldn't find any others.

It was a little like that every day, although that was one of the hardest. Believe it or not, all the images are thematically linked to the titles or the lyrics of the song or songs of that day. Granted, the connections are pretty loose, especially in the first week, when I was still using a bunch of images I'd downloaded in November, but I soon dumped those and started looking for appropriate images after I'd picked the songs, not before. That went better.

It was fun-ish. I mostly did it late at night in bed on the laptop. It took me maybe half an hour each time.

There was minimal editing. Mostly I took the images as they came. Occasionally I made some minor changes. I took the "Midwest National Parks" logo off the bottom of Day 23 because I decided only one of the three songs qualified as midwest emo. I cropped the Murad cigarette ad for Day 18 and also saturated the colors a little.

It was a lot of work. If I'd used AI, would it have been faster? Almost certainly. Better, though?

Take that problematic Day 10. I'd have ended up with something like, oh, I dunno... that picture up at the top of the post, maybe? Is that better? Worse? About the same? 

Hard to say, isn't it? I really like the Public Domain shot. It has a lot of the bleakness of Communist Daughter's cover of Christmas at Denny's (The original, by Randy Stonehill, doesn't carry a fraction of the weight, for me.) but then it doesn't do much for Root Boy Slim and the Sex Change Band.  I don't think I want to see what AI would have done with that, either.

As for Eels and Birdcloud and their collective Christmas cool, I might have gotten something like this:

I mean, come on! Do you call that cool? The name of the brand is gibberish, the guy is holding two cigarettes - except he's not really holding either of them - two artists have signed the same picture and that pair of poseurs ooze entitlement, not cool. Otherwise I guess it's... fine.

So, yeah,. maybe the AI image generators haven't improved as much as I thought. And maybe I would have had to just as much work to get something I was willing to use, even if I had taken the supposedly easy option. 

In the end, I was happy enough with what I got from the Public Domain and I know there's plenty more waiting if I need to go back for more. 

Next year, though, I kinda think I might take some photos of my own. Hey! Maybe I should use all original, hand-taken pictures but make the songs with AI!

That is something AI is good at, after all.

To One And All A Merry Christmas

 

And A Merry Christmas To One And All!

 

  

Notes on AI Used In This Christmas Message

Oh, yes, there was some...

First, I took a photo of Beryl, flat out and fast asleep after Christmas Lunch. I cropped and edited it in Paint.net, after which it looked like this:

Then I uploaded it to NightCafe, where I used it as a starting image for Flux Schnell. I gave it the prompt "A sleeping black and white dog wearing a santa hat, surrounded by piles of opened presents under a tastefully decorated Christmas Tree", set the run time to "Long" and asked for four images. The only usable one was this: 

No Santa hat. No tree. One measly present. And that was the best of about a dozen images.

I used several models, trying for something better but they were uniformly terrible. Honestly, it was like the last three years of AI development never happened. I haven't tried generating from an image for a while. I was expecting a lot more. I even used some of my freebies to access the Pro models but they were even worse than the free ones, which ties in with Suno's supposedly best model actually being much worse than its predecessor. 

I think some of these companies are just trying too hard now. Either they're getting desperate or they're so far into the forest they can't see the trees any more.

Anyway, I did manage to get one I was fairly happy with so I uploaded it to ClipChamp. Then I went to Suno and generated some "music" to go with it. That was a low-effort move on my part for which I'd apologize if I didn't also think it fits pretty well with the cheesy effect I was after. 

All I did to get started was type in a half-assed prompt: "Vaporwave Christmas melody, ethereal, glitchy, otherworldy, tuneful, soothing, seasonal, bells, jingling, faint caroling". That gave me something all but unlistenable so I tried to fuzz it up by covering it under the prompt "As heard through the faulty speaker of a  malfunctioning radio, broadcast by a station that fades in and out, quite faint, hard to hear". No luck. The cover sounded pretty much identical to the original. Apparently Suno can't do effects like that.

MeloBytes can, though, so I exported it as a .wav file and uploaded it over there, where I used a filter to make it sound like an old-time radio broadcast. I downloaded the result and uploaded that to ClipChamp. I put the image and the sound file into a timeline, added a couple of effects (Vaporwave and VHS) to get the scratchy, glitchy effect, then I exported the final version to my PC.

I was going to get Blogger to just embed the video directly but the file was too big so I uploaded it to my YouTube channel instead. Once it had processed, I embedded it from there and that was that.

It took me longer to write up this account of what I did than it took me to do it. I probably should have got an AI to do the summary. 

How much of all of that was really AI, though? If I'd been a bit less lazy and made up my own tune and uploaded that, instead of letting Suno do it for me, most of what the "AI" did would have been nothing more than post-processing. Calling it AI just makes it sound more impressive, or so the AI companies would like to believe.

It passed a Christmas afternoon while Mrs Bhagpuss and Bery sleep off their lunch, anyway! Happy Christmas everyone!

Christmas, Cryptic, Coke, Charli XCX And All The Rest

I didn't post yesterday, even though I could have. It felt like skipping school, by which I don't mean it felt fun. I was never one of those kids who enjoyed an unjustified day off. I could never quite forget I ought to be somewhere else. This was a little bit like that. Especially since I knew I had a busy few days coming up, what with work and other things, so I legitimately wouldn't be posting then. 

Also, there's the post count to think about. I hit the big three hundred in 2024 and it's on the cards for 2025. I need another 48 posts in thirty-three days. With the Advent Calendar to come it's doable. But only if I don't keep bunking off...

Speaking of which, let's start there.

The Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 

2022 was the first year I did one. I went with stock images and a single tune, all of which I sourced myself. It was hella fun so I did it again in 2023.

That was the year I tried to get the LLMs to find me some obscure Christmas songs, a job they signally sucked at, choosing instead to just make stuff up. AIs were still cute and funny then, like puppies. 

Not that everyone agreed. I had more success using AI image generators for the pictures but it lost me at least two readers, who made a point of letting me know they were going in the comments. I imagine quite a few more just stumped off in silence.

It didn't stop me calling on AI for help the following year but I did at least make some allowance for reader sensitivity. In 2024 I had the brilliant idea of doubling up with two tunes for each day, one Naughty, one Nice. I picked all the songs myself but for the images I used my own photos for the nice numbers and had AI do the nasty ones. That way, people could opt out of AI and still get to open a door every day.

It was a lot of work, not just the double-posting but because I also decided not to look at any pre-existing lists of Christmas songs. Too much work, in fact, which is why this year it's back to one window a day, although some days, when you open the flaps, you may find more than one song. 

This year, too, in keeping with my mild disillusionment with the way AI is going, there will be no AI involvement at all. The pictures will all be Public Domain images sourced from art galleries, museums and any other archives I can find. 

That has turned out to be a lot more work than you'd think. I can see why people use AI. It saves so much time. I'm already thinking that next year I might start with an AI image and then distress it, the way I do the non-AI pictures I use for music posts. That feels like it would be both faster and more fun and also legitimately involve at least some degree of human creativity.

As for the songs, I learned from last year's experience. Trying to find a couple of dozen unusual or obscure Christmas songs without looking at any lists or collections or playlists of unusual or obscure Christmas songs anyone else has done is a) really hard work and b) exhausting. 

This time I haven't even attempted to be original. I looked through a lot of other people's Christmas lists and cherry-picked. That led to me finding other songs that weren't on the lists,   so at least some of it is my own work. It sure went a lot faster this time, anyway, and I felt a lot less burned out by the end.

It's still quite annoying not to talk about the songs as I post them but I think that would kind of defeat the point of an Advent Calendar. The last couple of years, Redbeard has been kind enough to leave a comment on each day's entry, which gave me the chance to monologue about them in reply. If no-one comments this year, which is more than likely, I'll just have to do a separate post at the end. Don't think I won't!

Next up...

Oh, this is a Grab-Bag post, by the way. Did I not mention that?

Good News/Bad News

 

Which is it? Hell if I know. When I read that Embracer was selling Arc Games and Cryptic and that it was a management buyout, I had a couple of thoughts. The first was "I guess that's good news for Cryptic" and the second "Who is Arc Games?"  

Generally speaking, I'd say that if you're playing an MMORPG and the company that owns it sells it to someone else, you'd probably prefer it went to the people already making the content for it. Always assuming you're enjoying the game, that is. It seems like the safest option, aesthetically and emotionally, although possibly not financially.

Also, if your game was currently owned by Embracer, I guess you'd be forgiven for thinking anyone else would be an improvement. Then I read the article about the buyout on MassivelyOP, which clarified some things and confused others. 

Arc Games is what Perfect World Entertainment (PWE) turned into. It looks like it's some of Arc's management team that's mostly involved in the buyout, funded by Chinese company XD. As MOP points out, though, Embracer had already gutted Cryptic and handed the remnants over to one of Embracer's own divisions, DECA, while apparently Arc Games remained responsible for publishing Neverwinter, Champions and Star Trek Online. So that's as clear as concrete.

I haven't played any of Cryptic's games in years but I have at some point played them all. Champions I just didn't get on with. STO, I thought, was a decent enough game but I have very little affection for the Star Trek IP and I think you'd need quite a bit to want to keep playing for long.

Neverwinter, though, I did like. I played it a fair bit, on and off, although in common with most of the literally hundreds of MMOs I've dabbled with over the years, I never got all that far. There are a couple of dozen posts about it here, though, and of the three, it's the only one I occasionally think of going back to visit.

Whether this latest development makes that more or less likely is hard to predict. If it's just a case of changing the names on the board-room door then no, I guess it doesn't. If it actually leads to a material difference in the way the game is developed, then yes, maybe.

The real question, as always, is who is playing any of these games now anyway? I guess someone must be because the buyer, fancifully named Project Golden Arc, paid  Embracer $30m, which seems at the same time a lot and not much. Thirty million for three established and operating MMOs sounds pretty cheap when you consider EG7 paid ten times that for Daybreak just five years ago. On the other hand, I repeat, who plays Cryptic MMOs in 2025? Looked at that way, it sounds like a lot of money after all.

I'm guessing this will be an ongoing story. I look forward to further developments.

Oh God, Not More AI Nonsense...

I could probably do two or three posts a week just on news items about AI that turn up in my feeds. Most of them I read and forget about but a few really demand some kind of comment or examination. Especially the ones about music. Here's an example.

Right after I published yesterday's post, I got the news that Warner had done a deal with Suno. This follows a deal Udio signed with UMG last month. Udio and Suno are the two leading generative AIs involved in creating music, Suno being by far the superior of the pair, in my opinion.

Until very recently, both were facing lawsuits from the three giants of the record industry, two of which are Warner and UMG. As far as I can tell, Warner is still suing Udio and UMG is still suing Suno. The third, Sony, is suing both of them. I guess the music stopped when it came to Sony and the parcel was already all unwrapped. Pity there wasn't a third AI in there, then they could all have gone home with prizes.

This is exactly what we should have expected, anyway. The way the whole AI scene is going now feels like a mirror of what happened to all the previous technical innovations that threatened the huge media conglomerates. First they try to close them down and then they buy them out. After that it's either close them down themselves or assimilate the technology and use it for their own purposes. 

It's great for the sell-outs, who get a big payday and don't have to go to jail, but it's rarely - probably never - good news for either the current users or the artists trying to protect themselves from their predations. Arguably, it may be good news for all the hundreds of millions of people who didn't even know the tech existed until the majors repackaged it and sold it to them. That's how we got Spotify, after all. Then again, look how well that turned out...

Immediately I read the news, I went straight to Suno to see how they were spinning it. I was not impressed.  They claim "You’ll still be able to create original songs the way you love today." but I very much doubt that will last long. They've already announced changes, coming "soon", meaning "a paid Suno account will be required to download songs from the product, with each paid tier enabling a specific number of downloads each month."

That seems weird to me. I guess it depends how many downloads you get. If it exactly matches the maximum number of songs you can make under a given payment plan, then it's a non-issue. If it's fewer, though, then it makes very little sense. Why let anyone download a percentage of the songs you allow them to make? Unless, I suppose, you intend to charge them extra for the rest. Double-dipping, I think they call it...

We'll see the details soon enough but it's not going to affect me directly. I have already downloaded all my finished songs as MP3s and burned most of them onto CD so they can't do much about that. I have a few days left before my current Pro subscription runs out and I'm currently downloading everything again, this time in .wav format, along with a bunch of the also-rans, too. 

I'm sure as hell not going to download everything I've made. There are several thousand versions of songs of mine on Suno now because you literally cannot delete anything you ever make. Most of them I never want to hear again, so I won't be wasting hard drive space on them. I still own the copyrights under Suno's own agreement anyway, so they can just sit there forever as far as I'm concerned.

I will not be renewing my subscription when it ends, either. Unless, of course, they offer me another huge discount. Then I might. I also might come back for another go when all those Warner artists, who must be just so excited so be signing away their rights so we can all start remixing their work, which looks like being the game plan. That sounds like a fun toy. I have a whole post on that but it's still brewing.

You Don't Have To Be An AI To Deepfake

Is deepfake a verb? It is now. 

This made me smile. We hear so much about AI copies of famous people, both their images and their voices, it was oddly refreshing to read about such an old-school, analog way of doing much the same thing. 

Johnny Cash's estate is suing Coca Cola over a commercial Coke has been running for a few months, in which - allegedly - a Johnny Cash tribute singer was hired to sing in the lamented country star's signature style. For about five seconds, while some guy (If we're supposed to know who he is, I don't..) wanders through a crowd of sports fans. 

It hardly seems worth complaining about, let alone paying lawyers, but I guess if you have a brand you have to protect it somehow. Shame to think of Johnny Cash as a brand but that's the 21st Century for you.

Some TV Talking 

I had plans today to review the second season of Man on the Inside, along with a quick sidebar on the first episode of Stranger Things, Season 5 but a full review is a post of its own so I'll just say of MotI I liked it but not as much as the first season. Not sure the format can stand a third. It already seems to have turned into more of a family dramedy than a comedy crime show. A full review may or may not follow.

ST 5.1 was a trip, though. I was genuinely taken aback by just how big a deal it felt, especially given I came late to the party. If this was the old days of broadcast television it would have been one of those water-cooler moments, I guess.

Netflix has taken the Wednesday option and pumped it up, dropping the season in three parts, with the final episode also being screened in 350 movie theaters across the USA. It is the streamer's most successful series ever, so I guess they want to make the most of this last hurrah.

The first tranche is four episodes and I did consider watching all of them back-to-back. They're all somewhere around 70-80 minutes long so it's an afternoon, not a whole day. 

In the end I opted to stick to my established practice and just watch one every evening. I watched the first last night. It started slow and ended fast. I was gripped from the intro to the credits and I am not going to say anything about it other than that. I'm doing my absolute best to avoid all spoilers, including what anyone else thinks about it, which believe me has not been easy, so I won't contribute to anyone else's problems if they haven't already seen it.

Always Leave 'Em Singing

Yes, the obligatory musical ending. I have so many songs bookmarked now. Any opportunity to shed one gratefully taken.

House - Charli XCX (Feat. John Cale)

From the soundtrack of Emerald Fennel's adaptation of Wuthering Heights, already controversial before it's even been released. My first and so far only experience of Emerald Fennel's work was her novel Monsters, which at the time I thought was the most amoral Young Adult book I'd ever read. 

It still is and I still do. Only now she's famous so we have it faced out with a Recommends card. Which I did not write. But I would have, if anyone had asked me.

John Cale, of course, among his many, many accolades, is the man I saw perform at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, only a handful of years after the crimes in question, wearing a copy of the signature mask used by the infamous Cambridge Rapist. Even in a hall full of worshipers and admirers, it caused something of a stir. 

Among this company, Charli looks like the nice, polite, well-behaved one...

And We'd Have Gotten Away With It, Too, If It Hadn't Have Been For You Pesky Humans...

Before I changed PC, I had a whole bunch of bookmarks concerning various developments in AI that I was planning on stitching into some kind of post. Because I chose not to transfer anything at all across to the new machine (A decision that feels better every day. It's been like moving from cluttered, disheveled old house to a clean and tidy new one.) all of those are lost.

Okay, no they're not. They're on the old computer, which still works perfectly well. I just can't be bothered to go into the other room where I've left it and switch it on. No-one wants to read a load of old stuff about AI, anyway, not least because anything anyone wrote about it more than a few days ago is almost certainly out of date by now. 

On the other hand, it's that or yet another post where I go into painful detail about what I'm doing in New World, so AI it is. 

It's not like I need all those bookmarked articles and reports and opinion pieces to write a post about it. Things are moving so fast, it's hard even to hold a consistent uninformed opinion, let alone one based on actual facts. 

A couple of months ago, I was wholly convinced by the bubble scenario. The entire AI edifice is completely unsustainable. Millions of people are making a fortune using the almost-free services but no-one providing them has any idea how to make any money from facilitating the much-heralded Webpocalypse. 

Any day now, the individuals and institutions funding the whole thing are going to pull the plug and that will be that. Then the economy will crash and no-one is going to be thinking about AI any more anyway because we'll all be too busy breaking up our furniture and burning it to keep warm, once all those data centers stop super-heating the atmosphere.

Or all these AI services everyone's using for free now will start charging and then charging more and at the consumer end AI will just be another service you can subscribe to if you can afford it but how many of those are you paying for already and do you really want AI more than you want TV or movies or games?

Meanwhile, all the businesses and government departments that bought in to the AI hype will be discovering it doesn't do what they were promised it would and they won't have been able to let as many people go as they thought they would or if they did now they'll have to hire some or all of them back because AI just isn't cutting it on its own.

Any of those. Most likely all of them at once. That seemed like how it would go.

There was plenty of support for all of those timelines. The pieces I had bookmarked were all talking about surveys and reports that said businesses that had tried AI were finding they weren't getting anything done any faster or cheaper and in fact maybe it was even a bit slower and more expensive, what with having to have everything the AIs did checked by a human and probably re-written by one, too. One opinion piece suggested the companies that would do best out of the whole thing would be those who didn't invest in AI at all but instead snapped up all the good people being let go by those who did, so that when the inevitable collapse came, they'd be in pole position to take advantage of it. 

As for the public, it felt like there was so much push-back.  Not just from all the people who, understandably, didn't want to lose their jobs but from the consumers and customers and clients who would supposedly be the ones paying for the products and services AI would make it possible to supply more cheaply and efficiently. If everyone's boycotting your stuff it hardly matters if you saved money getting it to market.

One of the articles made what I thought was a very telling point. Historically, gamers have been among the earliest of adopters of new technology and also the most willing to spend quite significantly over and above the going rate to get their hands on whatever was being sold to them as the latest, bleeding-edge gadget or gimmick. 

This time, though, gamers have to be about the most rabidly anti-AI consumers out there. The merest rumor that someone's spotted a single AI-generated image in a game has them out with their pitchforks and torches. If you can't convince gamers to accept AI, the argument goes, how do you expect to sell it to anyone else?

All of which must feel very comforting to anyone who never liked the thought of AI in the first place. Well, except for the crashing the economy and starting a global recession part, that is. When Mark Zuckerberg said move fast and break things I'm not quite sure that's what he meant. Then again...

Except, doesn't it seem to be taking a long time for this bubble to burst? And hasn't an awful lot of the damage been done already? Once the AI is embedded in the infrastructure, just how easy is it going to be to get it out? And how much would that cost? It's all very well to say we can't afford to keep it but now we have it, can we afford to let it go?

Sticking with games, because I really do not want to think about the AI-controlled robot war dogs that will be taking over the policing of our streets any time now (And they can climb stairs, you know. It'll be like when the Daleks learned how to levitate. Nowhere will be safe.) it's obvious all the really big producers want to go full AI. Some, like Square Enix and Ubisoft, are open about it, but you can bet every one of them has a plan in place already for when they can stop dealing with those pesky creatives and just talk to nice, obedient LLMs that have never been trained on the history of the Union movement.

I could link to any number of news items and articles where games executives are pictured drooling over the prospects but I'll limit it to just this one, which surprised me by its positive tone. It's from GamesIndustry, which I'm guessing is officially neutral on the general topic of AI (Not on the topic of General AI, though, another kettle of extinction for humanity altogether.) but which more often than not chooses to sound quite sniffy about the whole idea.

The tl:dr for that link is that Ubisoft (It had to be them, didn't it?) is in advanced testing for AI-controlled alternatives to players. Obviously not to all players. How would that make money? Just to the players other players would usually play with.

It shoudn't come as any kind of surprise. I mean, it's not like actual players haven't been asking for it for years, is it? How many blog posts have you read over the last decade and a half, where someone was either ranting about how all anyone wants to do these days is play MMORPGs like they're playing a single-player game? Or that MMORPGs would be so much more enjoyable if it wasn't for all those stinky players?

I'll tell you how many. A shit-ton. As I've said a few times before, the first time I really noticed the
strength of feeling on the subject was when Gordon from We Fly Spitfires posted about playing Guild Wars 2 for the first time, fighting the same mobs and doing the same quests but not having to speak to anyone, let alone actually form a group.

We Fly Spitfires is long gone so sadly I can't link directly to it but I referenced that post and talked about the general topic of playing solo with others back in 2018. I don't believe gamers in general have become markedly more social since then so it's hardly surprising if one of the best use-cases for AI is seen as getting rid of other players. It's what a lot of them have been wishing for for years and voting, as they say, with their feet, although with their backsides might be a better way of putting it, what with all the sitting down gamers tend to do.

Whether those same gamers want exactly what Ubisoft is trying to sell them is another question. That GI post describes how the various AI-NPCs have different personalities, varying from "stoic" to "bubbly" for the grunts who join you in the fights to "authentically annoying: self-satisfied and occasionally belittling" for the mission commander who tells you what to do and where to go.

I'd have thought one prime reason many players would like not to have to deal with other humans would be all that messy personality stuff. But then, in a commercial release, once the tech has been passed as ready to meet the public, I imagine you'll be able to pick the personalities of your team to suit your tastes. 

Based on how AIs work now, I imagine the default option will be a bunch of flirtatious sycophants who just can't get enough of your amazing insights and truly incredible ideas. No doubt there's someone out there looking for a sarcastic AI partner who treats them like dirt but I'm not convinced a video game based on a Tom Clancy novels is where Ubisoft is going to find them.  

From a personal perspective, I feel like every week that passes leaves me less interested in and enthusiastic about AI than I was before. It was amusing a few years ago, amazing a few months ago, and now it's starting to bore me a little. It doesn't infuriate me - yet - but it's getting harder and harder to summon up the required goshes and wows for the endless, iterative, baby steps forward.

At the moment, I'm tending towards the opinion that AI in its current incarnation is going to end up being yet another of those not particularly interesting things we all have to use and pay for, whether we like it or not, like broadband service providers and local taxes. Try living on grid in any town or city in the Western Hemisphere without either of those and see how far you get.

Equally, try excitedly and repeatedly telling your friends how wonderful they are. See? Now no-one wants to talk to you any more.

Azuriel wrote a great post bouncing off the last one I put up about AI, in which he suggested the natural conclusion of the course I appeared to be, if not advocating for, then at least traveling along willingly, would be a future where we gave up on "content" altogether in favor of stimulating our pleasure centers directly until we all died of dehydration and/or exhaustion. It's not that I don't find it an attractive picture but I suspect that, at least in the lifetimes of most people likely to have read this far, it'll turn out to be something a lot less dramatic than that.

In my own case, it feels as though the future is probably going to involve considerably more involuntary use of AI, as it embeds itself inexorably in every aspect of all our lives, while at the same time my voluntary, personal involvement with the technology will decline. I've stopped making AI music, for example. It feels like I've done that now and, while it was immensely enjoyable and satisfying while I was doing it, I'm not missing it at all now I've stopped. I'll probably do it again at some point but it isn't something that's going to occupy me for the rest of the time I have left.

Another indicator is what's happening with this year's Inventory Full Advent Calendar. I've shortlisted all the songs now and I didn't use AI at all. In fact, I skipped straight past the Gemini AI summary at the top of every Google search I did and went straight to the links. 

As for the pictures, there won't be any AI images this year. I've decided they're boring. We've all seen far too many and they all look the same. They're also both too good and not good enough at the same time, which is a terrible combination. 

I actually still like making them and looking at them for my own enjoyment but I don't feel it's likely that anyone else is going to share my pleasure, which I'm well aware comes mostly from having made something that looks like the picture in my head, not form any intrinsic qualities of the images themselves. They require back story that would be inappropriate and counter-productive other than as illustrations to a narrative.

The main reason I won't be using any AI for the calendar this time, though, is that AI just isn't cool any more. Two or three years ago, even if some people really, really hated it and left comments saying they weren't going to come back if they were going to have to look at AI images, I felt like it was hip and clever to be making them and sharing them. Now, it feels like the default option. Everyone does it. I'd rather do something a little different, even if it is more work. 

And let's be honest, it is more work. A lot more. No wonder so many people do choose to use AI. It may not get you the right answer or draw you a great picture but it will give you an answer and a picture and it will do both in seconds. 

If you're putting a blog post together, quite often any answer or any picture will do. I mean, no-one really reads this stuff, anyway and even if they did, they'd most likely have the pictures switched off. It's not like I'm using AI to gather evidence for a court case or diagnose an illness, after all. Or even write a job description or an essay that someone's going to grade. No-one would be that lazy, surely. Or that gullible...

Look! All the way to the end and not one word about what I've been doing in New World! I'm really tempted now to give Gemini a precis of what I did in Aeternum yesterday and have it write a post for me, then put it up and see if anyone notices.

I never said I was going to stop using AI, did I? Or stop writing about it, either. I'm just not going to pretend I think it's cool any more. That'd be as bad as believing the best movie ever made was Fellowship of the Ring...

As for using it, I'll guess I'll stop when it's neither fun nor useful any more. We're not quite there yet but we could be soon. That's just the voluntary uses, though. I doubt any of us is going to be able to opt out entirely, ever again, short of going full Into The Wild.

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

Ironically, I didn't use any until I got to the final sentence, when I couldn't remember the name or author of the book I wanted to reference. I typed "what's the book where the guy walks into the Canadian wilderness and is never seen again" into Google Search and the AI Overview came back with "The book you are likely thinking of is Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer", which was indeed the right book.

The AI then went on to point out that it was the Alaskan wilderness, not the Canadian, that the person Krakauer wrote about, Christopher McCandless, walked into, but that there was another book, "Vanished Beyond the Map: The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell", published recently, which tells the story of an explorer who vanished in the Canadian wilds back in 1910. 

Gemini (For it was they, I assume.) then gave me precis of both, accurate in the case of Into The Wild at least, although I'll have to take the other on trust, along with links to Amazon for the Krakauer and the publisher's website for the other, so I could buy them both.

Given that Gemini wasn't just right but righter than I was, I suspect the days of being able to assume the AI summaries at the top of Google Search aren't to be trusted may be limited, although I do have to say that only a couple of days ago the same AI Overview told me about some album or other than sounded really interesting but turned not to exist, at least not so far as an actual Google Search could tell me. So maybe don't stop checking their work quite yet. 

Notes on Non-AI used in this post.

All the writing and all the pictures.  The first and second image are photos of things made by Mrs Bhagpuss and given to me as presents. The third image is two things made by her (The felts.) and two made by me (The mirrors.) all hanging in our hallway, as does the final image, a framed print I won in a raffle back inn the '90s. 

An art raffle. 

It was the nineties.

Don't you miss the nineties? 

It's Real If I Say It's Real

Yeebo dropped by the comment thread on the last post I wrote about Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, to mention how he'd started playing Honkai Star Rail a while back and was somewhat enjoying it, until he spotted a sale on Neir: Automata, which he'd heard described as "one of the best games ever created by humans". And that was it for his time with HSR.

That got me thinking about a lot of things, some of which came up in my reply, like how I really never get on with the combat in Honkai Star Rail and how any combat that isn't really easy puts me right off any game these days. Then I got to thinking about my gaming habits in general and how they've changed, both over the whole of my life and more specifically in the last few years.

I was going to write something quite specifically related to that today but then before I got down to it, I read this article at NME about a large-scale survey commissioned by French music streaming platform Deezer to find out if listeners really can tell the difference between music made by AI and music made by humans. And this one at GamesIndustry about the absence of player pushback over the use of AI in mobile games. And this one from the same source about Nexon suggesting everyone should assume every game company is using AI...

All of which made me think even more. Which is why this post is all over the place. I'm still thinking. But I have to start somewhere...

Let's begin with the shift from MMORPGs to Open World RPGs and Open World Survival Games, which for simplicity's sake I am going to lump together. I could also have linked a bunch of articles on that but I'm going to stick to my personal experience and some general observations because why do proper research when you can just wing it? That's how all the best columnists do it, anyway.

It seems hard to argue that these kinds of games, gacha or otherwise, haven't largely eaten the MMORPG sector's lunch. Still  as Sony/NCSoft's announcement of the in-development Horizon MMORPG, Steel Frontiers, proves, there is still a degree of interest in and commitment to the genre outside of its established, specialist niche market. MassivelyOP, who always nitpick over genre tags, were very keen to point out the acronym "MMORPG" appears right there in the title screen. 

And it is something worth mentioning. A lot of developers and publishers in recent years have gone out of their way to call their games anything but MMORPGs, believing to do so would harm their chances in the wider market.

Is that true? No idea. How would I know? Certainly, every new AAA game that claims to be an MMORPG seems to attract a million players on launch day. But then 90% of them are gone in a month and the rest a month after that. 

Was it because the games weren't MMORPG enough? Too MMORPG? Just not very good? Or were most of those people only there because it was the Big New Thing and a Thing can only be Big and New for so long?

Search me. No idea. And neither do the devs, apparently, because it keeps on happening.

What I can say, though, is that the naming of things is important. We should all know that as fantasy fans. To know a thing's name is to control it. 

Why, though? Why does a name, a true name, hold so much power?

It's all about authenticity, isn't it? That elusive, nebulous, indefinable quality that we know when we feel it. The Massively editorial team knows when a game is an MMORPG, regardless of what the press release they just received tells them. Just like we all know an NPC we're listening to was voiced by a human, not by AI. 

Except, do we? I can't help but think of the old Coke vs Pepsi test. That wasn't a notional thought experiment. It wasn't even something set up in some side-room in a University somewhere. It was an actual, physical test you or I could try for ourselves, when we went into town to buy an album or some new trainers.

If you search "Pepsi Challenge" you'll get the idea it only happened in America but I remember seeing the van parked in the shopping precinct near the bus and railway station in a city where I lived. I just can't remember which city... 

I didn't try it myself but I was always absolutely certain I could tell the difference. Pepsi is a lot sweeter than Coke, to my taste at least. Now, if it had been Coke vs Canada Dry, my all-time favorite cola, I'm not so sure. 

Which is kind of the point. Maybe I can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Certainly, to me, they don't really taste all that similar. Between Coke and Canada Dry cola, though? Those two are so close I wouldn't like to put money on it.

Whether I can tell or not, though, I think I know. Do I want to put it to the test? Not really. Why would I want to find out I was wrong? How would that make my life any better?

I have listened to a lot of music in my life and until very recently all of it was made by humans. There wasn't really any other option. Despite that intense and continued exposure, I don't doubt that, like 97% of the 9,000 people Ipsos tested for Deezer, I would not reliably be able to differentiate between music produced by AI and music produced by humans.

Mrs Bhagpuss says she can. She really likes the music I've made with AI but she says it all sounds "pink". She can hear the pinkness in it the way some people see auras. I cannot hear the pinkness. I did think about playing her something extremely similar that was made by humans to see if she still thought it sounded pink but that's an experiment that's going to stay firmly in my thoughts only.

She also says the vocals sound "too perfect".  I hadn't noticed that but after she pointed it out... I still couldn't hear it. What I think I can hear is the AI being imperfect on purpose sometimes, which isn't the same thing at all. And I certainly couldn't pick an AI singer out of an audio line-up based on perceived flaws.

But then, the AI vocals I'm listening to, the ones in the songs I've caused to be made, like a Renaissance artist overseeing a workshop filled with talented but anonymous craftsmen, are my vocals. The imperfections are frequently my imperfections, replicated as though they were intended.

I remember Tipa, who also uses Suno, mentioning a while ago that, while she liked the music she made with the software, she hadn't found much she wanted to listen to by anyone else there. I'd go further than that. I haven't heard anything there that I haven't found intensely irritating. The app defaults to playing the next tune on some playlist or other if you don't stop it, so I've been forced to hear snippets of lots of AI tunes and there hasn't been a single one I haven't almost broken the keyboard trying to silence.

But is that because they don't sound like they were made by humans or because they're just terrible songs? I could do much the same on YouTube and many of the tunes would be "authentic". They'd just be awful. A lot of people who can't play an instrument or sing also have terrible taste in music. Suno lets them share their lack of talent with the world, too. AI is really egalitarian that way.

What are we really lookng for when we listen to music or look at images or play video games, anyway? Authenticity or entertainment? Is a real, bad thing better than an artificial, good thing? And anyway, what even is authenticity?

At the moment I prefer Open World RPGs to MMORPGs and I prefer Eastern games to Western games. I'm not saying this is a permanent change or even a lasting one. It's a snapshot, like all preferences. It may stick or it may slide.

Looking at that preference as objectively as a person can observe a subjective preference of their own, I'd question some of the assumed positions on authenticity that come up repeatedly when games and especially RPGs are being discussed. There's long been a trend in the discourse over automation. It predates any queasiness over the use of generative AI, although that does seem to have intensified the and polarized the debate considerably.

MMO players in the West have tended to react very negatively to many of the things that are currently drawing me towards both open world RPGs and mobile ports and which a few years ago led me to appreciate a number of imported games that were calling themselves MMORPGs.  

One day I'll write a proper post about why I like these sorts of games but for now, here are a few of the more obvious reasons. 

 

I like the brighter colors and the flatter surfaces of the graphics, for a start. I like the cleaner textures. A lot of older or more traditional MMORPGs look gritty, somehow. Dirty, even. I can deal with that look but I'd rather not have to.

I like the stories, which seem a lot more modern and relatable than those in Western games. The characters are younger and more enthusiastic. The themes are stronger; the emotions clearer. 

There's a tendency to call them "anime" games but they could as easily be called "YA" games instead. I read a lot of YA novels (The acronym stands for Young Adult, marketing-speak for what publishers used to call "teen fiction".) and the characters in many of the games I'm now darting between remind me very much of the ones I meet in those books.

Ironically, these games, clearly aimed at a younger demographic than the traditional Western MMORPG, also tend to have a lot more time and respect for older characters. In most of the MMORPGs I've played, the characters are much of a muchness when it comes to age. 

The Elves all live forever so they're ageless. The dwarves are all old even if they're young. The humans are inevitably somewhere in their 30s or 40s. The anthropomorphic races (And the gnomes.) tend to be child-like. Mostly, though, unless a character has to be a specific age for a plot point, age barely even rates a mention.

The open world rpgs and anime games give me stories across the full age range, from small children to the elderly. And those stories frequently reflect the kinds of concerns real people in those age ranges would have. It's not all gods and mosnters. Sometimes it's homework or rivalries at work or the way your hip doesn't want to let you climb the stairs like you used to.

That feels more authentic to me but I'm betting it's a black mark against authenticity for anyone looking for the traditional, high fantasy MMORPG experience. Still, a lack of authenticity in the story is nothing compared to what happens in the gameplay. 

As I said at the start of the post, I bounced off Honkai Star Rail partly because I found the combat too much like hard work. I dropped Genshin Impact because I literally couldn't beat a boss to carry on with the story. Not all of these games have Combat For Babies enabled. Just the ones I like.

After a quarter of a century and more, I think I can say I'm officially over finding combat in MMORPGs fun for its own sake. I never liked it that much but it did used to have its moments. Now, it's almost always a means to an end. The easier it is, the better I like it. I like one-shotting mobs. All of them, if possible.

The received wisdom is that making combat too easy turns players off. They get bored and go somewhere else if the challenge isn't there. Not me. I get bored and go somewhere else if the challenge is there. One of the things I like best about BP:SR is the auto-combat. I use it in every fight. It's even better than one-shotting mobs because I don't even have to press a key.

Except I do press some keys, sometimes, because that's fun, too. I dodge a bit now and then. Jump about. Change position. Not sure if it makes any difference but it makes me feel like I'm involved. Because you want to feel like you're doing something, don't you? You just don't always want it to be true. 

Authenticity is in your head. There may be an objective reality out there but you do not have access to it. You think Coke tastes better than Pepsi because your eyes tell you so when you see the label on the bottle. Your taste buds have no say in it.  

That NPC you hear, the one that sounds so flat and uninflected? It might be AI. Or it might be a voice actor who isn't doing such a great job. That song you like? The one that came up on that auto-generated playlist that's by someone you never heard of before. Are you sure it's a real person singing? 

Yes, you know. Of course you know. But how are you ever going to know?

And what about the fun you had, playing that game?  No, wait...   

I won't say the fun you had. You may not have had that fun. I'll say what about the fun I had, playing that game where the AI (Different kind of AI, of course. The old, good kind.) did all the fighting for me. It even did the running, there and back. All I had to do was take the quest and hand it in. Did I really have fun or was I just imagining it?

Maybe I was having more fun all those times I spent an hour trying to beat some stupid boss in a Guild Wars 2 Living World instance. One of those times I lost so often all my armor fell off and I had to give up and leave. That time I had a headache for an hour afterwards. When I felt like uninstalling the damn game, I hated it so much. 

That was some authentic gameplay there, right?

Yeah, I don't miss any of that. What is authentic isn't the experience but  how I feel about it. If the game feels like it was fun, it was fun. If the song sounds good, it's good. If the voice acting is convincing, it's convincing. 

And that would appear to be why I prefer the games I prefer just now. They're authentically entertaining. Whether they're any good...

Well, that's an entirely different question.