I avoided that game based on the name, but from what I gather, it was misleading; pretty much every sect of that school is full of jerks (sadly including the nerds, who often cater to their own victim complex), and your character is just facing the larger of them.
At thte very least, the GOP has been losing some key elections in 2025, some they didn’t even expect to lose. Maybe some people could theorize these as “tactical losses”, but you may be better off not incorrectly viewing these idiots as masterminds. They bank on complicity, not tactics.
I’m curious if a dev that carefully manages placeholders could at least garner interest from artists this way. Clair Obscur’s debacle with their Indie Award demonstrates how horrible this can turn out if they miss even one asset; but sadly, I empathize coming from a position where I devoted my studies into learning coding and writing techniques, not artistry.
My space game was cubes and cylinders colliding.
The police are hundreds of years old. They still need warrants.
Funny enough, a lot of that ends up feeling similar with the move to Linux (and its many distros). It got a very good shift because of Microsoft voluntarily deciding “This OS will be horrible for everyone now.” but Reddit hasn’t had anything so egregious. Even Linux has a few issues with content/apps from not having enough contributors.
I recently had a long opinion post I made get downvoted. What upset me wasn’t that someone disagreed with me, it was that they didn’t take the time to explain their own contradicting position, because I wanted to figure out if I had something to learn there.
As long as people are able to stay civil, I’m definitely happy to dive into this subject, because it interests me a lot and I’m eager to see if anyone feels they learn something from it.
if the creator wants his characters to look a specific way then so what?
Valid sentiment, but it gets weird when “the creator” is not just one auteur, but a big network of interconnected developers. One may “really want a hot springs scene with detailed looks at the female lead’s boobs”, while much of the rest of the devs are uncomfortable with it, think it will hurt narrative pacing, or even think it could hurt sales.
I do think it’s hard to argue that sex un-sells, but there’s at least some slight data to suggest it. Two games come to mind. One is Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the other is Nier Automata. Both games sold well and had dedicated fans - but both also had a decently large number of players that saw what they viewed as “cringey anime hornbait” and decided to ignore it - even if the game would’ve readily contained other features they might have enjoyed - intricate JRPG mechanics and DMC combat. I don’t even view that audience as “prude” - they just generally held the sentiment that the sexiness was so out of place, it was distracting from the core themes of those games. In N:A’s case, it was a much smaller minority, but you could see in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 it kind of toned sexualization back.
if you’re upset that there’s an unrealistically attractive male or female in a game, respectfully, go fuck yourself. There’s millions of video games that you can also enjoy without your weird preconceived notions that video game characters need to be as attractive or less attractive than you personally are. Video games are a fantasy for a reason.
THIS, I think, is the biggest misconception. Although this is hard to cite with data, I feel reasonably confident in positing a theorem: Aside from an absolutely tiny, vanishingly small base, many of whom don’t even play games, I don’t think anyone * is upset at game characters being “too attractive”*. I watch quite a few female streamers, and by and large, they’re happy and eager to play games with gorgeous women in them. On many occasions, they don’t even care too much about sexualized outfits.
Where I think there’s the most silent sensitivity, and perhaps game publishers haven’t quite parsed this thought, is in objectification. captainlezbian kind of covered the thought - how sex should be humanizing and treat the sexy characters as people, with agency. When an attractive character is an “award”, or never speaks, or their decisions/actions have no effect on any story events, that can go from losing people’s attention to even making them feel uncomfortable - like their gender is “not allowed” in the medium.
Dead or Alive: Sexy, not always quite objectifying. The large-breasted characters range from master assassins on missions, to secret weapon projects, to girlboss CEOs bent on world control.
Bayonetta: Quite the opposite of objectifying. Bayonetta’s domineering personality, even when she’s stripping nude, evokes control over the characters and space around her.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: VERY objectifying - would be even if Pyra had smaller breasts. Pyra is cute, but she’s incredibly subservient, and basically relies on Rex, the male lead, to take charge as leader and protect her. She’s constantly oblivious to the more pervy characters in the cast. A lot of classic anime at least skirted the latter issue by having female leads highly aware, and beat up the lechers near them (even if the viewer benefited from their exploits). I don’t mind saying this was too much for even me. Again: Agency.
get some massive bodonhonkaroos in there, give that guy a massive bulge and a 18 pack, who fucking cares it’s a video game.
I think where this can get confusing is that, by and large, women aren’t quite seeking the same overtly excessive appearances in games as men. If you want some examples, search on Steam for what “Otome” games look like, and picture your male leads in a superhero game looking like that - complete with open button shirts and pensive, slightly-girly attitudes. Uncomfortable? Yeah - that shows what you said, about how not everything will appeal to everyone.
We’re lucky in that women generally are not sorely offended by women in games having breasts (Le Gasp!) but there’s neat ways of making them attractive for all players that don’t instantly produce an “ICK” from a sizable number of players.
The real silver bullet I’ve seen is customization, which is often a win-win. I often point to Stellar Blade as a good example; the default outfit for Eve fits the sci-fi fantasy very well. Then, you unlock a LOT of extremely sexualized, even objectifying, outfits, as well as other “cute, functional” outfits. I don’t mind saying I dived into the former, while many people less interested in sexualization enjoyed the latter. Generally, all parties involved appreciate Eve’s attractive figure and long hair.
In a world with a bit more trust, I feel like this is what blockchain/certificates would be for. Basically someone would make a signed statement from a lawyer or witness that “This user with email address xyz is over the age of 18.” Contains no other data, and the notary would be trusted not to collect any more than needed. Then, websites could verify the signature against a public key from the firm.
Instead we get this Orwellian mess.
Something I’d really like a group to be brave enough to address is the fallacy that “DEI” or “Diversity” initiatives stand in direct opposition to games featuring “Adult” or “Sexy” content, or that they encourage censorship.
We’ve had a wave of pretty bad games from AAA spaces recently, many of which have been uninteresting to anyone. Some people sadly latch onto these themes, and the fact that some of these developers promoted diverse spaces, to suggest that it’s a deliberate worsening of the media space.
In fact, tons of indie devs, as well as LGBT game devs, specifically hope to make adult content. They can suggest new ways of making characters attractive in ways that can still be inclusive; those devs even get harmed by censorship actions. Yet so much of the male-isolated booby-go-boing crowd has been cowed into a simple understanding of battle lines, wherein everything related to diversity and fairness stands against their fetishized hobby.
The example I gave was more around “context” than “model” - data related to the question, not their learning history. I would ask the AI to design a system that interacts with XYZ, and it would be thoroughly confused and have no idea what to do. Then I would ask again, linking it to the project’s documentation page, as well as granting it explicit access to fetch relevant webpages, and it would give a detailed response. That suggests to me it’s only working off of the documentation.
That said, AIs are not strictly honest, so I think you have a point that the original model training may have grabbed data like that at some point regardless. If most AI models don’t track/cite the details on each source used for generation, be it artwork on Deviantart or licensed Github repos, I think it’s fair to say any of those models should become legally liable; moreso if there’s ways of demonstrating “copying-like” actions from the original.
If the models are in fact reading code that’s GPL licensed, I think that’s a fair concern. Lots of code on sites like Stack Overflow is shared with the default assumption that their rights are not protected (that varies for some coding sites). That’s helpful if the whole point is for people to copy paste those solutions into large enterprise apps, especially if there’s no feasible way to write it a different way.
The main reason I don’t pursue that issue is that with so much public documentation, it becomes very hard to prove what was generated from code theft. I’ve worked with AI models that were able to make very functioning apps just off a project’s documentation, without even seeing examples.
Some key details from the phone footage.
Worst part is, it’s not a new thing. It’s a topic of concern for a character in a book I’m writing - where a powerful figure knows she’s wrong on some occasions, but the political atmosphere rewards her more for boasting her righteousness on those issues.
I doubt it’s a common cause, but my impetus for boycotting Nintendo was Garry’s Mod. They sent their lawyers after animators, who actually get people more interested in their games. Their litigious nonsense caught up with them that time.
That’s yet another bit I hadn’t even thought about. The end result of his action was that the car continued, with no conscious driver and its accelerator held, directly into a parked car. Imagine if there had been other people standing there.
Oaf a cough.
That may not have been enough, given that in incidents like George Floyd, public video postings were some of the most critical evidence. Everyone has that evidence, even if they cannot provide on-scene confirmations.
There must be at least some samaritans that joined with this plan in mind. I regret to think that there will never be a way of sorting them from the bastions of evil when they’re brought to courts though.
Many artists do starve, and many others succeed. Not sure what your point is, or why you want to shift the needle more in the former direction.
AI can’t compete with artists if they are not generating content to serve for the model. Even if the models could achieve consistent art, it would mean we get no new themes or ideas. People who would normally invent those new styles will start by repeating what’s existing, and will be paid for that.
Many nations provide grants for art, because they recognize it’s a world that doesn’t always generate immediate, quantifiable monetary return, but in the long run proves valuable. The base expectation is that companies recognize that value and uniqueness in fostered talent as well, rather than the immediacy of AI prompts giving them “good enough” visuals.
I mean, some looter shooters are successful. Division retains some popularity, Borderlands 2 was well loved.
I can believe that scattered around, there were cool ideas in Anthem’s development if they could just retain focus/planning. I think in that time, we were just seeing way too much meddling in development based on trends.