Gwen

this is going to be absolutely everywhere pretty soon I'm sure so I'll just link it here so you can all appreciate this CEO trying to do pre-emptive damage control about a kotaku article and manage to damage herself roughly 1000x more in the process

reminder that this studio laid off its entire staff with no notice and no severance after a lengthy unpaid "furlough" that lasted exactly long enough to prevent anyone from jobhunting at GDC

soooo I'm just gonna put this link here

To be clear the most critical arguments, against the dogshit they're putting into the world right now, have and must continue to center on harms to people and labor power. But I think it's still really important to point out, every single time, when their shit just doesn't do what they claim it does, especially when it has no clear path to doing so in the future. Tech capitalists are used to not being called on this. Most of the media is eating out of their hands, they've developed these rhetorical reflexes that we've all come to recognize from years of uncritical coverage: "Soon, this could be everywhere", "Right now it can only do X, but you can easily imagine in a year or two's time...", "It may not be ready for prime time yet, but...", etc.

And the thing is, tech capitalists ultimately don't even care whether or not what they're selling does what they claim it can. But calling bullshit hurts their sales pitch - and with enough people doing it loudly and well enough, it can truly shift the rhetorical power balance in a given situation.

The recent Amazon "actually just a bunch of exploited workers" potemkin AI store bullshit was apparently aiming for only 50 out of every 1000 transactions needing human intervention. They didn't get below 700/1000. That shit was never going to happen, it was a pure fantasy by some executives giddy with the profits they projected if they could cut workers even closer to the bone, and roll that out as the Future of Retail, everywhere. But you know right up until they bailed, they were out there pointing to The Numbers (fudging them as needed, as one can always do with numbers when ethics are of no concern) and being like "see? our very sophisticated very cool Machine Learning is getting better and better at detecting stuff. why, in just a few years, it'll be pretty close to perfect!" (do not use this as a drinking game phrase. you will die.)

So I think it's very important to bolster our central arguments - that this is a power grab for the future of humanity, perpetrated by capitalists who are wielding tech to exploit and control us - with the plain truth of technical critique, which is that in a vast majority of cases they are making wild extraordinary technical claims that do not hold up to scrutiny and that they are presenting without sufficient evidence. If you are a person knowledgeable in technical matters, this is a good use of the authority society has pretty much automatically granted you. Be rigorous, of course: ask for proof, point out flaws and discrepancies, distinguish marketing from reality. And be comfortable with the inherent ambiguities of forecasting: don't bother making a specific counter-claim unless you're nearly certain of it. The most important thing is to displace a tech capitalist's claim as the sole word on the matter. In a better world, people would default to doubting every single word out of these companies' mouths. This edge of the Overton window already has a nice handle on it.

The biggest reason I think the past few hype waves have swept up so many people and had such far-reaching negative impacts is that the tech industry has secured this implacable position in the public mind, creating self-amplifying cycles of both positive (the yearly PR rituals, product launches etc) and negative reinforcement. Most media people still live in absolute terror of being the next "guy in 2007 who said the iPhone was going to flop" - the world they operate in means they will never be punished for being too credulous but punished severely for not being credulous enough (ie being critical).

Tech has seized the entire territory marked "The Future" in the popular consciousness, and they've shown us very clearly what they intend to do with it. They're going to be capitalists, they're going to make our lives as precarious and powerless and miserable as possible as they further concentrate all wealth and power. Fighting to reclaim the future from them will be a generations-spanning project, and we have to get good at firing every effective weapon we have. The general public will pick up on this, the "techlash" is getting more and more mainstream every year. We can win this, but we have to go for the throat.

bang

probably the only place i’ll share this lmao. been tweeting about it but don’t wanna go full hater in front of 23k people. so for the cohost homies please enjoy a shocking opinion: the gacha game is bad

headfallsoff

reviewed NieR Re[in]carnation

★★★★★

★★★★★

Completed

first of all it's not a video game. removing the gacha elements only makes this more clear. the only mechanic is Number Big? if number big, you win. if number not big, pay up. in its final pre-cancellation form they let you skip that and in so doing only reveal there was never anything there in the first place, it was alwasy only a series of whale checks in front of that sweet sweet yoko taro lore you crave. the craven cynicism of it all is existentially destructive for the work, as taro's already tiring eccentricities of hiding crucial details in the least accessible of places now become vectors to leverage for the direct exploitation of his audience into a gambling black hole. better hit the pulls so you can upgrade enough bullshit to see the dark memory that reveals the connection to drakengard 3 that makes everything click into place!! don't want to be left behind!!

but that is known. the game is a gacha and more than that it is a bad one even by the exploitative standards of a blighted genre that shouldn't exist, and that's why it's shutting down. nier reincarnation will forever live on as a series of youtube videos where fans can experience the story fairly close to how it was originally intended, and that's more than you can say for japanese exclusive yorha stageplay number squintillion. so how is that?

bad!! very bad!!! the game takes one of the weakest elements of the nier games, the sidequest and weapon stories all having the exact same tragedy monotonously drilled into your skull over and over and make it the entire game. no weiss and kaine bantering to prop all that up with a jrpg party of the greatest oomfs ever pressed to a PS3 disc, no experimental presentation of combat and level design, just storybook tragedies presented at such arch remove you don't even learn the character's names until you check the menu.

it is ludicrous. it is hilarious. there's one where a kid joins the army to get revenge on the enemy commander who killed his parents, only to as he kills him discover with zero forshdaowing that the commander is his real father and his parents kidnapped him as a child. there's one where a perfect angel little girl's father is beaten to death by his own friends so she runs home crying to her mother, who is in the middle of cheating on him, and is like sweet that owns and leaves lmao. they do the who do you think gave you this heart copypasta!!! and you'd think with such ridiculous material that it would be played with a coens-esque A Serious Man type wry touch, but it isn't at all, it's thuddingly earnest throughout as every tragic story plays out to overwrought voice acting and a haunting sad piano.

it is impossible to take seriously, and by the time the twelfth playable character has experienced a tragic loss and succumbed to the anime nihlism of I'll Kill Them All, another more fundemental question arises: what does all this lore actually give you, as a function of storytelling? the yokoverse is an intricate and near impossible thing, spanning multiple decades and every kind of storytelling medium imaginable, and reincarnation references damn near every single page of it, grasping onto the whole thing and framing it as a sprawling multiverse of human conflict across infinite pasts and infinite futures, with decades of mysteries to unravel and connections to make and characters to ponder and: why? for the exact same No Matter How Bad It Gets, You Can't Give Up On Hope ending that every anime RPG has? that automata already did? the plot is vast and intricate but the themes are narrow and puddle deep.

the more nier blows itself out to greater and greater scales the smaller it feels. in earthbound you fight the same ultimate nihlism of a the universe and then you walk back home again. and you say goodbye to your friends. and you call your dad. and it makes me cry like a fucking baby every time. the original nier, for all its faults, had that specificity. that sense of a journey with characters you loved that overcame the generic nature of its larger plot. here, you heal all the tragedies and fix all the timelines and everyone continues to live inside the infinite quantum simulations that will never end as you strive to find a way past the cyclical apocalypses past and future that repeat for all eternity, and i feel absolutely nothing. a world of endless content and no humanity. how tragic. how so very like nier.

Reviewed on Apr 05, 2024