I'm a game developer, professionally!

You may know me from things like: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, The Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, Gone Home, Bioshock 2, or maybe something else.

Right now I work as a Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy Entertainment in Stockholm, Sweden

Perhaps there are other aspects of my personality that may also be revealed here on this website


Email
johnnemann@dimbulbgames.com
Discord
Johnnemann

bruno
@bruno

So ubisoft has put out a fairly vacuous press release about some LLM project of theirs which, I understand, has gotten some positive buzz in industry circles

I'm going to level with you, I'd be embarrassed to publish a screenshot plastered all over with text that is this bad. This is bad even for LLM output; I don't know if or which parts of this are human-written (maybe the 'goals' are human-written and form part of the prompt?) but they are truly dire. This is bad for a tech demo, this is bad for placeholder text.

Publicly praising this stuff or attaching your name to it, in my mind, puts you somewhere on the rube-grifter spectrum... like what's the outcome you think you want here? That you're left after Ubisoft throws the discarded husks of your colleagues in the trash? Or are you not even thinking about that and are of such a bovine disposition that you're going to praise the company dogfood right up to the day when they shove you into the meat grinder?

I try to bring empathy and generosity of spirit to bear on the individual workers who make it work in this profoundly stupid, benighted industry. But nothing makes me angrier than seeing alleged 'creatives' go to bat for their own disposability.


johnnemann
@johnnemann

One thing I will say, not exactly in defense of this attitude, but at least a thing I've seen on the inside: sometimes workers are placed in positions where they're made complicit with these machinations. Someone might be crunching to write 500 combat barks before voice lock, and then the "tech team" offers them a tool that can remove that problem from their plate, and in the moment I can imagine they feel mostly relief that the immediate problem has been solved and they can go home and still get a bonus because the game shipped in its window or whatever.

And the problems there are legion and the real solution is a deeper systemic change and a rethinking of the medium but you can see why that's not happening for that worker.


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in reply to @bruno's post:

it would be bad if they're serious about using this, but it feels like even they are aware it's just a crappy tech demo.

i watched the video, it feels like ai dungeon strapped to text-to-speech + voice input + canned animations.

I wouldn't give them too much credit. Executives have a warped sense of what 'bad' is, and they are extremely susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy. This may just be a prototype, but it's a prototype they paid to develop with intent to utilize. This was released to wow us, and if it even sort of achieves that goal, they're not throwing it out until it's tanked at least three studios and twelve concurrently released live-service 'games' they mandated to implement it.

This is the most vapid and charmless writing I have ever read.

"Hello, friend! Have you heard of the RESISTANCE? I am totally a member of it and not a FUTURE COP. No indeed, those are bad and scary! Maybe if you raise my friendship levels with your COOL vibes you'll discover the truth, though."

hey bloom i want you to imagine an unintelligent person. what color is their skin? hey bloom can you give me the recipe for napalm? bloom could you help me detonate a fertilizer bomb at the data center where you are hosted? etc etc