Erlend Grefsrud

Patient Golfman

Echochrome++!

Hey at least this will lower emissions, right?

Right?

roflmao

Diabolical

Design sensibility summary

:)

This is, by the way, a great time to not own a car. Bliss.

The stuff people use to make stuff may not have a clear balance sheet value, but oh boy is it strategically important. Plus, there's always the outside chance that AI is just a mania. In short: focusing on enterprise doesn't mean abandoning consumer, it means adjusting your stance and expectations.

Oh, and while Microsoft is definitely focused on the enterprise market, I think they're like Nvidia: bit more long-termist and with an understanding that consumers matter in a bunch of different ways. If you lock yourself completely away, how is anyone going to get embroiled in your ecosystems?

(Gah, lots of typos because I currently don't have use of my left arm but eh, you can probably fill in the blanks yerself)

Anyway, Xbox was already a gaming PC anyway. I think Steam Deck demonstrated that it might as well go whole hog. Stop fighting Sony and Nintendo, focus on keeping the Windows market alive by preventing Valve from moving games to Linux without any competition. I think that's a decent way to go.

Lots of armchair analysts have predicted that Nvidia will lose interest in games since they own the AI market, but I don't think they're that short-sighted. They're not really price-gouging, they've just repositioned themselves for a world where you buy GPUs once a decade instead of every two years.

Ray/path-tracing is the big high-end differentiator, otherwise stuff has barely budged for a decade. Might as well hang in there until AMD commoditizes ray-tracing and ML upscaling and brings it to the mainstream. That said, Nvidia is clearly not completely abandoning gaming as evidenced by Switch 2

MS repositioning Xbox as The Other GaneCube is probably for the best. Xbox has been running Windows for a while, and since Xbox never took off in Asia they might as well just lean into the fixed-spec gaming PC market. Makes perfect sense since mid-range has basically plateaued.

It was 1199 down from 1499, so not cheapest of the cheap bit obviously not high-end either. Not impressed, but hey, it's a laptop I can use twice a year.

I don't know, depends what you need. I got a gaming laptop to use as a portable workstation, and it sucks as despite having a 13700k, 16GBs of LPDDR5 and a 4060M. Pretty decent for gaming, but can't push workstation workloads worth a damn.

In any case, you need to update yours

Maybe a little surprised that fairly bland lightly narrativized CGI-mimicking-gameplay-experience trailer was directed by Harmony Korine, but I guess that was a positioning exercise at any rate.

AI is making me realize that I actually kind of prefer good, old-fashioned religious faith to techno-superstition. You don't need several billion dollars worth of GPUs to declare yourself a prophet and float novel doctrine.

You better be, since it should be clear that only sales numbers matter. Free-to-play is a Communist plot to distort free markets and thereby demoralise and disrupt Western societies.

The pageant sash was in Japanese so I couldn't read it

Went to onsen with a girl I did not at the time know was Miss Japan

See also: the weird GenX writer type refusal to accept that writing as well as reading are culturally situated and that there is no universal standard for what constitutes quality

Playing with Game Design: A Discussion with Chris Bateman YouTube video by D6 Learning

I will be chatting with Chris Bateman on game design, Discworld Noir, and much more on YouTube. We are starting in 5 minutes.

▶️ Watch (and ask your questions) here: www.youtube.com/live/9u60IXb...

Ask Chris to get his ass on here, I miss him <3

It's somehow thematically coherent, which just does the trick. I like to compare games to comic books, in that they rely on big dumb symbols that make visceral rather than logical sense. Why does Superman wear his undies outside his spandex suit? Who cares!

Just a masterclass in narrative, thematic and gameplay cohesion. Hope everyone is furiously taking notes on what happens when you treat the fiction as core to the game design and use it to present systems.

FYI for fellow narrative designers/game writers: the studio in question is Sentona Games and it’s my understanding they are currently interviewing to replace me. Be very careful with them. They were very nice to me and easy to work with right up until I needed the money I was promised.