And of course, from the folks that brought you "We Copyright Our Mechanics Because We Gatekeep Fun"

This was just funny.

Looking through my library, the majority of games do none of this.

Most of the big boys (Star Wars, Batman, Hitman) use TM.

(R) I found mostly with smaller studios: Darkest Dungeon and Spiritfarer. And randomly: Dishonored and System Shock 2. But only the System Shock bit. And not System Shock 1

After a Googling:

TM can apparently be used by anyone - it's a claim of trademark.

(R) means "we actually registered this with a government office." It's illegal to put an (R) after something that isn't registered.

Batman cannot decide if it's a trademark or not.

Sekiro has it. Dark Souls remastered has it.

Elden Ring doesn't.

I noticed Darkest Dungeon added a (R) symbol at some point, which (to me) indicates they are very committed to The Brand.

(reasonable)

The decision to call out the Brand seems like a very specific choice, and it got me curious about which games have a symbol, and which games don't.

I like how he says "right size", as though that were something other than "justify further layoffs."

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

"did you work on the game about the five fingered man?"

ffs

I hung out with someone from Obsidian tonight and asked if they'd worked on Pentadact.

"Do you mean Pentiment?"

I shrank into my shoes and quietly cursed the name of @pentadact.com.

Student: What is the secret of life?

Enlightened One: Every blue raspberry slushie makes your tongue blue, and everyone notices, but no one will tell you.

Student: That's the secret?

Enlightened One: *nods. slurps a blue slushie*

There are whole generations of people who are going to figure out who they are when they notice social media serving them different ads.

I've only played Norco once, but the feeling of it has never left me. I've had the pixel art as the background on my phone ever since.

I know there's a million terrible things going on but this is actually up there with the most terrible. The potential end of American nature, paving the way for total exploitation.

I think about this even more since I got into games.

Games have solved versions of this problem before.

Too many top players with too many resources slowing everything down? Time to create some sinks.

Then maybe we can focus on all the lower tier players getting stuck on microtransactions.

It's actually good for companies, too, because it reduces the intense salary one-upsmanship in upper management.

"You know I'd pay you more, Bill, but anything more I give you will go straight to Uncle Sam."

It ends up going to charities. Or reinvested in new products or practices.

God forbid, some of it even gets down to employees below the C-suite.

As they explained:

"When everyone pays 90% of every dollar they earn over a million a year, it doesn't make sense to offer someone 1 million and 1 dollars. It's wasted money."

So instead of paying that out to CEOs, companies start looking for other ways to spend their profits.

An investment banker explained to me once why high taxation on the rich is good for everyone.

It's not because the government gets more tax money. It's because high taxes -

- REALLY high taxes, like 90+% on more than 1-3m a year -

- stop the rich from paying themselves so much to begin with.

I haven't yet been able to connect to the draw steel community on Bsky, do you have any recommended follows? Besides Matt Coville 😁

If you want to do something more complicated, you're quickly straying into Gell-Mann Amnesia territory.

"AI's results are great! ... as long as you don't know any better."

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Ma...

Presently, I think AI's best use case is "Interactive Wikipedia."

"I want to learn about X. Can you summarize the basics and point me toward deeper sources of knowledge?"

That's it.

There are plenty of reasons to hate AI usage (robbing people of work, environmental catastrophe, oligarchic overreach), but my mainstay is:

I don't find the results that great.

I used to know someone who wrote web copy for a living. Pure keyword-based stuff, filling quotas to make rent.

That's what a lot of the Internet was pre-AI.

And *that* is what AI sounds like to me. Writers being whipped into "hyper positivity" about a bullshit product to feed an older algorithm.

Creative:
"Hey, can you summarize the different ancestries in Draw Steel so I can get players up to speed?"

The response was so generic and so "web-marketing"-coded that it was unusable.

Some examples (both technical and creative):

"In Unity's Netcode for Game Objects, how would I bundle custom data with my spawn request?"

*spits out 3 versions of boilerplate w/race conditions*

Actually, all I need is NetworkPrefabInstanceHandlerWithData<T>. (found by reading the documentation)

Are people only using AI to do repetitive, obvious tasks?

Because any time I've tried using it to help with something subtle or complex, it fails (and flails) miserably.

I've been playing with Claude for about ten days and it's earning a solid 6 in my book: "better than crappy websearch."

Hypothesis:

The things you learn will work when anyone does them is "the craft." The things that only seem to work when you do it is "your voice."

Last thing because I have to share:

Describing Athena-as-the-little-girl as "that great goddess, pigtailed Athena" just made me laugh out loud in my house. Utterly fantastic. 😊

"[Nausicaa] reached her father's palace gate. Her brothers gathered round her like immortals."

I know I'm just missing some context - is this implying "how they cluster on Olympus"? Or simply "doing it elegant fashion"? Or some third thing I can't yet guess?

(Thank you again for your great work)