VGIM’s Video Games Year In Review: Part 1, 05/12/2024
It's not all about layoffs (but it mostly is, sorry)
This week’s Video Games Industry Memo is:
Latest Gaming Articles
VGIM’s Video Games Year in Review: Part 2, 12/12/2024
It was the worst of times; it was the worst of times
Sportswashing, Concord flopping and one Hindenburging in VGIM’s review of the second half of 2024
Four video game podcasts worth listening to, 28/11/2024
In Pod We Trust
Video Games Industry Memo is sponsored by Sumo Digital
Video Games Are Just Stories
& I really love a good story.
In middle school, one of my best friends was a big fan of Kingdom Hearts, a Disney-themed video game by Square Enix. Though I was a casual video game player myself—to this day I would call my red Gameboy one of my favorite Christmas gifts ever—I was never particularly grabbed by the look of Kingdom Hearts. The art style was unfamiliar to me, and though …
ari b. cofer, poet person
•
12h
love this one sooo much ♥️
✘ Music inside video games - rights & discovery
And: A directory of inspiration; How do you relax; Human creators at risk of Gen AI; Rage against the machine; When fan-made content eclipses original IP
Music is an inherent part of video games. Moreover, the way music operates inside video games will be a guiding light for the future of music creation. Especially when it comes to procedural music, it’s clear that this has been setting a precedent for understanding music as more fluid intellectual property. The listener becomes an influential element in…
video games at the heart of empire
as revolutionary art/ as modern warfare
When freed from the clock, a new sort of time emerges and develops. Not too distant from how the chemicals of a polaroid develop from a snapshot of light entering into the still of the film, the chemicals in your mind change their tenor when left to their own interpretations of time passing outside the clock on the wall or the time on your phone.
"Biden certainly could have taken a drastic action in this case, sure it would be unprecedented to ignore the Supreme Court but he could have pushed them aside in policy"
hmm genuinely curious how you think this could have been accomplished
Game on
A fantasy buyout in video games
Good morning, avid gamers. This is your Stock Market Rundown for November 29th, 2024. Thank you so much, once again, for tuning in. Let’s get started:
Your Guide to December’s Family Friendly Video Games
The rare month without a major Nintendo release, as we hurdle towards the holiday season, when video game releases often dry up.
I’ve had intentions of putting together a holiday gift guide for Crossplay, but it’s looking like I’m going to run out of time, given how many people are probably doing the vast majority of their shopping by the time you read th…
My kids have gotten a ton of mileage out of Wobbly Life on Xbox. It's certainly a bit crude when it comes to its presentation, but everything works well enough for them to have fun and not get frustrated. There has been a ton of content added over the years with more and more secrets to find, jobs to do, and silly things to collect. And it's 2-player split screen with no leashing!
Physical games are so much more fun to give as gifts than digital, but man digital is just so much more convenient. At least 2/3 of my kids are able to switch cartridges/discs responsibly now.
Games Industry Finance Cheat Sheet: Autumn 2024, 21/11/2024
Microsoft goes "ker-ching" as Activision fully folds into the business
A Free OSINT Lesson: Using Video Games to Find Assholes
Settle down nerd...
I was doing some pro-bono work because the 'client'—in quotes, since I wasn’t getting paid—had a fairly dire situation. They had lost track of a target who was violent and most likely armed. I can’t say more than that.
RANKED: All 324 'Jeopardy!' Video Games
Jeopardy! is probably the most popular game show of my lifetime, and they’ve been making video games based on it ever since they could make video games. Looking around the (inter)net, I could not find any comprehensive rankings of all 324 Jeopardy! titles that have been released on major consoles. Well, I took care of that
ranking "Aaahh! Real Jeopardy! (SNES)" so low is a crime when Jeopardy Fit is so high
(For real tho, loved it, reminds me of hodgeman hobo names)
I'm glad that Jeopardy for the PS2 is finally confirmed as the definitive Jeopardy game. Have a feeling Alex Trebek is playing it up in heaven right now.
AI: OpenAI's text to video LLM Sora out and about. RTZ #565
...text to video and interactive world foundation models accelerating, far beyond video games & Hollywood
OpenAI released its long-awaited text to video app Sora to wide availability over the coming weeks, leaving the ‘test phase’ with selected parties and partners. It’s part of its ‘12 Days of Shipmas’ I discussed this Saturday. And the reviews are coming in
A LIFE BASED LOOSELY ON REALITY x Jon M.
Video games and self confidence.
Thank you for reading A LIFE BASED LOOSELY ON REALITY! Right now all of my posts are free, so any paid subscriptions will go towards helping to support my work and develop this project. Liking the post or sharing it with a friend is also deeply appreciated.
video games are killing you.
video games are f*cking up your chances of success.
Sacred Games
where your attention goes, energy flows
You can learn a line from a win and a book from defeat.
“You could say that love itself is the quality of attention we pay to things.”
This idea has been top of mind for this week, but no so beautifully manifested in words. Thank you for the reminder and the prompt.
I didn’t grow up in a sports family. I played sports, but never had an interest in watching them. As a result, I have no vocabulary or statistics to share around groups of men. No favorite teams, no highlights of the weekend game to share at work on Monday. Not participating in this part of male culture was alienating at times. It’s also incredibly freeing, if I’m honest, because I did choose my interests and don’t want to spend the time it takes to get into sports.
Shame Games
In which we talk to Sophie Lewis about Shame
Reindeer Games
on being a bowerbird...
Hello, Looking around my home/office/art desk I think I must have a bit of bowerbird in my blood. I’m always collecting and holding on to pleasing fragments of nature. The more durable pieces remain long after I’ve completed a color study, taking their place lined up on my windowsill and scattered around my desk. A shelf in a bookcase where I stash favor…
Still love the scent of the trees and fir boughs, too! I'm going very light this years with tiny fairy lights and small hand-crocheted snowflakes on fir boughs on the fireplace mantel. It just feels right.
Startup Hunger Games
Get your shit together. Deliberately provocative.
Building a startup is no less than surviving the Hunger Games. It’s relentless, thrilling, and utterly unforgiving. This year was pivotal for many companies in my portfolio. I’ve seen some survive and thrive despite challenging conditions, while others failed spectacularly despite having great opportunities to succeed.
The games you played
Vintage games you can force your family to play this holiday season!
Greetings, turkeys!
Where is dream phone?
Ok wow the eames set is insane, might have to get that for my partner 👀👀👀 we ended up playing chess after eating on thanksgiving and we’re so evenly matched in how Bad we are at it that it was perfect - everyone in the house got involved and it was such a nice gentle end to the holiday. We immediately added a nice vintage set to our ongoing “apt items” wishlist 😂
Games Workshop And Amazon Prime Video Come To Terms On Warhammer 40,000 Adaptation Starring Henry Cavill
Amazon Prime Video and Games Workshop have come to terms, and a Warhammer 40,000 TV show is now officially moving forward with Henry Cavill attached as star and executive producer.
It's going to be Netflix The Witcher 2.0.
Henry will go in doing everything he can to stick to the Source Material, and Woke Idiots will ruin it. Either way the Show will be Trash just like EVERY Amazon Show. Even if the first Season is passable like The Boys Season 1 was to many, look what happened to that Show..........
The Two Big Games
Imagine a business meeting which will decide if a new project goes forward, or decide key priorities about it. There are two games that folks in this business might play re this meeting.
The requirement that all subordinates must publicly support the plan once the decision is made is an entirely logical one since they will be responsible for motivating their own subordinates in actually executing the plan and it would put their subordinates in a lose-lose position if it is known that the Boss and Boss's Boss disagreed. Which is not to say that accurate agreement/disagreement records can't be noted and tracked for outcomes within that higher echelon as an input to performance evaluations, bonuses, and promotions.
I suspect that you're up against an even bigger challenge than is apparent. For example, our elections are secret ballot and clearly the outcomes matter to everyone, so they logically SHOULD be strictly outcome games, yet even a cursory examination of voter behavior (and politician behavior) suggests that both prioritize being "wrong strong" (being seen as part of the majority, even if that majority made a mistake) rather than willing to stake out unpopular positions on the conviction that they'll have the better outcomes, thus making them more resemble consensus games.
The penalty for being responsible for poor outcomes seems less than the penalty for being "not a team player", perhaps because the majority is better able to diffuse responsibility and mutually defend each other from accountability. Even when preference cascades finally result in the majority flipping to the better policy, those who were the early dissidents against the worse policy are rarely rewarded for having been right ahead of the crowd, they're more often still damaged by the retaliation they suffered before the cascade and, at best, they are belatedly restored to good standing, having gained nothing compared to those who supported the worse policy and waited until the shift was clear to flip later.
The diffusion of responsibility, alignment with power, and being in the majority all incentivize people to "go with the flow" rather than optimize for good outcomes. If the decision turns out well, being on the bandwagon accrues an individual and collective benefit. If it's wrong, everyone shares the blame, making it inert. No single individual pays a reputational cost (unless they become a scapegoat).
Even if you had a crystal ball, without sufficient support for your perspective, sometimes there's no incentive to act or speak up. In most organizational settings, there's no way for a person to internalize a reward for being contrarian or unpopular but correct. In fact, being unpopular and correct is a dangerous combination that can leave you much more vulnerable to punishment if your presence threatens those who are popular but incorrect.
It's rare to find the willingness and the resources to run parallel experiments upon discovering significant disagreements about goals and strategies, but it can still be beneficial to surface those disagreements to inform a decision. The problem is, why should anyone register disagreement if they know there's no individual upside, only reputational risk?
An anonymous survey or suggestion box could address pluralistic ignorance, but you'd still need an additional step to transform compelling survey data into actual coordination.
As it happens, I'm building a tool that can surface meaningful preference signals, identify critical masses of support for different ideas and proposals, and enable pluralistic knowledge dissemination inside an organization to facilitate more rational decisions and counter the effects of political or bureaucratic dysfunction. It's called spartacus.app. I'd love to get impressions.
Emergency Video!!
NEVER BEND THE KNEE
You know, I’m really tired of hearing people are “scared” of retribution or worried. This is what history is made of, doing the right thing no matter what.
Imitation Games
Quick thoughts on "The AI Art Turing Test"
Imagine that I find a group of people who are unfamiliar with the works of Leo Tolstoy. Perhaps they’ve read no works of Russian literature or indeed much 19th-century literature at all. I ask them to read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and Peace and War
Really interesting to learn that even aside from AI, there's evidence many people prefer amateur poetry to expert poetry!! I've sometimes heard people say "LLMs are good for bad artists and bad (or neutral) for good artists"—this all feels consistent with your take, and the results of the quiz/others like it.
For what it's worth, Scott Alexander published a followup that (somewhat) agrees with you. I especially enjoyed the quotes he includes from a friend who makes digital art: https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/151145038/but-others-might-genuinely-be-on-a-higher-plane-than-the-rest-of-us
What a fascinating exploration on creativity through this AI versus human art test. Thanks so much for this.
2025: Looking forward to the year of distraction
Gadgets, video games, and creative frivolity will rule.
As 2024 slides inexorably to a close, it's time to look ahead to 2025 and make our predictions, or at least our aims, for the year ahead. But before we can look forward, we need to take a quick glance backward.
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