Meaningful divides

I largely think “generational divides” are bullshit — there’s often more variation within generations than between them.

On the other hand:

Here’s the thing: I experienced physical pain sitting through an hour and a half of video discussing Vampir: Kyuuketsuki Densetsu. (Okay, I ran the video at 2x speed, but it still ended up being about 30 minutes longer than necessary.) I wish it was an article, because I could have skimmed the text a hell of a lot faster. 

After enduring the video, I'm now writing out the reviewer’s assertion that Vampir benefits from an inverse Harvest Moon mechanic:

• It takes place in settlements full of characters who have daily routines.
• You visit townspeople to strengthen your relationships with them.
• Each relationship can only be strengthened once a day.
• As your relationships advance, you learn different pieces of each character’s story.

(This is also something you see in Story of Seasons, Stardew Valley, or any other relationship-building title.) The guy narrating the YouTube video was captivated by the way Vampir inverts this trope — as a vampire, you’re working to erase everything that makes these people human. Your character patiently builds these relationships and learns backstories as part of a calculated effort to amass an army of mindless thralls. 

Meanwhile, your computer-controlled opponent is running around the map and trying to win people over to his own cause. It’s notable that while the reviewer felt that the experience was bland and tedious, the game's character-driven narratives made a strong impression. I had hoped to pick up more lessons in game design from that video, but I'll settle for seeing how good storytelling can shore up mediocre gameplay.

Elsewhere in bland and tedious, I read two books in October: Greg Bear’s Moving Mars and Terry Goodkind’s Running with the Demon. Neither one was particularly rewarding. 

I was hoping that Moving Mars would be more along the lines of Blood Music or Steel Beach (although it turns out that John Varley wrote Steel Beach; I'm not sure why I misremembered the author as Bear). Moving Mars ended up being more of a political thriller? Lots of factional maneuvering to develop and control a technology that is offscreen for most of the book. The text was divided into thirds, and I wish the story began with the final third, where they’re actually applying the technology and making things happen. 

I never got into Terry Goodkind’s Shannara books —several people recommended them when I was growing up, but I found them overstuffed with description and not very interesting. I always wondered whether I had tried reading them too young. Now that I’m older, I know that's not the case; I still find them overstuffed with description and not very interesting.

Edited to note that an observant reader pointed out how I confused Terry Goodkind with Terry Brooks. It was Brooks who wrote the Shannara series, but that still didn't make Running with the Demon very interesting.  

Image credit: hans/ Pixabay   

Interactive fiction and generative AI

This post starts with a shoutout to Bruno Dias for three reasons:

1. For writing a blog post about generative AI that influenced a mammoth discussion thread on the Interactive Fiction Community Forums;
2. For having the ability to politely ignore a poster who was too clueless to realize that Dias not only wrote the post cited in their discussion, but had also actively commented in the thread; and
3. For the observation that this year’s AI-generated entries caught a rake in the face.

Maybe explicit rules aren't needed to ban generative AI from the Interactive Fiction Competition? Those types of rules are difficult to implement, especially for IFcomp, which relies on volunteers.

On the other hand, Parsercomp 2025 saw some drama related to generative AI and irregular voting patterns. There's a certain type of GenAI evangelist who persistently refuses to take a hint. Overall, I’m conflicted about the best way forward.

I mean, I prefer to treat judges like adults, which is an argument I've made regarding other concerns about “selection bias.” Start by assuming they can, you know, apply their own judgment, and have robust measures in place to prevent bad actors from gaming the voting system.

That’s what made the original post from Dias so alarming; it described a plausible scenario where rational judges had incentives to abandon IFcomp as a forum for creative human expression. 

After seeing how everything played out this year, I'm thinking that playing and rating entries (including at least a few GenAI works assessed fairly against their peers) is going to be an important part of ensuring that interactive fiction remains a safe space of creative weirdos.

(Elsewhere in game jams and creative weirdos, it's worth noting that November is the PicoSteveMo jam. In previous years, it was responsible for Dolan's Cadillac and Stand Elsewhere, so keep an eye on what develops this year.)

Image credit: lscottewart / Pixabay   

Competitions and Controversies

It’s September, which means it's time for the Interactive Fiction Competition. However, I didn’t expect IFcomp to be another battleground on which the AI conflict is playing out. I thought it was a settled issue ("you'll get AI and like it"), but Bruno Dias wrote a blog post about how “Slop comes for everything you love,” and his sentiments were echoed by Michael Klamerus on his blog.

I'm not happy about AI being welcomed into the Interactive Fiction community, but I also don’t think it’d be productive to advocate for my preferences — as Dias puts it, “the IF community has a certain trauma around gatekeeping of what 'counts as IF'.” I played and reviewed two AI-driven IFcomp entries from previous years, and they were both lacking. 

(I also remain viscerally offended by "You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf," a non-interactive, procedurally generated text that was dumped into IFcomp five years ago and ranked dead last.) 

I've given up on writing reviews for IFcomp. This year I don’t even know whether I’m going to play any entries. I don’t want to deal with the extra work of sifting through titles to find ones that aren’t AI-enabled, and Dias lays out the problem with submitting ratings:

Theoretically, you could rate the AI entries at a 0; whether you bother to 'play' them at first […but] summarily nuking them is a pretty obvious violation of the judge rules. I don't want to participate in a way that will be read by comp organizers as bad faith.

Alternatively, you can play and rate only entries that don't use AI. This would seem to be 'fine' but it creates a dynamic where the only people willing to play and rate the AI entries are people who are not going to object to them on grounds that they are AI, and thus they're getting judged by a different standard than everyone else's work. This means that the final result of the competition is at risk of legitimizing AI use or worse, making someone who put out real work feel bad that they placed behind someone who put out slop.

So that’s what’s up with entertainment. In the news, Ryan Walters has resigned as state superintendent of Oklahoma Schools, which is notable for his impressive track record of generating horrifying news headlines due to terrible judgment.

There was is drive to start teaching the bible in schools. When the state Department of Education revealed its requirements for the bibles it would use, it turned out that, “there are very few Bibles on the market that would meet these criteria, and all of them have been endorsed by former President Donald Trump.”

He announced that out-of-state teachers would need to take an “America First” test before they could teach in Oklahoma. (It turns out that the test wasn’t much more than a way to deliver marketing leads to PragerU.)

And he wanted to set up chapters of Turning Point USA (Charlie Kirk’s conservative organization) at every Oklahoma high school, but it looks like he resigned before that happened.

His biography isn’t complete without discussing that time an image of a naked woman was displayed on a TV in his office during a school board meeting. It could have been a bizarre accident! But we’ll never know, because Walters denied it happened, falsely claimed to have been cleared before an investigation was complete, and insisted that anyone who said it happened was lying.

In gaming, I’m giving myself permission to quit Backpack Hero. It received a lot of enthusiastic praise on social media, but I kind of hate it? I’ve gone into it a few times trying to see if it gets good, but there are better ways to spend my time.

 

Image credit: Mote Oo Education / Pixabay