On Sunday, you can order a Steam Deck and be delighted with its appearance. Before we track down its delivery, let’s read this week’s best gaming (and gaming-related) articles.
Marie Dilessandri wrote on Games Industry.biz how to develop games for autistic people. Dilessandri talks to Changingday founders Nick and Alison Lang about creating a VR game designed with autistic gamers in mind.
“We have a feature where the player has a smartwatch so if they’re overstimulated they can hit that smartwatch and it’ll take you right out of the game to a nice relaxing place where they can calm down,” says Nick . “And there they’ll also find accessibility menus where they can fine-tune the game, the colors, the sounds. And then they click on the smart watch and return to the game from where they left off. But only when they are ready to do it. And they dictate the pace. It’s up to them, they control what happens.”
Sherif Saeed wrote a post for VG247 on Call Of Duty technologies are spent on Call Of Duty. The second season of Warzone 2 turns back the clock, ditching the big changes and returning everything to the way it was in Warzone. Sayed claims COD’s ever-evolving technology is tied to the series’ refusal to change.
It would be disingenuous to say that Call of Duty hasn’t changed in a decade, despite all the iterations of Battle Royale, Tarkov’s lite DMZ mode, open-world co-op, and more. But once you dig deeper and start playing it all, you’ll see that all of these experimental spokes are just different pockets of more of the same Call of Duty gameplay. It’s like using a frying pan without washing it over and over again; Sure, you’re cooking a steak right now, but it smells and tastes like orange syrup and caramel after making pancakes this morning.
Kieran Press-Reynolds wrote about it on Insider spend a night in TikTok Live and discover a strange wasteland. Press Reynolds wades into the largely unregulated cesspool of TikTok, and the algorithm serves up some interesting subgenres
Then there was a stream of a person who pretended to be a robot. By mechanically waving his hand at the camera, he performed different tasks (such as saying “Daddy”, “Mummy” or slapping himself) depending on the size of the gift. The one who donated the largest gift was forced to perform the “great punishment”. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but the vagueness of the term seemed ominous, inviting you to fill in the blanks with your most disturbing imagination. Commenters accused the stream of being a scam and warned newcomers that it wasn’t actually a real robot. (It looks like RPGs were the mainstay of the night’s stream.
For Soraya the Defector, Roberts argues that AI art only looks like art when you don’t care. Interesting snippets from people that show what is missing from the creative process of AI.
I thought of these photos when I read about how The Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy is using the ChatGPT bot to create an AI facsimile of Meloy’s composition, including strings. The result was “Sailor’s Song,” which the musician says is “what someone might think a Decembarists song sounds like if they skimmed a few reviews, noticed some pretty deep hot takes on Twitter.” Meloy himself pointed out that it goes beyond repeated or missing bits and errors. “He has data, he has information, but he has no intuition,” he wrote. “A lot of things in songwriting, in writing, in creating, come down to the intuition of the creator, the subtle changes that aren’t written down as a rule anywhere — you just know it’s right, it’s true.”
This week’s music is Moonlight Flight by Makoto Iwabuchi. Here Link to Spotify and Link to YouTube. Soothing.
That’s it for this week folks, have a great weekend!