#oneaday Day 154: If you can't create without AI, you shouldn't be creating

YouTube recommended me a video earlier. I'm not going to share it because it's shit. But I will tell you about it. It was a video supposedly "reimagining" the video game series Streets of Rage as a "movie". If you've spent any time on social media in the last year or so, you already know what's coming: yes, it's entirely AI-generated drivel, and the complete content of the "movie" consists of nothing but people staring moodily at the camera while there's a slight pan around them, and people walking towards the camera in slow motion.

The video has a quarter of a million views, and a comments section full of people gushing effusive praise over the "creator". This is not the first video that this channel has put out like this; to date, over the last year they have spaffed out 215 videos that are all like this. And not only that, their About section on their channel is very transparently written by ChatGPT.

I hope you don't think it controversial of me to say that if you can't create without using AI, you shouldn't be creating at all. I will, under extreme duress, concede that there are certain uses of AI tools which might be useful as part of the creative process. AI music tools, for example, can be quite effective if you feed them some lyrics you've written yourself. (Getting AI to write lyrics results in extreme garbage.)

But if all you do is put shit into an AI video generator and then spaff it out on YouTube — and you can't even be arsed to write your own bio — you are not a creative person.

The standard argument that insufferable AI types like to trot out at this point is that generative AI "democratises" creativity by allowing anyone to "create". Except it doesn't, because the output is not your own work; you haven't created anything. The result is a pile of plagiarised crap that is immediately identifiable as the product of generative AI.

And anyway, creativity is already democratised. There is tons of free software out there that anyone can download and use, for computers, phones and tablets. YouTube is full of video tutorials on how to get started, improve your techniques and take on some advanced challenges. There are several decades' worth of text tutorials archived across various websites from over the years.

There is no excuse for taking the lazy option and just feeding a prompt into the lake-boiling plagiarism machine. If you want to be creative, be creative. But know that it takes work. And that work is worthwhile, because people will be able to tell when you have put that work in. Those who follow you will see your work improve, adapt and change over time. You'll find your own unique "voice". And there really is nothing quite like being able to express yourself in your own distinctive way; being able to sit back and look at something you made and think, with a slight smile on your lips, "I made that".

With generative AI, there is none of that. You get derivative, immediately identifiable slop that all looks the same and all contains the same basic errors. You never have the experience of refining and improving your own work, because you haven't done any work. You never find your own unique voice, because you are beholden to the algorithms and training data that the LLM you're using has stolen from all over the Internet. And you never, really, truly, express yourself.

In the meantime, until you come to the realisation that all you're doing is spaffing out hollow, soulless pieces of crap that look like creative works but are actually anything but, you are poisoning the entire Internet with your garbage… and, judging by the comments section on the video in question, poisoning the minds of people who aren't familiar with just how fucking easy it is to tell the magic art-stealing machine to steal some art to your specifications.

The planet is doomed. And no-one gives a shit. Sleep well!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 153: Sharing stuff

Hello. If you follow me here, it's relatively likely that you follow me in other places, too. But I realise that there is the possibility you don't. As such, I would like to devote today's post to sharing a few things I've done over on YouTube. If you would like to follow my YouTube channel, here's the link. Over there, I make videos on video games, primarily retro stuff but with occasional dalliances into more recent stuff I feel like talking about. And also related topics, which brings me to the first video I would like to share.

Exactly what does Yars' Revenge taste like? I decided to find out. Yes, I am someone who is foolish enough to see a range of 10 sauces with "Atari" written on them, and then to spend £70 on purchasing all of them. I partly did this because I like Atari, partly because I like a good sauce, and partly because I thought it might make a fun video. I am pleased to report that these ten sauces have fulfilled all of their obligations, and you can see my first reactions to them in the video above.

You probably know this, but for my day job I work for Blaze Entertainment, makers of the Evercade range of consoles and the HyperMegaTech! Super Pocket devices, which are also Evercade compatible. When I learned we would be doing an Atari handheld, I was, of course, delighted — even more so when I learned we would be doing a special edition woodgrain model. In this video, I give a quick overview of all 50 games on the system. I was not paid to do this by either my employer or Atari — I just wanted to, because there's some cool stuff on there, and I'm an Atari nerd.

Atari attracted some raised eyebrows when they announced Yars Rising, a follow-up to the famous 1982 Atari 2600 title. I played the demo one Steam Next Fest and was very taken with it — helped enormously by the fact I'm very fond of the other games developer WayForward have previously worked on. I bought the full game and really enjoyed it, so I made a video about it, based on my write-up over on MoeGamer. It did quite well by the standards of my channel, too, which was nice.

This video didn't do very well, at least initially, and it's still sitting on the low side of the view count compared to some of my other stuff. But I wanted to share it because it's about a thoroughly interesting game: The Missing by SWERY65. This is a platformer in which you play a woman who can't die; she can survive being decapitated and dismembered and, indeed, it's necessary to endure both of those things in order to solve the game's various puzzles.

Far from being a weirdly violent horror game, though, The Missing is actually a thoroughly fascinating, deeply personal story about gender identity and finding acceptance — both in yourself, and from those around you. The game was so striking to me I really wanted to talk about it, so I'm glad I made this video, even if not that many people watched it.

Let's close with this one. I went into this thinking that doing a video on a text adventure would be a silly idea, but ended up really enjoying the whole thing. Narrating the whole thing makes for (in my humble opinion, anyway) a relaxing, pleasant video, and I don't mind admitting that I've fallen asleep to the sound of my own voice in this video on multiple occasions. Plus I think Moonmist is a thoroughly interesting game from Infocom that rarely gets talked about.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy those. Please do feel free to subscribe over on YouTube if you want to see more. My wife Andie is away for a couple of days from tomorrow lunchtime, so I'm going to use the time to record a bunch of stuff, I think, and probably do some streaming, too. Join me!

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#oneaday Day 152: Two things

Two things.

1. America, you fucked it up. After I specifically told you not to.

2. I did the thing. I hope reading it brings you some distraction.

I'm not sure what else there is to say, really, aside from that I really feel for my poor pals in the States right now. Knowing that a vile shitstain of a human being is going to be sitting in the big chair for one of the most powerful nations on Earth doesn't feel good from here, let alone what it must feel like for actual residents of that country.

And it's for the second time. It wasn't a fluke accident, this has happened for a second time.

I think it's long past time that the supposedly "civilised" world admits that we have a problem. A big one.

We're regressing. You and I may not be, but collectively, as a society, we are regressing. After a lot of good work to improve tolerance and inclusion for those who aren't straight cis white men, it feels like in the last few years we've taken more steps backward than we have done forwards. And Trump's election to the White House would just seem to confirm that.

Because, like it or not, the fact he achieved this means that there is a significant portion of people who think that he "Has a Point" about at least some of the vile, odious rhetoric he has been spouting in the run-up to this election. It's almost certainly the same people who think that projects having women or people who aren't white in a leading role is a sign of "wokeness".

Those people, for whatever reason, are furious about the world. And they see intolerance, abusiveness and voting for someone as transparently awful as Trump as a means of assuaging that anger. They hope he deports "all the immigrants". They hope he takes rights away from people who have had to fight to be recognised. They hope he sends things spiralling backwards into attitudes even the mid-20th century would be ashamed to express.

And, honestly, sitting here observing from a distance, it's frightening. It's horrible to know we live in a world where such intolerance still exists; the appalling treatment of minority groups is supposed to be something we read about in history books, then think all smugly about how much better we are than "back then".

But we're not. We may not be putting black people on their own buses or denying women the vote, but the intolerance the supposedly "civilised" world is exhibiting right now — and the fact it goes unchallenged — is still painful to witness, and I'm not the one experiencing that intolerance first-hand. It's not enough to "be a good person", to "be the change you want to see in the world", because no-one gives a shit.

What is it that one can do, though? It's honestly hard to say at this point. But the world we live in today is a frightening one. And I'm afraid I have few words of comfort to share for those who are most likely to end up suffering because of all this.

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#oneaday Day 151: Scribbling down an idea

Hello. Indulge me this evening, if you please, because I want to make a note of an idea I have for a longer article that I'll likely publish on MoeGamer at some point in the near future. It stems from a discussion I've previously had with my friend Chris (my MoeGamer Podcast co-star) about how RPGs are "categorised", and how "western RPG" and "Japanese RPG" are woefully inadequate terms to talk about the RPG as it exists today.

I'm not going to go too into it today but I wanted to jot down the ideas that were rattling around my head while I was playing Silent Hope this evening. And that is to devise some sort of "taxonomy" for RPGs as they exist today. I'm thinking at the top level, you can split them into two distinct categories: narrative-centric RPGs, where the core of the experience is on enjoying the unfolding story; and mechanics-centric RPGs, where the main point of the game is fiddling with its various systems, optimising your characters and suchlike.

There are some games that straddle that line, of course, but for the most part, it's pretty easy to split them down the middle like that based on what is clearly the main priority. Final Fantasy XIII, for example, is a narrative-centric RPG. Demon Gaze is a mechanics-centric RPG. Where things get quite interesting is that long-running series often go back and forth between being narrative- and mechanics-centric — Final Fantasy is a prime example of this.

You can then divide each half into further subcategories. Narrative-centric RPGs, for example, could be divided into cinematic RPGs, sandbox RPGs, visual novel RPGs and storytelling RPGs, while mechanics-centric RPGs could be split into first-person dungeon crawlers, isometric action RPGs, massively multiplayer games, roguelikes and various other categories, some of which intertwine and cross over with one another.

I haven't thought about the idea in a lot of depth yet, as you can probably tell from the vagueness, but I think there's an interesting concept to write about there. The reason I'm not writing about it in detail right now is because it's 1am and I, as ever, have forgotten to write anything on here sooner. It is not beyond my capabilities to bash out a 3,000+ word epic at 1 in the morning, but I do have to work tomorrow and would rather do so having had something approaching a decent night's sleep.

So that's that. I will flesh out the concept in the very near future and post it on MoeGamer. Might even turn into a fun video. We shall see. Anyway, I have recorded the idea here now. Next job is to completely forget that I wrote it down here and revisit the idea in roughly 36 months.

Good night!

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#oneaday Day 150: Don't fuck it up

Dear America,

We, the Rest of the World, are given to understand that you are holding an election for your next president tomorrow. To all of us, looking from the outside, the choice appears to be between a bright orange cunt who has done more than enough things to be locked up in prison for a very long time, and a likable woman who, along with her running mate, has not only done a surprising amount to reach out to "the young", typically some of the most apathetic when it comes to politics, but has also relentlessly — and completely correctly — highlighted her opponent's shortcomings.

This would, to us, appear to be an easy choice. We know that both candidates have things that you're not altogether happy about for one reason or another. We know that for certain groups of you living in the States, either choice is a difficult or uncomfortable one. But come on now. Seriously. If you vote for the orange cunt, you are an idiot. There is no other way to put it. You are a fucking idiot.

I'm not going to go off on one like some people do online and start talking about "Nazis" and "fascism", but the orange cunt is a cunt. The orange cunt is a criminal. The orange cunt has already proven that he makes a hash of things if given even the slightest hint of power, so how it even got to a situation where the choice is between the orange cunt and literally anyone else is completely beyond the ken of those of us observing from the outside. This race should not be happening. The orange cunt should not even be in consideration for the big chair in one of the most powerful nations on the planet.

And yet, somehow, he is. Which is what worries me. Because if the orange cunt can get into a position where he's an election away from sitting in that big chair — for the second time, let's not forget — it concerns me that he might actually win. And, besides that making your entire democratic process a laughingstock — not that ours is much better, mind — it looks like that is going to be outright dangerous for a lot of people.

Of course, it's entirely possible that the orange cunt losing will be dangerous, too. We've seen on multiple occasions that he doesn't take losing very well at all. We're just all consoling ourselves with the fact that if he does lose, there is hopefully enough out there now to lock him away where he can do no further harm. Although we very much doubt that this will actually happen. He's rich, you see, and rich people don't go to jail. "If the penalty for a crime is a fine, that law only exists for the lower classes," and all that.

So come on, America. There is very obviously only one sensible choice here, but we, collectively, don't quite have 100% faith that you'll make that sensible choice as a nation. You have voted the orange cunt into office once before, after all.

We'd very much like to be wrong. And so, in the words of Ru Paul: good luck, and don't fuck it up.

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#oneaday Day 149: Late night ravings

Hello. It is nearly 2am and I have forgotten to write a post. Because my brain works the way it does, I will now be unable to sleep until I write something, so here I am. I am writing on my phone and without my glasses on so please excuse any typos.

I finished Spirit Hunter NG this evening. That's the sequel to Death Mark, and an excellent horror adventure in its own right. I'm looking forward to playing the final game in the series; will likely start that tomorrow.

One thing these games have reminded me is my fondness for games that attempt to imply things are "mechanics" when they're really not anything remarkable. In both Death Mark and NG the best example of this is probably the "time limit that is not a time limit".

In both games, narrative pressure is placed on the protagonists to solve the various cases before the ghostly curse that has been placed upon them brings their lives to an unfortunate end. This is positioned to the player as it becoming increasingly urgent to solve things, but it's a purely narrative thing. There is no time limit and actually no means of dying from the curse expiring.

NG has another example in the form of its "Survival Escape" sequences. These are where you confront a ghost and must use the right items on the right objects in the scene to survive and fend off the spirit. Mechanically you're not doing anything different from the point and click investigation sequences, but the game's positioning of these sequences as being urgent — and the fact you die if you take the wrong action — sets them apart.

There's probably a more substantial article in this somewhere — I vaguely recall Final Famtasy XIII-2 having an overdramatic name for what was essentially conversation trees, for example — but right now I'm very tired and I must sleep. So I'm going to sleep.

#oneaday Day 148: Stream Success

I done a stream! It went pretty well, and I enjoyed myself. Even had a few people chatting along. If you want to catch up on it, here it is archived on my YouTube channel:

As you can hopefully see from the thumbnail, we were playing the delightfully named Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armour – You May Be Defeated But Don't Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King. This is a dungeon crawler by Experience, makers of, among other things, the Spirit Hunter horror adventures I've been playing recently.

I obviously talk more about the game in the stream itself, but my first impressions after a 3-hour session are very positive. It's really interesting how Experience manage to make what is ostensibly the same kind of game feel cool and different between all their different titles. Mon-Yu is pitched as an entry-level dungeon crawler, but there are plenty of interesting little wrinkles for genre veterans, such as being level capped on each dungeon, meaning you have to figure out how to deal with the bosses without just outlevelling them.

There's also an interesting equipment system, where equipment gains experience as you use it alongside the characters. Equipment has a "rank" which determines how much it can level up, so sometimes you have to make a decision between keeping your upgraded items or taking a temporary hit to your effectiveness while you power up something with a higher cap.

There's also a really great "rapid battle" system, where if you know what you're doing you can get all your characters to auto-attack or repeat their last actions without having to wait for all the animations and log entries to appear on screen. Combine this with the fact that the game has no random encounters — and by its level-capped structure, it discourages grinding to a certain extent — and you have a really interesting take on what has, over the course of the last few years, become one of my favourite subgenres.

Anyway, it's half past two in the morning now because I made a video about sauce after finishing the stream. Watch out for that on my channel later next week. For now, I must sleep!

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#oneaday Day 147: Saturday Night is for Streaming

Well, it is this week, anyway. Andie is going out for a friend's birthday in the evening, so I thought I might take the opportunity to do a bit of streaming. You, dear reader, are welcome to stop by. Here's my Twitch channel. I'll be streaming from about 8pm UK time, all being well, and the duration will depend on how much fun I'm having and whether anyone is actually chatting. I plan to go for at least an hour or two, though.

The game I've picked to stream is one I deliberately haven't started yet. It's Experience's dungeon crawler Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters and Gain Strong Weapons and Armor. You May Be Defeated, but Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be a Day When the Heroes Defeat the Devil King. I have picked this for several reasons:

I like Experience games.
I like dungeon crawlers.
It has a silly name.
As I understand it, it's a fairly light and breezy take on the dungeon crawler, so it should be eminently suitable for chatting while playing.

Now I'm sure anyone who is all about "optimising" their Twitch experience would recommend I play something people have actually heard of. But if you've ever paid my YouTube channel a visit you will know that I don't really give a shit about baiting the algorithm and getting huge viewing figures.

In fact, as I've discussed previously, I actually don't like it when a video does well, because after you crash through a certain number of views, people start to get a bit more mean and I'm not a big fan of that. So I'd rather just host a nice little comfortable stream for friends to drop in on as they see fit — and perhaps a few newcomers can pop along and learn a bit about a game they haven't seen before alongside me.

Streaming is something that, I know, you have to work hard at in order to get anywhere. To be honest, I'm not so fussed about trying to "make partner" or "go affiliate" or whatever — the thing that appeals to me about streaming more than anything else right now is the prospect of potentially making some human connections with people. I have been so bereft of good company beyond my wife and cats in recent years that I want to try various means of potentially meeting new folks. And streaming would seem like a potentially solid means of discovering people with similar interests that I might get along with.

I know that won't happen immediately. I'm fine with that. I've recorded lots of Let's Plays for YouTube, so I am intimately familiar with how to talk rubbish entirely to myself while playing a video game. But if some good conversation happens to come about? So much the better. We shall see, I guess.

Anyway, tomorrow evening, 8pm UK time. I'll let you work out what that is in your region. Let's hunt some monsters and have a good time!

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#oneaday Day 146: Spooky scary brownies

It's Halloween! I used to really enjoy Halloween, but as you get older it becomes more and more of a wet fart of a celebration, unless you have kids. For the last few years, we haven't even had any Trick or Treaters visit — though we did have a couple tonight. For my sins, I spent the evening editing a 75 minute video about Atari games rather than actually playing the horror game I am in the middle of (Spirit Hunter NG) but such is the way of hyperfixating. I could have stopped partway through the project, but my brain kept saying "go on, you're nearly done", and before I knew it, I was done. I wish I could find that sort of motivation for anything that actually mattered.

Anyway, Halloween. I have a few fond memories from various years. The earliest one I can recall was from when we were in America. I talked a little about this trip to America when I revealed my longstanding (and mostly overcome) fear of the wimdotch wib hamdongs, but there were lots of other things that happened on that trip. One of them was spending Halloween with someone my parents knew. I can't remember who the people were, what their names were or even if they were actually American or just British folks who had ended up living out there, but one thing I do remember is the lady of the house baking brownies.

I had never had brownies before this Halloween visit to this mystery family, and my introduction to them was with the most amazing home-made brownies I have ever tasted in my life. I have spent the intervening 35+ years trying various types of brownie from all manner of sources, and not one has ever matched the brownies I had that one October night in 1985. And I don't know why. Surely a brownie is a brownie? All I remember that might be a distinguishing factor is that these home-made brownies had walnuts in, and as a fussy kid I didn't think I liked walnuts. (I still don't.) But baked into those brownies they were wonderful.

So yeah. I hope before I die I can have at least one brownie that is even half as good as the brownies I had that night. I will continue to feel unfulfilled until that happens.

Another completely unrelated memory is from a Halloween night at university. Scary Movie had just come out, and Scream was still fashionable, so, being a shy sort, I figured dressing up as the Scream killer would be a great Halloween costume. And it was! The really interesting thing I found was that by completely hiding my entire appearance, I suddenly had way more self-confidence than I had ever felt in my life. I was laughing and joking with complete strangers, doing the "WAZAAAPP" thing from Scary Movie, and I was having a thoroughly lovely time.

I can't remember anything else about the evening other than the walk into Portswood, Southampton dressed as the Scream killer — I suspect once I arrived at my destination I proceeded to get absolutely twatted off my face on cheap cocktails — but that feeling of being nigh-invincible on the walk to the venue is something that has stuck with me ever since… and is a feeling I'd love to recapture at some point, somehow.

Anyway, my Halloween has been mostly uneventful, as you can probably tell, but it's now ten past midnight, my video has finished rendering and I still have to work tomorrow. So I should probably go to bed, huh.

Sweet screams or whatever.

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#oneaday Day 145: The love of a good cat

Apologies for last night's bleakness. Not entirely sure what came over me. I think it was just the fact I turned the TV on to watch something while I was having something to eat and I was immediately confronted by a "Dell AI" advert that… didn't advertise anything whatsoever. But anyway. That was then, and this is now, and now I am back from my overnight stay and monthly visit to the office, and I have been welcomed home by my wife and cats.

My wife is jealous of how much our cats love me. And not just our current two; I was clearly favoured by both Ruby and Meg also. I haven't particularly done anything special to make any of them favour me in particular, but I can confirm that both Oliver and Patti have been all over me ever since I returned home.

And it's nice. There is something wonderful about the completely (well, mostly) unconditional love you feel from an animal. Both Oliver and Patti simply like being with me. We don't have to be doing anything "together"; they both just like to be in the same room as me, knowing that I'm nearby, and that if they feel like jumping on me to harass me for some attention and/or treats, I'm right there, nice and convenient.

I'd always known that having a cat around was a genuine joy. I grew up with two of the most wonderful cats you ever could imagine, for starters, and I still miss them both dearly. I have doubtless told this story many times before, but our first cat Penny was very much my "nursemaid" when I was very little, and as I grew up I felt very close to her.

After Penny passed on peacefully one night, it wasn't long before my family decided that we didn't want to be without a cat, and so Kitty (we didn't name her) joined us. She was a wonderful bundle of joy who loved nothing more than jumping into your lap and lying down, regardless of if you were trying to do anything. Sadly she left us, well before her time, after an accident in the road outside our house.

I still think of both Penny and Kitty, and love them both dearly.

And having pets of my own has brought me immeasurable amounts of joy. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have been blessed with such wonderful pets consistently — though the fact that every pet I have had has turned out to be such a wonderful companion makes me wonder if the way you nurture them as their carer has as much impact on their overall personality as their general nature. If so, that hopefully says something positive about me.

The only thing I wish is that I'd explored the possibility of having my own pets sooner in my adult life than I did; right from when Andie and I first adopted a pair of rats because we thought it might be fun up until the fussy little mogs who are currently adorning various surfaces in my living room, pet ownership has been a wonderful thing.

There are challenges, of course, and it is sad when you have to say goodbye to a beloved pet. But the possibility of those sad times in the future should never take away from the amount of joy pets can bring you. And, as with Penny and Kitty, the pets we have lost over the years are still with me in their own way, too. Willow, Lara, Lucy, Socks, Clover, Ruby, Meg… I will never forget any of them.

Pets are wonderful companions, excellent listeners and never judge you. And now, I cannot imagine ever being without them.

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