Moviemaking and gamemaking are converging | Hacker News Reader

Moviemaking and gamemaking are converging

economist.com

185 pointspseudolus225 comments

The article says that there are similarities between the two industries, I see these similarities too between how the workforces are treated. Whereby Hollywood VFX workers are overworked and underpaid, and some even end up going under, and the Academy is always there to stomp out their protest during the few minutes they get at the Oscars [1]. Much like with game development, where waves of contractors are hired, then subsequently fired [2], or being just subjected to endless crunch [3]. I think it's fair to say that game dev companies are the sweatshops of the tech industry, and I feel for anyone who wants to break into what otherwise could be a creative industry.

[1] - https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-xpm-2013-f...

[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/03/raven-...

[3] - https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/23/18507750/fortnite-work-cru...

Well that may be true, but they get to work on stuff that is legitimately cool.

I know a guy that worked on StarTrek for years as a VR architect and general 3D modelling type of work. He worked longer hours than your average Torontonian, but nothing absolutely crazy. I've worked longer weeks.

He loved his job.

I'm not saying it is this way for everyone, but part of life is deciding if you want to work hard, have impact on things that matter, work on cool stuff, earn a lot of money, etc.

There are places where it truly gets exploitative, but in my humble opinion that's usually places where the people involved have almost no options other than to move to another town or country. I'm not against industries or companies where the up front expectation is hard work. Some people want that, at least some of the time.

>I'm not saying it is this way for everyone, but part of life is deciding if you want to work hard, have impact on things that matter, work on cool stuff, earn a lot of money, etc.

VFX people in Hollywoord are some of the most underpaid workers in the industry. Sure, it's cool that you can be a part of a team that helps make a movie. No doubt it must be pretty cool to see your work on the big screen, or even the small screen, and know that you played a part in bringing it there. But I think something the workers would also value is having some autonomy over their work, and being paid for it.

I'm not easily convinced by the argument of, "you get to work on cool stuff", working on cool stuff doesn't make up for risking povery, debt, or unemployment when you're underpaid. Furthermore, there's a difference between hard work, and exhausting working. And being put under crunch is exhausting work, not hard work.

Exactly.

Screw cool. I’m an adult.

Working on “cool stuff” is for people in their 20s or the perpetually naive…

The perpetually naive usually come to their senses when they’re old and recognize they don’t have any savings, don’t have a home to live in and can’t retire.

I’ll take a fair wage, health insurance, and balanced work hours every time. I can find cool things to do on my own time when not putting in 16 hours a day.

Ok great good for you! You're (presumably) in the West and can choose what you value, and you value a life with balanced work hours and, well, you call it fair, but in global standards it is high.

Either way, for people with the skills to choose between working for Google and making $400k a year or working for Hollywood and making $70k a year, then they go and work for Hollywood and complain about the hours and pay, I just don't really know what else to say other than it's a choice.

You get to see your work on the big screen, hang out at cooler parties, etc. Google people, generally speaking, do not get the same thing in life. Unions have their place, of course, especially with monopsonies or mining towns, but when it comes to a whole industry I just think some things naturally come out that way due to the motivations and dynamics.

I didn't realize that Google is paying nearly half a million dollars a year for VFX artists these days.

>part of life is deciding if you want to work hard, have impact on things that matter, work on cool stuff, earn a lot of money, etc.

One man's happiness is another man's hell, and so forth.

The question of happiness is a very subjective one, with everyone having a different answer.

> Well that may be true, but they get to work on stuff that is legitimately cool.

So? How does that justify being exploited and treated badly?

I've seen the same arguments made against teachers, nurses and other people who get to do "meaningful" work whenever they want fairer wages, and I do not see the logic. Do they need to be punished for doing a job where the result of their hard work doesn't make them hate themselves?

I see the reverse logic: pay jobs that nobody wants to do well to make them attractive. But the need for carrots does not imply the need for sticks.

Nobody is being punished. It's simple supply and demand. If you don't want to work on marvel movies there are millions of young men and women that would do it for pennies. Why is Disney going to pay them more if they don't have to?

It's alright and quite frankly understandable to be motivated to work on a "big project with big cash and big name".

The problem is when the producers use it in an exploitative way to have people work insanely longer hours than billed, or to lower the costs of labour so that the workers can have the "pride" of writing "big name" on their resume.

Unfortunately, this is common practice.

they get to work on stuff that is legitimately cool

Like most things, working on the cutting-edge, successful, top-tier stuff is cool, but most people in the industry aren't doing that. If you look at something like https://steamdb.info/upcoming/ you'll see a small number of "Yeah, it'd be cool to make that" games, and a lot of "Who the hell buys this crap?" games. Most people employed to build games are working on the second type of game.

> Well that may be true, but they get to work on stuff that is legitimately cool.

In other parts of the software industry, you can also work on legitimately cool stuff without having to kill yourself.

I think that movies and videogames industry need to get the hell out of America. Wages are too high. Making a triple A game takes a staff of 500 these days.

This is something they do, Marvel rely on outsourcing and using ununionised labour [1], and it shows in the recent films and TV shows they've made. There's a drop in the quality of the VFX. Wages for VFX artists aren't too high, as I've said, they are some of the most underpaid workers in the industry, and their protest against this is always stomped out. For a VFX worker it must be highly frustrating working in an industry where other workers are unionised, but they aren't.

[1] - https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/marvels-vfx-artis...

Some of the Bollywood VFX is amazing. The movies may not be my cup of tea, but they do good CGI.

RRR on Netflix was my first Bollywood experience and I quite liked it. The cgi was pretty bad though.

RRR is not Bollywood technically, it’s Tollywood.

Can you point me to a clip on YouTube that you would consider to be good Bollywood VFX? I've mostly been exposed to the most comically bad Bollywood VFX.

I can try and find a couple of the movies. Like I said, I don't watch them, so I've basically only seen the sizzle reels.

I'll bet there's some folks here, that actually watch the movies, and could point to better stuff.

They are not exactly bad, they are mostly over the top, and that could be a cultural thing.

RRR wouldn't be out of place in a Hollywood blockbuster.

As someone who watches and loves a lot of Bollywood, I’ve never seen a Bollywood movie with good VFX.

VFX artists can definitely make a good living. Their salaries are comparable to tech if you remove the stock portion. They also work crazy OT and are paid hourly which means big money. That's true if you're more senior of course.

Read the credits at the end of any CGI heavy movie from Disney, or AAA game like GoW and notice how many Indian names show up. It is a highly outsourced biz model, and most of the grunt work is humans doing repetitive tasks over and over for $1 to return $1.01

Oh no, paying people what they're worth instead of exploiting those in poorer countries, how terrible

Is it exploitation to pay someone above the average salary in their country?

I would posit that it is more akin to exploitation to keep rich nations rich and poor nations poor.

Labor being a global commodity peeves many in the business of solidarity.

Actually, the peeve is that capital (and profit) is now permitted to be mobile, while labor is generally not. The EU trade zone is the one, shining notable exception.

That is: we move our money into whatever markets we want, we withdraw our profits as we choose, but heaven forbid that labor should be allowed to move as it pleases.

Somehow paying someone relatively well in a low-paying country does keep the rich rich(er) and at the same time creates a larger pool of poor people.

It's possible to be the worker who's paid relatively well and still be exploited. That worker then becomes complicit in the exploitation.

Pitting one workforce against another is an old trick used to control them all.

> Pitting one workforce against another is an old trick used to control them all.

It's not a trick, it's the same as you choosing the cheapest product on a shelf between two competing brands. It's the foundation of a competitive market that puts high incentives to produce products the most efficiently and most cost effectively. Which is a huge boon to consumers and has lead to us all having a better standard of living than anyone else in history.

Sigh.

Being in country A and able to choose products made in country B is the result of specific political and legal choices made by the power structures of both countries.

Historically, there was nothing inevitable about the free movement of capital, goods and profit, but over the last half century or more, this has come to be seen as "normal".

Your argument is the classic one in favor of removing restrictions on the movement of capital, goods and profit (not labor!), and has been the justification for almost every free trade agreement over the last 75 years.

The evidence of it being a net benefit to everyone is now starting to skew against that claim. The distribution of negative environmental externalities to poor countries in particular argues against it (i.e. country X can make your widgets cheaper because they have less regulation about waste and pollution).

We're all consumers, it is true. But we're all citizens and employees too, and we spend more of our lives in those roles. Global free trade may be a boon to our lives as consumers, but it's been fucking over our lives as citizens and employees for too long alread.

What is you solution?

Either allow labor to always move as freely (or a un-freely) as capital & profit, or move back towards less international trade, certainly between countries with highly disparate income levels and legal systems.

I’ve the feeling that going back to less international trade will increase the risk of war.

> Either allow labor to always move as freely

When you use the word "labor" do you mean literally it has to be people who work or do you think any human should be able to move about freely?

I ask because international trade, capital, etc. don't move around without rules & regulations. For instance, I can't just move all my wealth between countries without scrutiny, fees, taxes, etc.

People should be able to move as freely as capital and profit, however freely that is.

This is the "RETVRN" that I would love to see. Make the USA pre-1882 again (year of the first immigration-related law in the US: the Chinese exclusion act).

Let people live where they want, everywhere in the world. Good places will draw population and prosper, and bad places will stagnate until they change.

> at the same time creates a larger pool of poor people.

Paying people so they can lessen infant mortality and such does produce a baby boom.

I cannot speak for videogames, but I have a family member who was in the movie industry doing CG stuff, and it is already heavily outsourced to other countries than the U.S., particularly Canada, India, and Australia. I’ve been told that the movie industry is essentially dead in the U.S., besides having rights holders/production managers/etc.

Not so in the Atlanta area. Mostly thanks to Tyler Perry. https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/douglas-county/lionsgate-in...

I never thought I’d write this sort of comment, but, the username checks out!

"and the Academy is always there to stomp out their protest during the few minutes they get at the Oscars"

Hm, I have no knowledge or connection to the events, but "stomping out protests" made me expect a bit more dramatic events, than stopping someones speech, after his time was up.

"But Westenhofer’s speech was cut off mid-sentence after he used up his allotted time"

It's something the Academy has always engaged in, is with cutting of the microphone of the VFX artists. Other people are not treated like this.

Fuck the academy

They lost all sense of credibility when Peter O'Toole was snubbed for Lawrence of Arabia, and then for the rest of his career.

It's just an industry meat parade designed to get you to watch their bullshit.

Did they ever have credibility?

The academy awards are literally nothing more than any other industry group awards: it's just people in the industry telling each other how awesome they are.

They are, and always have been, utterly meaningless.

No they didn't but giving Gregory Peck an Oscar over Peter O'Toole should have destroyed any notion of credibility.

To be fair, of the nominations that year, I’d have given it to Jack Lemmon for The Days of Wine and Roses. So it’s not like it’s uncontentious that O’Toole was snubbed.

They may be harsher with VFX people, but speakers are routinely “played off” the stage with music before cutting mics.

I'm not sure that game dev as a gig economy would be the worst thing. Make a thing, get paid, move on. Especially since a traditional game (not MMO or "game as a service") has a natural beginning, middle, and end of development.

Plus I assume if you're an independent contractor (not working in an outsourced sweatshop) you have more leverage to stand your ground against nonsense like crunch. But I'm fantasizing that because I've never done contract work so I don't know if that's really the case.

Your assumption is 100% wrong and I couldn't imagine what on Earth gives you that idea. In fact, I am not convinced you actually believe that yourself. I don't believe you've thought about this at all.

Are you going to provide your reasoning besides saying “you’re wrong?”

Literally every single example we have of gig economy results in lower wages and less worker protections.

Being able to earn money whenever you want so you don't have to build your life around your work would be huge even if it makes you earn a bit less. Developers earn a lot already, many would take that trade.

Edit: That would make game development much more palatable, since gig work implies no overtime unless you want it. Just do some game development and earn money rather than doing it for free on a hobby project. And since it is just a gig you can easily try it out and do something else if you don't like it.

How would gig economy not result in game dev being more exploitative than it is now? Oh, you dont want to do overtime making those car models? No problem. We have contact to 10 other people just waiting to do it in your place. And we will pay them less than we pay you, and then we will pay even less to those who will replace them.

Keep system running for decade or two and you have another area where people work to don't die from hunger. Because thats how gig economy worked for every other market.

And what is your retirement plan? Keep working until your health prevents you from working anymore and then die on streets?

The OP's words were 'independent contractor'. Someone switched the words to 'gig economy' and started beating on the straw man.

The OP is actually right - contractors have much better treatment than employees. Not only in law, where you can't be told your hours - etc, but also just by the nature of your employment where you have to sell yourself and they desire to work with you or they wouldn't have paid your fee. This isn't the case in industries where they have fake contracting - employment in all but name, but as an actual independent developer or whatever you make more and get treated better.

> you dont want to do overtime making those car models? No problem. We have contact to 10 other people just waiting to do it in your place.

This isn't how contracting works. They give you a deadline for the work and you accept it. They don't know if you're fast or slow as long as you meet the deadline. They don't demand you do more, they offer it.

As an employee you're a machine for them to use? Have you heard the phrase "Drive it like you're renting it"?

> And we will pay them less than we pay you, and then we will pay even less to those who will replace them.

Then they aren't in that first artists range anymore so they take other work.

At some point the work is "Click on all transparent segments of the SpongeBob character, applying to correct color for that body part from this design document." Why would that employ the same artists who, from an empty page, designed those characters and their looks?

> Being able to earn money whenever you want so you don't have to build your life around your work

And yet, every instance of gig economy pushes wages way down, pushes all the externalities (like health insurance, travel, equipment etc.) onto workers and makes their life revolve around work.

> That would make game development much more palatable, since gig work implies no overtime unless you want it.

As others already mentioned: then you'll be out of the job, because there will always be people willing to work overtime for the same money.

And since it's "just a gig", you can be let go even faster than it is now for workers in the US.

That's capitalism for you...

Independent contractors would have no leverage because there are too many people who will do the job. Also, companies won't like someone paying per hour when they can push 80+ hour workweeks on salaried employees.

Are there?

Even for Amazon warehouses they churned through people faster than they could find new ones and that were jobs where you basically have to be healthy enough to carry things so not requiring much.

Development or working on game requires quite some knowledge of specialized tools. Then that toolset in game industry varies a lot.

I don’t think there are that many Unity developers one can hire on the spot.

There is a lot of domain specific knowledge for sure. There is a huge difference between, "I made a flappy bird clone/shitty side scroller in Unity" vs someone who actually knows how to make a triple-A level game. The former requires, can you spend 4 hours watching youtube videos on a saturday night and literally just mimicking the video. And there are people who become the latter developer starting as the former. But there is a lot that has to happen in between.

That's mostly because filmmaking is ceasing to be filmmaking, at least for big movies and TV shows.

I tend to ignore new TV shows these days. Why? I just know they're gonna be great for a few seasons at best then start sucking, and I don't feel like wasting my time in the meantime. I can count on one hand non-episodic TV shows in the last 25 years that have maintained their high quality throughout.

  The Wire
  The Sopranos
  Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul
  Mr. Robot

Honourable mention for Twin Peaks: The Return, although Twin Peaks didn't exactly maintain its quality throughout season 2 even if Lynch swooped back in to save it near the end.

All cases where one person or a couple people had strong creative control of the project throughout.

I could sit here all day listing shows that started out really good but then it became clear the writers had no idea what they were doing, or the writers who did left.

These shows are all written by committee now. All these garbage Star Trek shows. Westworld has really neat sci fi premises for each season but other than season 1 they always devolve into action schlock because the writers don't understand how to actually write good sci fi.

As for big movies, they feel like they're written by marketing people not writers. They're optimised for getting people into the theatre and everything else is an afterthought.

There's still a handful of auteurs making great movies you could think of as big. People like Tarantino, Scorsese, the Coen brother. Christopher Nolan gets lucky sometimes, but most of his sci fi is ruined by sloppy writing for me(Interstellar...)

One thing is certain for me though. I can't think of a single recent movie I've enjoyed that had lots of CGI in it. The movies with the best writing are pretty much never the ones with huge effects budgets.

The true art of filmmaking lies in the writing. You can have all the effects in the world, the best actors and directors. Doesn't matter one bit if the script is terrible.

Tarantino is about to stop making movies by his own account - "a director should never make more than 10 movies".

I'm slightly vexed that you did not mention Villeneuve, who made Blade Runner 2049 and recently Dune. Blade Runner 2049 is already a cult classic and Dune felt like a fresh air of mature sci-fi in the age of Marvel. He is about the only one I truly look forward to see his next movie, right now being Dune 2.

As a lifelong Star Trek fan, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and Prodigy are as good as its ever been. The writing on all three is incredibly tight.

Disco and Picard... have been a struggle.

I have my doubts about all of them. Anything Alex Kurtzman touches turns to total garbage. So if it really is good he must not be meaningfully involved, or it's not as good as people seem to think it is(my guess).

I have a feeling it's gonna be like The Orville, just rehashing of good Trek ideas from the past. But I've yet to see it. If some of the critics I trust endorse it, I might.

The third season of Picard is actually good again, I can really recommend it.

A bit weird, but it's definitely evoking much more of the Star Trek feeling than the previous seasons did.

How?

Like Season 3 is definitely better than Season 2 and maybe Season 1, but besides the majority of the actors being in Starfleet uniforms on a Starfleet ship, it still feels way more Discovery than TNG. It's just cramming the nostalgia down your gullet so often that you don't have time to not care.

Look, Riker. Yay. Crusher! Yay. Worf's back, yay. He said a non-stereotypical Klingon thing, hilarious, he's not like the other Klingons. Oh. Now he said a stereotypical Klingon thing. He's still got the heart of a Klingon. Ooh. Changelings. Dominion War. Wolf 359. Locutus. Wow. Much Star. Very Trek.

All in all. I'd say Season 3 of Picard would have made for one of the better TNG movies. But considering that most of them were not good, that's not really a high bar to clear.

Lower Decks is the closest thing to old-school Star Trek that is currently being produced. But that's mostly because it wants to be a pastiche of TNG-era Trek.

Season 3 of TNG is definitely better than at least half of S1-S3 of TNG. Old-school Star Trek never was that good either, it took quite a while to figure out the formula to get good content.

Only by the time DS9 and VOY came out did they have a well-working formula, but at that time it became a bit too formulaic.

Still, it's entertaining, and there's enough quality there to enjoy it.

You talk about it evoking the feeling of Star Trek more so than the previous seasons. Which I assume means Star Trek of the TNG era.

And it doesn't. At least no more so than Discovery. It crams in a lot of reference and characters from that era, but it's still an action show set in space.

Even if the first couple of seasons of TNG don't have a lot of bangers, the spirit of the show is still there. I'm also tired of the trope that they aren't good. There's a lot in both seasons that carry through the show. Plus, The Measure of a Man is one of the best episodes of the series.

And that's the thing, when you look to TNG's best episodes, you'll come to episodes like The Measure of a Man, The Inner Light, and Darmok. Where there's either no action or the action really only exists to forward the real central conflict. Episodes which make us question what it means to be conscious, what it means to live a fulfilled life, what it means to be able to communicate with others. You get these meaningful explorations into humanity by forcing the issue through the extremes provided by science fiction.

In this season, we get told that Picard kinda, sorta regrets not being able to be a father to Jack Crusher. But we don't actually get to explore that within the show itself. We're way more concerned with surfing the gravimetric waves. Or the portal gun. Or changelings taking over the crew.

All the real conflict is physical and confrontational. The show is about saving the galaxy, not about what humanity means.

Regarding the Jack Crusher storyline:

Season 3 of Picard finishes a lot of the story arcs that got left over the runtime of TNG.

Take the storyarc that was begun in TNG S04E02 "Family" and continued in ST:VII "Generations" of the legacy of the Picard family. Both in "Family" and in "Generations" the desire to leave a legacy, to continue the family, is well established. The Jack Crusher storyline continues this very arc.

The show doesn't have to explore those feelings, because they've already been explored, this is just the conclusion of a 33 year old storyline.

I agree though that it'd be awesome if it was just the old TNG, continued, but I doubt that'd run well nowadays. First, the new showrunners obviously took some time to get the feeling of Star Trek - their seasons have improved one by one.

Second, them splitting what made TNG well into multiple shows - Picard resolves the open storylines, Strange New Worlds asks more philosophical monster of the week questions, Discovery explores progressive inclusivity - feels like a deliberate choice considering the fanbase is quite wide, and everyone expects something different.

Personally I really like that it's less pure action, a little more grounded, actions have consequences, Starfleet itself is involved again, it's all going in the right direction. Definitely not there yet, but after so many years of going in the wrong direction, this is good.

Also, explored in many other episodes. Like the seventh season episode Bloodlines, fourth season episodes Suddenly Human and Final Mission, and countless others.

It is heavily tread territory. Picard offers nothing really new to it. But it wants to retread it all over again for some reason. It's not really a continuation, it's a poor rehash. It's not even resolving anything. It's reopening something that's been resolved.

Picard Season 2 was considerably worse than Season 1.

It doesn't have to be TNG, but it could at least be closer to Strange New Worlds.

Picard is way more action-oriented than TNG-era Trek. There hasn't been an episode where physical violence wasn't central to the conflict. Now, Picard's structure is different from TNG-era. It is not episodic. Every episode serves a larger storyline. That necessarily precludes any individual episode being about "a thing".

I don't think Picard Season 3 is that different direction. It's just got more window dressing. It's more a continuation of the movies than of the series.

I enjoyed Lower Decks and Nope'd out of Picard after a couple episodes. The high-water mark for ST imo is DS9, and that's awfully hard to beat. I'll have to give SNW a try.

I was a lifelong ST fan until the JJ Abrams movies broke everything for me. I've ignored all things Star Trek ever since.

Has Star Trek returned to what made it great now?

The quality of writing in big budget media is truely shocking; they have no idea how to write a tight plot, or what verisimilitude means, or why consistency is important.

Looks at Rings of Power; absolutely gorgeous, and some great dialog sprinkled here and there, but the plotting, world building, tone, and story-beats are amateurish.

There's also far too much fan service in almost every popular franchise, and writers have absolutely no patience; an old example, but one I think highlights this, is the movie "Solo"; I quite liked the movie, much more than I expected and more than the general public did, but it was infuriating how they had to put in every single plot point that Han Solo mentioned in the original trilogy, as if without it we wouldn't understand who Solo was, or how clever the writers were.

Similarly Black Panther 2; so much good stuff but ruined, in my opinion anyway, by too much exposition given to us as dialog rather than flashback - Namor's backstory was probably unnecessary, and if it was necessary it would have been better as an opening sequence (not to mention the movie being at least an hour too long).

They do know how to do it. Check out "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish", it's really nicely done. They just don't do it often because when it comes to hiring writers and senior execs they prioritize ideological compatibility over proven skill:

https://i.imgur.com/DSy9zoy.jpg

(the woman in black runs the Star Wars franchise)

So you get these car-crash scripts with holes a five year old could spot, but they hammer home the message and so the people at the top feel good about themselves.

>The quality of writing in big budget media is truely shocking; they have no idea how to write a tight plot, or what verisimilitude means, or why consistency is important.

1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie better than a lot of schlock out there now

> There's also far too much fan service in almost every popular franchise

I recently watched The Matrix: Resurrection and thought half the movie was just fan service. "Look! It's Neo and Trinity back together again! And they're doing cool Matrix stuff!"

As a life-long fan, Star Trek has always had plenty of garbage writers and terrible episodes. (The original series is hilariously bad by modern standards.) The only thing that's held the series together are amazing actors and that the good episodes are really good.

Strange New Worlds has had an amazing first season. Hope that continues. :)

Sure there are lots of terrible Star Trek episodes. But being episodic, that's fine. These new treks are all just aping off the old shows. One which is basically just the Voyager premise done again. And one(or two? I've lost count at this point) that tries to cash in on TNG nostalgia.

I'm sure Strange New Worlds is the most competent rehashing of old ideas so far, but meh! Make something original. Go to the 25th century, make all new characters, a new ship, new technologies, new aliens, new concepts. That's what I want Star Trek to be. If I want nostalgia I'll throw on an episode from TNG season 3.

It just has this stench to me of retreading old stuff.

And no, TOS still holds up. It has some terrible episodes, some weird 60s moments that feel cringey, but it also has episodes that are fantastic sci-fi. And yeah, it looks like crap. I don't care. Sci-fi is not about special effects.

If you look at Star Wars over the past decade(?) there's generally an inverse relationship between how good the series/movie is and how close it is to the original story arc.

TOS can live apart from modern standards; you have to give it the benefit of historical perspective. And there was real chemistry between the case. And, because it was episodic, you can pick out 15-20 episodes and enjoy them as historical SF.

> Strange New Worlds has had an amazing first season

I don't get why people keep saying this. Don't get me wrong, it was pretty decent. Mount was the highlight of the otherwise mediocre-at-best Discovery S2 and he's still killing it in SNW, Peck is actually a great Spock, and the acting in general is high quality. But the writing was really kind of all over the place and their best episode cribbed Ursula Le Guin even harder than Voyager cribbed Robert L. Forward[0].

My personal opinion is that it has potential to be really good, but it hasn't been demonstrated that the writing competence is there yet.

[0] Credit where it is due: if you're going to be unoriginal, you may as well crib from some of the best.

> The movies with the best writing are pretty much never the ones with huge effects budgets.

The contrast was highlighted on a recent flight I took. I watched Zoolander while the guy next to me watched some Avengers movie starring Thanos. Not only were the colors more vibrant in Zoolander, the camera was always in focus. Even with $200mil on VFX, it was still blurry and soft-focus.

It’ll be fun and exciting if text-to-video can disrupt this. (Seems very likely. Shows might be totally revived to high quality within 3 years or so.)

No, text to video will not improve writing. GPT will also not improve writing.

I can already imagine fully generated TV shows. But they're not gonna be good, they'll lack cohesive vision and smart writing. This technology will only enhance the ability to produce more garbage at ever increasing rates.

My point is mostly that there exists a ton of talented writers and people with imagination who aren’t getting a chance to actually produce movies and tv shows. (I don’t think the issue is lack of talent doesn’t exist on the planet, I think they just aren’t lifted to the highest positions in hollywood, like they used to in decades past.) Admittedly there’s gonna be a ton of garbage via gpt too.

Most people tend to over estimate how talented the average non professional writer is and dramatically under estimate how good pro writers are. Writing is very hard. The issue is not coming up with ideas either, so don't think gptX streamlining the hard work (actual writing) will make much of a difference either.

Same is true for acting, photography, directing, etc.

> Honourable mention for Twin Peaks: The Return, although Twin Peaks didn't exactly maintain its quality throughout season 2 even if Lynch swooped back in to save it near the end.

Yeah honestly I didn’t care for it much. The casino plot felt like tedious filler, certain interesting characters from the original completely were completely sidelined, and at times it just felt like the horror surrealism was over the top to force some extra shock value.

More egregious to me though are the remakes of Hawaii 5-0 and Magnum PI. Those make me legitimately angry when I see them.

Taste is still taste of course. It's extremely... Lynchian.

This is mostly because Lynch changed a lot as a director since the original Twin Peaks. He brought that growth with him into The Return, and so it's basically a completely different beast. It was never going to be anything like the old show.

I loved it through and through. I enjoyed it even more on repeat viewing when I wasn't constantly waiting for Coop to "wake up".

Lynch is an acquired taste though, I get that for sure.

I'd add Mad Men and GoT, but it doesn't change the point you've made.

Haven't finished Mad Men, so I couldn't speak to it. Though I am planning to because it's become a lot more interesting to me as I've grown older compared to when it was new.

As for Game of Thrones, it doesn't fit into my list because the quality of the writing really nosedived, starting in season 5 to my mind, though seasons 6 and 7 is where it took a turn for the drastically worse. And season 8 was a disaster. So it's exactly in the opposite group that's too long to exhaustively list.

Mad Men does start to dip for a bit somewhere around season 5 imo, but once they get on track for the ending it picks back up and they stick the landing.

Definitely try to power through Mad Men, I tried to watch it a few times when I was younger but never got past season 3, whereas season 4 is where the real heart and message of it shows through, and the character development reaches new peaks. Really does seem like a show that resonates more when you are older.

I would also highly recommend FX's The Americans.

I forgot about that! That stayed good throughout although it did dip a little towards the end. But I think it's still good enough for my list because I enjoyed it throughout.

Looking at that list I have a feeling you'd like "The Bear".

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14452776/

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check out once it's finished airing :)

> That's mostly because filmmaking is ceasing to be filmmaking, at least for big movies and TV shows

Maybe that's why there seems to be fewer great movies being made than ever before in my lifetime.

I have increasingly become disinterested in CGI-heavy movies. I have taken to watching more foreign-language films, which seem to still be more interpersonal and grounded in reality. I say this as a person who would usually prefer sci-fi and fantasy over other genres, which are the genres which are historically the most heavy in CGI and VFX.

I have increasingly become disinterested in CGI-heavy movies.

Most of the writing talent for Hollywood has moved on to writing for TV. There's more money, more scope, and they can write things that don't need to be 'spectacular' enough to get people to pay $20 to see. They have enough scope to actually build plots and give characters interesting lives rather than the 2.5 hours a film affords them. TV shows are getting better at the same pace that films are getting worse.

The problem I have with TV is that most of these stories with interesting characters drag on until they get cancelled, depriving me of my favourite part of any story: the ending. Most movies on the other hand have an ending, even if it's open.

Yeah, that’s a problem now a days.

I’ve pretty much taken to waiting for a series to end and then binge watching because too many I’ve been interested in just get canceled in the middle of the story.

Probably part of the problem since I don’t show up in the weekly viewing stats but, oh well.

The production quality of TV has exploded. The writing quality, on the other hand, has taken a notable nosedive in the last decade. A notable recent example are things like the newest Lord of the Rings show, or the Foundations series. Incredible production values hampered by awful writing. Dialogue in the last years, in particular, has been awful in 90% of TV. Basic dialogue rules (like don't say exactly what the character is thinking or feeling) are broken for the sake of expediency and simplifying for the lowest denominator. The golden age of TV was a fairly distinct moment in prestige television making where a showrunner and some writers had enormous control over the show's direction and tone. Nowadays, most shows, like most hollywood movies, have a stupid amount of producers and the writing feels like a committee of YA-book authors put together the season's scripts in a weekend. A lot of modern TV is the sausage meat in the content factory of streaming services.

TLoU, Severence, Succession all quite wonderful. Even stuff like Peacemaker. There are a lot of nuggets with great writing, it's just that is is just SO MUCH content now, that there is bound to be more crap than good stuff out there.

These are all non-episodic TV shows which have yet to conclude. I reserve judgement until they have concluded as to whether the writing will hold up. For the vast majority of these shows, writing is great for a few seasons, then nosedives because they can't figure out how to conclude it or the plot becomes an ever expanding fractal of loose ends.

The reason for this is simple. Due to the nature of how studios are run now, you gotta keep making the popular stuff until it ceases to be. Even if it was better to just leave it at one or two seasons. Everything has to be renewed to make evn more money and to offset the endless treadmill of cancelled-after-one-season garbage that Netflix and HBO etc are pumping out.

I love Succession, but I hope this 4th season is the last one.

EDIT: named the wrong season.

The upcoming Succession season is the 4th one and HBO as well as the show runners have confirmed that it will be the last and conclude.

Oh it's the 4th, not the 3rd, my bad.

Good.

>The reason for this is simple. Due to the nature of how studios are run now, you gotta keep making the popular stuff until it ceases to be. Even if it was better to just leave it at one or two seasons. Everything has to be renewed to make evn more money and to offset the endless treadmill of cancelled-after-one-season garbage that Netflix and HBO etc are pumping out.

Getting back to video games, this is what I fear about the talk of The Last of Us Part III; that story is told, move on.

Most modern day blockbusters also seem to have transparently obvious CGI. All these Marvel movies aren't even trying to hide that the visuals on-screen are all CGI. The post Infinity Wars movies are particularly egregious.

There are movies like the Mission Impossible series that use plenty of CGI but most of the time you won't even catch it.

MI has the bonus that the 'meat' of the stunts are actually being performed by real people, and the CGI is dressing around it. A big draw, in my opinion. Superhero movies where the majority of the action is CGI? Eh.

Game of Thrones used tons of CGI too. But they did it right. They built out parts of the set, then did the rest in CG. This allowed them to create something which looked real(for the most part).

Problem with these Marvel "films" is there is so much CGI there's nothing left to ground them in reality, and then it looks fake no matter how many millions they poured into it.

The thing is, as I understand it, CGI are everywhere now, even in movies that are "grounded in reality". It saves money over building props, it can be "fixed in post", etc... Unless the film makes a statement of not using CGI, and it is often an expensive choice, you can assume there is plenty of it. Crowds, wild animals, mirrors, dust, etc... are often added digitally, because it is so much cheaper and convenient.

Edit: Here an example for the movie "Parasite" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3tfIem4ckE

Well, that's ok. Well-done CGI should be "invisible". I don't really care if the set is a set in the physical world or in a computer for as long as it looks good and doesn't fall into the uncanny valley.

It makes me think of "fury road", which I regard as one of the finest films of our generation, a stupid film, but masterfully done.

Anyway, the legend is the the film uses very little cgi, but that is not true, it is full of cgi, the masterful part is that the cgi is invisible. you can't tell it is there. and that is a sign of great cgi.

Note: the film is also full of great practical effects, which I think helps ground and make invisible the computer effects.

> one of the finest films of our generation

I agree with this, but I think that's a pretty strong condemnation of movies these days.

On the subject of foreign language films. I have a hard time watching most modern films, it is the dialog, the dialog just sounds bad (do people actually talk like this??). But I will happily watch a film in a language I don't understand.

My theory is that the dialog is just as bad if not worse in foreign films, If I could understand it I would still hate it. It is actually a case of reading rather than listening to the dialog, in consuming it it written form, rather than audio form, my brain fills in the gaps, covers up the inadequacies, the audio is only there to convey tone, I suspect that this forced quick reading covers up many sins of the spoken word.

Sometimes I am tempted to try and find foreign dubs and native subtitles for native films.

> I have a hard time watching most modern films, it is the dialog, the dialog just sounds bad

I read somewhere that the problem is the trend of actors whispering their lines or talking under their breath for dramatic effect, and that the audio has to be heavily amplified to make it audible, but in that process, fidelity is lost and so the dialog is hard to understand.

I know I'm not the only person who watches movies and TV with subtitles on these days. Watching a movie at a theater is awful because the difficult to understand audio is made worse by being in a large room.

> (do people actually talk like this??).

No.

> I read somewhere that the problem is the trend of actors whispering their lines or talking under their breath for dramatic effect

Isn't that the sort of thing the director is supposed to correct?

> I have increasingly become disinterested in CGI-heavy movies.

I honestly think that CGI has ruined most movies.

It's an exciting time. Unreal Engine is being used to great effect in things like The Mandalorian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk

The latest developments in large language models are another area interesting to me personally as a developer. Since the beginning of the video game medium, limitations in programming game AI have left video games stuck in a corner, where they use violence as the primary means of driving immersion, simply because it's just too complicated to model human-like behavior outside the domain of simple carnival games. Some games try and brute force their way around this by explicitly picking from a set of predetermined branching paths at predetermined critical moments. But the latest AI tools, first seen in stuff like the GPT-3 powered AI Dungeon, reveal that there will soon be new methods of maintaining a coherent story in a simulated game.

We won't have to always resort to violence and fancy carnival games for much longer.

Exactly! I'm excited for NPC to act like AI, and have full fledged conversations. Now, if they're allowed to have previous memories of their interactions of not could be interesting, since that is currently banned by ClosedAI

I fear how buggy that could make future games.

Some essential NPC interaction gets stuck in a weird loop / starts speaking Chinese / gets triggered into a Tay like paranoid Nazi rant while adamently denying the existence of the key it is holding that it's meant to give to the player to progress.

At worst, it's going to lead to a "is this a good NPC response" pipeline, where the model spits out lines based on its given prompt, and each one is approved by a proofreader.

The minutes of time spending on thinking up what an NPC would say is now (about 10 seconds of speedreading 5 lines of generated results + 5 seconds in clicking either the 'approve' or 'reject' button): That in of itself is at least a 10x increase in available topic queries for NPCs.

While I agree that violence in videogames is the "easy way out", the default mode of interaction that unimaginative designers reach for, I disagree this is because of limitations in AI.

Game design has a lot of tools in its toolbox. "Emerging play", "intelligent actors", etc, are only some, but not even the most important factors for interesting gameplay that is nonviolent.

AI is not the be all, end all of game design. Not even close to it.

> While I agree that violence in videogames is the "easy way out", the default mode of interaction that unimaginative designers reach for, I disagree this is because of limitations in AI.

You have an obstacle in your way. You use your skills to aim the crosshairs correctly and pull the trigger at the correct time. If successful, you are rewarded with the obstacle being removed. Then the loop repeats for just long enough so that you don't feel fatigued. It's a power fantasy and satisfying when balanced so that it's just within your reach.

Mapping it to guns, combat and violence is definitely the easy way to do things. Also one that sells a lot.

If you think about it, though, a similar loop exists pretty much anywhere there is a challenge in a game, violent or otherwise. You can turn that loop into a social skills challenge, but it's generally easy to see through those to the rules behind them, making them feel mechanical and hollow. That's one area where AI may be able to help, it's hard to tell.

This is an interesting conversation!

I agree with your characterization of the mechanisms for violence in videogames, and I also agree that if you abstract them a bit, they generalize beyond just violence.

Where I disagree is in your assumption that there is a similar loop "anywhere there is a challenge in a game". Deduction-based games aren't like this (e.g. Return of Obra Dinn). Puzzles aren't like this. Boardgame-like videogames aren't like this. Traditional point-and-click adventures aren't like this (they suffer from other problems though, beyond the scope of this conversation). Portal 1/2 are not like this in its core gameplay elements. Story-heavy, on-rails games aren't like this (though only because there is barely any gameplay to them -- and let me be clear that I think "movie-like" games are a game design dead end).

I do enjoy mindless fun and I'm not against violent games; I just think they are the easy way out for game designers. But I think ultimately making a "good" game goes beyond replacing shooting with some magic silver bullet (AI or whatever): ultimately you need good game design, there's no escaping this.

I don't think it's a coincidence the games I find more engaging are those that break the mold somehow, even when there's no "novel" gameplay element to them. Molleindustria's "Every Day the Same Dream" moved me profoundly, but there's no real tech breakthrough in it. It's just a bog standard Flash game.

I do think AI could be successfully employed in text adventures, or games where conversation with an "agent" was a core gameplay element. Imagine being able to Voigt-Kampf a replicant in an hypothetical Blade Runner game! (no, not Westwood's, which had a sucky VK implementation).

So the way this framework works with puzzle games is similar but slightly different. The important thing is to think about it in terms of what player skills are being tested to overcome a problem.

Instead of being a challenge to players’ reflexes and coordination - physical input on the keyboard/pad - it’s a mental challenge instead - exploration, observation, reasoning, etc. In this case the physical input is trivial but the challenge loop has the same shape.

In the case of Obra Dinn, each time you add something correctly to your journal you’re completing that same challenge loop. In an abstract, theoretical way, of course, but I find it useful (I am a game designer). Other games blend physical and mental skills together and of course there are many different skills for different games to test.

You’re probably right in that this doesn’t apply to every kind of gameplay, but most games drive you forward by putting some kind of challenge in your path, even if they’re not violent. I don’t know if that’s because it’s easiest, if it’s a convention from the early days of video games that has stuck, or if it’s a fundamental part of human nature.

Well, you need a challenge for it to be a game. Something to "play with". I suppose only aimless sandbox games escape this.

I don't think simply saying "this has an obstacle to overcome before you move to the next obstacle" is enough of a similarity. The gameplay loop of Counter Strike is nothing at all like the one in Obra Dinn or Return to Monkey Island. I don't see any similarity beyond "you need to solve a problem in order to continue". CS is like an e-sport; Obra Dinn and Return to Monkey Island are like theater plays with puzzles. One is made for replaying because you get better with experience; the others are meant to be played once, because once you solve the puzzle that's all there is to it. And so on.

Which skills are getting tested also makes a world of difference. If something tests my reflexes, it's radically different from something that tests my logical thinking. It's why gamers are drawn to some games but reject others!

In my opinion, all they have in common is that they are games.

> I suppose only aimless sandbox games escape this.

Flow theory suggests that players will self-direct to find challenges of their own making. A sandbox game needs to provide enough opportunities for that and make it suitably rewarding.

> The gameplay loop of Counter Strike is nothing at all like the one in Obra Dinn or Return to Monkey Island.

No game has one single gameplay loop, they're all meshes of smaller loops, but as you go deeper you always(?) end up seeing the same structure, almost fractally. The reason that I believe this model applies to both Counterstrike and for Monkey Island is that you can understand the difficulty progression for both games in the same way.

If the test of skill for aiming and shooting is primarily being able to move the left stick precisely and pull the right trigger at the correct moment, then I know that the challenge will be harder if there is more precision required (make the range of valid x/y position values returned by the stick smaller, e.g. by reducing the size of the enemy on screen - distance or physical size); or by reducing the timing window in a similar way.

In a linear shooter game you will use this (applied to every mechanic) to steadily increase difficulty throughout the game. In Counterstrike you can use it to balance and measure relative weapon effectiveness and also analyse why some positions are easier/harder than others.

In a puzzle game like Monkey Island (which predates all this theory) you provide the player an objective and put a number of complications in the way[1]. You can make a puzzle harder by adjusting the number of complications in the way. You can also adjust the difficulty of each complication. If one puzzle type requires observation skills you know you can make such a puzzle harder by making the object harder to see on screen: size, shape colour, animation, etc. If there is a memory test component, you make the puzzle harder by increasing the number of things you need to keep in working memory at one time.

You can then reuse those puzzle types again and again, controlling the difficulty of the challenges over time by increasing the difficulty of individual skill parameters and combining them with new ones. The same thing you would do in a linear shooter. The Witness is a perfect example of this.

This is not my own personal theory by the way. It's also not the only way of looking at game design, but it's a practcal method I've seen all over the AAA space, at least. It's not strictly formalised across the industry but Ubisoft internally called it Rational Game Design[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsjC6fa_YBg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqHAjwrNp70

> AI Dungeon, reveal that there will soon be new methods of maintaining a coherent story in a simulated game.

Somewhat coherent, for a few paragraphs. Still impressive.

For what it's worth telling GPT-4 you want it to simulate a text adventure game that lets the user enter their actions and dialogue, and pasting the setting and some characters works much better than AI Dungeon did when I tried it last year.

GPT-4's context size is much larger, and when it starts to misbehave, you can just remind it how the game works and it's good to go again.

I'm sorry or you're welcome.

I am glad I moved from game industry some time ago. The company I worked for wasn't bad, but it went bankrupt. Staying in the industry meant they I had to deal with less than great employers at some point, being overworked, having a smaller salary and my future growth perspectives to be limited.

That being said, I've enjoyed the years I worked as a game programmer, I had fun and I've learned interesting stuff.

Overall, game development feels much better when it is a hobby unlike a full-time job. You can experiment, without deadlines, but no money back on the other hand.

Being a solo indie dev isn't that fun either. You're looking for an investment of 1-4 years, without pay and without a guarantee that you're going to get it shipped and that it's going to pay you back.

Game development can be risky, especially if you've got bigger ambitions for your game. It all sounds great in your head, but progress is much slower. I spent 8 months on Unreal Engine, 8 months that I'm never going to get back, and I was never able to ship anything. Game development takes time and if you're someone who doesn't already have an expertise in asset creation, it's going to be even harder.

Speaking from a 3D game developer perspective, It also requires investment, not just hundreds of dollars but sometimes thousands because you can't do everything on your own. It's more than just 3d models, it involves animations, sound design, texture work, putting it all together and presentation and story and voice acting. So much stuff for a single person to handle.

It's great when you do not mind failure and putting 2–3 years into void, terrible when you expect something better than mediocrity.

Regular software development (web apps and apps) imho is much more rewarding. It takes less time to build an MVP, you can do it almost everything for $0 these days.

It's only risky if you feel a need to ship and profit from it. If you treat the game development process as an artistic endeavor, you can enjoy the time you are spending on it. Like an amateur painter creating a piece, just for something to put up in your own mantle, only for their friends and family to see. If you feel that you have to ship and monetize, then the process loses its magic.

This approach also requires that you work a day job, unfortunately.

I think I'd be fine with smaller games that I could make for kids in my family but that also requires some time investment. We're looking for 30-60 hours of work, even if it's a simple game.

I wish game development was as easy as web development.

I feel like this is true for most jobs.

Doing 3D/animation as a past-time? Super fun. As a career? Stressful and annoying

Doing programming as a past-time? Super fun. As a career? Stressful and annoying

Doing movies as a past-time? Super fun. As a career? Stressful and annoying

Doing music as a past-time? Super fun. As a career? Stressful and annoying

Literally any time I've gotten good enough at a hobby so I could earn a living doing it, and try to make a living doing it, it got way less fun and relaxing for me.

This. People often think that doing their hobby as a job means that they'll have a job they love to do. That works occasionally, but more usually they've just sucked all the fun out of their hobby.

Anecdata: My wife was addicted to the story in God of War Ragnarok.

She walked through the living room during the opening cut scene and exclaimed "Is that Toby Ziegler ZEUS?"

She ended up hanging out in the living room crafting, reading, playing on her phone, or watching her own shows while I ran around smashing and killing, and then would pay attention whenever a cut scene happened.

Movies and games are not the same thing.

But blockbuster amusement park movies and AAA video games increasingly are.

Well there's a headline ive been reading since the 90s.

What seems to have changed is that the stories were presented back then as a way for video game makers to tap into larger audiences, and to benefit from being in the good graces of the film industry. These days it seems to be a story about a Hollywood past its prime seeking to maintain relevance by partnering with game studios.

That's what I thought, but what's different now is that someone's about to make a photo-realistic gaming simulation and shoot a movie in it. From the article:

> “somebody’s going to invest in a [gaming] simulation that’s photo-realistic. And then they’re going to shoot a movie in it,” says one Hollywood executive. “It will happen. And it’s probably not too far away.”

And that's awesome because its going to basically democratize film making the way radio and TV were democratized by podcasts and youtube.

Hmm.. that would be pretty great, actually. podcasts and youtubers do radio and TV far better than radio and TV companies do.

You don't say; I honestly can't tell the difference between most AAA titles and Hollywood films nowadays.

No, I don't buy either.

Why not?

Cheap, vapid stereotypes all the way down.

CoD games from the past decade or so are particularly egregious examples, among many others. You could market them as Hollywood action thrillers and most people wouldn't notice a difference.

> No, I don't buy either.

If you don't partake, maybe that's why you can't tell the difference.

I don't need to be a world-class chef to tell you there's a fly in my soup and the soup is crap regardless.

That implies there is a fly in all the soups.

>No, I don't buy either.

Nothing of value is lost. Nowadays games are manufactured dopamine-gamifying cashgrabs and movies are propaganda outlets for whatever care-free non-STEM academics have brewed up as "current thing".

2000s was the golden era of gaming. Just compare remakes of RE2 and RE3 with the original PS1 ones. Or the new Wolfenstein series with Castle Wolfenstein.

I'm sorry but _holy shit what a bad take_.

>whatever care-free non-STEM academics have brewed up as "current thing".

Ah nevermind you're one of these people that think that not being in STEM is a crime, my bad, I thought we could have a rational discussion.

>Or the new Wolfenstein series with Castle Wolfenstein.

So, better in every possible way, with more brutal and satisfying fighting than Castle Wolfenstein ever had, still killing nazis (something that everyone ought to be happy with) ? I sure hope you're not angry about the fact that your crew is made up of a polish man, a jew, a mentally ill man and other kinds of people the nazis called undesirables making it a fun clap back at them. Right ? That's definitely not what your problem is, _right_ ?

I'm sure that you have no problems with games now including deeper themes like death and being a father (God of War), vengeance (The Last of Us Part 2), atonement (The Last of Us), paranormal activities (Control), or just being straight up absolutely great games with good stories like Prey, RDR2, Divinity, Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Octopath Traveler being varied and relaxing like Stardew, Terraria, being better metroidvanias than anything that came out before like Hollow Knight, Ori, amazing roguelikes like Hades, Dead Cells, Returnal, or just an infinite variety if I just go even in the last ten years.

Agreed completely, the parent comment is completely out of touch with the actual state of the game industry.

> 2000s was the golden era of gaming.

Things weren't better, you were just younger.

I was a teen in the 2000s and I had free time and every game felt new and exciting. There is 0 chance the landscape for media isn't a trillion times better now though.

> There is 0 chance the landscape for media isn't a trillion times better now though.

When was the last time a movie like the lord of the rings was released? 20 years, when it was released. Since then movies went more into soulless 3d rendering and so on. Big budget games took a similar path, back then investors hadn't figured out that they could churn out the same game over and over with new graphics so they funded a lot of novel game ideas, but that stopped and now most big budget games are very much the same.

The landscape might be better today in theory, but in practice the culture that made those days happen is no longer there and it wont come back since what made it happen was bridging old tech skills with new tech skills, the old skills are no longer there.

> the culture that made those days happen

Literally one movie, that was an unexpected hit is your contender for better culture?

In 2001 the highest grossing movie was Harry potter, and right below lord of the rings was monsters inc and jurasic park.

In 2002 Lord of the rings, Harry potter, Spiderman

in 2003 lord of the rings, matrix,nemo and pirates of the caribean.

Like how is that any different to now when you have pirates, spiderman, some children disney movie and fantastic beats which is just more harry potter?

> the old skills are no longer there.

Dune had more practical effects than lord of the rings. In 2001 the TV golden age had not started. Shows like the sopranos and the wire where struggling to find an audience. Friends and CSI reigned. Nowadays House of the Dragon and Last of US two high quality shows, with good use of practical effects are doing better than comparable mediocre daytime tv.

Even blockbusters are in many ways better. Andor is a million times better than anything from the 2000s prequels.

> Things weren't better, you were just younger.

Games weren't made to be cash grabs that will be edited in post.

Say what you want about games in 2000 but people draining all their savings on a game was THE news, not just another mobile/gacha game.

And if game didn't ship fully done it got panned. Today they get score based on number of dinners writer was on

> Games weren't made to be cash grabs that will be edited in post.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsiman_(video_game)

> And if game didn't ship fully done it got panned.

Bethesda is literally one of the most revered game companies and their bugs are as iconoic as their questlines

You're not addressing my point, sure Pepsiman was shit, but it didn't bankrot you or cause addictive behaviors. There were some Korean MMOs and stuff, but it wasn't omnipresent.

> Bethesda is literally one of the most revered game companies and their bugs are as iconoic as their questlines

*Despite their bugs. And even Morrowind caused uproar when it corrupted your saves and what not.

> it didn't bankrot you or cause addictive behaviors.

Considering the guy above was talking about RE remakes and Lord of the rings, I don't think he cares about gacha games as they are not triple A.

And sure those are bad, awful but they are hardly videogames. They are rebranded fruit machines. King the dumb company behind candy crush etc has more psychologists than programmers in their office to help people get addicted.

I do not think that is a problem of the gaming industry as entertainment, because it is not a videogame, its a Skinner Machine with a couple mini games to get the conditioning going.

> And even Morrowind caused uproar when it corrupted your saves and what not.

But it did not affect their scores, reputation or sales. Same as cyberpunk 2077 or probably Starfield later this year.

> I do not think that is a problem of the gaming industry as entertainment, because it is not a videogame, its a Skinner Machine with a couple mini games to get the conditioning going.

Gacha mechanics and its ilk are everywhere, from Battlefield to Diablo to Overwatch, etc. Most egregious example probably being Genshin Impact.

> But it did not affect their scores, reputation or sales. Same as cyberpunk 2077

Sure because rest of the game was amazing, but not even CP2077 escaped reviewers wrath. It got panned for poor perf and its user score on metacritic is justifiably low.

> Most egregious example probably being Genshin Impact.

Genshing is LITERALLY a gacha, is not that it has mechanics, its the main loop of engagement. The gameplay loop is just a breath of the wild lite

> but not even CP2077 escaped reviewers wrath.

You are kinda proving the opposite to your previous point. You said back in the day reviewers would not excuse poor performance, and now they do. Instead you admitted CP2077 got its reviews affected by performance but Morrowind didn't

> Genshing is LITERALLY a gacha,

It's not from what I understand. Main loop is the Explore -> Fight -> Unlock. Only unlock part is Gacha.

> You are kinda proving the opposite to your previous point.

You didn't read what I wrote.

> And if game didn't ship fully done it got panned. Today they get score based on number of dinners writer was on

CP didn't invest in enough dinners, people were shitting on lack of true trans inclusion before it released.

And now those reviews matter very little because CP2077 got patched into a usable state.

What saved CD Project Red was huge preorder catalog. They were profitable before CP 2077 was released.

> Games weren't made to be cash grabs that will be edited in post.

Arcade games were literal cash grabs, dating back to the 70s. Insert coin to continue.

Sure, but even those weren't this badly made at professional level and were satisfied with pennies vs 320000 USD to complete.

Things were better.

> 2000s was the golden era of gaming

I recently discovered L.O.L: Lack of Love (Dreamcast, 2000)[1][2] due to stumbling upon the soundtrack by Ryuichi Sakamoto[3], and I've been meaning to try to find a way to play it.

1: https://lparchive.org/Lack-of-Love/ 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.O.L.:_Lack_of_Love 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZjeC4BiUuM

L.O.L is listed as playable on the Redream emulator compatibility list.

https://redream.io/compatibility/

Most game studios from that time wouldn't qualify as AAA today.

There are new indie gems all the time. Tunic, Hades, Hollow knight, Risk of Rain, Overgrowth, Return of the Obra Dinn, Kerbal Space Program, Factorio, and the list goes on. Innovative gameplay, music, visuals are everywhere. Often indie games cater to niches. They don't appeal to everybody, which is part of their charm.

Just like blockbusters are usually average in most respects other than their budget. That makes for pretty good results on every single aspect, but given the budget, studios won't take risks by innovating too much in unknown areas.

> Most game studios from that time wouldn't qualify as AAA today.

They were still far larger than todays indie studios, todays indies are making great games but the kind of budget novel ideas had back then rarely exist for novel games today.

That's probably true in both gaming and cinema, as the genre becomes better known, and the unexplored possibilities space becomes smaller.

Still, there are AA games studios, even if most have been swallowed due to market consolidation lately.

GSC Game world (300 employees, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.), Team 17 (200 employees, worms, overcooked, escapists), PopCap games, etc.

But I kind of prove your point as most I can fit in the above list mostly churn out sequels to their previously succesful titles.

On the other hand, making good and technically impressive games has become easier and cheaper over the past two decades, with indies often reaching or going above the bar placed by AAA studios back then.

Tunic was made by a single developer, for instance.

Gaming now is much better than the early 2000s. There were some great games back then, but these days there is more quality and variety in every dimension and in nearly every genre (except RTS games which got split into MOBAs and factory games).

Just think about modern games like Elden Ring, BoTW, Overwatch, TLOU2, Immortality, Celeste and Hades, just to name some of the more popular yet interesting titles that came to mind.

How quick people forget what exactly happened in the 2000s lmao. Bethesda’s horse armor, Blizzard releasing the cash shop in what many people believe is the best World of Warcraft expansion, and Valve introducing purchasable hats in TF2. Golden era lmao

Horse armor in 2006. Oblivion was also commercially successful and showed a game would still be successful even if it was a buggy mess on release.

Blizzard introduced WoW’s cash shop in 2008 and sold its first pet, all as part of the incredibly successful Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Although really the first sign of things to come was with the trading card game and its in-game tie-ins. That was released in 2006. First pet in 2008 and the first mount available for cash at the battle.net shop was in 2010 with the Celestial Steed. Oh yes, people were upset and mad. But that mount was /everywhere/ in-game.

Worst offender by far was valve’s introduction of TF2 hats in 2009 and their continuation of cs:go loot boxes in the 2010s. This is not some outsider company btw, this is industry veteran and industry darling valve.

Golden age is such a joke.

TF2 hats were a dumb cash grab, but at least they were purely cosmetic. The orange box (TF2 + HL2 + Portal) was such a fantastic deal at the time, 3 AAA games for the price of one.

I will never understand the rage about the horse armor or WoW's cash shop.

"It's a cash grab!"

...then don't buy them? Like, I literally don't get it at all. It had zero effect on the game.

The biggest problem is being advertised to on a game I've already paid for and specifically in an MMO, being advertised to on a game I've already paid for and pay a subscription to. But y'see, it's not just being advertised to in the client UI or when I go to the website and there's an ad for a cosmetic item being 50% off for a limited time or whatever. It's going around in-game and seeing cash shop items everywhere acting as an advertisement that I can buy that item with real-world money.

Then there loot box drops like in CS:GO, or when a game adds in little inconveniences like limited inventory tabs, character limits, or games that add a grind and a way to avoid that grind via cash (XP buffs and the like).

It also sucks when the cash shop items take away from in-game content. Pretty sure this was an issue in WoW not too long ago when Blizzard added cash shop items that looked better and had better features than the in-game items you had to earn via raiding.

Then there are games like The Sims where you pay full price for the base game and then there are like a dozen different DLC packs of varying quality. I see they now made the game free to play (I paid full price when it was released) with a subscription option but I can also go to the DLC, add all of it to my cart, and pay $1,044.37 to get all the content. Awesome!

But really, the worst offender is CS:GO. You get FREE boxes in-game, pay for keys to open the free boxes you got, and you get those addicting animations and sounds. Literal slot machines being advertised to adults and children every day. How this hasn't been banned everywhere yet is beyond me. Egregious and greedy trash

> 2000s was the golden era of gaming.

Interesting. In my view, the 2000s is when computer games started their downhill slide.

Something tells me a lot of this incredibly subjective and depends on when you first cut your teeth on video games.

Same here, but I'm curious what you think causes this mediocrity?

I'm assuming the AAA game studios and Holywood know what they're doing, and money is definitely an objective. But why do they not succeed in telling an interesting story? Is it the focus on production quality? Is that the result of compromise between too many middle managers? Or simply: too much money, no one cares?

I think it's very simple: In a bid to satisfy everyone, they end up satisfying noone.

If you try to create a product for everyone, you will end up with a product so bland and void of character that noone will want it. A good product has its fair shares of fans and detractors, a bad product either has only fans or detractors.

So are you saying it's simply bad marketing research? Ie. if they would be able to narrow the target audience from "everyone" to a proper niche (say 18+ or teen age girls) they might succeed? That is: target a smaller market but server them better?

I feel that somehow, even with all those dedicated, inspired (and underpaid) creatives working insane hours, organizational structures (middle managers?) unintentionally prevent all that creativity from bubbling up. (I'm saying unintentionally here to suppress sarcasm but also because obviously a successful product is in the organization's best interest.)

>So are you saying it's simply bad marketing research? Ie. if they would be able to narrow the target audience from "everyone" to a proper niche (say 18+ or teen age girls) they might succeed? That is: target a smaller market but server them better?

Yes.

Consider games like Octopath Traveller which aim for and sell to a specific audience (fans of jRPGs from the 90s), they succeed where the likes of CoD don't. Successful products begin by knowing who you want to sell to and why.

Developing and selling a one-size-fits-all product to everyone, that is "the Average Man", simply won't work because the Average Man doesn't exist. The US Air Force will be happy to educate anyone on this. Noone wants a bland, vapid, sanitary product "for everyone".

>Consider games like Octopath Traveller which aim for and sell to a specific audience (fans of jRPGs from the 90s), they succeed where the likes of CoD don't. Successful products begin by knowing who you want to sell to and why.

2.5 million sales for Octopath Traveler (and OT2 doing awful).

Do I really need to pull out the sales numbers of Call of Duty, or do you admit right now that you made a horrible bad faith argument?

And please, do not use the "but sales don't mean it's good" argument either. You can _easily_ find 2.5 million people that truly enjoy Call of Duty.

> And please, do not use the "but sales don't mean it's good" argument either. You can _easily_ find 2.5 million people that truly enjoy Call of Duty.

People enjoying it does not mean it's good.

Otherwise McDonalds is the best cuisine of all time.

> Noone wants a bland, vapid, sanitary product "for everyone".

Well, empirically you're wrong. Unfortunately, there's enough of a market for Marvel movies and big-ass games titles to make huge profits, even if we feel they're too average, too mediocre to spend a single dime.

...But I get what you're saying. ;-)

It's "good" marketing research. Those AAA games with movie-like scenes do sell. Marketing research isn't "Hey, Dalewyn, what kind of game do you want us to make personally?"

It’s a tempting explanation, but were Hollywood movies ever not aiming for the biggest audience possible?

I buy the argument for games though, which historically have been much cheaper to produce and hence could be targeted to a smaller audience.

Hollywood movies have become open propaganda as a platform for beat you over the head messaging. They want the broad audience but they chase them away at the same time when they see the films. It makes people cynical and reduces interest over time.

> No I don't buy either

Do you steal them?

Hilariously, no. Those games aren't even worth pirating, let alone purchasing.

It’s been this way for awhile. AAA games have felt more like universal studios rides than games for the the last decade or so. I mostly stick to indie games or games from smaller studios at this point.

With the torrent of live service games failing spectacularly over the last several years, the Economist is here to tell you about why making good games is bad for business, that single-player is dead, what a 'live service' is (now and looking ahead to 2017), and the infinite money circle powering some of the sexual predators at Ubisoft.

Also,

> Developers used to finish making a game and go on holiday.

Citation needed? Maybe they meant: "holiday" /s/s/s

I assume 'developers' refers to the people who make the game, as the company can't really "go on holiday". With that in mind, developers used to, and still do, after (nearly dying) shipping a game, get laid off.

It's not mentioned in TFA, but Unreal Engine is also used by the BBC to create real time virtual studios for its various football punditry programmes [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N-XVHqUUOY

Gambling industry has been using it for a while now.

It has never been clear to me why people want movies and games to be the same thing. Most AAA games that are "cinematic" are just bad or mediocre movies that wouldn't get made or have already been made. For example, even some very famous video game designers have mentioned that they would rather make movies. Why don't they then? I think it's because the threshold to make a story good enough for a movie is a bit higher than a video game, even with the bar falling a bit in modern times for movies. There's even a question as to why gamers want movies made out of their favorite game. There's a reason why these usually fail, and it's usually because the underlying story is just not that interesting.

In my opinion, a video game should be a game and not a larping simulator for movies. Games like Journey, The Witness, The Last Guardian, Shadow of the Collossus, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Mirror's Edge, etc. should be the standard for video game designers.

Would add Whatever Happened to Edith Finch?, Abzü to that list

Besides the article being a bit behind the times ("Blizzard has turned World of Warcraft into a subscriber service", really, The Economist? You just discovered WoW?), most of the games it mentions are the kinds of games I find uninteresting.

WoW, PUBG, "games that retain players", no thank you.

For me, it's all about self-contained single-player games with no subscription or DLC (which I ignore), and no grandiose longterm plans. I hate "seasons" in games or DLC or any attempt at retaining me. I vastly prefer small, innovative indie games.

I think them not understanding Gaming as well as the Hacker News audience is expected. This is true of loads of fields; football presenters for example make statements about clubs that their fans find to be regularly incorrect, but then how can one person stay updated to the same level of detail for all clubs that a fan does for one club? This happens everywhere.

Football presenters are often former players, and they're seldom wrong on the same level as not knowing how the consumer fundamentals of how an MMO takes money from players. That seems like an error comparable to a presenter not knowing that football stadiums sell food.

I got this strange feeling that this article is behind the Times. The gaming industry has been getting progressively closer to the movie industry for about 20 years. I think they already have converged

Agreed, games like God of War, and the sequel Ragnarok cemented this for me.

Finally, the gameplay of a Michael Bay movie combined with the story of Super Mario

It might be countertuive but I've developped a sort of claustrophobia watching heavy cgi/vfx movies, I can't stand layers and layers of fake peoples, cities, ships, cars... It might not be aligned with my political views and might be sad to disclose but I kind of find relaxing watching the true cows, horses and landscapes of Montana in Yellowstone.

They have to diverge for the medium/media specific traits to emerge.

The 3D action MMO is the final medium/media.

Nobody is working on that.

It has tried and failed more than once in the past.

I guarantee someone is working on it now again, and eventually one of them will stick.

I am: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449

And is it a good thing or not? Both industries are notoriously for overtime and underpayment.

They are not.

The gamedesigners who are all "Show" not "play" are the worst. Same as authors who wan to "tell" and not "show" in movies.

Those who have "cool" scenes in there heads, which they want to make into a game, make for the worst, cause not interactive game experiences. Stop conflating a passive medium and a active medium.

Its even worse, if they glue singleplayer "movies" into multiplayer without gameplay considerations. As if the the ten other players want to wait for that cool "finnish" him cinematic to play the 100 time over.

The technology base might be merging, but god safe us from the merging of the creator bases.

I wish this myth would die, once and for all.

A lot of people enjoy games that are basically interactive movies. Hell, there's a whole market for people that want a game to progress all the way through while all they do is click the same button over and over again. Saying they have nothing in common is no different from trying to keep digital artists down because it is not “real art” like a painting or sculpture.

Unless you are a purist that only want completely analog movies and completely digital games then the creators and tools are already merged. Look at the direction of Unreal Engine for a great example and how movie producers are joining game studios.

The first Uncharted game is a great example.

Maybe for AAA games - granted, of which some are good. But the type of games I sink most time in (like factorio, satisfactory, stardew valley, terraria, ...) are not

I am tempted to argue that this has been in the process of happening ever since the first episode of Red versus Blue back in the early (mid or late?) 2000s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Camper

I was chatting about this with a friend as we were watching John Wick (2, I think)

Straight up 3rd person Shooter but as a movie.

And similarly, watching The Last of Us you can see how they broke down the screenplay into “levels” or “missions”. Maybe a bad example since it’s explicitly a video game crossover though.

Watching the Mandalorian straight up felt like watching someone live an Open World game, complete with sidequests (his bounties) and quest rewards and gear upgrades (here, for turning in that bounty you get another ingot of beskar steel and bam! new breastplate)

The only thing missing was Mando landing on a new planet and climbing the comms tower at the Spaceport to highlight all nearby Points of Interest.

Haven't I heard this one before? Multiple times? Over the past 20+ years?

What's different this time?

How many years until a small team of less than 10 people can produce a full feature film with generative tooling?. I'm pretty exited about the potential of powerful storytelling being in the hand over everyone without needing massive amounts of capital, especially if it shatters the entertainment semi-monopolies.

You'll still need massive amounts of capital to market the film, and that is where they The Industry That Demands The Same Same captures you. If the product is not just like all the others, the marketers have 0 idea how to sell it. I've been there: made a Mario style game for the original PSX during the 90's with a major animation studio... and no marketing firm could sell it, because at that time all PSX titles were "teen targeted" and they literally did not want to market the game because they themselves were not interested in playing it.

I think this has changed with Netflix and other streamning services: if you can get Netflix to buy it then the only marketing needed for Netflix is to put the movie online.

You no longer need to convince 1000s of cinemas and journalists that this movie is worth seeing.

It is harder with a game though even with Game Pass and PlayStation Network.

Good point. Now I'm curious the swag and favors bestowed on the Netflix Gatekeepers - they've got quite the power seat.

One of the most common uses of unreal engine for film is to use it to render in huge screens around the actors (instead of chroma), so you can record with the right light hitting the actors, or maybe even with the background already there.

I am curious how expensive these screens are, and the computers to drive it, but I imagine they are not cheap.

> One is that labour markets and production techniques for gaming converge with those of the film business, to the point where some envisage a single production process.

Seriously? "envisage"? Is that word really necessary to express this point?

I've seen some impressive audiovisual experiences in VR

Everything its a remix (look for the documentary)

Unreal Engine 5

For those who missed the Matrix tech demo from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU0gvPcc3jQ

They have been good decades.

Moviemaking, gamemaking and education are converging. I can see the day when blockbuster education games/apps are built with the budget of a Hollywood movie.

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