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Comment by DarkNova6 | Hacker News Reader

A good and interesting article, but mimicing old games will simply not work.

While it would be admirable to have old features back, some of the largest problem these days is fragmentation.

Up until the 2000s, a new AAA game was a shared event. Fewer games were released, magazines acted as moderators for a common understanding of the market and each game tried to trump its competitors.

Games these days simply left more of an impact than a game nowadays ever could. Not to mention a younger average target demographic, which is now sticking to games of their prime.

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That's one of the reasons a future in which everyone watches their own AI generated programming would be so empty. Shared culture is important. It already feels like a loss but it could get so much worse.

i've heard people talk about a future where everybody gets bespoke custom media made by AI. I can see how it would work in theory now, where a machine has a list of my previous media consumption patterns and I can give it some list of attributes/styles that I'm in the mood for and it'd spit out media perfectly tailored to my history and tastes. but things could get really weird once you cross the threshold into a world where people grow up only knowing custom AI-generated content.

if there's no common culture around to immerse yourself in, how would your initial tastes develop? and how would you even come up with the language to describe what you want?

letting everyone chase their own highly idiosyncratic preferences could place people on divergent trajectories that result in the creation of distinct genres and artistic conventions that are unique to each individual. would it get to the point where art made for you would be incomprehensible for everybody else?

would people even be willing to share the bespoke art generated for them with somebody else? seeing the art tailored to somebody else could reveal private, intimate details. art would stop being shared and actual encourage isolation.

I think it's not going to happen, precisely because of this. We think we have a certain taste, but as individuals, we hardly do. We want to feel like we are part of something together with other people, and for ultra-customized AI entertainment, it would have to lie to us to give us that (not very sustainable).

"I'm really into this new band, but you've probably never heard of it, since AI generated it for me in particular"

You don't even need AI for the death of shared media culture. Just look at the end of broadcast and the rise of subscription services: movies like Star Wars or Back To The Future could only reach their status as cultural icons through the low and wide end of the licensing ramp. A successful cinema release might make a movie the talk of the month, but long lasting cultural relevance only came from broadcast repeats. Stuff that stays on a subscription will only ever reach permanents and hoppers.

This is correct, same theory as the long tail for music bands.

It was more of a monoculture.

https://youtu.be/WPmJoucUXNY

Right, when Doom came out, everyone who was interested in computer games and could get their hands on this game would absolutely do so. Similar for other major games like Diablo, WarCraft, Quake, etc. Even if someone didn't end up liking it, there was basically no chance they wouldn't at least try it because these were like THE games to play at the time.

A lot of that was because of piracy, though - and the piracy may even have been part of why they were so big. There were a ton of other games coming out at the time which have been mercifully forgotten.

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