3 ms·
In analogy to suspension of disbelief I'd like to postulate suspension of genericity: when I sink countless hours skimming text content in some The Elder Scrol
by usrusr 7mo ago
In analogy to suspension of disbelief I'd like to postulate suspension of genericity:
when I sink countless hours skimming text content in some The Elder Scrolls I'm not really convinced that much of it is a story worth consuming (my opinion of TES is lower than my number of gameplay hours might suggest), but I'm at least open to the idea that it might be. Thousands of players have paid good money for consuming those stories, do who knows, I might actually find something meaningful, perhaps something I'll one day connect with a real person about, so it's not necessarily a given that it's all just filler.
But when it's an LLM generating the story for me and only for me, there's no other possibility. It's a hamster wheel time sink and I can't even pretend that it's not.
- coffeebeqn 7mo agoProcedural generation has always had this problem where over reliance on it feels cheap and not meaningful - see Starfield from the same developer. I would argue the exact same effect can be seen with AI images or videos - no one is watching those for hours every day on purpose
- usrusr 7mo agoAnd yet there were a lot of games with procedural generation as their centrepiece that did not suffer from this at all. The original X-Com games come to mind. I guess we can somehow "feel" where it's simulation, where it's "honest diceroll" (also very much ok when the rules appear tuned well). But when it's too much it's too much, and an LLM game (where either the LLM remains in the loop, or it just spewed out a seemingly infinite heap of static filler) can't not be too much.