Del

You might have heard that a fairly large board game publisher recently crowdfunded an entry in a well-loved series using AI-generative illustrations. Now, here at Space-Biff!, it’s my policy to pass on any titles that use generative AI in place of human craftsmanship. (...) But I get that many people may not understand such a stance. So let’s talk.

What is art? Are games art? Is "AI art" art?

It's a delightful, beautiful read. It touches on Roger Ebert's views, which are more nuanced than I thought. You know, the famous critic that once said that "games are not art".

The article leans more towards tabletop, but it is interesting from a digital perspective nonetheless.

(and there's tooltip text on the images)

How does Underground gaming compare with Glorious Trainwrecks?

• They are both first and foremost anti-commercial.

• UG sees games as art, GT sees games as a form of expression. They don't feel quite the same. The framing is a bit different, perhaps. GT feels punk rock; UG, I'm not so sure.

• Both try to make it as clear as day that it's not about unfinished games, though I think perhaps for different reasons. UG tries to elevate complete games from the ocean of unfinished projects, while GT seems to want to dissociate from the narrow commercialist vision of completeness, without abandoning all sense complenetess.

  • But notice that GT promotes jams. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It seems to me that jams are a great promoter of unfinished games, and amplifier of Sturgeon's law.

• Both love and promote modding.

• UG has an inclination towards free and open source software. GT seems agnostic, promoting easy to use tools (klik & play and many others), weird tools (MZX, for example). But notice that Unity is in their list of recommended tools.

• I'd wager that the GT folks are progressist, just not very explicit about it. I think I saw something in that sense, but can't trust my memory.

edit: ONE THING I FORGOR! UG is young and small, but what I've seen here (especially in arcane cache) is trying showcase the best and more interesting games. GT, on the other hand, seems to have a culture of "hey, I made this thing, why don't you dive into it without having any idea what it is?" There seems to be little effort in presenting one's own games, and the curation I've seen there seems to take the form of "this is good, trust me". I've seen more verbose curation "around" GT, but not "in" GT.

When I read the title of the video, I was like what? What year is this? That ship has sailed a long time ago, friend...

But Frost's definition of indie is very much his own. It is not non-commercial, but it hinges on not caving to commercial pressures.

Funnily enough, three months after that video, corporate greed led Frost and others to abandon The Escapist and regroup under Second Wind.

(Hi! I'm new here. Expect me to go through and answer some old posts Soon™. I hope I can get used to Lemmy. Never got used to Reddit...)