Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · 24d

Put it on LinkedIn so I may as well put it here. I’m leaving Asmodee but for an awesome reason (still extremely sad, though): I’m moving to Sweden to work on @worldofdarkness.bsky.social!! To all my American friends, I’m sorry I’ll see you less. To my European friends, I’ll see you more!!

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · 24d

Yeah I mean I hate to say it but for most people a single subtask is likely sufficient. But the nature of most knowledge work is pretty straightforward. We just exist in the little part that’s not, where Excel still works better.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · 24d

There are so few good PM tools that have this kind of granularity. Bane of my existence.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · 24d

RIP Robert Redford

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 27

Oh shit that’s awesome!!!

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

I’ve always considered those a bit like words and grammar, respectively. I think you need at least a solid foundation of the first to really puzzle out the latter, and the more words you know (arguably with diminishing returns eventually) the more able you are to grasp more advanced grammar rules.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

I think the word may simply be “meaningful,” but I get the difficulty you have in nailing it to a single word. I have it, too.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

When instead, if we knew the landscape, we would see so many things other media attempt are actually more suited to us, and that we can hit an even higher bar at it than them. But we don’t know what they’ve done, so we don’t try it, and so we continually fail at emulating what they’re best at.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

And more than that, because we do - and I agree with you here - view our form as not worthy of respect, we stoop to using the language of others and doing a shit job of it, we wind up in a position that only reinforces, in a vicious cycle, our need to be folk art to be art at all.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

End of day, I remain a believer that our form is in and of itself sufficiently unique that we can do something simultaneously new to media, of artistic merit, and still make big corporate bucks from it. My issue is that us not knowing our history or contemporaries limits to the point of killing us.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

I personally am against seeing ourselves as a fundamentally folk form in the modern era even if I believe we emerged from one, largely because it pits commercial endeavors against ones with innovative and transformative artistic merit against one another in principle rather than practice.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

Hahaha okay fair point, and fair enough

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

I may simply be entirely less forgiving and generous than you, and knowing both myself and you I can pretty assuredly say that’s the case in general, but I do not think I am wrong in this instance.

𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

That is… a lovely way to look at it, and broadly ignores the vastly enhanced opportunities for education and exposure that modern “apprentices” can enjoy if desirous.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

But if we are going to broadly adopt the language of another medium? That we’re now what, two decades into saying things are cinematographic in games, and we still barely achieve the competence of a freshman at USC let alone NYU in our big budget endeavors? That’s not frustrating, it’s embarrassing,

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

I do not care how you come to know about film or statuary or painting or music, or what you become informed of and by first, but damn if I am not frustrated by the seeming ignorance of one form’s artists of another, let alone my frustration with ignorance of the history of our own form.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

And I think it’s perfectly okay to arrive at it from either, or any, direction! But I am endlessly and forever a proponent of our chosen media as a legitimate art form, and I do not know how I can hold that opinion if I do not feel we are consciously in conversation with the rest of art.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

That said if more people were familiar with folks like Freund, Rittau, and Wagner, I think we’d have a better chance of really imprinting the vibe of the period on people. Same way I think getting folks familiar with the work of Bill Pope beyond his work with the Wachowskis would help.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

Haha I am well aware and I personally consider it a high watermark for the crossover :P I don’t just like you and hold you in high esteem because of our posting discourse :)

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

I’ll admit I find that very surprising, Torner. Given what you teach and study, I’d have thought the concept of cinematic play would be a frustrating reductionism in terms of both words of the phrase. I find it so uselessly broad as to erase the actual meaningful learnings on both sides.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

In terms of a film that exceeds what we’ve done in games, a game that hasn’t lived up to what film was doing decades ago? It can be sliced so many ways, it’s such a multifaceted failure to live up to the concept of “cinematic play,” that I’m not quite sure who to give as a comp for the broad failure

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

This message brought to you by watching the excellent documentary Visions of Light (1992) yet again and realizing just how little our entire form has taken from the history of cinematography despite the constant paeans to it, whether AAA or indie TTRPG.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 24

Not a secret opinion by any means (in some way it is the core of my persona), but GODdamn we need to work on media literacy of folks in nerd media. For a long time it was purely the signs/signifiers/grammar of media, but I’m getting to the point where I’m convinced folks just don’t watch/read/play.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 22

Just because I think it’s important to say for clarity, I do not like this. At all! In principle or practice in terms of the implementation of AI. We’re already too far into our slop era. But I get the business case for it if what I’m looking at is 20-30 years of selling something buyers understand.

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𓍘𓅱𓀁𓇋𓄿𓅱𓀗 (Joe) @iheartfargo.bsky.social · Aug 22

Something I think doesn’t get talked about enough is how a generation raised on Roblox, where the core value proposition is “whatever you want but it sucks and is slop,” is infinitely prepped for fully procgen slop AI games. That’s what they know, and buyers generally want what they know.

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