alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 110 Posts
  • 71 Comments
Joined 3Y ago
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Cake day: Jan 28, 2022
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The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East
> At DICE and GDC this year I heard talk of a trend in game development that sent a chill down my spine: "deprofessionalization." As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is a phenomenon driven by the overperformance of older titles (particularly free-to-play live service games), large studios struggling to drive sales, and the outsized success of some solo developers and small teams. > > These three forces, he argues, will combine to "drive career professionals from the traditional, professionalized side of the games industry." > > "Some of these people will decide to go indie," he continues. "Others will leave gaming altogether. And in between there’s a vast spectrum of irregular working arrangements available." > ## Deprofessionalization is built on the back of devaluing labor > > Rigney offered some extra nuance on his "deprofessionalization" theory in an email exchange we had before PAX. He predicted that marketing roles at studios would be "the first" on the chopping block, followed by "roles that seem replaceable to management (even if they're not)." > > "The winners will be the creative renegades. I'm talking about the people making work that would have never gotten greenlit at one of these bigger publishers in the first place. Some of these creatives will start their own studio, or dabble in side projects...This is the only creative industry on the planet where one person can make $100 million making something by themselves." > > That held up in my survey of the games boothing at PAX. The developers of Mycopunk and Cat Secretary had some of the larger teams on the floor of about 5-6 people. Indie publisher Playism was showing off a number of excellent-looking games like Mind Diver and Break Arts III. Executive producer Shunji Mizutani told me the average team size the company is looking to back is around 1-3 developers (though he said it's not a hard and fast rule). > [...]his key example of a post-deprofessionalization game developer is veteran developer Aaron Rutledge, a former lead designer on League of Legends, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and Apex Legends. After leaving Respawn Entertainment in 2024 he founded a consultancy firm Area Denial, acting as a "gun for hire" for studios. > > Rutledge deserves his success, and the life of a traveling creative called on by other studios sounds romantic. But as a foundation for game development, it's a framework that celebrates the few over the many. It narrows which roles are considered "essential" for making great games (often designers or programmers) and treats other positions as somehow less essential. You could see someone like Wehle hiring someone like Rutledge to bring some of that triple-A experience to a small game. > > But that feels like the polar ends of who can benefit in the deprofessionalized world—developers with the stability to swing big for big-shot ideas, and programmers or designers with deep career experience that can be called in like a group of noble mercenaries. People in between will be left out.
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The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East
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Former PlayStation exec says "$70 or $80" games are a "steal": "As long as people choose carefully how they spend their money, I don't think they should be complaining"
> It feels to me like the closer we get to the Nintendo Switch 2's June launch and the, apparently, $80 games associated with it, the more people are fighting with themselves over what is and isn't worth it. But at least Sony veteran and previous head of PlayStation Indies Shuhei Yoshida is free from inner turmoil – he thinks relatively expensive, high quality video games are unequivocally necessary. > > "I don't believe that every game has to be priced the same," Yoshida continues. "Each game has different value it provides, or the size of budget. I totally believe it's up to the publisher – or developers self-publishing – decision to price their product to the value that they believe they are bringing in. > > Yoshida continues to say that, "In terms of actual price of $70 or $80, for really great games, I think it will still be a steal in terms of the amount of entertainment that the top games, top quality games bring to people compared to other form of entertainment." > > "As long as people choose carefully how they spend their money," he continues, "I don't think they should be complaining."
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Former PlayStation exec says "$70 or $80" games are a "steal": "As long as people choose carefully how they spend their money, I don't think they should be complaining"
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Former Employees, Community Members Allege AbleGamers Founder Fostered Abuse Behind Closed Doors
> In 2004, AbleGamers was established as a nonprofit dedicated to elevating disabled voices and improving accessibility in the gaming industry. For approximately 20 years, the organization has presented talks across industry events, raised millions through annual charity events, and acted as a consistent resource for developers and players alike. Throughout its existence, video game accessibility and AbleGamers became synonymous, and reporters, developers, and the public viewed them as an integral source of advancing accessibility. > > Founded by Mark Barlet, the organization worked with studios like Xbox to create the Xbox Adaptive Controller, PlayStation to create the Access Controller, and even paired with Bungie for exclusive merchandise. Aside from industry partnerships, AbleGamers purports to act as consultants with developers to teach about the implementation of accessibility options in games. > > However, roughly 20 years after its founding, new reports from former employees and members of the accessibility community describe abuse, financial mismanagement from leadership, and a board that failed to protect its employees. --- > According to the corroborated account of a former employee who wished to remain anonymous, Barlet's behavior became concerning a few years after the employee joined the organization. Throughout their approximately 10 year employment with the charity, the source describes several instances of sexist and emotionally abusive comments directed toward them. > > "He kept telling me I was HR for the charity because I'm a woman," the source said. "At this time, I was the only woman in the charity. He then sent me to work on a literal HR case that I now know was really illegal of me because I didn't have those credentials." > > The source claims that Barlet occasionally made light of the aforementioned HR case for several weeks, causing numerous employees to feel uncomfortable. According to the source, Barlet would periodically tell the source she was HR because she "was the woman of the group." --- > They described incidents including overhearing racist remarks about other employees, a time when they felt they had to verbally break up a conflict between Barlet and another coworker, and witnessing a number of inappropriate comments from Barlet such as, "We need to get the most f***ed up disabled person to be on our marketing, the one with real multiple disabilities." The source notes that in this particular instance, Barlet proceeded to make obscene gestures, mocking individuals with physical disabilities. --- > "During an all-hands internal meeting, I was two months postpartum, and before the meeting, everyone was either in call or in the conference room physically, and he said my jugs had gotten so big that he wouldn't know how to handle them," the source said. "About a week later, we were walking past each other, and he went up to me with his hands outstretched hovering over my [chest] and said 'Haha, they're so big, I wouldn't know how to handle them because I'm gay.'"
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Former Employees, Community Members Allege AbleGamers Founder Fostered Abuse Behind Closed Doors
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4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere
> It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X to Facebook to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan. Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist. > > "The novelty of a website devoted to shock and gore, and the rebelliousness inherent in it, dies when your opinions become the official policy of the world's five or so richest people and the government of the United States," the Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins tells WIRED. “Like any ostensibly nihilist cultural phenomenon, it inherently dies if that phenomenon itself becomes The Man.” > > My first experience with the more toxic side of the site came several years after my LOLcat all-nighter, when I was in college. I was a big Tumblr user—all my friends were on there—and for about a year or so, our corner of the platform felt like an extension of the house parties we would throw. That cozy vibe came crashing down for me when I got doxed the summer going into my senior year. Someone made a “hate blog” for me—one of the first times I felt the dark presence of an anonymous stranger’s digital ire, and posted my phone number on 4chan. > > They played a prank that was popular on the site at the time, writing in a thread that my phone number was for a GameStop store that had a copy of the ultra-rare video game Battletoads. I received no less than 250 phone calls over the next 48 hours asking if I had a copy of the game. --- > Collins, like me, closely followed 4chan's rise in the 2010s from internet backwater to unofficial propaganda organ of the Trump administration. As he sees it, once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 there was really no point to 4chan anymore. Why hide behind anonymity if a billionaire lets you post the same kind of extremist content under your real name and even pays you for it? > > 4chan’s “user base just moved into a bigger ballpark and started immediately impacting American life and policy," Collins says. "Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter, then six months later out of the mouths of an administration official." > > But understanding how 4chan went from the home of cat memes to a true internet bogeyman requires an understanding of how the site actually worked. Its features were often overlooked amid all the conversations about the site's political influence, but I'd argue they were equally, if not more, important.
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4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere
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alyaza [they/she]toGaming@beehaw.org•Giant Bomb is now 100% independent
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and the press release from Fandom, which previously owned them for some reason:

San Francisco, CA - May 10, 2025 - Fandom, the world’s largest fan platform, is selling Giant Bomb to long-time Giant Bomb staff and gaming content creators Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb. Financials of the deal were not disclosed. Giant Bomb’s programming, which was paused in order to work out the terms of this deal, will resume as quickly as possible. More details will be communicated soon by Giant Bomb’s new owners.

Statement from Fandom

“Fandom has made the strategic decision to transition Giant Bomb back to its independent roots and the brand has been acquired by longtime staff and content creators, Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb, who will now own and operate the site independently. Fans are at the core of everything we do at Fandom and we’re committed to not only serving them but also supporting the creators they love, and the sale of Giant Bomb represents a natural extension of that mission. We’re confident Giant Bomb is in good hands and its legacy will live on with Jeff and Jeff.”

Joint Statement from Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb

“Giant Bomb is now owned by the people who make Giant Bomb, and it would not have been possible without the speedy efforts of Fandom and our mutual agreement on what’s best for fans and creators. The future of Giant Bomb is now in the hands of our supporting community, who have always had our backs no matter what. We’ll have a lot more to say about what this looks like soon, but for now, everyone can trust that all the support we receive goes directly to this team.”

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Giant Bomb is now 100% independent
> After over a decade of corporate ownership, Giant Bomb will now be truly independent. We don’t work for a corporation anymore, we work for you (please let us know where to send our PTO requests and expense reports). We're not serving an algorithm or executives, we're serving you, the audience. We want to lean into what’s always made Giant Bomb special, and that’s the people you see and hear on our content, and our extremely passionate community. > > Here comes the part that you’re probably expecting! > > We want your money. We need your money. Give us money. But for real, this is a big risk we’re taking and keeping Giant Bomb alive is going to rely on the support of the community. As an independent entity now, we can say that all support that we receive from you will go directly towards maintaining and growing Giant Bomb and paying the fine folks that you see on our programming week after week.
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Giant Bomb is now 100% independent
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Inside the life of a 24/7 streamer: ‘What more do you want?’
[archive.is link](https://archive.ph/gimQT) > Six hundred and forty-two people are watching when Emily tugs off her sleep mask to begin day No. 1,137 of broadcasting every hour of her life. > > They watch as she draws on eyeliner and opens an energy drink for breakfast. They watch as she slumps behind a desk littered with rainbow confetti, balancing her phone on the jumbo bottle of Advil she uses for persistent migraines. They watch as she shuffles into the bathroom, the only corner of her apartment not on camera. A viewer types: “where is emily?” It’s the only quiet moment she’ll get all day. > > On the live-streaming service Twitch, one of the world’s most popular platforms, Emily is a legendary figure. For three years, she has ceaselessly broadcast her life — every birthday and holiday, every sickness and sleepless night, almost all of it alone. > > Her commitment has made her a model for success in the new internet economy, where authenticity and endurance are highly prized. It’s also made her a good amount of money: $5.99 a month from thousands of subscribers each, plus donations and tips — minus Twitch’s 30-to-40 percent cut. > > But to get there, Emily, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that her last name be withheld due to concerns of harassment, has devoted herself to a solitary life of almost constant stimulation. For three years, she has taken no sick days, gone on no vacations, declined every wedding invitation, had no sex. > > She has broadcast and self-narrated a thousand days of sleeping, driving and crying, lugging her camera backpack through the grocery store, talking through a screen to strangers she’ll never meet. Her goal is to buy a house and get married by the age of 30, but she’s 28 and says she’s too busy to have a boyfriend. Her last date was seven years ago. --- > Though some Twitch stars are millionaires, most scramble to get by, buffeted by the vagaries of audience attention. Emily’s paid-subscription count, which peaked last year at 22,000, has since slumped to around 6,000, dropping her base income to about $5,000 a month, according to estimates from the analytics firm Streams Charts. > > She declined to share her total earnings, and Twitch discourages its “Partners” from disclosing the terms of their streaming contracts. “You can have the best month of your life on Twitch, and you can have the worst,” she said. > Sometimes Emily dreads waking up and clocking into the reality show that is her life. She knows staring at screens all night is unhealthy, and when she feels too depressed to stream, she’ll stay in bed for hours while her viewers watch. > > But she worries that taking a break would be “career suicide,” as she called it. Some viewers already complain that she showers too long, sleeps in too late, doesn’t have enough fun. So many “are expecting more all the time,” she said. “I’m like: What more do you want?”
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Inside the life of a 24/7 streamer: ‘What more do you want?’
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Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads
> A recent tell-all book by former Facebook insider Sarah Wynn-Williams, titled "Careless People," is blowing the lid on the sheer depravity of the social media giant's targeting machine. Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook — which subsequently changed its name to Meta a few years back — from 2011 to 2017, eventually rising to the role of public policy director. > > As early as 2017, Wynn-Williams writes, Facebook was exploring ways to expand its ad targeting abilities to thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across Facebook and Instagram — a decidedly vulnerable group, often in the throes of adolescent image and social crises. > > Though Facebook's ad algorithms are notoriously opaque, in 2017 The Australian alleged that the company had crafted a pitch deck for advertisers bragging that it could exploit "moments of psychological vulnerability" in its users by targeting terms like "worthless," "insecure," "stressed," "defeated," "anxious," "stupid," "useless," and "like a failure." > > The social media company likewise tracked when adolescent girls deleted selfies, "so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment," according to Wynn-Williams. Other examples of Facebook's ad lechery are said to include the targeting of young mothers based on their emotional state, as well as emotional indexes mapped to racial groups, like a "Hispanic and African American Feeling Fantastic Over-index."
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Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads
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GTA 6's delay doesn't mean the games industry's in trouble - it's already dead
> I saw someone, somewhere, saying something like this recently: it's always easier to play the role of doomsayer than the optimist, because far fewer people seem to care if you're wrong when you're predicting something will fail. > > I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but in writing this one it is undoubtedly at the back of my mind. This is because I think the video games industry - that is, the established order of massive, western developer-publishers, each making multiple games that cost hundreds of millions and employing developers in the thousands - isn't just in big trouble, now that GTA 6 has been unsurprisingly delayed to mid-2026. I think it's finished. The games industry as we know it is dead; it just doesn't know it yet. --- > The past week has been another brutal reminder. EA has joined in the fun of major layoffs, in obliterating the positions of more than 300 people and cancelling yet another project in the brilliant, dreadfully cursed Titanfall franchise, as well as parking the beloved WRC series at Codemasters. At the same time, Fandom, the wiki farm owner of games media icon Giant Bomb, has seen major staff departures over feckless ownership meddling. And Polygon, which housed many of our friends and peers (including Eurogamer alumni Matt Reynolds and Oli Welsh), has just been sold by Vox and immediately gutted by Valnet, in a scandalous exchange. All of this senseless bloodletting continues, either implicitly or explicitly, in the name of yet more sacrifices upon the great altar of eternal growth. > > It's tempting to label these latest casualties as just another case of this industry's continuing penchant for idiotic, MBA-fuelled foot-shooting, but there is also more going on here. As former games journalist Alanah Pierce pointed out in a recent, widely shared video, they are happening, yes, because video games have stopped rapidly expanding their audiences and instead become, in investor terms, a "mature" industry. > > But also more astutely because of two other reasons: first, that those investors are taking their money to other, more speculative realms such as AI (which adds to the claims we reported that Muse is at least partially a shareholder play for more investment in Xbox). And second, that video games aren't just capping out their audience because there are no more people in the world to play them, but because those people are now spending extraordinary amounts of time watching short, exceptionally addictive videos on social media.
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GTA 6's delay doesn't mean the games industry's in trouble - it's already dead
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People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies
[archive.is link](https://archive.ph/TjqSr) > Less than a year after marrying a man she had met at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kat felt tension mounting between them. It was the second marriage for both after marriages of 15-plus years and having kids, and they had pledged to go into it “completely level-headedly,” Kat says, connecting on the need for “facts and rationality” in their domestic balance. But by 2022, her husband “was using AI to compose texts to me and analyze our relationship,” the 41-year-old mom and education nonprofit worker tells Rolling Stone. Previously, he had used AI models for an expensive coding camp that he had suddenly quit without explanation — then it seemed he was on his phone all the time, asking his AI bot “philosophical questions,” trying to train it “to help him get to ‘the truth,’” Kat recalls. His obsession steadily eroded their communication as a couple. > > When Kat and her husband separated in August 2023, she entirely blocked him apart from email correspondence. She knew, however, that he was posting strange and troubling content on social media: People kept reaching out about it, asking if he was in the throes of mental crisis. She finally got him to meet her at a courthouse this past February, where he shared “a conspiracy theory about soap on our foods” but wouldn’t say more, as he felt he was being watched. They went to a Chipotle, where he demanded that she turn off her phone, again due to surveillance concerns. Kat’s ex told her that he’d “determined that statistically speaking, he is the luckiest man on Earth,” that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler,” and that he had learned of profound secrets “so mind-blowing I couldn’t even imagine them.” He was telling her all this, he explained, because although they were getting divorced, he still cared for her. > > “In his mind, he’s an anomaly,” Kat says. “That in turn means he’s got to be here for some reason. He’s special and he can save the world.” After that disturbing lunch, she cut off contact with her ex. “The whole thing feels like Black Mirror,” she says. “He was always into sci-fi, and there are times I wondered if he’s viewing it through that lens.” > > Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software. > > What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality.
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People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies
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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•China is building a cyber army of hackers, report finds
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You can post articles critical of the US, EU, Australian or any other government, but if you post a China-critical text you are whatabouted to death.

this will be a blunt comment. people would have no problem if you were doing this, but just in a quick scan, something like 10 of your last 15 submissions on our instance (Beehaw) are you obsessively posting about China–often from sources that are straight up fearmongering and/or guilty of doing literally the same thing they’re complaining China is doing. one of the most egregious submissions you’ve made in this vein is quite literally from the House Select Committee on China, as if the American government’s committee on “competition with the United States” doesn’t obviously have a vested interest in portraying things China does in the most uncharitable light possible (much as China would for America).

separately, and in a Beehaw context: at least from our userbase, you will largely not find disagreement that China is bad–nobody here really needs to be proselytized to the fact that China is an authoritarian capitalist country guilty of acts of imperialism against their neighbors, and probably of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Xinjiang. in fact, partially because of our political disagreements in that space, we do not federate with many of the Lemmy instances you might characterize as “pro-China.” this fact makes it incredibly conspicuous when someone like yourself obsessively posts every neurosis a Western country has about China on our instance. we’ve had a pattern of several users doing this in the past year or so–and at this point it’s blatantly propagandistic and Sinophobic bullshit we’re just not interested in letting people use our instance for.

even if you aren’t doing this for propagandistic reasons, though, and just think you need to push back against pro-China campists on Lemmy or whatever: this is also not your personal anti-China dumping ground, nor is it a place for you to shadowbox with campists who think China is cool. if you are genuinely posting in good faith: diversify your submissions and, if you don’t, at least drop the persecution complex when people push back on your voluminous China posting; if this is just using us as some middle-man in a bigger thing: going forward we’re going to aggressively prune these types of post.

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Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says executive
> The DOJ wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google’s own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals. The court has already ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in search, partly thanks to exclusionary deals that make it the default engine on browsers and phones, depriving rivals of places to distribute their search engines and scale up. But while Firefox — whose CFO is testifying as Google presents its defense — competes directly with Chrome, it warns that losing the lucrative default payments from Google could threaten its existence. > > Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added. > > Losing that revenue all at once would mean Mozilla would have to make “significant cuts across the company,” Muhlheim testified, and warned of a “downward spiral” that could happen if the company had to scale back product engineering investments in Firefox, making it less attractive to users. That kind of spiral, he said, could “put Firefox out of business.” That could also mean less money for nonprofit efforts like open source web tools and an assessment of how AI can help fight climate change.
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Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says executive
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Even Atari Game Cartridges Are Getting More Expensive Because Of Tariffs
> Atari has put out updated versions of multiple classic consoles in recent years, following up its Atari 2600+ replica console from 2023 with the 7800+ in late 2024, all accompanied by honest-to-god physical cartridge releases containing classic Atari games like Berzerk, Space Duel, and Ninja Golf. However, the retro game maker just informed fans that those physical copies will now be more expensive due to tariffs. > Atari’s ‘80s-inpsired gaming lineup includes the wood-paneled 2600+ and streamlined 7800+, along with the Atari 400 Mini and VCS digital gaming set top boxes. The prices for those appear to remain unchanged, but the replica cartridges will seemingly go from $30 to $33, a small but noticeable bump due to recently levied import taxes. If you want the entire collection of old-school cartridges, you’ll easily end up spending over $60 in tariff-adjusted price increases alone.
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Even Atari Game Cartridges Are Getting More Expensive Because Of Tariffs
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After Years of Struggle, Blizzard Has Found Itself in Uncharted Territory: Overwatch Players Are Having Fun Again
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After Years of Struggle, Blizzard Has Found Itself in Uncharted Territory: Overwatch Players Are Having Fun Again
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Elon Musk's X lost 11 million users in the EU over the past 5 months
> X's user base in the European Union is now officially lower than it was prior to Elon Musk's acquisition of the company. > > And that's according to a new report from Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter, but you knew that). The social media platform now has a total of 94.8 million monthly active users in the EU. > > That's a loss of roughly 11 million European users from X's previous transparency report, as highlighted by Social Media Today. > > Mashable previously reported on X's declining user base in the EU last fall. Now, we know that X's European user base has continued to drop. In 2022, before Musk acquired the social media platform, the company had more than 100 million users in Europe.
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Elon Musk's X lost 11 million users in the EU over the past 5 months
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The games industry is screwed. [26:11]
> [I spent well over a month talking to investors to get the actual data behind what’s happening to the games industry. I was going to say “enjoy!” but it’s, uh, not great. ](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dqnjwcs52efhcva7smwhotul/post/3lo2kp4gon22e)
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The games industry is screwed. [26:11]
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From 4chan to the White House: James Ball explains how failing to take games seriously has fed the populist right
> Big question: Why have alienated young men, especially in America, found their home in the populist political right? Part of the answer is that the populist right takes video games seriously. > > Mind the gap: Games have typically been treated as a bit of a joke by wider society. Long-held stereotypes about games being worthless, provoking violence or turning players into addicts has created a gap between the experience of the millions who play games and the perception of the medium in wider society. > > The art of persuasion: For most of us who love games, our way of dealing with this problem has been to try to change minds. We’ve talked about games as an economic powerhouse. We’ve argued that games have cultural power. And we’ve sought to support research that’s provided a level-headed perspective on whether games make people aggressive (they don’t) or if they negatively affect mental health (again, a pretty firm nope). > > Tunnelling down: But others reacted differently. A small number of ‘always online’ ‘transgressive’ young men, especially in America, have seen the rejection of games in liberal democratic culture as part of a wider betrayal of their personal and political identity. > > Worrying development: And according to James Ball, Political Editor at The New European and author of The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World, those disaffected people have successfully been courted by the populist right and authoritarian governments - fuelling their causes with activism and energy that is helping dismantle the liberal order.
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From 4chan to the White House: James Ball explains how failing to take games seriously has fed the populist right
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Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI
> Duolingo will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle,” according to an all-hands email sent by cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn announcing that the company will be “AI-first.” The email was posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn account. > > According to von Ahn, being “AI-first” means the company will “need to rethink much of how we work” and that “making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there.” As part of the shift, the company will roll out “a few constructive constraints,” including the changes to how it works with contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that “headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.” > > von Ahn says that “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees” and that “this isn’t about replacing Duos with AI.” Instead, he says that the changes are “about removing bottlenecks” so that employees can “focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks.”
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alyaza [they/she]toGaming@beehaw.org•One Million Chessboards · eieio.games
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One Million Chessboards · eieio.games
> I made a website. It’s called One Million Chessboards. It has one million chessboards on it. > > Moving a piece moves it for everyone, instantly. There are no turns. You can move between boards. > > ## What > > Well last year I made this game called One Million Checkboxes. > > It was a pretty fun time! So I thought I’d do something like this again. > > I worked really hard on this one. I hope you like it. > > ## How > > This was the most technically challenging thing that I’ve worked on in a long time. I’m going to save a full technical writeup until I see how my decisions pan out, since I think there’s a decent chance I’ll need to make a lot of changes. > > But I’ll summarize a few things for you. > > - Unlike One Million Checkboxes, I designed this for scale > - The game runs on a single server (!) > - The board is stored fully in-memory; it’s a 2D array of 64 million uint64s > - The backend is written in go. This is my first go project. > - I use a single writer thread, tons of reader threads, and coordinate access to the board with a mutex > - The frontend optimistically applies all moves you make immediately. It then builds up a dependency graph of the moves you’ve made, and backs them out if it receives a conflicting update before the server acks your move. > > That last part - optimistic move application with what games people sometimes call “rollback” - is about 1,600 lines of code that took me a ~7 days of fulltime work to write. I don’t remember the last time I wrestled with a problem that hard!
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One Million Chessboards · eieio.games
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Is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion still fun for a first-time player in 2025?
> For many gamers, this week's release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered has provided a good excuse to revisit a well-remembered RPG classic from years past. For others, it's provided a good excuse to catch up on a well-regarded game that they haven't gotten around to playing in the nearly two decades since its release. > > I'm in that second group. While I've played a fair amount of Skyrim (on platforms ranging from the Xbox 360 to VR headsets) and Starfield, I've never taken the time to go back to the earlier Bethesda Game Studios RPGs. As such, my impressions of Oblivion before this Remaster have been guided by old critical reactions and the many memes calling attention to the game's somewhat janky engine. > > Playing through the first few hours of Oblivion Remastered this week, without the benefit of nostalgia, I can definitely see why Oblivion made such an impact on RPG fans in 2006. But I also see all the ways that the game can feel a bit dated after nearly two decades of advancements in genre design.
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Is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion still fun for a first-time player in 2025?
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When the world connected on Skype
> Skype, the online video-calling service, is shutting down in May after more than two decades of service. For those of a certain generation, Skype changed everything. > > Before it launched in 2003, making international calls 📱 was prohibitively expensive and few viable digital alternatives existed. Skype offered users a cheap and easy way to call anyone in the world, skirting the draconian landline industry. When Skype added video calls a few years later, it felt as if the future had arrived: Students used Skype to stay connected to families back home 🤙, international friendships were born 🤝, and a generation of cross-border relationships began ❤️ — or ended 💔 — over the service. By the late 2000s, Skype was so ubiquitous that its name became a verb, much like Xerox and Google. Its bouncy ringtones and audio notifications were iconic. 🎶 > > At its peak, Skype had about 300 million users around the world. But it was a product of the desktop era, and as users went mobile, Skype lost its edge to upstarts like WhatsApp and FaceTime. Today, the app is forgotten on most phones and computers, particularly in the West. ⏰ > > The platform still has dedicated pockets of users in countries like Turkey, Russia, India, and the Philippines, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. “Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications and supporting countless meaningful moments,” Microsoft said in a blog post announcing its imminent shutdown. 😴 > > Before Skype goes the way of other early internet icons like AOL Instant Messenger and Friendster, Rest of World readers shared their favorite memories of the service. Here are their stories. 🙇
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When the world connected on Skype
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Indie Game Roundup (Apr. 25, 2025)
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Indie Game Roundup (Apr. 25, 2025)
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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•Slate Truck is a $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen
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2•24d

the website for it is pretty comprehensive as far as i can tell

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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•Slate Truck is a $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen
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21•24d

this strikes me as a fascinating idea–with a couple of eyebrow-raising backers–that is probably going to flop spectacularly because it’s too minimalistic to the point of just being cheapskate

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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•DeepSeek: The Chinese Communist Party’s newest AI advance is making repression smarter, cheaper, and more deadly. Even worse, they aim to export it to the world.
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6•1M

FYI: we’ve banned this user because after communicating our disinterest in being used as an anti-China dumping ground to shadowbox with people who can’t even see our instance, the user responded with a bunch of hostility about people pushing back on them.

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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•Risks to children playing Roblox ‘deeply disturbing’, say researchers
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18•1M

yeah, no shit, that’s not the same as “your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features”–not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what’s happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don’t have a company without systematically exploiting children

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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•Risks to children playing Roblox ‘deeply disturbing’, say researchers
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24•1M

it’s been very strange to watch this game i grew up on–pretty innocuously, i should note–gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off

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alyaza [they/she]toGaming@beehaw.org•have positive reviews destroyed games?
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2M

What you mean? Have you seen all those articles publisher website just giving out 8-9 on every damn game they get early access to?

this has been an issue people have complained about in gaming journalism for–and i cannot stress this sufficiently–longer than i’ve been alive, and i’ve been alive for 25 years. so if we’re going by this metric video gaming has been “ruined” since at least the days of GTA2, Pokemon Gold & Silver, and Silent Hill. obviously, i don’t find that a very compelling argument.

if anything, the median game has gotten better and that explains the majority of review score inflation–most “bad” gaming experiences at this point are just “i didn’t enjoy my time with this game” rather than “this game is outright technically incompetent, broken, or incapable of being played to completion”.

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alyaza [they/she]toGaming@beehaw.org•have positive reviews destroyed games?
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5•2M

no, obviously not; is this a serious question? because i have no idea how you could possibly sustain it

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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic
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4•3M

you’re being very weird in this specific chain of comments, and it’s unpleasant to read and dragging down otherwise pretty decent conversation. dial it back, or you’ll catch a temporary ban.

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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•On May 5, Microsoft’s Skype will shut down for good
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4•3M

hardly surprising. we talk about enshittification today but Skype was one of the most egregious offenders before the term was even coined, in late-stage Skype (circa 2016-2017) i couldn’t even run the fucking thing without lag because of in-line ads. the user experience was frankly awful, and once you’ve used something like Discord or Zoom there’s just never any reason to go back.

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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic
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3•3M

come on, this is not productive discussion

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alyaza [they/she]toGaming@beehaw.org•Marvel Rivals Director Shares That He And His Team Were Just Laid Off
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17•3M

the going theory is that this is effectively the western division of NetEase getting axed because they’re not important enough and “cost too much” to keep around

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alyaza [they/she]toGaming@beehaw.org•Marvel Rivals Director Shares That He And His Team Were Just Laid Off
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20•3M

resetERA is an unusual source for this, but the OP is just direct screencaps off of LinkedIn of people saying they were laid off, and it’s hard to get more definitive than that in terms of sourcing

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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•“AI took my job, literally”—Gizmodo fires Spanish staff amid switch to AI translator
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9•2Y

joint statement by GMG Union and Onion Union:

The Onion and GMG Unions are saddened to report that our colleagues at Gizmodo Español, a site that once housed original, quality Spanish-language reporting, have been replaced en masse by an AI translation service. Instead of relying on the talented journalists at Gizmodo Español, G/O Media has enacted an automation that takes English-language Gizmodo articles, translates them poorly into Spanish, and posts them on Gizmodo Español almost immediately, with no Spanish-language editing. We offer our deepest sympathies to the Gizmodo Español team and share in their frustration as jobs for working journalists continue to disappear worldwide. The Gizmodo Español team comprised of four full-time employees—one editor and three writers—who have been employed by G/O media for over a combined 25 years. Because of the nature of their yearly contracts, they will not receive adequate severance.

They were employed at half the rate of American staff writers due to the nature of these contracts, and were rarely offered raises. Unfortunately this move to eliminate the Español team represents yet another broken promise from G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller and Editorial Director Merrill Brown, who have repeatedly said that the company’s AI experiments were intended to supplement human writing, not replace it. This week, a team of four has been [replaced] by an undisclosed automated machine translation service. Adding insult to injury, when the Gizmodo staff objected to having their bylines attached to machine translations, G/O management removed all bylines from Gizmodo Español—even the bylines of the four journalists who were laid off by G/O Media this week. We remain stringently opposed to G/O Media’s use of AI-generated content and pledge to continue fighting on behalf of journalists and the indispensable public service they provide.

As always, we appreciate your support — and your continual support of real journalism.

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alyaza [they/she]toGaming@beehaw.org•Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun?
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2Y

fyi to you and @sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz, lemmy has inbuilt spoiler markup. it’s:

::: spoiler spoiler
[text]
___
:::

so for example

test

test

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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries
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3•2Y

like, to be clear: the scope of the article is laid out by those qualifiers, so naturally it’s not going to prescribe how to get rid of in-built batteries in consumer electronics since they fall outside of that scope. even so, it addressed the quibble you’re getting at here pretty bluntly, i think:

Of course, outsourcing chemical energy storage to the device is not the most sustainable option. The production of lithium-ion batteries requires fossil fuels, and (unlike lead-acid batteries) they are not recycled. The best solution, of course, is to reduce the use of electrical devices. But charging them with direct solar energy is a lot more sustainable and efficient than via other batteries or a fossil-fueled electricity grid. If we use high-tech devices, then preferably in the smartest way possible.

and Low-Tech Magazine has previously covered alternatives to battery technology in other posts. so i’m just not seeing what the objection here is.

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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries
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6•2Y

yes, i literally posted it. the article’s context makes it pretty obvious that “Off-Grid Without Batteries” refers to off the power grid (because you’re receiving direct solar energy) without batteries for holding your solar panel’s energy (because those are carbon intensive and expensive), hence i don’t know what the purpose of your comment is and it appears entirely derived from reading the headline and thumbnail alone.

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alyaza [they/she]toTechnology@beehaw.org•Direct Solar Power: Off-Grid Without Batteries
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4•2Y

this sounds like a comment you’re making based entirely off of the thumbnail; i would strongly encourage you to actually read the article if so

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