ranzware
Sundays are for ousting your editor from his throne while he’s on holiday. Here’s a roundup of some good writing from the internet last week.
This list of Games Writing Words I Hate by Riley MacLeod at Aftermath sets out some words games journalists would do well to avoid. I wrote a similar list over ten years ago, and it’s interesting to see many of the examples (“immersive”, “IP”, “franchise”) are still used by enough writers to merit continuing complaints from professional editors like MacLeod.
“A lot of video games writing words veer close to marketing words; while I don’t consider journalists the enemies of PR per se, we’re doing very different jobs, and the words we choose can make that clear. When marketing words creep into our vocabulary, we blur a boundary fundamental to journalists’ independence, and we also miss out on the opportunity to say the things that we as journalists are uniquely situated to say. Leave the press release talk in your inbox.”
(As long as we’re being pedantic, I’d advise people not to use “games writing” to refer to journalism, because it can be confused with writing for games. But never mind, MacLeod’s points on usage are sound.)
Pacific Drive Feels Like Storm Chasing, writes Kaile Hultner of No Escape. I like this interpretation of the driving roguelike. My go-to analogy would have been “really shitty road trip in a busted-ass vehicle” but a storm chase feels true to the spirit of the game. (Disclosure: Paul Dean, one of Pacific Drive‘s writers, has written for RPS).
“Sometimes – most of the time – storm chasing is hours of driving, navigating unfamiliar dirt paths and poorly-maintained pavement, constantly checking your route map and the GPS and Doppler Radar to make sure you’re not about to run into any, hmm, instability. Storm chasing can be incredibly dangerous, which is why preparation is so vital and why there are rules about how you do it. Nothing is stopping any yahoo from hopping in their 1996 Honda Civic and barging into the Oklahoma City metro area every late spring and mid-fall for a hoot, but smart chasers train first.”
Digital affairs writer Gerry McGovern sets out a case that our hoarding of data is an increasingly wasteful compulsion that benefits few and has a real and detrimental impact on the planet.
“We’re destroying our environment to store copies of copies of copies of stuff we have no intention of ever looking at again. We’re destroying our environment to take 1.9 trillion photos every year. That’s more photos taken in one single year in the 2020s than were taken in the entire 20th century. That more than 200 photos taken for every child, woman and man alive. Every year. 12 trillion photos and growing, stored in the Cloud, the vast majority of which will never be viewed again. Mind boggling and exactly how Big Tech wants it.”
What else lives in the cloud? Yup, it’s AI. In Bubble Trouble tech writer Bryan McMahon makes the case that generative AI is a market bubble and points out that one of the technology’s biggest companies, OpenAI, is incinerating money at an astonishing rate, with no prospect of a return, while China’s own versions of the technology are much cheaper to run and use. Some points in this piece are familiar and obvious to anyone who knows snake oil when they smell it, but it’s nice to have an instinct backed up by figures.
To start, OpenAI is burning money at an impressive but unsustainable pace. The latest funding round is its third in the last two years, atypical for a startup, that also included a $4 billion revolving line of credit—a loan on tap, essentially—on top of the $6.6 billion of equity, revealing an insatiable need for investor cash to survive. Despite $3.7 billion in sales this year, OpenAI expects to lose $5 billion due to the stratospheric costs of building and running generative AI models, which includes $4 billion in cloud computing to run their AI models, $3 billion in computing to train the next generation of models, and $1.5 billion for its staff. According to its own numbers, OpenAI loses $2 for every $1 it makes, a red flag for the sustainability of any business.
Look at these poor ants. Is their endlessly circling pheromonal deathloop a metaphor for something we humans also experience? It might be, but damned if I’m the one making the connection. It’s Sunday, I’m not working today.
Music this week is If U C My Enemies by Rubblebucket. Not video games enough for ya? Okay, have the entire soundtrack of South By Midnight. Oh aye. That’ll do.
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Kurt Indovina
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