Category: Rants

An Ode to Storybook Brawl

It was announced yesterday that Storybook Brawl will be shutting down at the end of the month. It’s interesting. Storybook Brawl wasn’t the game I thought I’d be writing a retrospective of today. I thought that would be Crimesight, which will shortly share a death day with Storybook Brawl.

This won’t be a writeup about the gameplay of Storybook Brawl. If you want that sort of information, perhaps because you’re engaged in some technical equivalent of an archaeological dig, I did a writeup on that here.

Instead, I think it’s worth looking at how we got here, and why. After all, it’s not like Storybook Brawl is an inherent failure. Steam charts show it as having a high of about 500 players a day. And I played the game! Storybook Brawl was fun. I’m going to ripping into another game later today that had less than 60 people play it yesterday. And it’s not going down in under a week.

Storybook Brawl is, like many other games, not going to go down because it was bad game. It was fun. It was fair. It wasn’t gacha oriented garbage. It didn’t sell skimpy bathing outfits for its characters. It likely died because it did one thing, and that one thing probably wasn’t even a bad choice at the time.

See, a while back, Storybook Brawl was sold to a small scrappy financial investments company run by an effective altruist you might have heard of. His name was Sam Bankman-Fried. And his company was called FTX. Well, at least FTX was one of the 50 or so he had set up. I don’t know which one actually bought or managed Storybook Brawl.

Then, as you might or might not know, the whole FTX thing lost 8 billion dollars (give or a take a bit), and stole its users’ money. And the aforementioned Sam might have committed a lot of financial crimes. Oh, and they were a cryptocurrency exchange. I don’t think I mentioned that bit.

When Storybook Brawl sold to FTX, with the implication that NFTs would somehow be added at some point, I was pretty unhappy. These days though, I have a more realistic view of indie game development. Frankly, I can’t blame them for taking the money, even if it might have been tainted. Or stolen. Probably stolen.

For all I know, the FTX deal is what kept Storybook Brawl alive for these last few years, up until this month. Maybe 500 daily active users, and 93% positive reviews isn’t good enough. Maybe making an interesting, novel, and fun game isn’t what you need to do to succeed.

Maybe you need anime girls in skimpy swimsuits distributed from slot machines and marketed to children. Maybe you need to take money from elaborate ponzi schemes, funded by stolen money and the inherent stupidity of crypto.

There was a woman demoing a physical version of a Storybook Brawl card game at PAX Unplugged last year. I have no idea what will happen to it. Maybe it will get a theme change, and shopped around. Maybe it’s as dead as the servers.

It’s hard to tell if Storybook Brawl was another casualty of FTX, or something else. Maybe it was less a victim than a slavering thrall, remaining animate by the money FTX pumped through its veins, and eventually killed by the death of its host.

But it was a good game.

James Marriott, who hurt you?

This rant is a response to this opinion piece in the New York Times. You can read it if you want context, but your life is likely richer for not doing so.

There, I’ve fixed your writeup for you.

In his piece “AI spells trouble for creatives — about time too” James Marriott includes a quote from Daisy Christodoulou: “ChatGPT sometimes produces superficially plausible essays that fall apart under closer scrutiny. But plenty of humans write essays like that too. In fact, it is one of the criticisms of PPE graduates.”

There’s something ironic in including a quote about things being superficial and falling apart under scrutiny, in an article that feels incredibly superficial, and falls apart under scrutiny. I’d quote more of his article in this response, but that means more people might have the misfortune of reading his 8 disconnected and unclear paragraphs.

Because I’m not James Marriott, and I value the time of people who read my pieces, let me offer my quick conclusion:

Mr. Marriott, you do not have a problem with artists or “creatives.”Nor do your lawyer friends, who have people roll their eyes at them, or ignore them at parties. You have a problem with assholes.

The fact that every artist you’ve ever met fits this profile does say something about the company you’ve chosen to keep.

Anyway, let’s get back to your opinion piece. I’m not 100% sure what your opinion is, which is bad, given that I’ve read your article 7 or so times now. Perhaps it’s that “Artists are a bit too full of themselves, and need to be taken down a peg.” Have I got that right? Have I summarized in one sentence what took you eight paragraphs?

Of course, you’re a professional journalist, and I’m not. Actually, my day job is working for a software company that sells what, at least on some level, amounts to automation software. This is likely why you were able to craft such a wonderful headline that grabbed hands, and filled those “creatives” you wish to see humbled with such rage.

James Marriott’s writeup addresses none of the actual issues many artists and writers have with the current generation of what I’ll lump as “content generation technologies.” He doesn’t talk about how their underlying training data may have been taken and used without compensation. He doesn’t cover how many of these models can be flawed backboxes. He just seem happy that this makes artist artists upset.

And so I must ask, Mr. Marriott, why? Why does it give you such glee that so many might be put out of work? Why is it, that when given space in a publication that more people read in a day than will read anything I ever write in my lifetime, you take that space to make perhaps the most petty argument that can be comprehended in favor of AI generated art and writing?

This is barely an opinion. It’s not even a rant. It’s a whiny self-centered hope that an emerging technology will “make some people who annoy me unhappy.”

I wanted to close this rant out by making some more ad hominem attacks, but unfortunately I can’t. You see, I can’t find any more of his work. When you google Mr. Marriott’s name, you find a comedy YouTuber/musician, with 2 million subscribers, and a few hundred thousand views on each video, and no other articles or writing by the one being ripped on in this article.

Square Enix Letter from the President on 2022

The president of Square Enix wrote a letter recently. It has a lot of words like ‘blockchain’ in it, and that has some folks a bit twitchy. If you want to read the full letter, you can see it here. If not, I’m going to summarize it and give some thoughts.

I have a lot of opinions on blockchain and games. My primary one is, “You motherfuckers need to stop freaking out each time a large company, gaming or otherwise, puts out a press release with the words ‘blockchain’ or ‘NFT’ in it”.

This isn’t because I think they’re secretly great, but because letters are cheap to write, and long term strategic business decisions are hard to make. I said as much in my writeup on the letter from last year.

As such, I maintain my position that when a company makes a statement like “We are investigating forward facing technologies for future monetization including non-fungible tokens” what they mean is “Someone in the c-suite got pitched on crypto over Christmas/Thanksgiving/April 20th and now we have to spend a bunch of money to explain to them why it’s a bad idea.”

And while this years letter has a lot more statements about web 3.0/blockchain stuff, I maintain a high level of confidence that this won’t impact Square Enix’s current customers. I’ll get to why in a moment, but let’s review this letter.

The first 8 paragraphs say nothing related to blockchain. Paragraphs 1 & 2 are a recap of current world economic conditions (pretty bad) and current world conditions (even worse). Paragraph 3-6 lay out some specific business plans and moves that Enix is making, and restructuring efforts, including sales of various business units.

Paragraph 7-8 are the most interesting ones that aren’t related to distributed Excel sheets. These paragraphs note a restructuring of Square Enix’s publishing setup in which the eastern and western groups functioned as separate silos. In the statement, the company intends to make them function as “One Square Enix.”

As a cynical man, I have to wonder how smoothly that will go.

Continuing to speak as a cynical man, we get to the remainder of the letter. Paragraphs 9-15 are all about “Blockchain.” Paragraph 9 lays out that Square Enix has “focused on Blockchain Entertainment” and “devoted aggressive investment and business development efforts.”

Paragraph 10 notes that many governments have moved to regulate Crypto (possibly in reference to China) but states that Japan has launched some initiative called “Priority Policy Program for Realizing a Digital Society,” which frankly, I have no god damn clue about. I don’t know if this is pro-crypto, anti-crypto, or just window dressing.

Paragraphs 11-13 are pretty meandering, but can be summarized as “It’s hard to predict the long term impacts of Blockchain technology. Currently, the space is extremely volatile, and we are investigating what that looks like.”

Also, this gem:

“If we consider traditional gaming to have been centralized, then blockchain gaming must operate based on a self-sustaining decentralized model. It is that concept, that philosophy that I see to be key.”

Author Note: I hate this quote. It makes no sense from a technological standpoint. More on that in a future writeup perhaps?

Paragraphs 14 and 15 are the most important, at least in regards to crypto stuff. Paragraph 14 notes that while there is a lot of “interest” in crypto-gaming, that interest is primarily from speculators, not players.

And so we get to paragraph 15, the important one. I’m going to go through the full thing sentence by sentence, as it’s short but important.

“Our Group has multiple blockchain games based on original IPs under development, some of which we announced last year, and we are undertaking preparations that will enable us to unveil even more titles this year.”

Did you catch that? Original IPs! Which means that Square Enix isn’t going the Ubisoft route of experimenting by grafting NFTs onto existing projects. If you’re a FFXIV person, or just a Square Enix fan of various brands in general, you’re likely safe!

“We are also engaged in global sourcing from an investment perspective and will continue to take stakes in promising businesses whether we find them in Japan or abroad.”

I honestly don’t know how to parse this sentence 100%. My guess is it means that they will continue to actively look for valuable locations to invest in related to our gaming enterprise and web 3.0 technology regardless of where it’s located in the world.

“Blockchain has been an object of exhilaration and a source of turmoil, but with that in the rearview mirror, we hope that blockchain games will transition to a new stage of growth in 2023.”

This is wishy/washy bullshit. It promises nothing, hopes for a rich future, but makes no predictions about actually achieving this future. You can probably ignore this sentence.

Oh, and I guess it does end with paragraph 16, but that’s mostly a “Woo, we’ve been around 20 years!” and not much else.

So yeah, in conclusion, yes Square Enix spent money on blockchain, but it’s still “early days” (where have I heard that before?) and there appears to be no intention to apply web 3 practices/technology to existing products.

Oh, also despite that whole “Multiple Games” thing, I can’t actually find any released games or announced games that actually do use Web 3.0/blockchain tech from Square Enix. I’ve reached out to them to clarify, and I’ll update this writeup accordingly I hear back.

Why I didn’t get the Halo: Infinite Helmet – A Brief Note to Discord and 343 Industries

Or an extended response to a survey question.

For a while recently, Discord was running a campaign where if you streamed 15 minutes of Halo Infinite to your friends, you got some sort of special helmet. I say “Was” because apparently the event ended, and they sent me a small survey, asking why I didn’t earn the reward. This is what I put in their survey as a response.

However, this seemed a little rude, so I thought instead of just Tweeting this out at them, I’d talk about it for a moment. So let’s talk about cross-promotional campaigns, and how they feel as a consumer.

First up, let’s think about them in the abstract. I’ve made a handy diagram here to aid the discussion.

Purely from the perspective of a consumer, blue is the sweet spot. If a game I already play is giving me free stuff for doing something I already do/use/purchase, that’s ideal. I make no behavior changes, and I get something extra. This is optimal.

Green is the “Mild Annoyance” location. Games that have fallen into this in the past would include things like Sea of Thieves, and Hunt: Showdown. I like these games. I don’t really like watching Twitch. So when those games offer Twitch promotions, where I can watch Twitch, and get cosmetics, my response is “Urgh.” Whether or not I’m actually going to go through with getting those rewards is dependent on how good the reward is.

Have I done it in the past? Yeah, absolutely. Would I do it again? Depends on how cool the reward is. The important point here that I want to note is this: doing a Twitch campaign for your game in this situation, where I’m in the green zone, is that Twitch is NOT promoting your game. Your game is promoting Twitch.

Now, that’s not to say in the larger structure of this campaign that you, the game developer, are getting nothing out of it. But what you’re getting out of it is delicious metrics for the marketing team, and trying to push yourself up on Twitch’s most viewed metrics. You are rewarding me with in-game items for your game, and because I like your game, I will sometimes do something that is not playing your game, in order to get the items.

This brings me to the red zone. The red zone is when I am already engaged with the product or service being used for the promotion, and not engaged with the game being offered. It’s effectively just a paid advertisement for your game, like you’ve put it up on a billboard.

It’s also where I would like to make an important distinction between my Venn diagram, and this specific situation. If this product being advertised was something I hadn’t heard of, this would be further exposure to it. And maybe that would get me interested.

But as it is, I’ve played 80 hours of Halo:Infinite. I did a whole writeup on the game’s multiplayer. If I wanted to play more, I would. But I really don’t.

So here’s why I didn’t finish this quest: I don’t want play more Halo Infinite. You are trying to bribe me into doing so by rewarding me with an item in a game I have no desire to play.

If you really wanted me to play more Halo, you should have offered a month of Nitro or something. Give me something for the service I am already using.

Instead, you offered a free terrarium decoration with purchase of tarantula to an arachnophobe. I’m not sure why you think that’s an appealing offer.

BeReal – A Social Media Review

This is going to be a bit of a departure from the norm. Usually, I write reviews of games. But this week has been one of those weeks. One of the most weeks of all time. That sort of thing. So instead, let’s review a social media app.

The premise of BeReal is simple: most social media is at least sorta fake, because it’s easy to look for perfect moments and perfect images. BeReal tries to solve this by working differently. Instead of uploading your images and posts whenever you want, once per day the app sends out a notification. That notification is the start of a two-minute window to take and upload an image. You can’t see anyone else’s images until you upload one first, and you can comment on images.

And that’s it. That’s everything BeReal offers at the moment. Let’s talk about it.

As someone who sucks at social media, I like BeReal’s stated goal. The idea of making social media more accurate to depicting folks’ lives is something I think is good. That said, I don’t know that I trust them in that stated goal. After using the app for several weeks, I have quite a few problems with it, and wouldn’t recommend BeReal. I’ll start with the easy problems, that is to say, things that can be fixed, and then go into the harder ones.

First off, from a general usage standpoint, the app currently kind of sucks. It’s constantly buggy. Often it’s not possible to upload a photo in the two minute window. It constantly freezes, and is just somewhat garbage. Adding text to photos isn’t a smooth experience either, and neither is commenting. But these are all technical problems, and solvable with time and money. Which brings me to my second observation.

Money. At some point this app is going to need to actually make money. And it’s going to likely do so the same way every single social media app makes money: advertising and data harvesting. Enough people already have my data, I’m not thrilled to give it to anyone else.

Onto the next problem: actual usage as a social network. I have two issues here. First off, all BeReal lets you do is comment on photos and post a single photo a day. There is no messaging, no ability to ping folks to hang out, none of that sort of stuff. BeReal might be great if you’re a college student, constantly running about to class, or sports, or whatever.

But I’m a working adult. If I take a photo a random point during the day, there’s a 90% chance that it’s just going to be me sitting in a chair. The camera will be pointed away from my monitor because if I take a photo of what’s on that, I could get fired. So instead, you get a picture of my fridge and dishwasher. The remaining 10% of the day will be me sitting in another chair, and playing video games. If I’m out doing something, I’m not going to bother taking my phone out to take a photo.

You have now seen a majority of my BeReal posts.

And that’s the main problem I have with the app. I said earlier that I agree with BeReal’s stated goal: to make social media less fake. That doesn’t mean I think their stated goal is their actual goal. It seems to me that getting users to build a pattern of behavior around taking a photo at a specific point in time is primarily a strategy for making a popular social media platform, and only secondarily about making social media “less fake.”

As a note, you can take photos later and post, but they show as late posts. Personally, I don’t care, but my younger sister said people see it as important that you post in time.

There are probably more problems with BeReal. When I asked my sister who recently graduated about it, she said she found it annoying how first years using the app would all rush for their phones when the notification dinged, even if it was the middle of ultimate frisbee practice. That’s not an experience I have any exposure to, but I think I’d find it frustrating if everyone needed a selfie break in the middle of a zoom call.

Or maybe I wouldn’t give a shit. I’m just so dead inside at the moment.

Anyway. While BeReal makes a stated attempt at resolving one of the major problems with social media, it doesn’t really address the bigger issue: giving buckets of information about every aspect of your life to a gigantic mega-corporation in exchange for the ability to sometimes see a cute photo of a dog is a pretty shitty trade.

Thanks for reading, and more game stuff to come shortly. Like I mentioned, it’s been a week.