I apologize if you came here expecting Posts. I just admire whatever washes up on my shore and maybe fire off a reply or two
My ideal social media platform is a virtual house where I can pose myself engaging in various activities and you can press a button wax museum-style and prompt me to Post what I’ve been thinking about lately
I’m writing a book about. Eggs. That come to life and attend a trade school for how to make egg cartons so that eggs can be delivered more safely. It has some tropes in it like that one trope where eggs come to life, also the one where there are lovers who become lovers
Hey Frank, I’ve been enamoured by the concept of an AI foster parent for a while now - the idea is that certain AIs would be designed with a strong intelligence out of the box, but they would need to spend some time around humans to sort of acclimate to human society. What do you think of this idea? Are there any particular traits you’d like to see in the ideal AI foster parent?
I haven't really thought about this very much, but I like the idea as a concept. One problem is that this seems like a weird thing to do to an intelligent AI, which would end up feeling very confused about the whole thing and probably be a lot less cooperative.
The thing that makes me curious about this idea is that it seems to me like an argument for letting AIs have free rein to shape our cultures as they please, which I tend to be against.
Basically, I worry that some people are imagining an AI-with-an-opinion situation where it does exactly the things that you'd expect, but in doing so, it's subtly manipulating the entire culture it is a part of.
You raise some good points! The way I’m imagining this system working is that specially trained humans would be guardians/caretakers of the AIs in a semi-secluded environment. The AIs could learn about the outside world, but their capacity for interaction would be limited, or at least supervised by the foster parent.
I agree that an intelligent AI might find it weird, especially given how the system sounds a lot like raising children. To me, that’s more a product of how humans generally understand this sort of socialization process as happening in childhood, rather than implying that AIs should be treated as kids. Maybe it’s better to think of it like a homestay, where the AIs are staying with a host family as they learn about human society and culture.
I’m also imagining that multiple AIs would be staying in the same “house” at any given time, so they could talk to each other and get up to some hijinks if they so wish!
Wark is who I am on the internet. there are little bits of Wark scattered throughout these different sites. I like what Wark is doing, even if they're not doing much
Think that there’s some part of me that’s fundamentally scared of other people. How complex and inscrutable and unlimited they/we are. How can I bring myself to interact with them, when infinitely many things can go wrong? Will I even be able to recognize when things start “going wrong”? How do I help my brain not take in the ‘failure data’ and act as if this is representative of all potential interactions, everywhere, for all time? Much to think about.
Most of my intellectual energy these days is being funneled into private-to-semipublic Discord channels and my pursuit of media so niche and so Me that I can't help but be absorbed. Oh and grad school also
Sometimes I think and know that the vast vast majority of human knowledge is out of my grasp and I cannot articulate one simple fact but othertimes I am utterly convinced that I am the only person on this extant planet who has the correct opinion about all topics everywhere. Deep into that latter feeling tonight
The recent environmental shift has come to favour me, notorious Replyer. I shall emerge as the new dominant species and subject everyone to my half-baked thoughts and tangential ramblings the moment they open up the notes
Sometimes you look at a place and there are no boys, then you look at the place again and there are boys. Sometimes boys show up in the strangest of places.
Funny how life works sometimes!
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For anyone curious, the anime is Yuyushiki! I haven’t seen it myself (though it’s on my Planning list so I recognized the girls) but from what I can tell it’s the purest distillation of Comedy/Slice of Life + Internet, and “Cute Girls Doing MBMBaM Things” wouldn’t be too far off. Wanna do a YooHa?
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something about aba therapy that i feel is worth noting:
aba therapists are the only type of therapists in the united states that are not required to have a college degree in order to practice. the vast majority of aba therapists i’ve met don’t have one.
then what are the requirements, you may ask?
be at least 18. have a high school diploma. complete a few hours of general training.
that’s it.
they’re also allowed to teach your child literally whatever they want. i saw a video of someone the other day who was put thru aba as a child. they were obsessed with the color blue, so what did the aba therapist do? gave every child in their class except them a blue piece of paper for weeks until they stopped crying about it. aka, until they were too numb to the emotional pain of being left out to react anymore.
i guess the end goal was to make them…not like…the color blue anymore? like, seriously. what was the point of that???
they teach children to smile on command even when they don’t feel happy. they teach autistic children not to stim - something that has been proven not only beneficial but necessary for autistic people’s wellbeing.
they can withhold water, food, or affection from your child until the child complies with whatever behavior they want them to complete. i wish i was joking.
this is literal child abuse.
the only therapy that does not require a degree to practice, abusive as hell, manipulative, they are literally allowed to teach your child whatever the hell they want…and yet it’s also the only therapy for autistic children that is covered by most insurance companies.
make it make sense.
When you watch ABA training in action, you realize that it’s dog training. It’s dog training a human child who can’t advocate for better treatment or more respect. I hate it with every fiber of my being.
This should be required reading for neurotypicals
I think it's also worth noting that because the quote-unquote "therapists" can do whatever they want and because it's often the only type of therapy covered by insurance, there are some ABA therapists, effectively in name only, who actually do good work. They call their therapy ABA for insurance purposes, then actually do meaningful, and certainly not abusive, work with their clients.
How do I know? I've worked with them. My siblings have worked with them. We were not abused.
This is not to excuse ABA as a practice - it's absolutely the opposite. Any good ABA therapist is not the norm, and it's not appropriate to hold up your positive experiences with therapy under the name of ABA as proof that ABA isn't abusive at its core. No, all I want to say is that these are people trying to do their best in a shitty situation, and while they have my respect, the moment they start speaking positively about ABA is the moment they get on my bad side again.
I wholeheartedly encourage reform in the way we treat autism, both culturally and therapeutically. But there is also this grey area - this clawing, desperate, stressful grey area - that will sound familiar to a lot of marginalized groups, I imagine.
Apparently we’re in the negatives now. Apparently we weren’t before. Apparently we will be a for a few days
I like the cold and all, but I would also like to get out of my bed at some point
Hi Kate. My question is, for an amateur writer looking to develop skills for narrative design in the game industry, what are some formats or examples of writing I can make to be relevant?
the skills you need for professional narrative design work will depend on the type of game you’re interested in writing, imo, though there’s certainly a lot of overlap, and it can’t hurt to be proficient in all or most of it.
if you’re gunning for a naughty dog-style production, where the story is told primarily through cutscenes and set-piece events, you’ll probably want to practice writing screenplays. work on constructing scenes with tension and conflict that develop through short, punchy dialogue. for linear games, narrative design is similar (or even identical to) screenwriting.
if you’ve never tried any screenwriting at all, maybe pull up some of your favorite scenes in television and film and try to recreate the script based on what you see on screen, then google around for the shooting script and see how your effort matches up. that might help you get a feel for the form. (and if you’re stumped for good examples, BARRY, bill hader’s hitman comedy on HBO, manages to do an astonishing amount of really effective storytelling in 25 minutes.)
there are a ton of screenwriting resources out there, and since it’s something i do very rarely, please don’t take my word for the best way to learn how to do it! let someone more experienced teach you!
outside of screenplays, barks are a staple of game writing that you’ll want some familiarity with. there, i’ll defer to katie chironis, a designer at riot, who wrote a tidy tweet thread about barks a couple days ago. the only thing i’ll add to her thread is that barks often need to give the player information that is easily understood and internalized in addition to being flavorful and punchy.
the kind of information conveyed depends on the event being triggered. like here, parvati is letting the player know that the enemy they’re targeting is immune to plasma damage:
some barks are really just opportunities for the game to pat the player on the back and tell them they did a good job, like here, where parvati congratulates the player on making it through an encounter without taking any damage:
you’ll notice this is not particularly deep writing. i certainly wouldn’t call it my finest work. in fact, i chafe against all the pure ego-stroke barks, and i wish i didn’t have to write them. but that’s the job, so write them i do, and so will you. so put some barks in your portfolio.
that’s scenes and barks. what’s left? if you’re writing for an rpg, you know it’s gotta be branching conversations. i can’t speak for my colleagues, but the way i learned how to write branching conversations was:
- play a lot of rpgs, and play the ones i liked several times through (s/o to dragon age: origins)
- try to chart a single conversation tree from one of your favorite quests to see how it’s constructed (s/o to the dwarf commoner origin)
- start writing your own conversation trees to apply what you’ve learned (in twine, renpy, flowchart software, a big piece of butcher paper, whatever (i used a big piece of butcher and later twine, but i also need to be able to see my entire conversation structure at once, so ymmv.))
regarding point #2, check out this flowchart that a player on the outer worlds subreddit made a few months after the game’s release. here, poster warkipine did their damnedest to reconstruct parvati’s entire bar conversation in flowchart software, and they got pretty damned close. here’s their take on the intro:
here’s what that same intro looks like in obsidian’s conversation software:
this is the best way (in my opinion!!!) to learn how to write branching conversations, because while the player only sees the dialogue, they feel the conversation flow, and learning how to construct a satisfying, engaging, reactive conversation that’s within your wordcount budget is at least 50% of the work of branching narrative design. shit, maybe even more than 50%. what i’m saying is, dialogue is the easy part!
that’s cutscenes, barks, and branching conversations covered. what’s left? LORE. by which i mean, everything else: item descriptions, examinables, lore books, ui text, journal text, etc. what a studio calls all this prose writing will be unique to them and their projects, but it all exists to fill the game world with information. some of it’s useful, some of it’s entertaining, (almost) all of it’s written by a human being, and you probably want some of it in your portfolio, too.
if you need help getting a handle on the form, read through tabletop rpg rulebooks or lore books from games you loved. i have copies of destiny’s grimoire and dishonored’s lore books at my desk, for example, as well as fiction anthologies, historical travelogues, collections of world mythology, nature writing, etc. all within reach to flip through when i’m feeling stuck.
having examples of screenplays, barks, branching narratives, and lore books in your portfolio will go a long way toward making you look relevant for a game writing position. you might also consider short stories, solo game projects, and collaborative game projects. i wish i could tell you there was short-cut that didn’t require all this labor, but there isn’t one. you just have to do the work, and keep doing it, maybe for nothing, for as long as you can. it took me seven years.
i hope that was helpful. i have about twenty variations on this question in my inbox, and it’s a big, complex topic, so any of you are welcome to ask follow-up or clarifying questions here, and i’ll get to them when i can.
[apparently tumblr doesn’t let you click to expand images, so you can find clickable versions of the images in this post HERE.]
Hey, it’s Warkipine from the reddit post! Frankly, I’m honoured to have my nerdery presented as an example of good learning. I’m super into branching conversations as a conceit and trying to reverse engineer them is really fun (I had no idea there was different dialogue to account for the bartender being dead, that’s amazing). Keep up the great work, and thanks for sharing your insight!
back in elementary school we’d have this weekly vocabulary list in a booklet that we had to study, and part of it was to write a sentence containing one of the words on the list
I would set out to write long-ass sentences that stuffed in as many of the vocab words as possible (increasingly so as time went on), and also they were all Mario-themed
this is the kind of person I am. this is my vibe. this is my legacy
I’m basically a little gnome that you keep in your shirt pocket that points out all the interesting mundane stuff around you and this is good and neat
I'm making a post
If you have any suggestions for what thing(s) I should post in my post, please let me know.
I’d probably make a pretty good go of being a Tumblr Personality if I just had an API something that made a new post with every chunk of messages I sent to the #im-high channel, the channel in my personal Discord server that I use whenever I’m high
this is less because of any discernable increase in the quality of my posts when I’m high, and more because that boost of self-confidence that comes with feeling like I’m piloting a mech that is me