BEHOLD... THE FUTURE OF GAMING!
Gaming is a field that's always looking towards the future. We always want to know what is just around the corner, what new ideas will be developed, how the world will turn out in the upcoming years. Sadly, there's no way to know what the future has in store for us. We need to rely on our senses, our intuition and our imagination to try to figure out what is coming, and we need to make peace with the idea that we'll be wrong way more often than we are right.
Just kidding! Everyone can use random magic cards to foresee the future. I mean, did y'all forget this? It's so easy, I don't know why people don't do it whenever they need a forecast. Futurists? Economists? People who are experts on what they're talking about? Pfft. All I need is a way to generate random outcomes, and a way to connect them to what I want to know.
So I used three different fortune-telling methods to scry into the future of three different questions about the upcoming year in gaming. I antecipate the results will be sterling.
Will gaming finally embrace unions in the upcoming year?
This is a complex one! The gaming industry (and the tech industry in general) have always been hell on workers, expecting them to subsist on "passion". It's a field that burns out its workers then churns them out, and treats them like crap in the meantime. Movements towards unionization in the field have been on the move for years, but for the first time they seem to be coalescing, as workers speak openly against operations in Activision, quite possibly the largest gaming company nowadays. There have always been small efforts at small companies, but if it goes down at Activision, there are big odds it'll very quickly trickle down to other companies.
For this question's reading, I decided to go with Tarot, since it's also something that has existed just fine for a long time but tech bros don't believe it could ever work. I chose my Cats tarot because this is the internet. This is a simple past-present-future spread.
Oh boy, what a reading. The card for the past is the Six of Pentacles, which represents steadiness, wealth and generosity. I read it as meaning that company could be expected to mantain the state of shit they've been keeping their employees in for a long time, if they only were minimally kind to them and spread their profits around. This hasn't happened (which is why this card is in the past), so things are about to change. The Lovers are in the present, representing a powerful decision, specially because it's the only major arcana in the spread. It means to me that some companies are about to see change and some are not, and lines will be drawn in the sand between them. I don't think any companies will crash and burn, but the way they speak about unions this year will show how they'll treat their employees in the near future. I expect this to be a hot-button issue this year. The final card, for the future, is the Two of Wands, has a very similar meaning to the Lovers, which means to me that this is not a divide that will become clear this year, and that this issue will keep popping up and reshaping the issue for the next years. This will be a pivotal year, but by no means final. The Two of Wands can also mean a focus on one's personal goals, so it may forecast a good ending for the workers.
What new things will we see in the videogame world this year?
Every once in a while, a new kind of game breaks into the market, rippling into new genres by the power of their ubiquity, and it's never the one you expect. I wouldn't hold it against you if you had not expected that a failed base-building, zombie-busting game that was hastily retrofit into a clone of Player Unknown's Battlegrounds would become the single greatest cultural phenomenon of the year, or if a clone of a failed Zachtronic prototype with even less direction would go on to become the world's best selling video game of all time. And yet, those things happen. Who could have seen that kind of thing coming?
We could! With our magic powers!
I know some of you don't believe in future-telling, you fools, so for this question I'll please you by choosing a method created by someone who, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't believe in it either. Ask the Stars, by Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland creator Chris McDowall, isn't created to see the future in the actual world; it's a method for roleplaying without a game-master, using dice and prompts based on a very dim impression of what astrology is like, buoyed by the kind of imagination that gave us, well, Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland.
Let's pick up two twelve-sided die and ask the question: what kind of game will make unexpected waves this year?
Our result is 9-3: The Elder, Twinned: An ancient power is now reliant on the support of another. Why must it be kept running?
Now this is a confusing result, because I don't know if it should be taken literally or not. Will it be a game about an ancient power, or will it be an old, estabilshed genre making a resurgence? Fortunately, Ask the Stars has a method for asking yes-or-no questions, so we can just ask it. Is this a ressurrection of an old genre? My result is 8, a Soft Yes, meaning the result is to be interpretated figuratively, but not quite so - it might also be, literally, about an ancient power.
I don't feel the dice will give us any more info on what the game is, so let's ask something else: Why will this game become so popular? The result is 7-4: The Child, Waning: Starvation is kicking in here, a power now unable to provide for themselves. Who was previously tending to their needs? This is a simple reading: this game will encroach into the field of a kind of game that has recently waned and lost its adepts. I wouldn't even be very surprised if it was a return of non-fortnite battle royale - although a good interpretation for the first result would be LOL/DOTA style arena battler, but I don't know enough about that genre to say if its hold on its fanbase has been weaning.
OK, let's end with something a little more definitive so one of us can laugh at the other at the end of the year. Will this game be released by a presently little-known indie studio, as opposed to an estabilished old wolf? I again roll an 8, a Soft Yes, which I'd interpret to mean it'll come from a small indie studio, but it won't be their first foray into success. Let's watch the skies.
How much will NFTs screw up the gaming industry this year?
Ah, NFTs. Because what's the point of simply becoming rich without expending effort if you're not destroying what little remains of the world in the process? The largest nail in our anthropocene coffin, NFTs have made quite a leeway into the gaming industry, which is surprising consisting it's basically a deed of ownership signed by "some dude" instead of any recognized authority. Possibly because, while you and I were having sex, crypto bros were selling their snake oil to rich folks, and now they've bought the entire stock. Several gaming companies have expressed interest on NFTs, and while there's nothing conclusive coming from any large one (and some of them have backpedalled after public outcry), it's a dark cloud looming in the horizon, made of rainforest ashes. What can we expect?
Because I want to show one can use anything that's sufficiently random as an oracle, I decided to go back to the original objectively worthless forest-destroying object that can somehow be worth millions: Magic cards.
Specifically, I ordered a special pack with eight random rare cards. This seemed to me to be very useful for oracle reading for several reasons. Rare cards are interesting (even the trash rares I'm likely to get), so there's a lot that can be gleamed from them. Since these are from a mix of sets, their storyline isn't likely to 'poison the waters' of our reading. And finally, eight cards can't be evenly distributed across the five colours of Magic; we'll be able to learn a lot from what's more present.
So here is my pack:
Yeah, of course some of them are in Portuguese. Here are the cards: Dragon Throne of Tarkir Sage-Eye Avengers Wildest Dreams Titan of Eternal Fire Invader Parasite Sifter of Skulls Daghatar the Adamant Munda's Vanguard
Boy, if you thought I was going hard on NFTs, you got nothing on the oracle. Wildest Dreams? Invader Parasite? This is something you learn if you start dealing with fortune-telling: oracles don't joke around.
So what do we have here? A funny thing is that there's no black cards here - except there's one, but it has an ability that makes it not black, even though it costs black mana and only goes into black decks. This means, to me, that NFTs will continue to downplay their nefarious effects - althought the lack of actual black cards means to me that greed won't be making a lot of leeway in this case. It will make some leeway, though, as the two red cards show - a card that has humans deal damage and a card that has lands hurt its controller are not encouraging from an ecological point of view. However, the fact that it is red means to me that its presence won't be lasting - only hasty investors will take the plunge and deal the brunt of the damage, so perhaps NFTs are silently being seen as too controversial to dive into willy-nilly. The white cards might be good news, but might not - one of the white card has a green/black activation cost, so I can see it being representative of NFT evangelists trying to greenwash their scam. (I mean, that card is pretty much a pyramid scheme.) White/red decks tend to be aggro decks - they do a lot of damage, but they peter out quickly, so this is what I see here. The blue creature is kinda weird, but I can see it as meaning that once the fervor dies down, sustained action consisting of cold, logical arguments will slowly disassemble the NFT hype. The artifact indicates to me that some people will throw their lot in the fray while staying out of it - which people do in any scam, so I'm hardly surprised. It only remains the only green card, which can be a message of hope, that we'll be able to fix the damage done... or maybe the wildest dream is to think we'll be able to.
Boy! Looking at the future is easy and fun. I don't know why people get this wrong so often. Join me at the end of the year to see how correct I've been!
December Link Roundup
So... I used to do this link roundup on my personal blag, and there were some places that I had to stop linking because otherwise I'd be linking only to them. After I moved the roundup here, I forgot about that, and y'all might not have heard about these. So righting this wrong in my end-of-year newsletter seemed auspicious.
This one, sadly, has just ended, which is perhaps a little less auspicious. To celebrate 50 years of the text adventure, journalist Aaron A. Reed picked a game from each year to highlight on this journey. This has been a hell of a ride on a year that I don't think I will surprise anyone when I say it's been kinda shitty. Between secret feminist cults, nerdy college students, opera singers and a kleptomaniac Gandalf, this is a marvelous study of the form, and Reed has assembled a brilliantly diverse corpus. It has filled me with joy to read it.
In this blog, AI expert Janelle Shane studies the limits of AI and forces it to dance to our amusement. While it's always good for a laugh, it's also scary to see how AI has progressed from being just smart enough to assemble sentences that are gramatically correct, if semantically nonsensical, to being able to write long, lenghty, self-consistent stories on any subject you desire, without regards or limitations towards truth - and they're now moving to do the same to visual art. Shane is very good at her work, always highlighting the moral morasses that might spring from AIs while also making you laugh with fart jokes. While this blog hasn't ended, she has just been invited to become the first Futurist in Residence at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, which might reduce her output.