2026-03-13 04:54:49
Fairly early on in The Bride! our title character and Frankenstein both go to Chicago’s well-known “pre-war Berlin” neighborhood for a night of dancing. Which makes sense, as it’s a safe space — or is it?! — for people that society might consider outcasts or, maybe even… monsters? You can tell it’s the queer neighborhood, because someone has meticulously written graffiti on the wall that reads “2 + 2 = 5?” There are no rules here! Question everything!
That’s not the one thing I like about this movie. I just have to mention it as the clearest sign of how it works, and how it’s just not something to be taken that seriously. Later on, there’s a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which is corny as hell but is also just almost clever enough for me to give it a pass. But over the end credits, “Monster Mash” plays. This is a movie that takes as much as it gives.
I was completely won over by the teaser trailers, with shots of a black void with Jessie Buckley’s head in a bell jar, speaking to the camera, intercut with flashes of dance numbers and Bonnie and Clyde references and huge title text. This was clearly a movie that was taking a big swing, and I was going to see it no matter what.
Even though early impressions weren’t great. Alonso Duralde described it as “if Moulin Rouge! were a proto-feminist horror movie,” which seemed both promising and intimidating. That movie kept trying to throw me off, by being so loud and corny and over-the-top, but it eventually won me over completely. The Bride! is similar in that there’s a lot of movie there, and it demands a lot of patience from the audience, taking all of the excess in stride. But it also doesn’t have anywhere near as much earnest sincerity.
Not that it’s insincere; I have no trouble believing that the movie believes in everything it’s saying (whatever that may be, exactly), and that all the performers are fully committing to the bit. Just that it never loses the feeling of a bunch of well-known actors sinking their teeth into an acting exercise. Annette Bening never stops being Annette Bening, even while playing a mad scientist. Same for Penelope Cruz, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Peter Sarsgaard. Even the bad guy from Superman (Zlatko Buric) never fully became “menacing mob boss,” not through any fault of his own, but just because the movie feels so purposefully artificial that recognizable actors remain recognizable actors.
The fact that Maggie Gyllenhaal is writer and director of this is all over the marketing, and it’s an essential part of what this movie is, but I kind of wish I hadn’t known that going in. Because I was never really able to watch it as anything other than a famous person getting a bunch of her famous friends and family together to do a very expensive piece of experimental theater. The earnestness of The Bride! is similar to the earnestness of a very personal one-act play. One that an acquaintance has invited you to come watch, and you weren’t able to come up with a sufficient excuse to bow out.
I went in expecting to have a take-away like, “you’ve got to respect how it was such a big swing!” There’s no shortage of big swings — and the movie is an early front-runner for any awards in the category of Most Acting — but they rarely connect.
Possibly the most obvious example is the conceit of Mary Shelley’s ghost. She opens the movie in a monologue delivered from a black void, saying essentially that Frankenstein is what became her legacy, but this is the story she really wanted to tell. She possesses the body of a gun moll in 1930s Chicago, who becomes our main character. It’s not used as a framing device, but is carried throughout the movie. Sometimes in conversations between Ida and Shelley, sometimes in passages of dialogue where Shelley takes over, and most often in the form of sudden outbursts, like a near-incessant verbal tic.
It sounds like it could be interesting, but it’s off-putting more often than not. I could only make out about 60% of what was actually being said at any given moment1, but based on the parts I could make out, I don’t think I was missing that much. A lot of it is sudden outbursts of wordplay, which always felt self-consciously written by a 21st century American to sound like what a literate Victorian would find clever. The other day at CityWalk, I saw a guy with a T-shirt that read “REAL EYES REALIZE REAL LIES” in big letters, and I felt like a lot of the wordplay in The Bride! had a similar vibe.
But that also leads into what I think was the best scene — or at least most effective one for me — in the movie. It’s pretty early on, where Ida/The Bride is in the middle of a dream in which she’s talking with Shelley’s ghost. We see her floating above her own body down on the operating table2, and they’re talking about identity. I can’t even remember any specific lines of dialogue, which I’m taking as a sign that it was one of the few scenes that was actually speaking to me. Conveying ideas opposed to reciting dialogue.
It’s not some post-modern, 21st century invention to use the writing of Frankenstein as a framing device for a story. Neither is it to invite comparisons between The Bride and Mary Shelley herself by casting the same actor in both roles. The Bride of Frankenstein did both in 1935. But with this scene, The Bride! is demanding that you consider all the implications of that, essentially giving you a visual breakdown of all the levels of irony.
It all but literally draws a straight line between Shelley’s ghost, the currently-lifeless body on the table that used to be Ida, and the essence of a different, synthesized person floating in between, still in the process of defining who she is, exactly. I think it’s an acknowledgement by Gyllenhaal of the audacity of the main conceit: she is basically reanimating the corpse of Mary Shelley for a specific purpose, to serve as her mouthpiece.
It’s also a kind of defense and justification, by suggesting that every interpretation or continuation of Frankenstein — the story itself, and the story of writing it — will unavoidably be saddled with that irony. Whether you’re putting it forward as a humanist story or a specifically feminist one, you’re still taking a story with a core idea of self-identification and imposing your own identity onto it. The movie is full of constant, explicit reminders that women are defined in terms of what other people want from them, and the limited idea of what other people think they’re capable of achieving. Putting Mary Shelley forward as a feminist icon and an under-appreciated creator of the entire genre of science fiction is itself imposing your own definition of who she was.
At least, that’s my interpretation. Which is, obviously, imposing my own definition of what Gyllenhaal was trying to say, which is an issue that carries on throughout the movie. The Bride! is simultaneously obtuse and unambiguous, often unclear of what it might be trying to say beyond the most patently obvious, but at the same time so direct that it doesn’t really invite you to try and come up with a more complex interpretation. But I thought this specific scene did exactly that. And the effect lasted throughout, turning the off-putting outbursts and verbal tics into a visual representation of how fraught it is to talk about feminism without descending into a self-contradicting spiral of irony.3
So I’m pretty critical of the movie, with the one scene that I think works the best actually being just a justification for the big swings that don’t really connect. Why am I interested in it at all, instead of dismissing it?
Because if you’re going to make a movie that is essentially just giving recognizable actors an opportunity for over-the-top acting exercises, you couldn’t pick a better pair of actors that Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that they make the movie work, but they absolutely make the movie memorable.
Bale seems well aware of what the movie is about and who is the focus, so he doesn’t try to meet Buckley’s energy, but deliver a contrast to it. His version of Frankenstein is awkward and beaten down from living too long as a monster, always conscious of not scaring people or taking up too much space. He’s prone to violent outbursts or the occasional fit of jealousy, but the entire plot is driven by how much of a romantic he is. When you see him sitting in a theater, grinning during a musical number and imagining himself on screen, it’s just plain charming.
Later in the movie, the characters are at a drive-in theater4, and a conversation between The Bride and Frankenstein plays out both in the audience and on the screen. They mention Dr Euphronious, the mad scientist that brought her to life, and Frank casually, wistfully, almost reflexively, observes, “She’s a genius.” It’s a small, weird detail, perfectly delivered, and for me it was one of the only genuine laughs in the whole movie.
And it’s really difficult to imagine anybody who could’ve pulled off the title role as well as Jessie Buckley. She’s constantly having to jump between Ida, Mary Shelley, and this gradually-emerging identity of The Bride, and it never feels natural or believable — because the movie seems to have decided early on that it wasn’t shooting for believability — but it’s rarely so jarring that it feels like nothing but an affectation. There’s something oddly subtle about it, in a movie that’s otherwise completely unconcerned with subtlety, where you get the sense that every thing this character does is a performance, until the moments when a real person starts to peek through. And to be blunt: I can’t imagine anybody else playing this part without its being insufferably annoying.
So the movie is a showcase for two outstanding actors, and it does have an interesting take on what it even means to make a movie like this in the first place. But ultimately I was pretty disappointed that this movie would seem to take so many big swings and having so few of them actually connect. To the point of making me wonder how many of them were actually big swings in the first place.
Going back to the Moulin Rouge! comparison: whether you love that movie or hate it, you can’t deny that it has a go-for-broke energy to it. If this doesn’t work out, we are all going to look very, very silly. For all of its weirdness, I could never shake the feeling that The Bride! was a cautiously controlled experiment.
2026-03-12 07:00:00
My anti-Pixar theme week continues, with a scathing take-down of… well, hang on. I’m still not interested in jumping into backlashes or hot takes, or complaining about something instead of finding an interesting idea at the core of it.
The whole idea of my trying to stick to the “One Thing I Like” theme isn’t at all a reminder to find something positive to say, even when I think the subject is garbage.1 I’d rather not waste time on something I don’t like, in favor of celebrating the stuff I do like. It’s only worth mentioning at all if I think there’s something interesting to be said about why exactly I don’t like it.
Anyway, yesterday I saw Hoppers. And while it’s definitely not for me, I can totally see why other people are enjoying it, and I don’t want to be completely dismissive of it. But over the course of the day, I caught myself turning my main criticism of it into a grudge, and piling more and more points against it as time went on.
My main criticism is that Pom Poko is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I can’t help but see all the ways that Hoppers tries to do the same thing and keeps coming up short. “Not as good as one of my favorite movies of all time” is an impossibly high bar to set, admittedly, but I will point out that Hoppers itself tries to lampshade comparisons to other movies by having a character stress that it’s nothing like Avatar.
The comparison was so hard for me to shake that it undermined the one thing I liked most about Hoppers. The movie very cleverly gives a visual indication when your viewpoint is swapping between the animal world and the human world, by having the eyes change. When they have big, white, cartoony eyes, with pupils and everything, you’re in the world of the animals, able to talk to them and understand what they’re saying. When they have little black circles for eyes, they’re animals, and humans can only hear them making animal noises.
But as I kept thinking throughout Hoppers, “Pom Poko did this, too, but more subtly and cleverly.” The tanuki in that movie flow freely through multiple states, depending on who’s seeing them and what their current mental/emotional state is. They go from being realistic animal versions, to their “main” cartoon-animal form, to their super-cartoony form2, to their human form, to their statue form, to whatever they’re transforming into, all throughout the movie and sometimes within a single scene.
As I kept finding little things that didn’t work for me in Hoppers, it all had the cumulative effect of feeling very loud and very blunt, never letting me go for longer than a minute without telling me exactly what to think and what to feel. I have no doubt that I went in predisposed not to like it, since I’d just been thinking about Pixar in terms of authenticity vs forced universality, but it all felt like it was desperate to charm me instead of being genuinely charming. A montage sequence set to Loverboy’s “Everybody’s Working For the Weekend” didn’t help at all; it just felt like I was suddenly watching a trailer for a Dreamworks or Illumination movie. And it did something that Pixar movies almost never do: made me acutely aware that I was a 54-year-old man in a theater surrounded by children.
But all of that is just another case of my not enjoying a movie, and not even in a particularly interesting way. It’s completely tied up with my biases and expectations, judging the movie based on what it’s not instead of what it is.
Except for one thing about the tone and what I think is the message of the movie, which left me with a sour aftertaste from something I otherwise would’ve shrugged and said, “It’s fine.”
And again I’ve got to pull out Pom Poko for comparison. That movie nails the ending in a way that makes me cry every single time I see it: it’s very sad, but highlights a moment of pure joy amidst the sadness. It’s the perfect capper to the recurring idea that these creatures aren’t cut out for war, because it goes completely against their nature. We’ve seen them anthropomorphized — both in cartoon form and literally taking the form of humans — but it makes no sense to apply human traits to them. Many of them simply can’t live as humans, and even for the ones who can, it’s exhausting. It’s urgent that we understand that our relationship with nature isn’t a battle between opposing sides, but requires us to stop ignoring our own true nature, to appreciate that we’re just as much a part of nature as any other living creature, and to maintain that balance.
Which, to the credit of Hoppers, are all ideas that it touches on in one form or another. There are a couple of scenes that stress how animals live according to the natural order of things, and human concerns are weird to them. There’s a very strong emphasis on finding peace by recognizing that you’re just one part of nature, and not set apart from it. And there is a vague sense of reframing environmental issues not as a perpetual battle between opposing sides, but more as a question of long-term sustainability.
And, I should stress: I don’t get any sense that this movie is all that concerned with having an impactful message about ecology. It’s first and foremost trying to be funny.
But that’s kind of the problem. It ends up undercutting and undermining any sense of urgency. And worse, it turns it into a mushy “both sides” message. So much of the story is about the main character learning to get control of her anger, that it’s presented as if that anger were just as much a part of the problem as the politician deliberately lying to the public so that he can destroy the environment.
The lesson, we learn, is to turn that anger into acceptance. To turn our rage into calm. To try and see the good in everyone. And to appreciate that instead of angry, unproductive activism, we need to work together to make the world a better place.
Why not try to see things from the perspective of our antagonist whose hairy chest hides a heart of gold, voiced by America’s sweetheart Jon Hamm? Sure, we saw that he’d been lying to drive animals out of their habitat into a crowded one that couldn’t support them, and then we saw his actions result in the destruction of even more of that habitat. But surely he learned his lesson when that destruction threatened to almost touch the human city! Didn’t you even see him helping clean up afterwards? (And giving orders to a construction crew, suggesting that he suffered absolutely zero repercussions to even his political career?) Why hold a grudge? It all turned out okay!
It’s just really tough for me to see this as a message about peace, calm, and balance; instead of one about passivity, acceptance, and moving on instead of holding people accountable. Maybe it’s because I’d been already jostled out of my enjoy-this-movie-like-a-little-kid state, and been reminded that I’m a middle-aged man, but it was very difficult for me to watch the last half of this movie without imagining a bunch of studio execs freaking out that the white guy authority figure was coming across as too much of a villain. I can’t help but picture a bunch of people scrambling to make sure the movie stressed how much our angry young hero had some growin’ up to do herself.
I don’t think every movie has to be as good as Pom Poko, and I don’t think most movies even need to aspire to that. I don’t think every message about ecology and our relationship to the environment needs to be strident and self-righteous. I think it’s fine for a movie to just want to be fun and silly, with just enough depth to keep from floating away into complete irrelevance.
But it does make me uncomfortable when I see movies aimed at all ages reject the message of “fight for what you believe in!” in favor of “whoa, calm down there, champ!”
I don’t know how to make a message of environmentalism land with the urgency it needs to, since it’s always dismissed and ignored. And I do genuinely appreciate reframing it as a holistic question of sustainable balance instead of just one tiresome battle after another. But there has to be a better way than the paper-straws-and-carbon-offsets approach. Blandly asserting “we’re all in this together!” and absolving anyone of actual consequences means just continuing to ignore the problems for a few more years, and we’ve pretty much run out of time to keep doing that.
2026-03-11 05:29:20
Pixar’s new movie Hoppers is out, and not only does it seem to be a hit, it’s getting pretty much unanimous praise from critics and audiences both. So it was a brilliant PR move for Pete Docter to turn the attention back to Elio. And to do so by saying the worst thing he possibly could’ve said.
Believe it or not, I’m not particularly interested in jumping onto the dog pile. I already got my zinger in: “‘We’re Making a Movie, Not Hundreds of Millions of Dollars of Therapy,’ says the writer and director of Inside Out.” [pause for approval from the internet]. If I’m being honest, I really didn’t like Elio, and I’m highly skeptical that making it more explicit that the main character was a gay kid would’ve done anything to change that.
Personally, I’m more interested in the whole topic of diversity and representation in popular entertainment. The difference between just acknowledging that it’s a noble goal and something that we should all strive to achieve, and really understanding why it’s important and committing to doing it right.
Because Docter’s comments put me in an awkward position. For years, I’ve been trying to defend Pixar against the criticism that the studio makes nothing but movies about the experiences and anxieties of straight, white men*. Except that they’re sold as “family movies” because the straight, white men have been represented by toys, cars, ants, monsters, fish, rats, adolescent girls, and, occasionally, straight, white men.
So when critics would respond to something like Toy Story 4 with “oh, not this bullshit again,” I was always insistent that the business of the studio should be kept separate from its creative output. I believed — and still do, to some degree — that they were doing exactly the right thing with the movies themselves, it was just the studio structure that was undermining that.
When I look at the “golden age” of Pixar, I think the one thing that makes the movies feel timeless and universal is that they didn’t have the overriding goal of being timeless and universal. Obviously, they aren’t scrappy independent projects; a ton of work went into modifying character designs, streamlining scripts, refining gags, choosing voice talent and music, all to make the movies as universally appealing and marketable as possible. But they hung all of this around a core idea that was very specific and personal, which keeps it from feeling like Commercial Entertainment Product.1
Finding Nemo is obviously about a father learning to be less over-protective of his son. Toy Story and Toy Story 4 are both about a man at different stages in his life, feeling anxiety over becoming irrelevant. I’ve complained a lot about The Incredibles over the years, but my biggest criticism is also my biggest compliment: underneath all the fantastic mid-century design, comic book super-hero callbacks, perfectly-executed action moments, it never loses the specific voice of a man who’s read a lot of Ayn Rand, took it all to heart, and is still holding a grudge over The Iron Giant.
The distinction between the creative side and the studio structure seemed important, because it had an obvious fix: push for more diversity in the people making the movies, not just in the movies themselves. Because if you’re just trying to fix the movies, even if you have the best of intentions, it’s easy to spot as a bunch of insincere patch fixes.
But it’s the thing that The Discourse always seems to focus on, making it feel like complaining about the symptoms instead of the actual problem. Like I said, giving Elio a pink bike and a boy crush wouldn’t have fixed my issues with that movie. Putting in or removing (based on who’s complaining the loudest) a lesbian relationship from Lightyear wouldn’t have made that movie feel any less like a dour slog. And Toy Story 4 would almost certainly have felt like less of a retread if it hadn’t been content to just put Bo Peep in pants, and a flashback to make her seem more kick-ass, but had gone all-in and made her the protagonist of the story.
It briefly seemed like Pixar was starting to get it, with Turning Red and Coco. Inside Out was fine, I guess, but it did very much seem to be striving to be universally appealing; this is what all kids go through. The others came from a more personal, specific experience, and just as with all of the Straight White Guy entries, the specificity is what makes it universal. It’s not trying to be authentic, it’s coming from a genuinely authentic place, and audiences respond to that authenticity. I’ve never had a period and I didn’t grow up in a Mexican household, but I still feel like I get it.
But for whatever reason, they quickly course-corrected and said, “Nah, we’re not into that, actually.” Making me feel stupid for defending them.
And it’s just a drag. Of course, it’s always a drag when you see business and commerce intruding on art, especially when it’s a bunch of white guys stamping their feet and insisting on a return to Traditional Values while claiming it’s what The People Want and they’ve got the numbers to prove it. These movies about an adolescent white girl standing in for all children everywhere made a metric shit-ton of money, while this movie catering to the Mexican demographic only made a ton of money. The people have spoken, and they yearn for whiteness!
But it’s especially a drag when you think someone has figured out exactly the right balance between art and commerce, making it a win for everyone. I really believed Pixar had cracked the code, and it stings to see them learning all the wrong lessons.
And it’s a drag to see people flat-out refusing to challenge their own assumptions, like a Californian insisting “I don’t have an accent” because they can’t conceive of a world in which their accent isn’t the default. Whether it was taken out of context or not, and whether it indicates his personal views or not, Docter’s quote says that gay people are a special interest group. A girl having a crush on a boy is uncontroversial and universal; a boy having a crush on a boy requires careful and delicate handling.
Whether or not a studio is willing to take on that careful and delicate handling to make people2 feel included is all but irrelevant, unfortunately. It’s already missed the sincerity cut-off, the line that separates sincere expression from focus-tested diversity. Because it ignores the obvious fact that as a gay kid, I didn’t feel like some weird special interest until people treated me like one; it was my normal.
And it seems like an adamant refusal to even consider whether the exclusive coven of straight white American men that spent decades with full creative control over Pixar might’ve been the most special of special interest groups. Sharing their own specific life experiences as if they were universally relatable, never considering that they’re asking audiences to treat their own specific flavor of weirdness as if it were normal.
* Edit: Re-reading this, I noticed I was casually tossing out the label “straight, white men,” which is a bad idea in general, but especially since I forgot that not all of the members of that group of most-well-known directors and writers are straight.
Seems like a good reminder not to get so hung up on identity — especially in a post that’s all about finding the universal in our own unique experiences — that you treat it as an opportunity to be dismissive instead of an opportunity to bring a unique voice to a project.
2026-03-11 02:46:01
It’s March 10th, which means people all over the internet are celebrating brand awareness by promoting their favorite Mario.
If you were really invested, though, you wouldn’t limit it to just one day. The Beastie Boys understood this by using every chance they could get to promote their favorite Mario, Mario Caldato Jr.
In “Intergalactic,” he likes to keep it clean. In “So What’cha Want?” either he can’t front on that, or the song is dedicated to him and you can’t front on that, I was never clear which. In “Three MCs and One DJ,” Norton is chillin’ with him.
I’m sure there are plenty more; those are just the ones that I’ve heard so many times that my brain calls them up even more easily than my phone number.
And in “The Grasshopper Unit” they’re asking him to rewind the tape and punch him in. Hello Nasty is my favorite of the Beastie Boys’ records, and I can still remember listening to it for the first time1. It was around half way through this song when I thought, “this is one of my favorite albums of all time.” It still is.
2026-03-10 13:26:46
Last week, Frank Lantz published a post called “Why No AI Games?” noting how the prominence of increasingly sophisticated LLMs hasn’t resulted in any standout AI-based games or new forms of gameplay. He offers a few theories as to why, eventually concluding that there’s just nothing inherently fun in this kind of unpredictable, “soft logic” computational model.
It’s interesting, and I encourage anybody interested in the topic to check out the essay and the discussion going on in the comments. Since I’m somebody whose answer to the question is, “There aren’t any because it’s impossible because generative AI is stupid and bad,” it’s probably a good opportunity for me to take a step back and consider the question a little more thoughtfully.
I don’t fundamentally disagree with Lantz’s conclusion, such as it is. There isn’t anything inherently fun in engaging with an unpredictable, anonymous system, once you quickly get past the initial novelty.
Even if you have such a loose and generous definition of “game” that it includes slot machines, the engagement is empty without that extrinsic reward of getting a big payout. Whatever fun there is to be had from seeing a black box generate unexpected outputs, it’s short-lived if you don’t have a meaningful way to interact with it. You’re just poking at a black box to see what happens.
I qualified “conclusion” with “such as it is” because Lantz seems insistent on refusing to come to a definitive conclusion. I think I understand why; if you’re taking a detached, academic, and theoretical approach to the question, you have to be careful not to claim that you can prove a negative. “Just because we can’t think of a fun application of this technology, surely that doesn’t mean no one can.”
But that’s frustrating, because I think we’re already past the point of being able to say “let’s sit back and see how all of this plays out.” There are too many fundamental issues with generative AI, each of them inseparable from the others, and they don’t just magically disappear when you choose to look at it through one specific lens.
One of Lantz’s theories as to why AI in games hasn’t taken off is labeled “Culture Wars.” It’s the idea that there’s currently a backlash against generative AI that as of now is discouraging people from pursuing ideas that take full advantage of the potential of LLMs.
I want to be clear that I’m not interested in calling anybody out, or assuming intent from an essay that wasn’t intended to be a value judgment on gen AI beyond this specific purpose. But I still don’t love how the whole conversation sounds. I’ve heard too many AI proponents insist that the only reason people are so vehemently opposed to it is because they haven’t really used it, or they don’t understand how it works.
So even labeling it as a “culture war” assumes a level of distance that comes across as condescending: let’s allow people to get this tantrum out of their system, so we can go back to an honest and objective evaluation of this groundbreaking technology. It assumes that people are yelling for the sake of yelling, instead of raising genuine, fundamental issues.
And one of the most fundamental issue is one that Lantz touches on, with his theory labeled “Business Models:”
“It’s very hard to build a real game around core functionality that you are paying a third party to supply. […] This dynamic also discourages developers doing small experiments and releasing them for free, hoping to go viral. The incentives are all wrong. Developers are highly motivated to hit the model as little as possible, to use cached, pre-generated responses or find other workarounds. I’ve also built game prototypes where the whole experience changed dramatically, for the worse, because the model I was building around changed in ways I couldn’t understand or control.
The business model is such an inseparably toxic part of generative AI that I believe any discussion that doesn’t include it — not as a problem to be inevitably solved, but as an inherently fatal flaw — becomes so vague as to be all but irrelevant.
It makes it difficult if not impossible to claim that it’s a pure thought experiment, along the lines of “what kind of gameplay would evolve if you had a non-deterministic thinking machine trained on all the world’s knowledge?” Because in reality, it’s more like asking “what kind of fun emergent gameplay would result from giving every player a fighter jet or an F1 car?”
It’s especially frustrating when combined with Lantz’s closing paragraph: “I’m sure that, even as I type these words, there is a clever teenager somewhere proving me wrong.” That’s the same kind of hand-waving that infuriated me so much in Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, because it perpetuates this fantasy that groundbreaking new technology is coming from scrappy young geniuses hacking away in garages or bedrooms somewhere. Instead of the reality, which is that it’s been the result of years of very rich people pouring ludicrous amounts of money, labor, and resources into developing systems that they control.
Unless that clever teenager has a few hundred billion dollars in a trust fund, and teams of underpaid people tagging content, and teams of lawyers coming up with new ways to circumvent laws around copyright and hoarding resources, it ain’t happening.
An essential part of the hype around AI is based on the idea that, like almost everything else in tech, it’ll just keep on improving indefinitely. It’s not optimistic; it’s deceptive. It distracts from the fact that it’s taking an unsustainable amount of resources to keep providing diminishing returns. I haven’t ever seen any indication that these systems scale efficiently at all.
It just can’t be stressed enough: they’re not giving you tools to create your own stuff. They’re trying to centralize everything under the control of as few people as possible, including the act of creation itself.
Okay, okay, but what if that weren’t true? What if you could actually separate all of the legitimate concerns about the technology from the technology itself? What if you had an ethically-trained model that could run locally and efficiently, but still somehow have the fidelity of the current versions of “Open”AI’s and Anthropic’s models?
Even with that fantasy scenario, the outlook isn’t good. I can’t see the point or promise of using the tech at any stage of development.
Split it into two broad categories: one where interacting with an LLM is the gameplay, and one where it augments a game.
Lantz mentions a few existing experiments, with the LLM either offering gameplay prompts, or presenting chat bots that you interact with. And it’s pretty easy to come up with formats that feel like they might have potential:
As I see it, the fatal issue with all of these comes down to two things: coherence, and fidelity.
First up: coherence, or the ability of one of these systems to retain information across iterations. Obviously, I’m biased against generative AI, so I haven’t been interested in keeping up with the “state of the art.” But at the time I stopped giving a damn, it was one of the key issues that people were trying to solve.
It’s easiest to see in generated video, and it’s why — as I understand it — video clips can’t be longer than a few seconds before collapsing into nonsense, characters will regularly go “off model,” objects horrifyingly morph into different ones, attempts to recreate DOOM or extraction shooter levels from prompts will quickly turn into Overlook Hotel geometry or worse, etc.
Presumably, it’s easier with text, since there’s simply less data involved. And considering the number of reports of troubled individuals who’ve become convinced that OpenAI built them a computer partner with a distinct personality, it’s presumably gotten better at faking long-term memory, at least.
But I think anything you can reasonably define as a “game,” no matter how simple it might be, requires a “game state” of some sort. And it doesn’t scale well at all, even for systems that seem to have solved the problem of indexing unfathomably complex data. Each new variable you introduce adds a huge layer of complexity, because it’s not actually doing any reasoning, but manipulating data sets. Again, as I understand it, you’re inevitably going to reach a point where the system starts contradicting itself or simply spitting out nonsense.
That might seem like another problem that will inevitably be solved. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that the idea of a natural language chat bot that could give any kind of coherent response to a prompt was pure fantasy.
But that’s also why I think “fidelity” is the fatal flaw: the closer these systems get to approximating general intelligence, the less interesting they get for anything creative. Making them “better” for utility makes them worse for fun.
We’ve already seen this play out on Janelle Shane’s AI Weirdness blog. The more “advanced” these systems get, the less interesting they become. They’re deliberately eliminating every weird output that we could interpret as creative or even amusing.
Interacting with the simpler models can’t really be described as a “game,” since the workings are mostly impenetrable and unpredictable. You can’t really keep prodding at the model to figure out what it’s going to do next; you can only be mildly surprised when it spits out something different.
Interacting with the more sophisticated models will inevitably approach natural language Google searches, or at best, replacing a player with the dullest person you know. As long as that person, instead of imagination, had a quirk of confidently and inexplicably shouting out random nonsense. Improv with an extremely well-read but unstable weirdo.
At either extreme, you don’t get that meaningful spark of the unexpected. It’s either completely predictable in a way that adds nothing, or it’s completely unpredictable in a way that’s more chaotic than creative.
Maybe you could make a game with an AI agent who’s a mutineer? Where you have to keep accomplishing tasks before the one crew member has an episode that brings everything crashing down?
In any case, I’m a lot more confident that we won’t see anyone come up with the breakthrough that makes interacting with a large language model game-like, or even fun. I’m more optimistic that the underlying machine learning technology could be used to analyze complex game states and result in better AI players — the Dominion mobile games use this approach, and by all accounts are excellent — but generative content is a dead end. Too chaotic in its current state, too boring in the future.
Usually it’d be a bad idea to come up with a list of obvious possibilities for something like a style of game, reject them, and then extrapolate from that to say it simply can’t be done. But I say if it can’t even handle the obvious cases, why should I expect anything from the edge cases that no one’s thought of yet? It would seem like expecting someone to come up with Tempest without anybody first demonstrating how fun Pong is.
It’s bad at retaining information, and it’s getting increasingly worse at meaningful or interesting improvisation. Occasionally, it inadvertently comes up with a funny bit of wordplay, like with the question “Is Marlon Brando in Heat?” but you can’t rely on accidents like that for anything resembling long-term fun.
The question I keep going back to is “what exactly are you trying to accomplish?” or more accurately, “who are you trying to replace?” What is it that keeps this from being trillions of dollars of solution in search of a problem?
Conveniently for someone like me, who’s against all of it, that leads directly into the topic of using generative AI to develop a game. (Something that Lantz asserts is already happening everywhere, as if the utility of it were patently obvious).
The alleged promise is games that are more perfectly reactive and responsive. In-game agents that can engage in natural language conversations with the player, giving reasonable responses to whatever they might say. Or a system that can create game levels on the fly, giving players an infinite number of spaces to explore, and maybe even throwing in obstacles or rewards in real time, in response to what they’re doing.
Again, being as charitable as possible, assuming that everything laughably wrong with the technology now is merely early steps, and we will some day be able to see the over-hyped promises become reality: so what?
There’s a reason that the term “slop” has stuck, and it’s not just a bunch of nay-sayers being overly negative. It’s because the idea of supply and demand can extend to areas outside of economics. The more “content” you have, the less valuable each piece of it becomes.
To be clear, I do genuinely believe in all of the eloquent arguments that have been made about how real, human-made art is inherently superior to generative AI, because the art is in the process of making it as much as it’s in the end result. But it’s just as important to emphasize how much the cut corners are evident in the end result.
Even in my own work, even if I don’t remember the process of writing something, I can immediately tell the difference between when I struggled to word something exactly the right way, vs when I was slapping something together to get it done.
And I’ve long been critical of BuzzFeed as being the worst offenders of the Age of Disposable Content, even though there’s often not anything egregiously wrong with the writing itself. It’s usually not badly written, and it’s often a lot more accessible and focused than the stuff I write. But it always has the unmistakable feel of being written to fulfill a quota, instead of being a sincere expression on the part of the writer.
One of the tenets of being a programmer is “the less code required to accomplish a task, the better,” which is why using AI to generate more code has always seemed like a huge mistake. That extends to writing, as well: the secret to good writing is never “lots and lots of it.” It’s the skill that I’m still constantly trying and failing to perfect: distilling everything down to the perfect wording, being memorable and saying exactly what it needs to.
Even if you somehow had an in-game agent that could be trained on all of your game’s lore and history, could be trained on exactly the character’s life story and specific voice, and could reliably respond correctly and convincingly to anything the player asked, what are the odds it’s going to come up with something that’s more than functional? That perfectly evocative turn of phrase that sticks with you for years afterwards?
If the character is just supposed to be functional, then the longer you engage with them, the more it will obfuscate their function. Whatever idea(s) they were trying to get across will be lost in the sea of words.
If they’re supposed to have actual personality — for instance, to be evasive — then the unpredictable nature of an LLM is a liability, not an asset. If what they say can change each time, there’s no guarantee that they’re not saying something misleading, wasting the player’s time.
If they’re just there for “immersion” as part of the background, then what’s to be gained by giving them a complete (and expensive) LLM, instead of a finite set of succinct and evocative lines of dialogue?
The more capable they are of engaging with the player, and the longer they spend doing so, the more they get elevated from background to major character. Outside of a game like the Fable series — and it remains to be seen whether their promise of “every single character is alive!” actually delivers — then adding more stuff to each of the characters doesn’t actually create an immersive world. It just becomes noise.
It’s become a mantra whenever generative AI is discussed: if you didn’t care enough to write this, why should I care to read it? And it’s more than just a quick dismissal; it’s asking everybody to take a step back and consider what exactly we’re actually trying to accomplish.
The answer is always some form of “stuff I don’t want to do, and lots of it.”
And it’s a drag, because not only does it threaten to bury players under slop that the developers don’t care about, but it’s prone to drowning out the stuff the developers do care about. You can see the economic incentive to reducing creativity to “content” and delegating it to someone else’s computer, but it’s discouraging to see the developers themselves buy into it.
Just one seemingly innocuous example sums it all up: you often see games on Steam that use a gen-AI image as their store thumbnail. Even if it’s not anywhere near the style of the game itself, it attracts attention and (if you’re not looking closely) gives the game a more “professional” sheen. But it means that whatever creative or original might be contained in the game, you’ve chosen to give the player this unrelated image, created by someone or something else, to represent everything inside. You’ve abdicated your voice in the one thing that could have been the strongest distillation of it.
The appeal of using generative AI, whether in creating static assets or actually including in the live game, is either money, time, or skill.
I’ve got some degree of sympathy for the money argument; for projects with very limited budgets, it can be tempting to go with a slick piece of cover art, or a fake voice actor, or some AI-generated music. But again, I’ll point out that every time I’ve seen a game with AI-generated cover art, it’s felt like such a bait and switch that it’s killed any interest in the game itself. Not even the old Atari 2600-covers style bait and switch, either, where the cover painting was so evocative, even if it had nothing to do with the actual game. The art that I always see associated with game storefronts is invariably the slickest, blandest take possible on whatever might have made the game itself unique. If you can’t afford to hire someone to collaborate with, I’d always prefer an amateurish but sincere take.
And even on projects I’ve worked on that did have the budget for actual talent, it’s always been the case, without fail, that a real musician, voice-over artist, or character designer has delivered something better than I’d imagined. The promise of generative AI is that, at some point in the always-near future, you can describe what’s in your head and the computer will deliver exactly that. Even if that were possible, that’s such a depressingly low bar. We don’t need trillions of dollars of investment when we have people who can deliver something better than the version that’s in your head.
I absolutely understand how writing can feel tedious, especially when it’s something that feels completely functional. There were many times during the Sam & Max games when I cursed the decision to have every interactive dialog include four choices, because it so often felt like scraping the insides of my skull to try and come up with a fourth option that was funny at all. The correct answer would’ve been to just drop that requirement, but even the push to come up with something often forced me to come up with a gag or an idea that made the exchange come to life and feel less like it was purely functional.
I’m not going to pretend that there’s a special kind of magic that gets unlocked by toiling over a bunch of random barks and lovingly hand-crafting each one. But occasionally you strike gold with a good one, and that becomes a stand-out memory of the game.
And even if that’s not the case, any time you’re writing something that feels functional and tedious, and tempted to go to the generative AI tools, it’s a perfect opportunity to consider how much of it is even necessary. Again, if it’s tedious for you to write, how is it not going to be tedious for the player to listen to?
The writing is what I’m calling out, because it’s what I’ve got the most experience with, but I think the idea applies to everything. Including any “live” content like AI agent NPCs or AI-created (as opposed to procedural, which is significantly different) levels. Is generative AI making things better, or is it just making more? And are you wasting the player’s time, giving them more stuff that you care so little about that you’re content to relegate it to a semi-predictable black box you don’t own?
Ultimately, generative AI is a land rich in contrasts. It’s here and inevitable, whether you want it or not; but somehow also demands that you get on board right now before it’s too late. It is both all-powerful and yet always in a state of becoming. It’s improving at a breakneck pace and yet still has laughably, unmistakably unusable results as often as not. It’s a tool to enable workers that also promises executives and managers that workers can be laid off in record numbers. It is simultaneously so sophisticated that it might even be conscious — who can say, really?! — and yet it demands that you use it the correct way for specific cases that are within its still-unspecified problem domain. It has access to all the world’s knowledge and has rendered Google all but unusable. It is the future that’s already here. It is infinitely scalable and yet requires buying up literally all of the planet’s RAM supplies. It is absolutely not a scam.
When you’re dealing with something that is Everything And Nothing, it can be easy to overlook the most basic questions. In terms of games and game development, I think the basic question is what are you trying to accomplish? And is this really a useful tool that can help you express your own voice? Or is it actually supplanting creative work in order to churn out a supply of stuff that drowns out your own voice?
2026-03-06 09:01:17
Today, I was making a list of nine of my favorite/most formative video games, because I’m on social media too much and I’m a joiner. When I was comparing to the ongoing list on this blog, I was surprised that I hadn’t included one of the most obvious: Sam & Max Hit the Road.
Maybe I had a self-imposed rule that I could only include one SCUMM game? That sounds like something I’d do, since it’s pretty dumb. Maybe it was just too obvious? Like, I’m trying to explain to people how I really got into a Sam & Max game, and the response would be, “Uh yeah, no shit.”
Or maybe the reason it’s different from the other obvious favorites is because it’s the one that felt like it was talking directly to me. I can explain exactly why The Secret of Monkey Island made me want to start working in video games, and I can explain how Half-Life 2 made me completely re-think how games can encompass more than one type of thing. But with Sam & Max Hit the Road, it’s either you already get what makes it so good, or I don’t care to know you.
It’s not perfect. And not only is that not a criticism, I’ve gotten to understand that it’s an essential part of why it was such a big influence on me. It was a case — quite possibly the last case — of my favorite video game studio taking a genuinely big swing. They seemed1 to be at the peak of a golden age of a genre they’d perfected, and they put their resources into making something that was so unapologetically weird.
And not performatively weird, either, which is something that I think a lot of people get wrong about Sam & Max, and which was especially true of underground comics, and then edgelord video games in the early 90s. I almost never got the sense that Hit the Road was trying to be weird, so much as they just couldn’t help it.
My entry point to Sam & Max was through the comics at the back of The Adventurer, and then I found all of the comics collected in long boxes at Bizarro Wuxtry in Athens. So I felt like I inherently understood why anyone would want to share these characters and this sense of humor with a wider audience. It certainly feels like a game completely unconcerned with being a commercial hit, or even being part of the Pantheon of SCUMM Classics for nerds like me to place on its proper pedestal. It more has the feel of guys, you have got to see this shit!
I had two main complaints at the time: one was that the story has kind of an anticlimactic ending. The other was that several of the puzzles were unsatisfying as adventure game puzzles; often, it wasn’t a case of being able to predict what was going to happen, but just “use Max on thing.”
Now I’ve got a greater appreciation for how those are more or less the gestalt of Sam & Max. Being unpredictable is inherent to what makes the whole thing work, even though it’s directly in opposition to what a video game requires. I’ll even be pretentious enough to say it’s similar to what I like so much about David Lynch’s best work: everything that makes it unsatisfying as a narrative is also exactly the same thing that makes it so impactful at the time and unforgettable for years afterwards.
And now a list of (some of) my favorite things about Sam & Max Hit the Road:
And simply the fact that the game has a cold open. And also that it’s an entire scene that I can still quote by heart, even if my other favorite lines from the game are all probably mis-remembered and taken out of context by this point.
“Mind if I drive?”
“Not if you don’t mind me clawing at the dash and shrieking like a cheerleader.”