2025-11-19 11:37:31
Last night, while working on my game for the Playdate, I was trying to draw a quick-and-easy version of the classic “pointing finger” from vintage signs. One of the most time-tested and recognizable images there is, so this would be as simple as it gets: choose one out of what must be dozens of reference images on Google, and whip out a smaller, one-bit version in Pixaki.
What the image search served up instead was page after page of AI-generated versions of that classic image. You could find them in every possible hand pose, pointing in every possible direction, in a variety of styles ranging from fake-woodcut to fake-engraving, in a spectrum stretching from big and cartoony to smaller and more realistic.
I could have (should have?) stopped there and just gone with one of those, and it would’ve made absolutely no difference. I just needed reference a simple drawing that I was going to do, instead of taking assets to drop directly into a game. And I should emphasize that the final product would be under 60 pixels square. But it still didn’t sit right with me.
I wanted to find a photo of an actual sign. Even if it was a photo of a sign from a theme park, or a Wendy’s1, which was itself several generations removed from the originals, those were at least made before generative AI was introduced into the process. (Not to mention that at this point, those versions themselves are “vintage.”)
But even then, all the photos that turned up were from places on Etsy or eBay, selling faux-vintage signs that were themselves printed with AI-generated slop. I was shocked by how difficult it was to find a genuine photo of even an imitation of such a commonly-used image.
So I ended up falling back to my absolute last resort: just taking a picture of my hand and drawing that. People keep saying that anyone who hates generative AI is just rejecting the inevitable march of progress and refusing to take advantage of modern technology, and at least in my case, they must be right. I took a digital photo using my handheld computer camera, which was instantly copied over the cloud to my tablet computer, where I used a wireless, pressure-sensitive stylus to trace over it, and then sent it to the laptop computer on my desk. Just like my ancestors would’ve done.
The only thing that keeps this from being another case of “cool story, bro”2 is that it made me consider the entire farm-to-table pipeline of generative AI, and how it’s such a gross failure at literally every single step of the process. It’s easy to concentrate on one specific way that it sucks, because the failures are so immediately apparent that pro-AI supporters (aka “people who are financially invested in it”) have incorporated the failures into their propaganda.
Nightmarish blobs and misshapen hands? Ha, isn’t that funny and charming — look, these smart systems are actually learning! It’s getting harder and harder for nerd Luddites to go online with suspect images, circling the offending parts in red. At the rate these things are improving, they’ll inevitably be flawless!
These systems are a huge drain on polluting energy sources and water supplies? Never bet against the inevitable march of technology, friend! As processors get more efficient, and models get more advanced, we’ll soon see all of this investment pay off!3
The models are train with work stolen from real artists, writers, and actors? Oops, our bad! Ignore that, since it’s all water under the bridge (and diverted to data centers for cooling), and we’re all about consent these days. Plus there are plenty of companies touting models that are trained “ethically” and run locally without being connected to the internet, and those claims are every bit as rigidly-defined and trustworthy as, say, seeing stuff in a grocery store that’s labeled “organic.”
The jobs of artists, writers, animators, actors, and filmmakers that are being eliminated to be replaced with generative AI? It’s all about efficiency, chum, letting people accomplish their jobs with less effort! (Just ask any of the tens of thousands of people who’ve been laid off to compare the amount of work they had to do today with the work they had to do even a few months ago! Ha ha, I can joke because I’m in management and we’re under no threat from this stuff).
It’s become so omnipresent so quickly, being shoved into more and more applications where it doesn’t belong, that it’s gotten all but impossible to avoid it? Ha, I know, right? Crazy days in 2025, I’m right there with ya, but since it’s so clearly inevitable, we might as well learn to live with it!
And of course, there have always been the more esoteric concerns about the ethics and morality of “thinking machines,” which have been floating around for as long as we’ve had even the concept of artificial general intelligence. What amazes me is how thoroughly and shamelessly AI proponents (aka investors) have incorporated skepticism and concerns into their propaganda. Have we learned nothing from Star Trek: The Next Generation? If these unfathomably advanced systems can actually think and feel, is it even moral for anyone to propose just… turning them off? We don’t even fully understand how they work!4
There’s a filmmaker named Sergio Cilli who’s been making videos cutting through the hype of generative AI, not by making impassioned protests about the ethics of training data, or the environmental costs, or marking offending portions of gen AI output with red circles, but by getting back to the most pragmatic basics: this stuff’s just plain not good. Many of them show a director trying and failing to get AI-generated video to deliver anything usable for even the most basic, unimaginative, and prosaic tasks, the only kinds of things that AI slop would theoretically be good at. Brief commercial spots, scenes from sitcoms, cliched horror movie moments. It fails to pass even the lowest of low bars.
His latest at the time I’m writing this is responding to a video from someone in Germany, which is a shamelessly manipulative bit of propaganda intended to look like a PSA interviewing children asking them how it feels to be AI-generated. (Cilli’s best line is “whoa, don’t show the Kool-Aid, just take a few sips!”)
The propaganda video is a perfect example of how deeply cynical these things are in their manipulation. It announces from the start that everything is AI-generated, but it still uses all of the stereotypical signifiers of “authenticity,” by generating shots that are made to look like they’re a peek behind the scenes. (Which are themselves gross perversions of reality, but I could spend hours ranting about that). It’s yet another example of the age-old trick of grifters and con men, trying to make you suspicious of one thing as a distraction from what you really should be suspicious of.
I don’t doubt that some viewers will be affected by the maudlin emotional manipulation, and some will be swayed by the idea that they’ve just seen a dire warning of the chilling implications of generative AI. But it’s cynically designed to work on a viewer coming at it with almost any level of skepticism. It’s not trying to convince you of anything other than eroding your trust and confidence. Whether it’s the guileless “maybe there is more going on in these systems than we yet understand!” or the defeatist “if they can make something that looks this real, does it really make a difference whether it’s actually real or not?”
When you can generate dozens or hundreds of these things at low cost, you don’t even have to come up with the one perfect video that goes viral and most convincingly makes its point. You just need to have them suggest an idea and then flood every social media platform with them so that the idea sticks with enough people.
And as always, the main idea that they’re trying to convince you of isn’t that generative AI is good. It’s that: it’s convincing, it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality, it’s so huge and sophisticated that laypeople can’t possibly even understand how it works, and that it’s inescapable and inevitable. You don’t even have to think that any of those things are good; you only have to believe that they’re true.
I think the most damning of Cilli’s videos is one where he doesn’t try to be funny. He just shows the output of one of these systems. He tries, out of curiosity, to get the most-hyped AI “actress” to recreate a genuinely classic scene, from Diane Keaton’s performance in Annie Hall. And the results aren’t just bad, but too bad to even be funny. It’s just repulsive.
The reason it’s not funny is because there’s no specific thing to make fun of, nothing that can be fixed to improve it. It simply has no reason to exist.
And that’s why pointing out “tells” or errors in something that’s AI-generated is kind of missing the point.5 If I were a more poetic person, I could probably come up with some kind of poignant analogy of how, at their most fundamental level, these systems are designed to generate errors and eventually incorporate them into a “correct” result. That’s similar to how the generative AI hype bubble works: the more you criticize any particular aspect of it, the more it gets fed into perpetuating the hype bubble.
It ignores the most basic question, which is why does this exist in the first place? A while ago, an artist at a comic book convention was suspected of using AI in his “original” art, and there were several people posting pictures of it with the offending parts circled. I looked at it and thought, “Yeah, I think I see the problem now. The whole thing sucks.” It was just generic, uninspired, derivative, non-art. The idea of it having been created with AI was one of the least offensive things about it, because nobody honestly expects a computer to have taste.
The technology has progressed to the point where I have a hard time reliably identifying when something has been made using generative AI. Honestly, a lot of the time, it just has the same look of rushed sloppiness of something I would make: outright forgetting to include a detail, failing to get perspective or proportions right, finding it hard to draw a certain thing and just replacing it with a random blob.
It’s gotten to the point where “false positives” are getting more frequent — social media will go on a campaign calling out something as having been clearly AI generated, and the artist responds with proof that it wasn’t. I don’t think this is the “gotcha” that some people seem to think it is, though. I know if I’d drawn something that was either sloppy or blandly generic enough for someone to assume that it was made with AI, I’d be prompted (ha!) to seriously reconsider what I was doing and why I was doing it.
Maybe instead of seeing it as an environment in which we can no longer trust that what we’re seeing is “real” art, which is depressing, we should see it as a case of people being more critical and more aware of what we value in art? Recently at a Halloween event, my husband and I were drawn to T-shirts that were for sale, and each of us became suspicious that they’d been generated by AI.6 We ended up not getting them, because we weren’t sure. In retrospect, I’m actually grateful, since it was a reminder of how often my personal taste trends towards Basic.
Why did I find it unnerving that I couldn’t tell whether this thing was real or not, instead of finding it unnerving that I was actually tempted to buy something that was so blandly inoffensive that I couldn’t tell whether it was real in the first place?
For a while, it’s been a bummer that a particular style of art and character design that I like a lot has become common in exploitative free-to-play games. So common, that it’s kind of ruined the style for me. It’s similar to how the specific style of cartoon person that pops up over and over again in generative AI happens to be exactly the style that I aspired to be able to draw someday. Depressingly often, I’d see a cartoon that had been shat out by some AI model, and think, “that’s exactly the style of character I had in mind that I’d eventually get adept at drawing, if I only practiced enough.”
I hope it’s obvious to you — because it wasn’t obvious to me until just recently — but that doesn’t say as much about the depressing ubiquity of generative AI, as it does about my own taste and what I aspired to make. Those designs are appealing to me because being instinctually appealing is the entire reason they exist. They are all but literally the average of all art that people have liked enough to share7. It’s a process not unlike turning the wild, imaginative, and often weird concept art for the Toy Story movies into the globally-appealing characters that ended up in the final product. Just with a source data set that’s orders of magnitude larger, and iterated over near-infinitely more generations. I like it because it has been manufactured specifically to remove any stray detail that might make me not like it.
It would be like declaring you have a crush on the average Apple executive that Ashur Cabrera generates every so often.
Which goes back, finally, to my gripping story of the pointing finger art. The main reason I could find nothing but gen-AI in an image search is because the thing I was looking for was so common and predictable that it’s been used thousands of thousands of times before. Most often to give off exactly the same type of “vintage” vibe that I’m using it for. It was the first thing to come to mind because it’s the biggest cliche.
I don’t even think that that’s bad, in this case, because it’s purely functional. Sometimes the easiest answer is the best answer. But the whole process of immediately going online to try and find a source image, instead of going to my own hand right there at the end of my arm, seems more significant. Like, universe slapping you on the back of the head to make you notice something significant.
It’s basically the whole gestalt of the generative AI that I dislike so much. Wanting something immediately. Choosing something predictable because it’s fine, and it doesn’t really need to be anything special. Being satisfied to recreate something that I’d seen before, hundreds of times. And trying to find a facsimile (of a facsimile of a facsimile) of the thing, instead of just looking at the thing itself. They’re all things that require ignoring the fundamental question of “why does this need to exist in the first place?”
I’ve seen very eloquent statements about the satisfaction of creating something truly original, the way that the process of creation is an inextricable part of the final product, the way that we learn so much during the process that we would never have learned if we’d just leaped from the idea to the final product. And they’re all true, but they’re also all preaching to the choir. People who can fully appreciate that and feel inspired by it are not, by definition, the target audience for generative AI.
The audience is more people like me. Or at least, a younger version of me. Honestly, if this stuff had been around twenty years ago, I would’ve been a lot more open to it.8 I’d have been open to the possibility that the concerns are very real, but we’ll find ways to address them, and after all the gold rush hype, we’d be left with a limited set of applications where using generative AI makes sense.
Because I tend to think I’m better at ideas than I am at executing on them, and I’m better at words than all the various kinds of art that bring words to life. I aspire to being a good artist, but lack the time (or patience) to dedicate to being satisfyingly great at it. I’m a programmer who’s often satisfied to use code that’s been proven to work, even if I haven’t taken the time to figure out for myself exactly how it works. And I have zero aptitude for voice acting or music creation, and have rarely been operating with enough budget to afford people who are good at it. In other words: I’m the perfect mark for a generative AI grift.
Had this stuff been readily available twenty years ago, I can all but guarantee that I would’ve made a lot of really uninspired garbage with it. Because the easier it is to make something, the less likely it is that it was worth making in the first place. I have had a lot of ideas over the years that I was dead-set convinced would be solid gold if I could just get them made; it was only a lack of time and resources that stood in the way. And I have completely forgotten 99% of these potentially world-changing flashes of genius.9
I’d been surprised by how quickly the push for generative AI seemed to skip past evangelism and go directly to bullying. You don’t want to get laid off like all these tens of thousands of other people? You’d better jump on board the train or you’ll be left behind! Don’t like it? Tough, we’re going to put it everywhere, whether you like it or not.
With every “advance” of the technology, it just becomes more and more apparent that the reason is because there’s nothing at the core of it. It’s just not good. Everything that’s genuinely amazing about it — and anyone with an interest in technology has to be honest and admit that it is genuinely amazing to be able to generate even seconds of realistic-looking video from a text prompt — is all on the surface level. Once you try to build anything on top of it, it either falls apart completely (which makes the news and gets lots of attention on social media) or more often, it becomes immediately uninteresting.
Even if there were a narrow set of applications where it was useful — which seems increasingly unlikely — those are not the kind of applications that make for impressive tech demos that will have people investing billions of dollars.
So I’ve developed a pretty pessimistic and dismissive attitude about generative AI over the past few years, but that was without even asking the most damning questions of all: why does this exist? And even if it could do everything it claims it can, what does it say about me that I would even want that?
2025-11-18 06:46:19
So I ended up doing exactly what I advised people not to do last night: I started thinking too much about The Running Man.
Not consciously, really. It had evidently just stuck in my brain enough that I woke up thinking about a scene with a woman and her scarf, and feeling irrationally irritated by it.
It comes after our hero (Richards) finds himself next to a freeway, and he gets into a random car and holds the driver at gunpoint, ordering her to drive him towards Canada. The driver (Amelia) is presented as an average, upper-middle class woman in this universe, riding in her Ioniq 5-looking self-driving car, having a video chat with a friend while they’re both watching the trashy reality television series we saw earlier. She doesn’t watch The Running Man, she says later, not because of the gross and excessive violence, but because “it’s so clearly fake.”
She refuses to help him, because she believes he’s the person that the TV show is presenting: a ruthless, remorseless murderer trying to get rich with violence instead of doing actual work, carelessly abandoning his slutty wife with no regard for their innocent child. He reminds her (at gunpoint) that everything on the show is fake, and he shows a photograph of his wife and daughter, to explain how he really feels about them, and how everything that he’s done has been for their benefit.
And then he scolds her about her scarf. It’s an ugly but basically unremarkable neckerchief-type thing. Probably chosen carefully by a costume designer not to be so ostentatious that it’s a stereotype of conspicuous consumption, but still distinctive enough to stand out in the audience’s mind. Richards tells Amelia that the money she spent on that scarf would’ve been more than enough for him to buy the medicine that would save his young daughter from needlessly dying of something as innocuous as influenza.
Earlier in the movie, there’s a scene where Richards is trying to escape a hostel, and he tosses a live grenade directly at our still-masked main villain. The villain casually steps on it, then nonchalantly kicks it back towards Richards, who fumbles with it before it explodes.
Can you see the similarity between these two scenes? Take a moment to write the answer in your notebook.
My initial impression of The Running Man still stands: it’s fine as long as you watch it as an often-clever action movie, and completely disregard it as actual satire. It’s ironic that it makes so much effort to stick closer to the original book and correct the mistakes of the 1987 adaptation, since that movie got a reputation for shedding all of the weight and relevance of the book for the sake of mindless action. Now that we’re actually living in 2025, it’s the current adaptation that falls apart the moment you start to dig below the surface level, and the original seems more daring in comparison. Simply by virtue of putting one of the most recognizable and bankable movie stars into a satire that said “don’t trust the media,” long before that sentiment was really in vogue.
It’s a clever bit of self-awareness when the 2025 adaptation implicates itself and its audience in the near-future dystopian media environment it’s depicting. Hey look, this reality TV family is a lot like the Kardashians! And all these people in the movie are fixated on their screens, watching a guy on the run for his life, hoping to see some violence and explosions and some very bad people get a helping of old-school justice: wait, that’s just like us watching the movie! Isn’t that something!
But popular media is terrible at actually satirizing itself. Even the most insightful and hard-hitting satire I’ve ever seen is still invariably turned into a catch phrase, or shorthand for what it actually means. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Or “That’s so Black Mirror!”
It’s like a magician performing a sleight of hand trick1, explaining to you how the trick works and not to believe anything that you’re seeing, and then pulling off the trick anyway.
The Running Man has explicit and overt messages about power to the people, pro-union heroes, being the spark that ignites a revolution, taking down the 1%, don’t trust the media, and so on. But that is itself a loaded message. It’s like oil companies or airlines stressing the importance of carbon offsets. Or major polluters telling all of us that it’s up to us to save the environment, by cutting up plastic yokes around six packs, or refusing to use plastic straws.
Or, hypothetically, one of the nation’s major political parties spending decades touting itself as the only line of resistance against an evil totalitarian regime that is always just a hair’s breadth and a small monthly contribution of just $10-$50 away from destroying everything we stand for. All while stressing the need for crossing the aisle, catering to wealthy donors, and actively working against anyone campaigning on a platform of actually trying to make a difference in government.
(One of the things I read about The Running Man was Stephen King praising this adaptation, calling it “bipartisan.” And I mean… wow. I honestly don’t know how I feel about that).
Even the otherwise valid message of “you can’t trust everything you see” is undermined, when you think for even a second of how much and how effectively that’s been corrupted and manipulated by grifters and confidence men. Instead of encouraging a healthy and responsible skepticism, it’s just spent decades chipping away at all of our institutions, undermining all faith in the expertise of people actually trained to understand what’s going on, in favor of the first person who can most loudly and simply tell you whatever it is you want to hear.
Any time I find myself trying to take a piece of popular entertainment as an earnest call to action, I need to imagine this scene in my head: this screenplay comes across some executive’s desk, and they’re immediately on the phone with the director and writer. “Wait wait wait wait… this giant media network conglomerate. That’s not us is it?! Are we the bad guys? Why didn’t anyone tell us? Clearly we need to change our ways, and put the word out to warn others about people like us, in the form of this major motion picture!”
Obviously I don’t want to over-correct and discount the importance of collective action and individual responsibility. There is undeniably a tendency to realize how much you’ve been manipulated by propaganda, and then conclude that it’s all propaganda, I’m done being gullible, none of this is actually our fault, it’s all the corporations and billionaires who are causing all the problems. That’s just tossing the grenade to someone else, which doesn’t accomplish much, even if they are the ones who most deserve to be holding it.
It shouldn’t be about absolving yourself of blame or responsibility, but realizing how much it’s a collective effort. Not so much Us vs Them, but the less-catchy fact that A Lot of Us Are Having Outrageously Disproportionate Impact on the Rest of Us, Without Taking Their Share of Responsibility or Acknowledging How Much We All Need to Give Back to Society.
So my advice: keep using paper or reusable straws, be reasonably skeptical of everything you see in popular media, be doubly skeptical if it’s taking the form of a big-budget action movie, triply skeptical if it’s distributed by a major media conglomerate whose CEO has been very vocal about his questionable views on political and social issues, support unions, go green as much as you can, and believe in the value of collective action and individual responsibility. Just never let anyone tell you that your buying an ugly scarf is the main reason less privileged people can’t afford to buy essential medicine for their kids.
2025-11-18 02:00:00
In the Edgar Wright-directed remake of The Running Man, there’s an action scene set to a somewhat obscure pop song I didn’t recognize, because of course there is. I just told you it was an Edgar Wright movie; weren’t you listening?
At the end of the scene (most of which is in the trailers), our protagonists make their way down to a secret passage carved out underneath a house. As soon as they get underground, the music suddenly sounds muffled, as if we’re hearing it as part of the chaos still going on above ground. So the score, which had previously been non-diegetic, was now actually happening in the movie’s world. Or maybe it wasn’t? Or maybe it always was?
That’s exactly the kind of thing that happens pretty often in Edgar Wright movies, but here, it’s not so much a stylistic flourish as it is a reinforcement of the movie’s overall themes. The Running Man is all about details that make you question how much of it is “real,” all with the meta-awareness that none of it is “real,” because it’s a movie. But then, it’s a movie talking about very real and relevant stuff. Or maybe it isn’t? Or maybe it never was?
Earlier in the movie, there’s a scene where Glen Powell’s character is talking to Josh Brolin’s, and in a fit of rage, Powell suddenly and violently slams Brolin’s head onto the desk. But then, much like my favorite moment from 8 1/2, we see that it didn’t actually happen, but was an intrusive thought showing what Powell wanted to do.
Earlier than that, we were introduced to a guy who we know immediately is Comic Relief Guy, because we recognize him from Saturday Night Live. It feels jarring and even a little tone-deaf, since up until that point, the movie had been completely straight-faced in its attempts to present us with a bleak dystopian future, as painfully earnest as any Hunger Games installment. But this guy’s one character trait — as soon as he enters a new space, he immediately declares the most obvious thing that everyone else can see — is actually kind of funny. Later on, we see a presentation from someone who’d been studying the history of The Running Man episodes, who informs us that the comic relief, the hedonistic DGAF type, and the angry “final man” who always survives the longest, are all the stock character types that are cast in every season of the show.
Once I clued into the idea, I was completely on board, and I started to see it everywhere. There are multiple scenes that feel like all is lost for our hero, until they’re revealed to be dream sequences. Cameras are everywhere, and we sometimes see the action switch between the “real” camera and the in-world camera, or even see a scene from multiple camera angles at once.
More subtly: our hero (the unnaturally pretty Glen Powell) has a scar on his forehead in the exact place that manga and anime characters have a bulging vein to indicate that they’re angry, and whenever he gets angry, the scar becomes especially visible. Meanwhile, our villain (the unnaturally pretty Lee Pace) spends most of the movie wearing a full face mask, and when his face is finally revealed, it’s covered with what appears to be burn scarring. Based on everything else, I don’t think it’s at all a reach to take this as commentary on what Hollywood considers beautiful vs “average” looking.1
Combined with the overt plot points of deep fakes being used to show fabricated versions of scenes we’d already watched, multiple characters acknowledging that everything they do is for show, and over -the-top depictions of our main villain — with weapons named “FATE” or “JUSTICE” in on-screen text that seems to exist both in the movie’s world and not — it all combines to give the constant undercurrent of suspicion, the feeling that you can’t be certain of a single thing that you’re seeing, and nothing that the movie is presenting should be taken at face value.
It felt like an ingenious way to do a modern remake of a movie that was, by all accounts, pretty clumsy and toothless late-1980s satire. It’s now all a meta-commentary on media manipulation, presented by a director who loves meta-commentary, and loves controlling, subverting, and manipulating what we see on screen.
Or maybe it isn’t?
I keep calling this a “remake” instead of a “new adaptation,” even though it is a much more faithful adaptation of the original book, and it’s coming out in the dystopian future year of 2025, when the original book was set. I’ve never seen the first movie in its entirety, only scenes out of context. And I haven’t read the original book, since I’d already lost interest in King’s “bleak future” stories by the time I heard of it.2 But at least based on the synopses — and the inclusion of a picture cameo from Arnold Schwarzenegger on the money used in this movie — this feels like it’s as much a reaction to the earlier movie as an attempt to more accurately adapt a book.
Overall, I got the impression that they were attempting to make the movie that should’ve been made in 1987, more than the one that should’ve come out in 2025. A classic case of satire aiming for where the target is, instead of where the target is going to be.
Because for all the tension that I’d felt building throughout the movie, causing me to get more and more suspicious of everything I was seeing, gearing me up for the other shoe to drop in an explosive reveal… it just doesn’t.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, as far as action movies go. It’s fine, and it’s engaging. And especially in an environment of generative AI, its depiction of a society where believable but completely fake images are quick, seamless, and ubiquitous, is a good reminder to be skeptical of everything you’re shown, especially when it gets a strong reaction out of you.
But I’d been expecting a movie that was “subverting the thing while doing the thing,” as Greta Gerwig described her Barbie movie, and that didn’t happen. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, because I already acknowledged that that can’t happen, because it’s impossible. Even if it weren’t in a movie about evil, totalitarian media companies that was distributed by Paramount, a Skydance corporation. A movie like this could not possibly be a genuinely biting satire of contemporary media, because it’s too much a product of contemporary media.
In fact, if you think too hard about it, the satire of The Running Man turns inside-out, and it becomes the worst example of the thing it purports to be satirizing. There’s some amount of this deliberately built into the movie and its premise: it shows blood-thirsty audiences eager to see people getting murdered in increasingly gruesome ways, to an audience that’s watching an action movie in which people get murdered in increasingly gruesome ways.
But it seems more sinister when you consider how much it simplifies the evils of this dystopian society down to a revenge quest against one specific bad guy. And especially when it shows the “common people” becoming victorious thanks to the power of zines and video exposes, as opposed to, say, governmental regulation or outright overthrow of the government. If you think too much about that, it seems less like a satire, and more like a placating fairy tale about resistance.
So it’s best not to think too hard about it! The Running Man is around 30 minutes too long, and it doesn’t really stick the landing well enough to rise above being a competent action movie, but it’s frequently clever, it’s got a lot of imagination, and there’s a fun sense of self-awareness throughout. Which is all interesting, even though it is ultimately more self-awareness of how movies work than about how society works.
In one of the scenes that was highlighted in the trailer and was evidently intended to be an iconic moment, considering that it was included in the “zines” that are shown over the end credits, Richards looks directly into one of the ubiquitous drone cameras and screams “stop filming me!” It’s deliberately ironic, since as I recall, there’s barely a single shot in the entire movie in which he’s not on screen.
That’s the kind of thing this version of The Running Man does well: mildly implicates the audience in being fixated on screens, treating real human lives as content for our entertainment, and living in a world where we spend so much time being observed that everything becomes a performance and nothing is genuine. The premise suggests a sense of overwhelming paranoia due to the fact that literally everyone is trying to kill our hero, but there’s actually surprisingly little of that. Instead, the pervasive sense of dread and paranoia comes from the constant feeling that you can’t trust anything you’re being shown.
Just don’t expect it to be a lot more than a fairly shallow and toothless satire of contemporary media. Boy, those reality TV types sure are a bunch of phonies, am I right?!
Now some spoilers for specifics about The Running Man: a scene that I still can’t figure out, and my expectations of what the movie was going to be. And then how the movie didn’t meet my expectations, and in fact, it probably couldn’t have.
After Richards meets the kid and his brother, he sees the video explaining how The Running Man works (not just the TV show, but as we’ve seen by now, the movie itself). The key points are that everything we’ve seen so far has been for the sake of the show, and that they’re going to let him live for as long as they can, to get the most climactic finale. We also get a reminder of how much everything is faked, how the show exploits people’s faith and trust in each other, and how he should trust no one. Richards has to leave for a safe house, so they put him in the trunk of a car to drive to a safer location.
In the weirdest scene of the movie, which I still can’t figure out, he gets into the trunk, and the two brothers pull out a blanket and wave it in front of the camera, like a magician pulling a disappearing act. (Or like a movie trying to disguise an edit in what’s supposed to look like one long, uninterrupted take, but as far as I can recall, this wasn’t what was happening here?)
After that, we’re inside the trunk with Richards, and we only hear what’s happening on the outside. It sounds like they’re trying to get away from hunters in pursuit. Again, it was really odd that so much of the scene seemed to be pointedly preventing us from seeing what was going on outside.
Based on all of this, I assumed that from the moment the blanket covered the camera, every single thing that followed was a deliberate part of the plan of the “show.” We’d see scene after scene of Richards making narrow escapes from the people in pursuit, only for it to be revealed that everyone had been working with the network, and he was being played the whole time.
Maybe it’s just because Now You See Me: Now You Don’t was still rattling around in my brain. Whatever the cause, I was convinced that we’d somehow gone through the looking glass, and the increasingly unrealistic things we saw — the entire house, the murder of Michael Cera’s character, the bunker he’d been trying to get to and the construction project that was now on the site, even the people cheering him on, and even the driver we see him take hostage — were all deliberately placed there to keep Richards (and the audience) believing that he was always one step ahead of his pursuers. When in fact, he’d been put into an unwinnable situation.
It made sense as an even darker take on the original story. A society, and a media environment, so cynical and corrupt that they’d use the illusion of resistance as a diversion and means of control. A way to believe that you’re battling against the system, even though in reality, you’re accomplishing nothing.3 And not just within the world of the story, but shocker: you, the viewer, are living in that world right now!
But the longer this imaginary version of the movie played out in my head, the more I realized a few things: first, that Black Mirror had not only done this already, but done it much more effectively, in Fifteen Million Merits. (Not to mention being half as long). Second, that there was no way in hell a movie with this much budget and marketing behind it was going to deliver on something that bleak.
And honestly, unless they managed to stick the landing to an unprecedented degree, it would’ve felt like a disappointing rug pull. The statement might’ve been impressive and satisfying, but the movie itself wouldn’t have. It spent two hours getting the audience invested in this character, more or less, and I’m not convinced that there’s a way that my imaginary version of the story could’ve resolved itself without feeling like a complete betrayal of that.
If we learned anything from the decade that followed the first The Running Man movie, it’s that piling layer on layer of self-aware meta-commentary just descends into a pointlessly nihilistic spiral, to where you’ve spent so much time saying “none of this is real” that you’ve ended up saying nothing real.
Not to mention that it would’ve been a nihilistic message that multiple media executives had signed off on, even though it supposedly implicated them in creating the kind of dystopian, manipulative society that it was purportedly satirizing. So maybe the most insightful thing that The Running Man has to say about media and media manipulation is this: don’t expect genuinely impactful satire to come from any project from a major studio that has a budget of over 100 million dollars.
2025-11-17 06:43:47
Foolish Mortals is an independent point-and-click adventure game from Inklingwood Studios, which according to its press kit was formed by the husband-and-wife team of David Younger, who’s credited as Designer, Writer, and Producer; and Sophie Younger, who’s credited as programmer.
The game’s described as being inspired by the Monkey Island and Broken Sword games, but you certainly don’t need a press release to see that. The influences are immediately evident, but instead of feeling just like a derivative pastiche, there’s a genuine sense of creators who loved a particular era of video games, and who are doing everything they can to recreate the era (with modern improvements) and recapture the way those games made them feel.
The story structure and puzzle design feel very much inspired by the Monkey Island series, with acts consisting of three or more puzzle chains you can work on simultaneously, culminating in a major plot development that leads into the next act. The art and animation style, and I’d say the overall tone, is more like the Broken Sword series: detailed backgrounds and fluid character-animations that I wouldn’t call “realistic,” but certainly “grounded.” It’s mostly light-hearted, but it’s not a comedy game; it’s more aiming for a general feel of coziness than hitting you with a barrage of jokes and wackiness.
And another clear inspiration is Disneyland; the title and premise obviously suggest the Haunted Mansion, but a love of Disney parks is an undercurrent throughout. The overall vibe I got was “what if there were a Broken Sword game set in and around New Orleans Square and the Rivers of America?”
Maybe the most telling endorsement I can give for the game is that I was compelled to finish it. In case that sounds like damning with faint praise, it’s not: for one thing, I rarely finish any games these days, even ones that I’m enjoying a lot. And more significantly, I genuinely was compelled to finish it. I played it over the course of a few days, and it stuck in my mind as a story left unfinished, and I was eager to see the end.
Which might be the most telling praise of all, since I don’t actually like playing point-and-click adventure games that much. I liked working on them. And some of them are still my most favorite games of all time. But those favorites were more a case of catching lightning in a bottle, the rare times when story, puzzle design, and writing all synced perfectly with my mindset. But over the years, I realized that adventure game puzzles were my least favorite form of interactivity, and more often than not, they felt like an impediment to the story instead of being engaging on their own. The style of game just doesn’t click with me, if you get my point. (Apologies, but I can’t help how my brain works).
So it took something like Foolish Mortals to get me interested in trying out this style of game again, since at least on paper, it seems practically custom-made for me: I loved the Monkey Island games so much that they made me want to work in video games, I worked on one of the installments as a programmer and writer, I love Disneyland, and the Broken Sword games I played are the only non-LucasArts adventure games that I remember actually enjoying.
And one of the things that quickly becomes apparent in Foolish Mortals is that this doesn’t feel like a small team of indie devs making a quaint love letter to a bygone era; the polish and overall production value is remarkable. A ton of care went into the backgrounds, the character animation is detailed and fluid, there’s a ton of music throughout, and all of the character dialogue is fully voiced. The main character is played by AJ LoCascio, who I recognize from his work on several of the Telltale games. And looking over the voice cast, I was surprised to see how many of the other, seemingly disparate characters were voiced by the same actor, many of them I’d been convinced had to be different people.
If you weren’t aware of the game’s release date and the team behind it, you could easily assume that it was a game made by a much larger studio, released around the time of Broken Sword 2. And then you’d wonder why the game was running in such high resolution and had so many quality-of-life improvements that didn’t exist back then.
Steam tells me I spent around 12 hours playing the game from start to finish. I might’ve spent longer if I’d refused to use the hint system, which in Foolish Mortals takes the form of the main character’s journal, recounting his story. There’s a setting for “dynamic hints frequency,” which I kept at its default value, but if it ever kicked in and offered a hint unprompted, I didn’t notice. The journal was sufficient for me, acting both as a reminder of your current story goals, and as a way to get increasingly-explicit clues for how to solve the puzzles that lead up to that goal. I thought it was a pretty elegant, straightforward, and non-punishing way to do in-game hints: prominently placed, so it feels like a natural part of the game instead of a cheat; and with hints that progressed naturally and felt written to give the player as much chance as possible to feel the satisfaction of solving the puzzle. First give a reminder of what the player’s trying to achieve, then a reminder of what they’ve seen and what should be on their mind, and then steps breaking down the logic behind the solution.
The puzzles are my main criticism of Foolish Mortals, with the reminder that I’m critical of adventure game puzzles in general. There were few that fell into the “moon logic” category, but I did need to consult the hints at least once in every chapter. I’m convinced that that’s simply endemic to this style of game; when the whole structure of the game is finding unconventional — and often intentionally non-sensical enough to be interesting — solutions to obstacles that could be much more simply and obviously solved in a straightforward way, you’re inevitably going to run into situations where the player and the designer were just not on the same wavelength.
But those were pretty rare. There were only a couple cases of “ye can’t get ye flask,” where the game flat-out refused to let me do something that I thought made sense, or where the puzzle demanded a bizarre solution that seemed to be there solely for the sake of the puzzle. The more common issues I had were simply ones of communication: an object appeared in a location I’d already visited, without enough signal that the environment had changed. Or an object that I’d already used now had different options available for it, with little clue that the state had changed. Or most commonly, cases of the interface not working like I’d want it to.
For the most part, the puzzles were fairly straightforward to anybody who’s played a point-and-click adventure game before. I was only a few minutes into Foolish Mortals before I felt a gear in my brain turn and flip a familiar switch into place. I was back to solving adventure game puzzles again, often even before I’d even reached the story prompt that told me exactly why I needed to solve them. And even in those cases, where I’d essentially solved a puzzle before the story told me what I needed to do, it recovered seamlessly and took what I’d already accomplished into account.
In fact, most of the puzzles might be straightforward to a fault. The reason I got more of a Broken Sword feel from this than Monkey Island is that many of the puzzles felt like obstacles to advance the story instead of being part of the story on their own. A string needs to be cut, and you have scissors in your inventory. To be clear: that’s not an objective criticism, but more an indicator of the style and tone of this game, and what it emphasizes. The solutions to the puzzles are rarely of the “a-ha!” variety, but more “yes, I see, now how will the story continue?”
My other criticisms are all of the nit-picking variety. There are options for fast-travel throughout, but there are still a lot of cases where you’re stuck watching your character slowly walk towards an object and reaching out to interact with it. As somebody who played every LucasArts game with one hand on the period key to advance through dialogue, it was frustrating that some scenes were simply unskippable, with little indication of when or why. I can absolutely understand the desire to encourage players to slow down and enjoy a more relaxed pace, especially when it’s evident how much time and care went into the animation. But honestly, I wish that more of the effort to create such detailed and fluid animation had been spent on the individual moments that had maximum impact on the story, instead of the more mundane moments of the main character reaching into his pocket to take out an item, or bending down to open a chest.
Overall, it’s impressive how much time and care went into this project. As someone who spent a lot of time working on more frugal productions, I’m especially impressed with how cleverly Foolish Mortals reuses environments without feeling pointlessly repetitive. There’s more a sense of call backs and escalating complexity as more of the island opens up and the story progresses — I know this place from when I did this, but now I can do that — than working on a limited budget. It manages to maintain a feeling of variety that makes the whole place seem bigger than it actually is.
If I’m being honest, I’d expected Foolish Mortals to feel like a quaint but dated throwback, a love letter to a style of game that simply isn’t relevant anymore, now that we’re no longer in an environment where Monkey Island or DOOM were your only two options — a game could have an engaging story and cinematic storytelling, or it could be exciting and fun. And while it does feel quaint and often charming, what surprised me is how it doesn’t feel “dated” so much as “genuinely nostalgic.” A reminder of how it really felt to be engaged in a story-based adventure game and eager to see how it all turned out. Maybe even more impressive than the fact that I finished Foolish Mortals is that it left me wanting to play more of these.
Edit: In the first version of this post, I wrote an overly long, hyper-critical breakdown of specific puzzles in this game, for who knows what reason. I’d just spent three days engrossed in the game, it was bringing back nostalgia for the days when I spent all my time over-thinking adventure games, and it was taking up all of the space in my brain.
Whatever the case, it’s absurd (at best) to be giving “play test notes” to a game that’s already been released, especially when it goes into even more unnecessary detail than I would if I were actually play-testing. (If I’d read similar about something I’d worked on, I’d have just nodded and then gone about my business, thinking “geez, what’s the matter with that guy?!”)
Worse than that, though, it gave a negative impression of the game, which is absurd, since I actually enjoyed quite a bit, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else the studio puts out!
The only things in that other version worth preserving: Dave Grossman and Brendan Ferguson are brilliant game designers that I’m fortunate to have gotten to work with. And also that playing Foolish Mortals reminded me about all of the tenets about adventure games that Jonathan Ackley stressed while making The Curse of Monkey Island, and even so many years later, I continue to be impressed by how much he got it and insisted on details and overall philosophy that made that game work as well it did.
2025-11-15 10:45:19
At the start of Act 3 of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t — the third in a series of movies about super-hero stage magicians who use their skills to pull off social justice heists — we get establishing shots of a flashy event in Abu Dhabi that our villain is holding in honor of her F1 car. It’s all set to “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga, and you know the person in charge of music must’ve been practically peeing themselves the whole movie, desperate to finally be able to let loose and let the needle drop. We see our heroes happily walking together towards the event, and one of them wise-cracks: “Yas Island: the Orlando of the Middle East!” End scene.
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. It’s not even the most ridiculous thing in the movie, by far. But it felt like the past hour and a half of raw, unfiltered absurdity had finally overwhelmed me. I’d come out the other side a changed person, my last impulse to fight back defeated, leaving me with nothing to do but laugh as it all washed o’er me.
The movie is shamelessly corny, even more than the acts of the magicians it claims to idolize (at one point, a guy driving the aforementioned race car says to himself, “Help me, Ricky Jay!”). I haven’t seen either of the first two, so I did briefly wonder if I’d be at a disadvantage, having missed out on all the lore-building. But it opens with an “underground” magic show serving as a reunion performance for the returning cast, where each one of them introduces themselves by essentially reading out a description of their characters from a synopsis of the first two movies.
Then they perform an illusion designed to rob a cartoonishly gross crypto-bro and give his ill-gained money back to the audience, and it was so blatantly a parade of visual effects that would never work outside of a movie, that I was wondering what was the baseline for this movie’s version of reality. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wonder for too long, because they quickly pull back the curtain and reveal that it was all holograms, projected onto clear sheets of acrylic.
In other words, it had all the realistic rigor of a Scooby-Doo episode, where we see a full-on glowing skeleton astronaut chasing teenagers around an abandoned air field, and then we discover it was all pulled off by one guy with a closed-circuit television and some glow-in-the-dark paint.
Actually, more than Scooby-Doo, it feels about as subtle and realistic as an episode of Captain Planet, given the villain. Rosamund Pike plays a ruthless diamond heiress who murdered her housekeeper, and having gotten a taste for blood, continues to brutally murder a German (?) accent. It’s the kind of performance that usually makes you say, “Well at least she was having fun!” But I’m not convinced any of the actors were genuinely having fun. There’s a sense that the light has gone out behind all of their eyes, not just Jesse Eisenberg’s as you’d expect. There’s nothing outright wrong with any of it, just the sense that you can see them all hitting their marks and exchanging their quips while their thoughts are preoccupied by how they’re going to spend the paycheck.
And yet, in its most amazing feat, it actually ends up being kind of fun? None of the cast feels legit, or even a tiny bit sincere, but the movie’s assembled a bunch of inherently charismatic people who could easily do all of this with their eyes closed. When Lizzy Caplan — who I think is physically incapable of not being appealing and magnetic — shows up, it gives a jolt of energy to the thing that makes it seem like things are getting good… and then it kind of peters out. But even when she’s having to deliver blandly corny quips about Yas Island, she can’t help but give off a passive aura of likeability that extends to the whole movie.
And a heist movie, even one that’s both implausible and predictable, can’t help but be at least a little bit engaging.
There’s one scene in particular, shot as if it were one extended, continuous take, in which each of our seven (!) lead characters swirls around each other, taking turns trying to one-up each other with illusions. It escalates from card tricks that undeniably feel like VFX, to more and more elaborate gags that eventually turn into one character transforming a torn-up playing card into a blizzard of confetti, which another character walks through and effortlessly does a complete costume change. It’s so brazenly unconcerned with being plausible that it feels like the scene itself is an attempt at misdirection. To hypnotize us into not trying to process what we’re seeing as if it were an actual movie, and instead just appreciate the spectacle.
Again, I haven’t seen the first two movies. But the premise of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t implies an unrealistic but still reverent celebration of stage magic and its pioneers. This is most obvious in a scene where Justice Smith’s character, who the movie takes care to relentlessly stress is a “magic nerd,” goes wide-eyed through a museum of rare artifacts from well-known magicians. Part of that is to introduce a historic trick in a shot that might as well have THIS IS FORESHADOWING super-imposed on it, but the rest is to establish that this universe is one where stage magicians are super-heroes.
You might think that this is to give audiences a peek behind the scenes of what real stage magic is like, but it’s not at all. I’m not even well-versed in the history of magic, but I feel like I could’ve hammered out this script based solely on what I already know and a web browser opened to the “history of magic” page of Wikipedia. The movie’s actually a celebration of the showmanship of a big, Vegas-ready, magic act. Unabashedly corny and all driven by spectacle. And most of what you get out of it is how willing you are to just take in the spectacle.
And again, the ridiculousness of the movie ends up being part of its charm. It’s hard to be offended or insulted by it. Even when it tries to be relevant to our earth, it comes across more as dated and tone-deaf than offensive. In the spectacular finale, in a shocking twist that everyone saw coming at least an hour ago, the diamond heiress is served Justice1 on stage in front of a crowd of affluent F1 fans on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi. Our heroes announce that the diamond will be returned to its rightful place of origin in South Africa, and exposing her will also take down all of the greedy billionaires who were complicit in the trade of blood diamonds. And even better, they’ll give back some of that money to the crowd. Of affluent F1 fans on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi.
At the start of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, there’s a black screen with text warning that the film contains flashing lights. I’d initially thought that it was a warning for photosensitive people who are prone to seizures, and I kept waiting for a set piece based entirely around strobe lights or something. But I never noticed anything particularly egregious. Based on everything else in the movie, though — including a tense scene in which a professional escape artist performing a heist to steal a diamond from a diamond heiress needs a group brainstorm and 15 minutes to realize that diamonds cut glass — I’m wondering if it was a more general-purpose warning for the target audience who’d be surprised and delighted by this movie. They might not grasp the entire concept of cinema, and be startled to suddenly find themselves in a dark room where disorienting lights are flashing onto a screen and seeming to make moving images.
2025-11-14 16:07:16
Yesterday, Valve announced three new devices to join the Steam Deck in its line of interoperable Steam Hardware, and honestly it’s all I’ve been able to think about. There’s an article from Chris Person at Aftermath if you want to hear a professional journalist sum up all the solid design choices evident in the announcement, but I wanted to add my take, too.
Disclaimer: I do have several friends who work at Valve, but I want to make one thing absolutely clear: I have no shame whatsoever, and if any of them wants to get me a developer kit or deep discounts on the hardware, I’ll gladly accept it in return for more gushing posts like this one.
Because while it’s not at all unusual for me to get excited about announcements of upcoming tech, especially if it includes AR/VR capability, it is unusual for me to get excited about announcements that are so sensible and reasonable. Based on what I’ve seen, it just looks like Valve made all of the correct choices, and they’re creating stuff that is exactly what I’m in the market for.1
The announcement is just over a day old, and I’ve already read or watched every article or video I could find about it, from YouTubers who got to try the hardware in person, and from other commenters reacting to the specs and videos. What I quickly realized is how much the usual sources for tech and gaming coverage have become irrelevant for what I want.
I rarely play AAA games anymore — and I’m not great at the ones I do still play — so I don’t really need the highest frame rates or resolution, and the majority of TLAs2 associated with performance specs for video games these days are completely lost on me. My Steam library is almost entirely made up of independent games, and the ones from larger studios are almost all turn-based, or simulators and city-builders. My Windows machine is several years old at this point, and it’s still overpowered for just about everything I try to play on it.
On the VR side, I’m still optimistic about the potential of it as a platform, even though it never quite seems to take hold beyond a niche audience. But even for me, the advancements I’d need to see are all in terms of experience, not technology. Not even in-game experience, since I have to wear glasses no matter what3, so I’m never going to get the highest clarity or widest FOV4. For me, the determining factors of “experience” are: how quickly can you put it on and get started, how comfortable is it to wear for extended periods, how self-contained is it, and how much is there to actually do with it once you’re inside?
I’d just started to take it for granted that to keep up with all the stuff I used to love — even as a consumer, not just as a developer — you had to be informed about all the details of rendering technology, processor design, memory caching and access speeds, display technology, object tracking, network latency, display latency, and whatever else has become crucially important just in the time it’s taken me to write this paragraph.
What I appreciated about Valve’s announcement is that the tone was basically, “Nah, we’ve got a lot of smart people who’ve figured all that shit out. You’re good.”
This one is the least interesting of the three devices to me, because I rarely have to put any thought into what controller I’m using. All of the stuff I play on a desktop machine, I play with a mouse and keyboard. As God intended.
But even here, they made all the right choices. If I were to get a controller for playing PC games, this is almost certainly the one I’d get.
There are people who love the original Steam Controller, but personally, I never found a good use for it. The overriding design principle seemed to be bringing every input you’d have available on a PC to a handheld controller, resulting in the over-sized trackpads that in theory combined mouse, dpad, and joystick input into one control, but in practice just felt like the worst version of each. Plus, the use of AA batteries made it a hassle, and the overall build quality felt cheaper and more plasticky than it actually was.
The new one is at its core a Steam Deck without a screen, and that’s exactly what it should be. The Steam Deck’s ergonomics are like the physics of bumblebee flight: it shouldn’t work, and yet it does. It seems like the thing is way too big to be comfortable to hold for extended periods, but as soon as you get into it, it’s a joy to use.
In addition to the dpad, two joysticks, and everything else you’d expect from a game controller these days, the touchpads have a placement and size, not to mention responsiveness, that makes a lot more sense. I still rarely use them, but on a platform based around playing everything in a library of games built for PCs, it’s inevitable to need to simulate mouse input at some point or another.
And all the improvements specific to the new Steam Controller sound like genuine improvements. In particular: joysticks that are designed to be drift-proof, which the Switch 2 didn’t include for some reason. And it’s table stakes to include a rechargeable battery instead of relying on AAs, but the magnetic puck that is both a charger and a wireless receiver is ingenious. Especially in a world where everybody else has essentially said, “Just give up and use Bluetooth.”5
I’ve heard several people praising Steam Input as the underrated MVP of the Steam Deck and the platform in general. I haven’t spent any time experimenting with it myself. But again, the philosophy of modding and community-shared content that seems to run through everything Valve does will pay off here, since there’s a good chance someone has already made a controller profile optimized for whatever game you’re wanting to play.
More appealing to me is the Steam Machine, which we have to acknowledge is solid, 1970s-style product naming, even if Steam Cube seems more appropriate.
I’ve been wanting a PC in the living room for almost two decades and three different living rooms. I’ve used everything from a Mac Mini running a Windows VM, to a Steam Deck dock. None of them have “stuck,” because there’s always been that little bit of friction that keeps it from being as quick and simple as a console. So I just keep taking the path of least resistance and saying, “Okay, fine, I guess I’ll buy the new PlayStation.”
So assuming they get the price right6, it looks like the Steam Machine will be exactly the thing I’ve been hoping for. A lot of the coverage I’ve seen has been focusing on the technical specs and comparing it to a desktop PC, but that honestly feels like it’s missing the point. I think Valve emphasized exactly the right priorities, namely: size, convenience, and compatibility.
Can it play my entire Steam library? Is it more capable than a docked Steam Deck? Can I leave it plugged in and not have to go through any setup every time?
And most importantly: can I 3D print a custom faceplate for it that allows me to attach Lego bricks?
It would’ve been foolish to position it as a gaming PC instead of a console alternative, since the people who are most interested in having a high-end gaming PC have almost certainly already got one. (Assuming they can afford the price of video cards). For people like me, who use Windows begrudgingly and only for gaming, a medium-to-high-end PC just sits under the desk making noise and taking up space. And it’s never a seamless experience for its intended purpose, either, since every time it boots up, it needs to go through another lengthy round of Windows system updates.
I appreciated that Valve showed the Steam machine being used as a desktop PC — and that’s all they showed, as far as I’m aware; I haven’t seen any out-of-game shots of whatever Big Picture looks like on this version of the platform. (I’m assuming it’s the Steam Deck’s interface, but bigger). But what I especially appreciated is how focused they were in the out-of-game shots: someone developing a game in Blender and Godot, and someone else using the Steam Machine to stream Stardew Valley. It’s such an ingenious way to communicate “this machine can do whatever you want” but still acknowledge “but we’re still perfectly aware of our target audience.” Clumsier and over-eager marketing might’ve tried to emphasize the computer’s versatility by showing someone editing a spreadsheet on it.
While I’m saying how impressed I am by this launch announcement, I should also mention how effectively they communicated “this is the diversity of our audience.” It doesn’t feel like a marketing team carefully picking out a member of each demographic to pointedly include them, but more a genuine effort to show what the audience really looks like.
And finally, the VR headset, which was the announcement I was most anticipating and still the one I’m most looking forward to. I skipped the Index, because it was too expensive for me to afford, and because I already had VR fatigue by the time it came out. From what I’ve seen, the Steam Frame is exactly the device I wanted it to be, since it’s positioned somewhere between the high-end Index and the less powerful but more self-contained Quest 2 and 3.
The biggest surprise to me was the inclusion of an SD card slot. Valve emphasized that you could take the card with your Steam library from the Steam Deck, and put it into either the Steam Machine or the Steam Frame, and it all works. Even if the specifications don’t match up, it is essentially a Steam Deck for your face.
I’m so used to thinking of VR headsets as either being standalone computers, or 3D displays for stuff streaming from a PC, that it hadn’t really occurred to me to take the “why not both?” route. I’ve been using a Quest 2 with Steam Link to play Half-Life: Alyx streaming from my PC, and I’ve been surprised how well it works — apart from my general ineptitude with the game, the biggest problem has been using controllers that the game wasn’t designed for. I’ve liked a few of the Quest-native games that I’ve played on the device, and I’ve wished that there were more I could play that didn’t require either streaming from the PC, or buying again for the Quest. The Steam Frame seems to say, “how about you have a VR device that can play pretty much anything from your entire Steam library?”
And since I’ve mentioned the Quest a few times: the obvious appeal of the Steam Frame for me is not having to use a Meta product. That’s not even the start of an anti-Meta screed, either. It’s just the simple and innocuous observation that the medium needs healthy competition to be viable. For years, the Quest has been the major player in VR, they’ve done a ton to keep it from dying out completely, and they’ve funded projects that wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to be made. And to their credit, they’ve made the platform open-ish enough for apps like Steam Link to let you stream games from the PC.
But even if you’re able to disregard how much they’ve integrated the negative aspects of their other platforms into the Quest, the more pragmatic problem as a consumer is having to build up a separate library of games. And while I still like the Quest 2 — even though it’s been so long since I used it that the batteries in the controllers have likely corroded — the Quest 3 never appealed to me enough to warrant an upgrade. It felt like they pushed too hard on the Mixed Reality aspect, trying to position it as a cheaper-but-just-as-viable alternative to the Vision Pro, instead of really playing to its strengths as a gaming platform.
If the pitch for Steam Machine was basically “it’s like a video game console, but it’s also a PC (that you can use mostly for gaming-related stuff),” the pitch for the Steam Frame doesn’t even bother with any such qualifiers. It says “your games in every dimension” right there on the front page. Valve is letting everybody else chase this idea of wear-everywhere AR goggles, or VR headsets as a lifestyle device for affluent people to consult recipes or browse the web. Meanwhile, they don’t betray even a whiff of being ashamed that this is a device targeted at people who play video games. And they shouldn’t be, because games are still the most viable application of consumer VR, by far.
Most of the magical appeal of the Vision Pro faded for me once I realized how unsuited it was for any of the types of gaming that I’m interested in. Not technically unsuited, but as a result of the conscious design choice on Apple’s part to position it as a lifestyle device instead of a gaming-focused, or really even gaming-capable one. It remains pretty great for watching movies, and I’m still holding out hope that some kind of killer app reveals itself before the platform becomes a dead end. But paradoxically, the push to make it more general purpose has meant that there’s not enough that it’s particularly great at. And even with the stuff that it is good at — watching movies or videos, browsing through photos, or using the giant-screen desktop mirror — it’s always a question of whether it’s enough of a better experience that I wouldn’t rather just do it with a flat screen.
So the fact that the Steam Frame’s pass-through cameras are still monochrome, for instance, is something I see as a feature, not a bug. I’m hoping it’s a sign that they’ve considered affordability as one of the main drivers of the project, and are hoping to price it competitively with the Quest 3, instead of higher-end headsets.
And it’s a sign that they’re not concerned about AR or MR, an implicit acknowledgment that there still haven’t been any truly standout experiences for AR or MR that rival the best immersive VR. Or even relatively early VR, for that matter: to this day, some of the best things I’ve seen in a headset were a dungeon crawler called Vanishing Realms, and Valve’s own The Lab demo suite.
Another way of looking at it: time spent using the passthrough cameras is time not spent playing games, and it’d be better to put all the emphasis on getting you into a game as quickly and easily as possible.
The through-line in all of the hardware announcements has been simple and obvious: more ways to play the games in your Steam library.
On that front, you could make a solid case that it’s hypocritical to complain about Meta being the 900-pound gorilla in VR, when Valve is the 900-pound gorilla in video game distribution. Where’s my love of healthy competition now?!
It’s still there; I just think that it’s a competition that Valve already won, years ago. And they keep winning, every time a new challenger steps into the ring, no matter how powerful they are, or how much money they pour into it. And unlike the contenders, Steam wins because I think they know what their business is, and they know who their customers are. EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Epic, and Microsoft have all tried over the years, to some degree or another, to build their own marketplace. And without fail, they force the customer to make concessions or jump through hoops, either with subscriptions or with exclusivity. It’s always more of a hassle than simply having all your games in one place.
It’s so rare in the tech world to find a situation where what’s good for the company is also good for the consumer. Every company either needs to be a non-profit constantly struggling to stay afloat, or a behemoth so fixated on maximum growth that customer service becomes an afterthought if not an outright inconvenience. I’m happy that Steam has made a metric shit-ton of money by distributing games, because I never have to ask myself, “wait a second… what’s the catch?”
(I haven’t ever tried to release anything on the platform, so I don’t know what the situation is for developers. But as someone who aspires to independent development and is also really, really, horribly, old, I still remember the pre-Steam days, when the idea of trying to make a living off your game without being beholden to a publisher was all-but impossible. Unless you’d made something genre-defining like DOOM).
And on the VR front, they’ve got their bona fides simply by having been invested in VR for a very long time. I have to say that the Steam VR experience has never been my favorite, since the interface was always little clunky, there was inevitably a setup step, and the whole process felt like a hassle to get started. The main reason I was so pleased with the Quest platform initially was that it was worth the downgrade from PC-quality games to mobile-quality, simply because the whole process was so much more seamless.
So I am completely and prematurely on board with the new Steam hardware. So far, all signs point to affordability being a goal, but of course it remains to be seen whether Valve’s idea of “affordable” is the same as mine.7 I don’t want to say that I’m getting too invested too soon, but I will acknowledge that I’ve already cleared a 7×7 inch space (for breathing room) on our entertainment center, and made sure that the living room floor is free of obstructions.