Category Archives: Gaming

Roll for deception

It’s a Saturday where I have lots of outstanding tasks, none of which are of high urgency therefore I will procrastinate them by writing this post.

For some reason I am a trusting person. I prefer to believe people and believe in people. I try to adhere to my standards of ethics and truth, which are admittedly high. For example, in last 4-5 years I turned down several recruiters who wanted to interview me for a position in a company that works in gambling. And I would do the same again, would that happen today. Same way I would turn down questionable enterprises like scam call centers or Ponzi schemes.

But it is really difficult to keep your principles when you see how modern society functions. People lie. Often. A lot. You can ask a consultant at an electronics store for an advice and in half of the cases they won’t be able to provide you with an adequate answer or even will lie to your face outright. This is not normal and this should not be an everyday thing. Yet we seem to live in a society™ plagued by deception and incompetence. One of the most noticeable things is social media. Specifically instagr*m.

I wholeheartedly hate the cult of envy and attempts to present yourself as something that you are not. Something that is better than you. Well, you are not better than you. Just be honest with yourself and the world.

People lie on their resumes and get hired for positions they don’t deserve. People lie to you in ads to sell you something you don’t need or something that does not match your expectations. Tech giants don’t lie outright, but they do lots of other shady (and in my opinion deceptive things): dark patterns, dopamine exploitation and artificial addictions and of course shitty conditions of service/license agreements that most people never read. Is being a liar, manipulator or just a soulless profiteer is a requirement to succeed in life? Does that become part of your job requirement at some point? When you enter middle management or something?

Tangential rant over, now to the meat and potatoes.

Running games on weaker graphics cards. Upscaling low-resolution videos. What do these processes have in common? That’s right. Deception. The neural networks that are responsible for these processes just make shit up on the go. Millions times per second millions of pixels get just made up. Sure, they are not outright random, they take into account the previous frames, the objects in them, the training data that they use as reference for details… But it’s still a deception. Highly sophisticated, incredibly complex __deception__.

Of course it did not appear out of the blue by itself. But I think that all these frame generation technologies are just bodge that holds together the failed state of modern game development. Studios want more profits faster and don’t really spend much time on optimization of the games.

However, it wasn’t always like that. Back in the day when gaming consoles had hard limitations on memory and processing power, the developers used all their ingenuity and talent to fit a game into the limited space on the cartridge (seriously, look it up. The optimizations were ingenious. UA 0:00 / 9:20 How Super Mario Bros Was Made Into 40 Kilobytes )

Nowadays every next Elder Grand Theft Assassin’s Cry of Duty will require a GPU upgrade because it is just not enough anymore. The studios just don’t bother. It’s “good enough”. If you are poor, you will use upscaling. If you are rich, you are ok with throwing resources at it.

Also in hindsight the DLSS stuff might have been a harbinger of the upcoming ai shitstorm.

I kind of lost my point while overthinking this topic, so this is the end for now. Maybe I will get back to this post later and update it.

TL;DR: Don’t lie on your resume, don’t do instagr*m, dlss bad, optimize your games instead.

Gaming in 2k24

I just had an interesting situation. I stumbled upon a game on Steam and I liked it. So much so that I downloaded a demo and started playing.
7 minutes into the game and like 2 minutes into actual gameplay after all the cutscenes I notice something that makes my spidey-sense tingle. There was an object labeled in cyrillic.

This label made me question the origins of the game. I googled the name of the publisher and found their website. On there it says that they are located in Cyprus. You know, the home country of many legitimate game studios such as uhhh… ermmm… I mean, maybe they exist, but I am drawing a blank right now. Right, where were we? On the same result page there also was a link to a Ukrainian website warning people that these are russians, just hiding under the guise of their HQ address. Which makes sense when you are a russian game studio and you want to look as as innocent as it is humanly possible while still employing people from russia and letting their taxes fund the war.

In the same article I found a Steam curator that issues warnings for games that are openly or discreetly made by russians. Which is nice. I subscribed to this curator.

By the way, a small tangent: Steam’s UX when it comes to the curators is just terrible. I had a page with the curator open in my browser, and in the desktop app I had to find the curator from scratch through the non-intuitive process of opening a game’s page, where one of my currently subscribed curators would have left a review and from their page going to general “Curators” page and searching for the curator I need.

I read through the list of games. Honestly it is hilariously bad. It has maybe a dozen games that may be considered interesting, but most of them are either hits from the yester-decade or quick cash-grabs made exclusively to cash in on a meme or a social trend. They are cheap and even not knowing they are made in russia I don’t think I would buy them.

Which brings me to the last thing I have thought about the matter. Choice.

Specifically, Humble Choice, to which I am subscribed since its first month. I am concerned that they might choose to overlook some of the questionable origins of the games and some russian game might eventually end up in my subscription.

Granted, I could just not activate it and pretend it’s not there, but in my opinion that would be wasteful. I pay money for my Humble Choice, therefore I should be able to activate all games and play them without the need to sift through them and argue with Humble’s helpful, yet slow support agents.

Next time I write about gaming, I will tell the story of my clash with Ubisoft.