Trevor Thompson

It'sThey Are Billions out there folks. Gamers understand this.

It never ceases to amaze me that the same person whose games dominated my life in 1990 at the age of 12, Chris Roberts, still does in 2026 at the age of 48. But, after all, this was inevitable. We are talking about a man who has been at the top of the videogame food chain, on and off, for nearly half a century. How could anyone beat him when everyone else quits after a mere 10 or 20 years? Take the BioWare founders. They released their first game in 1998, and a mere 14 years later they quit to make beer. How can you beat someone with 40 years' experience when you only have 14? You'd have to be a monster of talent compared to him, but the mere fact that you're quitting so quickly is because you have piss-poor passion, and that PROVES that your talent is far inferior, because talented people enjoy nothing in life as much as developing that talent! So not only is Chris Roberts far more talented than anyone else who ever made videogames, but ON TOP OF THAT he has worked on it for double, triple, quadruple the time compared to anyone else. How can you NOT win and dominate under these circumstances? It is inevitable. Everything seems to fit perfectly, in hindsight, within such a long life of developing your talent. When Roberts took a break from the game industry in the early 2000s to make and produce movies, everyone including me wrote him off as a has-been. We completely forgot about him. But the man had been burned out by a quarter century of cutting-edge game development by that point (more than both BioWare founders combined and he wasn't even at the halfpoint of his career lmao), so he followed his passion for cinema that had served him so well in his early career that had introduced cinema to 3D action games, and he just started to straight-up make movies. A decade later he returned to videogames and BOOM: his Squadron 42 boasted the most star-studded cast not only in all of games, but in all of movies too, and its cinematics look better than most movies. How would he have acquired the skills and know-how and contacts to pull that off without his decade in movie production? And which game director can now compete at it with him when they are all a bunch of brainless programmers whose idea of cinematic gaming is inviting Al Pacino to speak at the Game Awards despite his not being in any game? When you truly and fully consider the sheer amount of multidisciplinary experience that Chris Roberts has worked all his life to develop, it is a given that he'll end up at the top of the heap when no one else even tries half as much as him. I see the exact same pattern in my career too. I must have outlasted four-plus generations of wannabe critics and theorists by now. There was one generation that held the field when I entered it in the mid-2000s, the independent bloggers, practically all of whom had quit a mere five-six years later. Then a new generation entered the field, no longer building their own sites but employed by publishing companies (Gamasutra/Kotaku/Forbes) or universities (Full Sail/DigiPen/Tisch). Then by the mid-2010s all of those had quit too, and been replaced by a brand-new generation of YouTubers, all of whom had quit by the early-2020s to be replaced by a new generation of Twitter/Patreon/Substack losers, and we are now on the SECOND generation of THEM. The only constant in game criticism and theory throughout these two decades has been... me. I have 20 years of experience thinking and writing about games on top of my 40 years of playing them, and my competition has... five? And they aren't even a hundredth as bright as me, so their five counts for... one month by my standard? So when you see me smashing the shit out of them with a mere sentence or two, what you are looking at is 40 years of experience smashing one mere month, that's why the carnage looks so horrific, the distance so cosmic. They picked up a game pad at 25 with their 120 IQs and they're going up against a 139 IQ that has been playing games for 40 years! (and this without even bringing T into it). Of course they'll be made to look like ants. Because they are. What all this leads us to conclude is that, ultimately, we can deduce the quality of a work without reference to the work at all, merely by looking into its creators. Are the creators great talents that have been working for a long time? Then the work will be superior to that of lesser talents that have been working for less time; and for the ultimate work you need BOTH ultimate talent and MAXIMAL time, as in the case of Chris Roberts and me. Conversely, when you see a work pop up out of nowhere, without a long trail of effort behind it, you know automatically that it's crap, like all of those "indie" games or movies that pseudocriticism promotes as masterpieces every year, but which everyone completely forgets a few years later, and no one ends up building on because there's nothing to build on: it's dirt, and that's why it was able to appear so quickly. You can't build on dirt, you can only build on a solid base, and the base itself must be set deeper into the earth the taller the structure you're building. And this is where genetics and ultimately race come into it, this is the EARTH in the metaphor. Because genetics and race are precisely the foundations, the base, of all works. It's not an accident that Chris Roberts is Anglo-American and I am Greek. It is the very reason we're on top. Think for a moment: the most TECHNICALLY complex game in the world... who but an Anglo-American could make it? Then, the most CONCEPTUALLY complex game in the world... who but a Greek could make it? Conceptually, Star Citizen is very simple, even ridiculous in some aspects (for example when thousands of players play the same event over and over while the game pretends that the event only occurred once). Similarly, my game is so technically simple that much of it doesn't even require a computer, and can be played just fine on a table with some pen and paper. But conceptually my game is staggering, so complex that you need to read a whole book to even begin to grasp how it works. Hundreds of pages of theory, and that's only the grand outline, because each chapter of that book rests on top of dozens of other books for a total of tens of thousands of pages! You have a 4X with each POI in it being a full RPG campaign every event of which affects every event in every other across a metaplot that fuses together all the greatest fiction franchises ever! It's insane. And it could only have come from a Greek brain, just as Star Citizen's sheer technical scale and detail could only come from an Anglo-American brain: 64-Bit Worldspace, Object Container Streaming, Persistent Entity Streaming, Dynamic Server Meshing, immersive micro-mechanics, physicalized everything. It's ridiculous, so complex that journalists can't even report on it and have given up, and the industry pretends it doesn't exist because no one can grasp it. That's why they end up reporting on the only aspect of the project they can grasp: the funding (and even that not fully, which is why they're still wondering why people spend the money and what they get for it). Comes the coup de grâce. Because you would think by this point that Chris and I are equal: operating at different frequencies, but at the same level. Yet the moment he turns his engine into a VTT, I can put it in my game instantly, with near-zero effort; whereas he will never be able to shove my design into his game, for very basic reasons that would never cross his Anglo-American mind (millions of protagonists mean story is impossible, for one, just Drama 101, which is Greek). So I win, and it's inevitable. The mind wins. The soul wins, if you prefer an older formula. Because it's older. Orgy of the Will: orgyofthewill.net Art Theory: culture.vg/features/art-t… Ultimate Edition: culture.vg/forum/forum?f=…

@cultvgnews Incredible analysis as always. I feel privileged to be able to read it and thank you for writing it.

A testament to our community! variety.com/2026/gaming/ne…

This is insane!!! Someone just created a tool for Claude that lets it take any image and not just generate an environment, but individual meshes with physics and an ambient sound layer. Unreal, blender ready, etc.

“People have beautiful things to say about you, but you must die first.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

the guy who hates on vibe coding the most produces a game which could be vibe coded couldn't wish for a better timeline

I feel a lot of people are using AI tools the way you'd use a car if you didn't know that you can take your foot off the gas. People reporting "well its immensely useful, but gee its stressful to go 110mph to the store, around all those pedestrians"

Kayar was featured on a huge YouTube channel, doing a live 1CC of Mushihimesama Futari 1.5's Ultra mode - on default settings! Glad to see this game get so much exposure with an awesome player. youtu.be/srDR7-CLHkE?si…

@AnchorStill The problem is that the original ATLA was a self contained story that was foolishly expanded beyond the end of the original war. The world was designed for one story. Not more than that. It was all downhill from there from a plot perspective.

The fall of Avatar should be part of every animation and film school curriculum >Create arguably the greatest animation ever with loveable characters who each have their own development arcs, a perfect plot, and a captivating world >Produce a live action adaptation which ends up being one the worst movies ever made in general >Sequel series with an unlovable MC, incoherent romance, and fuck up the entire world >Go back to live action and try to make it more adult but just end up with endless exposition and awkward scenes, add in new details which contradict original animation for good measure >Go back to animation for a new movie featuring original characters, mediocre plot but ruin the characters' voices and then have it leaked months before it was to be released >Create new sequel series but retcon the entire world and story because Korra fucked everything up so bad the story simply could not continue What the fuck was their problem.

There are two neurochemicals that feel good. Dopamine, which mediates pleasure. And serotonin, which mediates happiness. Anyone who confuses the two, as we see in the comic below, puts his mind, body, and spirit in grave danger. Pleasure, unlike happiness, is not sustained. It exists only at the moment that an external, pleasurable stimulus is applied to your nervous system. Eating cake stops feeling good the moment you stop eating cake. If you want to keep feeling good, you have to eat more cake. And, for neurochemical reasons I won't get into, the second slice of cake never tastes as good as the first. So pretty soon, you're fat, and you're not even enjoying your cake all that much. Happiness, however comes from your internal state. The two most important kinds of happiness are a feeling of accomplishment, and a feeling of connection to other people. Lifting weights can sometimes feel good, if you're young and healthy and feeling particularly energetic, but it usually doesn't. Quite frequently, at the moment, it sucks. But if you can bend down, grab 525 pounds that's sitting on the floor, and stand up with it, you accomplished something. And the knowledge that you did that never entirely leaves you. It is a source of happiness, knowing that you did the thing. Serotonin, for other neurochemical reasons I won't get into, doesn't produce a diminished response. You cannot overdose on happiness and become insensitive to it. Diana, the video game character, is indeed designed entirely to make the player feel good. You're supposed to protect, care for, and teach her. And this is supposed to give you feelings of connection and accomplishment. That's happiness. But people who weren't properly loved as children (perverts), or who haven't accomplished anything in life (socialists), or both (Marxists), often haven't felt that much happiness, and haven't learned how to get it. When they look at this child character, they realize she is supposed to make them feel good, but the only way of feeling good that they understand is pleasure. Not happiness. And most basic way you get pleasure from another human being is sex. This is why they have trouble NOT sexualizing any positive interaction. They call any positive regard for another human being "dick-riding", or other sexualized terms. Any friendship between two men is a "bro-mance" to them. Human interactions are not inherently enjoyable to them, and so they analyze every relationship for dopamine potential. Can I use this person to score drugs? Can I have sex with them? Will they agree with me, praise me, or validate my opinions? Can I get money from them that I can use to get drugs or sex? What these people need explained to them is that this interaction is supposed to feel good to you without involving your penis in any way. And if it doesn't, if it doesn't even make sense to you, then your parents failed you. And you have our sympathy for that, but it isn't our fault, and we're not going to stop being happy for your sake.

And that's because people like "dunking" on those radical viewpoints. They like to culturally signal how based, virtuous, or intelligent they are by saying exactly why the radical thing is "good" or "bad". Or more importantly, why they are good or bad based on what they say about the viewpoint. And the reason why slop viewpoints, or the ones that appear as slop viewpoints to the observer are the ones that typically go to the top is... based on the observer. We create out own algorithms just like we create our own reality.

The algorithm will boost radical viewpoints regardless of whether anybody agrees with them

Pragmata is basically ICO 2 from what I hear. ICO x Vanquish or whatever. Good on them.

@wordgrammer It's a human problem more than it is an algorithm problem. People on average want to engage in clickbait. They like to respond to thinks that let them hear their own voices and their own thoughts. Not deep conversation, not nuance, and certainly not complexity. They want slop.

AI is a slave to capital, and capital is a slave to the algorithm. If Dario didn’t fear-monger, his clips wouldn’t go viral. And if his clips didn’t go viral… he’d raise less, hire worse researchers, and have fewer customers. Anyone who has ever had a post over 100 likes knows: you don’t pick what posts go viral. Quippy one-liners go viral. “Thoughtful, nuanced discussion, carefully approaching the future with wisdom and optimism” get zero likes. From my own experience, at least, I have to constantly choose between “saying what I really believe” and “selling out to the algorithm”. Even this post will probably get <10 likes because nuance is anti-mimetic. Dario and Sam both play into the FUD surrounding AI. Some people call this “bad marketing”, some people love to say “you should hire a PR department”. But in my mind, the problem is deeper… FUD goes viral, “good pr” does not go viral. We all knew this in 2008-2019. We saw that social media was full of anger and clickbait. The tech industry profited off of rage baiting, clip farming, clickbait, and so on. But the tech industry didn’t, itself, have to rage bait, clip farm, or clickbait. Right? Y’know, Zuckerberg stayed in the shadows, and micro-influencers did the FUD for him. Same for YouTube, same for Twitter. In the 2008-2019 era, social media platforms pushed people into increasingly radical political opinions. Simply because FUD goes viral and nuance does not. Social media platforms profited off FUD while still having plausible deniability. Radical political views increased engagement, which kept people on the platform. Did Instagram/YouTube ever themselves push the FUD? Hard to say. Probably. But maybe recommendation algorithms naturally optimize for radical political views. Is YouTube at fault for showing people what they want to see? But now. AI labs must, themselves, play the social media game. That means they must constantly choose between going viral and being optimistic. And so… the tech industry must game the same recommendation algorithms that it once created… I don’t think we can solve AI’s “pr problem” until we can solve the much deeper problem that recommendation algorithms are not aligned with human interest…

If you’re a hyperactive, high agency type of guy, the only path where you don’t go insane is entrepreneurship. It’s the only life that will stimulate you enough and put you in different situations and problems that actually make your brain function. The more you try to tame that energy the less you will feel alive. Some of us were made for complexity and ambiguity. The safe path is the most dangerous one. You know deep down you’re made for something different. Business is what gives you that. Avoid traditional jobs at all costs. Of course the price is high stress, uncertainty and lots of ups and downs… but let’s be honest, would you have it any other way? No. It’s too boring.

TTRPGs are the only type of entertainment where you have real moral agency. I just watched an old ER episode where the nurse is more upset that the murderer died than the murdered. Similar crap happens in video games too. You only see the moral options they want you to have

The reason why programmers think "software is dead" is because they don't have any ideas, and therefore keep implementing the same ones over and over again. And these are the same people who lament idea guys even though they obviously need them!

The realisation must come that this whole 'slop' thing with AI isn't *because* of AI. It is the consequence of the mass distribution of capable & subsidised intelligence - aka the average person isn't always suited to developing novel ideas, or designs. It assumes good taste.

Play better videogames.

o7

What the guy described below was particularly true of japanese art made in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, like Cowboy Bebop, but as more and more art has been developed, it's become less true. I think it's because, instead of japanese directors taking inspiration from primarily American and European art, now there's much more asian-directed art to take influence from because there's so much of it, and I think it's lowered the quality of their output overall. Unfortunately, this is even true in types of art that the japanese do well, like animation and videogames. As an example, I'll see clips from newer anime go around, and the effects and the lighting will be turned up so much that it makes it impossible to tell what is actually going on with what you are watching. Technically, these effects and lighting are very impressive in motion, which demonstrates the classic Japanese dedication and work ethnic in terms of actually animating that stuff, but... with a worse end product. This didn't happen in 20-40 years ago, and I think that's a big part of why.