Notes: Videogames

Somewhere on the streets of Tbilisi. As a big fan of the Dishonored series, I just couldn’t walk past this. I’m sure there’s a safe nearby that this code unlocks!

Colleagues are actively experimenting with o1-preview from OpenAI: the model turned out to be genuinely interesting. Unfortunately, tasks for it don’t come up too often — regular 4o handles most day-to-day stuff just fine. Bug-finding in code, analyzing medical tests in an unfamiliar language, or trying to recall the name of a childhood book with only a vague recollection of the plot — I can’t easily think of anything it wouldn’t handle.

It’s always fascinating to see how the AI reasons, jokes, and generally tries to act human. I’d say it won’t pass the Turing test just yet, but every now and then, it comes eerily close.

The answer below made me smile. Even leaving philosophy aside — looks like Skynet is off the table! :) Though, I’m afraid the future from the SOMA ending is still possible.

When ChatGPT remembers a detail from a conversation for the future, it displays a "Memory updated" badge above its response. Like, got it:

Every time I see it, it makes me smile because it instantly reminds me of The Walking Dead and the meme “Clementine will remember that”. In that game, the characters surrounding the protagonist would remember his decisions, and it would influence their behavior. This included Clementine — a girl the main character saved at the beginning of the game.

In the game, this mechanic was honestly implemented in a rather mediocre way, but when it comes to ChatGPT — it works. The attention to detail is so strong that sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m talking to a language model, not an extraordinarily attentive and very knowledgeable person.

The nice episode of the “We Are Doomed” IT podcast about developer burnout. No insights, but you can hear something useful for yourself. I liked the analogy with video games, somewhere close to the middle:

There was such a game — Diablo. RPG, all sorts of spells, you know. A character has mana and health, and when you have no mana to cast… Ha, I sound like a nerd! Well, nevermind. Briefly speaking, when you have no mana to cast, it's taken from your health.

— Doctor Cat

Natalia O'Shea has sung a Jaina's song in a Russian version of a trailer for a future update of World of Warcraft. As for me, she's extraordinary good in it — I mean, she knows how to make a proper mood and season a speech with steel.

By the way, speaking about her and “Melnitsa” as a whole thing — all of their most powerful songs are about something particular. We were at a concert dedicated to the “Luciferase” release and it's hard to compare, seriously. Perhaps, I didn't know something essential to understanding a context, but sometimes it was even barely possible to figure out a story which I was hearing.

Just watch a video I posted under. You don't need to know something special about the World of Warcraft universe, do you? For example, I haven't played WoW and not planning to do it, but the end of the song literally creeps me out :-)

I have translated Stardew Valley fan manga on a wave of enthusiasm at the end of July (SV is an enormously addictive farmer simulator which went out a couple of years ago).

It was an amusing experience. Firstly, an author of the manga is Chinese and her work was already translated from Chinese to English. I'm not sure what was the bigger problem — cultural differences or language skills, but several frames were a bit difficult to understand what's going on. Secondly, I've figured out that it's a real challenge to pick proper Russian words and not to get something like a quote from an official government's letter in the end.

So, a part of sense had lost during the process, I guess, although I tried to keep everything I could and even had a word with the author in order to solve the most problematic cases. It was quite funny — I don't know Chinese, she doesn't know Russian, so our a bit poor English was the only way to understand each other.

Something could have been translated better, I suppose, and several pictures definitely could have been changed more accurately. But you know what? Hell it out, perfection is a cruel mistress and I like the result yet. Yeah, there is no big deal or something like it — a drawing style is quite common, a plot has no significant differences with the game, but… I don't know. Perhaps, visual novels made a too sentimental son of a bitch out of me :-)

Thanks to Alice for helping me with image processing, Lem for helping me with the translation and Marika for the inspiration. And, sure, thanks to Quantus for the manga.