Shamus Young

World models do not belong here, or at least, we're still some years from figuring out how they would. If I want to text my wife I can imagine just telling my phone that somehow rather than using the current UI paradigm, but what "world model" am I going to pull up that is helpful to do that? World models belong in their own stream, along with rendering in general (movies, etc.), games, VR, and other similar things that we do not today classify as UI, for good reason.

In fact I suspect "world models" may let us re-experience some idiocy from yesteryear we thought we had put behind us, like [1]. Can't wait to go "shopping" in a "world model" of a store again! However do I survive in 2026 merely zipping around the store buying my favorite items off of my favorite's list as fast as I can think of the items and using search on the thousands of available items rather than WASD'ing my way through a "model" of the store.

By contrast I think the browser is undersold. GUI toolkits existed before browsers, but they were all based on widget layouts. That is, the top level of the widget hierarchy would be some layout engine, which had components, which had subcomponents, which had a widget, etc. Some were more dynamic and relative, some used a lot of absolute positioning, but they were all structured in this way. Browsers introduced a new paradigm, where textual layout was the "top level" of the tree, and the widgets all fit within that. Prior to a browser, a Mad Lib-style game where…

The problem with the ending wasn't only the outcome (which, IMO, the DCL ending still wasn't enough). It was mainly the the execution. The "press the button" ending was a travesty to what was advertised by the three games.

You can really notice that lack of thematic coherence and good writing when Drew Karpyshyn left the project.

I really liked ME2. The gameplay was the best, had really good quest lines and some ideas were really interesting (working for terrorists, the suicide mission). And it had Mordrin!

On the third game it goes all downhill.

Earth is, apparently, the most important planet on the galaxy. To the point that someone thought that it was a good idea to diverge troops that were defending the planet with the biggest and best fleet of the galaxy to defend the Earth.

ME2 and Mordrin spent a lot of time convincing me that, while the xenophage was something horrible, curing it would have unforeseen consequences and was a bad idea too. But now we're going to cure it, no choice in the matter.

Cerebrus turned from "amoral pragmatists" to "james bond villain".

My best bro Wrex still didn't return to the party.

And the dreadful awe of the reapers was simply squashed.

ME3 was a massive dissapointment. I don't see myself playing a multigame Bioware series ever again.

Two links:
A massive Mass Effect Retrospective, which cemented some of my feelings on the series: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792
Anon is still mad about ME3:…

Active Worlds was the coolest thing I ever goofed around in, at least at the time. The COFMeta (metaverse) and Mars worlds were my favorite.

It was basically the 3D equivalent of Geocities. You could wander for hours, looking at the cool little houses and weird displays people had built. You could even do simple scripting with keyframes for animating objects by toggling their visibility. :)

It was so cool, and I even ended up buying a little AWLD stock. The market imploded of course, and the people running it apparently did some scummy things (see Shamus Young's accounting here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=13720 ).

The only thing really missing was modeling; to solve this, you'd run across giant prefab yards, and then write down model names. Mars had a sort of boneyard for this purpose.

They also did kinda-cool tie-ins with other media, like a world for The 13th Floor and the X-Files movie. I miss that sense of "Oh man, this is the future!".

> It's pretty clear that Blizzard was not following their own guidebook here. I can't imagine them banning a player who said "Free Catalan!". The banning was only because it was anti china. An anti-Spain statement would have just resulted in some scratching of heads, not a 1 year suspension and revoking of prize money.

As far as I've read (which is basically nothing but https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=48310 ), the response to blitzchung came from NetEase, Blizzard's legally-required publisher/distributor in China. Unlike Blizzard, NetEase is a Chinese company.

It seems unsurprising that the Chinese distributor for Hearthstone would react like a Chinese company -- that's the point of the requirement. Was Blizzard even consulted on the response?

I'm not sure how much the fine print matters if it fails basic fit-for-purpose standards.

Regarding irrationality -- see e.g. this[0] Shamus Young post about the video game industry. IMO, this general sort of irrationality is everywhere. Businesses in general tend to be irrational because they're run by suits, whose primary motivation is not actually accumulating money for the business but rather prestige for themselves, which you get by doing business-y things, regardless of whether those actually make money. For all his reputed greed, that's how I actually expect Larry Ellison to act.

[0] https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=41924

Don't be intimidated! There are a lot of things you don't know about how to make demoscene-style programs, and the reason you don't know them is probably because you haven't tried to learn them yet. I'm pretty sure that if you start learning when you're n, a lot of things will seem self-evident when you're n+2.

Here's a series of really good blog posts from someone who decides to make a shiny procedurally-generated city. The result is an amazing how-did-he-do-that demo, but the steps he went through and the way he thought about the problem are understandable.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940