Technical difficulties lol

We'll be streaming at www.twitch.tv/tvcog!

Anyway wishlist my game Drywall Eating Simulator, I've been working a few things out of my system.

store.steampowered.com/app/3749110/...

What I can say about AI, and whatever they're going to pitch next, is that you have to look past what the tech is doing, or what it could do, and look at who is trying to sell it to you and why.

The throughline with all these fads is that they don't like it when you ask them questions about it.

I don't even feel you can say anything qualitative on how AI as tech can be used, because the money people got in from day 1 and immediately turned it into a exploitation machine that is rotting our brains, stealing the entity of human culture, and also drying up the planet.

All this to say - what colored my experiences with the tech industry was seeing a massive amount of money being moved around with very little end results to show for it, and as the years went on it became incredibly explicit with how crypto, NFTs, AI are all just about the money now.

Basically I saw people who had more money than I would know what to do with, pitch to other people who had more money than that, spend several years building a product that maybe like 200K people actually had the ability to use. And assume that they would be able to keep health benefits on ship.

DIPLOMATICALLY I will say they had good intentions but very little read on the actual world outside of their bubble. I think at this point I had gotten a VR headset but I think I was the only person I knew who had bought one not related to a job.

2016-2019 I was bouncing around two VR startups, both of which I spent a year at developing the product and then getting laid off a couple weeks after it released. Both times I kinda saw it coming as they assumed that VR hype would be enough to keep going, and then only had a month runway.

Blockchain I barely understand to this day, it was getting paired with Bitcoin (i think?) but it just read to me as stuff you only needed to care about if you only valued money. At the time it was sorta surprising to me it was getting pushed into games so heavily but I just kinda shrugged at it.

So ultimately, GDC 2016 was looking at a much of kinda neat tech and being like "This is kinda cool but I don't have money for this and so do most people I know."
The next year (I didn't make it back to GDC until 2024) VR was starting to be replaced with blockchain.

VR was something I had been messing with in my senior year of college. I liked the tech, but being broke meant I couldn't spend the $$$ and living @ home also meant I didn't have the space to really use it. I thought it was neat but it wasn't something I needed or could have at that time in my life.

I'm not really 100% sure how I would characterize myself at that time how I viewed new technology. VR was the thing in my senior year I was being told was "the next big thing" and walking around the expo hall at GDC there were dozens of booths all hocking VR something or other.

Slapfriends was an Alt Ctrl project that was accepted at both Alt.Ctrl.GDC and Experimental Gameplay Workshop in 2016. Coming from the USA East Coast, I didn't have the money to make it out to GDC during college, and only was able to then due to the free pass + my family helping with hotel + flight.