I loved making games. It’s a hugely creative endeavor, full of challenges. Wrangling a lot of peoples’ visions, managing a tremendous amount of complexity, trying to understand how players will receive what you’re building, and whether you’re building the right thing.

I was gifted a pass to GamesBeat Next by a friend, and have been thinking about whether to go or not. The timing is kind of a pain, and getting into SF is always a little bit annoying. But a lot of people I know will be there, and it might be fun to catch up with some of them if they have a few minutes to chat.

But look at this agenda:

Pacific Hall

• 10 AM | Build Beyond: The future of game development with cloud and generative AI

• 10:30 AM | Are You Ready for the EU’s Digital Markets Act?

• 11 AM | AI and gaming: Shaping the future of interactive experiencesReimagining beloved IP: how to get it right

• 11:30 AM | The right and wrong way to do blockchain games

• 12 PM | Building and operating a game with a symbiotic bridge between Web2 and Web3 gamers.

Landmark Library

• 10 AM | Keys to survival in Web3 Games

• 10:30 AM | Practical steps to making the metaverse

• 11 AM | The changing world of games by the numbers

• 11:30 AM | Navigating the challenges of AI in gaming

• 12 PM | Using AI to personalize games

There are a few potentially interesting tidbits. Detail on what the Digital Markets Act entails, but I could read up on that in 10 minutes and probably be just as informed. The changing world of games by the numbers is probably an interesting demographic breakdown of what modern gaming looks like that would have data I probably *don’t* have easy access to.

But everything else… who the fuck is giving talks about “The future of game development with cloud and generative AI”? Experts who’ve shipped content using those tools? No. Because no one’s *done that* yet. So it’s a bunch of people who have experimented with it, but built up no meaningful genuine experience. Which goes for *every fucking AI talk at this conference*. And the talks that aren’t AI? Metaverse and Web3.

Who gives a fuck.

I absolutely do not just not want to know about the Keys to survival in Web3 Games, I don’t want anyone in the goddamn industry to give a shit about it either.

But more, this is a conference whose content is essentially directed either at “business bros” who need to know about the “hot new buzzwords”, and fucking no one else.

Everything I love about games is people. It’s the vision for the art. It’s the complexity of interesting systems. It’s the elegance of paring down what a game is into something simple and expressive, or the complexity of systems interacting with one another. It’s an expression of feeling, emotions, or evoking them in players.

Everything I love about making games is people. It’s being surprised and delighted by concept art that is both exactly what I asked for and something magical I never would have imagined. It’s about working with engineers to find clever solutions to things that do 80% of the work in 5% of the time. It’s about trying to take this big, squishy, out-of-control monstrosity that only exists in our collective imaginations and do the difficult work of pulling it out of our heads and making it work in the real world.

AI is a tool. At best. Web3 is scammy bullshit that provides literally nothing of value, even in the best possible scenario. And it’s funny, because it feels like whoever approved all these talks thought, “Yeah, this conference is gonna be on the bleeding edge!” and in the year it took for it to all come together, it already seems hopelessly stupid.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the AI talks will be about finding ethical training sets for AI tools that empower artists and designers, and not just ways to suck the joy and fun out of gamedev and replace it with profit to enrich the Bobby Koticks of the world. But I doubt it. Maybe the web3 talks will be reflective sessions about how to not fall for baseless claims of “interoperability” and “ownership” without actually giving any consideration to how any of that shit would actually work, or why players would ever even care about it in the first place. But I doubt it.

I dunno. Maybe I’ll go to this, because there will be people there I respect and admire (100% guaranteed), and maybe some of the talks will not make me want to burn the whole industry down.

 

But I doubt it.