> movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better

God what an annoying thing to say. Suggesting that movies will essentially become games, or that future video games will be unimaginably better (presumably because they are driven by generative world models) betrays such a surface level appreciation for what makes art and culture and all this humanity so beautiful as it is.

The entire point of movies is the deliberate choices of the filmmakers! Movies will not be improved by our ability to choose what the main character looks like or add a style filter. Super Mario 64 is great because it is an expression of the very hardware that constrains it. Inevitable future versions where anything can happen because someone hooked the ROM up to a generative world model won't be better for it.

I agree that this technology is absolutely world changing, and am cautiously eager to see what comes of it, but it just bums me out, perhaps needlessly, that the people at the helm can be so artless, unreflective. Whatever.

> I agree that this technology is absolutely world changing, and am cautiously eager to see what comes of it, but it just bums me out, perhaps needlessly, that the people at the helm can be so artless, unreflective. Whatever.

This is something your average person can play around with. The filmmakers have been fumbling the ball a lot lately (not all the time, though) and I can't wait to see what rises out of the average populous. Lots of crap expected, for sure, but there will be gems in there that I'm willing to bet will blow away what we've seen in the industry. Kind of how indie game companies are eating AAA's lunch lately.

Sam had OpenAI start the Ghibli style image-gen (movies that are specifically loved for their artisanal quality). The man has patternly failed to read the room around culture.

Some movies and some games (or parts of games) really are just for fun. Eg a lot of Bethesda games would improve if you could do a randomly generated storyline on your 4th playthrough, and WoW has 0 storyline to their dailies. It could be kind of fun like a fortune cookie to get a random story. I don't expect art, but it'd be funny to see if it made up a meme-able story.

An awful lot of mainstream movies do have fairly trite plots, with a predictable film style. That's not entirely hate, sometimes I really want to see Michael Bay blow up half of LA. I don't think the next Fast and Furious movie would suffer horribly from AI writing, it's never really been an "art" kind of series anyways.

We've been living in a world of videogame-like FX movie slop for at least 20 years now, without the help of AI. Try to find insightful reflection of humanity and truth in a Marvel movie... God help you. It's as boring as, well, watching someone else play a video game.

It turns out, some people like that. A lot of people like it, presumably because it's fast and stimulating, and everyone's a sucker for wowing FX even as movie FX have gotten worse and more or less converged with video games.

What's lacking in these movies isn't so much plot, it's character and thoughtfulness. They tell us nothing about ourselves.

From an art history class, long ago, I remember the explanation of how classical Greek culture degraded into depictions if "pathos", visible in changes in the sculpture, and how that heralded more or less the decline of the civilization. It seems obvious to me that we've undergone a similar transition. And the thing is, it's not the technology itself, which could be used to produce meaningful art. It's the lack of thought on the part of the creators and the audience.

Make something beautiful, with or without the new tech. You and the rest of us will be better for it. And the investors are damn desperate for something to really resonate with the people who experience it.

Radio -> Silent Movies -> Talkies -> Movies -> Video Games -> ? Why is this annoying? We are moving toward greater immersion through technology.

I understand but I wouldn't dismiss how consumer choices already contribute to this

Younger people I know, and market to sometimes, literally avoid "plot based media" in favor of brainrot. Akin to what my generation used to call "sooo random"

People catering to it earn a lot. They don't identify as directors, but they are. They don't identify as artists either. They identify as influencers and brands.

You will never be the generation they engage with. I don't expect to base any of my choices in following trends looking for opportunities to be contingent on your affinity for movies and first/third person games.

Even when it comes to spending, they are a powerhouse because parents nationwide and worldwide give them their weekly allowances in platform credits, with no further accountability on how it's spent. There is a large audience already, trends that are full economies within a few months instead of needing to wait an entire 20 generation for the audience to have independent purchasing power.

That's whats happening and why someone with even greater perception than me would say things that seem out of touch, but are closer to reality than you'd realize.

Do you think that Super Mario Odyssey is better than Super Mario Bros for the NES? Is Breath of the Wild better than the Legend of Zelda? I mean -- take off your nostalgia-covered glasses and imagine if you handed them both to a kid who had seen neither which one they might be more interested in. Why do you think that is?

The Orville show explores this idea, before LLMs became a thing. Simulators become the replacement for movies, but the simulations are still designed by a person (or alien).

The concept feels more like a video game than a movie in the show, but presumably you could program the simulation to happen around you instead of you moving through it.