Comment by sjdh76
10 hours ago
Before AI showed up the UN released a report on the Attention Economy. It said Supply of content had vastly outstripped Demand. It decoupled because entertainment/media was being used to push other products. The telcos, amazon, google/fb and many others were all subsidizing content to push some other product. Exploding info chasing finite non growing eyeballs and time.
Creative content will become more personal and less profitable, art being some sort of commercial enterprise is a relative new phenomenon, we will survive without it. Most artists will have to generate income by performance or physical creation, just like it has been for the whole time before it was commoditized to feed the "attention economy"
What a gross and completly apt terminology for the commoditization of art from the bureaucrats by the way.
I'm looking at gaming these days and there's such an endless selection of excellent games I'd love to play. But there are far more great games than I have time to play. So when I see stuff like using AI to make games faster, I can only think what is the point, The market won't buy or play more games so something else has to give.
I feel completely the opposite. Mind, I play games a fair bit, but I generally don't feel that excited about most, and I'd say a lot of them have very repetitive tropes. I'm generally in the market for 30h+ spent on a game, so that filters out a lot of the more trendy stuff.
That sounds more like you are burned out on gaming in general. I don’t think infinite AI slop games would help here.
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Online games though you pretty much have to follow the herds to the newest titles. You could stick around but it usually isn't pretty: tough to find full lobbies or full of sweats or both.
"there's such an endless selection of excellent games"
If you have 0 standards.
There are more games at any standard than one's lifetime to play them in.
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There are roughly 50-70 new games released on Steam every day. I think there's pretty good review metrics available that you can assume 2-5% of those could be categorized as "Excellent". So that's around 1–3 excellent new games per day on just one platform.
Even if we're over-estimating "excellent" by a lot, that's still more games that anyone can reasonably play.
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I started building a game on a custom engine a few years ago and I used to think about selling it, but nowadays the market is so oversaturated I tend to think of it as nothing more than a coding exercise.
Same thing here. I gave up on gaming all together because my library grew too much. As a kid, I didn’t even own a console, I had to borrow gameboy or go to my friend house and even then it was just an handful of cartridges. Even now, I plan to just focus on small sample of programming languages and ecosystems, and learn them inside out. There’s just too much stuff out there.
> As a kid, I didn’t even own a console
As a kid, I played games with a board and counters. Sometimes I made my own board and counters. And there was only one channel on the B+W TV.
Same thing with books but no one says to stop writing.
Chat apps are cutting a slice into the supply side directly.
Could you give any hint about the title/authors/year of this report that would allow me to find it?
I would be very interested to read the report too.
It might be this one Yellow Economy[1]. But I'm not 100% sure.
[1] https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/yellow_economy_14_...
It's also very easy to make high quality content. You can record a professional album with 5000$ in gear. Live instruments and all.
You can make your album accessible to every human on earth for free.
So my Instagram is full of very very high quality music, much of it I'll only listen to once.
Music from all over the world.
Its great.
Yet sad. So much music I'll never get to. I have to spend 40 to 50 hours a week generating income. If only I did better on that Meta interview way back.
I'd be retired now, free to indulge in endless entertainment.
I guess preferences vary, but the idea of spending my retirement consuming "content" seems like a type of hell.
Just this summer I went to concerts in 3 different countries.
I also want to make games and music. Open source everything after 5 years. Honest games you buy once and self host forever.
Haha, look at the old B+W Perry Mason TV episodes. He drives all kinds of different cars. Those cars were definitely product placements.
There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
Most content sucks ass. What may appear to be bountiful content is actually a lot of okay and meh content. Very little of it fits to your actual taste preference. It's a whole lot of mediocre. We as humans do not know what plentiful content looks like. We've never lived in it.
Most movies suck. You doomscroll and are dissatisfied. You refresh your media recommendations and sigh. You are excited to see a new fantasy or sci-fi film that scratches that itch, yet often left disappointed.
We are still in a desert. Anyone who says otherwise is settling for the status quo that our childen will call primitive and beastly.
Jobs are disappearing because cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content. It's the optimal pareto frontier of content and does the most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours.
When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
> When the tools enable more creation at scale by tasteful creators, we'll start to get closer to content abundance. We're not there yet.
This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.
Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.
We are getting hammered by a massive increase in generation of content, and no change in our ability to consume content.
Understanding is a combination of consumption and reflection. There is simply not enough time to do so. This is driving a push towards content that is so simple to consume that it takes no effort.
> There is infinite demand for content (to the limit that human attention can absorb it).
That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
> which people struggling to get by rarely have
The hate for technological advances is so strong that we're wanting... Entertainment austerity for poor people?
Oh my God.
This community needs more hope.
> extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.
You're telling this to someone who is Meisner-trained, who acts and performs, who has directed, shot lots of films, and who is heavily involved in the arts. A24 is my jam, and even that's not enough to sate me.
I sincerely hope this isn't a performance.
I want better. Both as a consumer and creator in the arts.
> We are still in a desert.
It isn't exactly a desert? It is more like a full buffet, but nothing but cheap, mass-produced sugar literally everywhere. All the 2-star donuts and chocolate cupcakes you can eat, and nothing but that.
A barn full of fodder for cattle would be a more fitting analogy.
I would look to the culture industry in Japan as an alternative to the gatekeeping-industrial complex we call Hollywood.
Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.
Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.
I haven't investigated it much, but I imagine that LLMs have made it easier for japanese culture products to release products in English language. Is industry in Japan taking advantage of nearly free translation for it's print products?
> Most movies suck
Most new ones do, but they've been making like a dozen great ones each year for for like 80 years.
Honestly TV (including the back catalogs) are where most of the truly good video content is.
> cheap/free ad subsidized content attracts more eyeball hours than produced and prestige content
This part I really agree with. It's the reason shitty Netflix reality shows are among the most popular 'watercooler discussion' shows today.