MAGES and their usage of Generative AI

[NonoEnjoyer]

There's been some buzz about a new game MAGES is touting on steam, link below.

If you scroll to the bottom of the store page you will see that vast majority of the title, including all of its source code, is AI-made.

I won't waste a lot of words to say that I have no idea what they were thinking. AI is a subject that remains extremely controversial, especially its use in creative works. As Yuuni put in mChat, even just putting the concept of this out there seems ill-fated. Who is this for? What human being is going to buy this?

More worryingly, it's come out that Chiyomaru himself has been having conversations with LLMs about Steins;???. I don't need to point out why this is a bad sign for the future of our dear series.

Generally, my opinion is probably less doomer than a lot of the twitter people. While it's definitely going to suck if Steins;WTF has a shit ton of AI crap in it, it was already my view that the golden days of the series were over. I doubt anything will ever surpass Chaos;Child for me, and that's not to mention the rest of the GOAT entries of the series. I was excited for the new cast in Steins;WTF, but really I didn't think it was going to surpass or even be as good as the original. Hopefully this is a big nothingburger and it's actually a banger game, but I'm not holding my breath!

Your thoughts?

[dokyun]

That game looks like something you'd see on an itch.io game jam.

[Parzival]

Hope it at least filters out all the loser fandomites tbh and the SciADV sphere returns to just being otaku

Also, odds of S;? being a CCRU/Nick Land spiral time anomaly methamphetamine fever dream just sharply rose

My actual opinion is that SciADV has basically been over since the disastrous Xbone exclusivity deal. Chaos;Child was the last time Mages was really on their A-game.

[NonoEnjoyer]

Hope it at least filters out all the loser fandomites tbh and the SciADV sphere returns to just being otaku

Also, odds of S;? being a CCRU/Nick Land spiral time anomaly methamphetamine fever dream just sharply rose

My actual opinion is that SciADV has basically been over since the disastrous Xbone exclusivity deal. Chaos;Child was the last time Mages was really on their A-game.

I would tend to agree. Kind of like those old memes about how the world didn't end in 2012, but has anyone felt alive since then? We've just kind of shambled forward since C;C. Regardless of how I feel about A;C, the fact that it only came out at all because Chiyo was forced to stop rewriting it (as I understand) is telling. And it just feels to me like the priorities aren't in the right place. This is based off of vibes only, since we don't know how much it cost, but was it really necessary to infuse S;G Reboot with Live2D from top to bottom? Was anyone sold on the game because of this feature? Will jingling keys like this attract future customers who wouldn't play a VN without Live2D? I have no idea.

Yeah, if the next mainline/Steins;WTF sucks, it's whatever to me. I'd like for them to be good but I think our day in the sun is over with. Now we're in the long dark for the cycle to begin again with someone ripping off Chiyomaru and making a new peak VN series, just as Chiyo did with Never7/Ever17/Remember11

[Blond]

"Sacrifice Science Adventure, and I shall award you some of the prestige that you once had."

[Parzival]

I would tend to agree. Kind of like those old memes about how the world didn't end in 2012, but has anyone felt alive since then? We've just kind of shambled forward since C;C. Regardless of how I feel about A;C, the fact that it only came out at all because Chiyo was forced to stop rewriting it (as I understand) is telling. And it just feels to me like the priorities aren't in the right place. This is based off of vibes only, since we don't know how much it cost, but was it really necessary to infuse S;G Reboot with Live2D from top to bottom? Was anyone sold on the game because of this feature? Will jingling keys like this attract future customers who wouldn't play a VN without Live2D? I have no idea.

Yeah, if the next mainline/Steins;WTF sucks, it's whatever to me. I'd like for them to be good but I think our day in the sun is over with. Now we're in the long dark for the cycle to begin again with someone ripping off Chiyomaru and making a new peak VN series, just as Chiyo did with Never7/Ever17/Remember11

Basically, yeah. SciADV has been a zombie series. A;C was supposed to finally jumpstart things again but it clearly didn't because we had almost a decade of waiting for what everyone thought was gonna be the usual slow burn descent into insanity we usually get. We had plenty slapped in front of our faces, and a lot hinted at, but nothing was delved into really, and I think at this point either give us something else thematically resonant or actually give us some answers if this is what A;C was supposed to do. I'm one of the few who appreciated the confirmation of SciADV's world being a simulation, I like that we got it confirmed that it's a layered simulated reality- but we got NOTHING on the central antagonists of the series; nothing on what they ultimately want given the simulation reveal or even just what they actually even ARE and in fact we now have even MORE questions because of the ambiguity around the BKS, Anon/God, and the ties our reality has to SciADV's.

Also no SciAvengers even hint after a literal decade of promising it is so shit, I WANT to know what the previous casts are up to and how they're doing and at most we got some fucking 4chan cameos.

If S;? flops, and it likely will, that's probably it- and yeah, we'll just have to wait for someone to carry the torch once again... Or perhaps even do it ourselves.

[Blond]

If S;? flops, and it likely will, that's probably it- and yeah, we'll just have to wait for someone to carry the torch once again... Or perhaps even do it ourselves.

Unless they fuck up S;?, I actually think the opposite may happen. With Reboot being so successful, I'll say the dark times are ahead of us. We'll probably have even more S;G related media, and unlike last time, we won't have a backlog of other entries while we wait. We're about to see Persona 5 levels of milking from now on.

[NonoEnjoyer]

I would tend to agree. Kind of like those old memes about how the world didn't end in 2012, but has anyone felt alive since then? We've just kind of shambled forward since C;C. Regardless of how I feel about A;C, the fact that it only came out at all because Chiyo was forced to stop rewriting it (as I understand) is telling. And it just feels to me like the priorities aren't in the right place. This is based off of vibes only, since we don't know how much it cost, but was it really necessary to infuse S;G Reboot with Live2D from top to bottom? Was anyone sold on the game because of this feature? Will jingling keys like this attract future customers who wouldn't play a VN without Live2D? I have no idea.

Yeah, if the next mainline/Steins;WTF sucks, it's whatever to me. I'd like for them to be good but I think our day in the sun is over with. Now we're in the long dark for the cycle to begin again with someone ripping off Chiyomaru and making a new peak VN series, just as Chiyo did with Never7/Ever17/Remember11

Basically, yeah. SciADV has been a zombie series. A;C was supposed to finally jumpstart things again but it clearly didn't because we had almost a decade of waiting for what everyone thought was gonna be the usual slow burn descent into insanity we usually get. We had plenty slapped in front of our faces, and a lot hinted at, but nothing was delved into really, and I think at this point either give us something else thematically resonant or actually give us some answers if this is what A;C was supposed to do. I'm one of the few who appreciated the confirmation of SciADV's world being a simulation, I like that we got it confirmed that it's a layered simulated reality- but we got NOTHING on the central antagonists of the series; nothing on what they ultimately want given the simulation reveal or even just what they actually even ARE and in fact we now have even MORE questions because of the ambiguity around the BKS, Anon/God, and the ties our reality has to SciADV's.

Also no SciAvengers even hint after a literal decade of promising it is so shit, I WANT to know what the previous casts are up to and how they're doing and at most we got some fucking 4chan cameos.

If S;? flops, and it likely will, that's probably it- and yeah, we'll just have to wait for someone to carry the torch once again... Or perhaps even do it ourselves.

As for making our own SciAdv… I have plenty of thoughts.

Aside from what writing I’ve discussed in my own thread I have put some time into thinking about a “Western” SciAdv. I definitely would put it in North America, which leaves a ton of room for different locations to place stories. And there’s no shortage of weird occult/conspiracy stuff scattered all over the the US you could springboard into a proper narrative/plot device.

Cold War conspiracies, shit like missing 411, alien hoaxes/sightings, those cities people live in that the military uses for training exercises…

There are also thousands of flyover nowhere towns that would be great settings for weird shibuya-esque experiments and antics.

Time period would vary. I think I’d go as far back as late nineties, and certainly more recent from there. Plenty of hot topics to discuss from those years in the context how they’ve been used to change life in America for the worse.

The most glaring thing is personally I’m not interested in rehashing the “premise” of real science adventure. I bet we could do it better tbh, but it’s not something I think improved sci adv as a whole. Opinions vary but that’s my feeling.

I have some early early concepts for these sorts of stories but I’ll hold off on that for now. And we would have to be careful of having too many cooks in the kitchen if this were a serious project we ever decided to undertake

[Parzival]

Unless they fuck up S;?, I actually think the opposite may happen. With Reboot being so successful, I'll say the dark times are ahead of us. We'll probably have even more S;G related media, and unlike last time, we won't have a backlog of other entries while we wait. We're about to see Persona 5 levels of milking from now on.

Was Reboot even that successful? I've been hearing that it wasn't. Not that it did badly but it didn't do gangbusters like they were probably hoping for- and they were really needing that to happen given how Mages literally had to declare insolvency after A;C finally released. IMO, at most, Reboot has allowed for S;? to happen, but as for what happens after that, I'm not too hopeful.

[Parzival]

I would tend to agree. Kind of like those old memes about how the world didn't end in 2012, but has anyone felt alive since then? We've just kind of shambled forward since C;C. Regardless of how I feel about A;C, the fact that it only came out at all because Chiyo was forced to stop rewriting it (as I understand) is telling. And it just feels to me like the priorities aren't in the right place. This is based off of vibes only, since we don't know how much it cost, but was it really necessary to infuse S;G Reboot with Live2D from top to bottom? Was anyone sold on the game because of this feature? Will jingling keys like this attract future customers who wouldn't play a VN without Live2D? I have no idea.

Yeah, if the next mainline/Steins;WTF sucks, it's whatever to me. I'd like for them to be good but I think our day in the sun is over with. Now we're in the long dark for the cycle to begin again with someone ripping off Chiyomaru and making a new peak VN series, just as Chiyo did with Never7/Ever17/Remember11

Basically, yeah. SciADV has been a zombie series. A;C was supposed to finally jumpstart things again but it clearly didn't because we had almost a decade of waiting for what everyone thought was gonna be the usual slow burn descent into insanity we usually get. We had plenty slapped in front of our faces, and a lot hinted at, but nothing was delved into really, and I think at this point either give us something else thematically resonant or actually give us some answers if this is what A;C was supposed to do. I'm one of the few who appreciated the confirmation of SciADV's world being a simulation, I like that we got it confirmed that it's a layered simulated reality- but we got NOTHING on the central antagonists of the series; nothing on what they ultimately want given the simulation reveal or even just what they actually even ARE and in fact we now have even MORE questions because of the ambiguity around the BKS, Anon/God, and the ties our reality has to SciADV's.

Also no SciAvengers even hint after a literal decade of promising it is so shit, I WANT to know what the previous casts are up to and how they're doing and at most we got some fucking 4chan cameos.

If S;? flops, and it likely will, that's probably it- and yeah, we'll just have to wait for someone to carry the torch once again... Or perhaps even do it ourselves.

As for making our own SciAdv… I have plenty of thoughts.

Aside from what writing I’ve discussed in my own thread I have put some time into thinking about a “Western” SciAdv. I definitely would put it in North America, which leaves a ton of room for different locations to place stories. And there’s no shortage of weird occult/conspiracy stuff scattered all over the the US you could springboard into a proper narrative/plot device.

Cold War conspiracies, shit like missing 411, alien hoaxes/sightings, those cities people live in that the military uses for training exercises…

There are also thousands of flyover nowhere towns that would be great settings for weird shibuya-esque experiments and antics.

Time period would vary. I think I’d go as far back as late nineties, and certainly more recent from there. Plenty of hot topics to discuss from those years in the context how they’ve been used to change life in America for the worse.

The most glaring thing is personally I’m not interested in rehashing the “premise” of real science adventure. I bet we could do it better tbh, but it’s not something I think improved sci adv as a whole. Opinions vary but that’s my feeling.

I have some early early concepts for these sorts of stories but I’ll hold off on that for now. And we would have to be careful of having too many cooks in the kitchen if this were a serious project we ever decided to undertake

Honestly, I brought that possibility up partially as a joke referring to a terminally in-conceptual phase "SchizoADV" series I've had cooking around in my head that I've detailed a bit to the Schizopunk Media guys for like, a decade now. I've actually even done a bit of character art, I should post that on the OC thread sometime when I find it all.

I've been cooking these ideas since I was like, 14. I've always been fond of conspiracy and internet mystery culture so I have stories that basically rehash The Montauk Project but through a more Burroughsian lens, Cicada 3301 but it turns out to be the penultimate communicative phase between humanity and an artificial superintelligence from the future that's been interfering in human history since Trithemius, a high schooler in 2016 who finds out that his best friend becomes John Titor in the future and he has to try (and fails) to prevent the 9/11 attacks in his stead, and a whole bunch in-between.

I really like a lot of the things SciADV explores so I've always envisioned a series that does the same but goes full schizo and blends scifi with schizo occult, alchemical shit. Like, John Dee's magical Angelic Script is real but the "angels" may or may not also be super advanced future AI like something out of Xenogears, as are Philosopher's Stones but again, they're also strongly implied to be a form of 4-dimensional matter of which what we recognize as a Philosopher's Stone is only a particular phase projected onto 3-dimensional space when interacted with in ways that from a temporal view appear to be some kind of magic ritual.

Just balls to the walls insanity that unveils a paper thin reality that's NOT a super advanced computer simulation, but a hyperadvanced simulacra hosted on things beyond our comprehension. And like William S. Burroughs, I prefer instead of a "Committee vs. Anti-Committee", that the conflict is actually ultimately a multifaceted one between a wide array of competing upper domain bureaus and agencies struggling for control of the narrative reality studio, like if Borges' Orbis Tertius had a rogues gallery of competitors operating on higher world layers and/or dimensions.

Basically, I'm insane.