Three 'greatest hits' brought to you by Gemini

Surprising no one (I hope), this blog has been rather quiet. I committed the classic blunder – not the one about contesting a Sicilian, fortunately – of over-scoping. So I have roughly three thousand words written in response to this rather remarkable video from Yahtzee Croshaw and the Second Wind folk – and it isn't close to done. That video is now four months old and so now you understand my deep fear that I'm fundamentally. unsuited to the current information age. :)

So, until I finish that, or get distracted and write something else, I thought I'd dash off a quick post based on a suggestion from a friend and a rather impressive thing Gemini just did.

Try as I might, twenty years later I can't stop caring about the video game industry. One thing I've been marinating on is how we don't talk about people who leave games. Maybe this is on my mind in particular because I'm not sure whether I've left games or not. I think I haven't, but am I lying to myself? A topic for another post. But: how weird is it that we've known for over twenty years that more than a third of game developers intend to leave the field within five years, yet we rarely, if ever, ask where all these people go?

Considering that intention number, combined with later attrition calculations, and corroborating estimates that 50% of game developers leave the field within 10 years – there are easily as many ex-game-developers as there are game developers, and there might be up to three times as many. Working at Google, I know a lot of them, and that's only one company.

With what's been happening in the industry over the past couple of years, this question of what happens to former game developers is sharper than ever. And I don't think it's just about games. With slash-and-burn capitalism peaking, globalization peaking, and the rise of AI, employment broadly is going to become a lot more fluid, and we've known for decades that it was already trending in that direction before these influences.

Where do they go? Just anecdotally, I know some very interesting stories, and I think they deserve to be told.

Which brings me to this post! I'm intending to pitch Wired on a story about this, and that means I need writing samples. When I reflected on my long-form samples, the one that came to mind, a favorite one I wrote for the Escapist ages and ages ago, I pulled up – and realized the writing was embarrassingly bad. (With apologies to the most excellent editorial staff; I'm sure it wasn't as bad as I think it is.) So I sent my CV to Gemini and asked it to tell me which of the pieces demonstrated the best writing.

You can read my whole conversation here if you'd like. A good friend suggested recently that I talk more about how I use AI in my daily life. (Because I do, several times a day. I'm as surprised as you are, though this recent NYT piece tells a story rather similar to mine.) This conversation was a good example of the kind of lateral task that I've found Gemini particularly impressive at performing. It's ickily sycophantic, sure; everyone agrees that needs to improve. But, checking its reasoning, I agree with its results, and yet I wouldn't have come up with them myself. Ideally, I'd have a person who could tell me this – but that's asking a lot, and realistically it wasn't going to happen.

I've been meaning for a very long time to scrape out my old Escapist writing and possibly compile it into an anthology just so that I have a cleaned-up copy that is mine outright. I'm slogging through the same process with my Pyr novels, which have fallen out of print due to the publisher going bankrupt. It's a third or fourth job I have very little bandwidth for, but I chip away when I can – and so this function of Gemini-as-assistant is quite a welcome relief. As I tell students, the most important thing in using AI is to make sure you can fact check its answers, and in this case, my subjective evaluation is the one that matters, making it easy for me to double-check. Further, its commentary gives me food for thought and can springboard me into other thoughts. It's motivating and energy-enriching, and those are two things that come at a premium for me these days.

So! With apologies to my email subscribers who are about to get two posts back-to-back: here are the starting selections in this process. Initially these will be unlinked, and as I post, I'll come back and edit the links in.

1. "The Wine-Dark Sea: Color and Perception in the Ancient World". This is a post I happily cross-link to the original essay published in Clarkesworld in 2013. It was a true joy to write and reminds me of the minor obsession I had with the neuroscience of creativity in that period. This thinking significantly informed Shield of Sea and Space, incidentally.
2. "1988: The Golden Age of Game Piracy". This was a fun one. As I read through my old work, I realize I'm more of an essayist than a journalist – there's just a lot of first-person perspective (and of course I'm utterly untrained in journalism). But this one had a bit more research behind it.
3. "Cyberpunked: the Fall of Black9". I don't love how this one opens, which is why I initially chose "Why Your Game Idea Sucks" over it. And ultimately, I probably should include the original ea_spouse post in this, but that's very weird to use as a writing sample, isn't it? Ah well. This one threads the needle between the two, being a first person account, with a throughline, even referring to the ea_spouse post but not containing that content.

The honorable mention is "Why Your Game Idea Sucks," which is kind of a tough call and arguably should sub for "Cyberpunked" (readers, any feedback will matter). As I said, essayist not journalist. That one leans hard into the essay side but has a very different tone from the others. I might make it a number four just to bring it over to the blog and have it in my own archive without being both buried and weirdly formatted on the current Escapist site.

Even as I write this, I go back and forth on the last two, as far as which I'll send. We'll see!

In the meantime, I hope you all are well, and thanks for sticking with me through – whatever this is. :) There's much to tell; the kids are about to start school, I had a minor-but-kind-of-major surgical procedure in Denver, scientists may have distinguished long covid from me/cfs, and... well, everything else going on in the world, but you know about that from other sources. Happy August.