Interestingly, the two example you shared (Sonic Unleashed and the whole Sonic franchise being bad) are likely a good example of “hanging with the bad crowd”. Unleashed is… not great, in my opinion, but the whole franchise? Please. We’re not talking Sonic06 level of horrible decisions.

Another view on this is, if you enjoy something, and people have to tell you it’s bad just so you know, it can’t be that bad. People enjoy different things, and seriously, the toxicity of large communities is the worst thing ever. At this point, even with what seems to be “unanimously loved”, you’ll be able to find a large enough group of people happy to tell you it’s shit.

With that said, some games are really, really bad. But these games usually don’t need to be pointed out for people to know.

edit: dang, that was full of typo.

Yes. But I worry about your premises. Except for a few thing, gaming is not a 10 hour long experience every time; you can just easily slip-it in any free time. Not having the time to play video games sort of implies you never have free time, which would be concerning.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the question and it is not about having time to play video games as much as will to play video games. Interests can shift over time; for some people, it’s playing different types of games, for other, it’s having different hobbies over time.

I think the same way people have to be a bit social, they need a bit of “me” time here and there. All things in balance and all that. But the material “time” needed to play video games? Yeah, it’s there.

You’re talking about fast food. And even them are slowly (very slowly) moving toward reusable/washable stuff.

Some fast food, if eating there (not to-go) have limited waste, as far as the customer side is concerned. Actual restaurants, aside from straws everything’s reusable. And they’re probably a bit more efficient than cooking at home, too.

It might just be a case of stopping supporting places that are not moving in line with the time.

Then you missed the point that what you think does not have to be universal when it comes to reading material or movies.

why downvotes? You guys like cringe fanservice?

You think something you dislike makes it cringe. Perhaps other people do not think that way, and just believe that some people like stuff, and other people like other stuff, without feeling attacked in their feelings.

You’re allowed to criticize anything. The point is that some people are actively looking to forbid the existence of this or that on their personal whim.

The same way you’re free to ignore a piece of work you don’t care about, any author is free to ignore criticism of it. I’m just advocating not forbidding imaginary things, which is unfortunately a thing.

Exactly my point. It’s a good thing that we can make stuff that some people dislike freely. The only other option is to never, ever, do anything, as you’ll always find people that are against anything;

There are people outright advocating that some topic (of their choosing) should not even exist in fiction form. I’m referring to these.

One is free to like or dislike any work of fiction, no matter how (subjectively) good or bad it is. One is also free to ignore it, as it will have exactly zero impact on you in that case. Once one starts to forbid the existence of something that have no bearing on them, on the principle of “they don’t like it”, that’s a problem.

Everything is fair in fiction. No matter how sensitive or dark a topic is, fictional settings are the only place where anything should be allowed.

This does not mean that attacking/defaming people is ok, just that “I don’t like this” or “this is insensitive” should never be brought up against the existence of a work of fiction.

I’m not sure if “most” people would disagree with that, but there are too many that believe that fiction should be ruled by (subjective) morale and laws, while I believe it should be the place where anything goes.

Yes. It’s flooding places, and suddenly people decided that “smooth looking” was the absolute end goal of any drawing/music/creation/etc. It’s not. Some of the most famous art piece are completely wrong, some aren’t. That’s not the endgoal. Nobody’s gonna care that you can take that very simplified drawing and “generate” an extremely high-detail, fully shaded image that looks like it, as it was never the purpose.

Creative direction, intent, consistency (or absolute lack of consistency), execution, style, and a lot more goes into any creation, art or not. That’s what make a piece feel interesting. There’s a reason even now, with generated content being plausible as far as glaring mistakes go, we can still point out which image “feels” AI across a lot of different styles. At best, to remove that feeling of it being wrong, you’d have to spent a lot of time on the output of a model to touch it up everywhere and change details, which requires time and proficiency, which a lot of people jumping on that trend definitely lacks. Some of the worst results I’ve seen have been from people trying to make other “pay” for their output.

There’s also the issue of how these works. For decades, creative people (among other) have been sued by big companies, some very harshly, to protect IP from such overexploitation as “using a three second excerpt in a video” or “using the vague likeness of a character”. And now, these same targets are getting fleeced of their work by more big companies under the cheer of the people. That’s a gut feeling of disgust right there. Combined with the utter lack of creativity in these, we’re really watching the potential death of an activity (artistic creation), and that’s not a good place to be. If one wants to argue that “generated art” is also a form of creation, keep in mind that these models can’t be trained on generated pieces without extreme prejudice. Killing the very source they need to operate does not seem like a good long-term plan. But who cares about long-term when you can make a quick buck, right?

I’d also like to point out that all this rambling is about generated content that goes from “output of a model” to “final piece” with little to no afterthought. The “common” piece, where people will be happy to see twenty broken pieces because “well, there’s a lot of them, so it’s good”. AI and LLM models, as a tool, may or may not be useful in the long term, but I can see smaller applications, even for art. A lot of menial tasks can be improved, general posing, references, simple background that are marginally considered part of the product, guides, etc. Taking something you’ve drawn/created, and locally use an AI “filter” to remove an extra line cleanly or touch up a mistake you want out? Great. The tool carries the intent of the artist, the same way a pen do.

But AI generated content? Make a prompt, a stick-figure sketch, and call it a day? These, IMO, will always look and taste like garbage, no matter how pretty they look. Because it was never “pretty” we were looking for.

A lot of people. For many, it’s not even something they know exist. Even setting it up for them is a bother because of the occasional site it breaks, and the complete lack of technical awareness.