Hacker Cinema
Borderlands
2024 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Eli Roth
Returning to her home planet, an infamous bounty hunter forms an unexpected alliance with a team of unlikely heroes. Together, they battle monsters and dangerous bandits to protect a young girl who holds the key to unimaginable power.
5 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
Well “Minecraft” isn’t a character so there’s definitely some of that in it. It knows the look of other IPs too, like various movies or games like Borderlands, it’s just that it doesn’t know many people’s names whether they’re fictional or not. So maybe “Minecraft Steve” wouldn’t work - can’t tell atm as I’m out of credits.
From earlier prompts I tried, “Minecraft” makes things look conceptually blockier rather than visually blockier, if that makes sense. So a “Minecraft mansion” will turn into a midcentury-modernist house with flat walls and roofs rather than being made of voxels.
That’s a pretty neat effect, but if you use names of video games in dalle or other image AIs they tend to start generating UI elements on top of your image and it looks bad.
>useless
Well, they are not exactly useless. Even discounting for educational games, pointless games like Borderlands / Grand Theft Auto have great value. That value lies in providing entertainment in an interactive way, something that was never possible for most of human existence.
There is something magical about highly interactive games, like say Far Cry. GTA, etc, where the player knows his game, while being the same product, is unique to him/her. Services like Twitch have created whole new ecosystems of micro-economies, where a section of population is replacing movies with watching others playing games. There is great fun in watching an expert gamer playing a game. Part of the experience is in unexpected humor through mistakes, wrong decisions, distractions, etc. Part of the experience is in knowing that none of it is scripted and everything is happening in real time.
As an evolution of the entertainment industry, it's not useless.
There are many negative aspects of gaming as well. If played in excess, at the cost of childhood related activities, like playing with friends outside, etc, it can be detrimental to social development.
But those sorts of problems are there in many areas of life. Anything done in excess is detrimental.
I have been really enjoying the way games are being stylized nowadays. We reached a level of fidelity that is really expensive to maintain I think, and so game studios are leaning in on really solid art direction instead. It makes for much more interesting worlds and longer lasting art.
For example, LA Noire looks dated (though still excellent in many ways), while Borderlands looks as good as when it was released.
LA Noire while it feels a bit dated, the characters don't really hit uncanny valley thanks to the facial motion capture technology. I am still aware they are a video game character, just a very emotive one.
It makes me think there is a peak realism we should chase, after which improved graphics wouldn't really add much. I wonder if maybe we aren't already there.
Many games suffer from high detail but lack of clarity. We are still working with a 2D screen with limited dynamic range after all. So that means when there is higher detail it can get overly busy. Lacking contrast, making it hard to decipher what you are looking at quickly, especially if it is moving. Stylized games can add visual contrast in their lighting and art, improving clarity overall. Having said that, I think games could leanr some tricks from cinema in this regard. Just capturing what is real doesn't make good cinema, you have to engineer the scene and the shot.
> Especially when they're story based so basically you're replaying the movie that you've already seen.
Weren't most of Telltale's stories original? I didn't play any of the others, but I know the Borderlands and Batman ones were.
I discovered that I could listen to This American Life while playing Borderlands (and its sequels). The game doesn't have characters that talk to you nonstop (especially when you are playing side missions) and something about the shoot-y gameplay meshes extremely well with talk radio.
The weird part is that the two mediums got completely and inseparably tangled together in my memory. When I think of a specific This American Life episode I can instantly recall the 3d layout of the level that I happened to be exploring while listening to the episode. And when backtracking later in the game I see the terrain features and the ideas and important parts of the show flood back into my mind.
I find it very strange, and very interesting, too.