One of EA’s most popular and profitable games is The Sims, which famously benefits from Sim irrationality. In The Sims 5, there will be bold and new exciting ways for your Sims to behave, and they’ll be able to use our memetic virality model to have controversies and factional alignment. (Generating scissor statements is ethical so long as you’re doing it in Simlish.)
EA is investing in the hypothesis that bad writing drives underperformance. Having ratfic writers and philosophers look at Mass Effect 3 could have turned that from a disappointing series-ender (did you play Andromeda?) to a resounding triumph, and Dragon Age: Veilguard, despite being positively reviewed in general, was panned for its weak writing and became inflamed in culture war controversy. We’ve thought a lot about how misbehaving gods would act, in a way that I think would have made for a more compelling story and user experience.
I didn’t expect we could do anything relating to EA’s flagship sports games (FIFA, NHL, Madden, etc.), but what astonished me was the potential to do the reverse. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get Gwern 2025 out in time, but look forward to Gwern 2026. They were practically salivating at the idea of being able to take a normally annual product, tied to sports schedules that won’t be adjusted by advancing AI progress, and adapt it to a domain which, as part of an overall hyperbolic growth curve, will generate enough new content for a new release in ~half the time every new release.
What convinced me this made sense?
One of EA’s most popular and profitable games is The Sims, which famously benefits from Sim irrationality. In The Sims 5, there will be bold and new exciting ways for your Sims to behave, and they’ll be able to use our memetic virality model to have controversies and factional alignment. (Generating scissor statements is ethical so long as you’re doing it in Simlish.)
EA is investing in the hypothesis that bad writing drives underperformance. Having ratfic writers and philosophers look at Mass Effect 3 could have turned that from a disappointing series-ender (did you play Andromeda?) to a resounding triumph, and Dragon Age: Veilguard, despite being positively reviewed in general, was panned for its weak writing and became inflamed in culture war controversy. We’ve thought a lot about how misbehaving gods would act, in a way that I think would have made for a more compelling story and user experience.
I didn’t expect we could do anything relating to EA’s flagship sports games (FIFA, NHL, Madden, etc.), but what astonished me was the potential to do the reverse. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get Gwern 2025 out in time, but look forward to Gwern 2026. They were practically salivating at the idea of being able to take a normally annual product, tied to sports schedules that won’t be adjusted by advancing AI progress, and adapt it to a domain which, as part of an overall hyperbolic growth curve, will generate enough new content for a new release in ~half the time every new release.