This current era of the internet is very easily the worst one, even within its comparatively short existence. A myriad of reasons contributes to this, the most annoying and newest one being the advent of AI preying upon every last post you release unto the world. Artists are essentially in a constant state of looking over their shoulder in a dark alleyway in fear of their works being stolen. So what is Lucas Pope, creator of Papers, Place and Return of the Obra Dinn doing to combat this? Simply not sharing his work.
Speaking with Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail and No More Robots co-founder Mike Rose on their Mike & Rami Are Still Here podcast (ta, VGC), Pope discussed his approach to his production process, noting that he’s “very production-focused in in the sense that I want the production to work. I want it to be efficient. I want it to finish. I want to actually produce something at the end.”
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But, as he goes on to explain, he also likes to “talk about the stuff I’m working on, and I think just now the the situation kind of feels different to me, that you don’t really talk about stuff when you’re working on it because I don’t know that it’s going to get slurped up by AI or people are going to copy it or something else like that.” This isn’t a “hard rule” for the indie dev, but he notes that he “got the kind of feeling about that, and I just didn’t feel as comfortable talking about the stuff I was working on again. So I hope that sort of breaks and I can feel comfortable talking about the stuff I’m working on.”
I’m in the same boat as Pope here. It’s a disquieting feeling knowing that any single thing you share anywhere on the internet could be fed into some crappy AI software and spat out again as something hollow and lifeless. For game devs, at least, the software isn’t nearly good enough for making playable games. But it does seem to be a necessary thing to keep in mind.
The full interview with Pope is worth a listen too, as he does go on to talk about his concern on following up games like Papers, Place and Return of the Obra Dinn, which were received very well critically. “Do I really want to maybe just go out on a high note?” Pope said. “Why drag myself down with the next thing that people may not like? I feel lucky with those two games. I can do the same things again. I can sort of focus on narrative, and gameplay, and mechanics, and stuff like that, but who knows? It could be a total miss.”
