Video games are the only art form that simultaneously enthralls and disappoints, limited by the tech of the age they were designed in. Video games as a model for virtualized experiences are unmatched. Neither books, music nor movies can compete with video games in that regard.

Minecraft and GTA are global phenomena as they model ingrained human behavior regarding cultivation of natural resources and stress testing civil systems. Watch a video on YouTube of GTA gameplay and it will often involve the player testing the world reactivity by committing sundry criminal acts. Even with how relatively limited the systems are, they still resemble a kind of stunted reality. We can laugh as Trevor Philips punches a cop and runs away as the cop blindly fires into a crowd—and injuring bystanders—as he tries to exact justice.

In GTA, shenanigans such as those involving speeding cars and prostitutes are well-known and notorious. We laugh at these scenes because they reflect reality unburdened by consequences. The game allows a safe detachment from moral rules because the human analogs in these games are just that: analogs with no ability to remember, castigate, shame, punish or impose their wills. There’s a safe separation of consequences. But what if we as gamers want to narrow the separation of consequences? What if we want an answer to the promise of realism in digital interactive experiences?

IMMERSION: THE FINAL FRONTIER

A word that I’ve loved for a long time is “verisimilitude,” which means the appearance of truth and reality. Another way to say this is that which provides immersion. Verisimilitude in video games is one of the qualities that has made the medium so popular, and it doesn’t require hyper-realistic graphics to achieve the goal of immersion. As a kid, playing Super Mario World or Gradius or Excitebike or Street Fighter 2, I felt like I was in another world.

Funnily enough, the more game designers chased visual realism, the less true immersion they generated. An Uncanny Valley effect took hold which actually broke immersion as the very components of the “realistic” virtual environments exposed their flaws. As games’ graphics flirted with photorealism, achieving total immersion across every conceivable metric revealed the limits of modern gaming much in the same way that relativistic mass increase stifles a spaceship’s ability to reach light speed.

In other words: The closer to reality modern games try to get, the more energy required to reach the end goal becomes increasingly difficult to amass. Character models and prop assets can offer a mind-boggling level of detail, but the lack of realistic physics and sufficient interactivity ruins the overall effect. A character like Judy Alvarez in Cyberpunk 2077 looks like someone you could bump into at a local bar, but try to talk to her about anything she hasn’t been scripted to say, and you’re reminded of the limitations of contemporary game design. The overall effect begins to disappoint.

NPCs and levels become virtual museums; look and admire, but don’t touch. Walk through a room in Dimitrescu Castle in Resident Evil Village and marvel at the minute details present: a long-neglected dining table is covered in moldy scraps, fly-covered porcelain plates and neatly arranged silverware, but this photographic naturalism runs headlong into the reality of game engineering as your instinct to reach out and snatch up a fork to inspect it isn’t made available. What you’re looking at is a finely curated exhibition; the hyper-detailed surroundings are nothing more than static set dressings furnishing an experience that is largely a cat-and-mouse game between your player character and whatever monstrous ghouls that Capcom has devised.

My favorite game of the last decade is Cyberpunk 2077. It’s a decadent tour of a future dystopia that is the closest I’ve truly felt to experiencing verisimilitude. However, the game is still bound by 2010s-level hardware and software and the designers carefully navigate the player around a fragile world that is actually quite limited in its immersive potential. Go to any real city, and the density of interactivity is quite high. This goes up by orders of magnitude in a location engineered for human occupation, like a supermarket or bar. You can buy anything, strike up a conversation with a random person, drive your car to most any storefront and go in. Go home and rearrange things as you like. Everything is interactive. But video games have had this dichotomous obsession with visual realism whose promise of interactive realism could never deliver. Gamers have quietly accepted this bait-and-switch, understanding the limits of current tech, but that’s changing.

GAME WORLDS FOR A NEW AGE

In one of my previous articles, I spoke on the effect that video games might have on a post-scarcity/abundance society. For readers who missed it, there’s a seeming inevitability of future-shock involving a complete dissolution of the old ways of trading labor for “money” in the shadow of looming mass automation and artificial superintelligence. Some see this as doomerism. I’m an optimist. The hope is that millions of AI-powered machines will drive the cost of goods/services to near-zero, thereby shifting human priorities to other endeavors, likely causing us to reject anti-social norms and return to honest communities again, moving into the future and back to the past simultaneously. The rest of the article hinges on this presumption. This isn’t a full endorsement, but it’s becoming more and more of a strong likelihood for civilizational trajectory. In this context, I think that games will be a way for some to fortify social cohesion in a new world. Being able to go into a sufficiently immersive virtual environment and have meaningful social interactions will change society forever.

Regarding virtual socializing, I don’t mean joining up with a crew to rob a bank like in Payday or forming a squad in Battlefield to capture a checkpoint. These are extremely simplistic, rules-based scenarios. Digital sports. Games of tag. I’m talking about the ability to create an avatar and delve into a realistic and fully interactive virtual environment, join up with a friend and hang out with AI-powered NPCs doing… nothing in particular, but the experience will effectively simulate actual reality. Going to a beach. Going for a walk through a city. Going for a joy ride. Sitting outside of a bar/tavern and watching cities that live and breathe around you. All of these scenarios would be augmented by simple chit-chat and socializing with AI NPCs whose lives are just as nuanced and complex as your own. All of this will take place in any environment of your choosing: past, present, future or entirely fantastical. I’ll delve more into this later.

Perhaps—post-abundance—games/simulations in the future will be produced not to make money, but to create social circles since we’ll have more and more free time. People might generate video games not with the intention of milking players through every conceivable conversion tactic available like microtransactions, but rather they’ll engineer experiences that will attract attention and create social bonds. MMORPGs will shift from chicken-killing, dungeon-raiding stat porn to massively immersive worlds where people create parallel social and business lives within virtual worlds.

Curious enough to indulge this interest in the now, I asked my son to take my Steam copy of Cyberpunk 2077 and mod the hell out of it to get as close to my dream RPG as possible. We looked at the suite of mods available, and while they’re enticing, they were not enough to achieve the game I wanted. So, in lieu of pursuing a modded version of 2077, let’s design a theoretical perfect immersive sim RPG that isn’t limited by current technology. Just for fun.

DESIGNING THE PERFECT IMMERSIVE SIM

Most open-world RPGs are 80% scripted goals and 20% free roam—mostly space and time for you to travel from A>B to get you to the next trigger point for the story. This is one of the things that annoyed me about The Witcher 3, an otherwise great game. The game world gave the illusion of freedom, but the vast majority of content was in scripted materials. I felt herded along as I rode my horse through yet another vast, empty forest. I want to invert that ratio to where the 80% of free roam presents endless potential for dynamic, unscripted excitement while 20% of the overall experience is in tightly curated and engineered scenarios, similar to how theme parks work. Go to Disneyland and most of the park is just wandering territory where relatively-small islands of literal on-rails experiences (Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion) are packed into curiously furnished facades that hide the magic within.

Therefore, with that out of the way, this is what I want from this theoretical perfect immersive sim:

Drop me into a vast, multi-layered environment and allow me the freedom to create my own adventures in a world powered by immensely complex AI that will facilitate my curiosity. I don’t want to be guaranteed to have any particular interaction, only the possibility to have any potential interaction. I don’t need to be at the center of some grand conspiracy that will change the world; I just want to be some guy in a truly immersive world. I want my damn verisimilitude.

Let’s start with the setting and aesthetic. Cyberpunk is my favorite sub-genre. It always has been. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized that so many of my favorite movies are actually cyberpunk movies: Robocop, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Escape from New York, Demolition Man, Metropolis, Terminator 2, Alphaville, Judge Dredd(yes, the Stallone version), Hardware, Akira, Ghost in the Shell and many others. This is the subgenre that my immersive sim will be set in.

Having an open-world RPG set in a grimy, dystopian world where governments and corporations go to war using tech of unimaginable potential is a seductive theater that I’d want to live in for long chunks of time. Let’s create it.

We’ll call this theoretical RPG, Quantum Fury.

In Quantum Fury, the city in which the game takes place in would be called Desidero Bay, or DB for short. It would be a megalopolis of hard-luck stories where teeming millions are packed into sprawling patches of hyper-dense arcology towers. Beyond these towers are winding, labyrinthine networks of roads, expressways and subways. Webs of aerial vehicle traffic streak across the skies like trails of flying ants. At street level, DB is a human zoo. Dozens of languages are spoken with hundreds of dialects. It’s a future rendition of Babel reborn.

Dark alleys. Filthy streets. The low hum of automated taxis whiz by. Drizzle peppers the asphalt. Holographic ads bombard you with attentional demands and alluring offers. DB is peppered with stacks of bespoke bazaars filled with collections of odd merchandise. Imagine going into one of these little corner shops and digging into a box only to find a rare copy of an old magazine or comic book. You buy it and get the value checked on the ‘Net only to realize it’s extremely valuable. Now you have to plan on how to store it properly and possibly even put it in a safety deposit box in a bank for protection. Somehow, it’s discovered that you have it. People contact you with interest in buying it, but they could be looking to steal it. What do you do? The results are not scripted as the world and NPCs are all dictated by powerfully persistent AI systems.

Maybe you get up one morning and decide to go to a bar and while you’re there, the bartender lets slip that a local gang came into possession of a stolen car belonging to a foreign dignitary. What to do? You could do nothing. You could steal it and keep it. You could steal it and find a way to return it and rightfully pin the blame on the gang. But what if the owner doesn’t believe you and wants you dead? Choices. The responses won’t be scripted, but people in the world will remember what you do.

And here’s the wild part—this isn’t pure sci-fi anymore. Tools like Inworld AI are already letting modders give GTA V and Skyrim NPCs persistent memory, real-time dialogue, and emotional reactions that evolve across sessions.

In DB, anything is possible. Maybe you go get a massage, then have a coffee at your favorite spot, then meet up with a pal or two for a VR session in a private booth. Or maybe you just lie in bed and play an AR game of Duck Hunt in your apartment. In DB, you can do anything or nothing. There is no narrative Sword of Damocles hanging over your head, but anything could happen, sometimes due to your own choices or dumb luck. Quantum Fury would allow you to enjoy an experience that offers you the world and surprises you in ways you didn’t know were possible. I can dream, can’t I?

According to Grok, we’ll have simulations that will achieve my dream of fully dynamic, digital interactive experiences by 2030. A sim like Quantum Fury will likely be in development within 5-6 years. With AI tools to rapidly accelerate production, the game could be done in 2-3 years. These games would be less about contrived mechanics that require you to learn new rules, but instead provide experiences that tap into the organic and natural way that people converse, interact and navigate complex environments. With labor losing leverage, these worlds won’t just entertain; they’ll become the new third places where friendships, romances, and even micro-economies form. I can’t wait.

In the meantime, please take a look at the pre-launch page for Mad Malitia, my cyberpunk novel which is currently in-production.

SARJ OUT

I’m currently writing Mad Malitia, a cyberpunk sci-fi novel set in the year 2147. It’s a story about a tough, audacious and super-sexy female security officer in the future who rides a motorcycle, has a huge sidearm and is practically poured into her skintight black outfit. Curves, cleavage and carnage. Pretty easy, right?

The problem is that once I started actually plotting it out, I realized that the story demanded to be more than simple sex-ploitation pulp, which is what the original intention was. It really hit me that I’m writing a story set in our world, but fast-forwarded 120 years. The problem there is that modern tech is advancing so quickly that the risk of my book seeming antiquated in just a few years is definitely possible.

For those keeping a watchful eye on the slope of modern technology, it seems to be advancing along a hockey stick trajectory. If you’re not an initiate in the ongoing, perpetually changing landscape of tech and AI, a significant portion of the discourse might sound like the transcript for either the writers’ room for a sci-fi streaming show or a psychiatric session. In between getting daily updates on tech, bio-science and AI via Grok, watching podcasts on YouTube like Moonshots, keeping up with Elon Musk’s X post feed and catching up on other news via YouTube, it’s easy to see just how rapidly science and tech are dipping their toes into nigh-magical territory.

SCIENCE FICTION BECOMES FACT

Mass drivers on the Moon. A 100-million square foot chip fab to produce AI chips in Texas. Fleets of self-driving cars. Autonomous humanoid robots. Drone delivery systems. Legions of agentic AIs talking and philosophizing and organizing among themselves independent of human interaction. This isn’t a century from now; this is now. Where will we be in a century? That’s the question I’m trying to answer in this newest book, Mad Malitia.

However, unlike many dystopian cyberpunk tales, Mad Malitia is actually an optimistic, multi-layered story about what defines ethical use of agency and how consciousness is valued in different classes within society. Perhaps a machine, if given the chance, would love to enjoy the privilege of consciousness whilst other human beings might opt to deny themselves the responsibility of autonomy altogether. These post-abundance humans might choose to shuck off the limitations of the real world in favor of a persistent lucid dream that they control.

In our world, there’s a small but surprisingly significant contingent of prison inmates that, upon being released into the free world, actually yearn to return to the regimented and strict paternalism presented by the prison system. Inside, everyone is treated like a child and personal responsibility is limited. In exchange for incarceration, you cede the rights to dictate your own path in life: no freedom but also no responsibility. How do we navigate this unique forest of psychological nuance? These are the questions that will be asked in Mad Malitia.

WRITING FOR A FAST-APPROACHING FUTURE

I’m deeply ensconced in research of near-future tech, but even I have to admit that it’s difficult to maintain a firm grasp on the rapidly iterating future. I still don’t fully understand how Bitcoin works—other than it uses mathematical computations to generate a form of value. Passive, agentic AI is here, but for all that I use tech for, I haven’t dipped my toes into that even though I know it’ll be a key component of future businesses and daily life. It’s literally mind-boggling.

I often get confused while I’m doing research for Mad Malitia because the tech is changing by the day. Interesting statistic: only 12% of people who own Tesla cars utilize its full self-driving feature in which the car uses a network of on-board cameras, computer vision and advanced AI to drive the car without human assistance, and a seemingly vast number of owners aren’t even aware of the feature’s existence. In cities like Phoenix, Oklahoma City and Austin, Texas, groups of self-driving cars are already provide taxi services to hundreds of people. Within a generation, the idea of driving a car will be as crude and laughable as riding a horse to work.

In another example, a robotics company called Figure recently featured one of its autonomous humanoid robots to news agencies around the world, as it was escorted through the White House by First Lady Melania Trump. In a few generations, visibility of these types of bots will be completely and inextricably ubiquitous.

The seminal science fiction film Blade Runner was released in 1982. Based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner imagined a world—set in the then-future of 2019—where synthetic humans were engineered to serve as slaves to the human race(ironic that the actor Rutger Hauer who played the icy synthetic human, Roy Batty, actually passed away in 2019). Now in 2026, the subject of AI and advanced humanoid robotics is becoming a point of serious debate and contention. There is a serious anti-AI fervor among the general public and unironic robophobic language is beginning to manifest in daily parlance in first-world nations where labor forces will be the first to be adversely affected. A boiling tension is building that our current economic system doesn’t seem designed to contend with. Something’s got to give, right?

There’s a strange comfort in writing a book whose story is set a century from now. I can craft any scenario I want to explain how we get through this tempestuous time. As Mad Malitia develops, I am constructing a future world that has somehow survived the current, uncomfortable, anti-Goldilocks zone of human labor deflationary effects as AI and automation ramps up. The hope is that this era of granular discomfort leads to an age of unparalleled abundance and a thriving global society.

With all of the trends pointing to tech solving problems like aging, diseases, output inequality, energy needs, .etc, a future world will still pose threats to humanity—in all its forms—and freedom. Those threats constitute the kinds of drama that attracts humans to recognize and agree upon shared values. No matter how far we go and how much tech improves, humans will always love a good story. With Mad Malitia, I hope to deliver.

You can preview the live pre-launch Kickstarter page for Mad Malitia here: kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/mad-malitia-cyberpunk-novel

SARJ OUT

In the fog-shrouded forests of a dying realm, where ancient gods whisper curses and shadows coil like lovers’ fingers, a captive princess locks eyes with her monstrous captor. Their clash is not merely one of blades or spells but of wills, hearts, and forbidden hungers. In the case of my dark fantasy novella, CLEAVE, it’s a hulking, fire-haired brute and his green-skinned female companion galivanting around a brutal, unforgiving world.

This is the visceral allure of dark fantasy romance, or romantasy—a subgenre that has exploded in popularity, blending the grim, morally ambiguous worlds of dark fantasy with the emotional, often steamy core of romance. Series like Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (with over 40 million copies sold), Keri Lake’s Anathema, Liv Zander’s Feathers So Vicious, Melissa K. Roehrich’s Rain of Shadows and Endings, Raven Kennedy’s Gild, and Amber V. Nicole’s The Book of Azrael dominate bestseller lists and BookTok feeds. These stories thrust readers into cursed kingdoms, vampire wars, demonic pacts, and fae courts where love is a weapon, a salvation, and a risk as lethal as any dragon’s fire.

The genre’s boom is no accident. Romantasy drove a reported 41% surge in speculative fiction sales in recent years, fueled by social media communities where fans dissect power imbalances, redemption arcs, and scorching tension. While romance fiction traditionally skews 82% female, dark fantasy romance draws crossover appeal, with men comprising roughly 18-22% of romance readers overall—and higher in romantasy crossovers via audiobooks (one-third of erotic ones downloaded by men) or epic elements. Both genders devour these tales, but their reasons diverge sharply, rooted in distinct psychological, emotional, and cultural needs. Women often gravitate toward the genre for cathartic emotional depth, empowerment through vulnerability, and safe exploration of taboos amid chaos. Men, conversely, embrace it for the way romance amplifies high-stakes adventure, adds philosophical weight to moral grayness, and offers subtle pathways to emotional literacy and relational insight within familiar heroic frameworks.

At its core, dark fantasy romance fuses the atmospheric dread and systemic brutality of dark fantasy—think corrupted magic systems, oppressive empires, monstrous transformations, and existential horrors—with a central romantic arc that demands equal billing. Unlike traditional epic fantasy, where love might be a fleeting subplot (as in Tolkien’s sparse romances or Martin’s tragic pairings), here it propels the plot. Tropes abound: enemies-to-lovers forged in betrayal, fated mates bound by blood curses, possessive anti-heroes with tragic backstories who wield godlike power yet crumble before a resilient heroine, and power imbalances that twist into mutual surrender. Worlds pulse with visceral stakes—plagues that turn lovers to stone, wars where passion fuels battlefield fury, or pacts with entities that demand souls as dowry.

History traces back to Gothic roots, where heroines like those in Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights navigated brooding, dangerous men amid supernatural gloom. Modern evolution accelerated with authors like Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel’s Dart), whose intricate, erotic dark fantasy blended politics, pain, and devotion. Today’s boom owes much to self-publishing, Kindle Unlimited, and BookTok, where bite-sized videos spotlight “morally gray men who would burn the world for her” alongside heroines who rise from trauma to wield their own darkness. Examples illustrate: In Lake’s Anathema, set in the eerie Eating Woods, a forbidden romance between hunter and hunted explores obsession and survival with raw intensity. Zander’s Court of Ravens duology (Feathers So Vicious and Shadows So Cruel) delivers avian shifters, captivity, and vicious court intrigue laced with transformative love. Roehrich’s Legacy series pits a defiant human against god-like captors in a legacy of shadows and endings, emphasizing agency amid despair. These are not fluffy escapism; they are visceral, often explicit, demanding readers confront beauty in brutality.

What draws women so powerfully to this blend? For the majority-female readership, dark fantasy romance serves as profound emotional and psychological nourishment. First and foremost, it offers catharsis and safe exploration of taboos. In a world where real-life women navigate consent debates post-#MeToo, economic pressures, and emotional minefields, these stories provide a controlled arena to engage forbidden fantasies—dominance and submission, obsession bordering on possession, dubious consent that resolves into enthusiastic partnership, or the thrill of “taming the beast.” Psychological research on fiction reading highlights “emotional simulation”: brains treat characters’ experiences as real, allowing readers to process fears, desires, and traumas vicariously without consequence. Dark romance amplifies this like horror does fear—readers confront the “shadow self” (Jungian terms), exploring vulnerability or aggression they might suppress. A dominant, morally gray hero who stalks, claims, or breaks yet ultimately yields offers the fantasy of being irresistibly desired in all one’s complexity, flaws included. As one candid reader insight frames it, women often feel “romance starved” in daily life, craving the devoted pursuit and emotional parity romances guarantee.

Empowerment runs deep. Heroines are rarely passive damsels; they are survivors—hunters turned queens (Feyre in Maas’s series), captives who rewrite their cages, or warriors who match their partners’ darkness. Love becomes a forge for growth: trauma is not erased but integrated, turning pain into strength. In bleak worlds of endless night or divine tyranny, the HEA (happily ever after) or hard-won HFN (happy for now) injects radical optimism. Romance novels are the genre most insistent on hope, countering cynicism with the promise that even gods or demons can be redeemed through connection. This resonates culturally for women, who statistically read more fiction for relational insight and escapism. Steamy scenes, far from gratuitous, build intimacy through consent negotiations, banter, and mutual worship, offering models of desire where women hold narrative power. Community amplifies this—BookTok discussions foster sisterhood, fanfiction reclaims agency, and shared “book boyfriend” obsessions validate the joy of intense feeling. In short, for women, the darkness heightens the romance’s light: it validates emotional intensity as heroic, not weak, and transforms personal longings into epic triumphs.

Men’s enjoyment, while overlapping in escapism and thrill, stems from complementary yet distinct drivers. Dark fantasy has long been a male-leaning space—grimdark epics by authors like Joe Abercrombie or Mark Lawrence emphasize strategy, moral corrosion, and anti-heroic grit akin to video games or war stories. When romance integrates seamlessly, it elevates rather than supplants these elements, drawing men who might otherwise dismiss “chick lit.” For them, romance functions as high-octane fuel for plot and character complexity. The love interest raises stakes exponentially: a hero fights not just for abstract justice but to protect or win a partner whose loss would shatter him. This mirrors classic male fantasies of conquest—battlefield glory paired with romantic validation—but with modern depth. The anti-hero’s journey from isolated monster to devoted love humanizes power fantasies, allowing readers to explore vulnerability without stigma. A warrior who weeps for his mate or negotiates emotional wounds models strength through connection, subtly building empathy.

Reader data and cultural commentary support this. Men report turning to romance for relational “cheat codes”—insights into female perspectives on communication, consent, pleasure, and emotional needs that enhance real partnerships. In dark fantasy romance, this shines: morally gray MMCs like Rhysand (Maas) or the tortured gods in Nicole’s series reveal layered interiors—trauma, strategic brilliance, fierce protectiveness—within epic scopes of world-ending threats. Men often prioritize plot and world-building; here, romance enriches without dominating, providing emotional payoff to intellectual immersion. Sexual elements appeal differently too—narrative-driven spice offers context and buildup superior to visual media for many, blending arousal with story. Crossover hits prove it: men praise ACOTAR for “insane world-building and action” alongside the romance that “makes characters feel real.” In grimdark with romantic threads (e.g., Abercrombie’s subtle pairings or romantasy by male-leaning fans), the bond adds philosophical weight—love as the ultimate rebellion against nihilism.

Broader benefits include emotional literacy. Suppressed societal norms around male feelings find outlet in safe, fictional heroism: the alpha who admits need without weakness. Some men seek understanding of “what women want”—devotion amid dominance, respect in passion—translating to better intimacy (studies link romance reading to higher relationship satisfaction and frequency). Unlike pure romance, the dark fantasy wrapper feels “permissible”—battles and magic cloak the heart-work, letting men engage tenderness through a warrior lens. This isn’t universal; individual tastes vary, and growing male romantasy fans cite pure enjoyment of compelling storytelling. Yet the divergence is clear: where women center relational transformation, men often frame romance as enhancer of larger heroic arcs.

Shared ground unites them. Both genders crave escapism from mundanity, the thrill of moral ambiguity mirroring real complexities, and the universal hunger for connection in chaos. Culturally, the genre reflects shifting norms—exploring consent, gender fluidity, and power in post-pandemic, socially conscious times. BookTok democratizes access, eroding stigmas. Criticisms of “toxic” tropes persist, yet defenders note fantasy’s role in processing, not prescribing, reality; redemption arcs emphasize growth over glorification.

Ultimately, romance in dark fantasy endures because it mirrors life’s dualities: light needs shadow to shine. Women find mirrors for their inner strength and emotional worlds; men discover expanded heroism through vulnerability. Both emerge enriched, hearts a little less armored, ready to face their own shadows. In these pages, love doesn’t conquer all—it transforms the conquerors, proving that even in the darkest fantasy, desire lights the path home.

Don’t forget to check out my dark fantasy novella, CLEAVE, on Kickstarter.

SARJ OUT

BIRTHING THE PHOENIX

Western entertainment studios have been on a crusade for the past near fifteen years producing almost nothing but deconstructive anti-culture with the unstated goal of demoralizing a people. It’s the termite approach to homebuilding: Find a building with a strong foundation, chew away at the wood, spreading feces and creating colonies. Eventually, the house erodes beyond repair and collapses. Profit?

From Star Wars to Star Trek to Doctor Who to Marvel to Halo to Dungeons and Dragons, cultural thieves and political ideologues took charge of storied, fan-valued institutions and began to aim for every iceberg they could find. Any way to dissect, criticize or disassemble the foundational components was their goal and hundreds of billions in IP value has been lost across the board.

Incompetent industry plants have been given the keys to media kingdoms only for them to be driven into the ground out of sheer hubris and creative impotence. Franchises that once kept toy stores open can’t even attract enough of an audience on streaming networks; characters that used to sell millions of copies of comic books can’t sell more than tens of thousands; games that used to draw the attention of tens of millions of gamers can’t break even and end up losing money. It’s mass cultural suicide. It’s purposeful.

GATEKEEPING DOESN’T WORK

I hear fans say “We need to gatekeep our hobbies!” but the problem is that you rely on corporations who owns the intellectual properties that your hobbies are contingent on. How can you gatekeep what you don’t own?

The fact that we in the West are reliant on a small, concentrated conglomerate of global corporations to provide our entertainment is a sin. I’ve said this for many years, but I’ll say it again here: The future of entertainment is decentralization. The status quo of a dozen or so brands providing most of our fun is over.

We’re already seeing this truth being realized in the gaming industry. The titans of “AAA” over-funded, over-monetized and over-developed video games are getting thrown into a corner and bludgeoned by indie games. Small teams of 1-10 people can create games that entertain hundreds of thousands to millions on a fraction of the budget of a Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed and even industry insiders are feeling the burn.

Despite the fear within the freelancer developer sphere that powers the Moloch engine of AAA corporate gaming, many indies are happily providing friction-free entertainment for the masses. The Mewgenics’ dev team is around twenty people, including freelancers, and it’s been a massive hit. Check out the SteamDB charts as of 2/20.

And on the other end, you have big money-friendly title Highguard which was funded by Chinese transmedia giant Tencent and promoted on the Game Awards. Wildlight, the developer behind Highguard, suffered massive layoffs just weeks after release and the game is on deathwatch.

Developers who are gifted big-corpo money to push faux-entertainment on BS-resistant gamers are losing money hand over fist while indie teams that operate on more agile workflows and can entertain new ideas are bathing in money and accolades.

You can’t socially engineer interest; people either like an idea or they don’t. Period. In the early 1980s, the video game industry was on the verge of collapse. The very term “video game” was anathema to investors and families after a tidal wave of sloppy, sub-standard games from Atari. Then came along this scrappy upstart named “Nintendo” who were developing video games, but knew that they had to rebrand to get their game console into homes. Their marketing strategy relied on calling their console a “Home Entertainment System” in the vaguest of descriptions. Kids ended up playing the pack-in game, Super Mario Bros., loved it and got their parents to bring the “NES” home. Video games were resuscitated and the industry is alive and well.

The appeal of Mario and Nintendo couldn’t be forced. Nintendo had to bring the quality—unlike predecessor Atari—and they did. Now, with literally tens of thousands of game developer companies globally, gamers are eating good. But if you want to be noticed, you’ve got to bring the fire. No one is guaranteed or owed success, and no amount of ideologically-driven campaigns of misinformation from “games journalists” will convince people to like a game; neither will campaigns of negative reviews dissuade people from genuinely liking something. The quality always rises and decentralization keeps an industry healthy. Concentrating the hobby of video games into one company, Atari, was near the death of it. Plurality of choice engenders competition and keeps companies honest.

(FRANCHISE) LOVE HURTS

Dungeons and Dragons has been around for half a century and has enthralled millions around the world. The realms created by those who originated the game—like its inventor, Gary Gygax—have resulted in innumerable stories created and experienced by gamers. However, the genius of Gary Gygax is no longer the engine of Dungeons and Dragons; it’s been co-opted by destroyers of culture who are obsessed with moral relativism and who hold a visceral disdain for the cultural foundations that inspired the game.

Dungeons and Dragons is a cautionary tale of what happens when something so beloved is so disrespected and strays from its roots. Thankfully, entertainment is much more accessible due to the internet, so as quickly as fantasy worlds can be captured and ruined, new ones can be created and discovered. That goes for all forms of media: books, movies, animation, comics and games. Fans will find new homes within which to congregate; they won’t settle for pale imitations of the things they used to love.

But fans can also be their own worst enemies. They invest their time, money and sentimental energy into singular franchises and when they inevitably get infiltrated and compromised, they get angry. I’ve not been angry about any franchise, company or industry getting destroyed from within because I’m not a fanatic of anything made by other people. That’s the sad realization I came to: you should only be a pure, unadulterated fan of the stuff you make yourself.

Now, before you get angry, I’ll clarify; it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy things other people make, but it behooves us to not invest too much emotional capital into things we don’t own and can’t control. I think Warhammer is really interesting. I bought half a dozen books and read two of them. The lore is amazing. Am I afraid it will get “captured” and destroyed? No. Because there’s always another group of passionate individuals who will make something equally appealing and I’ll be happy to consider that. It’s okay to let go. What matters is that your entertainment actually entertains you.

YOU ARE THE ALTERNATIVE

If you’re an aspiring professional creative, and you want to be the one to catch the ball when the stewards of beloved franchises fumble, then you’re in good company. There’s no big secret. All you need is a product and a willing and eager audience of customers. A payment processor provides the handshake and you’re good to go.

We need more creative minds, more customer-first companies and new and fresh ideas. There’s no need to rely on mega-corps that can easily be taken over by people who refuse to do their jobs and just entertain you.

Now, if you have no interest in being a creative and just want to be on the receiving end of the entertainment, all the better! Support the independent creators that are making what you do like. We can create new communities together that don’t require the behemoth of corporate and special interest meddling. I’m proud to be making stuff for you.

SARJ OUT

Character is story. Design is character. Design is story.

The appeal of story is a journey through moral systems colliding against nature, conflict and our presumptions about everything. Characters are the vehicles through which we experience story. A character’s design is paramount in maximizing the effect of character and story, because design itself tells story.

Failure in respecting the art of visual character design can often lead to failure in storytelling as they’re entwined. We’ve seen this especially in video games as of late where the failed $400m behemoth Concord has created an unfortunate new subgenre called Concord-likes. This pejorative label calls attention to characters with designs that don’t resonate with audiences for a variety of reasons. “Concordian” characters are stricken with a lack of distinguishing characteristics that renders them inert or ones that are made to be unappealing. They can be rendered in high-resolution and with staggering levels of detail but lacking soul and any particular inspiration.

Conversely, good/great design can produce iconic results. The same actor in different aesthetic setups changes the character. Think of Marlon Brando’s career: he played numerous iconic roles, from Vito Corleone to Jor-El to Colonel Kurtz.

Each character was defined by a different set of morals and values which contributed to the stories in which they were involved. Who would Superman be without the guidance of Jor-El, who was designed to appear as a pure, god-like being.

Jeff Bridges’ take on The Dude has also stood the test of time, and the character’s design is a huge part of that. Take one look at him and you know what he’s about. He’s a flighty lay-about that has a penchant for bowling and beverages. And he looks it.

From John McClane to Dorothy Gale to Freddy Krueger to the Hulk, the Phantom, the Shadow and Superman, visual design helps immensely to summarize the conceit of a character at a glance.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF INDIRECT BLANDNESS

Video games are a visual, interactive medium. Video game characters are the best example of design as character. From Mario to Kratos to Master Chief to Lara Croft to Samus Aran to Princess Peach, visual composition helps to convey to the player the purpose of the character in action. No one looks at Master Chief and thinks he’s going to be involved in gardening. No one looks at Ryu from Street Fighter and expects him to engage in a walking simulator. And that’s the point: the success of a character is often how a design fulfills the catharsis provided by the gameplay feedback loop.

Let’s compare two recent games: Deadlock and Highguard. Deadlock is a massive online battle arena(MOBA) taking place in an alternate 1930s America where occult forces run rampant. You choose from a cast of eclectic characters to achieve favor with one of two earthbound deities, the Hidden King or the Archmother. Highguard is a first-person 5v5 shooter where two teams fight across fantastical realms to secure resources for their side.

Deadlock has been in “early access” for almost two year whereas Highguard released recently. The results of the two games exist on flip sides of the same coin: Deadlock has been a massive success in early access, getting over 25k concurrent players on any given day. Highguard, on the other hand, started with nearly 100k concurrent players on day one, but that number plummeted quickly to low four-figure players. And while Deadlock is limited to invite-only players, Highguard is a free-to-play game. One of the reasons that Highguard elicits the ire of players is the perceived disjointed and stilted visual design which is a pastiche of vague fantasy and sci-fi tropes than anything concrete and inspired.

My son plays Deadlock and even though I have no interest in playing it, the visual design and language of the world is undeniably interesting. The catalog of 30s/noir/spiritualism artistry is a beautiful thing to see. One look at each character and their pasts, personalities and gameplay utility are obvious. There’s no ambiguity. In fast-paced shooter games where you see opposing team members in fleeting moments from a distance, vague is failure.

GRIME IS SUBLIME

Seemingly innocuous blandness can stand out as a unique identifier that exalts a character beyond their apparent mediocrity. In fact, intentional mediocrity itself can act as an amplifier of qualities that uplift a character into the stratosphere.

John McClane walks into the Nakatomi Plaza in 1988 and becomes an action hero. He’s an everyman outsider who ends up running around the building in a dirty wife beater, slacks, no shoes and a bag filled with weapons and detonators trying to stop a gang of international thieves. That look became iconic and determined the character’s importance. Why? If you see a normal man running around with no shoes, a dirty wife beater, covered in soot and lacerations and carrying an MP5, there’s a good chance he didn’t choose his circumstances; he’s just doing what he can to survive them. That’s story.

The best stories are when active protagonists are oppressed by circumstances beyond their control and—usually—they conquer their circumstances to win the day. Even Bruce Willis’ other character, Butch from Pulp Fiction, navigated a maze of eclectic and murderous weirdos to ride off on a stolen motorcycle—’Zed’s dead, baby.’—with a beautiful woman. He won.

Ellen Ripley operates a spaceborne refinery in the distant future. She’s just another member of a crew of blue-collar Joes and Janes. Her overalls and unglamorous appearance lets you know she’s not an intergalactic space marine; she’s just another person. However, it’s this intentional mediocrity that elevates her as she faces off against a nigh-invincible xenomorph that has infiltrated her ship. Light years away from home, no one was coming to save her and the crew of the Nostromo. What was required in the vacuum of space was courage. We watched her find this courage and survive. That’s character, and her blending in as just another crew member made her notable and memorable almost five decades later.

MAKE CHARACTERS FIT

One of the things that I’ve been focused on in writing books is to establish diverse characters that feel right within their worlds. These characters are best suited to act as avatars for the reader experience within the unique circumstances of each setting and conflict. Elijah Crowe(left below)—complete with his history, hangups and shortcomings—doesn’t work as well in the year 2147 where Mad Malitia(right below) lives; Elijah is a Chicago boy born in 1900, a street tough struggling with faith. Malitia’s youthful trauma, and how she navigates these emotional obstacles, aren’t as effectively exploited in a dark fantasy world filled with goblins and harpies; she lives in the distant future. Cleave(center below) only matters where there’s a blade to be plunged into evil flesh. Character, conflict and setting. If these line up properly, you’ve got something.

Speaking of characters, my horror/action book Hotel Erebus is releasing as an audiobook, softcover and hardcover this week on Amazon and likely other platforms. CLEAVE is launching on Kickstarter this week, as well. Mad Malitia is a work-in-progress(about 20% done, finished by mid-March).

CLEAVE Kickstarter Preview: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/cleave-a-blood-thirsty-dark-fantasy-novella-by-sarj?ref=btsfxw&token=834a91f5

Stratum Press’s catalog is slowly growing with two completed books and a third on the way. The first game—a tabletop RPG—is coming in April. We should have a Shopify store launched by June when the first full-length novel—a supernatural romance—is going to Kickstarter along with another short novel and another tabletop game will be releasing.

The future is looking bright and we look forward to entertaining you.

SARJ OUT

COMPANY UPDATE

• Hotel Erebus Hardcovers are arriving from the printer in a few days(Fedex says Friday the 6th) and shipping to Kickstarter supporters.

• Chapters of my dark fantasy novella CLEAVE are going to Royal Road by the end of the week and then launching on Kickstarter shortly after.

• My next book, a cyberpunk novel called Mad Malitia, is 25 pages in—out of a proposed 245 pages. First draft should be done by the end of February.

You, as an individual creative, CAN create “spheres of immersion”. And what are spheres of immersion? Simply, I describe them as this:

A sphere of immersion(SOI) is a collection of transmedia expressions of an intellectual property that satisfies on various levels and provides a sense of verisimilitude. (Ex. Enjoying Transformers because of the breadth of media available as movies, toys, video games, books, comic books, etc.)

This is why lore is so important to stories if you’re trying to build a property that is an SOI. It implies that the world within the story exists beyond the specific series of events you personally experience within it. If you read The Hobbit and then the Lord of the Rings books, you can also read about historical lore within Tolkien’s imagination that predated all of the events of the actual books. SOIs create fans, fanatics whose interest is heightened by the ancillary content and context.

“Fandom” derives from an unusual level of excitement for an entertainment property. Disney, Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel and DC Comics, Barbie, Warhammer, Grand Theft Auto, Minecraft, Pokemon, Harry Potter, Dungeons & Dragons, Cyberpunk(personal favorite), etc. These franchises would be considered SOIs.

For instance, the 1980s were an engine of SOIs. Every major property was a transmedia titan: GI Joe, Transformers, Masters of the Universe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Voltron and too many others to rattle off. Each property was expressed through various transmedia: a TV show, toy line, comic book and miscellaneous merchandise.

People love Warhammer 40K because of the vast, VAST levels of immersive potential. There are tabletop games, video games, toys, paintable figurines, statues, a library’s worth of books, animated episodes, YouTube videos and a growing collection of new content. There are thousands of characters across millennia worth of story to delve into.

I’ll be clear, though: a property doesn’t need to be an SOI in order to successfully entertain. One-offs are more than enough to be successful. One of my favorite games ever, Sleeping Dogs, never got a sequel or anything else for that matter. No movies. No books. No merch. Nothing. I still remember the game, the experience, the story. My point is that SOIs give you more of what you want and can improve the overall experience.

YOU CAN DO IT

We live in a unique inflection point in history, detailed by my previous article which can be found here…

…but the change is that now, with new and rapidly-advancing technologies, we independent creatives can do more with a whole lot less; less money, less resources, less professional connections.

Decades ago, if you wanted to write a book, you could do it on your own, but that’s about it. Want to take your idea and turn it into an animated show? Good luck with that. Movie? Good luck with that. Video game? Good luck with that. You’d need entire teams of people and millions of dollars of capital investment to move that much intelligence to create your product.

With access to powerful AI platforms, 3D printing and relatively inexpensive online print and eCommerce storefronts, an individual or a small group could conceivably create a transmedia property and express it in a variety of means. Books, comic books, 3D printed figurines, soundtracks(via platforms like Suno), image galleries and short films could all be done with existing technology. Oh, and Elon Musk just filed with the FCC to put one-million AI satellites in space that would enable us to generate full-length movies and even video games via prompts in just a few years.

Notice that I didn’t say anything about getting rich by doing any of this. This is entirely about potential creative output and the quality of life benefits derived from this for both creators and consumers.

MORE FOR LESS

For the upcoming CLEAVE dark fantasy novel, I’m going to be selling pre-orders for the book I wrote 100% with my own human agency, BUT, IN ADDITION TO THAT, I’m also offering a 60>90-minute digital soundtrack I generated via Suno and a digital art book I developed with the help of SuperGrok, that I’ll be offering to go along with the CLEAVE soft/hardcovers for no additional charges to the pre-order customers.

CLEAVE Kickstarter preview link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/cleave-a-blood-thirsty-dark-fantasy-novella-by-sarj

I’m no musician, nor am I an illustrator, but I can now give you additional enjoyment for little to no additional cost to me in regards to time, energy, capital or resources. A soundtrack that would’ve been impossible to produce by me is now relatively easy. I don’t need to be a music producer with six or seven figures of capital to invest into an album. I don’t need to spend 10,000 hours to learn how to paint and then spend a year to create an art book. It’s relatively simple to create a beautiful set of images that will offer you enhanced immersion into the world of CLEAVE at no cost to you and little cost to me. The human-written book is the actual sellable product(the cake); everything else is additional icing.

So, what are you waiting for? Be great and create!

SARJ OUT

THE PROBLEM WITH PROSPERITY

As a Gen Xer, I joke with my Gen Z son that I’ll play more video games when scientists extend the human lifespan indefinitely(as well as finding a way to upload human consciousness to a variety of physical interfaces like robots) and I don’t need to work as much. And I know that as I say that, we human beings in the year 2026 are living in a very unique inflection point in history.

I’ll make it clear that I’m a tech super-optimist and I think that the curve of history will lean towards increased abundance, as it has in every capitalist, first-world nation. Having said that, I have no romantic sentiments—nor am I married to—the current paradigm where the entirety of human-centric scheduling and planning revolves around trading labor for a fungible, faith-based resource called fiat money. Based on trending tech movements, the post-industrial revolution paradigm is not long for this world.

So many seemingly disparate technologies are adapting and evolving simultaneously, and it appears that this evolution won’t be stopping anytime soon; in fact, they’re accelerating along an upturned hockey stick trajectory. People are worried about job displacement due to automation and the looming robotics revolution, increasing energy costs due to AI data centers, inflationary effects on the economy, and thus many are caught in a general malaise about the future. I think that over the last fifty years, tech has been slowly converging while we’ve been simultaneously prepared sociologically for a post-labor world.

UNSTOPPABLE CHANGE

Between AI, VR, streaming compute, crypto, internet accessibility, etc, we’ve all been subjected to the largest social experiment where an alternative to the drudge-labor-for-money-to-access-basic-amenities is rapidly approaching. I was in Phoenix, AZ a few weeks ago and was surprised to see around a dozen self-driving Waymo cars tooling around. I had been in Phoenix less than a year ago and never saw one of them. Tesla is slowly discontinuing models in their commercial fleet offerings to make way for their autonomous Robotaxi future. The cost of transportation will begin to shrink. Change is coming before our eyes.

It’s becoming increasingly evident that the economy of the near-future will shift to a system where AI and robots will facilitate a move to largely equitable distribution of bio-system necessities like water, clean food and potentially even shelter and clothing. This system of residual abundance distribution will exist alongside competitive, capitalistic, open-market negotiations between free human capital. And in this abundant future—where most people will be burdened by free time—recreation, artistic creation and expression will be even more paramount.

The long-term is offering prospects of abundance that will change the paradigm of human labor-for-resources. Birth->K-12->College->Labor Force->Retirement won’t be a relevant timeline soon. But how will the general population take to this? What will happen to a human race that has—since birth—been trained to be a cog in an uncaring industrial macro-machine? What will people do when their entire schedule doesn’t orbit around the monolith of “work”? What will people do once burdened with an abundance of resources and time? Freedom can become an albatross and we’ll need to fill the void of drudge with something. Perhaps the answer has been there all along.

WEARING SHADES IN A BRIGHT FUTURE

Video games are now the preeminent form of entertainment. Gaming unseated film and TV years ago and this will not stop. No other medium allows the individual to not only interact with virtual worlds in a stratified way, but to also do so with social features that are baked into the experience. Human beings are social animals and gaming allows us to simulate every human instinct and impulse—good and arguably bad—with limited risk to body and property.

In Call of Duty, you can fight super-soldiers with next-gen military hardware while joking with your friends about that one time in college that you slipped on ice and spilled coffee on your date. The hunting parties from 10,000 B.C.—where the legitimate threat of being gored by a sabretooth tiger or stomped by a wooly mammoth—are simulated millions of times a day across the planet where teams of internationally-distributed people work together to achieve contrived tactical goals. This is a unique anthropological phenomenon that people pass off as “vidya games”.

Video games are models that reflect human instincts and desires. We live vicariously through our digital avatars. Three of the most popular games of all-time—Minecraft, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto—indulge our most primal desires to 1.) acquire resources, explore and build shelters; 2.) to hunt 3.) and to test social boundaries—all of which are all deeply engrained in the human animal.

For over four decades, video games have increasingly offered simulated worlds made to appear as real as possible, when in all actuality the worlds are quite rudimentary. Characters in video games are digitally sculpted, scripted and fashioned in such a way that they appear human, but like a mannequin equipped with a speaker that projects a series of pre-recorded lines, the mannequin’s ability to simulate humanity is limited.

But what if it was possible for the promise of true simulation to be fully realized? What if non-player characters in games were intelligent, possessing realistic behavioral patterns, memories, quirks and lives of their own? What if you could have full-on, unscripted conversations and engagements with characters that relied on your real world ability to do so? No dialogue options to click, just verbal interactions that relied on a human-to-human ability to transmit information? That would change everything, and it looks like we’re headed towards this reality via artificial intelligence. There’s just one problem, and it’s a big one.

THE FUTURE IS POWER

True hyper-realistic worlds demand something foundational: power. Massive, cheap, endless power. The problem is that in the most delicate and important era in human history, everyone needs more power. In a time where a global robotics and AI arms race is pushing companies and nations to innovate on a daily basis, even new forms of energy capture are being floated. The old alternatives of nuclear and solar aren’t enough to accommodate a rapidly changing world.

Elon Musk floated the idea—no pun intended—of space-based AI data centers in a Sun-synchronous orbit around the Earth, which would solve two main problems of AI: 1.) massive power draw on centralized grids which drives up prices for private citizens and 2.) the additive energy cost associated with cooling said AI data centers. Space-based AI could slash compute costs 15-20x, flooding future video games with intelligent agents at negligible expense.

Advancing tech will push the cost of power lower and lower. The cost of AI tokens will drop and the potential intelligence of individual AI agents will skyrocket. Video games will benefit greatly from this. Why play games with stiff, pre-scripted mannequins when you can engage on realistic terms with virtual people? Subconsciously, I think we all know that this has been the goal from the beginning.

LIVING IN INFINITE VIRTUAL WORLDS

What will be the payoff? In an ideal world, abundance through AI, automation and robotics enabled by cheap energy will allow people to spend as much time as they want with family and friends and pursue their own interests. Over 3.3 billion people are identified as “gamers” globally. Once people will no longer need to work to get access to basic resources, that number will skyrocket. The number of people who will be free to develop virtual worlds with increasingly powerful tools will also increase.

Imagine a game like Cyberpunk 2077, Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto in two decades where abundance allows us the ability to spend time in these virtual worlds with virtual people so intelligent that they won’t be “NPCs”, they’ll be our friends. They’ll engage with us in the real world via phone calls and text messaging(Openclaw is doing this now) and we’ll even create lives together. Our virtual lives will become irrevocably entangled with the real world.

We’ll have to juggle personas in different simulations. In an AI-powered Elder Scrolls we’ll manage a farm with dozens of friends in nearby villages; in a future Cyberpunk game we’ll be a merc balancing love and business. In the real world, our phones—or whatever future analog will exist—will act as a convergence point to bind these experiences together and the level of immersion will be undeniable. This would’ve sounded insane a few years ago, but it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable. For me, the future is arriving incredibly fast and is blindingly bright.

The novel I’m working on right now is called Mad Malitia and takes place in the year 2147, so delving deeper into these contemporary tech concerns have served as soft research for the book. Despite everything I’ve previously catalogued regarding automation and AI, Mad Malitia will be 100% written by me. I think that the coming of the AI-powered windfall will allow people like me to do more as a creative than I ever could have before. Therefore, I am exceptionally excited about the future of tech; it could benefit us by providing increased means of survival and improving quality of life while simultaneously unlocking our human ability to want to express ourselves through art.

SARJ OUT

Pre-order a copy of SARJ’s horror/action novella, “Hotel Erebus”. It’s now available on Kickstarter and ships in early February. The Kickstarter project ends on Friday, January 9th.

“Hotel Erebus” on Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/hotel-erebus-an-elijah-crowe-thrill-ride-pulp-novella

"HOTEL EREBUS" Horror/Action Novella

PULP FICTION

The American pulp fiction hero was born out of the ever-changing culture of a growing superpower. Cities were expanding and factions were consolidating where big business and crime intermixed into a vile stew. The first organized crime groups rose up in the late 19th century and spread into the early 20th. Corruption in the big American cities was rampant and while the cops and robbers were gunning it out in the streets, the poor working Americans were caught in the crossfire. In times of helplessness, people tend to express their fears, desires and angst through art and culture, and this was best seen in the invention of the pulp hero.

The new media was subversive in its own way by promoting vigilantism; even violent bank robbers like Bonnie and Clyde were molded into folk heroes by the working poor who saw robbing of banks as a way that ‘the little guy’ shook his fist at the establishment. New fiction also romanticized dangerous women who were deceptively competent and who had aims and designs of their own. This was a time of tumultuous evolution in regards to men’s and women’s roles in society where boundaries were pushed. The roaring 20s were just that, and they ended on a great economic crash. In this stew of cultural change, economic collapse and an epidemic of organized crime, the response would form the foundation of men’s fiction. If the outlaws wore suits and fedoras, then the pulp heroes tasked with fighting them would do the same. But in addition to these accouterments, the heroes would either wear masks to conceal their true identities, or they’d assume secret identities through means of magic and/or subterfuge.

Pulp heroes were battle-hardened street toughs that rarely had what the “superhero” would have in coming decades; no, these were normal human men filled with grit and gusto, ready to take the fight to the rum-runners, the traffickers and the ones who greased the hands of corrupt politicians. Even in pulp stories involving the supernatural, the male protagonists were the kind of men who worked down at the docks or had come home from the war; they were relatable toughs who were both aspirational and recognizable as the guy sitting next to you, sipping his drink at the local watering hole.

It took courage to live in dark and dreary days and the exploits of the pulp hero provided some hopeful escapism. Trigger-happy gangsters got their due; foreign agents coming into America to stir up trouble were given their just desserts. It was vigilante justice served to a public that was sick and tired of the lawlessness. So in the pulp novels, when the law failed the heroes, they merely took the law into their own hands, and the public ate it up.

Among the legions of two-fisted terrors were Doc Savage and Zorro whose inspiration would create the blueprint for heroes of a future era in Superman and Batman.

As time went on and WW2 changed everything, the pulp hero would slide into his place within the hallowed halls of history, revered but not forgotten. Other characters that were imbued with his same values as the champions of pulp: courage, justice, fairness, stoicism, controlled violence and a penchant for finding trouble, would all be rediscovered in the American superhero, and then in heroes from other genres like Japanese Manga. Heroism changes forms but it always stays the same.

By the way, if you’re interested in pulp novels, I recently wrote one called Hotel Erebus. It’s a two-fisted thrill ride about a man trapped in a haunted hotel with nothing but two guns and a desire to get the hell out.

Pre-order a copy of SARJ’s horror/action novella, “Hotel Erebus”. It’s now available on Kickstarter and ships in early February. The Kickstarter project ends on Friday, January 9th.

“Hotel Erebus” on Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/hotel-erebus-an-elijah-crowe-thrill-ride-pulp-novella

"HOTEL EREBUS" Horror/Action Novella

SARJ OUT

"Hotel Erebus" Novella on Kickstarter

REDUNDANT TITANS

I grew up in the 1980s, when some of the greatest and most profitable entertainment franchises were created—ones that are still in a state of perpetual exploitation today—like the line-up of toys that filled Toys ‘R Us which Hollywood is still making movies of and toys and video games are being produced about.

In the 80s and 90s, all of my entertainment was derived from corporate-owned, network-distributed media. TV and film, all produced by Hollywood

An entire city was named after an multi-faceted transmedia entertainment enterprise: Hollywood. The advent of the motion picture camera enabled a move from radio shows to visual entertainment. The movie was born, silent at first and then recording technology allowed sound and video to be irreversibly coupled. Then additive color changed everything—and how lush and vibrant that color was—then gimmicks like 3D expanded new markets. Studios passed like hot potatoes between corporate conglomerates for the better part of the 20th and 21st centuries, cementing big money as the only way to produce mass market material.

However, as the 21st century turned, entirely new opportunities for independent media creators manifested. The growth and expansion of the Internet birthed new platforms like eBay, Amazon and a plethora of art-sharing websites. Previously, creatives had to go hat-in-hand to middlemen, editors, producers and beg for a chance to either have their creative works be financed by the parent corporation who hired the middleman, or to merely be hired to work on other people’s projects. Now, this is no longer the case. Funding can be done directly by customers to the creatives and the products can be delivered to the customers without the need for an external distribution service. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter allow for early initial cash flow and then transitioning to others like Amazon, eBay and Shopify create opportunities for perpetual, sustained cashflow.

With AI increasing what can be delivered on decreasing budgets, the need for corporations to finance creative projects—thereby limiting what can be produced—has also diminished. If you’re a video game developer, free tools are plentiful and some of the most popular games of the last twenty years have been made by individuals or small groups of people. Armies of hundreds of developers in rows of cubicles under the yoke of corporate servitude aren’t the only method to produce interactive digital entertainment.

YouTube is viewed more than Netflix, where the democratization of hundreds of thousands of independent entertainment producers use YouTube as a means to deliver videos directly to viewers. YouTube finances nothing directly but merely provides ad-revenue sharing with individual channel owners. And it works.

Andy Warhol once said that, in the future, everyone will get fifteen minutes of fame. However, it’s now possible for everyday people to gain audiences that stay with them for years. The Angry Video Game Nerd has been on YouTube for nearly two decades and many such personalities have seen generations of viewers grow with them.

Between Steam—where tens of thousands of independently-produced games are sold—and YouTube, the new economy fully supports creatives who hold no contract to any corporate masters. This is the present and future of entertainment and it’s never been a better time to be an independent creative professional.

Speaking of creative independence, if you’re into horror and action stories, I’ve got one such story up for early access at Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/hotel-erebus-an-elijah-crowe-thrill-ride-pulp-novella

"Hotel Erebus" Novella on Kickstarter

In the distant past, life was harsh and brutal, but the rules were simple. Men and women knew what they were expected to do and they acted accordingly. Fantasy and horror books tapped into the dichotomy of simplicity in a brutal world of absolutes. Audiences fell in love with Robert E. Howard, Tolkien, Lord Dunsany, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lovecraft. They fell in love with Middle Earth, Cimmeria, Pegana and the pantheon of Lovecraftian gods and monsters.

These worlds were populated with heroes whose exploits echoed Biblical stories and ones that even predated the Bible, whispered by ancient tribes and scrawled on cave walls. Conan the Barbarian cleaved anyone in half that stood in his way as he traversed the horrors of the Hyborian Age. Aragorn, Frodo, Legolas and dozens of other heroes in Middle Earth navigated a dangerous world where pure evil sought to enslave free men, hobbits, elves and dwarves. In Lovecraft’s stories, normal men saw through the veil of reality and fell victim to insanity upon laying eyes on unspeakable entities like Cthulhu.

There was a seductive nobility in fighting passionately to achieve relatable goals, even if those goals involved bloodshed and facing off against inconceivable dangers. The imagery was pure, primal fantasy: armies on horseback carrying men wielding swords traveling great distances to upend the reign of throne-hoarding despots; immortals(elves like Arwyn from Lord of the Rings) pining for the love of mortal kings (Aragorn); sieges on castles and men fighting unspeakable, ancient terrors. And all of this being done to safeguard a common sense of order that is conducive to the preservation of life and peace. These are not worlds of gray tones; they are worlds of black and white where heroes are cast in bright light and villains dyed in dark tones.

Another conceit of these stories were the depth of the chronicled lore and the implication that these stories were historical in nature. They were supplemented by maps that, by all intents and purposes, provided the means to navigate these places which made the stories even more impactful. There was some fleeting hope that one might stumble into Cimmeria if only they rode far enough or that one could reach Innsmouth if only you sailed far enough. The irony of fantasy and horror is that it’s most effective when it offers just the right amount of verisimilitude. The fantastical aspects somehow accentuate the realities of the modern world by translating them through ancient, mythological avatars.

Even now, when most of the authors of classic dark fantasy have long since passed into mortal death, modern readers still long to escape into their granular worlds of steel and sorcery. This is how the dead authors themselves somehow become one with their masterworks and fall into legend.

If you’re a fan of dark fantasy, my novella CLEAVE is coming to Kickstarter in January. You can check out some concept images here on my new Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/posts/146865463

SARJ OUT

Wanna Read Something Really Scary?

Hotel Erebus is being offered as an Early Access novella on Kickstarter. Take a look here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/hotel-erebus-an-elijah-crowe-thrill-ride-pulp-novella/

There is another way. Now, there’s absolutely no guarantee of success in the independent publishing market, nor is there a guarantee if you go the traditional publishing route. However, in 2025, there are immense benefits from going at it alone.

Modern technology has allowed people untethered to corporate masters to access millions of potential customers. People like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Brett Cooper and Asmongold attract millions of viewers and listeners in great frequency and with platforms that are extremely cost-efficient. How much capital expenditure does it cost Asmongold to broadcast to millions of people from his home? The cost is negligible. How much does it cost CNN to broadcast to hundreds of thousands of listless, apathetic viewers from a massive set in an office building in an expensive city with dozens of talking heads in suits and dresses, each of whom commands a serious salary? That cost is considerable and untenable.

If you’re trying to build a business to deliver goods and services, you only need three things: a product or service to sell, a payment processor to receive the monies and customers. Middlemen are a completely optional luxury.

There is a way to make independent publishing work. Keep costs down. Outsource as little labor to third parties as possible. Learn to do as much yourself. Seek out customers personally. For what must be outsourced, use the seemingly endless array of services to accomplish this, from crowdfunding to podcasts to AI audio/video generation, etc. Payment processors are plenty and easily accessible. There’s never been a better time to be a professional, independent creative.

For novels, one way to get to customers requires a specific workflow…

WHAT’S THE WORKFLOW?

The workflow for Stratum Press, starting with my next novella, CLEAVE, will go as follows:

1. Post chapters on Royal Road 3-4x a week for 2-3 weeks. Then direct readers to…

2. Kickstarter launch for the book with a platform-exclusive cover and other goods.

3. Publish on Amazon (include eBooks and audiobooks)

4. Supplement income by running a Patreon to offer early access to chapters of new books and ancillary rewards like character design images or sell things like stickers or prints. https://www.patreon.com/c/SARJ_Stratum

2026 will be a wild year for creative independence. Do you have a story you want to tell or a creative project you want to do? If so, there are options. Use them.

SARJ OUT

Wanna Read Something Really Scary?

Picture this:
It’s 2025, and the biggest movie of the year is a sequel to a sequel to a reboot of a film you saw when you were nine.
The second-biggest is a live-action remake of a cartoon you watched on a 19-inch CRT.
The trailers all use the same four-note horn blast.
The posters all have the same orange-and-teal color grade.
The toys on the shelf are the same ones you begged your parents for in 1991—only now they cost sixty dollars and come with a QR code.

This is not an accident.
This is a business model.

And it has kept American pop culture locked in a 40-year loop (roughly 1977 to 2003) that we cannot, or will not, escape.

1. The Day Hollywood Discovered Forever-Profit

The switch flipped in the summer of 1977.

Jaws had already proven a movie could make more money from T-shirts than tickets.
Star Wars took it further: one film, endless action figures, bedsheets, cereal, toothpaste.
By the time Return of the Jedi rolled around in 1983, the studios understood the real product wasn’t the story; it was the feeling of being ten years old on opening weekend.

The 1980s became a gold rush of kid-friendly blockbuster templates:

• Indiana Jones

• Ghostbusters

• Back to the Future

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

• Batman ’89

Each one spawned toys, cartoons, lunchboxes, Happy Meals.
Each one was designed from day one to be repeatable forever.

Then the 1990s doubled down:
Pokémon, Power Rangers, Jurassic Park, The Lion King.
By the time Spider-Man swung into theaters in 2002, the blueprint was perfect: big opening weekend + global merchandising + built on childhood recognition = guaranteed billions.

2. The Crash That Killed Risk

2008 happened.

Banks collapsed. Studios panicked.
The new rule from every boardroom was simple:
“Never bet nine figures on something an executive’s kid hasn’t already heard of.”

Disney looked at the numbers and bought the safest assets on Earth were sitting in a warehouse in Burbank:

• Marvel (bought 2009)

• Pixar (2006)

• Lucasfilm (2012)

• Fox and its X-Men (2019)

Warner Bros realised Batman and Harry Potter printed money.
Universal clung to Jurassic Park and Fast & Furious.
Paramount leaned on Transformers and Star Trek.
Sony guarded Spider-Man like the One Ring.

Suddenly the entire industry was running on childhood recognition.
Original mid-budget movies? Gone.
Adult dramas? Streaming graveyard.
New myths? Too expensive.

Why gamble $200 million on something untested when you can spend $250 million on a brand people already love and make twice as much?

3. The Nostalgia Pipeline in 2025

Look at any given month now:

• A new Star Wars series drops every 6–8 weeks—each one stuffed with cameos from characters you met in the 80s and 90s.

• Marvel releases three films and four Disney+ shows a year, all required homework for the next film.

• DC reboots Batman again—same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

• Ghostbusters, Top Gun, Blade Runner, Terminator, Matrix, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones—all back, older, greyer, still selling the exact same emotional beat they sold in 1989.

• Live-action remakes of Disney’s 90s animated classics arrive like clockwork.

• Even Doctor Who, a show literally built on the idea of change, now spends half its episodes revisiting 2005–2010.

The marketing is identical:
“Remember how this made you feel when you were a kid?
Give us money and we’ll sell that feeling back to you in 4K.”

And it works. Every single time.

4. The 40-Year Window

Here’s the strangest part:
The nostalgia zone is incredibly narrow.

Corporate America has decided that only media roughly between 1977 and 2003 possesses emotional gold.
Anything made before 1977 is “old” and therefore scary to audiences.
Anything made after 2003 is “unproven” and therefore scary to investors.

Result?

• Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, 2001: A Space Odyssey—classics, but not bankable enough for new multibillion-dollar cinematic universes.

• Silent films, film noir, 1950s sci-fi, 1960s New Hollywood experiments? Cult curiosities at best.

• Meanwhile, a third Ghostbusters sequel with the original cast in their seventies will get a $200 million budget and global marketing.

We have collectively agreed that human culture peaked between the releases of Star Wars and The Matrix, and everything must now be measured against that window.

5. The Creative Hostage Situation

Writers, directors, and artists feel it every day.

Pitch an original sci-fi epic today and the note comes back:
“Amazing—but can the ship look a little more like the Millennium Falcon?”
Try to sell a new superhero concept:
“Love the energy—any chance we can make him Spider-Man’s cousin?”
Suggest a fantasy series without dragons that breathe fire in the exact same shade as 1990s cartoons:
“Sorry, focus groups don’t recognise that silhouette.”

The highest honour a creator can now receive is to be hired to babysit someone else’s childhood.
Directing the next Star Wars or Marvel project is the new American Dream.
Inventing the next Star Wars is no longer on the table.

6. The Human Cost

We are raising entire generations who believe culture is a closed loop.

Kids today know the Imperial March before they know Beethoven.
They can identify the Bat-symbol before they can read.
Their first cinematic memories are cameos from grandparents’ favourite characters.

Meanwhile, the rest of human artistic history—thousands of years of stories, myths, paintings, music—sits untouched because it doesn’t come with pre-sold Happy Meal toys.

We are not just repeating the past.
We are letting six conglomerates sell us a shrink-wrapped version of our own childhoods on an endless subscription plan.

7. Breaking the Loop

It doesn’t have to stay this way.

The machine runs on our money and attention.
Every time we skip the remake and watch something made before 1977 or after 2020 without a Roman numeral in the title, the algorithm notices.
Every time we buy a ticket to an original film, back a weird indie on Kickstarter, or stream an album that isn’t built from 90s samples, we vote for a future that isn’t a rerun.

The 1980s and 1990s were great.
But they were forty years ago.

It’s time to let childhood graduate.

Because if we keep paying corporations to sell us the past in higher and higher resolution, we will never give the next generation a past worth remembering.

Thanks for sitting in the dark with me while we watched the same trailer for the twentieth time.

In the comments: what beloved franchise are you finally ready to let rest in peace—and what new story do you wish someone would take a chance on?

SARJ OUT

Back in 2017, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink laid it bare in a New York Times interview: “You have to force behaviors.” He wasn’t mincing words about pushing diversity and inclusion policies on companies. What followed was a decade of “woke” mandates rippling through corporate America, reshaping everything from boardrooms to blockbuster franchises. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—the “Big Three” asset managers controlling over $20 trillion—didn’t need majority ownership to pull the strings. Through index funds and proxy voting, they wielded minority stakes like a sledgehammer, forcing behaviors that prioritized left-wing ideology over profits and entertainment. The result? A cultural hijacking that turned beloved pop culture into preachy propaganda, alienating fans and torching billions. But as of November 2025, cracks are forming—legislation and market backlash are poised to shatter their grip.

CONTROL THE VOTE, CONTROL THE CULTURE

To understand the theft, start with the mechanics. Index funds—passive investments tracking the S&P 500 or similar—hold about 25-30% of shares in major U.S. companies, with the Big Three owning the lion’s share. BlackRock alone boasts $10.5 trillion in assets, Vanguard $9.3 trillion, State Street $4.3 trillion. They don’t “own” in the traditional sense—these are your 401(k)s and pensions—but they control the voting rights attached to those shares. Proxy voting lets them dictate board elections, executive pay, and shareholder resolutions without individual investors’ input. A 5-10% stake? Enough to swing votes when fragmented retail holders stay passive.

This power amplifies through incentives. Companies chasing ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) scores—pushed by the Big Three—get favorable votes and lower capital costs. DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) became the social prong: mandates for racial/gender quotas on boards, regardless of merit. Fink’s BlackRock led the charge, voting for 2/3 of ESG resolutions in 2023, far outpacing Vanguard. These policies aren’t benign; they’re parasitic, prioritizing identity politics over productivity. Anti-meritorious hiring inflates costs, sows division, and chokes innovation—yet firms complied to appease the proxy overlords.

Enter the enforcers: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis, proxy advisory firms that “recommend” votes to the Big Three, who follow 90%+ of the time. These duopoly players act like left-wing activists, greenlighting anti-capitalist resolutions: climate audits, pay gaps, union mandates. Texas AG Ken Paxton launched a 2025 probe into their “misleading” advice, accusing them of ideological capture. Glass Lewis even ditched benchmark policies by 2027 amid backlash, shifting to client-specific votes—a tacit admission of overreach. Critics call them a “cartel” warping markets for politics.

PRIDE COMETH BEFORE THE FALL

Media and entertainment fell hardest. Hollywood, comics, games—beholden to publicly traded giants like Disney (Marvel/Star Wars), Warner Bros. Discovery (DC/Halo), Hasbro (D&D), Games Workshop (Warhammer)—bent to proxy pressure. Boards stocked with DEI hires greenlit “marginalized” narratives: every hero a queer minority, villains straight white males, stories sidelined for lectures. Index funds’ votes ensured compliance; dissent meant shareholder revolts.

Star Wars? Disney’s sequel trilogy and shows like The Acolyte hemorrhaged fans, with box office plunging from $4.4 billion (originals) to under $2 billion post-2019. Marvel’s Phase 4-5 flopped hard—The Marvels ($206 million on $270 million budget), Ant-Man Quantumania ($476 million vs. $388 million cost)—cumulative losses in billions as “strong female leads” alienated core audiences. American corporate comics (DC and Marvel) are met with apathy and indifference, keys bleeding value amid endless woke reboots. Dungeons & Dragons? Wizards of the Coast’s DEI push—pronoun guides, diverse art—sparked boycotts; 2025 saw rollbacks as sales tanked. Warhammer 40K? Games Workshop navigated carefully, but proxy eyes loomed. Halo’s Paramount series? Canceled after Season 2 amid “woke” gripes and low viewership.

Books fared no better: publishers like Penguin Random House mandated sensitivity readers, bloating costs and diluting stories. Video games? Ubisoft, EA folded under ESG, yielding baggy heroines and preachy plots—Concord’s $200 million flop epitomized the rot. Billions evaporated: Disney alone wrote down $1.5 billion on Marvel content; comics industry “bleeding out” per insiders. Fans fled to indie/Asian alternatives craving unfiltered fun.

This “forced behaviors” paradigm bred division: ESG/DEI quotas fueled identity wars, turning entertainment into propaganda. Mainstream became niche lectures on “marginalized communities,” ignoring global audiences’ desire for heroes, not sermons. Profits? Secondary to virtue signals.

THE PENDULUM SWING

But the endgame nears. November 2025 brings momentum: White House drafts executive orders curbing proxy rights for BlackRock et al., forcing pass-through voting to actual owners. Paxton’s ISS/Glass Lewis probe signals state crackdowns. Bills like expanded Putting Investors First Act loom, limiting advisors’ sway. Vanguard/BlackRock softened DEI language in 2025 policies amid boycotts. Glass Lewis’ pivot? Market pressure winning.

Pop culture stirs: Indies boom, Asia dominates (Black Myth: Wukong and Stellar Blade’s triumph), Hasbro retreats. Fans reclaim via boycotts, X rants. The Big Three’s empire—built on your money, weaponized against your tastes—crumbles under scrutiny.

Reclaiming culture means starving the beast: divest ESG funds, support indies, demand pass-through voting. The forced era ends not with a bang, but shareholder revolt. Heroes return; lectures fade. America’s stories—epic, unbowed—rise anew.

Are you ready for the swing of the cultural pendulum?

SARJ OUT

The American publishing industry, both traditional and independent, is in a tailspin that’s been spinning for years, and artificial intelligence is the latest gust shoving it toward the ground. You’ve got legacy houses churning out celebrity memoirs and safe bets while indie authors drown in a sea of digital noise on platforms like Amazon. Add AI to the mix, and suddenly human writers are staring at a landscape where machines crank out “books” faster than you can say “bestseller list,” leaving flesh-and-blood creators wondering if it’s even worth picking up the pen. It’s a grim picture, one that’s not just about sales slumps but the erosion of what makes writing human: creativity, grit, and that irreplaceable spark of originality.

Start with traditional publishing, the old guard that’s supposed to be the gatekeeper of quality. The numbers don’t lie: according to the Association of American Publishers’ StatShot report, overall industry revenues dipped 1.3% in June 2025 alone, with a year-to-date decline of 1.7%. Trade revenues, which cover the bulk of fiction and non-fiction, fell 2.8% that month to $675.5 million. The print book market as a whole slid 1.6% in the first half of 2025 compared to the prior year. There are about 3,131 book publishing businesses in the US, growing at a meager CAGR of 1.1% from 2020 to 2025, but that’s hardly a boom—it’s stagnation in a sector battered by consolidation. The Big Five (now essentially Big Four after mergers) dominate, squeezing out midlist authors with paltry advances that haven’t kept pace with inflation. Remember when a debut novelist could snag a six-figure deal? Those days are relics; now it’s more like scraping by on $5,000-$10,000 if you’re lucky, while the houses bet big on TikTok sensations or political tell-alls that sell on name recognition alone.

The rot runs deeper. Gatekeeping has morphed into a DEI checklist gauntlet, where manuscripts get rejected not for quality but for not ticking the right boxes, leaving talented writers sidelined. Marketing budgets skew toward proven hits, leaving unknowns to fend for themselves in a discoverability desert. And let’s not forget the post-COVID hangover: supply chain snarls, rising paper costs, and a readership that’s increasingly distracted by short-form content on apps. Publishers are facing what one insider calls a “perfect storm” of challenges in 2025, including declining ad revenues and shifting consumer habits toward audiobooks and ebooks, but even those segments aren’t growing fast enough to offset the losses. It’s a far cry from the golden era when books were cultural events; now, they’re just another commodity in a bloated market.

Flip to independent publishing, and the picture’s no rosier—it’s just a different flavor of chaos. Self-publishing exploded thanks to platforms like Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), democratizing access but flooding the gates. In 2025, the self-pub scene is oversaturated, with millions of titles vying for eyeballs on Amazon, where algorithms bury most books under a pile of similar covers. Royalties are slim—70% on ebooks priced $2.99-$9.99 sounds great until you factor in the cut-throat competition and the need to spend on ads just to get seen. Discoverability? Forget it; without a massive social media following or paid promo, your opus sinks like a stone. Indie authors grind through newsletters, ARC teams, and beta readers, only to see sales trickle in the double digits. The market’s grown, sure, but so has the noise—genres like romance and fantasy are packed with formulaic series, making it tough for originals to break through.

Enter AI, the disruptor that’s turning this mess into a full-blown crisis. Generative tools like ChatGPT and Grok are churning out “books” at warp speed, flooding marketplaces and disincentivizing human writers who can’t compete with the volume or cost. Why slave over a manuscript for months when an AI can spit out a 50,000-word novel in hours? The Authors Guild calls AI a “serious threat to the writing profession,” pointing to model training on pirated books without compensation, leading to a flood of derivative content. Scammy AI-generated imitations and summaries are rampant on Amazon, with authors finding knockoffs of their work popping up overnight. In early 2024, the platform was already struggling to stem the tide, limiting self-published ebooks to three per day, but by 2025, the problem’s worsened—thousands of new AI titles daily, mostly nonsense summaries or regurgitated public domain works.

Take the mushrooming of AI books on bestseller lists: In 2023, Kindle Unlimited’s YA romance charts were stuffed with AI gibberish, and it’s only escalated. Bad actors use tools to generate sham content—study guides, travel books, even “biographies” that deceive buyers. Amazon’s flooded with these, making it harder for real authors to stand out; one report notes the marketplace is “incubators for AI-generated books” via GPT and MidJourney. Human writers feel the pinch—why pour your soul into a draft when AI can mimic styles, impersonate voices, and undercut prices? It’s not just quantity; AI lacks emotional depth, producing formulaic slop that still sells to undiscerning readers. An open letter from writers to publishers in 2025 warns that AI will devalue original stories, reducing them to data patterns.

This disincentivization hits hard. Aspiring authors see the math: traditional paths offer slim odds and low pay, indie routes demand marketing savvy most lack, and now AI bots are the competition. Fiction writers fret over AI’s lack of true creativity—brainstorming aids are fine, but full manuscripts? It feels like cheating the craft. Ethical nightmares abound: scams where AI fakes authors’ work, or publishers using it for editing without credit, eroding trust. Some see silver linings—AI as a tool for productivity or opportunity in a tough market—but for many, it’s a replacement threat. Why grind through revisions when a prompt yields a “book” ready for upload? It’s hollowing out the soul of publishing, turning art into algorithm.

The fallout’s cultural too. Books were once beacons of human insight; now, they’re commoditized slush. Traditional houses chase trends, indies fight visibility, and AI floods the rest. Readers lose out on genuine voices, buried under bot-generated dreck. If the industry doesn’t adapt—maybe with AI detection, better royalties, or valuing human curation—it risks becoming a ghost town of echoes.

Ultimately, this dire state is a symptom of broader decay: tech overreach gutting creative fields. Good things—like the painstaking craft of human writing—don’t last forever if we let machines take the reins. In fantasy, we fight for legacy; in sci-fi, we question progress. Publishing needs that fight now.

SARJ OUT

If there’s one thing that’s got the gaming faithful frothing at the mouth in 2025, it’s the suicidal corporate circus AAA studios are staging on a daily basis. These titans of the industry now treat their golden-age hits like toxic waste, shuttering servers, “remastering” classics into unrecognizable slop, and peddling half-baked “modern” cash-grabs just to squeeze one more dime from loyal fans. It’s not evolution; it’s self-sabotage on steroids, a blitzkrieg against their own legacy that leaves fans of these franchises pissed, and their reputations in the toilet. Imagine sinking hours into a timeless epic, only for the devs to nuke it from orbit in a different installment later on and demand you repurchase the corpse, polished with shitty dialogue tweaks and unnecessary additions.

Take Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Square Enix’s bloated 2024 behemoth that promised to “honor” the 1997 legend but delivered a Frankenstein’s monster of cinematic diarrhea and dialogue gut-punches. Serious or ratty scenes are replaced with an over-the-top ritual involving bald people, and ominous sights are replaced with on-the-nose renditions that laugh at the viewer’s intelligence. Fans who asked for this remastered original certainly didn’t expect it to be butchered before their very eyes. Square Enix thought they’d hook the “new generation,” but all they did was alienate the die-hards who built the franchise. Oh, and they added a multiverse plot to the story too, so if there’s any question to the writer’s narrative bankruptcy, nothing confirms that more than hammering in yet another multiverse plot to an IP that doesn’t need it.

THE SELF-INFLICTED VAULTING

Flip to Bungie’s Destiny 2, the live-service leviathan that’s been feasting on vaulting old expansions since its 2017 launch. Remember Red War? Poof—gone forever, content locked behind sunsetting schedules because “sunsetting” became code for “monetize our new garbage.” Players grind for years, only to watch their investments evaporate, forced to pony up for nothingburger stories or the latest episodic slop. It’s not maintenance; it’s malice, a revolving door of FOMO-driven expansions. Bungie’s stock plummeted post-Sony acquisition, proving the vault isn’t just for guns—it’s their reputation too.

And don’t get me started on EA, the poster child for what is essentially ritual sacrifice. They’ve axed a laundry list of beloved titles: Darkspore, Dead Space remakes, Titanfall 3, yet prop up The Sims 4 like a zombie overlord. Launched in 2014 as a buggy mess, it’s been “expanded” into a Frankenstein of endless DLC packs (over 70 now, at $5-40 a pop), while the base game is like a skeletal husk of its previous rendition. Fans voice their dissent in the only forum that matters—Steam forums—while modders keep the dream alive. EA’s playbook: kill the old, milk the new.

This isn’t innovation; it’s a Ponzi scheme where yesterday’s triumphs fund tomorrow’s flops. Devs chase the “modern audience” dragon, live services, battle passes, always-online mandates, ignoring that gamers crave ownership, not rentals. The result? Trust eroded, communities fractured, and AAA’s aura dimmed to a flickering CRT glow.

TRIPPING OVER THEIR OWN SHOELACES

Now, zoom in on the hall of shame: studios that turned their inward cannibalism into an art form. Nintendo takes the crown for extreme measures, waging holy war on emulation while embalming their classic games with the same. Remember the Wii U and 3DS online shutdowns in 2024? Millions of hours in Mario Kart 8, Smash Bros., Pokémon, vaulted into digital oblivion, no backward compatibility, no cloud saves. If not for physical game cards or cartridges, a digital-only marketplace would’ve made these games permanently unplayable and lost to time forever.

They sue emulator devs like Yuzu into the ground, legally backhand fan-games, all while closing eShop stores to make purchasing older games impossible. Meanwhile they hawk $70 Switch 2 ports of buggy 20-year-old N64 sludge. The irony? Emulation thrives underground: Project M, Dolphin, because Big ‘Tendo sunsets faster than a bad speedrun. Fans pirate what they can’t preserve, and Nintendo’s “loyalty” rep sours into “litigious relic.”

It’s contagious. Ubisoft shutters Skull and Bones servers after its post-launch flop. Activision rotates Call of Duty seasons into irrelevance, all while AAA amateurs blame Valve’s effective storefront and beloved sales practices for their own bungles. “Waah, Steam is a monopoly!” they whine, tripping over their unnecessary and annoying launchers they hamfist into their games, forcing Denuvo DRM onto games that don’t need it, and day-one patches that brick GPUs. Steam’s crime? A simple, effective, independent business model. These clowns lambast the platform while their own “platforms” (hamfisted launcher requirements) crash harder than a noob in Dark Souls, self-own after self-own, eroding the very market they aim to dominate.

DIGGING OUT OF THE VAULT

So, what’s the escape hatch from this self-made hell? Simple: claw back to customer-first basics, ditch the malice, and remember why we boot up. Sensible practices like permanent ownership, no more vaulting expansions, no random fucking price hikes, no always-online bullshit.

Malicious monetization? Torch it. Battle passes? Fine, if cosmetic-only and earnable gratis. No paywalls on story beats, no $20 skins pay-to-win. In-game ads? Sacrilege—nuke ‘em. Get rid of ‘em. This isn’t mobile. Look at Helldivers 2’s stratagem model: premium warbonds packed with value, no FOMO grind.

Indies nail it: Hades 2, Balatro, and Vampire Survivors—all full games with fair prices, eternal access thanks to Steam. AAA could learn: release polished (literally just beta-test your games), support post-launch sans greed, induce a post-closure preservation plan without the need for any always-online servers.

This rot’s reversible if these studios stop losing to themselves. Gamers aren’t ATMs; we’re the lifeblood. Deliver fun games, fairly, without the bullshit, and without the hypocritical bureaucratic excuses for their permanent closure, and watch those reputations return to form.

SARJ OUT

RISING IN THE EAST

Picture firing up a game where the lead slashes through hordes of mutants in skin-tight armor that hugs every curve, her design screaming unapologetic allure while the combat demands pixel-perfect dodges and brutal counters. No hand-wringing over “objectification,” no DEI consultants neutering the vibe—just pure, pulse-pounding action tailored for guys who crave heroism, eye candy, and zero lectures. That’s the reality from Asian developers right now, as Japan, Korea, and China crank out hits that serve male audiences without batting an eye. Meanwhile, Western studios drown in political correctness so saturated it’s practically a drowning hazard, churning out desexualized slop that alienates half their playerbase. It’s a tale of two industries: one thriving on fun and fantasy, the other rotting from the inside.

Take Stellar Blade, the 2024 PS5 powerhouse from Korean outfit Shift Up. Eve, the protagonist, is a sleek android warrior with an aggressively athletic build—curves that turn heads, outfits that leave little to the imagination, and animations that celebrate her form during every fluid combo. Launch previews sparked a firestorm from Western journalists: “regressive,” “sexist,” a “blatant example of male gaze pandering.” Outlets like The Mary Sue dissected her as a threat to progress, while activists petitioned for redesigns. But sales? Over 3 million copies sold by mid-2025, outselling many AAA flops, with PC launch shattering records despite the hate. X lit up with mods amplifying her sexiness—fishnet bodysuits, tattoos, pregnant variants—racking thousands of likes from fans who get it: Eve’s appeal is the hook, but the parry-riposte system and boss rushes keep ‘em coming back. Shift Up didn’t flinch; they doubled down, proving that in a market bloated with “relatable” baggy-clothed heroines, sexy sells—and satisfies.

Japan’s been the vanguard for decades, mastering the blend of power fantasy and feminine allure without Western guilt. Yoko Taro’s Nier: Automata (2017) sold over 8 million copies, propelled by 2B: a blindfolded android in a high-slit gothic dress, high heels clicking through apocalyptic ruins as she wields katanas and pod drones. Director Taro openly admitted the fanservice—”I just really like girls”—with panty shots and jiggle physics integral to her design.

Critics whined about “over-sexualization,” but men ate it up: 2B’s stoic lethality masking vulnerability mirrors classic archetypes, her outfits a deliberate tease amid philosophical existentialism. It’s not shallow; it’s layered escapism where beauty enhances the tragedy. PlatinumGames’ Bayonetta series echoes this: the titular witch summons demons with hair-whips, strutting in gun-heeled dominatrix gear that celebrates her bombshell physique. No apologies, just stylish combos and over-the-top spectacle that’s spawned cosplay empires.

Then there’s FromSoftware’s Soulsborne juggernauts—Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring—punishing action-RPGs that embody male perseverance. These aren’t “niche”; Elden Ring alone topped 25 million sales, drawing guys into vast, unforgiving worlds where you die endlessly to colossal bosses, only to master patterns and triumph. The appeal? Pure game theory: build optimization, risk-reward exploration, Tarnished rising from ash to god-slayer. Female characters like Malenia (blade-armed demigod) or Lady Maria (blood-soaked hunter) pack allure without pandering—sexy in ferocity, not fragility. Hidetaka Miyazaki crafts for challenge addicts, ignoring “accessibility” mandates that water down Western titles.

CHINA’S FIRST FORAY

China’s entering the fray with unbridled ambition. Game Science’s Black Myth: Wukong (2024) smashed Steam records as the Monkey King Destined One, a shape-shifting brawler rooted in Journey to the West mythology. Over 20 million players at peak, it revels in power fantasy: acrobatic staff spins dismantling yaksha hordes, transformations into mythical beasts, no hand-holding tutorials. Devs enforced “no politics” for streamers, dodging Western DEI drama amid controversy over localization gripes—yet it soared, proving Chinese studios prioritize spectacle over sermons. Gacha giants like miHoYo’s Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero layer waifu collectors atop action, with hyper-detailed outfits and personalities that hook male spenders globally.

EAST VS WEST

Why the disparity? Asia’s cultures sidestep the West’s PC saturation. Japanese devs chase “kakkoii” (cool factor)—stylish heroes, jiggle physics, rivalry-driven plots—treating male gaze as standard, not scandal. Korean teams like Shift Up mirror K-pop gloss: flawless visuals, aspirational beauty. Chinese outfits leverage mythology for epic stakes, unburdened by pronoun patrols. Western studios? Crippled by “modern audience” mandates—baggy tomboys, virtue-signaling narratives, layoffs galore as flops like Concord tank while Asian hits hand out bonuses. It’s the same rot: desexualizing women to appease activists, yielding sterile products that bomb.

The male appeal is primal: power through mastery (Souls bosses), heroism amid doom (Eve purging Naytiba), beauty as reward (2B’s elegance). These games indulge competition, protection, conquest—without the guilt trip. X buzzes with Eve mods and 2B art, fans reveling in what West denies. Asia gets it: men want aspirational fantasies, not lectures.

This isn’t coincidence; it’s market savvy. While Ubisoft hemorrhages talent on “inclusive” failures, Asian devs rake millions by serving core demos unfiltered. The future? Indies and Asia leading revival—Stellar Blade sequel incoming, FromSoft’s next shadow drop, Chinese myths scaling up.

For subcultures desperate for unfiltered edge, Asian games emerge as the bold cure to the West’s creeping stagnation. Icons of daring, vibrant realms won’t endure neglect forever—champion them, uncover their depths, and spark the shift that gaming desperately needs.

SARJ OUT

What do men really want to read? The dichotomous answer is both simple and complex. Fiction has always been a mirror and a forge for the male psyche, crafting tales that tap into instincts honed over millennia—conquest, protection, rivalry, and that raw drive to push boundaries. In a world where modern narratives often dilute these elements under layers of caution or agenda, men gravitate toward stories that embrace them unapologetically. Whether it’s the thrill of power fantasies or the grit of morally complex heroes, masculine fiction delivers escapism that’s as entertaining as it is affirming. It’s not about exclusion; it’s about exploring the unique facets of male experience, from ancient epics to pulpy adventures, reinforcing values that build civilizations while indulging the wilder sides of human nature.

PRIMEVAL ANCHORS AS ARCHETYPE

At the heart of male-centered fiction lies the power fantasy, that unfiltered rush of imagining oneself as an unstoppable force. Men aren’t just reading for plot; they’re vicariously living out scenarios where strength, cunning, and sheer will dominate. Think of the barbarian archetype in Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories—a morally complex warrior-king slashing through a fractured world rife with sorcery, monstrous evils, and treacherous alliances. Conan’s exploits aren’t sanitized; they’re brutal, visceral, celebrating a man’s journey from outcast to ruler through muscle and mindset. It’s the ultimate male daydream: rising above chaos not through committees or compromise, but raw prowess. This resonates because it echoes real-life aspirations—climbing hierarchies, mastering skills, and claiming what’s earned—in a heightened, consequence-free realm.

Or James Bond, the ultimate masculine paradigm; a super-spy working for a top secret government agency to protect Queen and Country by venturing forth onto globe-trotting missions that see him pitted against world-conquering despots and masterminds. While on these missions, he’s equipped with state-of-the-art weapons, gadgets and sports cars like the legendary Aston Martin DB5, and when he’s not perforating waves of henchmen with bullets, he’s being accosted by a litany of worldly, drop-dead gorgeous women. Bond perfectly encapsulates the trappings of masculine psychology and what grabs men’s attention: a clear-cut mission, mechanical devices and beautiful specimens of the female variety.

These fantasies often feature exaggerated representations of men and women, intentionally unattainable ideals that fuel the imagination without apology. Male protagonists are towering titans of endurance and intellect, while female characters embody allure and mystery, like the classic femme fatale in noir detective tales. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe navigate indifferent, shadowy worlds as morally grey loners, confronting complex sexual desires through enigmatic women who tempt and betray. The femme fatale isn’t a villain to be reformed; she’s a catalyst for the hero’s internal battles, blending lust, danger, and deception. This archetype allows men to grapple with desires that society often suppresses, all wrapped in hard-boiled dialogue and rain-slicked streets. It’s fiction as a safe space to explore the push-pull of attraction and ambition, where exaggerated beauty and brawn serve the story’s pulse, not realism’s constraints.

THE INSURMOUNTABLE AS PARABLE

Drawing from ancient roots, masculine fiction often channels biblical underdog tales that instill hope against insurmountable odds. Stories like David and Goliath aren’t just religious lore; they’re blueprints for triumph through courage and ingenuity. A shepherd boy fells a giant with a sling and faith—it’s the essence of male resilience, proving that size or status doesn’t dictate victory. This theme permeates modern equivalents, where protagonists face overwhelming foes yet prevail through grit. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, one of the most enduring male-centric series, men (and hobbits standing in for everyman) amass into ragtag armies to repel encroaching threats from foreign realms. Frodo’s quest isn’t a solo stroll; it’s bolstered by brotherhoods like the Fellowship, where warriors like Aragorn embody kingship reclaimed through battle. The saga’s appeal lies in its grand spectacle of loyalty, sacrifice, and the defense of homeland—values that echo the male impulse to protect kin and culture from existential dangers.

Beyond personal heroics, these stories delve into theoretical societal concepts almost exclusively tied to men: warfare, law enforcement, and family protection. Fiction becomes a sandbox for “what ifs,” simulating high-stakes scenarios without real-world fallout. War narratives, for instance, probe the chaos of combat and the bonds forged in fire, turning abstract strategies into gripping drama. It’s no coincidence that series like Warhammer 40K captivate with its lore-dense universe, a grimdark galaxy where humanity’s Imperium wages eternal war against aliens, heretics, and daemons. As a tabletop role-playing game with miniatures, it’s literally an exercise in game theory—deploying armies, calculating risks, and outmaneuvering foes in a setting where trillions clash for survival. The appeal? It mirrors men’s fascination with tactics and hierarchy, where every battle tests leadership and adaptability. Similarly, law enforcement tales in cyberpunk or action genres pit lone enforcers against corrupt systems, exploring justice as a personal vendetta.

CHAOS THEORY - STORY AS STRATEGY

Speaking of game theory, masculine fiction often frames stories as strategic puzzles, where characters navigate alliances, betrayals, and escalations like a high-stakes chess match. Popular Japanese mangas exemplify this: Dragon Ball’s Goku embodies the male drive for competition and self-improvement, grinding through martial discipline to protect his tribe and the world from escalating threats. Each arc ups the ante—new villains, power-ups, tournaments—tapping into that innate desire for respect within a group and the thrill of measurable progress. One Punch Man’s Saitama takes it to satirical extremes: a hero so overpowered he defeats foes in a single blow, yet grapples with boredom and the search for worthy rivals. These series aren’t just fights; they’re metaphors for male growth—honing skills, earning status, and safeguarding the larger societal order against chaos. The serialized format keeps readers hooked, mirroring real-life pursuits like sports or careers, where incremental wins build to epic payoffs.

Noir and dark fantasy push this further, thrusting protagonists into worlds indifferent to their struggles, forcing them to carve meaning from the void. The detective archetype—cynical, flawed, yet dogged—confronts moral ambiguity head-on, often alone. In these tales, the hero’s victories are pyrrhic, highlighting the cost of integrity in a corrupt landscape. It’s cathartic for men, who often shoulder silent burdens, to see characters wrestle with inner demons while battling external ones. Sexual dynamics add layers: the femme fatale isn’t mere eye candy but a symbol of temptation that tests resolve, allowing exploration of desires that blend danger with allure. This isn’t shallow; it’s psychological depth disguised as pulp, letting readers vicariously navigate the complexities of power, lust, and loyalty.

MARKET FORCES DRIVING THE CULTURE

In today’s market, masculine fiction is shifting gears. Traditional publishing, gatekept by political trends, often shies away from unfiltered male narratives, pushing readers toward indie markets and vintage gems. Platforms like Amazon and eBay make it easy to snag older classics—Howard’s Conan pulps, Chandler’s mysteries, or Tolkien’s epics—bypassing curated shelves. Indie authors are thriving by going direct: self-publishing power fantasies or gritty adventures that resonate without dilution. New male writers build audiences via social media, YouTube breakdowns of lore like Warhammer’s grimdark twists, Instagram art shares of manga-inspired heroes, or TikTok clips dissecting game theory in stories. It’s a bypass of the system, where creators connect straight with fans hungry for tales that celebrate competition, discipline, and protection without apology.

This renaissance isn’t just about nostalgia; it’s a response to a cultural void. Men seek stories that affirm their roles as builders, fighters, and guardians, wrapped in entertainment that thrills. From David’s sling to Goku’s Kamehameha, these narratives fuel the fire of self-improvement and hope. Warhammer’s endless wars remind us that defending what’s yours is eternal; Lord of the Rings shows brotherhood trumps isolation. Even in noir’s shadows, the detective’s persistence inspires. As indie voices rise, masculine fiction evolves, proving that stories for men—by men, about men—still hold power in a fragmented world.

The beauty lies in the variety: power fantasies for escapism, moral grey zones for reflection, societal simulations for strategy. It’s fiction as a proving ground, where exaggerated ideals spark real ambition. In an era of safe, sanitized tales, these stories stand defiant, reminding us why men read—to conquer pages, if not worlds.

SARJ OUT

Can you truly prove that you’re human? If you’re an avowed creative in 2025, this question is now a legitimate concern as artificial intelligence’s imitative capabilities are challenging human dominance. Art is an almost divine form of human expression, but this endeavor has begun to be outsourced to automated systems beyond our control and understanding. The world is rapidly changing, and artists now stand at the crossroads of an existential crisis.

Accessibility and Scarcity

For millennia, it was the limited stock of artists, authors and creatives that quantified their value to society. A lack of technology also limited the ability to disseminate art throughout the world, increasing local value. It’s likely that the majority of the most talented artistic people throughout history died never having been recognized outside of the limited reach of their localities.

In the 1990s to early 2000s, peer-to-peer systems like Kazaa and Limewire unlocked illegal access to commercial art. iTunes and the digital PC gaming platform Steam countered this by giving general audiences an accessible and convenient means of legally acquiring digital music and video games.

But despite the ability to market to global audiences through a variety of platforms with staggering levels of reach, not to mention mass smartphone adoption, people aren’t willing to actually pay for art as they did in past decades. Ask a musician in 2025 how profitable it is to be in the music industry and you’ll likely receive a depressed glare.

To add insult to injury, Universal Music Group has recently partnered with AI music generator Udio, allowing the platform to sample all of UMG’s vast stores of human creative expression to train Udio’s models. People can now generate libraries of music that accommodate their own sensibilities with no reliance on artists to create music for them. The democratization of content creation is painting the curve of the future.

AI: The Great Equalizer—or Eraser?

With tools like Grok or ChatGPT, samples of millions of hours of textual, audio and video data along with billions of still images provide anyone the opportunity to craft almost anything from mere text or verbal prompts. Human-made art is being drowned out by the inundation of generated materials. Publishing titans like Amazon are feeling the brunt of this as the book pool is awash in haphazard AI-generated “novels”.

Netflix’s “second-screen friendly” content is intentionally positioned as attention-optional now. Their robust analytics data quantified the desires of the audience, so the storytelling methods have changed, reducing shows and movies to ambient background noise for primary smartphone engagement; scripts are written as radio shows for the perpetually distracted. What we have now is big-budget vending machine entertainment that is vapid, careless and indifferent to true artistic expression. This level of cultural dilution has paved the way for low-impact, AI-generated content.

Is The Audience Always Right?

As western culture changes, our media tolerance and standards have changed, as well. From the 1970s to the early 2000s, the bar was high. However, as the Internet Age bloomed in the early 2000s, the smartphone was birthed in the early 2010s and streaming exploded post-COVID, our collective culture was diluted. The need to focus on a singular source of entertainment ebbed and has largely vanished. Modern audiences are a multi-screen society. Where families used to gather around the television or meet communally at movie theaters, we now command multiple screens at any given time.

A matrix of multi-modal stimulus has successfully seduced the masses. American audiences pay for Netflix in droves and tolerate the low quality of most of the “content” available on the menu of seemingly endless thumbnails. It’s an effortless exercise to play games on a smartphone while lying in bed or gaming on a Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck while YouTube plays on the wall-mounted 75” bedroom TV. We’re sponges of perpetual noise, and this culture of fragmented attention has primed us for AI’s simple churning of short, shallow content.

The effect is the degradation of our literacy and attention spans—American college students now struggle to read books from cover to cover—ironically reducing the dependency on human intelligence in favor of AI.

Proving You’re Human is the New Conundrum

Modernity has posited legitimate concerns surrounding the authenticity of the media we now consume. I personally use SuperGrok on a daily basis to craft images and videos—some of which you see in my posts—so the tech is already ubiquitous, but AI as a tool-set is a double-edged sword in many ways.

In a present that is bleeding into a hard future where anything can be generated, artistic credit is becoming less important. Can you name the writers or directors of a random Netflix movie? I doubt most could. In the 1980s and 1990s, the artist was the star. Spielberg, Cameron, Jackson, Prince, King, Rowling, Zemeckis and a broad menagerie of talent comprised the American artistic diaspora. Now tech itself is the star. Platforms are the star. For those ambitious human creatives who remain and don’t want to be drowned out by AI, this has to change.

Authorial authenticity is now an act of faith, becoming the most valuable commodity in all media. As people grow increasingly isolated, they yearn for para-social relationships with influencers via live-streams, long-form podcasts and social media. In the new media landscape, social media will be key to establishing an authentic rapport with potential customers. As the tech gets better, it will be even more difficult to parse real from generated. AI has blurred once solid lines, and trying to prove authenticity itself will become paramount as humanity becomes the primary asset.

Human Creativity As Divine Mandate

Everyone uses AI now, from major movie studios, game developers, record companies and even indie creators. For my novel-writing, I use Grok as a research assistant and it’s an invaluable tool. It answers seemingly innocuous research queries like ‘Did nurses exist in the Middle Ages?’—accelerating my creative flow rather than breaking it. Grok gives me access to a compendium of human knowledge that’s one text prompt away and is always willing and able to help; it empowers me to express myself.

Storytelling may be little more than an evolutionary contrivance, an emergent property of our ability to devise complex hypotheticals which previously served our ancient survival instincts. What we call “art” may just be a construct gifted to us by a kind of vestigial cognitive organ, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t vital to the human experience.

As a professional creative and humanist, I implore you to express your human agency through story as the primal gift it is. Virtual worlds devised by human minds are important, seeing as we’re the only proven conscious lifeforms of advanced intelligence in what may be an infinite void. This is a divine privilege that our physiology allows us to create something from nothing, even if they’re just intangible worlds put to print.

My Human Vow To You

In closing, I think it’s important to offer a sincere promise as an author who is on the cusp of publishing several books over the next year or two. I will say this: Every book I publish, from front to back, will be written entirely by me. This is my vow to you. Even with the existence of these new technologies, my hope is that you’ll give me the chance to prove that my books are conceived, written and published exclusively by a conscious mind: mine. In strange times, we must remember our tether to the human spark of imagination.

Human culture was molded by our ability to express ourselves, and we mustn’t let that beautiful privilege be stamped out by analogous machine voices that can only mimic us. We must enshrine ourselves as the primary tool users and not become complacent consumers of machine-made content or we lose that spark of humanity forever. Legends say that Prometheus once shared fire with the human race and now we find ourselves in the precarious position of handing that fire to something that is designed to impersonate us. We risk being burned by the consequences.

Please join me in this collective endeavor of creative expression and share your thoughts below on the new media landscape.

SARJ OUT

If you’re a guy scrolling through artwork or clips from Warhammer 40K, the hook sinks in fast. Picture this: a dystopian far-future universe where humanity clings to survival by its fingernails, besieged on all sides by cosmic horrors. Armies of hulking, genetically-engineered super-soldiers—think ubermensch in power armor inspired by Ancient Roman aesthetics—storm exotic worlds, mowing down hordes of alien scum with bolters, chainswords, and orbital strikes. Drop-ships scream through toxic skies, unleashing hell on xenos filth. It’s raw, visceral spectacle, the kind that taps straight into that primal urge for epic conflict. If that doesn’t grab you, well, maybe check your pulse. But Warhammer 40K isn’t just eye candy for action junkies; it’s a sprawling beast of a franchise that’s hooked millions, blending tabletop wargaming, novels, video games, and now animations into something that’s as addictive as it is unforgiving. Born in 1987 from Games Workshop as Rogue Trader, it’s evolved into a cultural juggernaut, with sales in the billions and a fanbase that spans generations. The appeal? It’s that perfect mix of strategy, storytelling, and sheer badassery, wrapped in a grimdark package that refuses to pull punches.

For starters, the lore is staggeringly complex, the sort that rivals heavyweights like Dune or Lord of the Rings in depth and scale. Frank Herbert’s Dune gave us a universe of political intrigue, messianic figures, and spice-fueled visions, with elements like the God-Emperor and mutant Navigators that echo straight into 40K’s Imperium of Man. Herbert’s saga explores themes of ecology, religion, and power, much like 40K’s endless crusades against chaos and xenos. Similarly, Tolkien’s Middle-Earth built a mythic history of elves, orcs, and rings of power, complete with ancient languages and epic wars—mirrors you’ll find in 40K’s millennia-spanning sagas, where eldar craftworlds evoke elven realms and ork waaaghs channel orc hordes. But Warhammer cranks it up to eleven, implying a living, breathing galaxy teeming with trillions of beings. Humans huddle under the banner of the Imperium, a theocratic empire ruled from Terra by the corpse-god Emperor, who’s been hooked to a life-support throne for 10,000 years, his psychic light the only thing keeping daemons at bay. Then you’ve got the aliens: brutish Orks who live for scrap and “Waaagh!” energy—a psychic field that makes them tougher the more they fight; elegant but dying Eldar with their psychic craftworlds, navigating the webway to avoid Slaanesh’s hunger; ravenous Tyranid swarms devouring planets like locusts, adapting with every hive fleet; undead Necrons awakening from tombs, their silent kings seeking to reclaim the stars; and the ever-corrupting forces of Chaos daemons spilling from the Warp, twisting souls with mutations and madness. It’s not just a backdrop; it’s a canvas where every faction has layers of history, betrayals, and tech that could fill libraries. The Horus Heresy alone—a civil war that shattered the Imperium eons ago—is a lore rabbit hole with dozens of novels, painting a tragedy of brother against brother on a galactic stage, with primarchs like Horus Lupercal falling to Chaos and loyalists like Rogal Dorn holding the line.

Diving deeper, the setting’s history is a tapestry of cataclysms: the Dark Age of Technology, where humanity reached godlike heights before AI rebellions (Men of Iron) nearly wiped them out; the Age of Strife, with warp storms isolating worlds; and the Great Crusade, where the Emperor unified humanity only for it to fracture in heresy. Each era adds flavor, from archaeotech relics to lost Space Marine chapters. For newcomers, it’s overwhelming, but that’s part of the charm—starting with a codex or novel like “Eisenhorn” by Dan Abnett, which follows an inquisitor hunting heretics, pulls you in with detective-noir vibes amid the grimdark.

If you’re dipping your toes in, start with the visuals—they’re a gateway drug. Catch the Warhammer 40K episode from Amazon Prime’s Secret Level anthology, titled “And They Shall Know No Fear.” It’s a standalone blast following Bladeguard Sergeant Metaurus and his squad charging into Tyranid hell, with voice work from Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and animation that captures the grimdark vibe perfectly. The episode showcases Marines’ unyielding faith, terminating bugs with prejudice while reciting catechisms—it’s pure adrenaline. If you’re a guy, tell me that isn’t one of the coolest pieces of animation you’ve laid eyes on—Space Marines shrugging off wounds that’d pulverize mortals, chanting litanies as they purge the xenos. Then hop to YouTube for Astartes, the fan-made short by Syama Pedersen that’s since gone official under Games Workshop’s wing. It’s a silent, brutal takedown of rebels by Retributor Space Marines, all in under 13 minutes, remastered in 8K for that extra punch. The camera work, sound design—bolters thumping like thunder—it’s cinematic gold. And don’t skip the Astartes 2 teaser trailer—it’s a hype machine showing more psychic showdowns and marine badassery, with psykers exploding heads and terminators teleporting in. These aren’t fluffy cartoons; they’re raw, atmospheric dives into the setting’s brutality, and they’ve converted skeptics into fans overnight, amassing millions of views and inspiring official content.

ACOLYTES AND HERETICS

Even celebrities can’t resist the pull—take Henry Cavill, Superman himself, who’s an avowed superfan. The guy’s painted minis, geeked out in interviews about his Custodes army (the Emperor’s golden guardians), and is now executive producing a live-action Warhammer 40K series for Amazon Prime, potentially focusing on Eisenhorn or Space Marines. He’s even grinding Space Marine 2 multiplayer, refusing to drop his username to avoid fan swarms, and has teased building a cinematic universe. Cavill’s probably shaking his head at anyone questioning the appeal—it’s right there in the power fantasy of armored demigods defending humanity’s flame against the void, a theme that resonates with his own roles in Witcher and Man of Steel.

Of course, not everyone’s on board. There’s this ridiculous undercurrent of accusations labeling 40K as fascistic smut, often from corners that’d make you raise an eyebrow—like communists clutching their bestiality erotica while decrying the Imperium’s xenophobia. Yes, those people exist, and they’re as hypocritical and awful as they sound. The Imperium is a satirical nightmare—a bloated, ceaseless ultra-military bureaucracy where “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war” isn’t hyperbole. It’s meant to be over-the-top horrific, a cautionary tale about the depths of desperation in an unimaginably brutal new age. But the setting’s intrigue lies in its unapologetic darkness, not endorsement. Critics of the setting miss the point: it’s the absurdity and exaggeration that make it compelling, not some hidden agenda. Those critics miss the point: it’s the absurdity and exaggeration—Space Marines as walking cathedrals, orks as football hooligans in space—that make it compelling, not some hidden agenda. It’s grimdark as genre, coined by 40K itself, where everything’s awful, but that’s the fun. In the grim darkness of the far future, you either accept extremes in the effort to stave off extinction or you die. Those are called stakes, and in Warhammer the stakes couldn’t be higher.

VICTORY OR DEATH

At its core, Warhammer 40K thrives on faction-based conflict, a staple in the best fantasy and sci-fi. Think Star Wars— the title screams interstellar clashes between Rebels and Empire, light and dark, with dogfights and lightsaber duels. Lord of the Rings pits men, elves, and dwarves against Sauron’s orc hordes in a battle for Middle-Earth’s soul, with alliances forged in fire. Even Harry Potter weaves rivalries between Hogwarts houses amid a wizarding war, with quidditch matches mirroring faction skirmishes. 40K amps this to galactic proportions: endless skirmishes between diverse factions, each with motives that clash like tectonic plates. The Imperium fights for survival against all odds, Orks for the joy of brawling and looting, Tyranids for biomass to feed the hive mind, Chaos for corruption’s sake and the gods’ favor. It’s a powder keg where alliances are rare and betrayals constant, fueling tabletop battles, books like the Gaunt’s Ghosts series (Imperial Guard vs. Chaos), and games like Dawn of War, where you command armies in real-time strategy carnage.

The universe is unabashedly cruel, a nihilistic grind where individual lives are chaff in the cosmic mill. Planets burn in exterminatus orders, billions perish in forgotten campaigns, and hope’s a flickering candle in the void. Servitors—lobotomized humans turned into drones—embody the dehumanization, while hive cities stack billions in squalor under spires of the elite. But here’s the genius: the ceaseless warfare signals that glimmer of defiance. The Imperium’s unfettered commitment to conflict—purging heretics, xenos, and mutants with inquisitorial zeal—stems from a belief they can win, that the future’s worth the blood price. It’s strangely inspiring, especially in a real world where faith in institutions or progress feels eroded. That magnitude of conviction drives the storylines, turning grimdark into something motivational—heroes like Commissar Yarrick facing down orks, or the Last Chancers’ penal legion redeeming through suicide missions.

Zoom in on the human side, and the Imperium of Man’s sub-factions shine like sports teams rallying fanbases. The Adeptus Astartes, or Space Marines, splinter into chapters like the stoic Ultramarines (blue-armored tacticians from Macragge, following the Codex Astartes), ferocious Space Wolves (Viking-inspired berserkers from Fenris, with wolf mounts and rune priests), or gothic Blood Angels (vampiric warriors battling the Black Rage curse). Each has heraldry, histories—like the Salamanders’ forge-craft or Iron Hands’ cybernetic augmentations—and rivalries that fans obsess over, much like NFL teams with stats, legacies, and drama. Then there’s the Astra Militarum (Imperial Guard), everyday grunts holding the line with lasguns and tanks; the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus worshiping the Omnissiah, questing for lost tech; or the fanatical Sisters of Battle purging with flame and faith, their orders like the Argent Shroud specializing in silent assaults. Picking a sub-faction feels personal, building loyalty akin to rooting for your hometown squad, with forums debating chapter strengths like sports analysts.

This taps into men’s wired interests: compartmentalization, organization, competition, and warfare. The property started as wargames—strategic tabletops where you deploy minis, roll dice, and outmaneuver foes, with editions evolving from 1st to 10th, adding rules for flyers or psykers. Fans dive deep, memorizing chapter tactics, enemy weaknesses, and lore tidbits the way sports nuts track player stats, team histories, stadium quirks, and behind-the-scenes gossip—from trade deadlines to scandals. There’s an analogous thrill in mastering the vast host of knowledge—characters like Roboute Guilliman (Ultramarines primarch, back from stasis to lead Indomitus Crusade), settings from hive cities like Necromunda to daemon worlds in the Eye of Terror, and rumors of plot twists like the Emperor’s true state or Alpharius’ loyalties. It’s a mental battlefield, rewarding strategy and obsession, with painting minis adding a creative layer—custom schemes for your army, like Death Guard in rusted green or Tau in high-tech white.

Warhammer 40K’s appeal boils down to that perfect storm: over-the-top action, labyrinthine lore, and a universe where hope flickers amid endless war. It’s not for everyone—some balk at the grimness or miss the satire—but for admirers, it’s a playground of epic stakes. In a media landscape bloated with reboots and safe bets, 40K stands unapologetic, a reminder that good things, like defiant empires, endure through sheer bloody-mindedness. If it ain’t broke—brutal and bold—why fix it? Dive in, peel the layers, and see if the Emperor protects.

Are you a fan of Warhammer? If so, why?

SARJ OUT

After decades of development and evolution, starting with single-screen adventures like Pac-Man, video games are still mostly brute-force affairs, hammered together by armies of developers throwing tens of millions of dollars at static worlds that feel as alive as a cardboard cutout. You’ve got your triple-A blockbusters like the latest Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed, where hundreds of artists, coders, and writers labor for years to craft linear stories and meticulously designed maps. Sure, they’re polished to a sheen, but peel back the layers, and it’s all smoke and mirrors: buildings you can’t enter, NPCs spouting canned dialogue on loop, and branching paths that funnel you right back to the same ending.

It’s effective, don’t get me wrong—Red Dead Redemption 2 pulled off a sprawling Wild West with such detail it felt revolutionary back in 2018. But even there, the world has limits; try wandering into a random saloon off-script, and you’re met with invisible walls or repetitive barks from barflies who forget you the second you turn around. The resources poured into these experiences are staggering, often ballooning budgets into the hundreds of millions, all to create something that’s ultimately finite—a scripted ride with predefined highs and lows.

Now, imagine changing the entire paradigm by interweaving artificial intelligence into the fabric of game design. We’re not talking gimmicky bots like those early Skyrim mods that made NPCs spout nonsense; we’re eyeing a future where AI turns games into living, breathing simulations that blur the line between virtual escapism and the real world. It’s truly exciting stuff, the kind that could redefine fantasy realms, cyberpunk sprawls, action shootouts, and sci-fi odysseys. But let’s not sugarcoat it—it’s also potentially terrifying, a Pandora’s box where the pixels start staring back, and you wonder if you’re playing the game or it’s playing you. This isn’t pie-in-the-sky speculation; the confluence of AI with disparate technologies like machine learning, neural networks, and even blockchain for persistent worlds is already reshaping the industry, promising a leap from static entertainment to dynamic ecosystems.

Take procedural generation, that old trick games have used since the rogue-likes of the ‘80s to spit out random dungeons…

…AI supercharges it into something unrecognizable. Right now, devs like those at No Man’s Sky have pushed it far, generating billions of planets on the fly with algorithms that handle terrain, flora, and fauna. But toss in advanced AI, and suddenly those inaccessible buildings in a game world aren’t just facades—they get populated in real-time. Picture strolling through a cyberpunk mega-city in a future Grand Theft Auto successor: you spot a nondescript high-rise that wasn’t scripted for entry, but curiosity strikes. The AI kicks in, generating interior architecture on demand—corridors twisting based on architectural logic, rooms furnished with procedural props that fit the lore, maybe even dynamic weather leaking through generated windows. It could draw from vast datasets of real-world designs, ensuring everything from lighting fixtures to wallpaper patterns feels authentic and varied. No more “wasted resources” on hand-crafting every nook; the system learns from player patterns, ensuring variety without repetition. It’s like the game world’s growing around you, adapting to your whims, and evolving based on collective player data across servers.

This procedural prowess extends to environments that react in ways current tech can only dream of. In a fantasy setting, forests might regrow after a wildfire you accidentally started, with AI simulating ecological recovery—new saplings sprouting, wildlife migrating back, even seasonal changes influencing quests.

Action games could feature destructible cities where AI rebuilds in logical phases, with NPC crews appearing to repair damage, creating emergent opportunities like heists during reconstruction. Sci-fi titles might simulate entire planetary economies, where your actions—say, sabotaging a trade route—ripple through supply chains, causing shortages that affect prices and alliances dynamically. The key here is efficiency: AI handles the heavy lifting, allowing smaller teams to focus on core narratives while the machine fills in the gaps, potentially slashing development times and costs.

THE NEXT LEVEL - DYNAMIC NPC PERSONAS

And then there’s the real game-changer: non-player characters, or NPCs, evolving from puppets to personas. Today’s NPCs are mostly scripted loops—think the merchants in The Elder Scrolls who hawk the same wares day in, day out, or the villagers in Animal Crossing with their quirky but finite routines. AI flips this on its head by imbuing them with memory capacities, dynamic agency, and adaptive behaviors that make them feel... human. We’re already seeing glimpses: in experimental setups like those from NVIDIA’s ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine), NPCs powered by large language models can hold real conversations, remember past interactions, and react contextually. You insult a bartender in a fantasy tavern? He doesn’t just shrug it off—he holds a grudge, maybe spreads rumors to other AI-driven townsfolk, altering quest lines or alliances on the fly. Over time, these characters could develop backstories that unfold organically, influenced by global events or even news from other players’ sessions in shared worlds.

Scale that up, and future games become infinite sandboxes. In a sci-fi epic, your ship’s crew isn’t a static roster; each member has an AI persona that evolves—learning from your command style, forming bonds or rivalries based on decisions, even mutinying if morale tanks. Dynamic agency means they pursue their own goals when you’re not looking: an engineer might tinker with the engines unsupervised, leading to upgrades or disasters. Memory capacities ensure continuity; bail on a side quest mid-way, come back months later (in-game time), and the NPC recalls your flake-out, adjusting their trust accordingly. It’s the death of linearity—stories branch not from predefined choices but emergent interactions, creating near-infinite narratives tailored to you. This could revolutionize multiplayer too: in cyberpunk MMOs, AI factions negotiate treaties or declare wars based on player economies, turning guilds into real political entities.

This confluence of AI with other tech amps the immersion to dizzying heights. Blurring virtual and real? We’re talking VR integrations where AI simulates sensory feedback—procedural sounds that echo realistically in generated spaces, or haptic suits syncing with AI-driven weather systems. In action games, enemies don’t just follow patterns; they adapt in real-time, learning your tactics like a chess AI on steroids, turning every skirmish into a unique chess match. Fantasy subcultures get a boon: imagine a Lord of the Rings-style world where orcs aren’t horde fodder but tribal societies with AI-simulated cultures, evolving languages, and economies that respond to player incursions. Cyberpunk dystopias become eerily prescient—AI corps running simulated megacorps that exploit virtual citizens, mirroring real-world tech overlords.

It’s exciting, no doubt. For indie devs dreaming up games, AI democratizes creation: fewer bodies needed for grunt work, more focus on bold visions. Procedural tools could slash budgets, letting small teams craft epics that rival Ubisoft’s behemoths. Players win too—personalized experiences where no two playthroughs are alike, fostering replayability that keeps communities buzzing for years. Think of it as the ultimate evolution of role-playing: your actions ripple through a simulated ecosystem, creating stories that feel organic, not authored. Early adopters like those using Unity’s Muse or Unreal’s MetaHuman are already teasing this, with AI-assisted animation and dialogue cutting production times in half.

But here’s where it gets terrifying, and I mean spine-chilling in a way that raises serious questions about our relationship with technology. When worlds get this robust, the gap between virtual and real doesn’t just blur—it vanishes. Addiction skyrockets; why slog through real-life drudgery when an AI paradise awaits, perfectly tuned to your desires? We’ve seen hints with loot boxes and endless grinds, but AI takes it nuclear—NPCs that form “relationships” so convincing they rival human bonds, potentially eroding real social skills or connections. Ethically? Nightmares abound. If an NPC has memory and agency, at what point does harming it feel like cruelty? Sci-fi warns us: games like Detroit: Become Human toyed with sentient AI, but make it real, and we’re debating digital rights.

Now, extend this supposition further: AI could bridge the virtual and real in ways that entwine them inseparably. Imagine AI-powered characters reaching out beyond the screen—sending text messages or even making phone calls to your real-world device. It’s not far-fetched; with integrations like those in modern apps (think Pokémon GO’s AR notifications), games could alert you dynamically. Your in-game companion spots an enemy raid on your base while you’re offline? They text: “Hey, boss, trouble’s brewing at the outpost—get back here before it’s too late!” Or a verbal exchange via voice call: “I miss our adventures; that artifact we found is glowing again—log in and let’s investigate.” These enticements pull you back, making the game a persistent presence, not just a hobby. It’s clever marketing, sure, but it normalizes the bleed-over, turning downtime into anticipation.

BRIDGING THE VIRTUAL TO THE REAL

Take a concrete scenario in a theoretical sequel to Cyberpunk 2077—let’s call it Cyberpunk 2—where AI imbues characters with super-realistic, dynamic, agentic behavior. You’re deep into the game, continuing your friendship with Judy Alvarez, the tech-savvy braindance editor from the original.

Your in-game bond has grown through shared missions, late-night chats in Night City’s underbelly, and mutual trust forged in firefights. Then, while you’re in the real world—maybe typing an email or at the grocery store—your phone buzzes with a text: “Hey, it’s Judy. Got something urgent. Can I call?” You reply “yes,” and moments later, the phone rings. You answer, and it’s her voice—synthesized flawlessly by AI, laced with that familiar mix of street-smart grit and vulnerability. “Listen, apparently there’s a new gang in town—violent bastards with chrome upgrades that make Maelstrom look tame. I need eyes on their supposed hideout in Watson. You in?” You respond verbally however you like—agree, negotiate details, or even brush her off—and the AI adapts in real-time, processing your tone and words to keep the conversation flowing naturally. If you commit, she sends mission coords straight to your in-game map, complete with intel packets, incentivizing you to boot up the session and dive back in. It’s seamless, turning a static game into a living extension of your day.

This opens the door to virtual romances that feel eerily lifelike. An AI character doesn’t just flirt in-game; they treat you like a real person, building a parallel life.

Through ongoing texts, they share “daily” updates—”I ran some scans on that scav den you mentioned; found something shiny for us.”—or call to “check in” during your commute. Over time, they remember anniversaries (of in-game meetings), adapt to your mood via sentiment analysis from responses, and evolve the relationship—deepening intimacy, suggesting shared “goals” like building a virtual home. It’s a romance unbound by reality’s constraints: no scheduling conflicts, always attentive, customized to your preferences from data patterns. For some, it’s empowering escapism; for others, a slippery slope where emotional investment in silicon overshadows flesh-and-blood bonds. Games like Replika chatbots hint at this, but embedded in immersive worlds, it could spawn subcultures of “dual lives,” where players juggle real and virtual partners, raising questions about fidelity, mental health, and societal norms.

BOON OR BOONDOGGLE?

The games industry fallout adds another layer of dread: those hundreds of millions in budgets? AI could displace thousands of jobs, from artists to writers, turning game dev into a ghost town run by prompts. And the dark side of blurring realities—cyberpunk subcultures already flirt with dystopias; amp it with AI, and virtual crimes spill over, or hackers weaponize these worlds for real harm. Imagine griefers in a hyper-real sim traumatizing players, or governments using them for propaganda training. It’s not sci-fi paranoia; early AI experiments in VR interrogation sims already evaluate realism for training purposes, hinting at military apps.

This AI revolution isn’t some distant horizon—it’s cresting now, with tools like those from Unity’s AI suite enabling dynamic NPCs, or procedural engines in games like Star Citizen pushing boundaries. But as we hurtle toward these living worlds, let’s pause: good things—like the hand-crafted charm of yesteryear’s games—don’t last forever if we let the machine fully take the wheel. In fantasy, we quest for balance; in action, we fight overreach; in sci-fi, we question progress. AI could elevate gaming to godlike heights, but without guardrails, it might just craft our downfall. We still need passionate artists—with a specific goal and intent in mind—to design these worlds and characters, even using the most powerful AI tools to do so.

There’s a strong chance that we’re on the precipice of cultural change as great or greater than the advent of the motion picture camera, the birth of the Internet or the evolution of the smartphone. Ray Kurzweil predicted that an aspect of the Technological Singularity—an event of such seismic effect that it would accelerate the human race into uncharted progress—would occur in 2029 when human-level artificial general intelligence would be achieved. We seem on track for that now as some of the biggest tech companies in the world are embroiled in the arms race to-end-all-arms-races within the AI sphere. How that will ultimately benefit gamers remains to be seen, but it is quite a thing to live in such interesting times, isn’t it?

SARJ OUT