A DiaWoF rethink based on recent censorship and AI news (Patreon)

This summer will be dedicated to Dating in a World on Fire development, but as of late there has been news of censorship issues that will likely affect the game and I want to address that first.

The State of Game Censorship

First, I want to direct your attention to a video from Sex Positive Gaming: How Steam and Patreon are Killing Midnight Sin’s Creative Soul .

Too long; didn't watch summary: A game called Midnight Sin that was written as a coming of age game set in "college" was forced to become a coming of age game set in a hotel because Steam has stopped approving "college" settings in AVNs.

My first problem: Real life censorship of adult games. Namely games set in College are reportedly being banned by Steam.  I haven't been advised as to why, maybe too many characters look too young? I don't know, but it interferes with the initial concept of Dating in a World on Fire.

Stat: The word "college" pops up 35 times in Dating in a World on Fire. It's how the player character meets Relay. Despite this, there are only two scenes actually set in college so far, the first one and the last one.

My idea to change it? Censorship is coming down hard on "college" games, but Dating in a World on Fire is set in the future.

In the present day, I believe that much of western society has been devaluing education lately, especially with the rise of AI technology, which is constantly being sold as making education less important. Schools, including Colleges are being defunded by conservative governments and corporate greed, so there is a good chance traditional colleges will cease to exist in the near future. 

But, today we are already seeing a backlash. I think devaluing education is so destructive to a society that in the near future we will see a growing backlash against AI followed by a growing emphasis on returning to improving public education for humans.

To save money and make it cheaper, future classes will be in the form watching recorded lectures, but live classes will continue to be popular for their "social" benefits.

So, I'm re-imagining why the PC and Relay are going to a class? "Colleges" could be replaced by free or inexpensive "adult education" courses officially designed to educate, but unofficially become a place to meet people and socialize in this future society.

The game begins with a "college" class on AI, which I'm rewriting to be a "training" class. My goal is remove the word "college" from the game completely and re-invent "adult education" and "career training" in the future.

The Present Day shifting of AI tech

Second problem: My late 21st century game sounds too much like an early 21st century game. Especially with all the AI references, which is another core issue I need to change to keep it "futuristic".

The word "AI" appears 62 times in the game. It is a modern marketing term that has taken off in the last few years, but is already quickly declining in popularity.

"AI" has always lost money. The recent changes to "charge by the token" is something that AI companies were always going to do, and as I predicted, is requiring users to face the true cost of the technology after years of being "free", thus declining the popularity of AI even further.

The anti-AI backlash is coming a lot faster than I anticipated, already making Dating in a World on Fire feel dated after only two years since I started making it. I'm thinking that the term "AI" itself may disappear, it's inaccurate anyways, but replaced with what? 

Luckily, I studied this stuff in my own college education.

From a technical standpoint, what LLMs or Generative AI do is solve a big problem in computer programming called "The Natural Language Problem" which originated in the 1950's during the cold war, when they attempted to use their primitive giant computers of the day to translate Russian intercepts. They quickly learned that dictionary look-ups of every Russian word to English didn't work.  This difficulty with language became "The Natural Language Problem" and various attempts to solve it have proven unsuccessful.

Then came LLMs. LLMs handle natural language much better, and using them to translate is getting closer to perfect. That's what today's AI revolution is really all about from a computer science perspective: Getting computers to understand human language well enough to handle input and output.

The big mistake was assuming that solving this problem would lead to more intelligent computing and creating AGI or artificial general intelligence.

The hard wall preventing AI from becoming AGI, or hyperintelligence, or whatever marketing term they are using, is driven by an early theory called the Church-Turing Thesis. The simple explanation of the thesis is that there are many problems that are simply uncomputable, and I'm pretty sure AGI is one of them. That's why I've never bought into the horror stories of AGI taking over the world. It's now an established fact that LLMs will never become AGI.

Also uncomputable are most of the emotional conversational questions people ask chatbots. LLMs are incapable of understanding anything about relationships, so all that LLMs can do is repeat some answer found in it's training, probably written by some Reddit troll, or spit out the wrong answer using auto-complete technology based on what's most popular in its training data.

For the game's sake, I need to replace "AI" with something else. My first thought was "NLT" (natural language transformers, a phrase I just made up), when referring to the technology. Accurate, but not that easy to understand.

My current thought is using "SMART", being an acronym for something I haven't figured out yet, and "SMART assistant" instead of AI assistant when referring to Relay's Brutus. It's more memorable than "NLT" and readers will figure it out easier.

I already coined another fictional term for the game QNNT (Quantum Neural Net Transformers) as a future technology that I imagine is closer to AGI. This is my "speculative tech" in this "speculative sci-fi" story -- a big plot point in the game so I'm keeping it.

Somewhere near the beginning of the game I'll explain that "SMART systems" are what used to be called "AI" before it lost trillions of dollars and turned people into addicted zombies.

The need to keep focused on the core theme

With all of these ideas for changes to the game, I also need to remember the "theme" of the game: I stated the theme in the first scene with Samantha: "You can't let the broken world stop you from pursuing love, if that's your goal. Or finding opportunities to improve the world, if you can."

As the game stands now, the "A" plot -- the "Relay Date" scenes, are about pursuing love despite living in a broken world. The "B" plot chapter 2 scenes involving your friends and Relay's friends are about finding opportunities to improve the world -- like finding new resources or helping others. Notice the lack of "college" or "AI" in this theme statement, meaning changes I need to make should not affect the story much at all.

tl;dr: I'm rewriting the game making changes to keep the game fresh and away from future censorship problems, but most of the current game will likely not change significantly... (I hope!)