u/entropyfails

We've been making Gido Gido: Kaiju Battle Party for the past few years with our team of artists and game devs in Taiwan. It's a 4v4 game with matchmaking that's best when played with a group of friends. So it definitely sits pretty squarely in what's called "friendslop" now.

We are having some internal discussions of if maybe we should push the term or not so I was curious as to how people feel about "friendslop" as something you would say in marketing as opposed to something people say about you in conversation.

My instinct is that marketing is partly about going with what the terms that are out there and what's in the zeitgeist so it maybe is an angle we should push. The potential downsides is "slop" kind of brings with it low quality or AI vibes (neither of which apply to us, it's high effort and 100% human created).

If anyone here has thoughts or examples to share, I'd love for a few more minds on it. Thanks in advance for any thoughts you can provide!

I have lots of favorites of him being so insightful and blowing past the science of the day and current science that I'll share. Please share any of your favorites!

Evolution:

For someone that said "I don't know if there is such a thing as evolution..." he had a really meaningful contribution that I don't think we've even started to integrate into scientific theory yet. He said "Nature does not use anything as a model. It is only interested in perfecting the species." I don't think that the profound nature of this statement is taken seriously enough. He's saying that Nature is searching for something that can survive no matter what. Aka evolution is a search function with a goal of the the "The Probability of species existing in the next year is 100% for all future years". That means that evolution looks for something that can survive in any climate, is not limited to a single world, can understand future threats and mitigate extinction. Humans are really close, maybe something like 99%. Sadly the thing that got us that survival factor is the thing that's keeping us from getting to 100%. I mean it's mostly us and Tardigrades that are at that level. It's a profound concept with predictive powers.

AI:

In 1981, he called out the dangers of AI "The day you introduce thinking into computers, their usefulness will be completely gone" and "They, the computers, have become so sophisticated now that they are thinking and self-correcting themselves. We may, someday, just have to plug them in and then follow their advice. " This is something we are seeing play out now. We are not truly there in the LLM era but it's getting closer and closer. He also was way ahead in saying that human thought isn't anything special and is able to be replicated by a mechanical computer. And his maxim that self is a "demand for continuity" also shows perhaps some limits to current LLM AI approaches and thus has predictive power.

I'd love to know some other favorites that you may have thought of over the years! Please share!