ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 178.

While the show was taking a break, Drew started putting together some essays on the growing list of recent recent surprise hits—games that, for whatever reason, have been doing vastly better than their developers or publishers had expected. 2024 does, so far, seem to have a sort of serial monogamy to it, with the Sauron’s Eye of game-liker attention focusing intensely on one thing before moving on to the next, abruptly and fickly, with equally frightening fervor.

So at the risk of being eternally behind the viral content curve (as though we’ve ever feared that around here), we’re going to take a little time to think through the breakout successes of this year, starting with Palworld. We’ll also be talking about Last Epoch and Helldivers II (which got so popular that they ceased to function) in future installments.

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• I mention the episode of Experience Points about Palworld, in the context of positing a possible public domain Pikachu.

• Jack Saint’s video brought the fan design issue to my attention, and also got me thinking about which pal designs work better than which other ones. (Those would be the more original, less chimeric pals).

• Here’s that much-discussed Hbomberguy video about YouTube plagiarism.

• And here’s OpenAI telling the UK’s Parliament that they would have no business model if they had to respect anyone else’s intellectual property rights.

• Astra Taylor pointed out that full automation is still an aspiration and a threat, a pipe dream and a nightmare, rather than a reality, when she coined the terms “fauxtomation.” I learned about this concept from Brian Merchant’s thoroughly excellent Neo-Luddite book about the original Luddites, and about what we can learn from them, Blood in the Machine.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Pal of My Lonesome Hours” by Abe Lyman and Walter Hirsch, performed by Abe Lyman and His California Orchestra.

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