Where's the Voice, Copilot?

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon*, I'm not a fan of "assistance" by AI when writing.

There's a big difference in providing flags for grammatical errors and AI frequently "helping" by suggesting words and/or complete sentences to assist me when writing. Oh, I can see where it'd be a useful tool to have around if you're trying to write an email for work and you're stuck on how to present it properly, but most of the time I can muddle through without much of an issue. After all, there's a certain value to experience at work. (I think.)

But when you're writing a blog post or fiction, where you want a specific voice, having Copilot or another pseudo AI pop up word or sentence structure suggestions isn't very helpful at all.

The AI portion begins around the 3:33 mark,

which I'm linking to right here.

Believe it or not, this post wasn't caused by Emma's gripe about AI on The Late Show a few days ago, but this article on The Register about roughly half of the people laid off due to AI are predicted to be rehired at a lower payscale. That didn't exactly surprise me, given the shoddy quality of work I've seen out of people who think using AI to do their job and not bothering to check the results has risen quite sharply over the last year. Remember the line "trust but verify" that I mentioned in the post on Wednesday? Yeah, kind of like that.

But her complaint as an author pretty much hits home for me. If you don't know what you're doing and you're trying to write something (such as a support document) for your job, then fine. Let Open AI have a crack at it. But if you're trying to write fiction and you just rely upon Copilot or another Open AI to do your work, people WILL notice. You (yes, you) have a specific authorial voice, and even if you're writhing as Anonymous, people will know it's you who wrote the piece because of that voice. But if you let AI create the word salad, you'll discover that your authorial voice vanishes. And people won't like it.

So my advice is to do the hard work of learning your voice and keep writing to learn how to use it. Your voice is your own; don't abdicate your uniqueness to some Generative AI.

Oh, and after writing this but before I published it, this little ditty dropped from Jared Henderson:

Hucksters and swindlers using AI to try to make a quick buck by flooding Amazon with "ebooks" close enough to the original human-written work to fool customers? Who'd a thunk it? Maybe if some swindlers start using AI to create ebooks "exposing" some of these leading AI CEOs, something will get done. There are enough tech CEOs with fragile egos that maybe they'll get something done about this slop. Or, unfortunately, they'll probably just create their own slop to counter the original.

*The late Andy Rooney comes to mind. I can only imagine what his commentary about the rise of Generative AI would be like. I think that Wilhelm would have met his match, never mind me.

How About Enforcing the ToS?

Under the header of "that was unexpected", I found yet another Brandon Sanderson video (released yesterday) in my YouTube feed. This one, however, was more related to gaming.

If you want to skip the first half of the video/podcast where Brandon and Dan Wells discuss Magic: the Gathering (I don't play M:tG, so I can't comment here) and a sandwich food heist in Norway, the multiplayer video game portion begins here, at the 11:40 mark.

The TL;DR is that since there are adults/parents who no longer have the reaction skills, but they do have disposable income, is to provide a subscription service to pay for moderators to come in and monitor the chat/voice discussions to remove obnoxious behavior from the game or the lobbies.

When I first heard the word "pay" I thought "Oh crap, he's going to ask for whale-ish items in a cash shop," but then when Brandon fully described his idea I then thought "Oh, you mean like what we're paying Blizzard to (theoretically) do in World of Warcraft?"

I do have to wonder just how much it would cost to actually have real enforcement of Terms of Service of multiplayer games such as Marvel Rivals or League of Legends, not just lip service. Obviously too much, if you see all of the bad behavior in multiplayer games and MMOs that I've seen over the years, because I'm at the point where bad behavior is pretty much expected unless proven otherwise.*

Among other suggestions that Brandon and Dan floated were a "little brother/little sister" mode for multiplayer games (beyond the games that already have it) so that the little kids could play along too. I personally had no issues grouping up with either the mini-Reds or even my Questing Buddy's kids to just goof around, but if you're playing a game such as a Zelda title** and the wee set needs help, having that sort of mode would be a godsend to both the kid and the parent/older sibling. 

Or maybe the parent needs help on Elden Ring, having their teenaged kid zone in and help them out would be a decent solution rather than trying to use third party addons (or simply giving the controller to the teen) to bypass the game.

Anyway, I expected explicit "god mode" pay to win type of suggestions, but got something that should have been taken care of by a game's ToS. Anyway, it was interesting enough of a suggestion that I decided to post about it.

*Yes, I've been told via whispers in the past that they expected me to be an asshole of some sort when I joined a group event but the people whispering me were pleasantly surprised to be found wrong. And no, I don't understand why people would look at my toons or how I was acting and think that I was going to ruin their fun. 

**I almost said Elden Ring or Mass Effect, but I immediately shut that one down. Why on earth would you let a 5 year old play Elden Ring? Or the cutscenes in Mass Effect or Baldur's Gate 3?

How About a Lecture for a Friday?

I realize that I don't point out videos the way some other bloggers do --gaming blogs or not-- but it's not that I don't watch YouTube videos. Yes, I watch my share of music and sports and gamer videos, but I delve into whatever piques my interest. You know, topics such as solar power, blacksmithing, cooking, and other stuff.* Right now, I've been going down the rabbit hole of pellet smoker grills**, but something I also have been keeping an eye on is written SF&F, because I'm a nerd who grew up reading Tolkien, Eddings, Moorcock, Asimov, James Blish, and Fred Saberhagen.

So when a video from Brandon Sanderson's YouTube channel popped up in my feed, I was curious:

I'd never actually heard Brandon Sanderson speak until now***, but yes, he is planning on recording his entire series of lectures in 2025 for the Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy class he teaches at BYU. Apparently he's done this before, but since the first entry in the series is only 14 days old or so, I'm catching this right at the beginning. 

I found his lecture to be engaging and honestly a lot of fun, which bodes well for the rest of the lectures.

Me, I just want to know how he cranks out these mammoth novels as if it were effortless. I know it's not that easy --I do write, after all-- but I also know he's been doing this for quite a while now and so he's got a good cadence down. One thing he did mention in that first lecture about outliners versus discoverers**** was that he mentioned that discoverers have issues with over-editing, where you are constantly going back and editing what you've written. And, dammit, he has me pegged right there. I am a discoverer, and I have issues constantly going back and tweaking my written work before I've actually finished the damn thing.

(If you ever wondered if there's more fiction in the pipeline, yes, there is. And now you know my Achilles' Heel.)

Maybe I ought to create a Friday lecture post as a recurring item, pointing to an online lecture that I found interesting. I can't really take "Friday Fun Day", since that's the informal title Tim Cain uses for his Friday YouTube posts. So, watch this space to see if I do anything with it, and if you write or are interested in the craft of writing, go watch the video. It is definitely worth the hour's lecture.

*No, not so much on makeup (sorry), but I do watch videos about sewing and cosplay and historical/fantastical clothing. Hey, it's engineering with cloth and thread!

**I'm sure my Questing Buddy can give you an earful about how I've been pestering one of our friend group about his Pit Boss smoker since I've been thinking about having a proper smoker to use on the deck once I'm finished rebuilding it. Right now I have plenty of time to narrow models down, since it's not even late Winter yet and there's snow covering the deck at the moment.

***John Scalzi is from Ohio, and he periodically makes visits to our local independent bookstore for readings and signings, so I have heard him before. I've also heard Kim Harrison at the same bookstore quite by accident when I didn't know she was doing a signing; her Hallows books are set in a Fantastical version of Cincinnati. Yes, before you ask, she does have quite the following here locally, even though she's not a local herself. She's from Michigan, which amuses me to no end. Why, you may ask? Because of the rivalry between The Ohio State University and the University of Michigan.

I've also attended signings by Anne McCaffrey, Terry Brooks, and Robert Jordan, among others.

****In terms of writing style: do you have an outline you follow or you just wing it?

Just How Do They Do It

There are days when I wonder just how some authors, such as Brandon Sanderson, can crank out novel after novel at such a high rate. 

Sure, there are people for whom this is their job, and they get up and do it on an 8 AM - 5 PM basis. I get that. But for me, my writing goes in fits and starts, highly dependent upon whether the bug actually bites me and I can write in an inspired state. When I try to force myself to write, what tends to come out sounds like reports from work.

That might be because report and documentation writing is the least favorite part of my job. 

The beauty of working from home is that I can
be flipping off Lumbergh while he's telling me this.
From makeameme.org.

It's not that I don't realize that the work is important --because it is-- it's just that writing that stuff is bland and uninteresting. It's... well, it's a job, and being forced to write is not nearly as fun as wanting to write something.

So when I see people like Brandon or Stephen King do the 8 hours of "work" of writing per day, somewhere deep inside my brain I hear screaming, as if my creative impulse was bound up and tossed over the walls of the Chateau d'If.

***

I will freely admit that I do have issues with description. There are days when I sit there and see something in my head and think "this would be so much easier if I had the capability to actually draw or paint what I see rather than describe it," but my artistic ability is worse than my writing.

"What does it look like?" I tell myself.

"Nice," I reply.

"Nice... That fucking helps a lot..."

I'm reminded of how the Apollo astronauts were trained to observe and describe objects on the lunar surface. They all had to learn how to describe landscapes the same way that they described activity in the spacecraft they flew, and it took a large amount of unlearning to then begin to build up their vocabulary and phrasing properly. 

While I'm not on the caliber of being an Apollo astronaut, surely I can figure out how to write the turns of phrase needed to describe something properly. 

Ha.

From colorado.edu.

I wish it were that easy. 

My inner critic loves to tell me that I'm no good and that I should give up "playing at writing", but I've found that my addiction to putting words on the (virtual) page isn't so easily vanquished. I don't believe that my speed at writing fiction will ever improve, but hopefully I can actually complete a story without it turning into drudgery.

Sometimes, It Doesn't Mean Anything

In the years that I've been blogging here, I've watched this medium's popularity peak and decline.

To be fair, in 2009 blogging had likely already peaked, but in MMO space we were still riding the high point of the MMO wave with WoW's Wrath of the Lich King and the impending release of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Parallel Context was just one of many MMO (and WoW specifically) oriented blogs out there; if you went to any of the big MMO sites back then, it certainly seemed like there were a lot of people starting up or maintaining blogs. I guess it feels kind of weird when I sit back in 2024 and realize that PC is a survivor.

Blogging is, at it's heart, a solitary kind of experience. When you write, you don't get much in the way of feedback until you actually post.* After a while, that can get kind of old. Here we are, blogging about a genre that is at its heart a social endeavor, and yet we operate in solitude while writing.

It takes a certain type of person to keep blogging, year in and year out.

From wpbeginner.com. Yes, there's a site for
purchasing tutorials on how to blog using Wordpress.
Not sure how I feel about that one, given the
complaints I read about WP from my friends.

This isn't a lead-in to me saying how wonderful I am at blogging, because most days I'm just happy if I can get something off my chest and posted here. And really, if people actually knew how to write something that was guaranteed to go viral, they would go and do just that. Human psychology being what it is, you can't operate with certainty about anything. You can establish trends and have a really good feel on tendencies, but prediction is an inexact science.

And people's tastes can be fickle and change on a dime. (Just ask Billy Squier and his sudden plummet from popularity after Rock Me Tonite.**)

For me, the head scratcher is that while I've been doing Meme Monday for close to 1.5 years now, the Meme Monday about Playing a Female Toon is the one that by far got the most eyeballs to Parallel Context.

The memes themselves were kind of tame, because I didn't want to retread the same old female armor memes or the sexy fun times memes that are all over the place on social media, but for some reason that post got people to the blog. 

Go figure.

***

I will admit that blogging in the age of streaming and Tik-Tok does feel kind of weird. I thought of this while I've been reading Pride and Prejudice, because I can see the forms that modern novels take in the story, but the novel is most definitely a product of a bygone era. But if an author writes what is important to them, so do bloggers today. 

That's not always the case, given the metric ton of "how to write for profit" books/websites/etc. that are out there, but when you get to the heart of it all we do tend to write what we like and what we want to say. 

And what do I want to say? I'm not sure, really. I just write about things that pop into my head. Are they interesting? To me, yes. 

For example, reading Jane Austen has given me a bit of a window into what she found interesting over 200 years ago, and in turn I wondered what someone would think of my own output if they were to read this blog in 2224. How much could that reader glean from my posts?

It's a question that I can't really answer, because I think I'm too close to the blog to be able to stand back and take a more critical approach without coloring my opinions. But I do wonder what authors thought their work might appear to people in the future, or whether they were more concerned with simply providing a living for themselves and their family to worry much about what future generations thought.

I certainly hope that they won't think that the high point of my output is a Meme Monday on playing a video game as a Female avatar.

*Unless you bring other people into the writing process, or have multiple bloggers for one blog, such as what PC originally had. 

**Whether or not the video played a part in Billy's fall from grace is debatable, but what isn't is that Rock Me Tonite was Billy's last charting single in the US, and he suddenly vanished from the pop charts after that single.

Getting Back on That Horse

"[Now, there are two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse.] One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and, at leisure, figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial."

--Wilbur Wright, 1901.  From The Wright Brothers, by David McCollough, pp 67-68.

I've been thinking about what works and what doesn't work in a story lately.

(Yeah, it's gonna be one of those posts, so buckle yourself in and hold on tight.)

Normally, I'd start writing something about this, get partway through, and then shelve the post for an indeterminate amount of time. I sometimes come back to them --like this past Meme Monday-- but a lot of times they just sit there in the Draft portion of the blog, never to see the light of day again.

This is a screenshot of some of the posts still in draft form from early 2023. Some of them are musings, some are fiction with placeholder titles, and oh look, there's an RPG From the Past still in there.*

However, I've more of a mind to plow though this, since I've been in more of a contemplative mood lately.

My first contemplation, that work sucks and takes up too much of my time, is hardly a new revelation. Those people who absolutely love their job genuinely worry me, because it feels that they've got blinders on and fail to notice the reality and drama of day-to-day life working with people whose goals are different than yours.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. It's about stories and what makes them tick.

Kaylriene had a post yesterday about what worked and didn't in the story/lore for Retail WoW's Dragonflight expansion, and that got me to thinking that what ails Retail WoW isn't something that could be fixed by returning Warcraft to its "more manly" roots or any other politically charged bullshit, but rather by going out and actually stepping away from Warcraft itself.

No, I'm not talking about any bullshit such as when people who want to break into upper management go to get their MBA**, but actually going out and working on their craft the only way you truly can to improve yourself: by expanding your horizons.

As I mentioned in my comment on Kaylriene's post, my high school guidance counselor back in the 80s used to constantly tell me to go and read more. "It'll help you get into college," he added, and whenever we met*** he'd check in to see what I was reading and how much I was reading.

Did he care about the quality of the books? No, not really. I mean, he knew me well enough that I wasn't going to read middle or elementary grade material****, but he wanted me to get out and simply read. And before you ask, I could tell he had absolutely no clue as to Science Fiction and Fantasy novels that comprised the bulk of my reading habits, but that wasn't the issue for him. 

Now, my senior English teacher in high school --it would now be considered AP English, a combination of English Literature and English Composition-- did care about the quality of my reading, because it reflected in the quality of my writing. He and my other English teachers insisted I keep writing, because the more I wrote the better I wrote. This was reinforced by, of all people, one of my Physics professors. 

No, really.

He was my professor for Advanced Lab I and II, which were Junior and Senior level Physics lab courses. Unlike a lot of the Engineering labs that my friends had which were cookbook in nature, my Advanced Lab's experiments were along the lines of the professor saying "Here's some journal articles and literature, go and reproduce the Photoelectric Effect with the lab material in Room 101B."

Given that I had to write an average of 15-20 pages per lab report, my professor would push me to write better. "The only way you'll get better at it is to do it more often," he told me. I certainly didn't see how my writing improved over the course of those two semesters, but he did and told me as much.

Why bring all this up? Because from what I've seen, Blizzard's story team needs to break out of their rut and do the two things that will truly improve their writing.

***

It's far too easy to claim that Blizzard's story team as a whole was better back in the days when gaming was far more a masculine endeavor or some other politically charged bullshit*****, but my opinion is that they were better because they abided by the 'less is more' dictum. But the longer they worked on their games, the more internally focused they became and the more the writing became bloated.

Their writers need to write more, and not simply Warcraft. Or Diablo. Or whatever.

Stop abiding by the Rule of Cool.

Stop trying to shoehorn in a backstory that's simply not there.

Stop writing cutscenes that have nothing to do with the player. 

Stop writing novels and other media that end up being a requirement to understand what's going on in a game. If you can't follow along in a game without leaving the game, there's a problem with the game.

Stop trying to write cutscenes and story text with gigantic info dumps and passing it off as being normal. As one of my English teachers once told me, people don't talk like that. If they're giving a lecture, sure, but if they're just talking to people? Come on...

Info dump aside, they're freaking DRAGONS.
Why are they in, well, our form? I think we could
cut Blizz some slack if they were in their 'normal'
form for these conversations.
Pic from GameRant of a Dragonflight cutscene.

But more than anything else, they need to read more than just Blizzard material. Or other material written for video games. Break out of your rut and try different genres.

***

I can actually speak to that last one from experience.

Last April, when I posted about my experience reading a Romantic Fantasy novel written by a friend of mine, I mentioned that I'd not read very many Romance novels. I think Sharon Shinn's novels count, and I've read Jennifer Crusie as well, but beyond that, not very much. I mean, the novels I have read have had sex and romance in them --to varying degrees of authenticity-- but not nearly enough to qualify for the Romance genre. 

But I know enough to know that I need to read more to be able to write better dialogue and human interaction, and while I'm comfortable in my own skin for the most part, I have perused the Romance section of our local bookstore and... Yeah, I'm kind of lost. At least with the Literature section I know what I'm getting into with the mishmash of classics with purely literary stuff with popular novels, and I've a working knowledge of the Mystery section as well given that I do read Mysteries from time to time. But Romance?

Sorry, couldn't resist. This was all over
social media last Fall.

Well, I figured that if I was going to do this right, I ought to go back to the original Romance novelist.

Jane Austen.

My mom, the one who gets flustered by anything in a novel beyond a PG rating#, requested a Regency Romance novel for Christmas, so when I bought the novel I kind of slid on over and took a look at what Jane Austen novels were available.

From the Amazon page for the Oxford World Classics
edition of Pride and Prejudice. No pressure. None at all.

I knew going in that while Jane Austen is highly regarded, she's very much a creature of her time. To be blunt, writing has evolved mightily over the couple of centuries since Pride and Prejudice came out, so using Jane to improve my writing is kind of like taking editing lessons from Herman Melville. (Or Tom Clancy, for that matter.)

So I bit the bullet and did this:

And oh look, an excuse to pick up an issue
of BBC History Revealed. Yes, I am SUCH a nerd;
I swear Dan Snow's History Hit and PBS'
NOVA and Secrets of the Dead
were made for people like me.

***

Now, tying this back to Blizzard's writing team, if I can go out and break out of my comfort zone so I can write better, surely they can as well. 

This isn't something that can't be fixed. It really can be fixed, but you can't simply take a seminar and suddenly everything is better, despite what advertisements for LinkedIn Learning or Brilliant would have you believe. You have to put in the time to read more diverse works and write more.

But for all of those who are celebrating that Chris Metzen is back at Blizzard, I have to ask: did he learn the writing and plotting lessons that are necessary for the ship to be righted at Blizzard? Will he allow the Blizzard writing team to do the necessary work to improve their craft? Or did he merely go to CEO School just to make investors happy?##

*I ought to do something about Pendragon, since Chaosium has the new edition coming out soon and they already released the Starter Set for Pendragon last Gen Con.

**The people involved are long retired, so I can actually tell this story. This happened upwards of a decade ago. The company I contracted for --and was outsourced from, BTW-- had an all-hands meeting at 8 AM for all of us contractors. Those of us who worked near their company headquarters came into the hall, sat down, and we met with one of the Executive VPs for the company, who proceeded to give us a pep talk about how well we were doing and how much she enjoyed working with us, her "favorite account". I may have made a few whispered snarks to people around me about that, given that she was my boss two levels up when we were outsourced, and she managed to jump ship from being outsourced herself to being safe on the "mother company". But when talk turned to the new CEO, who returned to his old role to help the company regain financial footing, she described him as being a totally new person. "He'd gone to CEO School and now he knows how to lead this company like a real CEO," she enthused. Given that their "new" CEO's first two orders of business were an announcement of impending layoffs and a gigantic compensation package, I thought the entire thing was bullshit. 

***Which was about 3-4 times a year. I don't know how it worked for you, but for me he'd send an invitation to the high school's main office, and they would track me down as to what class I was in and forward the request along. As long as I didn't have a test that day, I would then inform the teacher and show them the scheduling slip and then head on out to meet with the guidance counselor. Hey, I got out of class for upwards of half an hour, so I was fine with this.

****Remember, this was before the Young Adult genre explosion of novels, so novels that today would be classified as YA --such as the five books of David Eddings' Belgariad-- fell under the fictional genre or in the generically "Adult" section. Yeah, there really wasn't even a YA SF&F subgenre, either. 

Also it needs to be said that I was exiting high school when the original Watchmen comics and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight were coming out, so if you want a delineation of when comics suddenly swerved into being "serious" and "adult", I was a teen during that time. It's all bullshit, since comics had been covering adult themes since forever, but it was in the mid-80s when some critics finally "discovered" what comics had been doing all along.

*****I'm starting to throw around "bullshit" in this post like Holden Caufield tossed around "phony" in The Catcher in the Rye. Sheesh.

#I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but one time my mom was visiting her mom --my grandmother-- and noted a novel on the table. Inquiring as to how good it is, Grandma quipped that it was good but "Oh, you wouldn't like it. It's got sex in it." And this was when Grandma was in her upper 80s. I still sometimes wonder how on earth my parents had my brother and myself, given how icky my mom is about sex, especially when compared to her own parents.

##See ** for the CEO School comment.