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‘Venba’ Takes Me Back to My Roots Through Food and Family

‘Venba’ Takes Me Back to My Roots Through Food and Family

Before I could muster up the courage to use the idli maker my mom gave me after I moved out, here I was making idli in a narrative cooking video game. Though Venba’s idli maker differs from ours, the fluffy steamed rice cakes at the end of the level were a familiar sight.

Venba centers on the main character of the same name. The story begins with her and her husband Paavalan as new Canadian immigrants in the 1980s, raising their first-generation son, Kavin. Venba is about adjusting to the new while trying not to chip away at traditions and ties to a country that was once home. Venba and Paavalan work to make ends meet in a place that devalues their history yet dangles a bright future ahead of them, all while trying to balance traditional and new values in their son.

As the game’s narrative progresses, I reminisced about my life as an immigrant from India, while the intermittent cooking puzzles had me reflect on fond memories from when I was younger.

I was 5 years old when my family hopped on a train to Chennai right before migrating to the United States. I faintly remember the beach overlooking the ocean and amusement park rides, but seeing the banana leaves decorated with tiny dishes—ranging from dal to different types of rice—every day was unforgettable. It’s one of my last moments before moving across seas that I cling to, and seeing that Venba is from Chennai only made me more engrossed in her immigrant story.

Besides Venba’s love of gold bangles, Paavalan’s struggle to write while he searches for a well-paying job, their hesitancy with seeing things through Kavin’s generational perspective, the cultural divide, their financial issues, and even their challenges in introducing Kavin to his own culture resonated with me. I could even sense my own parents in the solemn yet zealous way Venba and Paavalan presented regional food to Kavin, giving their child a taste of his own heritage. Kavin rejecting their attempts, however, was unlike my own yearning for connection through food, but this difference shows that the chaotic lives of immigrant families can vary as much as our dishes.

Venba skips across years, presenting new conflicts among Venba, Paavalan, and Kavin—and rather than disrupting the growing tension around their family, it shows how it’s a never-ending struggle to get different generations of an immigrant family on the same page about their culture. The time skips also remind me how time is fleeting and how far I have come in my life, so much so that my eyes teared up while playing.

In the game, in the year 2006, Venba prepares layered biryani, which the developers have said is inspired by the style of biryani in Hyderabad, the south-central Indian city where I’m from. Despite the mutable nature of immigrant life, my mom’s biryani is a constant, always earning high praise that it tastes just like home. So, I thought it was only right to have her play this level with me—which was entertaining on its own since the in-game recipe varies from hers. Still, she rushed to tell me to fry the onions before I could explain the mechanics, and was impatiently eager to know its taste when Kavin, Venba, and Paavalan sat down to eat. Here, I noticed the subtle generational difference as Paavalan ate with his fingers and Kavin ate with a spoon.

AI Can Give You an NPC That Remembers. It Could Also Get Your Favorite Artist Fired

AI Can Give You an NPC That Remembers. It Could Also Get Your Favorite Artist Fired

AI’s presence in the gaming industry has evolved from a mere novelty to an indispensable force. With every algorithmic breakthrough, new possibilities and challenges arise for gamers and developers alike.

In March 2023, a Reddit user shared a story of how AI was being used where she worked. “I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney overnight,” the author wrote. The post got a lot of attention, and its author agreed to talk to WIRED on condition of anonymity, out of fear of being identified by her employer.

“I was able to get a huge dopamine rush from nailing a pose or getting a shape right. From having this ‘light bulb moment’ when I suddenly understood a form, even though I had drawn it hundreds of times before,” says Sarah (not her real name), a 3D artist who works in a small video game company.

Sarah’s routine changed drastically with version 5 of Midjourney, an AI tool that creates images from text prompts. Midjourney has also been widely criticized for violating copyright of visual artists and stealing their work in order to train its image generation engine, criticism that’s led to a massive copyright lawsuit.

When Sarah started working in the gaming industry, she says, there was high demand for 3D environmental and character assets, all of which designers built by hand. She says she spent 70 percent of her time in a 3D motion capture suit and 20 percent in conceptual work; the remaining time went into postprocessing. Now the workflow involves no 3D capture work at all.

Her company, she explains, found a way to get good and controllable results using Midjourney with images taken from the internet fed to it, blending existing images, or simply typing a video game name for a style reference into the prompt. “Afterwards, most outputs only need some Photoshopping, fixing errors, and voilà: The character that took us several weeks before now takes hours—with the downside of only having a 2D image of it,” says Sarah. “It’s efficiency in its final form. The artist is left as a clean-up commando, picking up the trash after a vernissage they once designed the art for,” she adds.

“Not only in video games, but in the entire entertainment industry, there is extensive research on how to cut development costs with AI,” says Diogo Cortiz, a cognitive scientist and professor at the Pontifícia Universidade de São Paulo. Cortiz worries about employment opportunities and fair compensation, and he says that labor rights and regulation in the tech industry may not match the gold rush that’s been indicative of AI adoption. “We cannot outsource everything to machines. If we let them take over creative tasks, not only are jobs less fulfilling, but our cultural output is weakened. It can’t be all about automation and downsizing,” he says, adding that video games reflect and shape society’s values.

Cortiz says that gaming companies must, either as an industry or individually, collaboratively discuss AI, its usage, where it should be applied, and how far it can go. “The committees need to have diversity in terms of gender, age, class, and ethnicity, to discuss and create a more inclusive AI,” he says. “They need to make their AI principles available to everyone.” He adds that gamers should have access to how companies use AI so there can be greater transparency, trust, and more developed digital literacy on the topic.

In practice, that means companies should disclose the AI tools employed in games and make their AI committee available to write public reports and answer questions from all stakeholders involved in a video game—developers, players, and investors.

Labor-Saving or Labor-Crushing?

“Incorporation of AI in our workflows relies on three axes: creating more believable worlds, reducing the number of low-value tasks for our creators, and improving the player experience,” says Yves Jacquier, executive director of Ubisoft La Forge.

Jacquier describes several ways that his company is already experimenting with AI, from smoother AI-driven motion transitions in Far Cry 6, which make the game look more natural, to the bots designed to improve the new player experience in Rainbow Six Siege. There’s also Ghostwriter, an AI-powered tool that allows scriptwriters to create a character and a type of interaction they would like to generate and offers them several variations to choose from and edit.

‘Critical Role’ Lays Out the Next Era in Tabletop Games and Live-Action Role-Play

‘Critical Role’ Lays Out the Next Era in Tabletop Games and Live-Action Role-Play

“What Matt [Mercer] has shown me is that the power of sitting around a table with your friends and playing pretend is a spark of magic that creates a universal feeling of empowerment,” says Sam Riegel, cofounder and cast member. “We’ve learned that this feeling can reach people who are stuck in the darkest of places. I think everyone in the world is the same deep down, and that universal feeling transcends our differences.”

“We’ve all survived a really alienating period of history,” says Taliesin Jaffe, cofounder and cast member of Critical Role. “It’s been a bit of an emotional emergency for people. Finding community at the tabletop is a great way of dealing with it. If people love to see us do that, I want to make sure they know how to do it for themselves too.”

The Next Era of Critical Role

Critical Role has reached a pivotal moment in its progression. Emerging from the pandemic in its third campaign with 2,270 hours of play streamed on Twitch, where viewers watch 86,795 hours of it every day at the time of writing, the team isn’t content to sit on its laurels. The company is diversifying its offerings into game system development, their own board games, and narrative podcasts.

“We’ve been asking ourselves ‘Can we try this?’ a lot,” says Matthew Mercer, cast member and Critical Role’s chief creative officer. “And the answer has usually been, ‘Why not?’ If these ideas fail, at least we’ll know that we gave them a shot.”

“A lot of our planning has centered around preserving legacy and longevity,” Ray says. “We’re all getting old! As we expand into new areas, we’re also trying to nurture a new generation of people to handle it all, and eventually, succeed us and carry what we’ve created forward.”

Critical Role’s mission is “leave the world better than you found it,” which has shaped their direction since becoming a company.

“There are creators out there with dreams the world would have stomped out just decades ago,” O’Brien laments. “We want to give new stories a home—from voices that haven’t historically had a platform in this space.”

“We have a unique opportunity,” Ray says. “Being able to design and publish ways of playing and immersing in stories, and also create high-profile live-play shows of those systems that illustrate how much fun they can be. Practically no one can make stuff so accessible by design like us. We want everything we do to be accessible inside and out, from translations, considerations for disability, and lowering ladders for people to uplift the products of their own creativity.”

The Legacy to Come

Besides a community-minded commercial direction, charity is also a big part of how Critical Role operates.

“From the very beginning of streaming back in 2015, charity has been very important to us,” explains Johnson. “To have our work go toward uplifting important causes that resonated with all of us and show them to our Critters.”

Since its launch in 2020, the Critical Role Foundation has raised a little over $2 million for some incredible social projects and charitable organizations. Working with the Shanti Bhavan Children’s Project, First Nations Development Institute, World Central Kitchen, Hope for Haiti, and Women for Afghan Women, to name a few, Critical Role has been sharing its prosperity with those who need it most around the world.

The 10 Best Games on Xbox Game Pass (June 2023)

The 10 Best Games on Xbox Game Pass (June 2023)

Even when budgets are tight, Xbox Game Pass is one of the few services I keep around. For $15 a month, you get to choose from over 100 titles in a regularly refreshed library of options to play on console as well as PC. For active gamers, it’s a worthwhile subscription that costs less than the price of three AAA games.

The Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription comes with Xbox Live Gold, access to EA Play, and cloud gaming. Just on console and not interested in online multiplayers games? Microsoft offers a cheaper tier that costs $10 a month. Ditched your console? There’s a PC-only plan that’s also $10. (PlayStation and Switch gamers should check out our guide to the top subscription services for those platforms.)

I sifted through the Game Pass catalog and curated a few outstanding titles to help you decide which ones to download first. (It’s a bit overwhelming!) From new indies to classic blockbusters, our genre-spanning picks for the best Game Pass games likely has something that’s perfect for your style of play.

Searching for even more great game recommendations? WIRED’s lists of the best Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S titles also include fantastic picks.

Netflix Games Is Still Happening. Just Don’t Hold Your Breath

Netflix Games Is Still Happening. Just Don’t Hold Your Breath

Netflix Games wants to cater to every kind of player. Not only that, says head of external games Leanne Loombe, it wants to be “a publisher that developers from all around the world want to work with.”

It’s a lofty goal for a service barely a year into launch. The streaming giant is big on iteration; it keeps a “crawl, walk, run” model as one of its guiding principles. To date it has released 55 games, all mobile titles, ranging from licensed games based on popular shows like Stranger Things and the dating show Too Hot to Handle to established game properties like Tomb Raider and Kentucky Route Zero

The company has also scooped up developers like Oxenfree creator Night School Studios and established an in-house game development division. “Games are one of the biggest forms of entertainment,” Loombe said at a recent press briefing. “It really is a natural extension for us to include games in our members’ subscriptions.”

But big tech companies that have taken an interest in games over the past few years, including Google and Amazon, have learned the hard way that you can’t just throw money at games and reap immediate rewards. Good games are an investment of time and talent. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have a decades-long chokehold on a market that is arguably oversaturated already. As of August last year, a scant 1 percent of Netflix subscribers were reportedly playing its games. 

Video games are a harder sell than investing passive energy into a 30-minute TV show or a movie. It’s difficult to sample games quickly via Netflix, and some games can’t really be enjoyed without working through a learning curve. Netflix is working on its own cloud streaming tech (similar to Google’s now dead Stadia and Nvidia’s GeForce Now), but for now it remains focused on a specific corner of the gaming market: mobile. 

Netflix not only faces screen-time competition from mobile apps like TikTok or Twitter, it also has problems with discoverability of its games. Netflix games are only available via the mobile app, which requires subscribers to leave Netflix, go to the App Store or Play Store, and download the game before they can play. That won’t be changing anytime soon, according to Loombe. “We don’t have full plans to share right now, but as you can imagine, we do want Netflix games to be playable on every Netflix device,” she says. 

During the briefing, Loombe did not answer direct questions about how many players the service has today. “We are super happy with what we’re seeing so far,” Loobme said. “We’re not at the point where we expect 100 percent of our Netflix members to be playing games.”

Netflix plans to release an additional 40 games this year, and Loombe says the company has another 70 in development with its partners. The company’s in-house studios are also working on an additional 16 games. It also continues to pull in already established games, including Uswo’s critically acclaimed Monument Valley and its sequel. Both games are expected to launch on Netflix in 2024. 

But it’s telling that one of the platform’s biggest upcoming titles is a game nearly a decade old. Success in the video game world is not about quantity over quality. If it’s not careful, Netflix might just end up over-saturating its own platform.