I Just Got The Nintendo Switch 2. Here are my first thoughts
Plus an interview with a professor about whether a Minecraft-based AI has free will
We’ve got an extremely busy June ahead of us, so let’s get started.
The Nintendo Switch 2 is upon us. For those who have not been following every second of news about this console, it’s possible to miss this. It feels like a quieter console launch than usual.
My first impressions are on Inverse but I’ll say a little more here. The Nintendo Switch 2 feels like that graphical and processing power update that developers were really waiting all these years for, to do real justice to games like Hades II or Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition. The game download speeds are still quite slow, but the storage is seriously expanded, so I can finally have more than a handful of games on the native console, even without buying an SD card upgrade.
I have my review unit in hand, and will be bringing it with me on my travels to Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles this weekend.
Does AI have free will already?
A Finnish philosophy professor, Frank Martela, has studied Voyager, a large language model-based AI agent in Minecraft that other AI researchers created, and found that it could potentially have free will.
I interviewed Martela who tells Updater that the AI agent essentially could have free will because it makes complex decisions that resemble human behavior.
“On different runs, the Minecraft agent can make different choices,” Martela says, “Our best way of explaining and predicting their behavior has to assume that they are capable of making free choices.”
Martela says that AI is becoming more like an adult, making choices that need the proper guardrails in place. And he says we’re still not there when it comes to reaching artificial general intelligence (or AGI).
“A few breakthroughs are still needed before we get there,” he says. “But it’s hard to say whether those breakthroughs are two or 20 or 100 years ahead of us.”
Bonus links:
Rockstar Games announced on May 2 that it’s delaying GTA 6 until May 2026. It’s not that surprising. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told IGN in an interview, “While of course, delays pain me — how could they not? — the most important thing to do is to support your teams in their search for perfection.”
After five years, Fortnite is back on iPhones. The appeals continue, but it does look like the end to a drawn-out battle. Epic declined to comment beyond social media posts from CEO Tim Sweeney.
This was an impressive feature from The Gamer about how this Hades-like was delisted from Steam in China. It has a gorgeous look to it and I still mean to try it.
At A Netflix Screening
The other day, I went to see Love, Death, + Robots Volume 4 at Paris Theater in New York, with a Q&A with the producer Tim Miller afterwards. There was a mysterious third seat on the stage, and my neighbor in the audience suggested Mr. Beast was in attendance.
Miller says due to a studio closure, the Hunger Games-like short (episode 7) he was working on needed to be remade. That delay gave Miller enough time to come across Mr. Beast on Amazon Prime Video’s Beast Games and think “what an asshole” and then decide to cast him as the villainous game host in his short about rich people watching violence as spectacle.
Mr. Beast played off the critiques here, and jokingly said that the audience should threaten Netflix executives that they would cancel their subscriptions if Love, Death, + Robots was not renewed for a fifth season.
Last month was a big month for Mr. Beast news. He also announced that he’s working on a novel with bestselling author James Patterson. It’ll be interesting to see the social media mogul take his salesmanship to the literary world. As Harper Collins president and CEO Brian Murray told The New York Times, “He’s like: Failure is not an option. I’m going to move these things.”
What I’m obsessed with
Last Saturday, I immediately binge-watched Mountainhead, a film (on the newly renamed HBO Max streaming service) that satirizes the tech industry. Putting you right into the minds of four tech billionaires, it suggests a world quite similar to the one we live in which is run by simpletons, charlatans, and frat boys. I was rather impressed with the level of accuracy I felt the story followed and how the scenes of riots breaking out across CNN did not seem like too far of a stretch from what we’re familiar with.
Last month, I avidly watched The Devil's Plan. It’s a show that initially sparked my interest in logic games and puzzles. This time around, I got the funny idea of studying formal logic from it. Season 2 features Justin Min, an actor of Beef and The Umbrella Academy fame, but like the first season, my favorite characters never get enough screentime.
Now I’m reading Eat to Beat Your Diet, by physician William Li, about how some foods have the power to heal. It’s a concept familiar in Eastern medicine, but one that somehow feels vaguely foreign and novel in a Western tradition.
You already know I will be downloading Mario Kart World tonight at midnight and seeing multiple other gaming companies this weekend. It’s not-E3 weekend in Los Angeles, and I’ll be reporting back with what I’ve learned.
How the switch 2 feels in terms of gameplay
Heck yeah Devil's Plan. 7high and Eun-yu forever.