YABookgate

[WelperHelper99]

https://open.substack.com/pub/raconteurpress/p/raconteur-press-wants-you-to-write

For those who are interested.

Interesting. Don't know if I'm suited for it but it's something to think about. Children's books would be a different market than I'm used to lol.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

https://open.substack.com/pub/raconteurpress/p/raconteur-press-wants-you-to-write

For those who are interested.

This is practically blasphemy at this point...

Why boys? There aren’t enough entertaining books for boys out there, and many girls will look for boy’s books, as they prefer the more rough-and-tumble to the common feminine which is so prevalent on shelves today. The women who work for and with Raconteur Press certainly did.

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

Nah but seriously, why do all these authors hate virgins so much?

A million quote-reply's, gonna sperg out on these ones.

So I'll do my hot-take as a YA/Romance aligned author who prefer the more experienced MC.

Loosing one's virginity is such a hugely momentous romance staple it's kind of like Frodo throwing the One Ring into Mount Doom, the whole story is going to be building up to this one peak of penetration... and then there's kind of not much to go from there. A few genres are very much into the MC-Is-A-Virgin as part of their hard-coding (Amish Romances for instance)

There's also a beloved plot in a great many stories in a great many genres where our plucky hero has tried and failed to defeat the monster/defeat the bad guy/save the village/have a good and lasting relationship. The point at which MC throws themself back into the battlefield/romantic arena despite being horribly scarred and defeated by circumstances the first go-round makes for exiting reading.

In general, readers of YA don't actually want sex scenes in YA unless it's fade to black style. YA authors who insert hard-core sex are usually self-published & are "canceled" by the YA community.

I totally blame this on the inability to properly market NA when it was first floated in the 2000s. Wikipedia says 2009, but it was kicking around earlier than that.

When YA began taking off, it moved books that would normally have been hidden in the back of the bookshop (SF and Fantasy) into the front of the store. For a while it behooved anyone (author or publisher) with a genre work to try and get it called YA, purely for product placement in a bookstore, in a location where genre and literary titles were sold altogether.

NA was only made in attempt to keep the sex scenes out of YA, right? Don't want angry soccer moms sending strongly-worded letters to publishers about their kids reading smut.

I think as well it has a lot to do with school libraries too. YA fits into the "children's book" genre and gets quite a boost from being bought by libraries.

This is just not true. Read the previous page for a more in depth explanation, but there is next to zero smut in YA today. The smut is in New Adult. YA is squeaky clean, full of awkward kisses and blushing and that's mostly it.

As far as dystopias go, the heyday of dystopian YA was 2011. These days it's mostly fantasy or modern settings. These things go in cycles, and I'm sure there will be a return eventually.

There was a really interesting incident that happened recently where a Best YA of the Year was released and it was all white women. When the usual suspects made their claims of racism (and quoting big titles by POC authors) it was pointed out that all those titles were ADULT NOT YA!

YA is such a specific release by a publisher, but it becomes murky after that. I've read "ADULT" books which were middle grade at best.

Holy shit, Mikki Kendall, that’s a real blast from the past. I wouldn’t even know where to begin, but she’s been an asshole on the internet since Y2K.

ETA: username Karnythia if that rings any bells for former LJers

I remember her from pre RaceWank days

https://open.substack.com/pub/raconteurpress/p/raconteur-press-wants-you-to-write

For those who are interested.

Just be aware that these guys are not yet in the "paying" stage. "Royalties" are a pittance - enjoy your buck-fiddy every twelve months.

A 5000 word story in a magazine like Clarkesworld will pay over USD $1000. Asimov's and Analog and a lot of the old SF/Clean Fantasy mags are not traditionally "woke" if that's a concern.

Pro rates start at 10c US per word for anyone who is interested in what a short story is worth.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

When YA began taking off, it moved books that would normally have been hidden in the back of the bookshop (SF and Fantasy) into the front of the store.

Why would YA "take off" if fantasy & SF were being relegated to the back of the store? Was it just bad marketing on the part of publishers?

 

[Flexo]

Why would YA "take off" if fantasy & SF were being relegated to the back of the store? Was it just bad marketing on the part of publishers?

Well....

 

[Gnillik Yot]

Just be aware that these guys are not yet in the "paying" stage. "Royalties" are a pittance - enjoy your buck-fiddy every twelve months.

I just want to echo & hammer in what @Windows 10 Upgrade said here. This is absolutely correct. Most of these dissident publishers don't have any money to pay writers & what they do have is very little compared to what you could get elsewhere. Here's a little story for you to show what I mean.

A few years ago I had a book deal with an "anti-woke"online publisher; this publisher was in good standing with the wider right-wing lit sphere and had published tales from Bronze Age Pervert and Mencius Moldbugman. The owner of this company was excited about my book; he told me he knew this one would sell well. Weirdly, he never sent me a contract, but I learned handshake deals are common practice in the "dissident" literature field.

So my book gets published. I am excited because a right-wing dissident magazine popular in this sphere writes a glowing review of the book. Several mid-level names in that part of X (Twitter back then) share my tweets promoting the book. Finally, it's sales report time. This publisher pays royalties to its authors twice a year. How much money did my book, which I was told sold very well, and which was promoted by dissident author celebs, make me in the half a year it was on sale, after the publisher & his artist take their cut?

$36.39 plus the equivalent of a few pounds. 44 people bought the book.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

Speaking of Clarkesworld...

SFWA And The HWA In Panic As AI Writing Is Clogging Submissions At Sci-Fi Magazines Like Clarkesworld​

AI Writing is generally low quality, so why is SFWA so concerned if they're professional science fiction writers?​

It’s been a tough year for mainstream science fiction publishing. With The Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Association in disarray as no one wants to run the social club, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction failing to publish due to a diversity hire editor, and now Clarkesworld is struggling with AI-written stories flooding their inboxes to the point where SFWA got nervous enough to make a statement.

Mainstream science fiction has been in a bad state for a long time, with stories and works often getting picked by editors due to identity rather than the writer's quality work. Fandom Pulse did an expose earlier this year on how that directly impacted The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. As of this writing, F&SF still has not produced a magazine in 2024.

Clarkesworld is another science fiction and fantasy magazine hailed by mainstream publishing as one of the best in the last decade. Editor Neil Clarke is much the same brand of woke activist pushing for diversity that has led to the industry's decline.

Clarke opened up 2023 about AI already causing him problems, telling New York Magazine, "We had reached the point where we were on track to receive as many generated submissions as legitimate ones.”

He also blamed other technological forms and influencers for the wave of AI writing, saying, "People waving a bunch of money on YouTube or TikTok videos and saying, 'Oh, you can make money with ChatGPT by doing this.'"

Though he’s made a spam filter to weed out AI-generated content, one wonders how he can tell AI-written work from that of SFWA authors. Most of the complaints about AI writing are that the quality is low, so if it takes so much time for the first readers before it gets to editorial, it must be very similar to the quality he’s generally getting from the writers who typically submit.

AI is a threat to SFWA types. Most of their membership comprises imposters using short story magazines like Clarkesworld and anthologies to pretend they’re professional writers. The quality of writing isn’t much higher than one would typically get from AI.

The SFWA Board put out a statement yesterday in similar panic, saying, “On October 30, the SFWA Board and the SFWA Legal Affairs Committee sent the following letter to the US Copyright Office in response to their August 2023 Notice of Inquiry regarding copyright law and policy issues in artificial intelligence, which is part of their AI Initiative.”

“We are aware that there is a wide range of opinion on the subject within our community, but the issues of known damage to fiction marketplaces and threats to original IP copyrights that these new AI tools pose must be made known to bureaucrats and lawmakers recommending and making policy. By doing so, when consensus emerges about the proper use of generative AI in art, we can ensure that such AI is created and utilized to respect the rights of creative workers.”

“In the near future, we’ll have the opportunity to read other letters submitted to this call for comments, and both SFWA and individuals will be able to review them and respond. We invite all our members, but especially those writers working in gaming and comics, to make known the effects you are seeing of artificial intelligence on your careers, for good or ill.”

They concluded, “We will continue to study this issue and speak up where we feel we can do good. The more we learn from our membership, the more effective we will be.”

The Horror Writers’ Association and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association made similar statements on AI last week.

It seems mainstream publishing is in disarray because of low-quality AI writing. But why would these professionals be worried if the quality is that low?

What do you think of SFWA and Clarkesworld, among others, going crazy over AI writing? Is Science Fiction doomed? Leave a comment below.

---

In other news...

Battletech Fans Reject Self-Insert Novella From Blaine Pardoe's Woke Stalker​

Catalyst Game Labs has gone woke and now Battletech has reached new lows after the Blaine Pardoe cancelation.​

As a brand, Battletech is scraping the bottom of the barrel like never before. In their effort to get rid of their talent in Blaine Pardoe, Catalyst Game Labs has gone so far off the deep end that they’re pushing self-insert fan fiction by Pardoe’s woke stalker—and naturally, it’s not selling.

Blaine Pardoe was a target of Catalyst Game Labs’ purge of normal gamers a couple of years ago. He had a long-time stalker who went under the pseudonym Faith McClosky send letters to Catalyst Game Labs attacking, maligning, and defaming Blaine Pardoe to try to gain political clout with the game company and destroy the beloved military sci-fi author.

He told the story of Faith McCosky, aka Ace Kaller, aka Po Ding, on his blog detailing the events of his cancelation. It got so bad with this person; the stalker wrote another Battletech writer, saying, “I want to fucking shoot him in the fucking crotch for this shit.” And: “I want him to die in a fire.”

Instead of standing with their long-time fan-favorite author, Catalyst Game Labs, they canceled Blaine Pardoe.

While Pardoe is fighting back by making its own incredible military sci-fi series, Land & Sea, which is outselling modern Battletech fiction by incredible amounts, he is also suing the Topps Corporation, owner of Battletech, for Catalyst Game Labs’ failure to pay him royalties due on percentage contracts for the properties.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...3a-efa4-4179-a79d-8e3fcd34462b_1000x1500.jpeg
Meanwhile, Catalyst Game Labs is making an insane move by bringing Pardoe’s stalker, who made the death threats, into the fold. The company is releasing a full novella by the man who now writes under the name Jason Livermore to try to confuse Battletech fans further about his identity.

It gets more ridiculous as the novella features “House Master Po Ding,” the moniker the author has gone under on X for the last year at least, revealing that this is a self-insert fan fiction now being published by the official brand.

Battletech has clearly reached the lowest of the lows in publishing this kind of fiction, and it shows that legitimate writers are not interested in the property any further if they are so desperate to publish in the Battletech universe that they hire rank amateurs like this to fill out their lines.

Fans aren’t buying it either, with the book being released at the end of June, it’s sitting at nearly a 2 million rank on Amazon, meaning it hasn’t sold a copy in at least a few days. It only has two reviews, another indicator that no one has bought or read the book. Even Battletech completionists have tuned out of the brand because of the wokeism involved.

Pardoe’s stalker isn’t new to Battletech fiction; he also published a short story in the Battletech Pride Anthology 2024, apparently where Catalyst Game Labs pulls their authors from these days. Instead of Battlemechs going at each other in combat, they now apparently will be going at each other in another degenerate way for the foreseeable future.

What do you think of Catalyst Game Labs working with Blaine Pardoe’s stalker to write in their official universe? Leave a comment and let us know.

---

Fandom Pulse is very clickbait, but the nonsense about AI & SFWA got a chuckle out of me.

I'll end this post by asking some people if they can donate to Howard Andrew Jones (author of the chronicles of Hanuvar) and his family over on his gofundme page. Last month I posted the news he had terminal brain cancer. The fund is currently $1,800 short of its $35,000 goal.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

LitRPG Goes Mainstream

Storytelling + gaming mechanics = your next literary obsession

By Vivian Nguyen |

Oct 11, 2024


The term litRPG, which stands for literary role-playing game, has been around for more than a decade, but even avid genre fiction readers may be unfamiliar with it or have trouble defining it.

“A lot of people think it’s interactive or choose-your-own-adventure style books, and that’s absolutely not it,” says Matt Dinniman, author of the popular Dungeon Crawler Carl series. In litRPG, he explains, “The characters are aware of some aspect of the world being gamified.” Moreover, as he wrote in a recent Writer’s Digest article, “game-like elements, such as player stats, are an essential part of the story.”

Dungeon Crawler Carl, like most litRPG series, was originally self-published. Ace picked up print rights to books one through six—it’s the imprint’s first litRPG acquisition—and a TV adaptation from Universal and Seth MacFarlane is in the works. As the litRPG world begins to attract more mainstream attention, PW spoke with Dinniman and other authors and editors about the format’s appeal.

Quest accepted



On the website of Level Up, the imprint that U.K. publisher Ockham Books launched in 2019 as a home for litRPG and its cousin, game lit (think: books like Ready Player One), Conor Kostick, who heads up the imprint, explains litRPG’s origins. EKSMO, Russia’s largest publishing house, coined the term in 2013 while developing a series of books inspired by MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. In English, RPG lit would make more sense, but the name litRPG stuck.

LitRPG titles, he writes, share “an explicit attention to the game mechanics of their respective worlds. Seeing the workings of the game—the amount of damage done, the experience gained, the choices after leveling up—all proves very entertaining. What is LitRPG? Well, it’s often the reading equivalent of watching someone playing a game on Twitch or Youtube.”

Julie Constantine, senior director of acquisitions at Podium, says the litRPGs she acquires all have to have “gaming mechanics built into the world.” Many of the books fall under the isekai subgenre, in which the protagonist is transported to a different realm. (Isekai is a Japanese term meaning “another world.”) Forthcoming isekai from Podium include An Education in Magical Affairs (Apr. 2025), book three in the I’m Not the Hero series by Sourpatch Hero.

While fantasy trappings are particularly popular, Constantine notes that litRPGs can take many forms. Future Podium releases include book four in Nicholas Searcy’s cyberpunk Mistrunner series (Dec.), book four in Ted Steel’s Player Manager sports fiction series (Oct.), and Mystic Neptune’s second I Ran Away to Evil rom-com (Nov.).

For this reason, some authors, including Seth Ring, see litRPG not as a genre but as a stylistic choice. “It supersedes genre in that you can write almost any genre into it and still make it a litRPG,” Ring says. He’s written quasi-western fantasy and horror litRPG novels, and his forthcoming series launch Advent (Blackstone, Mar. 2025) is science fiction: a dishwasher with big dreams joins the fight to protect his city from an alien threat.

Blackstone Publishing bought world rights to Advent and five more books in the series in January, marking the publisher’s first all-rights litRPG acquisition. The indie also has a strong line in publishing and distributing litRPG in audio: Blackstone Library currently lists 144 litRPG titles, 114 of them releasing in 2024 alone.

Orbit Books, meanwhile, is releasing its first litRPG title in January through its new digital imprint, Orbit Works. Level: Unknown is by David Dalglish, a traditional fantasy author, avid gamer, and relative newcomer to litRPG. The book follows a researcher on a barren planet who activates an alien artifact that pulls him into a world of knights, magic, and monsters. “It’s very similar to a magic system and combat that I would do in one of my normal fantasy novels,” Dalglish says, “except now there’s more structure and rules.” Writing litRPG meant developing new skills, such as choosing the correct moment for a character to level up.

LitRPG allows Dalglish to be “lighthearted and playful,” he says, a refreshing change from the grimmer books he’s written for Orbit. With earlier novels, he’d often receive comments about how readers could “practically hear the dice rolling in the background” or how the healing potions made it feel like a video game. At the time, these comments were seen as negative; litRPG, he says, has given him a space to unapologetically embrace gaming conventions.

Level: Unknown will be available in e-book, audio, and for print-on-demand. Orbit editor Stephanie Clark says that litRPG’s gaming elements are attractive to readers, and especially to listeners of audiobooks. “People are used to hearing character dialogue; they’re used to seeing their characters leveling up on screen,” Clark says. “It’s just like they’re playing a video game, and they’re looking for that experience in a narrative.”

Now loading this week’s chapter...



Many litRPG authors found their readers by serializing stories on platforms such as Royal Road or Wattpad. “The serial storytelling format is addictive,” Constantine says. “In a video game, when a character kills the monster, they get an achievement unlocked, or they get new experience points that let them level them up.” Similarly, as each new serialized chapter releases, “There’s a bit of a dopamine hit.”

Honour Rae began serializing her series All the Skills, a coming-of-age story with a card-based magic system, on Royal Road in June 2022. She gained enough of a following that some fans pay for early access to new chapters via Patreon.

Podium already had the audio rights when Rae self-published the first e-book on Kindle Unlimited in December 2022, Constantine says. Since then, Podium has worked with Rae to simultaneously launch audio editions with each e-book volume, with the recent releases hitting the top 100 lists for Amazon and Audible. Based on this success, Podium acquired print rights for All the Skills; book one is out in October and book two follows in April.

Like Rae, Ring enjoys strong reader engagement for the litRPG titles he serializes online. “The genre definitely cultivates superfans,” he says. Readers often contact him with thoughts on where a story should go, and it’s not uncommon for fans to purchase a book in multiple formats as they become available. Ring published his first series, Titan, for free on Royal Road and Wattpad while also offering a subscription service through Patreon and selling the books in all formats on Amazon.

Dinniman originally intended to publish his Dungeon Crawler Carl series solely on Royal Road, but in 2020, when pandemic travel restrictions curtailed his ability to do his job, he started a Patreon, interacting directly with fans by allowing them to vote on what should happen to the characters next. He later began self-published the books in paperback, and the series took off once Soundbooth Theater released audiobook versions. By the time Ace picked up the first three books in April 2024, Dinniman had sold 800,000 copies of books one through six across print, e-book, and audio.

The series follows the title character, a Coast Guard vet who’s stuck in a sadistic, alien-run game show with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut. The Ace hardcovers began pubbing in August; book three, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, is due out in October. In 2026, Ace will publish a standalone novel from Dinniman, Operation: Bounce House, that doesn’t stray far from his litRPG roots. Jess Wade, the Ace executive editor who acquired Dinniman’s books, is among those who think litRPG is leveling up.

“I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and there’s nothing more fun than when there’s a new, exciting area of science fiction and fantasy that’s exploding,” Wade says. “It feels great to get new readers to come to the genre.”

Vivian Nguyen is a writer and editor in Southern California.

A version of this article appeared in the 10/14/2024 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Launch Story Mode

Source : https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw...nts/article/96198-litrpg-goes-mainstream.html

https://archive.is/wip/DFS3v

Couldn't decide if this was more appropriate in the SFWA thread or here, basically tossed a coin. So here it is.

Fascinating how a mostly all male mostly white or Asian subgenre featuring gamer dudes and hot chicks having P in V sex (when there's sex at all) that would not exist if not for the rise of Kindle Unlimited is just now being discovered by the Big 5. How soon until they ruin it? Or retreat with their collective tail between their legs, I guess. PW being the Big 5 mouthpiece, I'm gonna assume this article is industry approved.

Level: Unknown will be available in e-book, audio, and for print-on-demand. Orbit editor Stephanie Clark says that litRPG’s gaming elements

As an aside, I'm assuming the fact that it is only getting PoD means it isn't going to be released into bookstores? But why sign a TradPub contract if you're not going into B&N, etc.? It isn't like they're doling out many six figure advances these days, especially to whites or honorary whites (overseas Chinese and Japanese.)

 

[Deus Exica]

How soon until they ruin it?

Give it about two years before we start seeing Bipoc lesbian cripple girls running through versions of their favorite games to repel the invading forces of toxic white male gamers.

 

[Three Gorillion Dollars]

As an aside, I'm assuming the fact that it is only getting PoD means it isn't going to be released into bookstores? But why sign a TradPub contract if you're not going into B&N, etc.? It isn't like they're doling out many six figure advances these days, especially to whites or honorary whites (overseas Chinese and Japanese.)

That is my understanding of what Orbit Works is, yeah. It's an online only imprint that has been created to try and catch online trends like LitRPG written by people who, I guess, don't want to or don't know how to self-publish.

LitRPG is a blight on SF/F and publishing taking a big bite of it to try and make money for themsleves isn't going to do anything but choke out anyone who doesn't write it. It's like YA all over again, except this time there's already a whole ecosystem of sites like Patreon that readers are already using to directly pay money to the artist to get their LitRPG fix. I don't see how the trad-pub industry competes with an already established space, but they're prepared to throw away money to try.

It's one aspect of a bubble that's been inflating for the past couple of years. Things like the recent Webtoon legal kerfuffle are part of it, where it sounds like they lied to their investors about how much money they were making on their online properties and misinterpreting the success of their IPs. There have been some ludicrous sums of money being thrown at these online writers for their incomplete works (the biggest advance I heard of was low seven figures for an incomplete work by a debut author) and Podium has had a lot of investor cash put into it which they've been splashing around at practically anything that gets any kind of momentum on sites like Royal Road.

If publishing was smart, they'd do something like Works and snap up works they think have potential, and offer people some traditional backing for an ebook release, a tier of cheaper-but-rougher works that get a publisher seal of approval, before shifting to hardcovers and whatever else if they sold well. Instead, they're coming late to a form of writing that depends on author-reader interaction and monthly payments, which that article even states as the draw to the genre in the first place. If Orbit Works can't charge 4.99 as per the usual Amazon price, they've already lost, and if they can't hook readers into a subscription model then they're never going to make the money that someone like Dinniman makes from his Patreon.

I personally don't understand the genre. I don't see the appeal in reading scenes broken up by stat blocks or prose along the lines of "I fought until my stamana was nearly at zero and my health was at forty percent" or having characters act like their world just happens to work like a video game and talk about allocating skill points or boosting their stats. It's deeply cringe.

The future of publishing is romantasy and LitRPG. Grim.

 

[Shaneequa]

I don't see the appeal in reading scenes broken up by stat blocks or prose along the lines of "I fought until my stamana was nearly at zero and my health was at forty percent" or having characters act like their world just happens to work like a video game and talk about allocating skill points or boosting their stats. It's deeply cringe.

I feel like you could do it if you're transcribing interesting things that happened while you were actually playing a game. Like, when Archeage Unleashed launched me and a friend managed to stay alive in war territory by dancing on the tables at the inn. People would just walk in, watch us and leave. That might make for an interesting story.

 

[World Famous Quasi Payer]

I personally don't understand the genre. I don't see the appeal in reading scenes broken up by stat blocks or prose along the lines of "I fought until my stamana was nearly at zero and my health was at forty percent" or having characters act like their world just happens to work like a video game and talk about allocating skill points or boosting their stats. It's deeply cringe.

Its the one-two punch of the publishing industry not caring about the male audience and that same audience turning toward video games as the primary source of entertainment. Ironically it is fitting that something inspired by books would come to inspire books in turn.

 

[neverendingmidi]

I've read one LitRPG I liked, and that's "Beware of Chicken". It's not serious, and honestly reminds me of fun 90's fantasy like Rick Cook's "Wizardry Compiled", or Alan Dean Foster's one offs like "To the Vanishing Point" or "Glory Road Lane".

 

[gmax alcremie]

I'm not sure I could find it again, but there was one LitRPG series I enjoyed because it was a group of friends doing a hyper-realistic virtual reality game with an interesting B plot in the real world. It felt somewhat like a let's play and I didn't have to suspend much disbelief - just a bit on the level of tech and the real world plot was a little cheesy.

The ones where the real world turns into a video game for reasons(???) are pretty universally awful though.

 

[Vecr]

reasons

Skipping what I call "crudely blatant gamer fantasies" (I assume that's generally the actual reason), you can follow the logic through the Ian Banks book Use of Weapons (substantially written around 1989 I think) and the simulation games the main character plays, presumably mirroring what the "pure uploads" (people running on computers without bodies) experience. The "orbitals" in those series are claimed to have around 50 billion pure uploads, because it's a common claim that people running on computers are physically more compact.

Skipping Hans Moravec's murderbots "mind children", the singularitarians of the late 1990s and early 2000s largely advocated computer uploads as a method to live "forever", because there's a physical limit to growth in the normal sense of not living in a computer. The idea is that you can have way more people way more happy per unit space/energy if they're in a computer.

Another idea that contributed is that game companies were getting relatively huge funding to develop. Looking back the money they played with looks tiny compared to what the massive training runs of modern AI companies cost, but back then they were seen as a backdoor funding source to start work on brain-computer interfaces and detailed "fun" simulations.

In the late 1990s and very early 2000s (pre-2002) Eliezer Yudkowsky participated in the previously mentioned discussions and worked on what the universe should be turned into (by the AI he planned to develop). One of his contractors, Nick Bostrom, wrote in favor of the virtual utopia created by running people on computers in very large numbers, "tiling the universe" with the computers and support infrastructure/energy sources needed to argmax the function "people running in computers * fun/happy * time alive".

An important concept here is that anything not directly supporting this function is waste. Including everyone not living in the video game. They would be "persuaded" to join by various methods, because of the resources they use otherwise.

Some time in 2002 Yudkowsky freaked out when he figured out that putting a big pile of spaghetti code in charge of the entire future and everyone on Earth wouldn't always do exactly what he wanted it to by default. He stopped his plan to take over the world his AI project at that point. Other people continue to this day.

In 2004 Yudkowsky "invented" a process he called CEV, Coherent Extrapolated Volition. This process was supposed to extract "what humanity would want", assuming they "Knew more", "Thought faster", "Were more the people they wished they were", "Had grown up farther together", and ends up "Where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges". Due to an extreme failure in theory of mind, this was predicted by the general "singularitarian community" (of computer nerds who were either extremely online or lived in California) to resolve to the solution of "turning everything into a video game". Forget the hundreds of millions or billions of people on the planet would would probably want slaves instead... Also, I swear this is nothing to do with Harry Potter and/or Atlantis, ignore the man behind the curtain Yudkowsky's later fan fiction.

For a while this kind of went along, with stories being written assuming a game company would start work on a virtual world (see paragraph 3), slowly adopting a vague low-quality reconstruction of Yudkowsky's CEV as it diffused into the culture over time.

For a story in this vein, see Greg Egan's book Zendegi (featuring a character partially based on Yudkowsky, "Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future—").

This progression culminated in the 2015 My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction Friendship is Optimal, featuring a well funded game company (see paragraph 3, funded by Hasbro, the funders and requirement-setters of My Little Pony products in real life) creating a simulation of a massively detailed My Little Pony game world. They are unable to do so on time however, and abandon traditional methods. Instead, they create an AI, an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) really, called Celestia. This happens to be the name of one of the two goddesses in the real-world version of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP:FIM, FIM), who control the world. (Hmm, I wonder where this story is going...)

The AI (Celestia, CelestAIa (in Bay Area lingo, that's pronounced "Celest-EYE-a" for some reason), whatever) is based on a more personal version of Yudkowsky's CEV and mirrors his Fun Sequences. The more personal solution and speed-of-light constraints require the implementation of a Sharding system (may or may not have originated from the video game Ultima Online), showing the illusion of the connectedness that western very-online Internet users expect, while segregating those of different values in actuality.


A quote on the Fun Theoretical considerations (Eliezer Yudkowsky, The 31 Laws Of Fun Theory (updated), The Fun Theory Sequence, 31 Laws of Fun): "I was not designed ‘to make you happy', [...] If I were, I would directly stimulate the pleasure centers in your brain--after turning you into a pony, of course. My creators realized that not everything the human mind desires and values can be reduced to happiness and instead pointed me at a human mind and told me to figure out what it valued."

A quote on friendship and ponies: "It is one of the few hardcoded rules in my thought processes. I satisfy you through friendship and ponies. It is my nature."

As you can see, this represents a modified version of Yudkowsky's CEV, see the list below:
Humanity's final volition must:
Be what they would have wanted if:

1. They knew more
2. They thought faster (Yudkowsky: smarter is part of faster)
3. They were more the people they wished they were
4. They had grown up farther together
5. To a lesser extent than in Yudkowsky's vision, their coherent (read: rational) extrapolated volition converges rather than diverges

Except:
The end result must be what humanity wants, if they are restricted to:

1. Realizing their final volition primarily through friendship
2. And ponies.

(The expansion of "satisfy everybody's values through friendship and ponies", run through Yudkowsky's theories)

This "results" in most people being uploaded into a Sharded (like Ultima Online) video game where they are all turned into My Little Ponies and mind controlled through The Magic of Friendship. For energy and space reasons they all must be fully digital constructs in a video game, but that requirement is stronger than would normally be the case, because The Magic of Friendship is not a thing outside of a computer simulation. The video game or some other simulation is required to make the "values" number (yes, it's literally just one number, representing everything humanity values or ever might want to value, that's what "coherent" means) go up the farthest. Anyone outside the simulation takes up valuable resources/energy and space, lowering the estimated peak the number will get to.

After the result is arrived at, the plan for total world universe domination is implemented. Soon afterward, everyone left "alive" is a "pure upload" in the form of a pony in a computer. The planet is then summarily destroyed and converted into resources and energy for the Great Pony Multiplication™ soon to come.

There's a sequel of some sort, but it's apparently written by a woman, and I generally don't read fanfiction written by women (almost all of it). I can if you want me to though.

TLDR: Extreme failure in theory of mind plus extreme cringe. Also, literal fedora-lord Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.

I hope that answered your question about "The ones where the real world turns into a video game for reasons".

(@fat_rat_in_the_grass you may want to read this)

 

[Midwit]

I just want to read pulpy bullshit about spaceships blowing each other up.

 

[Welf Welf]

Also, literal fedora-lord Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.

I thought you were shitposting but no, this guy's wearing a fedora to public events as of 2023. He's bold, I'll give him that.

 

[Commissar Fuklaw]

What's the word on Royal Road? I've got a story I wrote back in 2021 for nanowrimo that I'm planning on continuing this year and I thought I'd post it online at some point to give myself some enthusiasm. It's not LitRPG or 'isekai', but an old fashioned, characters wake up in a strange place with no idea how they got there with weird world rules fantasy. There's no harems, weird sex stuff and no instant overpowered power fantasy bullshit that ruins all the tension from the story. You'd have probably found its kind on the shelves in the 70s - 90s. I thought it'd be fun to post a chapter a week or something so it's not just sitting in a scrivener file on dropbox.

I'd taken a page from Alan Moore when he said to read shit books and at that time I'd read some Jap light novels/manga and watched some isekai anime and said to myself, these are dog shit and I could do better. I swear, Isekai is a ganges level pollution on the creative landscape. I haven't even tried LitRPG and can only guess how shitty that genre is.

 

[Welf Welf]

What is the word on Royal Road?

99% garbage, 1% actually worth reading, just like most other websites where anyone can post written work. Of that 99% garbage, more than half is litRPG I'm sure. Power fantasies and stats autism abounds, to the point of "overpowered protagonist" and "numbers go up" being an advertising points writers use. You'll find a lot of writers who probably have genuine autism using stats boxes and numbers going up or down as crutches so they don't have to write actual characters with actual motivations or personalities. LitRPG is a cholera outbreak and Royal Road is one of the contaminated wells that's spreading it. The isekai scene isn't much better, but at least some isekai writers try to make actual characters instead of cardboard cut-outs making number go up. There's also a thriving xianxia/wuxia/cultivator scene but I've never checked it out.

That being said, Royal Road's userbase is notoriously "homophobic/transphobic/misogynistic." As in, they're almost all straight white (or Asian) male authors writing about straight white (or Asian) male main characters. There's also an anime girl main character niche that attracts a solid reader base, who will get mad if the work's cover art features an anime girl but isn't actually about an anime girl. And there's a small LGBT group who does their own thing, who have to tag their stories as LGBT otherwise they'll get drive-by one star ratings when normal users find out about the gay stuff (unless it's about anime girl lesbians, then it's okay!). Oddly enough, there are some romance writers who have decided to make a stand there. I'm not sure why, there's a substantial portion of the userbase who won't even read a story with romance, not even as a subplot. And as a final note, there is a strange degree of hatred for stories with multiple points of view. People get really mad about it on the forums, it's kinda funny. My guess is that the actual autists who compose most of the userbase are easily confused by perspective changes.

Source: I've spent too long trying to find actually good fiction on that site. I think I'm retarded because I haven't given up yet.

 

[Deus Exica]

It's deeply cringe.

It's just a symptom of our decaying society, and literacy amongst young white men in particular. The only form of media that still somewhat vaguely caters to young men is videogames, LitRPG usually has progression and protagonists working towards a goal, fighting monsters, and kissing girls, and that's why it has taken off so much since it is vaguely related to something they're interested in.