Yesterday was the IPO of SpaceX. It's IPO price was $135, and over the first day of trading the share price stabilized at around $160. If you multiply the total number of existing shares in SpaceX with that share price, the company SpaceX is worth a bit over $2 trillion. That makes is roughly 10 times as valuable as the company I own shares in. But if you look at SpaceX revenues, profits, and dividends, there is no logical relation to the share price. SpaceX has no profits or dividends. It makes roughly 10 times *less* revenue than the company I own shares in. In other words, the company I own shares in has a share price to revenue ratio of slightly over 1, while SpaceX has a share price to revenue ratio of slightly over 100. SpaceX is what is politely called a growth stock. The numbers only make sense if you assume that the revenue and profits of the company will grow at a rather fantastic rate.

Are the people buying SpaceX shares all fools? No, many are very rational people. For example there are people who undersigned the IPO, got shares for $135 from SpaceX, and then directly sold them on the first day for $160. $15 pure profit per share in just a day, nothing foolish about that. IPOs these days are carefully orchestrated. SpaceX only sold 5% of its shares, to keep the supply of these shares lower than the demand, more or less guaranteeing the share price would "pop" up on the first day of trading, creating a positive narrative.

But what about the other 95% of SpaceX stock, not currently traded? Elon Musk owns around 45% of SpaceX (in a special class of shares with higher voting power, giving him around 80% of votes and thus total control). Elon probably doesn't want to sell those shares, and is actually contractually prevented from selling them for a year. That still leaves 50% of shares in the hands of other SpaceX founders, early venture capital investors, and SpaceX employees. They too are still under a contractual lockout, preventing them from selling their shares, but not for long. SpaceX has a staggered lockout, in several tranches from day 70 to day 180 after the IPO. In other words, other than Elon Musk, over the next half a year, all SpaceX shareholders become free to sell their shares.

Thus the supply of SpaceX shares is going to increase a lot between now and the end of this year. That makes the trajectory of the SpaceX share price somewhat predictable. So predictable that is has a name, the "IPO pop and drop". It is very basic economics, supply and demand. Supply of SpaceX shares is increasing over the next 6 months, demand probably by not that much, thus a drop in share price is rather likely. In fact, some people are planning to make a lot of money short-selling SpaceX shares.

Now this certainly isn't financial advice. But if you were a strong believer in growth stocks, a believer that everything Elon Musk touches will turn to gold, and you do think that one day SpaceX will reach revenue and profits that are more reasonably aligned with its market capitalization, you might still want to wait for several months before buying SpaceX stock. There are a lot of stocks that are worth more today than they were on their first day of trading, but there are very few for who the first day of trading would have been the best day to buy them. And that is much more true for growth stocks than for value stocks.

Many of the people buying SpaceX stock now don't plan to wait until the company makes a profit and they get their money back via dividends. Instead they believe in the greater fool theory of investing: It doesn't matter whether the share price of a company is justified by that company's revenue and profit; you can make a profit from an overvalued share as long as there is somebody out there who is a "greater fool" than you, and who values that company even higher than you paid for it. That is purely speculative. But it is the explanation for the valuations of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and many growth stocks, especially in AI. You are not betting on a company reaching certain goals, you are betting on the mood of the market. That isn't investing, it is gambling. There are certainly people that made money that way. And there are people who still own a bored ape NFT, who bought Bitcoin for $100,000, or bought Pets.com shares at the IPO. In a market dominated by professional traders, how likely do you think a regular retail investor is to outsmart the bankers? If you want to get rich quick, you are probably better off betting on the outcome of soccer world cup. If you want to save money for your retirement, you should stick to boring value stocks.

While I managed to play the same civilization over the ages, that actually was never really my problem with Civ 7, and I had enjoyed other 4X games in which you didn't stay the same for the whole game. My problem with Civ 7 rather was that the second age, exploration, feels very scripted and sameish to me, regardless with which civilization or civilizations I play it. It is just the tech tree that allows you the exploration, and the whole reward structure is designed to push you into that exploration.

So between the uncanny unfamiliarity with the game and feeling that I was still following the same scripted gameplay, I stopped half way through the age of exploration and gave up. For me this wasn't the patch that fixed all of Civ 7's problems and made me come back. And when I see the concurrent player numbers, it seems that the rest of the world feels the same. After a short peak Civ 7 is back to have far fewer players than Civ 6.

Not all board games are created equal. Something as simple as a deck of cards can have various different levels of card stock and finishing, so that those cards could be flimsy and wear out quickly, or be a lot more solid and wear resistant. Tokens can be cardboard, wood, or plastic. Meeples can be cardboard standees, wooden, or plastic miniatures, with or without sundrop or paint. Chip Theory Games is famous for making games that are completely waterproof: Game boards are neoprene, not cardboard, and printed poker chips are used as both meeples and tokens. The quality of the components has an obvious effect on price.

With many games, you don't get a choice: The game is the price it is with the components it has. I happened to me that I bought a game at a low price, but then was disappointed at the quality of the components. Great Western Trail: El Paso is a game I like the gameplay of, but dislike the shoddy material. Parts of that game I replaced with my own materials, like cubes and discs; but I can't do anything about the cards and the game board. On crowdfunding board games, the trend is more towards the other direction, I pledged for some games where I ended up with lots of plastic miniatures I didn't really felt necessary.

In the end that is a business decision by the game company: While a prettier game with better table presence can attract some people, others might then be turned off by the high price. So increasingly crowdfunding projects have several options, like a base version with cardboard standees and a more expensive version with miniatures. And of course there is usually a completely over the top "all in" pledge with all the expansions, and all the deluxified materials you can possibly think of.

Normally I am more of a base pledge guy. I actually prefer standees over miniatures. I also prefer wooden tokens over plastic tokens. But I also do like wooden tokens over cardboard tokens, and I especially like metal coins over cardboard coins. That is how I ended up with the "Glory of Rome" pledge level for Concordia, because it has wooden meeples and acrylic tokens instead of cardboard, as well as metal coins.

Concordia is the third "Special Edition" of a classic board game that Awaken Realms produces. They made special editions for Puerto Rico and Castles of Burgundy before. With the deluxification being a more recent trend, the original games were all cardboard. And for some games that is enough. I bought a copy of the old Castles of Burgundy for €19, while the special edition costs €90 plus shipping plus VAT, so around €130 for just the most basic version of the special edition. I didn't buy any edition of Puerto Rico.

Not only did I like the game Concordia more than I liked Puerto Rico or Castles of Burgundy. Concordia is also a game that already has a lot of expansions, and if you have everything you'll sit on quite a lot of boxes. The special edition has all the expansions already existing, plus adds a couple of new ones. And they all come in one large box, making storage easier. What I ordered is a luxury item and thereby by definition unnecessary, but I do get a lot of nice stuff for my money.

Ultimately this moves away from a game that one buys to play it, and enters the territory of a collector's item. It is slightly more useful than a Labubu doll, but the gameplay value doesn't really justify all of the purchase price. In my previous post I talked about Arydia, which did cost something similar, but that game we played for 66 hours, so a bit over $3 per hour, which isn't half bad for a board game. I would have to play Concordia a lot to get down to that price per hour. There is some satisfaction to have a game complete with everything (even if I didn't take the €330+ "Opus Magnum" pledge, as I didn't want the plastic miniatures), with deluxified materials making it look good. Not a reasonable purchase, but sometimes one wants to spoil oneself.

I now put the whole Arydia game back into the box. What I didn't do is resetting the game. Arydia is a game which changes while you play it. Map hexes get turned over when exploring them, cards move from active to inactive or banished, additional game components are unveiled during the campaign. We have a big plastic bag full of cardboard tokens representing gear and other stuff we used and discarded during the game. Arydia is a "green legacy" game, so none of the changes are really permanent. It is possible to reset the game and put everything back where it was at the start of the game. The problem is that this would take hours of work, and I am not really motivated to do that.

I think we played through over 90% of the content of Arydia. Playing the game again would follow largely the exact same story, even if the order or individual battles could play differently. A second playthrough would certainly be a lot less interesting than the first playthrough. And as my board game library resembles my Steam library, too many games - too little time, I don't really see me playing Arydia a second time, even if I enjoyed the first campaign.

Unlike a Steam game I played and don't plan to come back to, a board game takes up physical space. Arydia is a huge box weighing 11 kg. I wouldn't even want to sell it used on Ebay or elsewhere, as I don't want to ship such a huge box. And with the game being in a state where it would need hours of work to reset, I doubt there would be much interest for it anyway.

So I am currently leaning towards throwing the game away. Maybe keep some of the materials like the painted miniatures for use elsewhere, and sort the rest into plastic and paper waste. But that feels somewhat ungrateful towards a game we had a lot of fun with. On the other side, I can't have too many games I'll never play again block all of my shelf space.

If you look at the totality of all jobs, you will realize that most people have jobs in which they manipulate physical objects in some form as core function of their job. Take the stereotypical entry level / student job of flipping burgers. ChatGPT can't flip a burger. You would need an AI-powered robot to flip that burger. And between the cost for the robot and the cost for the AI, it isn't obvious that the minimum wage human doing the job isn't actually a lot cheaper than the robot. Also, even an entry-level human employee tends to do better when things go wrong. Imagine the flat-top griddle having an electrical failure and not heating anymore. A human would notice instantly that his burgers aren't sizzling anymore and react in some way. A robot might happily keep flipping raw burgers, with catastrophic consequences when that raw burger reaches the customer.

In the absence of physical object manipulation requiring a robot, from the remaining jobs there is still a very large part that requires direct interaction with humans, typically customers. You don't need a robot for that, but you need your AI to not mess up by hallucinating. There are famous examples, like the Air Canada chatbot inventing a refund policy, and the airline being forced by the courts to pay that refund. Basically the courts found that a company is liable for their employees messing up, regardless of whether that employee is human or AI. That can get expensive for a company, when a tech-savvy customer persuades your chatbot to sell him a $70,000 car for $1, an error a human salesman is unlikely to make.

If I use the version of Google Gemini that is included in a regular Google search, or I use a regular ChatGPT chatbot, that use of AI is free. That is the typical tech business model of reaching a dominant market position by providing a service at a loss. Which is inevitably followed by some form of "enshittification", because sooner or later the company needs to provide its services at a profit to themselves. Those trillion dollar AI data center investments don't pay for themselves if you don't charge your customers sufficiently. AI companies already charge "pro" users and commercial users, and some companies had to put caps on AI use, because AI use quickly got too expensive. So even for the jobs that an AI can do well, the question is how much cheaper it is going to be than a human, and how the quality and reliability of the output compares in the end.

Sam Altman is predicting the Billion-Dollar Company of One, a startup built by one person with a laptop, an internet connection, and an army of AI agents, worth a billion dollars. While I don't think that is impossible, it is obvious that there are huge parts of the real economy in which such a company is unthinkable. The company can't be involved in any manufacturing, can't be involved in any handling or delivering of physical objects, and can't be involved with any services to humans that can't be done purely online. Robo bricklayers? Robo hairdressers? Robo plumbers? All of these are still decades away even in the most AI-positive scenario, and might never become a practical reality out of cost reasons. I am absolutely positive that AI will not take *all* of our jobs. Although we might end up with some surprises on which jobs AI eventually will replace; for example I can envision a future in which much of porn is AI generated, putting a lot of pornstars out of work. But if you look at a general classification of occupations, you immediately see a huge number of jobs that AI is extremely unlikely to perform in the foreseeable future.

Dice Gambit plays in an interesting world that combines elements of the Italian Renaissance, with families feuding over a city, with modern aspects like influencers or AI. Combat is based on a mix of swords and technology, with some extremely original character classes like the movie director. You unlock these classes by gaining faction reputation with the members of the feuding families. There is a default mode, where you are likely to get classes in a certain order, but there are options to randomize that during setup, and play a game with a completely different set of classes.

You start with a single character arriving by Vespa in the city, having inherited the Inquisitor title. You discover that the city is overrun with monsters, and get into a fight immediately. Over the course of the main story you marry, "incubate" children directly into adulthood, and go on expeditions with squads out of your family members. You have a general level, but can level up every class only so much, so you have to switch classes sooner or later. The stronger any family member is, the stronger will be the spouse he/she marries, and the stronger will be the children. That gets a bit confusing sometimes, because new family members start at level 1, while often being already as strong as their relations.

Combat takes place on a hex grid, and is dice-based. You throw a number of dice based on your dice power, which you can sometimes improve by leveling. You can use the dice results for basic actions like moving, shielding up, or attacking. But you also have 4 abilities (of which 1 signature ability), that allow you to spend some combination of dice for powerful effects. By leveling you also get passive skills. Ideally that all adds up to powerful combinations, like abilities that let you throw lots of knives combined with passive skills that make damage cascade to other enemies. Every character ends up very different through the combination of classes, abilities, passives and stats he accumulates. That, and the variety of different combat scenarios, makes combat very varied and a lot of fun.

There are three acts to the main story of Dice Gambit, taking around 10 hours. But there are a lot of interesting options in the setup, where you can replay the game in a different way. And you can fast forward the story bits you already know, so replaying the same main story isn't that bad. I have already played 20 hours of Dice Gambit, and I am not finished yet. Recommended!

P.S. You can play the first act as a free demo!

Now you might wonder what a rocket company has to do with AI. Well, Elon Musk, who controls SpaceX, also controlled xAI, an AI company that owns Grok and the social media network Twitter X. And in February of this year, he sold xAI to himself SpaceX for $250 billion in shares. SpaceX now has three businesses, a very profitable satellite internet part called Starlink, an unprofitable rocket part, and a money-burning AI part. But in the documents filed for the SpaceX IPO it is claimed that it is the AI part that will address $26.5 trillion of "total addressable market" for all three parts of $28.5 trillion. The AI part of SpaceX is what is used to justify a total valuation for the whole SpaceX of $1.75 to $2 trillion. That makes the SpaceX IPO the biggest IPO in the history of the world, mostly based on a business that is losing billions of dollars of money every year, and doesn't have a very clear path towards a profitable future.

The SpaceX IPO will also be one of the first to profit from new rules for the Nasdaq index. Under rules valid until May 1st of this year, SpaceX wouldn't even have made it into the Nasdaq index, as for that at least 10% of a company's shares needed to be on the market. SpaceX will only have 4% to 5% of its shares on the market, leading to higher volatility, but this is now allowed since this month. Under another new rule, SpaceX will be added to the index after 15 days of trading, previously at least 3 months.

So there is a definitive possibility that the SpaceX IPO will, at least initially, do very well. With so little of the company shares being actually sold, the rarity of those shares could very possibly keep prices up initially. And 15 trading days later, every Nasdaq ETF would then have to buy SpaceX shares when the company is added to the index, further increasing demand for these rare shares. Meanwhile the people who hold the other 95% of those shares are initially locked out from selling them, with a staggered lockout period lasting a total of 180 days. As a speculative share for day traders and later short-sellers, SpaceX might be quite a hot ticket. For long-term investors, it is probably a very bad deal, as SpaceX is even more likely to follow a typical share price evolution after IPO, peaking shortly after the IPO, and then falling in the following 6 months. If SpaceX as expected is initially high on the Nasdaq index, any fall would be amplified by those ETFs shedding the share automatically.

Unusually, 30% of the SpaceX IPO is reserved for retail investors, which usually get nothing of hot IPOs. But of course there is a large Elon Musk fan club, who are likely to be interested. Despite a long history of overpromising and underdelivering, a lot of people still believe that any venture of Elon Musk can only make them rich. Even an IPO that list under its business goals to build a colony of 1 million people on Mars, and whose AI business prospects are also very much science fiction.

Where it gets interesting is the possibility of the SpaceX IPO either not doing very well, or crashing even harder than expected after the initial hype. If you believe in an old school idea of the value of a company being the sum of future profits, the numbers don't really add up. SpaceX is losing $5 billion on $18 billion of revenue. You can't even calculate a price to earnings ratio, as there aren't any earnings. If you calculate a price to revenue ratio, you get a ratio of 100. If you consider that Nvidia has a price to revenue ratio of 20, you begin to understand that it would take a major miracle for SpaceX to ever return the money to investors. Not only would AI have to become fabulously profitable, SpaceX would also have to beat all the other AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft to the biggest slice of the cake. Seeing how Grok is currently most famous for being able to undress women against their will on social media, that is quite a stretch.

So the SpaceX IPO is a first test case, testing the markets true feelings on the future of AI. And if that goes well, the 6 months after the IPO will be another, longer test case. If the market holds up, later this year the IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic are expected. Overall, AI companies will have IPOs valued between $3 and $4 trillion this year. This could end in an US stock market that is even more concentrated on AI by the end of this year. Or somewhere before that end of the year investors will get cold feet, reject a hot ticket IPO, and cause a cascade of rethinking of valuations for AI companies, pricking the AI bubble. 2026 is going to be an interesting year for AI valuations, and thus for the stock market as a whole.

Campaign board games very often have a simple premise: A game experience similar to a pen & paper roleplaying game, but without the need of one player playing the dungeon master / game master. For the person who would otherwise need to do all the DM/GM work, aka me, that is interesting. The downside is that the story is more scripted than in a pen & paper RPG. But different games have different amounts of storytelling, as well as different means. Arydia, which we are currently playing, has all its story on cards, and so there is a certain brevity. Other games have books, and there might or might not be an app with voice acting to read that book to the players.

The last two campaign games we played, Tidal Blades 2 and Arydia, did certainly have a story, but the focus of these games was more on the game mechanics, specifically combat. So we spent most of the time at the table moving our characters around a battlefield and using their skills and abilities to fight various monsters and bosses. And we liked to play that way.

This is where my research into Lands of Evershade resulted in me not buying the game: Several reviewers reported that in Lands of Evershade the percentage of time reading story was much higher than the percentage of time spent in combat. Yes, there is combat, but it is also totally possible in Lands of Evershade to spend a complete session just reading story, making decisions in that story, and never getting into a fight. There will certainly be people who like it that way, but this isn't exactly the style of me and my group.

I think that this also has to do with the fact that we are 4 players in my group. With so many people around the table, it is hard to have a long story sequence without somebody losing attention. I sometimes play games with my wife, and with just 2 players (and her being less interested in tactical combat), a story-heavy game is an easier sell. I could also see myself playing a story-heavy game solo, although I would probably prefer a computer game to a board game for that.

While it did happen this week that I played Rune Dice for several hours, I do appreciate that fundamentally a single run is well under 1 hour, even if you make it until the end boss. I can see this game staying on my desktop as an "in between" game, or when I don't have the energy to start something bigger. Chucking a few dice around and trying to cause chain reactions is always fun.

When you start a game of Farthest Frontier, you select some settings for the map and the difficulty. From that, a random map is generated. And while playing Farthest Frontier, I fell into a pattern that is familiar for me with games that have random maps: I play the game for a while, find out how the game works, find that the map isn't great, or I made a mistake choosing my starting location, and thus reroll the map and start over. That can happen several times, until I finally have a map I am really happy with. With Farthest Frontier, I am now on the third game where I have been playing for more than 1 hour, and had a number of rerolls to get there. In particular, my first game didn't have any sources of sand, and my second map had a sand pit which turned out to be a "deep" sand pit, that you can't use until much later in the game. As sand is important to modify the fertility of your fields, I was only happy with my third map that had sand attainable from tier 2 on.

Farthest Frontier is good for rerolling maps, as it shows you a large part of the map after creating it, before you choose a starting location. In other games, e.g. Civilization or Age of Wonders, you only see a very small part of the map at the start, and it is hard to tell whether the location is any good. Then I need to either play a few turns just scouting before rerolling, or I save the game, use a cheat to reveal the map, and then reload with the fog of war back on when I am happy with the map. I admit that it is a bit of a weird obsession of mine to want to have a "good" map in these kind of games. A lot of people just take the random map / starting location as part of the game they need to accept. However, I have played too many of these games where it turns out much later that some "bad" maps can lead to very annoying situations which make me abandon that particular run. So I am preempting that by rerolling the map.

I am playing Farthest Frontier while waiting for the Civilization VII update 1.4.0, Test of Time, this evening. I am not sure why they didn't call it 2.0, because it really is a kind of relaunch of the game, after the first launch wasn't a big success. I didn't mind that you had to switch civilizations in Civ 7 1.0, but the transition between eras was jarring, the "victory conditions" between eras and at the end weren't much fun, and the whole thing felt rather restrictive. As patch 1.4.0. changes all that, I want to give Civ 7 another try sometimes in the coming weeks. Maybe not on the first day, I'll wait for the inevitable hotfix first and watch some reviews too. But I am sure that this will be another game where I will be rerolling maps until I find one I like.

A month ago, BoardGameBollocks, a mid-sized board game YouTube channel featuring a guy with strong opinions about board games speaking into a camera using a lot of swear words, made a video about his opinions about AI. He had a balanced opinion on AI, which is unsurprising, seeing how he himself is using AI to create his thumbnails: He said that for him AI is a tool, if it helps a good game designer to make a board game faster that was alright with him, and if a lazy game designer thought AI would do his work for him that would only create garbage. There was nothing exceptional about the video: The opinion was middle-of-the-road, and the style was in line with his usual content, some swear words of a guy talking at home into his camera.

However, somehow that video managed to trigger Tom Brewster, the Editor-in-Chief of the world's largest board game YouTube channel, Shut Up & Sit Down. So he used a secondary channel to post a video with his opinion: The BoardGameBollocks video on AI was "mythically bad, don't watch it", AI is the devil, and Shut Up & Sit Down has a policy to blacklist anybody using AI tools.

First of all, that was breaking internet etiquette: The biggest channel in a niche shouldn't badmouth a video of a channel in the same niche that has over ten times fewer subscribers. Calling out another content creator's video's lower production value, when that other content creator obviously hasn't the same financial means feels particularly mean. But Tom's video was also very bad on a range of other standards: It only said that the video he didn't like was bad, asked people to *not* watch it, didn't provide a link, and didn't engage with any of the arguments that were made in that video. Tom's video was just pure Cancel Culture: Another opinion is bad, so it shouldn't be heard, shouldn't be argued, should just be blacklisted. Tom's stated policy of Shut Up & Sit Down, in which he explicitly used the word "blacklist" to talk of any board game company using any form of AI, is also rather extreme. It is just Virtue Signalling, not a viable policy in a world where nobody can even tell most of the time whether for example the rulebook of a board game had some AI tools used for editing. Text and image generation and editing tools using AI are widespread by now, and unless a company is lazy and just uses AI content without further human review, the use of AI isn't even obvious.

Now if you make a video that badmouthes somebody else's video, there is likely to be a response. And if that somebody's trademark is using rude language, that response will be filled with rude language. The natural instincts of somebody having been insulted align with the economic interests on YouTube, where drama creates clicks, which creates revenue.

I do think that it is perfectly valid to be anti-AI. But when observing what has been going on on BGG and YouTube this year, it appears to me that being anti-AI is the new purity test of the hobby, with which some elite is trying to signal how much better and more virtuous they are than anybody else. We had games that don't even use AI being review bombed for just the suspicion of AI use. The AI witch hunt in the board game hobby is real, and it doesn't even serve its purpose.

Large language model AI is pretty bad at getting facts straight. But its weaknesses in matters of truth are strengths when the task is a friendly chat: AI models tend to be extremely sycophantic, doing their very best to say exactly what the person using the service wants to hear. That can be bad when the person using the chat service is pondering something harmful, and the AI encourages that person. But outside those edge cases, many people think highly of their AI "friends", because those are so supportive, unselfish, and unlikely to contradict you.

The origin story of this blog is as a MMORPG blog. After many years of covering MMORPGs, I stopped playing those. While some were quite good if you just considered them as games, the overall feeling was that MMORPGs never lived up to their promise as virtual worlds. NPCs in MMORPGs were static and boring. Other players were either actively harming you if they could, were more interested in their own goals than interacting with you, or were simply offline. I certainly had some great moments of interaction with other players, and even great roleplaying moments. But mostly I had the choice of either fighting other players in PvP, which I hate, or playing a PvE game in which the interaction with other players was just a minor part. The most common positive interaction with other players was trying to beat group content together with other players, but that was not always a nice experience, and rife with stuff like guild drama or group members shouting at each other. The most famous player interaction in the universe of MMORPGs is Leeroy Jenkins, and that is telling you something.

It isn't just MMORPGs. Other attempts of creating virtual worlds, from Second Life to the Metaverse, not only failed because of technical problems and design flaws. The fundamental problems, that other players were online only some part of the day, might be gone next month due to having lost interest, and rarely had a positive social interaction with you are their primary goal, made the whole idea of virtual worlds that feel lived in impossible. People ended up playing The Sims instead, because the interactions with the NPCs in that game were still better than the social interactions with real people in virtual worlds.

So I had a vision of a future in which somebody would create a virtual world which was predominantly or even exclusively populated by AI chat bots. Where you could live in a virtual village, and have virtual friends and neighbors that are all powered by AI. They'd be there 24/7, they'd always be interested in chatting with you, and they'd always be nice. They would have memory of previous interactions with you, and a consistent personality. The virtual world could optionally have game mechanics, like Stardew Valley or The Sims, but in a way that wouldn't punish you if you spent most of your time just having parasocial interactions with AI chat bots. I do think that such a virtual world would be highly attractive to a large number of people. Maybe humans just aren't good enough to populate a virtual world and make it feel alive.