#predicting the future

Before I answer, I will preface this with the usual disclaimer - I'm not psychic, I cannot predict the future, I have no inside information and am only speculating. Unless something major changes, I see one of two scenarios happening.

Scenario A: Things continue as they are right now

I'm seeing many cautious and a few good indicators, like a small number of new people getting hired at my studio and the reopening of an internship program. I don't see 2026 as a "good" year, but I feel like this year is where things mostly stabilize and may start turning (cautiously) toward growth again near the end of the year. We still have some axes yet to fall - Ubisoft is still in process of breaking itself apart and EA hasn't gone through with the deal to go private. In Ubi's case, that may have some ripples this year. For EA, I don't expect major changes to happen until a year after the deal goes through (similar to how Activision didn't get hit with the big layoffs until a year after the acquisition was complete). However, aside from these two, the rest of the industry should continue to chug along. I suspect it will be a fairly conservative year, with more content for already-successful games, but not much else.

Scenario B: The AI Bubble pops, taking a large chunk of the American (and global) economy with it

This scenario essentially wrecks the global economy, causing layoffs and cost-cutting measures across the board. Consumer spending drops because people don't have jobs, leading to a cycle of companies cutting costs (more layoffs) and people spending less. We get another recession, the situation sucks for another year or two, and then things stabilize and start growing (slowly) again. The companies most heavily leveraged in AI likely die, AI evolves into more specialized internal tooling and not the kind of big public-facing panacea it's been billed as. Games once again retreat to the safest options for a few years.

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Watching star trek next generation. First episode. 1987. In a quick background shot there's a guy wearing one of the short skirt uniforms. In 1987. SO BADASS.

I absolutely love this quick cut shot. The Federation is supposed to be a utopian society. So the designers are very clearly stating that traditionally feminine garb is no longer gender coded in utopian society.

It's a super quick shot, likely leaving viewers going, "Was that...?" and having no way to confirm it. (No pause, rewind, or video release.) So they can get away with it.

But. Seriously. They did this in what was THE VERY FIRST EPISODE OF THE BRAND NEW STAR TREK REBOOT.

They boldly went.

No Context Crow #325: Prognosticating Crow

The future is not set in stone, what I believe the tarot does is first and foremost tells you what energies are at play in your life and the most likely outcome that this will lead to. The most likely outcome is not the definitive outcome, it is simply one of many possibilities that can occur. What would be the point of getting a reading and being told something awful is going to happen and then simply accepting it as fact?

If you are a witch or magician and you are accepting your fate without trying to change your circumstances for the better you are a poor occultist in my view. If a tarot reader tells you that if you buy stock on the stock market and will lose money, would you still proceed to invest? You have been told a likely future in which you lose money, but by obtaining that knowledge you have the agency to change direction and ensure you make money.

There are of course some things I do believe are more set in stone, major life events etc. Some things are unavoidable, if a tarot reader tells you that your physical health is bad and that sometime in the near future you're going to have complications it is probably already too late. Things like that are more set in stone and this brings me to another point. The near future is more solidified and easier to predict than the far future and this is because of the many choices you have not yet made that will alter the future.

I find tarots ability to predict the future less useful than its ability to be used introspection and plotting a course that can guide you into the future. By performing a reading for the future you are in a sense already going against the thread of the fates and altering that person's natural course by giving them knowledge of what is likely to happen and giving them more agency to change this than if they had not had the reading in the first place.

It all becomes complex, it's like a doctor who episode.