On Evading a Rabbit Hole, a Friend, a Connection
On Aug 19, 2025, I read the following post on BlueSky:
Via BlueSky
I figured the French JRPG was an allusion to Clair Obscur (still on my list, haven't gotten to actually play it proper yet). I had no clue what the French Bioshock might be and I was incredibly excited to know (and purchase it, when the time came).
I spent a few minutes idly googling around trying to figure out what French developers might have announced a Bioshock-like game. I looked at the list of game announcements from Gamescom 2025 which I figured this post was in the context of, and I skimmed through The Verge's coverage of the event to see if something jumped out at me. The author of this post was running said coverage, which felt like a good reason to look there, but alas alack, nothing.
And then I guess I forgot about it until now, when I was looking at screenshots on my phone. And I figured I'd take Google AI Mode for a spin to see if it could help me figure out what this game was. My first search was literally pasting in the text of the tweet along with its date to ask what game might be referred to here. The engine refused to even try to find the game, stating a lack of details in the original post.
I nudged it to try anyway, and it figured out Clair Obscur as the first game but didn't acknowledge the one I was actually asking about. My next step was to add some pretty explicit context, tell the thing that I was looking for a game that was announced during Gamescom 2025, that might be like Bioshock, and by French developers. And then it told me I was likely looking for Valor Mortis, a game that folks on the internet were calling a "French Revolution Bioshock". It cited a Reddit post for that quote which I'm guessing came out around the time of the Gamescom announcement from its timestamp.
All this while, vanilla Google Search does not yield anything I needed for "French Bioshock", "Bioshock French developer", "French developer Gamescom 2025 Bioshock", beyond the actual game with its regional version. And I don't know that it should, either. Most people are not looking to dig deeper into a vague allusion to a game through search, I think. So it's nice to have this incremental, conversational mode of searching for something and nudging it along when it doesn't get it right. And to be clear, AI Mode does need the human providing important context, which I don't think is a lot to ask for. I would honestly be a little scared of the kinds of data it had access to if it could piece some of this stuff together without a human's guiding hand (that's right, here at this blog, we worry about data privacy, not nonsensical claims of AGI).
However, I'm also struck by the fact that if it were not for AI Mode, I would likely have (1) spent a lot more time on the Gamescom 2025 website to look at all announcements, read descriptions thoroughly, and maybe even discovered another game or two that sounded exciting, or (2) reached out to a friend who keeps tabs on this stuff to see if they knew what the author was talking about, or (3) responded to the original BlueSky post 3 months later, confessing being stumped by what it was, and asking what game they were talking about.
And none of these things that I circumvented are boring things! Sure, they're a little more effort, but the rabbit holes, the opportunity to reach out to a friend, or the opportunity to forge a new connection online are all cool things! These are the things we have (I have?) enjoyed about the internet! And I am not sure that the thing replacing them is worth the convenience, or if we just need to find new ways to do the collective sensemaking and open-ended exploration that used to happen by default in the gaps where search systems failed. I think losing out on those things would be quite sad.
A design problem, you say?