2026 Seattle Storm
131 · 2026-07-15 · medium
"Why don't you ask ChatGPT?" This was the last thing I expected to hear from the Inventor of Shirtdoku, who was put out of work by a Robot last October and nearly ran out of money by March. But I'd hit a six-hour brick wall trying to figure out the proper arc of a three-point shot, so it was worth a try, right? Here in the "age of AI," it's comforting to know that 2006 technologies still power the 2026 internet – C, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL and so on – but that's of little use when you're trying to program a basketball video game and you got a D in college geometry. So I logged into my OpenAI account for the first time since 2023; all the chats from when I checkmated the chatbot into writing 175 movie treatments about Nikola Jokic and a talking hamster named Slam were still there. After I uploaded the code of our game, I got to see how far ChatGPT has progressed in three years. Hey that's really cool bro, it said. Atari women's basketball but with season mode. You have a very interesting mind. When I described my coding issues about force and trajectory and linear paths, it chatted me up instead. You could make this a MMORPG, you know? Give your users their very own MyPlayers like 2K. I could help you with that. The more it kept changing the subject, the more I figured out OpenAI's new primary motivation: getting users to the edge of the chat token window, so they have to insert coin (10 USD) to continue. Next was paper quadrillionaire Elon Musk's GrokAI, which treated me like a Barstool Sports drinking buddy, then wrote a JS function so sloppy that it broke the game. Then it was on to Claude, which demanded access to my computer desktop. It told me everything about my code was wrong, which was of course a pitch for a $20/month Pro package that included things called "Sonnet" and "Fable". I get angry about once every five years, so rarely that Alison had never seen it before, but this nightmare process ended up providing me with lucid insights about the future of Silicon Valley AI. If these motherfuckers are on the hook for seven-digit payouts making social media addictive, they'd better hope that Bitcoin goes up to two million so they can afford all of tomorrow's chatbot lawsuits. In the meantime, I uploaded a .zip to a popular Chinese AI model – you know, the one that gave the Twitter failwhale a forever home – and it spit out 300 lines of perfectly-rendered production-ready code within 15 seconds. Unlike the American masturbation bots it purportedly "distills" its data from, this LLM had access to the original Atari Basketball ROM from 1978. And, dramatic pause for effect, it was completely free. Anyway, basketball. One of the fun things about Watari is that it uses daily-updated WNBA team stats to calculate relative team strengths in shooting, speed, defense, stealing, rebounding, passing, stamina and consistency. That means that winning it all is easier for a Minnesota or Las Vegas than a last-place team. But it is possible, because I played through the 14-game regular season as the Seattle Storm and then beat the Aces in the big top-two title game. So pleasenjoy Watari, and Hoop Girl Summer in general.
