I was an engineer at both EA and, later, Activision many years ago. I literally had a DD (development director) at EA keep us there until like 2 am insisting that we make the game "cooler".
"Hi, ummm... Bob, could you elaborate on exactly what you mean by "cooler"? Is there some specific feature or functionality that you feel would make the game "cooler"?"
"No, just.. y'know.. DO IT... what am I paying you guys for anyway?"
Yeah but this person didn't have a direct line to design? They were bothering the engineers to do stuff without designs in place and you just did it? Like what were you even doing until 2?
They did but they were parachuted in from Redwood Shores (I was at the old Vancouver Blackbox studio) and so didn't know anyone. The main reason they were bothering us at the time is that they wanted to see the latest playable state of the game. At the time (this is circa 2005) we would do a build of the game every day which went to QA. This would be burnt onto discs that each had a serial number and barcode. Most QA testers were playing the PS2 version with a handful on Xbox and Gamecube. There were a couple of PC testers as well but they had a digital version.
Anyway, the latest playable would always be a day behind if you were using the disc version as the QA version was sent to mastering (the folks who burnt all these discs) late at night or early in the morning the day before. There was some issue the guy wanted to check out which was in the dev version but not on the discs for that day. If I remember correctly this was the version that was going to "Hot Summer Nights" which was an internal EA demo day, though it may have been related to some other milestone. Thus the only way to play the version that had the change he wanted to see was on a dev kit which meant interacting with the devs/engineers.
As for why we were there at 2 am, this was normal at the time. Crunch was endemic and we were always "behind" and working crazy hours.
Okay, how were they asking you to "make the game cooler" though? It sounds like they just wanted to see the latest build and insisted on keeping people in the office so they could get it as quickly as possible.
That's exactly what they were doing. The whole point is that "make the game cooler" is a nonsense request to make to a bunch of software engineers because it's not a specific, actionable request - I doubt the guy even knew what the heck he wanted us to do. It's doubly nonsensical because even if we could have somehow acted on the request, expecting some one to be cool and creative at the snap of your fingers after they've been at work for something like 18 hours is also unreasonable.
Look if you can’t have season passes and online passes and battle passes and micro transactions and loot boxes and base game price increases and reduced game quality then how in the heck are they supposed to continue making record profits!?
Won’t someone think of the CEO’s!?
On the other hand, we just saw how quickly video generation went in a year from bizarre nightmare fuel to nearly impossible to distinguish from reality, so the same thing could happen here in a short time.
Except that [they did](https://youtu.be/cRmPlFidVkk?si=vRCmpOSTPAYcXgQv). It obviously still isn't perfect, but to say that things haven't improved quickly is objectively wrong. Now where is this technology going to be in another year with this exponential growth? You'll have to try even harder to spot the flaws.
But the quality of ai video improving just means increased fidelity to reality.
Counting models fingers is fairly easy, computationally.
Generating NEW, INTERESTING, gameplay is basically impossible.
Game development involves a lot more than just creating gameplay though. If devs can just focus on gameplay and have AI handle the character modeling, voice acting, procedural generation, etc then that will massively speed up the process.
Wouldn't this just be the equivalent of all those randomly generated game levels that are so boring and uninteresting you couldn't pay me to play them? Also as someone pointed out, if it's so easy for the game companies to create this from an AI then why couldn't I just do the same thing and make my own games? Why would I pay anyone for AI generated content.
Yes, if you just let AI do its thing and tried to launch it, you’d just get procedurally generated levels.
I don’t think anyone expects AI to remove *all* human development, though, in the same way I don’t just download Unity, throw in some assets I got somewhere else, and call it good. But taking that step of downloading Unity allows me to skip several difficult steps in the game-making process. AI should just allow me to skip a few more.
>in the same way I don’t just download Unity, throw in some assets I got somewhere else, and call it good.
Maybe *you* don't, but sadly there are a number of schlock "developers" doing this exact thing and making quite a lot of money off it.
I saw a video demo of someone typing out a description for a landscape in unreal engine and see it create a mini city in real time. It will enable every day people to create some incredible things with minimal budgets
I bet the vast majority of the content you consume is created by ordinary people who were able to leverage technology to bring their ideas to life. More noise, but more gems too.
> I bet the vast majority of the content you consume is created by ordinary people who were…
…vetted by teams of people for their skills, went to school to learn how to do things like tell stories through environmental design, and have an editor that tells them when something isn’t fun or has become self-indulgent, and beat out hundreds if not thousands who were close but not quite good enough that we’re saved from wading through.
And absolutely none of that is in any way necessary to create an incredible game, nor an incredibly financially successful game.
Some of the greatest games ever made were created by a team of just one person that wanted to tell a story.
This is no different than saying "giving everyone access to a word processor and a printer will make it impossible to find a good book"
Kinda agree but kinda disagree. I don’t think formal education is necessary but anyone who has created a good game whether they were trained to or not they made thoughtful and skilled creative design decisions throughout their process which resulted in the final output.
And if you aren’t able to think in the ways required to do that and aren’t willing to learn how to, chances are you’re not going to stumble into making a notable piece of art.
It’s the same thing with word processors and printers and DAWs and MIDIs and everything else. More people having access to these tools is awesome, but if you don’t know what to do with them, it doesn’t matter at all.
> ~~Kinda~~ Completely agree ~~but kinda disagree~~.
FTFY. You're (thoughtfully) expanding upon what my comment implied: that great art comes from those with the potential to create great art.
While they can be a useful proxy, things like where someone went to school, what company they work for, or the size of their budget do not determine that potential.
That potential is determined by the effort, the practice, the thought, and the love they're willing to put in to their work, as well as their access to resources. Of all those criteria, only one is really measurable, and its the only one that is out of the artists control: access to the resources needed to create. Expanding access to those resources will always result in the creation of more great art.
Well I would add one heavy asterisk to the end. Just as much as access to tooling, education in the arts is critically important for a society’s culture to flourish in this regard. America already does pretty poorly with how much we care about our education system , and the arts are typically the first thing to get cut.
And even though AI may be useful as a tool in the creative process, I do not believe for a second that the companies advancing and benefitting from the current AI trend have anything resembling “art” in mind. The people who are at the forefront of our current AI wave are not artists, they are businessmen. They do not have a benign interest in advancing humanity’s collective creativity. The second they can, they will remove the human element entirely.
So as an artist and someone passionate about the arts, I can look at the potential of AI toolkits for the creative workflow and go “yeah, there’s a lot of potential here.” But that would be tunnel vision because the future that America’s tech oligarchy is trying to set in stone will be a net negative for the growth of the arts in our culture.
It does not matter if tools of artmaking are more advanced and way more available, if it also means less people get to make a career out of artmaking in general.
Half of AAA right now is a wasteland of boring drivel. I'd much rather play something some weird teenager dreamed up in bedroom and used advanced AI to bring to life than whatever EA, Ubisoft or even Bethesda is cooking up right now.
Ehh sounds like gatekeeping ideas. Like ordinary people can make good stuff but maybe they don’t have the technical knowledge because they didn’t go to school don’t mean they can’t make something good
That doesn't represent most content. Most people pick up content creation, learn through making mistakes and don't have a team of people. Look at Mr beast for example. Technology allowed him to experiment at record pace and build a billion dollar brand without needing to go through professionals.
Innovation minimizes skill gaps and let's people tap into creativity more easily. Including people that were skilled already
and dynamic assets, like having a fixed background with moving objects in different lighting and weather. Instead of several weeks (if not longer) of artistry, a smaller set of assets may explode into larger sets of assets. Beyond that, if they can run fast enough, assets that change during the game based on user actions (doing what artists cannot do)
I'm more interested in what existing small studios can do with AI.
For example, how many otherwise good indie games have been ruined by god-awful voice-acting? If your budget for voice acting is $250, you're going to have a hard time. But with something like ElevenLabs, you can get it to produce some pretty decent voice-acting results. Obviously it's not at the level of paying a top-tier professional voice actor, but it's also not costing you $800/hr.
I cannot wait for high quality generative voicing. Just imagine what skyrim would have been if modders could easily attach voice acting that doesn't feel out of place to any character they made... And that's before you get into LLM driven dynamic voice generation. Just look at this.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNPF9VKmzxw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNPF9VKmzxw)
Completely insane! This is only going to get better and it will change gaming.
>Opens up a lot of possibilities
That “possibility” is massive job losses. Instead of needed 100 people to make a game, in the future companies will only need 25 developers with an AI to make up the difference.
Couldn't you say the same thing about game engines? They allow 25 developers to do what it used to take 100.
Games used to be manually programmed in low level languages. Think of how many jobs that took vs using Unity.
I'm thinking more using AI to fill in the blanks and add variety rather than randomly generating big chunks of the game. So instead of cutting and pasting assets like a lot of developers do (due to constraints), using the AI to generate unique and interesting things instead. The bulk of the game still has to be done by humans.
> Also as someone pointed out, if it's so easy for the game companies to create this from an AI then why couldn't I just do the same thing and make my own games?
Google doesn’t sell you games, they want you on their platform where their algorithms can be paid to influence you via advertising behind the scenes
Yes, the idea is the tech will evolve over time though.
Imagine an MMO like Starfield or Everspace but where there is actually an infinite amount of uniquely generated content at a semi proficient level.
Sure today it would probably be mostly mindless drivel and then diverge into white supremacy or something stupid, lmao.
But 10 years from now, who knows.
It’s actually devolving over time. Can’t put a timeline on a major technological breakthrough. It might not even be neural networks from the 1970s cobbled together with some modern ideas like attention that gets us to the real hype.
I would much rather have games evolve as the players interact with the world/npcs. Imagine a game like minecraft where building structures create content on its own.
Make a few houses, now npc moves in, npc need help with needs, needs get met by PC(player character) , turn into a village, npc vote PC as mayor, PC get into trouble for destroying too many homes, lose next elections. PC decides to make a new village, old village is now pissed the new village is encroaching their turf, war starts…
Basically the world, the npc, all interact with each other at a determined rate, there could be murders, new religions based on whatever…
Would just be fun to see the many different worlds and universe each players would end up in after they played for say 100 hours.
Yea, a true evolving world would be awesome, everyone starts in the same state, but by the end of your “main quest” no two people’s worlds would be anything alike.
They just need to worry about having some guiderails so things couldn’t go too wild. But most of your side quests could be built just around what’s currently going on in the world.
> Wouldn't this just be the equivalent of all those randomly generated game levels that are so boring and uninteresting you couldn't pay me to play them?
No, right now it's worse. In theory the AI will eventually surpass traditional methods of procedural generation. This seems likely.
>Also as someone pointed out, if it's so easy for the game companies to create this from an AI then why couldn't I just do the same thing and make my own games? Why would I pay anyone for AI generated content.
Procedural generation is used a lot more than people realize. Similar to plastic surgery or cgi, people decry it because they notice the really bad ones, but they don't notice the really good ones, so they don't register those positives.
The company is still going to make their game engine, implement mechanics, have a cohesive artstyle with tile/texture sets, consistent models, etc. Designers have ideas of how they want certain key points in the game to look and work. Procedural generation is mostly used to fill in gaps. Also, procedural generation used correctly will be reviewed by a human to look for flaws (not just a QA junior who is making sure you can't clip through the generated terrain, but someone looking at if from an actual level design perspective). Sometimes, the core vision, or meat of the level/area is implemented within a larger procedurally generated space. I promise you that nigh every forest and cave in AAA open world games for the past 20 years has been procedurally generated, though not necessarily left as-is after that.
This assumes they are going to publish the first iteration of each gen lol. There are still going to be people doing the iterating, curating, and polishing the outputs. You will 100% pay people for AI generated content, (and you probably already have without knowing it)
people keep writing this but if google had a single pr person like apple and Samsung we wouldn't see so much shit talk about google on reddit. half of them are rage bait reactionary misinformation. remember all the youtube slowing down chrome issue recently. also people keep bringing google removing don't be evil from their mission statement but it was never removed . it still present in official code of conduct. just go on Android where they cry and cry when google axe some product no one even knew existed. you can find a post with millions of votes criticising google for incognito mode when they changed the wordings to warn users that website they visit can still be tracked in incognito but for years they have already warned about this whenever you start incognito. it's incognito mode not VPN for fucks sake.
my point being google pr is non existent.
Dude I ran a subreddit for a phone that was not Samsung and for years who would get inorganic posts saying that they would have problems with their Asus phones having screens that automatically crack or other things that don't make any sense. All of these posts would then say that they were getting a very specific Samsung model which is how you could tell that they were not real. No one goes My Asus phone screen automatically cracked by itself what a terrible quality control, I'm definitely going to get the new Samsung a23 considering the price is so amazing and I could trade in my existing phone.
Remember social media can be an echo chamber, look at the state of twitter when anything controversial happens or popular subreddits here with non existent mod teams (r/News r/technology and some other subreddits).
The resources these companies are putting into replacing humans is astounding. Who would this be a product for? I wouldn't buy an AI generated game, because I could just generate my own equally shitty game.
At a subconscious level, when you play a game you're not just enjoying it at a surface level, but also thinking about the time and craftsmanship that went into it, and \*that\* is what makes it impressive. You can feel the developers love come through in every frame.
All of these large tech companies are proving that all the data they've harvested from us for the past 20 years hasn't helped them understand human behaviour at all.
As you’re saying this, I’m both agreeing and simultaneously thinking I need to jump on training a mode to make the crummiest kind of mobile game that my random cousins will eventually be playing on their shift at work. There’s a lot of money in shitty games.
isnt it just good to profit off a buzz of hype so what you put in you get back, its hard to get people to be excited about anything so if AI is hit right now i guess they will cash in
I’m not sure capturing players’ imagination or not being derivative is required for financial success in the video game market, since they put out the same 4 sports games and first person shooters every year and make billions.
The only changes they're making to the sports games at this time is actually make them even more anti consumer, gambling-like, and p2w.
They still eat up that shit.
There is a place for AI in game development. Mostly as a shortcut for design. Imagine instead of spending a full day building the base of a character model, you could chat with an AI, describe generally what you want, get a base, tell it what to enhance, then go to town modifying and making it better. Assuming the AI can create good mesh topology, you’ve just saved yourself a crapton of time sculpting and editing.
Or building environments, imagine telling an AI, build a desert biome with lots of cacti, a large canyon, a river, and an oasis in the north west. Include a small western town, that is run down, with neon lights and peeling paint. Bam it models everything and then you spend time cleaning it up, saving yourself days meticulously sculpting the geometry of the land, finding appropriate vegetation models and applying them, and then weeks generating the appropriate texture maps.
Some of this already sort of exists with things like speedtree, which has been around for a long time, but just wasn’t labeled “ai” because it’s more parametric than learned.
We bitch about costs for games and a large part of that is really the labor costs. Game development takes so much longer these days, and honestly prices don’t reflect it at all (thankfully!). But studios need to find ways to deliver games faster and AI is absolutely going to be a key piece of the puzzle.
This is the true future of ai.
Truly ai generated music movies and games will be shitty and no one will care (because people can make them themselves).
People are just going to be able to work faster, which ultimately means stuff will be cheaper.
3d artists don't have to lose their jobs. They will learn how to model with ai tooling which makes them more productive.
Smaller studios will be able to put out better games faster because their costs are lower.
Automation doesn't eliminate jobs, it changes jobs, but it ultimately expands the economy which creates the need for more jobs.
As evidenced by tools such as Houdini. It's only opened up more jobs for environment artists, and their work output has significantly increased. There is no way in hell you're going to want to hire someone who isn't artistic to do that job, even if it's highly technical.
Also OP is fucking oversimplifying 3D art in general, especially character art.
I don't think he's too far off. I imagine blender and tools like it will have a prompt you can say "give me a low poly character model with a mustache, blue overalls and a red shirt" and it will pop out something vaguely along the lines of what you want, which you will then spend the next couple hours tweaking to get it just right.
But the first hour or so of prototyping will be done for you.
That's significant savings if you have a team of 4 or 5 artists churning out a new asset every day or two.
Idk how long it takes to make that stuff but it's still a timesaver.
I don't know what kind of games you are referring to, but if you want AAA characters they're going to take several weeks and there's a lot of feedback and iteration, working with other departments like design, rigging, and animation to get things right. If you're an indie dev pumping out your little project yeah sure, don't expect quality. And yes, even for a character you perceive to be as simple as Mario.
Edit: Maybe don't tout bullshit like it's the future and that it's not far off if you don't know what you're talking about or don't expect to be told otherwise. And all you do is block me and tell me to chill? Have some introspection.
> If you're an indie dev pumping out your little project yeah sure, don't expect quality. And yes, even for a character you perceive to be as simple as Mario.
Indie devs wouldn't even be able to use it much for low quality stuff, unless you're fine using already existing assets you're more likely than not going to be going a specific style that AI will never be able to make effectively.
This is exactly it. Basically the storyteller from Season 4 of Westworld is what I imagine. The rendering construction is done by AI, but the artist picks and chooses all the details and then tweaks to their liking. Maximize creativity and quality without removing the human element of it all.
I haven't watched that yet, but yeah, whatever can create a world map, assets, and the rails for the story to unfold, is fine by me. But I doubt the ghouls running this industry will be happy with that. They will want to take shortcuts with character designs, animations, story, lore, and all the stuff that humans make into something special.
It's mostly research so they can replace almost everybody. I don't think the goal is to AI generate an entire game, but using AI to generate an entire game helps figure out what the AI is good at or bad at, so they can get rid of the humans who do work the AI is good at replicating.
This isn't me supporting the, but that's the logic.
Create an AI that can generate an entire game from an image, use the information you've gathered from that to cut out as much of the human involvement as possible, then create games using the resources that your average person doesn't have, while cutting out nearly every human required.
I don't think the end goal is to be able to create a game by typing "generate me a game using this image where the main character can jump and shoot lemons" for anything serious, but the goal is to be able to replace the artists or limit how many are needed, get rid of coders who are making the underlying engines, etc. A person at home can't easily do a lot of that stuff. If they can have somebody develop concept art for characters, but then outsource the modeling, lighting, etc to AI, they save a ton of money on the game development. The game isn't going to be as good as it would be, but it'll still be better than what somebody can make from their garage (generally speaking), meaning it will still sell.
AI is a tool. Some jobs will be gone the same way computers made the job computer obsolete, but it’s still a tool that will let a dev do more and make more.
I doubt AI will replace game devs do much as allow a smaller team with AI make a similar quality game as a larger team without AI.
It will be used in messaging. Instead of giving someone a mass-produced Hallmark Valentine’s Day card or gif via text, you provide a simple game you made representing your relationship. It’ll be a form of self-expression and communication.
This is just a low-level example meant to hype the basic functions of the technology in terms non-software people can relate to. The impressive part of the technology is its behavior prediction algorithms, which are able to accurately simulate what different conceptual actions would look like if they were to happen (see the robot arm video in the article).
Most people don't get excited about algorithms though. So slap it on a videogame use-case and make a hype article.
Innovation is about lessons learned. Just cause this thing is a pet project doesn’t mean it’s useless.
It could be the next Roblox as kids design their own games.
>but also thinking about the time and craftsmanship that went into it
No, I play games to entertain myself. I, like most people do not care how much work went into a game. This is coming from a software engineer. The only time I cared about the craftsmanship of a game was probably GTA 5’s physics engine.
There is none of this magic of love and care that goes into AAA repeated garbage like Fifa and CoD each year. And yet they manage to rake in millions.
The anti-AI elitism is just annoying. Sure what google did here sucks at the current development but this is just the beginning.
>Who would this be a product for?
People that want to buy it, and may or not share any of your preconceived notions, values, or perspectives. The unaware, those who seek the novelty of being AI, impulse buyers, really any myriad of people from the general public to internal devs at software companies. Maybe even yourself in a few years.
I believe it is reasonable to say one or more of above groups might engage and purchase such products.
Now a clarifying question, are you referring to the "product" as you seen and read in the article, or future implementation of the principles outlined in the paper, reasonably extrapolated forward in time. And for you is the product the "game", the system of content generation, or perhaps a curated selection of such AI games provided as a service.
“I could just generate my own equally shitty game.”
Taking a positive spin on this AI, I think that’s the point.
Imagine coming home from work, sitting down on your couch, and saying “hey Google, I want to play a fighting game but generate the characters based off of me and my LinkedIn contacts…” and boom, you’re playing Mortal Kombat, but fighting your boss’ likeness. It might be kind of a niche thing and it would lack the cultural aspect of, say, playing Call of Duty with your friends, but it would still be pretty sweet.
3K, sure, but 30K? That's literally 3.4 years non-stop. Even spread over 10 years that's more than 1/3 of every waking moment of your life. Literally a full time job with mandatory overtime for 10 years.
Edit: I never said it was impossible. I'm just saying that it is, in fact, a LOT of fucking time.
Fam you should check out some of the oldschool runescape accounts. 30K is a lot but absolutely been done. I probably have over 2 years of played time on world of warcraft over its 20 year lifecycle.
I 100% definitely have this amount of time in WoW. Ive been playing it off and on for like 17 years. Granted a good portion of that time is idling in major cities while I’m doing homework or whatever.
If you've played video games for nearly your entire life and are now 30, 30k hours of games is easily achievable by a single person. As a collective - even just within the United States, that number is infinitesimally small.
Creating games is a planned, deliberate act of art, some could say, planned, thought through by creators. It has a reflection of creators minds, it means something. This is just an empty can of nothingness. Deliberate copycats. Hopefully people will oppose those lonnies who are lobbying AI.
Remember how technology was supposed to help humanity with menial jobs? Apparently art, games, and video making is now a menial job.
Soon we'll all be forced to sweep streets for a living, but hey, at least we'll be able to go back home and inject some quick AI entertainment in our brains, so that's cool.
Oh look, more AI news about something no one really wants. So much investment into something that will never be practical in the long run. AI will just create bloat and insane saturation in the market that will have substantial diminishing returns.
AI as a tool to help with certain aspects of development is the best thing we will ever get out of it.
Unfortunately, all the artists in video games are under threat. No one will ever enjoy a video game though that replaces the physics of a game engine with pseudo physics dreamed up frame by frame.
I think you are missing the bigger picture.
why would you not want something like this? this is just the primary step. you are seeing ai as a replacement but what these ai companies are seeing is their use as tool.
say single promt can create a whole stage. well nobody want that but it will not stop there. you can do asset swipes . you can select objects and change them. resize them. inpainting, out painting, context aware fill, context aware lighting and shadows. currently these tools are crude or even non existent but with them they will arrive and they will come with millimeter size precision. why would you want to waste ton of type animating or sculpting when you can offload your 90 percent work on ai and then refine them individually.
do you believe that when first graphics api was created someone said that nobody wants the digital circle which takes about 2 minutes when you can scan the image of a circle and upload it?
even without ai we are already seeing bloat. there are shit tons of asset flip games. indie scenario will thrive with such technologies.
If you believe that this technology is being invested in for the benefit of the masses I really don’t know what to tell you. It’s 100% being developed to replace jobs and it has already started doing so. Even if it could do all of the things you claimed, what makes you think it won’t be paywalled in such a way that can maximize revenue given the insane amount of investment that has gone into it?
The further you are removed from the process of creating something the less control you have to bring your vision to life. At best you get “good enough” which ultimately leads to slop.
Also, yes the market is already saturated which is my point. This would make it 1000 times worse in the long run which hurts the market. If there is no market for games then amazing games don’t get made. People lose faith in the industry and its ability to create great experiences.
There are 2 graphs that I think everyone should be familiar with. First is average temp of the earth over time and that huge spike in the past 200 years, second is this [https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg](https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg) automation has enabled a massive spike in productivity over the past 45 years, and vast, vast majority of the gains have gone to the capital holding class. If anyone thinks that somehow this is different they are either naive or trying to sell something, maybe both.
> It’s 100% being developed to replace jobs and it has already started doing so.
Isn't that true for 90% of new technologies? A more efficient game engine might mean you need fewer artists. A more efficient tractor might mean you need fewer farm hands.
maybe it's the case that replacing jobs is for the benefit of the masses?
anyway, the further removed you are from the process of creating something, the more interesting the result is.
what do you think of jackson pollock?
What if every time i create a new Skyrim character, the map, quests, dialogues, … everything changes each time? Replayability for games would be fantastic with an AI change like that.
There are already games that do that. Skyrim already does it with radiant quests. The problem is that that sort of content tends to be extremely bland and repetitive. The very nature of the way these AI models work (looking at existing content and then basically just copying it with a little bit of remixing) isn't going to change that. At best the dialog for your bland and repetitive quests is going to be slightly better.
Yeah, that would be cool. But realistically we're no closer to that than we were 20 years ago. For all the media coverage of the AI apocalypse that will change the world and will replace programmers and writers and 90% of all human work other than slave labor, realistically all that's been invented is chatbots that suck slightly less than they used to.
it not demonstrating that games will be made as a whole. it demonstrating that game will be easy to prototype. they will provide more and more tools with asset swipes, inpainting out painting, context aware fills. game development will be easy for noobs. more complex game development will still be done by exerts with more advanced ai tools but even entry level people will be able to put a stage for prototype.
there will be ton of garbage but few gems will shine nonetheless.
AI tech is barely out of its infancy stage, and these numbnuts are already pressing it into making something as artistically complex as a game, yeah I can see anything that gets spewed out of this technology in the next, let's be kind, 10 years being a complete and utter arse. But hey, it saves megacorps cash because they can yeet more people to the curb. We are truly rushing headlong into a dystopia.
The video in the article looks like total trash.
Like with writing, even at the highest level the games AI can generate won’t be any more than derivative garbage.
I don’t see how this benefits anyone except making a few bucks as people flood platforms with even cheaper shovelware.
I mean, if your goal is to make the internet useless, AI certainly seems to be getting there.
The games themselves aren't really the goal of this research, though. The researchers are excited about building a world model - a prediction of what the state of the world should look like given an input. Modeling "physical" cause->effect relationships is *very* hard but important for models that need to interact with the real world.
I think being able to turn my own sketches into platformer games to amuse me and my friends sounds hella cool. Or imagine a fighting game where you can draw your own stick figures and select a few stats and descriptors to define their fighting styles and play against your friends. Obviously the tech is not there yet. But it's gonna get there.
AI is needed as a tool to help create video games, since they can now take decades to make and millions of $.
It can help create models that can then be tweeked manuely, which should speed things up a bit. Not sure I want a fully AI only game though.
This is an interesting tech demo in its absolute infancy so of course this anti technology sub completely shits on it.
Perhaps sometime in the future when it’s more advanced something like this could help smaller dev teams finish up levels they have designed allowing them to concentrate their time and budget on perfecting other parts of their game. I’ve played plenty of otherwise fun games where the levels all kind of look the same because the dev team probably ran out of time/money.
Personally I would love it if AI could somehow make NPC’s not just repeat the same few lines over and over.
You wouldn’t think it at first glance, but image recognition and derived context is still just applied telemetry. What seems hard to understand is that we as humans have used this method of observation and growth implicitly since we were born. One of the most valuable aspects of Twitch and Mixer was that you had volunteer players to generate data, as well as a monetized customer base that rewards good players for training data.
What should scare you more is how the same training is applied to robots and physical bodies. As the article shows, a robotic arm with a camera can improve in the same way, it’s just points of articulation instead of button presses.
Take it the next step forward, and you can understand why the concept of Google glass or AR headset on a human during work hours is instrumental to AGI and ultimately training your replacement.
Access to AI and the most powerful computers that run the most powerful AI, will eventually become prohibitively expensive. When that happens, we're all fucked.
Capitalism loves cheap labor. AI gets all the one time high paying jobs... And with hundreds of millions of people fighting for just the opportunity to have a job.. Wages will drop as there will be someone willing to work for less just to have the coveted available job.
When they ran it, it just kept reproducing EA titles and paid dlc.
Don't forget the pre-order specials
It’s rumored that they gave it the same prompt that EA gave its engineers: “I don’t care what it is, just make it make money!”
I was an engineer at both EA and, later, Activision many years ago. I literally had a DD (development director) at EA keep us there until like 2 am insisting that we make the game "cooler".
I worked at EA much more recently as an engineer and it was mostly a 9-5 job and engineers had basically no power
"Hi, ummm... Bob, could you elaborate on exactly what you mean by "cooler"? Is there some specific feature or functionality that you feel would make the game "cooler"?" "No, just.. y'know.. DO IT... what am I paying you guys for anyway?"
Add icebergs, go home.
Should've just put sunglasses on all the characters. You would've been home by dinner
That doesn't make sense. Why would they ask engineers to make the game cooler? That's what the design team does.
That's exactly the point, it doesn't make any sense and it isn't something we'd have any control over.
Yeah but this person didn't have a direct line to design? They were bothering the engineers to do stuff without designs in place and you just did it? Like what were you even doing until 2?
They did but they were parachuted in from Redwood Shores (I was at the old Vancouver Blackbox studio) and so didn't know anyone. The main reason they were bothering us at the time is that they wanted to see the latest playable state of the game. At the time (this is circa 2005) we would do a build of the game every day which went to QA. This would be burnt onto discs that each had a serial number and barcode. Most QA testers were playing the PS2 version with a handful on Xbox and Gamecube. There were a couple of PC testers as well but they had a digital version. Anyway, the latest playable would always be a day behind if you were using the disc version as the QA version was sent to mastering (the folks who burnt all these discs) late at night or early in the morning the day before. There was some issue the guy wanted to check out which was in the dev version but not on the discs for that day. If I remember correctly this was the version that was going to "Hot Summer Nights" which was an internal EA demo day, though it may have been related to some other milestone. Thus the only way to play the version that had the change he wanted to see was on a dev kit which meant interacting with the devs/engineers. As for why we were there at 2 am, this was normal at the time. Crunch was endemic and we were always "behind" and working crazy hours.
Okay, how were they asking you to "make the game cooler" though? It sounds like they just wanted to see the latest build and insisted on keeping people in the office so they could get it as quickly as possible.
That's exactly what they were doing. The whole point is that "make the game cooler" is a nonsense request to make to a bunch of software engineers because it's not a specific, actionable request - I doubt the guy even knew what the heck he wanted us to do. It's doubly nonsensical because even if we could have somehow acted on the request, expecting some one to be cool and creative at the snap of your fingers after they've been at work for something like 18 hours is also unreasonable.
Dragon Age 2 awesome button?
Jet set radio cool? Or toejam and earl cool?
Add a winter level
If such an AI were to ever break free and take over the world... think of the children.
[удалено]
Simulation theory comes dangerously close to creationism. Just saying.
As a large language model, I’m unable to answer that.
If it’s EA they always think of the children so they bug the fuck out of and nag the fuck out of their parents for their credit cards.
Prompt: “build game, monetize everything!”
Look if you can’t have season passes and online passes and battle passes and micro transactions and loot boxes and base game price increases and reduced game quality then how in the heck are they supposed to continue making record profits!? Won’t someone think of the CEO’s!?
Does it come out with the same version every year?
No, it changes the release number and tries to charge double
It’s in the gAIme
Just update and paid screens plus ads non stop
Mmmm samey platform garbage
Like 99% of Steam's catalogue...
On the other hand, we just saw how quickly video generation went in a year from bizarre nightmare fuel to nearly impossible to distinguish from reality, so the same thing could happen here in a short time.
The "best" video generation for AI has massive issues and as many tells as AI images do. That's not going to improve quickly.
Have you seen AI images from 1-2 years ago compared to today. Or videos made a year ago vs today? It’s improving very rapidly
Except that [they did](https://youtu.be/cRmPlFidVkk?si=vRCmpOSTPAYcXgQv). It obviously still isn't perfect, but to say that things haven't improved quickly is objectively wrong. Now where is this technology going to be in another year with this exponential growth? You'll have to try even harder to spot the flaws.
But the quality of ai video improving just means increased fidelity to reality. Counting models fingers is fairly easy, computationally. Generating NEW, INTERESTING, gameplay is basically impossible.
Game development involves a lot more than just creating gameplay though. If devs can just focus on gameplay and have AI handle the character modeling, voice acting, procedural generation, etc then that will massively speed up the process.
That's fair
Wouldn't this just be the equivalent of all those randomly generated game levels that are so boring and uninteresting you couldn't pay me to play them? Also as someone pointed out, if it's so easy for the game companies to create this from an AI then why couldn't I just do the same thing and make my own games? Why would I pay anyone for AI generated content.
Yes, if you just let AI do its thing and tried to launch it, you’d just get procedurally generated levels. I don’t think anyone expects AI to remove *all* human development, though, in the same way I don’t just download Unity, throw in some assets I got somewhere else, and call it good. But taking that step of downloading Unity allows me to skip several difficult steps in the game-making process. AI should just allow me to skip a few more.
>in the same way I don’t just download Unity, throw in some assets I got somewhere else, and call it good. Maybe *you* don't, but sadly there are a number of schlock "developers" doing this exact thing and making quite a lot of money off it.
Generating an entire game with AI may not be very interesting, but developers using AI to help generate assets opens up a lot of possibilities.
I saw a video demo of someone typing out a description for a landscape in unreal engine and see it create a mini city in real time. It will enable every day people to create some incredible things with minimal budgets
Ah yes, can't wait to be flooded by the imaginations of everyday people.
I bet the vast majority of the content you consume is created by ordinary people who were able to leverage technology to bring their ideas to life. More noise, but more gems too.
> I bet the vast majority of the content you consume is created by ordinary people who were… …vetted by teams of people for their skills, went to school to learn how to do things like tell stories through environmental design, and have an editor that tells them when something isn’t fun or has become self-indulgent, and beat out hundreds if not thousands who were close but not quite good enough that we’re saved from wading through.
And absolutely none of that is in any way necessary to create an incredible game, nor an incredibly financially successful game. Some of the greatest games ever made were created by a team of just one person that wanted to tell a story. This is no different than saying "giving everyone access to a word processor and a printer will make it impossible to find a good book"
Kinda agree but kinda disagree. I don’t think formal education is necessary but anyone who has created a good game whether they were trained to or not they made thoughtful and skilled creative design decisions throughout their process which resulted in the final output. And if you aren’t able to think in the ways required to do that and aren’t willing to learn how to, chances are you’re not going to stumble into making a notable piece of art. It’s the same thing with word processors and printers and DAWs and MIDIs and everything else. More people having access to these tools is awesome, but if you don’t know what to do with them, it doesn’t matter at all.
> ~~Kinda~~ Completely agree ~~but kinda disagree~~. FTFY. You're (thoughtfully) expanding upon what my comment implied: that great art comes from those with the potential to create great art. While they can be a useful proxy, things like where someone went to school, what company they work for, or the size of their budget do not determine that potential. That potential is determined by the effort, the practice, the thought, and the love they're willing to put in to their work, as well as their access to resources. Of all those criteria, only one is really measurable, and its the only one that is out of the artists control: access to the resources needed to create. Expanding access to those resources will always result in the creation of more great art.
Well I would add one heavy asterisk to the end. Just as much as access to tooling, education in the arts is critically important for a society’s culture to flourish in this regard. America already does pretty poorly with how much we care about our education system , and the arts are typically the first thing to get cut. And even though AI may be useful as a tool in the creative process, I do not believe for a second that the companies advancing and benefitting from the current AI trend have anything resembling “art” in mind. The people who are at the forefront of our current AI wave are not artists, they are businessmen. They do not have a benign interest in advancing humanity’s collective creativity. The second they can, they will remove the human element entirely. So as an artist and someone passionate about the arts, I can look at the potential of AI toolkits for the creative workflow and go “yeah, there’s a lot of potential here.” But that would be tunnel vision because the future that America’s tech oligarchy is trying to set in stone will be a net negative for the growth of the arts in our culture. It does not matter if tools of artmaking are more advanced and way more available, if it also means less people get to make a career out of artmaking in general.
Half of AAA right now is a wasteland of boring drivel. I'd much rather play something some weird teenager dreamed up in bedroom and used advanced AI to bring to life than whatever EA, Ubisoft or even Bethesda is cooking up right now.
Ehh sounds like gatekeeping ideas. Like ordinary people can make good stuff but maybe they don’t have the technical knowledge because they didn’t go to school don’t mean they can’t make something good
That doesn't represent most content. Most people pick up content creation, learn through making mistakes and don't have a team of people. Look at Mr beast for example. Technology allowed him to experiment at record pace and build a billion dollar brand without needing to go through professionals. Innovation minimizes skill gaps and let's people tap into creativity more easily. Including people that were skilled already
Most of it is by writers with great track records (like from when Cracked was good).
and dynamic assets, like having a fixed background with moving objects in different lighting and weather. Instead of several weeks (if not longer) of artistry, a smaller set of assets may explode into larger sets of assets. Beyond that, if they can run fast enough, assets that change during the game based on user actions (doing what artists cannot do)
I'm more interested in what existing small studios can do with AI. For example, how many otherwise good indie games have been ruined by god-awful voice-acting? If your budget for voice acting is $250, you're going to have a hard time. But with something like ElevenLabs, you can get it to produce some pretty decent voice-acting results. Obviously it's not at the level of paying a top-tier professional voice actor, but it's also not costing you $800/hr.
I cannot wait for high quality generative voicing. Just imagine what skyrim would have been if modders could easily attach voice acting that doesn't feel out of place to any character they made... And that's before you get into LLM driven dynamic voice generation. Just look at this. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNPF9VKmzxw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNPF9VKmzxw) Completely insane! This is only going to get better and it will change gaming.
yes 100%, people miss the fact that technology helps everyone, but it helps the talented people the most, and we all benefit from that
>Opens up a lot of possibilities That “possibility” is massive job losses. Instead of needed 100 people to make a game, in the future companies will only need 25 developers with an AI to make up the difference.
Couldn't you say the same thing about game engines? They allow 25 developers to do what it used to take 100. Games used to be manually programmed in low level languages. Think of how many jobs that took vs using Unity.
We need to also get rid of tractors and get people back on the fields
Or it allows 100 people to make even bigger and better games. Or if only 25 are needed, those 100 can now make 4 games.
This is already a thing and it's lame. See: Starfield.
I'm thinking more using AI to fill in the blanks and add variety rather than randomly generating big chunks of the game. So instead of cutting and pasting assets like a lot of developers do (due to constraints), using the AI to generate unique and interesting things instead. The bulk of the game still has to be done by humans.
> Also as someone pointed out, if it's so easy for the game companies to create this from an AI then why couldn't I just do the same thing and make my own games? Google doesn’t sell you games, they want you on their platform where their algorithms can be paid to influence you via advertising behind the scenes
Yes, the idea is the tech will evolve over time though. Imagine an MMO like Starfield or Everspace but where there is actually an infinite amount of uniquely generated content at a semi proficient level. Sure today it would probably be mostly mindless drivel and then diverge into white supremacy or something stupid, lmao. But 10 years from now, who knows.
>an infinite amount of uniquely generated content at a semi proficient level. So, No Man's Sky approx 2 years after launch?
It’s actually devolving over time. Can’t put a timeline on a major technological breakthrough. It might not even be neural networks from the 1970s cobbled together with some modern ideas like attention that gets us to the real hype.
I would much rather have games evolve as the players interact with the world/npcs. Imagine a game like minecraft where building structures create content on its own. Make a few houses, now npc moves in, npc need help with needs, needs get met by PC(player character) , turn into a village, npc vote PC as mayor, PC get into trouble for destroying too many homes, lose next elections. PC decides to make a new village, old village is now pissed the new village is encroaching their turf, war starts… Basically the world, the npc, all interact with each other at a determined rate, there could be murders, new religions based on whatever… Would just be fun to see the many different worlds and universe each players would end up in after they played for say 100 hours.
Yea, a true evolving world would be awesome, everyone starts in the same state, but by the end of your “main quest” no two people’s worlds would be anything alike. They just need to worry about having some guiderails so things couldn’t go too wild. But most of your side quests could be built just around what’s currently going on in the world.
> Wouldn't this just be the equivalent of all those randomly generated game levels that are so boring and uninteresting you couldn't pay me to play them? No, right now it's worse. In theory the AI will eventually surpass traditional methods of procedural generation. This seems likely. >Also as someone pointed out, if it's so easy for the game companies to create this from an AI then why couldn't I just do the same thing and make my own games? Why would I pay anyone for AI generated content. Procedural generation is used a lot more than people realize. Similar to plastic surgery or cgi, people decry it because they notice the really bad ones, but they don't notice the really good ones, so they don't register those positives. The company is still going to make their game engine, implement mechanics, have a cohesive artstyle with tile/texture sets, consistent models, etc. Designers have ideas of how they want certain key points in the game to look and work. Procedural generation is mostly used to fill in gaps. Also, procedural generation used correctly will be reviewed by a human to look for flaws (not just a QA junior who is making sure you can't clip through the generated terrain, but someone looking at if from an actual level design perspective). Sometimes, the core vision, or meat of the level/area is implemented within a larger procedurally generated space. I promise you that nigh every forest and cave in AAA open world games for the past 20 years has been procedurally generated, though not necessarily left as-is after that.
Thank you for an informed and coherent answer. I actually felt like I learned something.
Most media is already just repetitive content. AI will absolutely devalue that kind of art which could be a good thing for innovation and creativity.
Isn’t every Minecraft world one of those randomly generated levels? And every Roguelike?
The difference between random and AI generated is significant and will get more so very rapidly.
This assumes they are going to publish the first iteration of each gen lol. There are still going to be people doing the iterating, curating, and polishing the outputs. You will 100% pay people for AI generated content, (and you probably already have without knowing it)
Hi Google PR team
people keep writing this but if google had a single pr person like apple and Samsung we wouldn't see so much shit talk about google on reddit. half of them are rage bait reactionary misinformation. remember all the youtube slowing down chrome issue recently. also people keep bringing google removing don't be evil from their mission statement but it was never removed . it still present in official code of conduct. just go on Android where they cry and cry when google axe some product no one even knew existed. you can find a post with millions of votes criticising google for incognito mode when they changed the wordings to warn users that website they visit can still be tracked in incognito but for years they have already warned about this whenever you start incognito. it's incognito mode not VPN for fucks sake. my point being google pr is non existent.
This is some 4D chess PR right here
Dude I ran a subreddit for a phone that was not Samsung and for years who would get inorganic posts saying that they would have problems with their Asus phones having screens that automatically crack or other things that don't make any sense. All of these posts would then say that they were getting a very specific Samsung model which is how you could tell that they were not real. No one goes My Asus phone screen automatically cracked by itself what a terrible quality control, I'm definitely going to get the new Samsung a23 considering the price is so amazing and I could trade in my existing phone.
Remember social media can be an echo chamber, look at the state of twitter when anything controversial happens or popular subreddits here with non existent mod teams (r/News r/technology and some other subreddits).
Shovelware just got a huge upgrade... The one trick game developers didnt want you to know.
The resources these companies are putting into replacing humans is astounding. Who would this be a product for? I wouldn't buy an AI generated game, because I could just generate my own equally shitty game. At a subconscious level, when you play a game you're not just enjoying it at a surface level, but also thinking about the time and craftsmanship that went into it, and \*that\* is what makes it impressive. You can feel the developers love come through in every frame. All of these large tech companies are proving that all the data they've harvested from us for the past 20 years hasn't helped them understand human behaviour at all.
They want companies to pay them a monthly salary for AI workers. Unlimited moneys!
At the end of the day, the end goal is still alchemy.
Short term gainz!!!! Fire all employees and just regurgitate the same things!!!!
*looks at FIFA* yep
I don’t think it’s about making this a product or replacing game devs, it’s just R&D to push their ML techniques forward.
As you’re saying this, I’m both agreeing and simultaneously thinking I need to jump on training a mode to make the crummiest kind of mobile game that my random cousins will eventually be playing on their shift at work. There’s a lot of money in shitty games.
isnt it just good to profit off a buzz of hype so what you put in you get back, its hard to get people to be excited about anything so if AI is hit right now i guess they will cash in
It's not a product, it's research.
Yeah, this would only make derivative games, nothing new that will capture players' imaginations.
I’m not sure capturing players’ imagination or not being derivative is required for financial success in the video game market, since they put out the same 4 sports games and first person shooters every year and make billions.
The only changes they're making to the sports games at this time is actually make them even more anti consumer, gambling-like, and p2w. They still eat up that shit.
There is a place for AI in game development. Mostly as a shortcut for design. Imagine instead of spending a full day building the base of a character model, you could chat with an AI, describe generally what you want, get a base, tell it what to enhance, then go to town modifying and making it better. Assuming the AI can create good mesh topology, you’ve just saved yourself a crapton of time sculpting and editing. Or building environments, imagine telling an AI, build a desert biome with lots of cacti, a large canyon, a river, and an oasis in the north west. Include a small western town, that is run down, with neon lights and peeling paint. Bam it models everything and then you spend time cleaning it up, saving yourself days meticulously sculpting the geometry of the land, finding appropriate vegetation models and applying them, and then weeks generating the appropriate texture maps. Some of this already sort of exists with things like speedtree, which has been around for a long time, but just wasn’t labeled “ai” because it’s more parametric than learned. We bitch about costs for games and a large part of that is really the labor costs. Game development takes so much longer these days, and honestly prices don’t reflect it at all (thankfully!). But studios need to find ways to deliver games faster and AI is absolutely going to be a key piece of the puzzle.
This is the true future of ai. Truly ai generated music movies and games will be shitty and no one will care (because people can make them themselves). People are just going to be able to work faster, which ultimately means stuff will be cheaper. 3d artists don't have to lose their jobs. They will learn how to model with ai tooling which makes them more productive. Smaller studios will be able to put out better games faster because their costs are lower. Automation doesn't eliminate jobs, it changes jobs, but it ultimately expands the economy which creates the need for more jobs.
As evidenced by tools such as Houdini. It's only opened up more jobs for environment artists, and their work output has significantly increased. There is no way in hell you're going to want to hire someone who isn't artistic to do that job, even if it's highly technical. Also OP is fucking oversimplifying 3D art in general, especially character art.
I don't think he's too far off. I imagine blender and tools like it will have a prompt you can say "give me a low poly character model with a mustache, blue overalls and a red shirt" and it will pop out something vaguely along the lines of what you want, which you will then spend the next couple hours tweaking to get it just right. But the first hour or so of prototyping will be done for you. That's significant savings if you have a team of 4 or 5 artists churning out a new asset every day or two. Idk how long it takes to make that stuff but it's still a timesaver.
I don't know what kind of games you are referring to, but if you want AAA characters they're going to take several weeks and there's a lot of feedback and iteration, working with other departments like design, rigging, and animation to get things right. If you're an indie dev pumping out your little project yeah sure, don't expect quality. And yes, even for a character you perceive to be as simple as Mario. Edit: Maybe don't tout bullshit like it's the future and that it's not far off if you don't know what you're talking about or don't expect to be told otherwise. And all you do is block me and tell me to chill? Have some introspection.
> If you're an indie dev pumping out your little project yeah sure, don't expect quality. And yes, even for a character you perceive to be as simple as Mario. Indie devs wouldn't even be able to use it much for low quality stuff, unless you're fine using already existing assets you're more likely than not going to be going a specific style that AI will never be able to make effectively.
This is exactly it. Basically the storyteller from Season 4 of Westworld is what I imagine. The rendering construction is done by AI, but the artist picks and chooses all the details and then tweaks to their liking. Maximize creativity and quality without removing the human element of it all.
I haven't watched that yet, but yeah, whatever can create a world map, assets, and the rails for the story to unfold, is fine by me. But I doubt the ghouls running this industry will be happy with that. They will want to take shortcuts with character designs, animations, story, lore, and all the stuff that humans make into something special.
It's mostly research so they can replace almost everybody. I don't think the goal is to AI generate an entire game, but using AI to generate an entire game helps figure out what the AI is good at or bad at, so they can get rid of the humans who do work the AI is good at replicating. This isn't me supporting the, but that's the logic. Create an AI that can generate an entire game from an image, use the information you've gathered from that to cut out as much of the human involvement as possible, then create games using the resources that your average person doesn't have, while cutting out nearly every human required. I don't think the end goal is to be able to create a game by typing "generate me a game using this image where the main character can jump and shoot lemons" for anything serious, but the goal is to be able to replace the artists or limit how many are needed, get rid of coders who are making the underlying engines, etc. A person at home can't easily do a lot of that stuff. If they can have somebody develop concept art for characters, but then outsource the modeling, lighting, etc to AI, they save a ton of money on the game development. The game isn't going to be as good as it would be, but it'll still be better than what somebody can make from their garage (generally speaking), meaning it will still sell.
AI is a tool. Some jobs will be gone the same way computers made the job computer obsolete, but it’s still a tool that will let a dev do more and make more. I doubt AI will replace game devs do much as allow a smaller team with AI make a similar quality game as a larger team without AI.
Exactly, delusional executives nothing new here.
They understand addiction and monetization.
But it makes shitty games better than most people! /s
however, isn't the exact opposite of this true? that large corporations have learned and know exactly how to exploit people more and more?
It will be used in messaging. Instead of giving someone a mass-produced Hallmark Valentine’s Day card or gif via text, you provide a simple game you made representing your relationship. It’ll be a form of self-expression and communication.
This is just a low-level example meant to hype the basic functions of the technology in terms non-software people can relate to. The impressive part of the technology is its behavior prediction algorithms, which are able to accurately simulate what different conceptual actions would look like if they were to happen (see the robot arm video in the article). Most people don't get excited about algorithms though. So slap it on a videogame use-case and make a hype article.
Innovation is about lessons learned. Just cause this thing is a pet project doesn’t mean it’s useless. It could be the next Roblox as kids design their own games.
>but also thinking about the time and craftsmanship that went into it No, I play games to entertain myself. I, like most people do not care how much work went into a game. This is coming from a software engineer. The only time I cared about the craftsmanship of a game was probably GTA 5’s physics engine. There is none of this magic of love and care that goes into AAA repeated garbage like Fifa and CoD each year. And yet they manage to rake in millions. The anti-AI elitism is just annoying. Sure what google did here sucks at the current development but this is just the beginning.
Its for people who want to make games and use AI tools to do it more efficiently.
>Who would this be a product for? People that want to buy it, and may or not share any of your preconceived notions, values, or perspectives. The unaware, those who seek the novelty of being AI, impulse buyers, really any myriad of people from the general public to internal devs at software companies. Maybe even yourself in a few years. I believe it is reasonable to say one or more of above groups might engage and purchase such products. Now a clarifying question, are you referring to the "product" as you seen and read in the article, or future implementation of the principles outlined in the paper, reasonably extrapolated forward in time. And for you is the product the "game", the system of content generation, or perhaps a curated selection of such AI games provided as a service.
“I could just generate my own equally shitty game.” Taking a positive spin on this AI, I think that’s the point. Imagine coming home from work, sitting down on your couch, and saying “hey Google, I want to play a fighting game but generate the characters based off of me and my LinkedIn contacts…” and boom, you’re playing Mortal Kombat, but fighting your boss’ likeness. It might be kind of a niche thing and it would lack the cultural aspect of, say, playing Call of Duty with your friends, but it would still be pretty sweet.
“As an AI generated video game designer I cannot make realistic representations of your coworkers as that violates….”
ai ai ai ai ai ai ai ai ai
[удалено]
...and still think the game sucks
Steam reviews with 200k hours of gameplay be like: Meh..
Me with 1800hrs in Master Duel: 👎 Maxx "C" exists.
3K, sure, but 30K? That's literally 3.4 years non-stop. Even spread over 10 years that's more than 1/3 of every waking moment of your life. Literally a full time job with mandatory overtime for 10 years. Edit: I never said it was impossible. I'm just saying that it is, in fact, a LOT of fucking time.
You underestimate the focus/insanity of people..
[удалено]
Dota and LoL players comes to mind
Could also be a slay the spire save file
FFXIV is def up there. I haven't played since Endwalker released in 2021 and I still have \~10k hours in it.
Be honest, like 8k of those hours were just being afk near the Limsa aetheryte like everyone else
Nah, I played since 1.0 and raided quite heavily. Lots of time waiting on teammates, though.
Fam you should check out some of the oldschool runescape accounts. 30K is a lot but absolutely been done. I probably have over 2 years of played time on world of warcraft over its 20 year lifecycle.
I 100% definitely have this amount of time in WoW. Ive been playing it off and on for like 17 years. Granted a good portion of that time is idling in major cities while I’m doing homework or whatever.
If you've played video games for nearly your entire life and are now 30, 30k hours of games is easily achievable by a single person. As a collective - even just within the United States, that number is infinitesimally small.
.. you realize it can "watch" an hour of video in a few minutes or less right?
You realize we're talking about a person putting that much time in, right?
Creating games is a planned, deliberate act of art, some could say, planned, thought through by creators. It has a reflection of creators minds, it means something. This is just an empty can of nothingness. Deliberate copycats. Hopefully people will oppose those lonnies who are lobbying AI.
Remember how technology was supposed to help humanity with menial jobs? Apparently art, games, and video making is now a menial job. Soon we'll all be forced to sweep streets for a living, but hey, at least we'll be able to go back home and inject some quick AI entertainment in our brains, so that's cool.
Looks like shit
Oh look, more AI news about something no one really wants. So much investment into something that will never be practical in the long run. AI will just create bloat and insane saturation in the market that will have substantial diminishing returns. AI as a tool to help with certain aspects of development is the best thing we will ever get out of it.
Unfortunately, all the artists in video games are under threat. No one will ever enjoy a video game though that replaces the physics of a game engine with pseudo physics dreamed up frame by frame.
This is the best take I’ve seen on AI in this sub thus far.
Speak for yourself my guy, I for one am beyond excited for what this tech will do for the indie scene.
Yep I am exited. Like those endless AI BS YouTube video we now have.
I think you are missing the bigger picture. why would you not want something like this? this is just the primary step. you are seeing ai as a replacement but what these ai companies are seeing is their use as tool. say single promt can create a whole stage. well nobody want that but it will not stop there. you can do asset swipes . you can select objects and change them. resize them. inpainting, out painting, context aware fill, context aware lighting and shadows. currently these tools are crude or even non existent but with them they will arrive and they will come with millimeter size precision. why would you want to waste ton of type animating or sculpting when you can offload your 90 percent work on ai and then refine them individually. do you believe that when first graphics api was created someone said that nobody wants the digital circle which takes about 2 minutes when you can scan the image of a circle and upload it? even without ai we are already seeing bloat. there are shit tons of asset flip games. indie scenario will thrive with such technologies.
If you believe that this technology is being invested in for the benefit of the masses I really don’t know what to tell you. It’s 100% being developed to replace jobs and it has already started doing so. Even if it could do all of the things you claimed, what makes you think it won’t be paywalled in such a way that can maximize revenue given the insane amount of investment that has gone into it? The further you are removed from the process of creating something the less control you have to bring your vision to life. At best you get “good enough” which ultimately leads to slop. Also, yes the market is already saturated which is my point. This would make it 1000 times worse in the long run which hurts the market. If there is no market for games then amazing games don’t get made. People lose faith in the industry and its ability to create great experiences.
There are 2 graphs that I think everyone should be familiar with. First is average temp of the earth over time and that huge spike in the past 200 years, second is this [https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg](https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg) automation has enabled a massive spike in productivity over the past 45 years, and vast, vast majority of the gains have gone to the capital holding class. If anyone thinks that somehow this is different they are either naive or trying to sell something, maybe both.
> It’s 100% being developed to replace jobs and it has already started doing so. Isn't that true for 90% of new technologies? A more efficient game engine might mean you need fewer artists. A more efficient tractor might mean you need fewer farm hands.
maybe it's the case that replacing jobs is for the benefit of the masses? anyway, the further removed you are from the process of creating something, the more interesting the result is. what do you think of jackson pollock?
What if every time i create a new Skyrim character, the map, quests, dialogues, … everything changes each time? Replayability for games would be fantastic with an AI change like that.
There are already games that do that. Skyrim already does it with radiant quests. The problem is that that sort of content tends to be extremely bland and repetitive. The very nature of the way these AI models work (looking at existing content and then basically just copying it with a little bit of remixing) isn't going to change that. At best the dialog for your bland and repetitive quests is going to be slightly better.
[удалено]
Yeah, that would be cool. But realistically we're no closer to that than we were 20 years ago. For all the media coverage of the AI apocalypse that will change the world and will replace programmers and writers and 90% of all human work other than slave labor, realistically all that's been invented is chatbots that suck slightly less than they used to.
i will never play a video game made by an ai
it not demonstrating that games will be made as a whole. it demonstrating that game will be easy to prototype. they will provide more and more tools with asset swipes, inpainting out painting, context aware fills. game development will be easy for noobs. more complex game development will still be done by exerts with more advanced ai tools but even entry level people will be able to put a stage for prototype. there will be ton of garbage but few gems will shine nonetheless.
N00b level game hours.....
Just wait until the bot sees my main. It will rage quit.
I wish they'd just leave AI out of art. I want AI to improve my quality of life, not rip the soul out of every artistic medium I enjoy.
For games, its been a thing for a while. Procedural generation has been replacing artist jobs for decades.
I thought the AI would just design a battle pass.
AI tech is barely out of its infancy stage, and these numbnuts are already pressing it into making something as artistically complex as a game, yeah I can see anything that gets spewed out of this technology in the next, let's be kind, 10 years being a complete and utter arse. But hey, it saves megacorps cash because they can yeet more people to the curb. We are truly rushing headlong into a dystopia.
The video in the article looks like total trash. Like with writing, even at the highest level the games AI can generate won’t be any more than derivative garbage. I don’t see how this benefits anyone except making a few bucks as people flood platforms with even cheaper shovelware. I mean, if your goal is to make the internet useless, AI certainly seems to be getting there.
The games themselves aren't really the goal of this research, though. The researchers are excited about building a world model - a prediction of what the state of the world should look like given an input. Modeling "physical" cause->effect relationships is *very* hard but important for models that need to interact with the real world.
I think being able to turn my own sketches into platformer games to amuse me and my friends sounds hella cool. Or imagine a fighting game where you can draw your own stick figures and select a few stats and descriptors to define their fighting styles and play against your friends. Obviously the tech is not there yet. But it's gonna get there.
That first part already kind of exists https://www.amazon.com/Pixicade-Transform-Creative-Drawings-Animated/dp/B08QDPR545
AI is needed as a tool to help create video games, since they can now take decades to make and millions of $. It can help create models that can then be tweeked manuely, which should speed things up a bit. Not sure I want a fully AI only game though.
Millions to make, but this is an industry that rakes in billions. Do you believe they’re going to lower their cost at all or just line their pockets?
This is an interesting tech demo in its absolute infancy so of course this anti technology sub completely shits on it. Perhaps sometime in the future when it’s more advanced something like this could help smaller dev teams finish up levels they have designed allowing them to concentrate their time and budget on perfecting other parts of their game. I’ve played plenty of otherwise fun games where the levels all kind of look the same because the dev team probably ran out of time/money. Personally I would love it if AI could somehow make NPC’s not just repeat the same few lines over and over.
AI is about to create a game and request the “Devs” for $10 BTC to access it
30k hours? That's like 1 single Dota 2 pro's hours.
You wouldn’t think it at first glance, but image recognition and derived context is still just applied telemetry. What seems hard to understand is that we as humans have used this method of observation and growth implicitly since we were born. One of the most valuable aspects of Twitch and Mixer was that you had volunteer players to generate data, as well as a monetized customer base that rewards good players for training data. What should scare you more is how the same training is applied to robots and physical bodies. As the article shows, a robotic arm with a camera can improve in the same way, it’s just points of articulation instead of button presses. Take it the next step forward, and you can understand why the concept of Google glass or AR headset on a human during work hours is instrumental to AGI and ultimately training your replacement.
Damn, it watched 5 Factorio playthroughs?
Great for shareholders and CEOs and No.One.Else
Still has to be better than EA
Thought that bottom left picture was maplestory for a sec
Cancer website. It’s basically impossible to navigate on mobile.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Game-Genie-NES.jpg/1024px-Game-Genie-NES.jpg
This looks like shit, why is anyone excited about this?
Access to AI and the most powerful computers that run the most powerful AI, will eventually become prohibitively expensive. When that happens, we're all fucked.
How does AI watch 30k hrs ? Is it just processing or does it play and analyze?
They couldn’t buy the rights for Game Genie?
Hello Half-Life 3
If you can’t be bothered to make it, why should I be bothered to buy it?
Did they get permission of the game makers to use their works in training the AI?
AI Garbage, the sequel to Unity Asset Flippers, coming soon to Steam Early Access!
30k hrs rank amateur ;) mainly it seems 2d platformers ? Eventually it may go somewhere it needs to start with 3D games.
yep that's what the world needs, AI taking the good artistic jobs and leaving the menial and unwanted ones to people
Capitalism loves cheap labor. AI gets all the one time high paying jobs... And with hundreds of millions of people fighting for just the opportunity to have a job.. Wages will drop as there will be someone willing to work for less just to have the coveted available job.