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Why No AI Games?

franklantz.substack.com

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Re: Why No AI Games?

#11

Post by waffletower »

YesBox wrote: post #7

For games, interacting with an LLM is an improv experience. It’s a fractal that can be explored in any direction. Video games have discrete, static goals that let a player focus on an objective. Compared to LLMs, it’s a passive experience. People play games for all sorts of reasons (to relax, competition, to build something of their own, solve challenges). I think this is a fundamentally different experience than wha…

It really depends on the style of game. There are gradations here. I think many designers are stuck in a static, controlling posture. Minecraft is an excellent and viral example of an alternative.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#12

Post by mannanj »

coldpie wrote: post #4
azath92 wrote: post #2

Only because it is something i find fascinating: > There are those Orcs in that one Lord of the Rings game who hold grudges against you. Is referring to the nemesis system in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, and its an amazing set of interlocking procedural systems that do genuinely feel like its AI, but is really AI in the sense its always been used by games (the rules the games follow to govern NPC…

> I think a system like this could really work well Too bad, it's patented! https://www.eurogamer.net/shadow-of-mordors-brilliant-nemesi... Fuck software patents and every single person who has ever filed one.

Ah. Well, maybe we could improve the patent system instead? If most property is going digital, and we agree as a society that idea generators and executors deserve compensation for their effort, I think the answer would be better more evolved compensation systems and I agree stopping patents that are clearly a troll though would be better to be fucked.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#13

Post by [deleted] »

azath92 wrote: post #3

And to separate my thoughts from the info blob: i think the culture war point is also super true of the game design industry, not just the consumers, where the already ultra competitive nature of the work means that the creatives and the industry as a whole have taken a veeeery strong stance against genai. Thats a reckon, and i dont know if its good or bad. It does feel a little counter to the march of progress, but…

[deleted]

Re: Why No AI Games?

#14

Post by joshuakcockrell »

> Maybe there are some cool AI-centric games that I’m overlooking?

The enemy locomotion in Arc Raiders was almost entirely created with reinforcement learning. It’s a very impressive modern example (the game has been out for less than 6 months).

Here’s the documentary explaining how the RL locomotion works. Skip to 10 min 36 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRlhpzc7ImA&t=636s

Re: Why No AI Games?

#15

Post by neonnoodle »

> You know what’s fun? A stick. A stick is fun. A ball is fun.

Having a body is fun. I think that's one reason why VR has such quick hype/death cycles--it doesn't do a good enough job of fooling your body. Conventional games induce more like a dissociative or hypnotic state where you temporarily forget your body. That can range from very, VERY abstract (like Pong or Pac-Man, or BABA IS YOU), or built on an attempt to simulate the real world as convincingly as possible through high-end graphics and physics engines.

One of the things that made Untitled Goose Game so much fun for me was that playing it made me _feel like a goose_. It made me want to run around doing goose things for goose reasons. You can spread your wings and honk, regardless of whether it advances the game. A similar game that came out called Little Kitty, Big City offers the promise of the same idea but as a cat instead of a goose. I tried that game but never felt like a cat playing it, instead it felt like being a person controlling a cat. These are such subtle shades of gameplay and storytelling that I have a hard time imagining LLMs being useful in the design.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#16

Post by adampunk »

It’s really weird that this article walks past the 2 likely explanations and then declares them both insufficient in favor of an assertion that maybe it’s not any fun.

Speculative generation is expensive and time consuming and in most cases will just be the game company writing a check to a provider every time the player does something. It’s very difficult to imagine a revenue model which allows that to make sense. Even if you did get it to make sense, you then have to worry about their being a market risk to people associating your game with AI. I don’t think you need more than those two explanations to understand why in two or three years we have not seen games that the author describes come out.

Is it a possibility that talking to a chat bot is not any fun from a games per perspective? Yes it might even be very likely. But we’re not gonna have a real answer to that question tested out by real game developers until it becomes pragmatically possible to ship a game using these tools.

The cost of generation will come down and people will find clever uses for it and one way or another opinions about AI will change. Then maybe we’ll see whether or not these are any fun.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#17

Post by drunken_thor »

I think AI could reinvent text based games in a fresh way that would be fun. Text based games were always so constrained by what the developer could guess that you would type but with AI it really could read more like an interactive choose your own adventure novel that is easy to navigate.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#18

Post by somenameforme »

azath92 wrote: post #3

And to separate my thoughts from the info blob: i think the culture war point is also super true of the game design industry, not just the consumers, where the already ultra competitive nature of the work means that the creatives and the industry as a whole have taken a veeeery strong stance against genai. Thats a reckon, and i dont know if its good or bad. It does feel a little counter to the march of progress, but…

Rather than an affinity for artisanal stuff or there being some bias against AI itself, I think it's simply that most stuff that's going to be made with AI is going to be very derivative. Even before AI you'd read posts from people, including on here, like 'I made a highly competent knockoff of [popular indie game] but got no sales. Woe is me.' But games aren't commodities. If people like a game, that doesn't mean they want to play, let alone buy, a complete knockoff of it.

The biggest barrier to success has always been having a good idea and AI is just going to make that ever more apparent, because you'll be able to cook up knockoffs ever more rapidly.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#19

Post by max8539 »

It could be about cost: big LLMs don’t work locally like most games, and even with server hosting, the context for a well-detailed and non-textual game would grow very fast, so processing it would become slow and/or expensive. These are the current limits for truly generative games.

As for generated content in regular games, I don’t see an issue if the content is high quality and free of errors. People don’t like low-quality content regardless of who generated it - human or LLM. It’s just that there’s currently more bad content coming from LLMs, that’s all

Re: Why No AI Games?

#20

Post by Nevermark »

drunken_thor wrote: post #17

I think AI could reinvent text based games in a fresh way that would be fun. Text based games were always so constrained by what the developer could guess that you would type but with AI it really could read more like an interactive choose your own adventure novel that is easy to navigate.

That was one of my first tests of ChatGPU.

It was actually an incredible experience … except for the quick “game” truncation.

Be interesting to see how Claw can improve on that. Give it some serious design time first.

Also thought about how a smart expansion of Zork would play.

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