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Why No AI Games?

franklantz.substack.com

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Re: Why No AI Games?

#61

Post by coffeebeqn »

usrusr wrote: post #49

In analogy to suspension of disbelief I'd like to postulate suspension of genericity: when I sink countless hours skimming text content in some The Elder Scrolls I'm not really convinced that much of it is a story worth consuming (my opinion of TES is lower than my number of gameplay hours might suggest), but I'm at least open to the idea that it might be. Thousands of players have paid good money for consuming those…

Procedural generation has always had this problem where over reliance on it feels cheap and not meaningful - see Starfield from the same developer.

I would argue the exact same effect can be seen with AI images or videos - no one is watching those for hours every day on purpose

Re: Why No AI Games?

#62

Post by zoogeny »

PaulHoule wrote: post #54
zoogeny wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who has worked on a game knows it is a long, painful slog to the finish line. AI dev is promising the exact opposite: minimal prompts and the agent does all the slog. Even if AI can whip up a quick demo or prototype for a game, it is the long-tail of tedious details that a passionate person has to hammer away on that separates what ships from what dies. I'm guessing most AI opportunists are looking for quick w…

In the other corner we have the AAA publishers who are laying off devs and canceling games and talking as if AI is going to revolutionize their business… somehow.

Not to be argumentative since I broadly agree with your characterization (and the mass cancelling of games is concerning), but I think AI will revolutionize at least asset creation.

I worked on sports titles for a while and there was literally an army of contractors making uniforms, shoes, hairstyles, etc. I'm pretty convinced gen-AI will make that job obsolete.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#63

Post by coffeebeqn »

aqme28 wrote: post #36

I tried to write a different "convince an AI" game about a year ago, but it was hard to work with, hard to figure out a business-model for, and more importantly-- it just wasn't very fun to play. Maybe there's a different scenario than the one I chose.

I tried prototyping a detective game also but like you said it ends up being a wrapper for a LLM and it’s a bit chaotic, not much more fun than just talking to the LLM in a web interface or whatever

Re: Why No AI Games?

#64

Post by tyleo »

At Rec Room, we made tons of AI games. The problem is that they weren't economical. You need to make a ton of money if your players are burning tokens: https://www.tyleo.com/professional-work-history/rec-room-ugc...

I think folks are having a lot better luck on the tools side. Some interesting things are happening in the AI Game Dev Org Discord: https://www.tyleo.com/blog/the-excommunicated-devs-making-ga...

Re: Why No AI Games?

#65

Post by Copyrightest »

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.

As another commenter points out, this sort of exists in the broader sense of "interactive fiction." There's lots of options for scaffolding an LLM into something like a storytelling toy.

But I truly believe an AI-generated equivalent of Zork or Lost Pig is decades away. The "knowing what it is talking about problem" is not even close to being solved, no matter how impressive coding agents have become. It is simply too easy to sabotage clever game design with accidentally adversarial prompting.

More generally: LLMs are still unfunny except in cases of clear plagiarism. This also extends to making fun games.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#66

Post by pavel_lishin »

valley_guy_12 wrote: post #37

Patrick McKenzie, aka patio11, used a LLM to generate and run a DnD campaign for a gaming convention/conference, He discusses the process and results as part of this podcast on the con. https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/narrative-mas...

I'm going to listen to this, but as a D&D enjoyer - both as a DM and a player - the idea of using an LLM for D&D feels so gross to me.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#67

Post by repne_scasb »

A few years ago when the first diffusion models for image generation came out, we built a Dixit-like party game where you were supposed to guess what was the prompt that generated the image. Back then the image generation models were still quite crappy and that was the main source of fun in the game. You never knew how many limbs you were going to get.

I was pretty surprised to see that the service we set up still works! https://impromptu.fun/ If you'd like to check it out.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#68

Post by bunderbunder »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #66
valley_guy_12 wrote: post #37

Patrick McKenzie, aka patio11, used a LLM to generate and run a DnD campaign for a gaming convention/conference, He discusses the process and results as part of this podcast on the con. https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/narrative-mas...

I'm going to listen to this, but as a D&D enjoyer - both as a DM and a player - the idea of using an LLM for D&D feels so gross to me.

Just based on skimming the transcript, it sounds like it wasn't a D&D campagin, it was actually a roguelike CRPG that he vibecoded in Claude Code.

Still, he mentions some gross things, like how he "got bullied into" adding a game mechanic he didn't want by the LLM. It kept adding it, without being asked, and he finally just got tired of taking it back out again. The mechanic in question was a leveling system, so I imagine the LLM kept adding it because that's such a standard-issue element of dungeon crawler games. Which speaks to my main source of pessimism about AI in games: LLMs have a tendency to want to do standard, middle-of-the-road things, and will tend to fight you every step of the way when you try to involve them in an attempt to do something new and different.

But I imagine you'd run into a similar thing with D&D campaigns. Which, if true, raises the question: why would I need an LLM to generate Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms style quests when back issues of Dungeon magazine already give me more of that kind of material than I could reasonably get through in a lifetime, and probably in a much more polished form?

Re: Why No AI Games?

#69

Post by jaredcwhite »

People are not intrinsically fun? What on earth is this author saying??

As for why no AI games, it's pretty simple really. Planet-destroying plagiarism machines built at a steep loss by oligarchs who delight in putting artists out of business are not fun!

Re: Why No AI Games?

#70

Post by pavel_lishin »

bunderbunder wrote: post #68
pavel_lishin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to listen to this, but as a D&D enjoyer - both as a DM and a player - the idea of using an LLM for D&D feels so gross to me.

Just based on skimming the transcript, it sounds like it wasn't a D&D campagin, it was actually a roguelike CRPG that he vibecoded in Claude Code. Still, he mentions some gross things, like how he "got bullied into" adding a game mechanic he didn't want by the LLM. It kept adding it, without being asked, and he finally just got tired of taking it back out again. The mechanic in question was a leveling system, so I im…

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