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Why No AI Games?

franklantz.substack.com

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Re: Why No AI Games?

#81

Post by Garlef »

I think this is a very interesting question.

But I think getting good AI features into a game requires a very very high engineering effort that is easily underestimated.

Current game engines are very good at creating large worlds with interactable assets: "Pull a lever and the door opens", "enter a building and a preprogrammed event starts", etc.

They are also good at physics simulations.

But ultimately, most of the content is hand-crafted/"hardcoded". And the systems in systemic games are very simple. (With a few exceptions like Dwarf Fortress).

In order to to - for example - let an AI introduce an ad-hoc questline, a lot would need to be formalized.

Imagine the following scenario: When I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 I hoped that I could roleplay as a corpo, slowly going up the ranks, backstabbing, etc. But the sheer amount of social and economic simulation this kind of openness would require is huge.

And it does not help that the work of writers is undervalued in the industry. And also that most creatives are in the anti-AI camp.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#82

Post by nitwit005 »

Why pay for a game that's a ChatGPT wrapper, when you can just describe the game to ChatGPT and get the same experience?

It's the same problem as a bunch of startups that made products that were wrappers around OpenAIs APIs. They weren't providing much value.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#83

Post by azath92 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #48
coldpie wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s not really, the patent is very narrow https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1iyrbzd/clearing_up_... https://patents.google.com/patent/US10926179B2/en The patent was filed in 2016 and granted in 2021. If the system was so useful we would’ve seen it in another game before then, or a very similar system after.

I was aware of the patent, and agree i think its overly narrow and you could get around it easily. I think the reason we haven't seen it or something like it in another game (or i haven't but someone pleeeease id love to hear systems like it), is less because its not useful, or maybe its not useful as a plug and play because the only reason it works is because of the super exhaustive care taken on tuning its parameters and giving it enough variety to make it interesting to play.

Kinda like the dialogue/story paths in something like hades, where IIRC they made a whole system to manage it, but the reality is that system only matters when the tree is suuuuuuuuper complex. or maybe it was disco elysium, or both ...

Re: Why No AI Games?

#84

Post by finalarbiter »

empath75 wrote: post #31
adampunk wrote: post #16

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. E…

> Is it a possibility that talking to a chat bot is not any fun from a games per perspective? Lots of people "roleplay" with chatbots every day and it must be fun for them or they wouldn't do it. The problem is mostly "how do you lock an LLM into the narrative context of a more structured game"? Having an LLM roleplay as a _specific character_ in a _specific setting_ for a long period of time is a hard problem. Even…

Why does the site immediately prompt me to use my Google account? Is there another method available?

Re: Why No AI Games?

#85

Post by jwatermelon »

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.

There is a new text based game using AI called Lifespans. You create a character, and live out a simulated life. You can make any decision or action that you want, and there is a D20 roll mechanic to make sure that your decisions make sense. You can play it at lifespans.app

Re: Why No AI Games?

#86

Post by lofaszvanitt »

Sheesh. This man doesn't know what he is talking about.

"Here’s a puzzle — back in 2021, when the new AI era was just kicking off, it seemed obvious (to me at least) that it would lead to new kinds of games and radically new forms of gameplay."

Wrong premise. Next.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#87

Post by empath75 »

finalarbiter wrote: post #84
empath75 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it a possibility that talking to a chat bot is not any fun from a games per perspective? Lots of people "roleplay" with chatbots every day and it must be fun for them or they wouldn't do it. The problem is mostly "how do you lock an LLM into the narrative context of a more structured game"? Having an LLM roleplay as a _specific character_ in a _specific setting_ for a long period of time is a hard problem. Even…

Why does the site immediately prompt me to use my Google account? Is there another method available?

because that was the easiest way for me to set up auth in 5 minutes.. I just set it up for my friends to use.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#88

Post by whackernews »

PaulHoule wrote: post #35
neonnoodle wrote: post #15

> 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…

I think there's a certain antipathy between "hustle culture" and gaming https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/ that is is, people who are caught in AI FOMO are performatively trying to appear to be productive and that's the opposite of fun.

Wow thanks for posting this. Stole the show for me.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#89

Post by usrusr »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #61
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

And yet there were a lot of games with procedural generation as their centrepiece that did not suffer from this at all. The original X-Com games come to mind. I guess we can somehow "feel" where it's simulation, where it's "honest diceroll" (also very much ok when the rules appear tuned well).

But when it's too much it's too much, and an LLM game (where either the LLM remains in the loop, or it just spewed out a seemingly infinite heap of static filler) can't not be too much.

Re: Why No AI Games?

#90

Post by mannanj »

coldpie wrote: post #30
mannanj wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> maybe we could improve the patent system instead? The patent system benefits the uber-wealthy at the expense of everyone else, so no, that won't be happening.

is that still true in an age where intelligence is accessible via AI models and we can all file patents? (not saying we are there today, though maybe that may be a reality in 1-2 years)
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