Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 155 posts

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#91

Post by Calazon »

majormajor wrote: post #65
rdbl27 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.

You don't get to play the game before you pay for it. Do you want to have to go ask for refund after refund after noticing it's yet-another-AI-slop-cookie-cutter-lookalike several hours in?

Being unable to tell a game is garbage without personally playing it is a problem with or without AI. Though AI is vastly increasing the amount of slop out there, for sure.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#92

Post by Narishma »

galangalalgol wrote: post #18
bob1029 wrote: post #13

The biggest issue is that it has become very accessible to approach AA quality in a solo setting. The jump from indie to AA is much more plausible than the jump from AA to AAA. The middle of the market is in a gigantic space trash compactor right now. I could sit down with one other level designer / environmental artist and create something that would be visually competitive with Myst in record time using modern tool…

Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramification for leaving off the disclosure, or adding one? Personally if the gameplay is good I kind of don't care if it used lots of ai.

Because code is invisible to the end user while art is right in their face.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#93

Post by saulpw »

paulcole wrote: post #34
volkk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i just think its extremely difficult to make a game that's good. i feel like most indie studios/solo developers that complain their game doesn't get any downloads or playtime is because their game is likely...bad. i have yet to bump into a story where an actually great game goes undiscovered. happy to be proven wrong!

This is the hard-pill-to-swallow meme truth. If it didn’t already exist, you could make Myst today and it would be massively popular because it’s a great game. It would cost almost nothing to make. Yes, a company can very easily find ways to spend $1-$10 million dollars to make a game. And some great games do cost a lot of money (much more than $10 million). But great games can be made for almost nothing as well. If…

I don't think that's true. Games are a product of their time and context; if Tetris didn't exist, do you think it would be a massively popular hit today? I can see it being an interesting entrant in the mobile space like a match-3 game, but not something that literally everyone plays. Like we were ready to be Tetrisized in the 1980s but by the 2010s the vibe was more Angry Birds.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#95

Post by lotsofpulp »

nucleogenesis wrote: post #42
galangalalgol wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramification for leaving off the disclosure, or adding one? Personally if the gameplay is good I kind of don't care if it used lots of ai.

The most widespread ramification I think is just a continued disintegration of shared trust in the public square. If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag. If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs. It’s just…

>If you replaced your art team with an AI I won’t give you my money. If you lie about it then you’re just a scumbag.

Does this mean reducing number of employees on art team to zero is bad?

>If your professional artists are using AI for their own work à la how I use it to generate code, I’m less bothered, particularly if they’re iterating on their own artistic inputs.

Does this mean reducing number of employees on art team to a number greater than one is acceptable?

>It’s just a matter of principle.

I am having trouble understanding the principle. If I interpreted correctly, then what is special about reducing number of employees to 0 rather than reducing them to some other amount.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#96

Post by [deleted] »

rdbl27 wrote: post #26
tsimionescu wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because code is utilitarian, it is only valued for what it does, while art is not utilitarian - it is valued for subjective human reasons, which, for many people, include human authorship. It's the same reason people build their games out of code libraries, but generally design bespoke art for it (with some exceptions).

The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.

[deleted]

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#97

Post by vidarh »

jubilanti wrote: post #49
rdbl27 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.

> The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all. By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all. Or: the fact that (some) people can't tell between food that is marketed to t…

> By that logic, the fact that (some) people can't tell between gold and fool's gold is strong evidence that gold was not what they value at all.

Well, no? Most people don't value gold for intrinsic attributes of the metal, but for the market-assigned value of it or perceived status.

I think GP overstated the point, but it's clear that a lot of people who object to AI authored content are objecting not because of the intrinsic attributes of the content but because of their emotions on the subject.

That doesn't make it invalid. If someone really doesn't want to consume AI generated content, then so be it.

But I also think the people making a big deal out of this seriously overestimate how deeply most people care. I suspect most people care only to the extent that the quality is lacking.

I'd justify that view with your example: People keep eating unhealthy food despite knowing it's bad. And as another example, we keep buying things we can't be sure is ethically sourced. We're willing to look past a whole lot.

The same way "Made in ..." labels were originally protectionist measures, I suspect disclosure requirements etc. will seriously backfire when it turns out most people stop caring the moment the quality is usually good enough.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#98

Post by WalterBright »

uxhacker wrote: post #9
thataccount wrote: post #3

Is it really that no one can afford it, or is it more no one really wants to back independent studios?

What the article misses is that the first game was made by just roughly 6 people on the development team. What has happened is the number of people working on games has become ridiculously large.

Myst is a fun game, but the game play is little more than the original Colossal Cave Adventure (ADVENT). Instead of typing in commands, you clicked on things on the screen. I.e. the game play code was pretty simple.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#99

Post by scarmig »

DicIfTEx wrote: post #56
rdbl27 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that these same people can't tell whether it was authored by a human or an AI without a seperate disclosure is strong evidence that human authorship as such is not what they value at all.

Imagine I sell you something and you pay me in cash. The notes look authentic, but I later discover that they are conterfeits. It would be absurd to claim that your successful passing-off deception demonstrates that I don't value money at all.

Whatever the morality involved, it's an unstable norm. There can be good actors who use AI and disclose, and good actors who don't use AI and don't disclose. There are bad actors, however, who will use AI and not disclose. The entire discourse will be flooded with non-disclosers accusing each other of AI use (particularly, the bad actors will accuse everyone else of AI use, to flood the zone with shit), and there will be no way for a consumer to distinguish good from bad. Bad actors will prevail economically.

See e.g. corporate green and rainbow washing, Amazon marketplace, organic food.

Re: No one can afford to make Myst games anymore

#100

Post by to11mtm »

galangalalgol wrote: post #18
bob1029 wrote: post #13

The biggest issue is that it has become very accessible to approach AA quality in a solo setting. The jump from indie to AA is much more plausible than the jump from AA to AAA. The middle of the market is in a gigantic space trash compactor right now. I could sit down with one other level designer / environmental artist and create something that would be visually competitive with Myst in record time using modern tool…

Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramification for leaving off the disclosure, or adding one? Personally if the gameplay is good I kind of don't care if it used lots of ai.

When you're playing a game, you don't -usually- see, let alone care about the underlying code, you care about what it does.

At least in certain genres, the use of AI art (or worse, writing) can become obvious to the player, and it winds up breaking whatever level of immersion that existed.

There's also the issue where it causes the 'signal/noise' ratio to go out of whack; Using Visual Novels as an example, the amount of shovelware has increased by at least one order of magnitude.

You can still have a VN with good enough writing, that 'AI Art' can be forgiven; and some devs actually do that to get started, i.e. they are hoping the project gets enough interest and support that they can go ahead and pay for an actual artist.

Post reply on HN