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Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

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Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#121

Post by lobf »

stryan wrote: post #96
tptacek wrote: post #84

I say this with all possible respect, reverence even, for what Tarn Adams has accomplished and what continues to work on, but there may be no worse messenger for the problem of disintermediating game designers and creators from actual code authorship than the author of Dwarf Fortress. It's an amazing game that succeeds in spite of and not because of its code. Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started wit…

I don't think there's a way to really say a comment like this "with all possible respect" given the (albeit meager) content of the article. Either way, I'd be much more willing to bet that if Toady had Opus/Sol/whatever we wouldn't have Dwarf Fortress, we'd just have Rimworld: perhaps a technically better game, but not !FUN! in the same way Dwarf Fortress is fun.

Why do you think this?

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#122

Post by redsocksfan45 »

georgeecollins wrote: post #61
hax0ron3 wrote: post #22

>They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. If AIs get just a few times better than they are now, the CEO probably actually will be able to press a button that makes a good quality game. The problem for the CEO is that every other CEO will be able to do the same thing, so what will be the distinguishing factor? The buying without a job part isn…

It's possible to be very talented and a crank.

[dead]

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#123

Post by hn_acc1 »

newtonianrules wrote: post #5

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

I've worked for a few companies from 2000-2026 (2 startups, 2 medium companies), and overall, I would say they all had decent to great leadership. None of them were out to only maximize next quarter, all stressed being 100% honest with the customer, even if it meant disappointing them (i.e. we can't quite make that target, here's what we can do - this was for a consulting company), etc., and they were all trying to make the company grow AND be sustainable.

One startup didn't go too far (folded after 3 years), one grew to ~20 people, lasted for maybe 20 years total, I left after 2 years during the dot com crash.

Both of the medium companies are bigger now (I'm still working for one), and have generally positive outlook. I mean, you can't consistently be #1 in your industry when there are 2 companies with combined > 50 or 60% market share and roughly equal - some quarters, your competitor's 2-3 year plan will finish and deliver better for that quarter than your previous (now "old") product that is in the middle of a 2-3 plan, etc..

So they are out there, but it's RARELY in the "high profile" (FAANG/whatever) "move fast, break things" companies that you hear about a lot or that everyone wants to work for.

A friend said was like Game of Thrones come to life in a corporate setting, for example. Yet, some people got rich off it, I'm sure.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#124

Post by lubujackson »

newtonianrules wrote: post #5

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

Companies are on purpose poorly run during the "gold rush" phase, which is where AI is right now. Everyone wants to not be left behind and velocity is placed ahead of profitability and especially ahead of quality.

What happens next (eventually...) is the bubble popping, which for AI will mostly look like established companies pulling back on AI hiring and especially cutting AI SaaS solutions unless they are clearly providing value and improving the bottom line.

What we think of as quality will come in the next phase, once the infrastructure woes get sorted out. Web 1.0 was pre-cloud and websites crashed all the time, no one could handle traffic spikes, etc. After a crash, stability becomes a market advantage, i.e. why Facebook won and Friendster died.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#125

Post by bob1029 »

Game dev is the last thing I think will be genuinely disrupted by AI. It can do everything at the edges with superhuman ability, but the core magic happens in the scene where all the disparate systems come together to provide the final experience. Working in arbitrary world space is pretty much the hardest thing I can imagine asking an LLM to do. I also think things like animation, sfx and mastering will never be disrupted meaningfully at the AAA level.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#126

Post by asdff »

munificent wrote: post #20

1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply in…

I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? NYT is now 10x as thick? Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x?

Not at all. Seems output in this brave new AI era is more or less the exact same as it was in the dark ages. The only output that has gone up, logarithmically at that, is spam and other low effort fodder.

I also want to push back on the idea that content is "solved." Consider the fact that you could be born in 1810 or 1910 or 2010 and in each of those eras, have more content available for you to read than you could ever read in your lifetime. People tend to enjoy contemporary stuff vs exclusively reading classics, and therefore there is constant demand for new stuff of quality in principle.

I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future. I mean after all, technology has come up with dozens of new ways to commodity just about every medium of art there is for mass production, and yet, for every medium of art there is there are still sought after and celebrated artists.

Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#127

Post by unleaded »

munificent wrote: post #20

1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply in…

As long as AI is only able to create crap that people are embarrassed to admit they watch (which I think is likely IMO just given how it works) I think we'll be mostly fine. Trash TV didn't ruin the television industry and mobile shovelware didn't ruin the gaming industry.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#128

Post by madrox »

When we've used software to disrupt other industries to deliver more with fewer people we called that a good thing. And it is, because consumers tend to win. Games are a hit-driven business, so they're going to feel the squeeze faster than, say, SaaS, but it's coming for all of us. Software is now being disrupted. Reap the whirlwind.

I worked at a (very) well known media company in Hollywood during the Netflix disruption. This really doesn't sound all that different from a Hollywood exec mocking internet media in the early 2000s. People are trying to understand it and leverage it. Quality is bad. Then one day you wake up and it's taken over, because it kept improving. Setting aside the debate on AI use in the creative process, even if models never get better there are years of optimizations to be done on the tools/business side.

As a gamer, I'm actually excited for it. I want more diversity in games beyond what the current indie scene provides. If we can give smaller teams the horsepower to make what was considered AAA 5-10 years ago I will be quite happy as a consumer.

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#129

Post by addandsubtract »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #101
daemin wrote: post #93

The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.

Unrelated but are there any games using LLMs or ML for the NPCs? I really want enemies that adapt to the player.

I've only seen proof-of-concepts, like Vaudeville[1]. I think more work is currently done in the modding scene, for example with Mantella[2] which, "brings every NPC in Skyrim and Fallout 4 to life with AI."

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240920/Vaudeville/ [2] https://art-from-the-machine.github.io/Mantella/

Re: Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI

#130

Post by asdff »

daemin wrote: post #93

The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.

They already bifurcate in most any tech related job posting. You have the "AI/LLM" jobs that are full on llm koolaid and pretty vague about what your role in the job even entails, and then there's the "AI/ML" jobs that are just how they are calling the same old ML jobs these days. The title could be the same between the two, but its usually obvious from the post description what the job actually is.
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