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

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131–140 of 264 posts

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

#131
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 think there is a skyrim mod that lets hook up an LLM to the NPCs so you can talk to them, the problem is that the rest of the game design doesn't really support that. So the novelty wears off quite quick.

There is probably some limited utility for using ML in games, lifelike multiplayer bots trained on behaviour of different types of players.

I think in most scenarios good gameplay comes from iteration which comes from tweak-ability, you see players get stuck in area x so you do a minor or major adjustment to area layout, enemy composition, or give the players more tools. If something is controlled by an LLM it becomes unpredictable and hard to reason about for both player and designer, and consequently also hard to adjust.

I think it is possible there is some role for LLM's in games, like how Left 4 Dead had an AI (this is classic AI not ML) director who would decide how to structure enemy waves and for example send a boss after a player who strays too far from the rest. But even there rules based AI is probably easier to adjust for the designer.

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

#132
post #96
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 not? The code is famously convoluted and slow (see: dfhack). It's still an amazing accomplishment, but that doesn't make the code itself a challenge frontier models today aren't up to.

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

#133

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…

Supply has just become near infinite, that means all of the value is now in curation rather than creation, and to pick out the good stuff is now more work than it ever was. Good luck finding the next Jimy Hendrix, Picasso or Doris Lessing.

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle. How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.

I think as a developer this is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from this whole thing. I used to view features sitting endlessly in a JIRA backlog as a bad sign; a signal that we weren't prioritizing the right thing. But in reality this serves as a natural selection mechanic; if devs don't care enough about it to get it done and PM doesn't see the value in it then it slowly fades away. With agents you can just t…

I'm a big fan of forgetting. I throw out the phrase "forgetting is the point" a lot, loosely paraphrased from some musician (I forget who!) that said if you couldn't remember the lyrics they must not have been very good. Somewhere in the original spirit of Agile there was no Jira board, because the next thing to do was obvious to the team, and if it wasn't obvious it was easily discoverable, just go ask some users what they need. The idea of writing down every idea and letting AI crap out the features is entirely antithetical to creating good software.

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

#135

In the first paragraph: > While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper And the linked article is about revenue going up YoY, not profit. And then it says: > It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right Xbox in their own earnings report said their revenues dropped by 7% YoY. Yeah OK, I guess games journalist are as ba…

The video game revenue growth is mostly mobile game and gacha game mtx, primarily in the Asian markets.

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

#136
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know of any that use LLMs and my educated opinion would be that there won't be any in the next decade or ever. The main reasons are that games already run with tight margins of both frame time and memory consumption, and that designers/game developers want to control the interactions with the player and what the player experiences in the game. So an LLM won't be used for any story relevant NPCs in the game as…

In my completely unqualified and baseless opinion, I think the reason machine learning in games isn't more popular, is that ruthlessly difficult enemies that learn and adapt to the player just aren't.. fun. Level playing fields between characters and enemies just don't work. For example, the Dark Souls series is generally known for being "difficult but fair", however enemies are not smart by any means, they ultimately have a very limited number of attacks and very basic AI that consists of "Wait until player is in range, Run in a straight line toward the player until in attack range, attack". Even with that simplistic AI its pretty difficult and enjoyable.The player is meant to triumph over hundreds of enemies, its the player that learns and adapts to a static set of obstacles. If enemies in Dark Souls learned and adapted to the player, it would go from difficult to impossible very quickly and would not be enjoyable.

The purpose of AI in games isn't making something thats impossible to beat, its making something that is ALWAYS possible to beat while remaining fun and engaging.

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

#137
post #126

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…

I believe you're spot on. We now have exceptionally capable local image generation models for example. Are the masses rushing to produce a thousand fold increase in the output of any sort of generative images?

Not even in the slightest is that happening. Why not? Nobody gives a shit. Their attention time is finite. And the masses don't want to produce anything when they're not at work. Production is work. High-quality production is hard work. The latest human TikTok continues to be at least 10x more interesting to the masses than most any form of AI media. Why? It's about pleasurable passive consumption. AI video isn't there yet (3-5 years before it really matters in the realm of big media).

There's no risk on the horizon of a supply issue. The 99% do not care to spend their home time manufacturing.

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

#138

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.

I felt the television industry and gaming industries were in fact ruined by those trends. Or at least ruined in the same sense that global warming ruins our environment.

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

#139

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…

Supply has just become near infinite, that means all of the value is now in curation rather than creation, and to pick out the good stuff is now more work than it ever was. Good luck finding the next Jimy Hendrix, Picasso or Doris Lessing.

Actual supply hasn't done anything consequential. Extreme increases in generation + publishing are not occurring in a way that impacts the typical user.

The typical TikTok user is not seeing a 10x or 100x increase in published tiktoks from the people they follow. The same goes for YouTube. Absolutely nothing of consequence has shifted, at all.

The typical Spotify user is not seeing a flood of quality music that they have to sift through. There is no actual curation problem. The AI garbage is overwhelmingly and easily being ignored by the masses. They're just shrugging and going back to listening to their favorite music, or back to listening to their favorite podcasts, and so on.

The premise of supply to infinity is nothing more than an empty (and now aged) talking point that has turned out to be false.

It'll be trivial to find the next Hendrix, easier than ever in fact. AI sucks at making interesting music (short'ish term problem), and it can't play an instrument live to save its life (substantial problem). Fans want to see Taylor Swift live more than they want to listen to her mp3s or discs by a radical margin. They want to watch Swift perform on YouTube videos, or at the Grammy's, they want to watch her in interviews. They're fans. AI can't stand on stage and do jack squat, it has zero charisma, zero stage presence. Nobody cares about AI.

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

#140
post #63

We need Dwarf Fortress creator to lead Butlerian Jihad

Instead, we got Universal Paperclips ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Which ironically is the name of a pretty amazing game: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
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