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Comment by augment_me | Hacker News Reader

You are talking from a perspective of games as a medium for an artist with a certain bias and an audience that is interested in this specific bias.

You say "vision, colors, positioning, etc", yet you have Candy Crush being the most played game on mobile for 13 years which simply employs direct signals and ques from cognition and cognitive neuroscience to achieve this.

The games that you describe are a small subset of what the general public is playing or is interested in.

This can further be pushed into a monoculture by shaping the players expectations about what a game should be. Maybe Skyrim has too much walking and dead-time, it's better to optimize for fast combat and action, like in Fortnite, and mold the playerbase in a way which makes them susceptible to simpler games more tuned to neurophysiology.

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Even Candy Crush, a huge part of what made it successful, was the tiny details. The bright colors, the art, the subtle and not-so-subtle animations... An LLM can technically do all that, if you keep reminding it, and have strong rules, and constantly keep it in check, but there's no way it would do it on its own and keep it consistent and coherent.

Eg, if the tall green pill candy and the red round one both scale by exactly 3px when you drag them, it might still "look" wrong, and get into uncanney valley territory. And that's even assuming the LLM picked the same value to scale when you prompted it to "add a red candy", or it picked a different one arbitrarily.

I've tried making games a few times, or even CSS animations, and I can tell that they don't "feel" right, even if I have no idea why, or what to change. I have mad respect for artists and animators that can manage that, and I have no idea how you tell an LLM "It doesn't feel right when I drag the candies", and have it be able to figure out that a tall vertical candy needs to scale differently on the X and Y axis than a round one.

The OP is absolutely not talking about making Candy Crush. They ARE talking about making art. Both can exist in the same world and be successful. The existence of and success of reality TV doesn’t negate the art of filmmaking and the enjoyment of watching a movie. Same with games.

OP is invalidating the blog with the reasoning of detail, art, taste, etc is necessary for a good game.

I am saying that a small subset of people care about this given what people choose to play in practice. It's currently much, much easier to not care about these things and focus on the cognitive aspects to capture player attention, and the human cognitive incentives are not stacked in favor of OPs view.

> I am saying that a small subset of people care about this given what people choose to play in practice.

1. Candy Crush is one of the highest grossing games of all time, but if you look at the other top 20 highest grossing games, the vast majority are nothing like it.

2. Janky crush wouldn’t have been the success it was without massive attention to detail and polish.

Also there is a huge effort to optimise the game for retention, LTV and UA arbitrage.

These are not the fun details but they are details none the less and whilst LLMs will probably be more useful here the insights that drive their actions are the taste humans provide.

Candy crush is not the first of its genre, yet it is the most successful. What made it stand out from its bejeweled predecessors? Vision. Colors. Positioning. Animations. Smooth movement. Feedback. Tighter gameplay loops. Sense of accomplishment. All of the above

What are choices of vision, colors, positioning, feedback animation, sounds, etc, if not the exact things you call "employing direct signals and ques from cognition and cognitive neuroscience"? The former is the execution of the theory of the latter.

If you define art to be the transformation of cognitive scientifically addictive concepts into a game, then we are in agreement :)

>which simply employs direct signals and ques from cognition and cognitive neuroscience to achieve this.

Does anyone actually do this or is this all post hoc rationalizations on why certain things work? My experience and understanding is that it's all just a bunch of "let's try lots of things and then do more of what did well". Ie it's the result of a crazy amount of iteration rather than "employing cognitive neuroscience".

Candy crush has a team of hundreds of people, it's far from a simple game. I know for a fact they had individual product managers for certain features inside the game.

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