The October inflection point for vibe game development
simonwillison.net
simonwillison.net
Then try to think of examples where Generative AI has betrayed a lack of creativity or care from the creator, and thus left a sour or ambivalent impression.
Personally, I can't do the former and the latter is depressingly easy.
Are we speeding towards a future where most people are effectively wireheaded?
A couple of years ago I predicted that an award winning movie would eventually be made that used generative AI as part of the production process.
Then I learned a VFX artist on that movie used Runway's AI-assisted rotoscoping tools (though notably not generative AI, so I guess my prediction hasn't resolved yet) for the emotional sequence with the rocks.
https://www.techbrew.com/stories/2023/03/09/this-ai-startup-...
(I'd argue that the armies of orcs in the Lord of the Rings movies are a ~25 year old example of AI usage in movie making, too.)
I guess I should refine my question to be about text to media specifically.
Likewise for the orcs I guess. Maybe its just going to be a matter of degree and any test I come up with have exceptions and counter examples.
The worst example I've seen was the title sequence from the Marvel show Secret Invasion in 2023, which I think was the worst show Marvel have put out (independently of the awful title sequence.)
I've got the impression that concept art for movies is heavily AI generated now. Directors like being able to spin up a visual concept from a prompt as part of the development process. The concept artists are really suffering.
Right now you have failsons like musk bragging about his terrible "one shot" short films but people who use them with more subtly and with actual skill will just look like anything else being produced.
This reads like Clifford Stoll’s “the Internet will never really matter” article - and the internet was already 40 years old and the web server was already older than ChatGPT is today. Your post sounds a bit like this sentence: “ The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”
Where was the TV in 4 years? Facebook? The telephone?
I don’t know if you are correct, but the bar of “cultural artifact” created from a system that just barely came to be and who’s capabilities wouldn’t even be close to this until like 3 months ago, is just a really really early thing to make a decision on already.
"The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works"
This sentence seems pretty accurate to me? Like it does undersell the scale of change, but you still can't replace a good human teacher, and people still read books and newspapers despite never ending predictions they are done for
Art is fine. In fact, I dare say the masses are even more appreciative of capital A Art nowadays that everybody and their dog believe they are an artist because they asked a machine to draw a pretty picture.
We will have a lot more slop, yet humans will keep creating and appreciating Art, because this is what separates them from the beasts.
My hunch is he's not using Claude Opus 5.5.
Making a fun, polished game, and not just a quick prototype to post screenshots of on social media, is not just about choosing the right LLM model and telling it ‘make a fun game’
I was as surprised as you are.
We need to not glaze it so much. It's cool that a rock put these demos together, but they're not "really fun". Not even close. The UI is pretty thanks to the Claude Design's injected stylesheet doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Also, it's been easy to make not "really fun" games since the late 90's with no-code game maker tools. Klik & Play anybody? GameMaker? The only difference is now, thanks to the hard work of Three.js and browser tech contributors—the graphics are better.
Every skirmish and Daily Op now opens with a choice, gives the side that’s losing a way back, and pulls the armies into the middle of the map. There are also two new ways to play.
Openers: pick Blitz, Industry or Air Wing before the clock starts.
Call-down powers: Barrage, EMP, Drop Pod and the Sky Hammer orbital strike.
Objectives and salvage: Uplink relays, supply drops and wrecks worth scrap.
Feel: combat juice, adaptive music, unit voices and an announcer.
Command: battle alerts, game speed, saved squads and touch placement.
New modes: Last Stand survival waves and an 8-mission Ops campaign.
Progression: heroes, an after-action report with awards, a career, 7 mutators and a Daily Op.
Prior to those there wasn't any reason to explore the map, it was just a game of building up an army and then storming the other side all at once.
The other details - shakes, music, announcements, etc, did all add little bits of interest to it.
I _am_ looking forward however to game developers using AI to debug and optimize their games. Let's squeeze all the performance we can get from existing hardware.
For example, I've long wanted to do a specific architectural approach that allows my Minecraft server's players and standalone game players to crossplay with each other. Now it's actually happening!
I think the problem in the future will not be making games, it will be standing out because games are becoming easier and easier to make nowadays! There are still many game genres, especially multiplayer, that suffer from not having a big enough playerbase and too much fragmentation can definitely worsen the game experience there.
Yeah this is a major problem. At least do one of these yourself.
> And if the game isn’t fun enough, add this:
> Make it a LOT more fun
I think theres also a certain quality that AI is missing in HOW it creates '''art''' like this. Games are often fun but they're not ABOUT having fun. Same way as how some of the best movies aren't always enjoyable to watch. I don't believe that an AI created soulslike would be any good because it would miss that some stuff is meant to feel frustrating or kinda bs or unfair at first.
You mean, environmental damage caused by the energy usage? A lot, for such "fun" hobby projects.
I don’t want the games industry to be polluted with slop that has no soul. But also, I want opportunities for people to learn or just exist in game development via smaller projects. There is some market for web games, casual games, and generally small games. These markets can be great for indie devs and beginners. But if we lose that market to the slop machine, real people will lose a lot of these opportunities.
We can do away with all that. No need to strive to be a complete person, no need to grow, to challenge yourself.
All you need to do is snap your fingers. What do you mean you still feel hollow inside? You should have asked the machine to also give you a dose of Accomplishment for the task you didn’t put any effort in.
I wonder if I can ask AI to make me a millionaire so I don't have to put in the effort to do it myself.
I dont need to milk a cow to enjoy cheese, or build a house to enjoy having one.
Some people enjoy and romanticize the process, and that's okay. Others aren't interested.
But just like people who try to write a book without writing skills or paint a mural without ever having picked up a brush, it’s going to be an uphill battle and will likely fail. So to that end I ask: what’s the point? Why are the AI pilled so passionate about the increase in spam and slop and harbor so much disdain for skill, expertise, and dare I say, discipline?
I don't particularly mind if those things aren't very good. I want people to be able to build things, share them with friends, and have fun doing so.
I'm just not convinced that someone building a crap (or not so crap thanks to Opus 5.5) game hurts anyone else. Just like if you write a bad blog post I don't think it's harmful.
What's harmful is spamming other people with your unwanted crap. So don't ship bad games to Steam, don't setup reply bots on Twitter, don't spam Reddit with slop.
For the record, I was one of those people who wanted to make games. That led me to learn programming and eventually led to a career as a programmer. Lots of others with similar stories. But if you’d given a younger me an LLM, I may never would have developed those skills.
That’s one of my concerns. I have others, like effects on the job market, the general unfairness of all our data being used to train models we’re now expected to pay for, negative effects on the environment, and the way in which LLMs promote inequality and can potentially crush small businesses. How do these concerns weigh against someone who wants to make a video game but doesn’t want to learn how to make video games?
That’s the piece that’s missing from this and other analyses. At least in other cases it makes a little sense in automating work. But game development is a creative endeavor, and the health of our planet and the lives of real people are at stake. Can’t you at least weigh the downsides against the benefits?
This feels like Jurassic Park: “Your scientists spent so much time asking if they could, they didn’t stop to ask if they should.” LLM supporters act like LLMs are inevitable and talk about the benefits, even when they’re relatively minimal. But serious discussion of the risks and downsides is missing. And it has been missing for years now.
I'm currently of the opinion that all of the other positives outweigh the negatives. Furthermore, I think we can help push the balance to the positive by ensuring as many people can use this technology in as positive a way as possible.
Games are not some holy monolith LLMs are encroaching on, and your favorites are not harmed because some random guy has an idea and an LLM can patch it together, even if he puts it on Steam. Even if there will be more games on Steam now of low quality, they will be easy to filter and the good games will rise to the top as it always does.
Besides, some of the most beloved games are inefficient, low quality dumpster fires by any professional programming standard. Just look at Bethesda games, or Roblox in the youth department.
The quality ship sailed when the consoles became locked down PCs and speeds were high enough that uncompressed assets could be streamed directly to the rendering pipeline and the devs could just yell “POOR” if your PC didn’t run it. It’s been dead so long we don’t even know where the bones are anymore because we didn’t put a grave marker.