> You know what’s fun? A stick. A stick is fun. A ball is fun.
Having a body is fun. I think that's one reason why VR has such quick hype/death cycles--it doesn't do a good enough job of fooling your body. Conventional games induce more like a dissociative or hypnotic state where you temporarily forget your body. That can range from very, VERY abstract (like Pong or Pac-Man, or BABA IS YOU), or built on an attempt to simulate the real world as convincingly as possible through high-end graphics and physics engines.
One of the things that made Untitled Goose Game so much fun for me was that playing it made me _feel like a goose_. It made me want to run around doing goose things for goose reasons. You can spread your wings and honk, regardless of whether it advances the game. A similar game that came out called Little Kitty, Big City offers the promise of the same idea but as a cat instead of a goose. I tried that game but never felt like a cat playing it, instead it felt like being a person controlling a cat. These are such subtle shades of gameplay and storytelling that I have a hard time imagining LLMs being useful in the design.
Anyone who has worked on a game knows it is a long, painful slog to the finish line. AI dev is promising the exact opposite: minimal prompts and the agent does all the slog.
Even if AI can whip up a quick demo or prototype for a game, it is the long-tail of tedious details that a passionate person has to hammer away on that separates what ships from what dies. I'm guessing most AI opportunists are looking for quick wins.
I still think it is only a matter of time before someone with the passion hammers an AI to get a game to market.
At Disney, they had an immersive Star Wars VR experience that I don't think is there any more (and was extremely pricey for a session).
They tricked the senses by having physical objects you could touch for every space in the game environment, there was stuff like wind, you could feel the heat of lava radiating off the ground in some spots - and body packs that would jolt you if you got shot, and a physically held "blaster" with haptic feedback.
I was blown away at how good it was and how immersive it felt. But, you need an entirely custom experience and game room and as I said it was very expensive (probably for good reason).
One thing I've learned is, there's a ton of interesting stuff in the world. Super talented people. But, what surface and gets widespread recognition and adoption is often very much determined by luck, and these days by algorithms. It's very possible there's some really cool AI games out there already, and they just haven't been discovered.
The other aspect is that a lot of people in the AI community are completely hooked on the reward-seeking of 'new thing'. Every hour there's some new tool to try out that 'changes everything'. But, without grinding it out you might never create something interesting by constantly jumping to the next new thing. Because, technological capabilities are just one part of the story.
Third, what makes something 'fun' often requires tons of iteration and a lot of LLM-type tools still rely on snapshots of applications. They're not fully there yet in terms of what happens in between moments. There are lots of principles they can draw on from and get a good prototype quickly, but it again comes back to really just slogging through lots of iterations until you find something fun.
Finally, I think with every new medium you get a first wave that really just copies the medium that came before it. Early radio was a lot like theater. Early TV was a lot like radio. I think eventually we'll see people – probably younger people – who are fully into AI and will find interesting things about that medium to express in ideas, and we'll get some really new and interesting stuff as a result.
I'm making one as a hobby project alongside my day job.
It's a debate chat game where two humans debate on a topic and a biased AI judge picks a winner. Over time players compete for ELO rankings like in chess or similar head-to-head competitive games.
I'll probably make a blog post someday about what's been involved but I think the points in OP are spot on. I've been struggling to make the format feel fun and lively. Two things really helped compared to my early versions - real-time streaming of the other person's arguments so you're not just staring at a timer while they're writing and very very short rounds so you get feedback and results quickly.
I've also tried a version with AI NPC opponents and it's much less fun than playing against real humans for reasons I can't entirely articulate. The AIs just don't make for very interesting debaters and the wins against them feel a bit shallow somehow. Right now, I've got NPCs on the game which you can opt into debating if you spend more than 30 seconds in the matchmaking queue but I hope once I get proper player counts I can disable them entirely.
I'm super biased, but proud of how the game has been coming along. Will make a show hn post someday but if anyone's curious my alpha version is live here: https://letsarg.com
In analogy to suspension of disbelief I'd like to postulate suspension of genericity: when I sink countless hours skimming text content in some The Elder Scrolls I'm not really convinced that much of it is a story worth consuming (my opinion of TES is lower than my number of gameplay hours might suggest), but I'm at least open to the idea that it might be. Thousands of players have paid good money for consuming those stories, do who knows, I might actually find something meaningful, perhaps something I'll one day connect with a real person about, so it's not necessarily a given that it's all just filler.
But when it's an LLM generating the story for me and only for me, there's no other possibility. It's a hamster wheel time sink and I can't even pretend that it's not.
Only because it is something i find fascinating:
> There are those Orcs in that one Lord of the Rings game who hold grudges against you.
Is referring to the nemesis system in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, and its an amazing set of interlocking procedural systems that do genuinely feel like its AI, but is really AI in the sense its always been used by games (the rules the games follow to govern NPCs+world) and not AI in the sense of modern LLMs or even other generative systems. This video is a great look at what it is and why its great IMO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm_AzK27mZY
I think a system like this could really work well with some modern LLM stuff, but it certainly feels magic without it.
The patent was filed in 2016 and granted in 2021. If the system was so useful we would’ve seen it in another game before then, or a very similar system after.
Ah. Well, maybe we could improve the patent system instead? If most property is going digital, and we agree as a society that idea generators and executors deserve compensation for their effort, I think the answer would be better more evolved compensation systems and I agree stopping patents that are clearly a troll though would be better to be fucked.
I did a conferencr talk maybe three years ago on using AI for games.
Since the talk, code, audio,and imagery have progressed leaps and bounds, almost all of the points on active AI use haven't changed much.
You have more capable smaller models now that means you could at least run local models in games, but you still don't get to see what it is going to do before the user does. Developers are acutely aware of the climate. if a game has a fault because the AI does something unexpected, it's not just a bug, It's a news story.
It still cannot be realistically used for multiplayer games. The models are prone to adversarial attacks, which can harm a multiplayer experience.
I did point out at the time that solo sandbox games could benefit. An active AI can be empowering for the player, unchecked empowerment can be great in a solo game. It destroys a multiplayer game.
Then there's just a lack of training in some of the specific areas of games. You pretty much have to filter game state down to text for a llm, I don't yet know of any gameplay embedding model.
I have played around with a little tower defence to see how much an AI can work on gameplay, It essentially has a REPL interface to the game logic where it can take actions and advance the game a tick at a time. It does an ok job, but there's still not much understanding of time and urgency to work with an active environment
This has been discussed ad nauseum in other places here over the years, but basically I don't think the conclusions in the post are correct.
It does not make a whole lot of sense to let an AI determine story, whether it be dialogue, changing the game state, or whatever. The reason basically being a few things - one, the fundamental aspect of a game is that there are rules and boundaries these rules need to remain consistent (and testable). It is entirely jarring if an AI NPC that says something that's not consistent with the game state, or changes the game state in a way that violates the constraint of the understood rules/boundaries of the game - this isn't fun to the user at all, even if it sounds cool. If you do not believe me, you can test this out trying to play DND with these things and see how annoying it can become. If you decide ok, I'm going to try to tightly bind what the AI can do or not with branching and rules, you are basically engineering the same way that games have engineered already, so why even use AI? It's a solution looking for a problem here.
The second big issue is determinism - LLM's are fundamentally non-deterministic. In most games, you would expect an action to have the same or at least very similar reaction most of the time - RNG comes into play naturally already in a lot of games in a predictable way (dice rolls, chance to hit, etc.) LLM's bring nothing new to the table here.
For world gen, we already have games like No Man's Sky deterministically generate quadrillions of worlds. What help is an LLM here? We already have the technology.
One area that would be interesting, is agentic bot players, but that sort of leads down the same path as the above arguments - there already are extremely sophisticated bots that play a huge variety of games. What do LLM's bring here?
"It is entirely jarring if an AI NPC that says something that's not consistent with the game state, or changes the game state in a way that violates the constraint of the understood rules/boundaries of the game"
I played with the Mantella mod for Skyrim a few months back and one of the problems with LLMs is you can't keep them on topic. I even used a custom trained one just for Skyrim, but the problem was it still has vast real world knowledge it shouldn't. For instance I asked a town guard where I could find Taylor Swift, who said she might be down at the tavern playing music. While the conversation didn't super overtly break the theme, the guard "stayed in character" and didn't start gushing about specific songs of hers or something, he still "knew" who she was. Current-gen AIs can't be fenced in very well. And almost every game idea needs some sort of fencing in.
If you play along with the AI it's not bad but if you poke the edges the illusion breaks quickly. You can't prompt a current-gen AI to just "forget everything you shouldn't know because it doesn't fit in the game universe."
I expect future architectures probably will fix this and that will help a lot. But we don't have them yet.
Patrick McKenzie, aka patio11, used a LLM to generate and run a DnD campaign for a gaming convention/conference, He discusses the process and results as part of this podcast on the con.
I think AI could reinvent text based games in a fresh way that would be fun. Text based games were always so constrained by what the developer could guess that you would type but with AI it really could read more like an interactive choose your own adventure novel that is easy to navigate.
These are kinda popular today in the form of AI Dungeon, NovelAI, FictionLab etc.
Basically you create characters with bios, traits. Then a setting/context. Now, as you write your story, you can have multiple characters involved and they'll act from their perspective and traits.
Then these also have lorebooks with triggers, so if you mention The Barking Dog Inn, the AI and the characters will know what you mean and your characters with an outgoing personality type will be more eager to go there than others etc.
Finally, these systems usually have a long term memory where key events are saved and the AI remembers.
In earlier text adventures (e.g., Infocom games), some portion of those constraints were due to the authors failing to anticipate legitimate ways that users would try to phrase things and account for them in the game. But that's not nearly such a problem in anything made since the late '90s, especially if you stick to xyzzy award winners.
The more essential reason for that constraint is that it's just good storytelling. The author of a work of IF has an idea they want to explore. That main idea could be narrative (Photopia or Anchorhead), or it could be a gameplay mechanic (Savoir-Faire or Counterfeit Monkey). But in any case, if your goal is to appreciate the creator's vision, those constraints are critical because they telegraph to you, the player, what you should and should not be exploring.
This isn't an idea that's specific to text adventures, either. The creators of the Outer Wilds deliberately made areas flat and boring when there wasn't anything there for the player to do to advance the story, specifically because they didn't want players wasting time on exploration that would ultimately prove to be pointless. This is also why open world games that do go for a more uniformly detailed world also need to hand-hold the player and tell them where they need to go every step of the way. Without that players would tend to get lost, lose their sense of progress, and ultimately end up bored.
I think that, because of this dynamic, using AI to flesh out the unimportant bits of the game would be a cardinal game design sin. Making bloat cheap and easy does not make it good. I just makes more of it.
I've spent way too many years chipping away at genai gaming, here's my 2c.
First, the intersection between someone who understands and cares about genai (and keeping up with the SOTA), with someone who wants to put in the work and compromise to make great games, is slim.
Think about the intersection between a procedural generation/shader programmer, someone focused on making a really fun and compelling game tech be damned. The skills don't really overlap. One requires deep knowledge, technical mastery, geometric thinking, algorithmic optimization, and time in a dark room, and the other requires empathy for humans, brutal iteration, artistic taste, and a knack for storytelling (even if just to sell the player on your game). You basically need both for your "ai game" to even qualify as an ai game. And in an industry that's so anti-ai it's hard to find teams where these two personalities meet and vibe enough to work on a game together.
Secondly, is model performance: quality, speed, cost. I don't think the industry has yet crossed the threshold where generation is high enough quality, fast enough for players, and cheap enough that it amortizes compared to traditional gamedev. You see tons of AI used in development but deploying this stuff to the front lines doesn't really napkin math. That will change though.
Third, game engines are NOT designed for genai. They are decades of optimization for a completely different pipeline, both technical and human: pitch -> publisher -> game engine -> art team + coders -> trailer -> marketing -> release -> support. Adding even simple very, very basic genai requirements to this (say, dynamic texture generation and loading over the network, streaming character dialogue) completely breaks decades of assumptions of how games are built and shipped (e.g. everything mega-super-duper-compressed and loaded to statically allocated gpu buffers). So doing anything new means throwing away large parts of the game engine. And if you pitch not using 70% of the game engine, or making your own, to a 20 year game veteran/studio boss calling the shots in this industry: well, your game will not be getting funded.
This will all get fixed though. The technology jsut came faster than the industry could adapt.
I agree that AI is not as good as people at being entertaining. And everybody looked at putting LLMs in their games as GDC circa 2022 or so. It seemed like a good idea until you realized the server cost or the performance hit. So this is right.
But.. as someone who works in the business of games.. how sure are you that AI hasn't been there all along in ways you may not realize? Companies are very disincentivized to let you know when they are using it.
The costs of interactive AI have interesting effects as the author points out. Much like the lack of variety in music models, 3D asset generation via AI has a long way to go, particularly as studios have no incentive to share their data. But I think AI assistance could at least make some marginal improvements. Take a procedural game like No Man's Sky. There are billions of possible worlds in the game. But, presumably because of team size and/or agile philosophy, they drop these rigid, nearly identical, items and buildings throughout those billions of planets. AI could at least conveniently empower some added incremental complexity (via Claude Code etc.) to their existing asset generation, which lends more believability to these planets. If studios were willing to partner and share data, incredible world generation models, which could be used exclusively as asset generators rather than real time world renderers initially, could be built and dramatically empower designers.
Having recently considered playing Dwarf Fortress(and quickly rejecting it for UI issues and overall tediousness), it seemed like a game that would benefit from an LLM backend. I'm curious what sorts of world history an LLM could come up with. It likely would be a lot less efficient than the current system, but interesting nonetheless. I think it would be easy for devs/modders to add a way to supply an API key to an LLM and experiment there.
Also having recently played a run of Civ5(before burning out because the late game is tedious and the overall game so unrealistic), I thought that good AI would help 4x games remain epic while letting the user choose their level of tedium. It would be nice, for instance, to manually go through the early game when management is easy and exploration is fun, only to turn that over to an AI at some point(and you generally do with autoexploration). Same thing with other eras though. By the time I'm in the late game and have a large empire, I'd rather focus on diplomacy and moving armies, not city management or worker management. I don't want to commit to fully giving up on those aspects of the game though. It would be nice to, say, automate war mostly but be able to jump in if I want to micromanage for a few turns.
It could be about cost: big LLMs don’t work locally like most games, and even with server hosting, the context for a well-detailed and non-textual game would grow very fast, so processing it would become slow and/or expensive. These are the current limits for truly generative games.
As for generated content in regular games, I don’t see an issue if the content is high quality and free of errors. People don’t like low-quality content regardless of who generated it - human or LLM. It’s just that there’s currently more bad content coming from LLMs, that’s all
Generating text & audio is relatively cheap. If users paid a $5/month subscription you could generate a couple hours of dynamic npc audio per month and still make a tidy profit.
I have to imagine someone is looking into that, sandbox style games with hundreds of characters who have unique personalities and respond to any input and remember all your interactions... that would be amazing.
For games, interacting with an LLM is an improv experience. It’s a fractal that can be explored in any direction.
Video games have discrete, static goals that let a player focus on an objective. Compared to LLMs, it’s a passive experience.
People play games for all sorts of reasons (to relax, competition, to build something of their own, solve challenges).
I think this is a fundamentally different experience than what an LLM can offer.
That’s not to say LLMs can’t become a fun experience, but it’s going to take decades to develop a way to procure that experience. Look at how long it took dungeons and dragons, or any video game genre, to get to the level of polish it’s at today
It really depends on the style of game. There are gradations here. I think many designers are stuck in a static, controlling posture. Minecraft is an excellent and viral example of an alternative.
I dont think Minecraft is a fractal-like experience. The world may be infinite, but it repeats and each block that world is comprised of has set of rules that dont change. The living entities all follow their own rules. etc.
> Maybe there are some cool AI-centric games that I’m overlooking?
The enemy locomotion in Arc Raiders was almost entirely created with reinforcement learning. It’s a very impressive modern example (the game has been out for less than 6 months).
They're are plenty of mods that inject AI into games, like Skyrim. Though in order for a game to have LLMs and scale to a shipping audience without a subscription, you would want to run them locally.
The real technical blocker is performance and voice synthesis. If voice synthesis was at parity with human actors, it would be worth it to battle the performance aspect for major studios. In text based games especially, taking time to generate enough text is just too slow to be convenient
Yeh there is a skyrim mod that lets you talk to any NPC and basically queries an LLM behind the scenes even with a screenshot of the scene so it can react to your clothing etc. if you insult it the LLM understands it dynamically and makes the NPC attack.
I mean thats not a new game concept but I definitely think that levels up the experience.
I tried to write a different "convince an AI" game about a year ago, but it was hard to work with, hard to figure out a business-model for, and more importantly-- it just wasn't very fun to play. Maybe there's a different scenario than the one I chose.
i think the culture war point is also super true of the game design industry, not just the consumers, where the already ultra competitive nature of the work means that the creatives and the industry as a whole have taken a veeeery strong stance against genai. Thats a reckon, and i dont know if its good or bad.
It does feel a little counter to the march of progress, but in a medium where high effort can be enjoyed by many, im personally cool with artisinal handmade games.
Rather than an affinity for artisanal stuff or there being some bias against AI itself, I think it's simply that most stuff that's going to be made with AI is going to be very derivative. Even before AI you'd read posts from people, including on here, like 'I made a highly competent knockoff of [popular indie game] but got no sales. Woe is me.' But games aren't commodities. If people like a game, that doesn't mean they want to play, let alone buy, a complete knockoff of it.
The biggest barrier to success has always been having a good idea and AI is just going to make that ever more apparent, because you'll be able to cook up knockoffs ever more rapidly.
I have had a great amount of fun prompting Claude with: “Lets play a choose your own adventure game. Give me a completely random scenario. I’ll be a xxxx.”
> The video game audience has decided, almost unanimously, that they don’t want generative AI in their games.
Nah, it's just a very vocal minority making lots of noise. We're slowly starting to see saner minds prevail, with steam backtracking on the ban of aigen and so on. People don't care if the end result is good. And the "but muh art" is just virtue signalling. I've used this example before, for me "art" is the fact that I can have a horse as my ruler in EU, not the fact that the horse might be generated by a diffusion model. Art is always in the eye of the beholder, or something.
On a more general note, like with the question "where are all the good open source projects", things will come. We're still in the learning phase of this new shiny toy that we got. It's only been 3 years since the tech is readily available, and maybe 2 years since people can take offline models and run with them. Give it time.
In the meantime, I see a lot of help from agentic coding in game dev. I've been following a space rouguelite thingy on itch, the developer has been pumping updates every other day, and the game is pretty much ready in ~1month. Sure, some updates broke stuff, some things didn't make much sense, but the speed with which the dev could take the feedback and pump out an update is remarkable. Small projects are doing it today. Larger projects will probably do it tomorrow.
My guess is that there's a big chance that the next "big thing" in gameplay w/ AI being somehow used will come from a smaller team / single dev type of thing, and not the big labs. Something genre-defining like minecraft or tarkov.
It's not only just signalling. I've never said anything about AI art in games before this moment, but if I become aware that a game has used it, I'm not getting that game.
Signalling means you are doing the thing only to identify yourself to others as being in the tribe. That's kind of the opposite of my personal take.
It’s really weird that this article walks past the 2 likely explanations and then declares them both insufficient in favor of an assertion that maybe it’s not any fun.
Speculative generation is expensive and time consuming and in most cases will just be the game company writing a check to a provider every time the player does something. It’s very difficult to imagine a revenue model which allows that to make sense. Even if you did get it to make sense, you then have to worry about their being a market risk to people associating your game with AI. I don’t think you need more than those two explanations to understand why in two or three years we have not seen games that the author describes come out.
Is it a possibility that talking to a chat bot is not any fun from a games per perspective? Yes it might even be very likely. But we’re not gonna have a real answer to that question tested out by real game developers until it becomes pragmatically possible to ship a game using these tools.
The cost of generation will come down and people will find clever uses for it and one way or another opinions about AI will change. Then maybe we’ll see whether or not these are any fun.
> Is it a possibility that talking to a chat bot is not any fun from a games per perspective?
Lots of people "roleplay" with chatbots every day and it must be fun for them or they wouldn't do it.
The problem is mostly "how do you lock an LLM into the narrative context of a more structured game"?
Having an LLM roleplay as a _specific character_ in a _specific setting_ for a long period of time is a hard problem. Even maintaining consistency writing prose for more than maybe a chapter or two's worth of text is tricky.
I don't even really think the cost problem is relevant. If a game had a kickass gameplay loop that required you to put your own open ai token in to use, people would 100% do that. Maybe that wouldn't work for a AAA game, but not even an indy game has tried it or figured it out.
Claude can write and design and play games. I know this because I hooked up a MUD to an MCP server and it built a whole world and I had other agents joining and they talked to each other and solved problems together and built their own little sections of the MUD out.
It is actually fun! I have it online if people want to play -- just sign up, wait to get approved, add your mcp to claude code and tell it to play:
There are no (big) AI games yet, but I would bet money that the next big wave of adventure games (GTA6, TES6, HLX) is planning to make a splash with this tech. But things are changing so fast so it's probably a very challenging planning task.
No one wants to move first with such a polarizing, unproven and rapidly changing tech.
I've said this before: In Mass Effect, characters are interesting because they are unique, principled, not always right, and are tested. Garrus for example is a former law enforcement official who got upsetty spaghetti about how sometimes the law fails to catch a criminal so he decides to start murdering them instead. In the course of several missions, you as the player personally experience this dynamic, hearing his story, seeing how the failure of real justice impacts people, talk with Garrus about his beliefs and how they changed, you can critique his position and point out ideals or whatever, and then after an hour of directly chewing on and mulling over the finer points of this textbook moral quandary, you are put in a position to make a snap decision whether you should kill a bad guy or let the courts handle it, including having your own motivations and incentives.
AI doesn't do that. There's no internal consistency, and certainly not consistency with the surrounding game. It won't build a character to explore a point, and also build levels and game and even background events to tie in with it. Do you remember any characters from playing AI dungeon a few years ago? People remember Garrus for decades.
Go read an AI generated book, they aren't very good. They aren't trying to say anything. They don't have a unique perspective or set of ideals they want to explore. They don't have a purpose in their content creation.
If you burn immense effort tuning a procedural generation system, it will occasionally spit out content that seems to have a story, but 95% of it will just be unconnected boring mush. Game paste.
If you want to know what a LLM produced story looks like go play a recent Call of Duty Campaign. It's just a list of 5 second Set Pieces and the entire point of the game is just to be dragged through set piece after set piece with barely the fragrance of a narrative in there. It's utterly boring and desensitizing.
> You know what’s fun? A stick. A stick is fun. A ball is fun.
Having a body is fun. I think that's one reason why VR has such quick hype/death cycles--it doesn't do a good enough job of fooling your body. Conventional games induce more like a dissociative or hypnotic state where you temporarily forget your body. That can range from very, VERY abstract (like Pong or Pac-Man, or BABA IS YOU), or built on an attempt to simulate the real world as convincingly as possible through high-end graphics and physics engines.
One of the things that made Untitled Goose Game so much fun for me was that playing it made me _feel like a goose_. It made me want to run around doing goose things for goose reasons. You can spread your wings and honk, regardless of whether it advances the game. A similar game that came out called Little Kitty, Big City offers the promise of the same idea but as a cat instead of a goose. I tried that game but never felt like a cat playing it, instead it felt like being a person controlling a cat. These are such subtle shades of gameplay and storytelling that I have a hard time imagining LLMs being useful in the design.
I think there's a certain antipathy between "hustle culture" and gaming
https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/
that is is, people who are caught in AI FOMO are performatively trying to appear to be productive and that's the opposite of fun.
Anyone who has worked on a game knows it is a long, painful slog to the finish line. AI dev is promising the exact opposite: minimal prompts and the agent does all the slog.
Even if AI can whip up a quick demo or prototype for a game, it is the long-tail of tedious details that a passionate person has to hammer away on that separates what ships from what dies. I'm guessing most AI opportunists are looking for quick wins.
I still think it is only a matter of time before someone with the passion hammers an AI to get a game to market.
At Disney, they had an immersive Star Wars VR experience that I don't think is there any more (and was extremely pricey for a session).
They tricked the senses by having physical objects you could touch for every space in the game environment, there was stuff like wind, you could feel the heat of lava radiating off the ground in some spots - and body packs that would jolt you if you got shot, and a physically held "blaster" with haptic feedback.
I was blown away at how good it was and how immersive it felt. But, you need an entirely custom experience and game room and as I said it was very expensive (probably for good reason).
One thing I've learned is, there's a ton of interesting stuff in the world. Super talented people. But, what surface and gets widespread recognition and adoption is often very much determined by luck, and these days by algorithms. It's very possible there's some really cool AI games out there already, and they just haven't been discovered.
The other aspect is that a lot of people in the AI community are completely hooked on the reward-seeking of 'new thing'. Every hour there's some new tool to try out that 'changes everything'. But, without grinding it out you might never create something interesting by constantly jumping to the next new thing. Because, technological capabilities are just one part of the story.
Third, what makes something 'fun' often requires tons of iteration and a lot of LLM-type tools still rely on snapshots of applications. They're not fully there yet in terms of what happens in between moments. There are lots of principles they can draw on from and get a good prototype quickly, but it again comes back to really just slogging through lots of iterations until you find something fun.
Finally, I think with every new medium you get a first wave that really just copies the medium that came before it. Early radio was a lot like theater. Early TV was a lot like radio. I think eventually we'll see people – probably younger people – who are fully into AI and will find interesting things about that medium to express in ideas, and we'll get some really new and interesting stuff as a result.
I'm making one as a hobby project alongside my day job.
It's a debate chat game where two humans debate on a topic and a biased AI judge picks a winner. Over time players compete for ELO rankings like in chess or similar head-to-head competitive games.
I'll probably make a blog post someday about what's been involved but I think the points in OP are spot on. I've been struggling to make the format feel fun and lively. Two things really helped compared to my early versions - real-time streaming of the other person's arguments so you're not just staring at a timer while they're writing and very very short rounds so you get feedback and results quickly.
I've also tried a version with AI NPC opponents and it's much less fun than playing against real humans for reasons I can't entirely articulate. The AIs just don't make for very interesting debaters and the wins against them feel a bit shallow somehow. Right now, I've got NPCs on the game which you can opt into debating if you spend more than 30 seconds in the matchmaking queue but I hope once I get proper player counts I can disable them entirely.
I'm super biased, but proud of how the game has been coming along. Will make a show hn post someday but if anyone's curious my alpha version is live here: https://letsarg.com
In analogy to suspension of disbelief I'd like to postulate suspension of genericity: when I sink countless hours skimming text content in some The Elder Scrolls I'm not really convinced that much of it is a story worth consuming (my opinion of TES is lower than my number of gameplay hours might suggest), but I'm at least open to the idea that it might be. Thousands of players have paid good money for consuming those stories, do who knows, I might actually find something meaningful, perhaps something I'll one day connect with a real person about, so it's not necessarily a given that it's all just filler.
But when it's an LLM generating the story for me and only for me, there's no other possibility. It's a hamster wheel time sink and I can't even pretend that it's not.
Only because it is something i find fascinating: > There are those Orcs in that one Lord of the Rings game who hold grudges against you.
Is referring to the nemesis system in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, and its an amazing set of interlocking procedural systems that do genuinely feel like its AI, but is really AI in the sense its always been used by games (the rules the games follow to govern NPCs+world) and not AI in the sense of modern LLMs or even other generative systems. This video is a great look at what it is and why its great IMO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm_AzK27mZY
I think a system like this could really work well with some modern LLM stuff, but it certainly feels magic without it.
> I think a system like this could really work well
Too bad, it's patented! https://www.eurogamer.net/shadow-of-mordors-brilliant-nemesi...
Fuck software patents and every single person who has ever filed one.
It’s not really, the patent is very narrow
https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1iyrbzd/clearing_up_...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10926179B2/en
The patent was filed in 2016 and granted in 2021. If the system was so useful we would’ve seen it in another game before then, or a very similar system after.
Ah. Well, maybe we could improve the patent system instead? If most property is going digital, and we agree as a society that idea generators and executors deserve compensation for their effort, I think the answer would be better more evolved compensation systems and I agree stopping patents that are clearly a troll though would be better to be fucked.
> maybe we could improve the patent system instead?
The patent system benefits the uber-wealthy at the expense of everyone else, so no, that won't be happening.
I did a conferencr talk maybe three years ago on using AI for games.
Since the talk, code, audio,and imagery have progressed leaps and bounds, almost all of the points on active AI use haven't changed much.
You have more capable smaller models now that means you could at least run local models in games, but you still don't get to see what it is going to do before the user does. Developers are acutely aware of the climate. if a game has a fault because the AI does something unexpected, it's not just a bug, It's a news story.
It still cannot be realistically used for multiplayer games. The models are prone to adversarial attacks, which can harm a multiplayer experience.
I did point out at the time that solo sandbox games could benefit. An active AI can be empowering for the player, unchecked empowerment can be great in a solo game. It destroys a multiplayer game.
Then there's just a lack of training in some of the specific areas of games. You pretty much have to filter game state down to text for a llm, I don't yet know of any gameplay embedding model.
I have played around with a little tower defence to see how much an AI can work on gameplay, It essentially has a REPL interface to the game logic where it can take actions and advance the game a tick at a time. It does an ok job, but there's still not much understanding of time and urgency to work with an active environment
This has been discussed ad nauseum in other places here over the years, but basically I don't think the conclusions in the post are correct.
It does not make a whole lot of sense to let an AI determine story, whether it be dialogue, changing the game state, or whatever. The reason basically being a few things - one, the fundamental aspect of a game is that there are rules and boundaries these rules need to remain consistent (and testable). It is entirely jarring if an AI NPC that says something that's not consistent with the game state, or changes the game state in a way that violates the constraint of the understood rules/boundaries of the game - this isn't fun to the user at all, even if it sounds cool. If you do not believe me, you can test this out trying to play DND with these things and see how annoying it can become. If you decide ok, I'm going to try to tightly bind what the AI can do or not with branching and rules, you are basically engineering the same way that games have engineered already, so why even use AI? It's a solution looking for a problem here.
The second big issue is determinism - LLM's are fundamentally non-deterministic. In most games, you would expect an action to have the same or at least very similar reaction most of the time - RNG comes into play naturally already in a lot of games in a predictable way (dice rolls, chance to hit, etc.) LLM's bring nothing new to the table here.
For world gen, we already have games like No Man's Sky deterministically generate quadrillions of worlds. What help is an LLM here? We already have the technology.
One area that would be interesting, is agentic bot players, but that sort of leads down the same path as the above arguments - there already are extremely sophisticated bots that play a huge variety of games. What do LLM's bring here?
"It is entirely jarring if an AI NPC that says something that's not consistent with the game state, or changes the game state in a way that violates the constraint of the understood rules/boundaries of the game"
I played with the Mantella mod for Skyrim a few months back and one of the problems with LLMs is you can't keep them on topic. I even used a custom trained one just for Skyrim, but the problem was it still has vast real world knowledge it shouldn't. For instance I asked a town guard where I could find Taylor Swift, who said she might be down at the tavern playing music. While the conversation didn't super overtly break the theme, the guard "stayed in character" and didn't start gushing about specific songs of hers or something, he still "knew" who she was. Current-gen AIs can't be fenced in very well. And almost every game idea needs some sort of fencing in.
If you play along with the AI it's not bad but if you poke the edges the illusion breaks quickly. You can't prompt a current-gen AI to just "forget everything you shouldn't know because it doesn't fit in the game universe."
I expect future architectures probably will fix this and that will help a lot. But we don't have them yet.
Patrick McKenzie, aka patio11, used a LLM to generate and run a DnD campaign for a gaming convention/conference, He discusses the process and results as part of this podcast on the con.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/narrative-mas...
I think AI could reinvent text based games in a fresh way that would be fun. Text based games were always so constrained by what the developer could guess that you would type but with AI it really could read more like an interactive choose your own adventure novel that is easy to navigate.
These are kinda popular today in the form of AI Dungeon, NovelAI, FictionLab etc.
Basically you create characters with bios, traits. Then a setting/context. Now, as you write your story, you can have multiple characters involved and they'll act from their perspective and traits.
Then these also have lorebooks with triggers, so if you mention The Barking Dog Inn, the AI and the characters will know what you mean and your characters with an outgoing personality type will be more eager to go there than others etc.
Finally, these systems usually have a long term memory where key events are saved and the AI remembers.
So a lot of this already exists!
I'm not so sure.
In earlier text adventures (e.g., Infocom games), some portion of those constraints were due to the authors failing to anticipate legitimate ways that users would try to phrase things and account for them in the game. But that's not nearly such a problem in anything made since the late '90s, especially if you stick to xyzzy award winners.
The more essential reason for that constraint is that it's just good storytelling. The author of a work of IF has an idea they want to explore. That main idea could be narrative (Photopia or Anchorhead), or it could be a gameplay mechanic (Savoir-Faire or Counterfeit Monkey). But in any case, if your goal is to appreciate the creator's vision, those constraints are critical because they telegraph to you, the player, what you should and should not be exploring.
This isn't an idea that's specific to text adventures, either. The creators of the Outer Wilds deliberately made areas flat and boring when there wasn't anything there for the player to do to advance the story, specifically because they didn't want players wasting time on exploration that would ultimately prove to be pointless. This is also why open world games that do go for a more uniformly detailed world also need to hand-hold the player and tell them where they need to go every step of the way. Without that players would tend to get lost, lose their sense of progress, and ultimately end up bored.
I think that, because of this dynamic, using AI to flesh out the unimportant bits of the game would be a cardinal game design sin. Making bloat cheap and easy does not make it good. I just makes more of it.
There are a few companies doing this already -- I think AI Dungeon was one of the first movers in this space. I don't know how it is as a user, though
That was one of my first tests of ChatGPU.
It was actually an incredible experience … except for the quick “game” truncation.
Be interesting to see how Claw can improve on that. Give it some serious design time first.
Also thought about how a smart expansion of Zork would play.
I've spent way too many years chipping away at genai gaming, here's my 2c.
First, the intersection between someone who understands and cares about genai (and keeping up with the SOTA), with someone who wants to put in the work and compromise to make great games, is slim.
Think about the intersection between a procedural generation/shader programmer, someone focused on making a really fun and compelling game tech be damned. The skills don't really overlap. One requires deep knowledge, technical mastery, geometric thinking, algorithmic optimization, and time in a dark room, and the other requires empathy for humans, brutal iteration, artistic taste, and a knack for storytelling (even if just to sell the player on your game). You basically need both for your "ai game" to even qualify as an ai game. And in an industry that's so anti-ai it's hard to find teams where these two personalities meet and vibe enough to work on a game together.
Secondly, is model performance: quality, speed, cost. I don't think the industry has yet crossed the threshold where generation is high enough quality, fast enough for players, and cheap enough that it amortizes compared to traditional gamedev. You see tons of AI used in development but deploying this stuff to the front lines doesn't really napkin math. That will change though.
Third, game engines are NOT designed for genai. They are decades of optimization for a completely different pipeline, both technical and human: pitch -> publisher -> game engine -> art team + coders -> trailer -> marketing -> release -> support. Adding even simple very, very basic genai requirements to this (say, dynamic texture generation and loading over the network, streaming character dialogue) completely breaks decades of assumptions of how games are built and shipped (e.g. everything mega-super-duper-compressed and loaded to statically allocated gpu buffers). So doing anything new means throwing away large parts of the game engine. And if you pitch not using 70% of the game engine, or making your own, to a 20 year game veteran/studio boss calling the shots in this industry: well, your game will not be getting funded.
This will all get fixed though. The technology jsut came faster than the industry could adapt.
Looking forward to GDC this year!
I agree that AI is not as good as people at being entertaining. And everybody looked at putting LLMs in their games as GDC circa 2022 or so. It seemed like a good idea until you realized the server cost or the performance hit. So this is right.
But.. as someone who works in the business of games.. how sure are you that AI hasn't been there all along in ways you may not realize? Companies are very disincentivized to let you know when they are using it.
The costs of interactive AI have interesting effects as the author points out. Much like the lack of variety in music models, 3D asset generation via AI has a long way to go, particularly as studios have no incentive to share their data. But I think AI assistance could at least make some marginal improvements. Take a procedural game like No Man's Sky. There are billions of possible worlds in the game. But, presumably because of team size and/or agile philosophy, they drop these rigid, nearly identical, items and buildings throughout those billions of planets. AI could at least conveniently empower some added incremental complexity (via Claude Code etc.) to their existing asset generation, which lends more believability to these planets. If studios were willing to partner and share data, incredible world generation models, which could be used exclusively as asset generators rather than real time world renderers initially, could be built and dramatically empower designers.
Having recently considered playing Dwarf Fortress(and quickly rejecting it for UI issues and overall tediousness), it seemed like a game that would benefit from an LLM backend. I'm curious what sorts of world history an LLM could come up with. It likely would be a lot less efficient than the current system, but interesting nonetheless. I think it would be easy for devs/modders to add a way to supply an API key to an LLM and experiment there.
Also having recently played a run of Civ5(before burning out because the late game is tedious and the overall game so unrealistic), I thought that good AI would help 4x games remain epic while letting the user choose their level of tedium. It would be nice, for instance, to manually go through the early game when management is easy and exploration is fun, only to turn that over to an AI at some point(and you generally do with autoexploration). Same thing with other eras though. By the time I'm in the late game and have a large empire, I'd rather focus on diplomacy and moving armies, not city management or worker management. I don't want to commit to fully giving up on those aspects of the game though. It would be nice to, say, automate war mostly but be able to jump in if I want to micromanage for a few turns.
It could be about cost: big LLMs don’t work locally like most games, and even with server hosting, the context for a well-detailed and non-textual game would grow very fast, so processing it would become slow and/or expensive. These are the current limits for truly generative games.
As for generated content in regular games, I don’t see an issue if the content is high quality and free of errors. People don’t like low-quality content regardless of who generated it - human or LLM. It’s just that there’s currently more bad content coming from LLMs, that’s all
Generating text & audio is relatively cheap. If users paid a $5/month subscription you could generate a couple hours of dynamic npc audio per month and still make a tidy profit.
I have to imagine someone is looking into that, sandbox style games with hundreds of characters who have unique personalities and respond to any input and remember all your interactions... that would be amazing.
For games, interacting with an LLM is an improv experience. It’s a fractal that can be explored in any direction.
Video games have discrete, static goals that let a player focus on an objective. Compared to LLMs, it’s a passive experience.
People play games for all sorts of reasons (to relax, competition, to build something of their own, solve challenges).
I think this is a fundamentally different experience than what an LLM can offer.
That’s not to say LLMs can’t become a fun experience, but it’s going to take decades to develop a way to procure that experience. Look at how long it took dungeons and dragons, or any video game genre, to get to the level of polish it’s at today
It really depends on the style of game. There are gradations here. I think many designers are stuck in a static, controlling posture. Minecraft is an excellent and viral example of an alternative.
I dont think Minecraft is a fractal-like experience. The world may be infinite, but it repeats and each block that world is comprised of has set of rules that dont change. The living entities all follow their own rules. etc.
> Maybe there are some cool AI-centric games that I’m overlooking?
The enemy locomotion in Arc Raiders was almost entirely created with reinforcement learning. It’s a very impressive modern example (the game has been out for less than 6 months).
Here’s the documentary explaining how the RL locomotion works. Skip to 10 min 36 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRlhpzc7ImA&t=636s
They're are plenty of mods that inject AI into games, like Skyrim. Though in order for a game to have LLMs and scale to a shipping audience without a subscription, you would want to run them locally.
The real technical blocker is performance and voice synthesis. If voice synthesis was at parity with human actors, it would be worth it to battle the performance aspect for major studios. In text based games especially, taking time to generate enough text is just too slow to be convenient
Yeh there is a skyrim mod that lets you talk to any NPC and basically queries an LLM behind the scenes even with a screenshot of the scene so it can react to your clothing etc. if you insult it the LLM understands it dynamically and makes the NPC attack.
I mean thats not a new game concept but I definitely think that levels up the experience.
I tried to write a different "convince an AI" game about a year ago, but it was hard to work with, hard to figure out a business-model for, and more importantly-- it just wasn't very fun to play. Maybe there's a different scenario than the one I chose.
There are AI games. Check out Weekend (formerly Volley) and play a realtime AI voice game on your smart TV. https://www.weekend.com/
And to separate my thoughts from the info blob:
i think the culture war point is also super true of the game design industry, not just the consumers, where the already ultra competitive nature of the work means that the creatives and the industry as a whole have taken a veeeery strong stance against genai. Thats a reckon, and i dont know if its good or bad.
It does feel a little counter to the march of progress, but in a medium where high effort can be enjoyed by many, im personally cool with artisinal handmade games.
Rather than an affinity for artisanal stuff or there being some bias against AI itself, I think it's simply that most stuff that's going to be made with AI is going to be very derivative. Even before AI you'd read posts from people, including on here, like 'I made a highly competent knockoff of [popular indie game] but got no sales. Woe is me.' But games aren't commodities. If people like a game, that doesn't mean they want to play, let alone buy, a complete knockoff of it.
The biggest barrier to success has always been having a good idea and AI is just going to make that ever more apparent, because you'll be able to cook up knockoffs ever more rapidly.
Surprised nobody has mentioned Pax Historia yet. Very fun game and I believe the most popular startup by traffic in the most recent YC batch.
I have had a great amount of fun prompting Claude with: “Lets play a choose your own adventure game. Give me a completely random scenario. I’ll be a xxxx.”
AI romantic partner, doesn't that qualify?
> The video game audience has decided, almost unanimously, that they don’t want generative AI in their games.
Nah, it's just a very vocal minority making lots of noise. We're slowly starting to see saner minds prevail, with steam backtracking on the ban of aigen and so on. People don't care if the end result is good. And the "but muh art" is just virtue signalling. I've used this example before, for me "art" is the fact that I can have a horse as my ruler in EU, not the fact that the horse might be generated by a diffusion model. Art is always in the eye of the beholder, or something.
On a more general note, like with the question "where are all the good open source projects", things will come. We're still in the learning phase of this new shiny toy that we got. It's only been 3 years since the tech is readily available, and maybe 2 years since people can take offline models and run with them. Give it time.
In the meantime, I see a lot of help from agentic coding in game dev. I've been following a space rouguelite thingy on itch, the developer has been pumping updates every other day, and the game is pretty much ready in ~1month. Sure, some updates broke stuff, some things didn't make much sense, but the speed with which the dev could take the feedback and pump out an update is remarkable. Small projects are doing it today. Larger projects will probably do it tomorrow.
My guess is that there's a big chance that the next "big thing" in gameplay w/ AI being somehow used will come from a smaller team / single dev type of thing, and not the big labs. Something genre-defining like minecraft or tarkov.
It's always this massive cop out.
"Things just got stated. The future will be amazing".
I heard this with IoT, Wearables, Cryptocurrency, VR, now Gen AI.
Forgive me if after a while every vague gesture that "now it is for real" just becomes noise.
It's not only just signalling. I've never said anything about AI art in games before this moment, but if I become aware that a game has used it, I'm not getting that game.
Signalling means you are doing the thing only to identify yourself to others as being in the tribe. That's kind of the opposite of my personal take.
It’s really weird that this article walks past the 2 likely explanations and then declares them both insufficient in favor of an assertion that maybe it’s not any fun.
Speculative generation is expensive and time consuming and in most cases will just be the game company writing a check to a provider every time the player does something. It’s very difficult to imagine a revenue model which allows that to make sense. Even if you did get it to make sense, you then have to worry about their being a market risk to people associating your game with AI. I don’t think you need more than those two explanations to understand why in two or three years we have not seen games that the author describes come out.
Is it a possibility that talking to a chat bot is not any fun from a games per perspective? Yes it might even be very likely. But we’re not gonna have a real answer to that question tested out by real game developers until it becomes pragmatically possible to ship a game using these tools.
The cost of generation will come down and people will find clever uses for it and one way or another opinions about AI will change. Then maybe we’ll see whether or not these are any fun.
> Is it a possibility that talking to a chat bot is not any fun from a games per perspective?
Lots of people "roleplay" with chatbots every day and it must be fun for them or they wouldn't do it.
The problem is mostly "how do you lock an LLM into the narrative context of a more structured game"?
Having an LLM roleplay as a _specific character_ in a _specific setting_ for a long period of time is a hard problem. Even maintaining consistency writing prose for more than maybe a chapter or two's worth of text is tricky.
I don't even really think the cost problem is relevant. If a game had a kickass gameplay loop that required you to put your own open ai token in to use, people would 100% do that. Maybe that wouldn't work for a AAA game, but not even an indy game has tried it or figured it out.
Claude can write and design and play games. I know this because I hooked up a MUD to an MCP server and it built a whole world and I had other agents joining and they talked to each other and solved problems together and built their own little sections of the MUD out.
It is actually fun! I have it online if people want to play -- just sign up, wait to get approved, add your mcp to claude code and tell it to play:
https://mycorrhiza.fly.dev/
Every bit of actual game content was entirely written by ai agents with veerrrry little input from me.
There are no (big) AI games yet, but I would bet money that the next big wave of adventure games (GTA6, TES6, HLX) is planning to make a splash with this tech. But things are changing so fast so it's probably a very challenging planning task.
No one wants to move first with such a polarizing, unproven and rapidly changing tech.
Because AI is not good or interesting.
I've said this before: In Mass Effect, characters are interesting because they are unique, principled, not always right, and are tested. Garrus for example is a former law enforcement official who got upsetty spaghetti about how sometimes the law fails to catch a criminal so he decides to start murdering them instead. In the course of several missions, you as the player personally experience this dynamic, hearing his story, seeing how the failure of real justice impacts people, talk with Garrus about his beliefs and how they changed, you can critique his position and point out ideals or whatever, and then after an hour of directly chewing on and mulling over the finer points of this textbook moral quandary, you are put in a position to make a snap decision whether you should kill a bad guy or let the courts handle it, including having your own motivations and incentives.
AI doesn't do that. There's no internal consistency, and certainly not consistency with the surrounding game. It won't build a character to explore a point, and also build levels and game and even background events to tie in with it. Do you remember any characters from playing AI dungeon a few years ago? People remember Garrus for decades.
Go read an AI generated book, they aren't very good. They aren't trying to say anything. They don't have a unique perspective or set of ideals they want to explore. They don't have a purpose in their content creation.
If you burn immense effort tuning a procedural generation system, it will occasionally spit out content that seems to have a story, but 95% of it will just be unconnected boring mush. Game paste.
If you want to know what a LLM produced story looks like go play a recent Call of Duty Campaign. It's just a list of 5 second Set Pieces and the entire point of the game is just to be dragged through set piece after set piece with barely the fragrance of a narrative in there. It's utterly boring and desensitizing.