Last year whenNaughty Dogwas promotingThe Last of Us Part 1remake, one of themajor elements it stressed was AI improvements. These days, it’s a phrase that would set off screaming alarm bells, but back then nobody batted an eye. What Naughty Dog meant, and what we all understood it to mean, was the AI that powers each character, that controls when they move, when they search for Joel, when they become violent, and so on. AI has been part of gaming for a long time, and should continue to be. The line should not be ‘no AI’, but ‘no creative AI’.
Whenever you play a game ‘against the computer’, you are playing against the AI. All of the characters you meet in any given game are acting under AI - this is not one of those interactive theatres where actors stand around doing nothing until you arrive to speak with them, where they respond in specific, bespoke ways. Nobody has an issue with this type of AI in gaming, and nor should we - there would be no gaming without this sort of AI.
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The problem is it has crossed a line into creativity. All of these examples above are the AI responding in tailored ways based on the work of developers, who set the parameters of behaviour which changes with each interaction. It’s harder to make an enemy boss only just miss you than it is for them to hit every time, and it’s the human hand behind AI that makes it most effective.
Right now though, there is a creeping desire to reverse the polarity -for AI to become the hand that guides humans. Whether it be anenforced reliance on ideas generated by AI, a reframing of creative work astweaking what an AI has wrought rather than conjuring from nothing but one’s own brain, or replacing creative work with that of a computer completely, AI is about to make gaming so much worse.
Tech bros have been searching for a chance to crowbar themselves into gaming, and this might just be it.NFTsand the Metaverse didn’t stick, and it was hard to visualise how they worked. You need to sell an idea to two groups of people for it to work - the money men and the crowd. Money men would have backed NFTs to the hilt, but the crowd didn’t understand the point of them (largely because there was none). With AI however, it’s easier to be taken in, and therefore even more important to stay vigilant.
Money men liked NFTs because they could havemademoney - the idea is to overcharge suckers to ‘own’ the guns they use in a game. But no one is that big a sucker and the idea was a non-starter when it relied on moving guns from one game to a totally different game. AI though is sticking. Right now the trend is using AI to expand on paintings, movie frames, or memes, with no regard for the intention of the original creation. There is no ‘rest of the Mona Lisa’. Money men like this idea not because it makes money, but because itsavesmoney, allowing you to pay artists less, and hoping players don’t notice.
There has also been talk that gaming has brought this on itself, lowering its standards of writing to the point where a computer can take the wheel. I agree with this more than it is perhaps safe or wise to admit - a lot of writing in gaming is generic, rushed, and underbaked. But this is because writing is still not respected enough in gaming, and thus is deprioritised in terms of both time and resources. Using AI to ‘replace’ writers will only make this worse, whether that beUbisoft’s plan to use AI for barksor the more pie in the sky idea of fully realised conversations written by AI on the fly.
It’s harder to keep your guard up with AI, because ‘no NFTs in gaming’ is an easy slogan. ‘No AI in gaming’ makes no sense. The line must be ‘no AI for creative work’, ensuring that artists are still trusted (and perhaps need to be trusted even more) to build these worlds for us as they envision them, not as a simplistic program created by plagiarising other sources.
AI will always be an essential part of gaming, and that’s why it’s harder to protect it from this new invasion. But the best way to shield gaming from the predictable and oversaturated inspirations AI steals is to give more respect to the artists who make these games, not less.
