3 ms·

The secret to Mario games is a new gimmick introduced every level. They've gotten better at this over the years, and Mario 1 + Lost Levels is the worst example

by a13o 4y ago

The secret to Mario games is a new gimmick introduced every level. They've gotten better at this over the years, and Mario 1 + Lost Levels is the worst example of it. That makes it a great comp for GPT-3 which can churn out an endless supply of flavorless brick & pipe levels and still feel vaguely Mario 1. Were this tool to live up to the hype of "indies punching above their weight", it would need to design novel platformer mechanics. The work it's doing isn't the hard part of platformer level design. For another example of why this isn't commercially viable, look at what happened with Super Mario Maker. In that game _humans_ are given a fixed set of Mario doodads with which to build levels. But Nintendo kept the secret sauce for themselves - the ability to create new doodads. What follows is millions of derivative Mario levels unworthy of their own game. Even if you trained MarioGPT on the rich set of level data available in Mario Maker, you would not have an algorithm that makes commercially viable Mario levels.

asddubs 4y ago
mario maker had lots of levels combining the different mechanics in new and unforeseen ways, and even using glitches to create new mechanics.
kibwen 4y ago
> What follows is millions of derivative Mario levels unworthy of their own game. It doesn't refute your point, but what actually happened was that brilliant tinkerers found ingenious ways to combine the basic tools to create whole new classes of advanced gadgets that enable styles of gameplay not intended by Nintendo. Here's a playlist with some examples and tutorials: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLekbcfvMB1gYieKXixxXVBTYCuWRKvxjK https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLekbcfvMB1gYieKXixxXVBTYC...
- levesque 4y ago
  Yeah OP missed the target on this one. Super Mario Maker is a great example of insane creativity demonstrated by a community. AI can't do that though.
  - nextaccountic 4y ago
    AI can't do that by its own yet. AI can be leveraged by an human designer to do that with some effort. Like, humans may have good taste in level design and AI may explore the concrete possibilities. AI might be able to do this in the future by itself
    - levesque 4y ago
      AI models might be able to do this in the future by themselves, though with current paradigms AI will barely generate copies of existing levels with little creativity. Sure, a composition of existing level pieces could lead to an interesting level design, though it would be more by accident than by design. Models do not maximize player enjoyment, there is no metric for that. Maybe engagement metrics could be used, but I don't think players would stick around long enough playing bad levels to reach a viable model. New models and paradigms will come up, but until then I'd say anything AI-generated will feel pretty vanilla and somewhat incoherent.
      - nextaccountic 4y ago
        > Models are do not maximize player enjoyment, there is no metric for that There might be! Just have some people to play and rate the levels. I think that doing this would considerably improve the quality of the levels in MarioGPT or other algorithms for generation of game levels
  - a13o 4y ago
    My point isn't that the Super Mario Maker players weren't having fun flexing their game design muscles. My point is that a million makers on a million joycons couldn't generate enough commercially viable content for a single game. So what hope does GPT have? Both situations have similar design constraints, which I'm arguing is missing the critical design component necessary to make commercially viable platformers. The reason why commercial viability is of interest is because the article claims this tool will be valuable to game developers and I don't think it will be because it doesn't solve for any problems in the business of making games. Nobody is stuck deciding where the pipes and bricks go. To end on a positive note, lots of open world games use terrain generators as a first pass. AI might have better luck in that domain.
tialaramex 4y ago
While obviously it'd be more freedom to be allowed to do just whatever you want, artistically it helps to have some sort of constraint. "I can do anything" is a bit... vague. OK, but what should I do? If you give me six specific lego bricks I'm constrained, but immediately I have ideas, and if you think "Six lego bricks means maximum 6 factorial ideas" you're badly mistaken. If you train MarioGPT on MM2 levels, the reason you don't get "commercially viable Mario levels" is that's not what the community ever wanted to build, it's like training a model on abstract portraiture and then complaining this doesn't produce saleable landscape paintings. Mario Maker has multiple communities, let's look at two of them, in both cases they are not "commercially viable" for whatever that's worth. Kaizo. Kaizo means roughly "re-arrange" in Japanese but eventually Kaizo Mario is a style in which tremendous skill is needed to navigate the course. Basic Kaizo techniques include the "Shell jump" in which Mario throws a shell, it bounces off a wall or other surface, and Mario jumps off the shell he threw. Mario can of course arrange to throw, jump off, and catch shells more than once, and he can cause Yoshi to swallow and then spit out a shell, jump off that shell, and catch it. Good Kaizo players think nothing of a multi shell jump to climb a wall, they'll assume that if there's a shell and a wall that's what is intended. Kaizo Mario is far too difficult to be commercially successful. Most people could learn, if they're got good hand-eye co-ordination, but it's not easy and most people would only ever be passably good at it, so that hard Kaizo levels might be impossible either because they didn't figure out the technique or because their skills are inadequate, very frustrating. "Chocolate" Kaizo (which is Kaizo where you also change the game's rules) isn't possible with Mario Maker, but even if an AI were able to make the best Chocolate Kaizo levels, they're not commercial, the best Chocolate Kaizo today is probably something like "Grand Pooh World 2" but there are maybe a few hundred people in the world who have fun playing something like that, so where's the money? OK, next community, Troll. Troll Mario subverts the assumptions about the central concept of Mario. The idea is to surprise and perhaps frustrate the player, unlike Kaizo great skill is not mandatory, but patience is, and you need to be able to accept that you were wrong and learn from mistakes which many people struggle to do. A Troll level might present Mario with two apparent routes forward, a mushroom power up with a door, or a fire flower and a pipe. Except nope, those are both instant death, the correct solution is to jump into the obviously deadly pit, it wasn't really deadly and Mario gets a different mushroom then is pushed into a one-shot teleport. A common Troll trope is the "anti-softlock" complete with use of the "Slide theme" music. Nintendo's levels are designed so that either Mario can win or you will be put out of your misery quickly to try again. Where it's possible to instead get stuck, unable to die, that's called a "Soft lock" - as opposed to a hard lock where the game just freezes. The anti-softlock then is the art of a Troll level making it possible but very difficult to die, even though Mario can't win. Fashion changes, sometimes it's popular to have actual softlocks, sometimes fake ones, where Mario will die after say 15 seconds somehow, but often especially later in a course, you have complex puzzles in which the only benefit of the solution is Mario dies and you can start over from the checkpoint you reached.
jerf 4y ago
Among the many things I've wished I had time to do, I've wanted to sit down and build a procedural level generator in which the 'tricks' you refer to are first-class citizens, meaning both that they could be incorporated into the levels consistently by the generator and that we could control their introduction into the player's vocabulary consistently. This approach could be a viable approach to that, but it may need some tuning. It is possible that the problem in this case is less GPT and more the training set; the examples given imply that the levels were characterized as a whole by some very superficial criteria, so it isn't necessarily a surprise that the resulting levels are equally superficial. The system was never trained on "shell jump" (not that that appears in Mario 1 AFAIK, it's just the first Mario term that came to mind), so it never produces them. I would want to look at training on a screen-by-screen basis, with some overlap, rather than levels, and more richly categorizing the input data. If I were designing a new Indie game, I'd be feeding it some hand-crafted level snippets. However, in terms of getting it out, it would be hard to know whether I can feed the GPT system enough input with enough categorizations to know whether it would just be more cost-effective to design the levels directly. At the moment it is not obvious to me how to convince GPT to understand the concept of level flow, or even something as simply as "this pipe is physically impossible to jump over". It is also possible there just isn't enough input data to really make this slick. There aren't that many publicly-available Mario levels.

by a13o 4y ago

asddubs 4y ago

mario maker had lots of levels combining the different mechanics in new and unforeseen ways, and even using glitches to create new mechanics.

kibwen 4y ago

> What follows is millions of derivative Mario levels unworthy of their own game. It doesn't refute your point, but what actually happened was that brilliant tinkerers found ingenious ways to combine the basic tools to create whole new classes of advanced gadgets that enable styles of gameplay not intended by Nintendo. Here's a playlist with some examples and tutorials: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLekbcfvMB1gYieKXixxXVBTYCuWRKvxjK https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLekbcfvMB1gYieKXixxXVBTYC...

levesque 4y ago
Yeah OP missed the target on this one. Super Mario Maker is a great example of insane creativity demonstrated by a community. AI can't do that though.
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  AI can't do that by its own yet. AI can be leveraged by an human designer to do that with some effort. Like, humans may have good taste in level design and AI may explore the concrete possibilities. AI might be able to do this in the future by itself
  - levesque 4y ago
    AI models might be able to do this in the future by themselves, though with current paradigms AI will barely generate copies of existing levels with little creativity. Sure, a composition of existing level pieces could lead to an interesting level design, though it would be more by accident than by design. Models do not maximize player enjoyment, there is no metric for that. Maybe engagement metrics could be used, but I don't think players would stick around long enough playing bad levels to reach a viable model. New models and paradigms will come up, but until then I'd say anything AI-generated will feel pretty vanilla and somewhat incoherent.
    - nextaccountic 4y ago
      > Models are do not maximize player enjoyment, there is no metric for that There might be! Just have some people to play and rate the levels. I think that doing this would considerably improve the quality of the levels in MarioGPT or other algorithms for generation of game levels
- a13o 4y ago
  My point isn't that the Super Mario Maker players weren't having fun flexing their game design muscles. My point is that a million makers on a million joycons couldn't generate enough commercially viable content for a single game. So what hope does GPT have? Both situations have similar design constraints, which I'm arguing is missing the critical design component necessary to make commercially viable platformers. The reason why commercial viability is of interest is because the article claims this tool will be valuable to game developers and I don't think it will be because it doesn't solve for any problems in the business of making games. Nobody is stuck deciding where the pipes and bricks go. To end on a positive note, lots of open world games use terrain generators as a first pass. AI might have better luck in that domain.

tialaramex 4y ago

While obviously it'd be more freedom to be allowed to do just whatever you want, artistically it helps to have some sort of constraint. "I can do anything" is a bit... vague. OK, but what should I do? If you give me six specific lego bricks I'm constrained, but immediately I have ideas, and if you think "Six lego bricks means maximum 6 factorial ideas" you're badly mistaken. If you train MarioGPT on MM2 levels, the reason you don't get "commercially viable Mario levels" is that's not what the community ever wanted to build, it's like training a model on abstract portraiture and then complaining this doesn't produce saleable landscape paintings. Mario Maker has multiple communities, let's look at two of them, in both cases they are not "commercially viable" for whatever that's worth. Kaizo. Kaizo means roughly "re-arrange" in Japanese but eventually Kaizo Mario is a style in which tremendous skill is needed to navigate the course. Basic Kaizo techniques include the "Shell jump" in which Mario throws a shell, it bounces off a wall or other surface, and Mario jumps off the shell he threw. Mario can of course arrange to throw, jump off, and catch shells more than once, and he can cause Yoshi to swallow and then spit out a shell, jump off that shell, and catch it. Good Kaizo players think nothing of a multi shell jump to climb a wall, they'll assume that if there's a shell and a wall that's what is intended. Kaizo Mario is far too difficult to be commercially successful. Most people could learn, if they're got good hand-eye co-ordination, but it's not easy and most people would only ever be passably good at it, so that hard Kaizo levels might be impossible either because they didn't figure out the technique or because their skills are inadequate, very frustrating. "Chocolate" Kaizo (which is Kaizo where you also change the game's rules) isn't possible with Mario Maker, but even if an AI were able to make the best Chocolate Kaizo levels, they're not commercial, the best Chocolate Kaizo today is probably something like "Grand Pooh World 2" but there are maybe a few hundred people in the world who have fun playing something like that, so where's the money? OK, next community, Troll. Troll Mario subverts the assumptions about the central concept of Mario. The idea is to surprise and perhaps frustrate the player, unlike Kaizo great skill is not mandatory, but patience is, and you need to be able to accept that you were wrong and learn from mistakes which many people struggle to do. A Troll level might present Mario with two apparent routes forward, a mushroom power up with a door, or a fire flower and a pipe. Except nope, those are both instant death, the correct solution is to jump into the obviously deadly pit, it wasn't really deadly and Mario gets a different mushroom then is pushed into a one-shot teleport. A common Troll trope is the "anti-softlock" complete with use of the "Slide theme" music. Nintendo's levels are designed so that either Mario can win or you will be put out of your misery quickly to try again. Where it's possible to instead get stuck, unable to die, that's called a "Soft lock" - as opposed to a hard lock where the game just freezes. The anti-softlock then is the art of a Troll level making it possible but very difficult to die, even though Mario can't win. Fashion changes, sometimes it's popular to have actual softlocks, sometimes fake ones, where Mario will die after say 15 seconds somehow, but often especially later in a course, you have complex puzzles in which the only benefit of the solution is Mario dies and you can start over from the checkpoint you reached.

jerf 4y ago

Among the many things I've wished I had time to do, I've wanted to sit down and build a procedural level generator in which the 'tricks' you refer to are first-class citizens, meaning both that they could be incorporated into the levels consistently by the generator and that we could control their introduction into the player's vocabulary consistently. This approach could be a viable approach to that, but it may need some tuning. It is possible that the problem in this case is less GPT and more the training set; the examples given imply that the levels were characterized as a whole by some very superficial criteria, so it isn't necessarily a surprise that the resulting levels are equally superficial. The system was never trained on "shell jump" (not that that appears in Mario 1 AFAIK, it's just the first Mario term that came to mind), so it never produces them. I would want to look at training on a screen-by-screen basis, with some overlap, rather than levels, and more richly categorizing the input data. If I were designing a new Indie game, I'd be feeding it some hand-crafted level snippets. However, in terms of getting it out, it would be hard to know whether I can feed the GPT system enough input with enough categorizations to know whether it would just be more cost-effective to design the levels directly. At the moment it is not obvious to me how to convince GPT to understand the concept of level flow, or even something as simply as "this pipe is physically impossible to jump over". It is also possible there just isn't enough input data to really make this slick. There aren't that many publicly-available Mario levels.