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> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc. No 'code' or 'programming.' If game players are the most anti-AI group then it's crystal clear that LLM coding is inevitable. > This stands in stark contrast to code, which generally doesn't suffer from re-use at all, or may even benefit from it, if it's infrastructure. Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing. > Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver. Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. The fact one developer fumbled it doesn't make the idea of procedural generation bad. This is a perfect example of that a tool isn't inherently good or bad. It's up to the tool's wielder.

trashymctrash 8mo ago
If you read the next couple of paragraphs, the author addresses this: > That said, Steam's policy has been recently updated to exclude dev tools used for "efficiency gains", but which are not used to generate content presented to players. I only quoted the first paragraph, but there is more.
theshrike79 8mo ago
Also "AI" has been in gaming, especially mobile gaming, for a literal decade already. Household name game studios have had custom AI art asset tooling for a long time that can create art quickly, using their specific style. AI is a tool and as Steve Jobs said, you can hold it wrong. It's like plastic surgery, you only notice the bad ones and object to them. An expert might detect the better jobs, but the regular folk don't know and for the most part don't care unless someone else tells them to care. And then they go around blaming EVERYTHING as AI.
- delaminator 8mo ago
  "I hate CGI video" "So you hated the TV Series Ugly Betty then?" "What? that's not CGI!" This video is 15 years old https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY
  - wormpilled 8mo ago
    I think that's a different category, though. Those backgrounds are actual video recordings of real places, not 3D environments modeled from scratch. It looks 'real' because the background actually exists.
    - theshrike79 8mo ago
      It's still 100% CGI compositing and definitely not all of them are real places or real objects. In that specific 15 year old example they're mostly composited, you're right about that.
      - DonHopkins 8mo ago
        I love Ian Hubert's demos of green screening in Blender. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxD6H3ri8RI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxD6H3ri8RI His Blender Conference talk about photogrammetry / camera projection / projection mapping was fantastic: World Building in Blender - Ian Hubert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPWKecazgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPWKecazgM
    - delaminator 8mo ago
      Computer Generated Imagery.
  - runarberg 8mo ago
    Your case would have been better if you had used Mad Max: Fury Road, or even Titanic as examples, rather then a mediocre TV show nobody remembers. Ugly Betty used green screens to make production cheaper, that did not improve the show (although it may have improved the profit margins). Mad Max: Fury Road on the other hand used CGI to significantly improve the visual experience. The added CGI probably increased the cost of the production, and subsequently it is one of the greatest, most awesome, movie ever made. Actually if you look at the scene from Greys Anatomy [0:54] you can see where CGI is used to improve the scene (rather then cut costs), and you get this amazing scene of the Washington State Ferry crash. I think you can see the parallels here. When people say they hate AI they are generally referring to the sloppy stuff it generates. It has enabled a proliferation of cheap slop. And with few exception it seems like generating cheap slop is all it does (these exception being specialized tools e.g. in image processing software).
tovej 8mo ago
An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs. There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.
- vntok 8mo ago
  > An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. This reads like a skill issue on your end, in part at least in the prompting side. It does take time to reach a point where you can prompt an LLM sufficiently well to get a correct answer in one shot, developing an intuitive understanding of what absolutely needs to be written out and what can be inferred by the model.
  - Jooror 8mo ago
    I’m curious about how you landed “git gud; prompt better” and not “maybe the domain I work in is a better fit for LLM code”. Or, to be a bit less generous, consider the possibility that the code you’re generating is boilerplate, marshaling, and/or API calls. A facade of perceived complexity over something that’s as complex as a filter-map or two.
    - 3371 8mo ago
      Sharing my 2 cents. In the past 2 months I've been using all the SOTA models to help me design a new DSL for narrative scripting (such as game story telling) and a c# runtime implementation o the script player engine. The language spec and design is about 95% authored by me up to this point; I have the LLMs work on the 2nd layer: the implementation specs/guidelines and the 3rd layer: concrete c# implementation. Since it's a new language, I consider it's somewhat new/novel tasks for LLMs (at least, not like boilerplate stuff like HTTP API or CRUD service). I'd say, these LLMs have been very helpful - you can tell they sometimes get confused and have trouble to comply to the foreign language spec and design - but they are mostly smart enough to carry out the objectives, and they get better and better after the project got on track and has plenty of files/resources to read and reference. And I'd also say "prompt better" is a important factor, just much more nuanced/complicated. I started with 0 experience with LLM agents and have learned a lot about how to tame them, and developed a protocol to collaborate with agents, these all comes from countless trial and errors, but in the end get boiled down to "prompt better".
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lxgr 8mo ago
> I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing. People spin all kinds of things if they believe (accurately or not) that their livelihood is on the line. The knee-jerk "AI universally bad" movement seems just as absurd to me as the "AGI is already here" one. > Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation, seemed very soulless to me at the time. As I see it, it's all a matter of how well it's executed. In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work (in the same way that e.g. renaissance artists didn't make every single brushstroke of their masterpieces themselves). In the worst (or maybe even average? time will tell) case, there are only minimal human-made artistic decisions flowing into a work and the output is a mediocre average of everything that's already been done before, which is then rightfully perceived as slop.
- zimpenfish 8mo ago
  > Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation I might be misremembering but wasn't the Oblivion proc-gen entirely in the development process, not "live" in the game, which means... > "In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work" ...is what Bethesda did, no?
  - lxgr 8mo ago
    Yes, but I beg to differ on the "skilled" part. I find the result very jarring somehow; the scale of the world didn't seem right. (Probably because it was too realistic; part of the art of game terrain design is reconciling the inherently unrealistic scales.)
    - bombcar 8mo ago
      WoW had this but you never really thought about it - even the massive capital cities were a few blocks at most. The problem with procedural generation is it's hard to make it as action-packed and desirable as WoW zones, and even those quickly become fly-over territory.
fzeroracer 8mo ago
> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing Do you ever ask why you're writing the same thing over and over again? That's literally the foundational piece of being an engineer; understanding when you're reinventing the wheel when there's a perfectly good wheel nearby.
- porridgeraisin 8mo ago
  When you make a function f(a, b, c) It is reusable only if simply changing a, b, c is enough to give the function that you want. Options object etc _parameterise_ that function. It is useful only if the variability in reuse you desire is spanned by the parameters. This is syntactic reuse. With LLMs, the parameterisation goes into semantic space. This makes code more reusable. A model trained on all of GitHub can reuse all that code regardless of whether they are syntactically reusable or not. This is semantic reuse, which is naturally much broader.
  - fzeroracer 8mo ago
    There are two important failures I see with this logic: First, I am not arguing for reusability. Reusability is one of the most common mistakes you can make as a software engineer because you are over-generalizing what you need before you need it. Code should be written for your specific use case, and only generalized as problems appear. But if you can recognize that your specific use case fits a known problem, then you can find the best way to solve that problem, faster. Second, when you're using an LLM to make your code more 'reusable' you are taking full responsibility for everything that LLM vomits out. You're no longer assembling a car from well known parts, taking care to tailor it to your use case as needed. You're now building everything in said car, from the tires to the engine and the rearview mirror. Coding is a constant balance between understanding what you're solving for and what can solve it. Using LLMs takes the worst of both worlds, by offloading both your understanding of the problem and your understanding of the solution.
    - 8mo ago
Sharlin 8mo ago
> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.
- porridgeraisin 8mo ago
  Oh come on, you don't have to be condescending about function calls. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260385
  - Sharlin 8mo ago
    I was talking about libraries, higher-level units of reuse than individual functions. And your "syntactic" vs "semantic" reuse makes zero sense. Functions are literally written and invoked for their semantics – what they make happen. "Syntactic reuse" would be macros if anything, and indeed macros are very good at reducing boilerplate. You might have a more compelling argument if instead of syntax and semantics you contrasted semantics and pragmatics.
    - porridgeraisin 8mo ago
      A library is a collection of data structures functions. My argument still holds. > Syntactic reuse would be macros Well sure. My point is that what can be reused is decided ahead of time and encoded in the syntax. Whereas with LLMs it is not, and is encoded in the semantics. > Pragmatics Didn't know what that is. Consider my post updated with the better terms.
      - runarberg 8mo ago
        I’m not sure your logic is sound. It sounds like you are insisting on some nuance which simply isn’t there. LLM generates unmaintainable slop, which is extremely difficult to reason about, uses wrong abstractions, violates DRY, violates cohesion, etc. The industry has known how to reuse codes for two decades now (npm was released 16 years ago; pip 18 years ago). Using LLMs for code reuse is a step in the wrong direction, at least if you care about maintaining your code.
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krige 8mo ago
> Spore is well acclaimed And yet it also effectively ended Will Wright's career. Rave press reviews are not a good indicator of anything, really.
- h2zizzle 8mo ago
  Tbf Spore's acclaim comes with the caveat that it completely failed to live up to years of pre-release hype. Much of the goodwill it's garnered since, which is reflected in review scores, only came after the storm of controversy over Spore not being "the ultimate simulator which would mark the 'end of history' for gaming" died down. And you wouldn't really have any idea this was the case if you weren't there when it happened.
dannersy 8mo ago
You're cherry picking. The open world games aren't as compelling anymore since the novelty is wearing off. I can cherry pick, too. For example, Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring. And the users may not care about code directly, but they definitely do indirectly. The less optimized and more off-the-shelf solutions have seen a stark decrease in performance but allowing game development to be more approachable. LLMs saving engineers and developers time is an unfounded claim because immediate results does not mean net positive. Actually, I'd argue that any software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term sustainability.
- whywhywhywhy 8mo ago
  Startfield is boring because of the bad writing and they made a space exploration game where there are loading screens between the planet and space and you don’t actually explore space. They fundamentally misunderstood what they were promising, it’s the same as making a pirate game where you never steer the ship or drop anchor. You can prove people are not bored with the concept as new gamers still start playing fallout new Vegas or skyrim today despite them being old and janky.
  - alexpotato 8mo ago
    This is why Sid Meier's Pirates [0] remains such a great game. It was really a combination of mini-games: - you got steer a ship (or fleet of ships) around the Caribbean - ship to ship combat - fencing - dancing (with the Governors' daughters) - trading (from port to port or with captured goods0 - side quests Each time I played it with my oldest, it felt like a brand new game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Pirates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Pirates!
    - whywhywhywhy 8mo ago
      Played this as a kid, genuinely great gameplay loop and felt very immersive at the time.
  - dannersy 8mo ago
Nursie 8mo ago
> Spore is well acclaimed. Spore was fun (IMHO) but at the time of release was considered a disappointment compared to its hype.
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bartread 8mo ago
> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver. Yes, this is a wildly uneducated perspective. Procedural generation has often been a key component of some incredibly successful, and even iconic games going back decades. Elite is a canonical example here, with its galaxies being procedurally generated. Powermonger, from Bulldog, likewise used fractal generation for its maps. More recently, the prevalence of procedurally generated rogue-likes and Metroidvanias is another point against. Granted, people have got a bit bored of these now, but that's because there were so many of them, not because they were unsuccessful or "failed to deliver".
- bombcar 8mo ago
  Procedural generation underlies the most popular game of all time (Minecraft) and is foundational for numerous other games of a similar type - Dwarf Fortress, et al. And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines). What procedural generation does NOT work at is generating "story elements" though perhaps even that can fall, Dwarf Fortress already does decently enough given that the player will fill in the blanks.
  - optionalsquid 8mo ago
    > And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines). Apparently Stardew Valley's mines are not procedurally generated, but rather hand-crafted. Per their recent 10 year anniversary video, the developer did try to implement procedural generation for the mines, but ended up scrapping it: https://www.stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-10-year-anniversary/ https://www.stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-10-year-anniver...
    - bombcar 8mo ago
      They're quasi-generated with random elements and fixed elements - similarly to early Diablo procedural generation.
larodi 8mo ago
> No one cares about how the code is written. I would overstate: No one even cares how architecture is done. Unless you are the one fixing it or maintaining it. Sorry, no one. We all know Apple did some great stuff with their code, but we care more about the awful work done on the UI, right? I mean - the UI seems to not be breaking in these new OSs which is amazing feature... for a game perhaps, and most likely the code is top notch. But we care about other things. This is the reality, and the blind notion that so-many people care about code is super untrue. Perhaps someone putting money on developers care, but we have so many examples already of money put on implementation no matter what the code is. We can see everywhere funds thrown at obnoxious implementations, and particularly in large enterprises, that are only sustained by the weird ecosystem of white-collar jobs that sustains this impression. Very few people care about the code in total, and this can be observed very easy, perhaps it can be proved no other way around is possible.
- TimTheTinker 8mo ago
  This is overstating it. Computers are amazing machines, and modern operating systems are also amazing. But even they cannot completely mask the downstream effects of poor quality code. You say you don't care, but I bet you do when you're dealing with a problem caused by poor code quality or bad choices made by the developer.
  - miningape 8mo ago
    Yep willing to bet that the majority of people saying "users don't care how well the code is written" will crash out when some software they're using is slow and buggy, even more extremely if it glitches and deletes their work. Just like how most people don't care how well a bridge is designed... until it collapses.
    - larodi 8mo ago
      yes, they will hit the TV or through the remote, or bang the mouse, or the box. I mean - if you tell me this is 'care', no... this is outrage, and it would probably not even be focused to one particular component. and for what is worth - the reason of failure may not be because of particular nut, but the combination of them all. the whole idea that most software is done in good faith is just plainly wrong, and most of the software we rely on a daily basis - all the enterprise bullshit - is very very very often not done in good faith, but rather just made, seamed, helped into some weird equilibrium of temporary performance. perhaps hardware is done right more than software ever is.
BloondAndDoom 8mo ago
One the topic procedural generation; rogue likes are all about it and new generation Diablo like games have definitely similar things, well respected new games like Blue Prince. There has never been such as successful period of time for procedural generation in games like now, and all of these are pre-AI. AI powered procedural generation is wet dream of rogue-like lovers
- hiddevb 8mo ago
  I don't think I agree with this take. I love procedural generation, and there is definitely a craft to it. Creating a process that generates a playable level or world is just very interesting to explore as an emergent system. I don't think LLMs will make these system more interesting by default. Of course there are still things to explore in this new space. It's similar to generative/plotter art compared to a midjourney piece of slop. The craft that goes into creating the code for the plotter is what makes it interesting.
  - 1899-12-30 8mo ago
    The key to non-disruptive LLM integration is using it in a purely additive way, supplementing a feature with functionality that couldn't be done before rather than replacing an existing part. Like adding ai generated images to accompany the dwarf fortress artifact descriptions. It could completely togglable and doesn't disrupt any existing mechanics, but would provide value to those that don't mind the slop.
mathgradthrow 8mo ago
localization? Why would you oppose LLMs doing localization?
- fhd2 8mo ago
  I guess the chain of reasoning would be: AI for art is bad -> Writing is art -> Translation is writing. Personally, I do appreciate good localisation, Nintendo usually does a pretty impressive job there. I play games in their original language as long as I actually speak that language, so I don't have too many touch points with translations though.
- JadeNB 8mo ago
  In case they hallucinate? There's no point having content in a wide variety of languages if it's unpredictably different from the original-language content.
- teamonkey 8mo ago
  It’s bad at it. At least, it can’t be guaranteed to get nuance or context correct in a way that doesn’t feel artificial to a fluent speaker. My favourite example I saw was where Google translated an information page of the Italian branch of a large multinational as “this is the UK branch of [multinational]”, presumably because the LLM thought that was more contextually appropriate in English.
larsiusprime 8mo ago
Also RE: procgen, one of the hit games right now, Mewgenics, is doing super well and uses it extensively. Obviously it's old school procgen that makes use of tons of authored content, but it's still procgen.
SirMaster 8mo ago
>No one cares about how the code is written. People definitely do care. Nobody wants vibe-coded buggy slop code for their game. They want well designed and optimized code that runs the game smoothly on reasonable hardware and without a bunch of bugs.
- llm_nerd 8mo ago
  Your second paragraph does not follow, at all, from the first. These are completely orthogonal demands. The gaming industry is absolutely overwhelmed with outrageously inefficient, garbage, crash-prone code. It has become the norm, and it has absolutely nothing to do with AI. Like https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/ https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times.... That something so outrageously trash made it to a hundreds-of-million dollar game, cursing millions to 10+ minute waits, should shame everyone involved. It's actually completely normal in that industry. Trash code, thoughtless and lazily implemented, is the norm. Most game studios would likely hugely improve their game, har har, if they leveraged AI a lot more.
- roesel 8mo ago
  No one wants _buggy slop code_ for their game, but ultimately no one cares whether is has been hand crafted or vibe-coded. As proof, ask yourself which of the following two options you would prefer: 1. buggy code that was hand-written 2. optimized code that was vibe-coded I'll bet most people will choose 2.
  - SirMaster 8mo ago
    I've never seen something as complex as a video game vibe coded that was actually well optimized. Especially when the person doing the prompting is not a software developer. So I personally do care and I am someone, so the answer is not no one.
    - NeutralCrane 8mo ago
      Vibe coding as we know it has only been a thing for the last 12-18 months. So by definition the vibe-coded games you have seen are the ones being rushed.
amiga386 8mo ago
> Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. Restaurant-goers only object against you spitting in their food if it's painfully obvious (i.e. they see you do it, or they taste it) Players are buying your art. They are valuing it based on how you say you made it. They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the rise of AI (where someone else made the art and you just shoved it together... and the combination didn't add up to much) and they come down hard on AI slop today, especially if you don't disclose it and you get caught.
- riversflow 8mo ago
  > They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the rise of AI That’s not what I remember, I remember PUBG being a viral hit that extensively used asset flipping.
  - amiga386 8mo ago
    The more nuanced take is that, if somehow your game is actually good or interesting despite being full of other people's assets, players will see the value that you created (e.g. making a fun game). This is missing in most "asset-flip" games. Another example comes from Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, which despite the fact it uses a lot of pre-bought art assets, the entire game has the indisputable hallmark of Bennett Foddy -- it has a ridiculously tricky control mechanism, and the whole game world you play in, should you make any mistakes, has a strong likelyhood of dropping you right back at the start, and it's all your own fault for not being able to recover from your mistakes under pressure. You can see this theme in his other games like QWOP and Baby Steps
dec0dedab0de 8mo ago
No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. This reminded me of a conversation about AI I had with an artist last year. She was furious and cursing and saying how awful it is for stealing from artists, but then admitted she uses it for writing descriptions and marketing posts to sell her art.
- raincole 8mo ago
  Sinix even explicitly says that AI is an IP theft machine but it's okay to use AI to generate 360 rotation video to market your 2D works[0]. To summarize this era we live in: my AI usage is justified but all the other people are generating slop. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8fFM6kjZUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8fFM6kjZUk [1]: Disclaimer: I deeply respect Sinix as an art educator. If it weren't him I wouldn't have learnt digital painting. But it's still quite a weird take of him.
- Lord-Jobo 8mo ago
  Which I would point out isn’t necessarily hypocrisy on their part. I can rage against guns and gun manufacturers for their negative effects on our nation and hate when they are used for monstrous evil, but also believe that police should have firearms and that the second amendment is important. It’s a tool. You can hate the way it’s made and marketed, and hate many of its popular use cases, and still think there are acceptable ways to use and market it without requiring a total abolition.
  - Aushin 8mo ago
    I mean, the police probably shouldn't have firearms and the second amendment is one of the worst legal creations in human history.
- WarmWash 8mo ago
  Everyone is in it for themselves. The world makes waay more sense when you really internalize that. It doesn't necessarily mean people are selfish, large groups often have aligned interests, but when an individuals interest alignment changes, then their group membership almost always changes too. I'd bet she has a bunch of pirated content and anti-copyright remarks from the golden age of piracy as well.
hamdingers 8mo ago
At least to some extent, the anti-ai folks don't care about ai assisted programming because they see programmers as the "techbro" boogieman pushing ai into their lives, not fellow creatives who are also at a crossroads.
Izkata 8mo ago
> Spore is well acclaimed. Its creature creator was, but as a game it was always mediocre to bad. They had to drop something like 90% of the features and extremely dumb down the stages to get it released. It was also what introduced a lot of us to SecuROM DRM - it bricked my laptop in the middle of a semester.
AnotherGoodName 8mo ago
Games with ai art assets are some of the most popular right now in any case. Arc raiders being a great example where some of the voice assets are AI generated. Be careful of reading any viewpoint on the internet. Apparently no one used facebook or instagram and everyone boycotts anything with ai in it. In reality i think you’d be foolish not to make use of the tools available. Arc Raiders did the right thing by completely ignoring those sorts of comments. There may be a market for 100% organic video games but there’s also a market for mainstream ‘uses every ai tool available’ type of games.
Throaway1985123 8mo ago
Spore was not well-acclaimed precisely because it failed to live up to its promises as a world-builder. Only the 1st two stages were any good.
pojzon 8mo ago
3/4 pf all code written now is auto-complete. Code was never the hard part.
vor_ 8mo ago
> If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. And if you actually read the article, you'd see it addressed that. > Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. Like a library?
simianparrot 8mo ago
Let's not forget No Man's Sky here. Or Elite Dangerous' planet-scale procedural generation using solar system properties to fuel the deterministic but procedural generation of tectonic plates that again seed how a planet's surface is deterministically generated, even down to impact craters over millennia, for a universe of billions of consistent deterministically generated full-scale planets you can land on. Something you couldn't do without proc-gen because there's not enough disk space to store it.

trashymctrash 8mo ago

If you read the next couple of paragraphs, the author addresses this: > That said, Steam's policy has been recently updated to exclude dev tools used for "efficiency gains", but which are not used to generate content presented to players. I only quoted the first paragraph, but there is more.

theshrike79 8mo ago

Also "AI" has been in gaming, especially mobile gaming, for a literal decade already. Household name game studios have had custom AI art asset tooling for a long time that can create art quickly, using their specific style. AI is a tool and as Steve Jobs said, you can hold it wrong. It's like plastic surgery, you only notice the bad ones and object to them. An expert might detect the better jobs, but the regular folk don't know and for the most part don't care unless someone else tells them to care. And then they go around blaming EVERYTHING as AI.

delaminator 8mo ago
"I hate CGI video" "So you hated the TV Series Ugly Betty then?" "What? that's not CGI!" This video is 15 years old https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY
- wormpilled 8mo ago
  I think that's a different category, though. Those backgrounds are actual video recordings of real places, not 3D environments modeled from scratch. It looks 'real' because the background actually exists.
  - theshrike79 8mo ago
    It's still 100% CGI compositing and definitely not all of them are real places or real objects. In that specific 15 year old example they're mostly composited, you're right about that.
    - DonHopkins 8mo ago
      I love Ian Hubert's demos of green screening in Blender. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxD6H3ri8RI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxD6H3ri8RI His Blender Conference talk about photogrammetry / camera projection / projection mapping was fantastic: World Building in Blender - Ian Hubert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPWKecazgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPWKecazgM
  - delaminator 8mo ago
    Computer Generated Imagery.
- runarberg 8mo ago
  Your case would have been better if you had used Mad Max: Fury Road, or even Titanic as examples, rather then a mediocre TV show nobody remembers. Ugly Betty used green screens to make production cheaper, that did not improve the show (although it may have improved the profit margins). Mad Max: Fury Road on the other hand used CGI to significantly improve the visual experience. The added CGI probably increased the cost of the production, and subsequently it is one of the greatest, most awesome, movie ever made. Actually if you look at the scene from Greys Anatomy [0:54] you can see where CGI is used to improve the scene (rather then cut costs), and you get this amazing scene of the Washington State Ferry crash. I think you can see the parallels here. When people say they hate AI they are generally referring to the sloppy stuff it generates. It has enabled a proliferation of cheap slop. And with few exception it seems like generating cheap slop is all it does (these exception being specialized tools e.g. in image processing software).

tovej 8mo ago

An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs. There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.

vntok 8mo ago
> An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. This reads like a skill issue on your end, in part at least in the prompting side. It does take time to reach a point where you can prompt an LLM sufficiently well to get a correct answer in one shot, developing an intuitive understanding of what absolutely needs to be written out and what can be inferred by the model.
- Jooror 8mo ago
  I’m curious about how you landed “git gud; prompt better” and not “maybe the domain I work in is a better fit for LLM code”. Or, to be a bit less generous, consider the possibility that the code you’re generating is boilerplate, marshaling, and/or API calls. A facade of perceived complexity over something that’s as complex as a filter-map or two.
  - 3371 8mo ago
    Sharing my 2 cents. In the past 2 months I've been using all the SOTA models to help me design a new DSL for narrative scripting (such as game story telling) and a c# runtime implementation o the script player engine. The language spec and design is about 95% authored by me up to this point; I have the LLMs work on the 2nd layer: the implementation specs/guidelines and the 3rd layer: concrete c# implementation. Since it's a new language, I consider it's somewhat new/novel tasks for LLMs (at least, not like boilerplate stuff like HTTP API or CRUD service). I'd say, these LLMs have been very helpful - you can tell they sometimes get confused and have trouble to comply to the foreign language spec and design - but they are mostly smart enough to carry out the objectives, and they get better and better after the project got on track and has plenty of files/resources to read and reference. And I'd also say "prompt better" is a important factor, just much more nuanced/complicated. I started with 0 experience with LLM agents and have learned a lot about how to tame them, and developed a protocol to collaborate with agents, these all comes from countless trial and errors, but in the end get boiled down to "prompt better".

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lxgr 8mo ago

> I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing. People spin all kinds of things if they believe (accurately or not) that their livelihood is on the line. The knee-jerk "AI universally bad" movement seems just as absurd to me as the "AGI is already here" one. > Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever. Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation, seemed very soulless to me at the time. As I see it, it's all a matter of how well it's executed. In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work (in the same way that e.g. renaissance artists didn't make every single brushstroke of their masterpieces themselves). In the worst (or maybe even average? time will tell) case, there are only minimal human-made artistic decisions flowing into a work and the output is a mediocre average of everything that's already been done before, which is then rightfully perceived as slop.

zimpenfish 8mo ago
> Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation I might be misremembering but wasn't the Oblivion proc-gen entirely in the development process, not "live" in the game, which means... > "In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work" ...is what Bethesda did, no?
- lxgr 8mo ago
  Yes, but I beg to differ on the "skilled" part. I find the result very jarring somehow; the scale of the world didn't seem right. (Probably because it was too realistic; part of the art of game terrain design is reconciling the inherently unrealistic scales.)
  - bombcar 8mo ago
    WoW had this but you never really thought about it - even the massive capital cities were a few blocks at most. The problem with procedural generation is it's hard to make it as action-packed and desirable as WoW zones, and even those quickly become fly-over territory.

fzeroracer 8mo ago

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing Do you ever ask why you're writing the same thing over and over again? That's literally the foundational piece of being an engineer; understanding when you're reinventing the wheel when there's a perfectly good wheel nearby.

porridgeraisin 8mo ago
When you make a function f(a, b, c) It is reusable only if simply changing a, b, c is enough to give the function that you want. Options object etc _parameterise_ that function. It is useful only if the variability in reuse you desire is spanned by the parameters. This is syntactic reuse. With LLMs, the parameterisation goes into semantic space. This makes code more reusable. A model trained on all of GitHub can reuse all that code regardless of whether they are syntactically reusable or not. This is semantic reuse, which is naturally much broader.
- fzeroracer 8mo ago
  There are two important failures I see with this logic: First, I am not arguing for reusability. Reusability is one of the most common mistakes you can make as a software engineer because you are over-generalizing what you need before you need it. Code should be written for your specific use case, and only generalized as problems appear. But if you can recognize that your specific use case fits a known problem, then you can find the best way to solve that problem, faster. Second, when you're using an LLM to make your code more 'reusable' you are taking full responsibility for everything that LLM vomits out. You're no longer assembling a car from well known parts, taking care to tailor it to your use case as needed. You're now building everything in said car, from the tires to the engine and the rearview mirror. Coding is a constant balance between understanding what you're solving for and what can solve it. Using LLMs takes the worst of both worlds, by offloading both your understanding of the problem and your understanding of the solution.
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Sharlin 8mo ago

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.

porridgeraisin 8mo ago
Oh come on, you don't have to be condescending about function calls. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260385
- Sharlin 8mo ago
  I was talking about libraries, higher-level units of reuse than individual functions. And your "syntactic" vs "semantic" reuse makes zero sense. Functions are literally written and invoked for their semantics – what they make happen. "Syntactic reuse" would be macros if anything, and indeed macros are very good at reducing boilerplate. You might have a more compelling argument if instead of syntax and semantics you contrasted semantics and pragmatics.
  - porridgeraisin 8mo ago
    A library is a collection of data structures functions. My argument still holds. > Syntactic reuse would be macros Well sure. My point is that what can be reused is decided ahead of time and encoded in the syntax. Whereas with LLMs it is not, and is encoded in the semantics. > Pragmatics Didn't know what that is. Consider my post updated with the better terms.
    - runarberg 8mo ago
      I’m not sure your logic is sound. It sounds like you are insisting on some nuance which simply isn’t there. LLM generates unmaintainable slop, which is extremely difficult to reason about, uses wrong abstractions, violates DRY, violates cohesion, etc. The industry has known how to reuse codes for two decades now (npm was released 16 years ago; pip 18 years ago). Using LLMs for code reuse is a step in the wrong direction, at least if you care about maintaining your code.

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krige 8mo ago

> Spore is well acclaimed And yet it also effectively ended Will Wright's career. Rave press reviews are not a good indicator of anything, really.

h2zizzle 8mo ago
Tbf Spore's acclaim comes with the caveat that it completely failed to live up to years of pre-release hype. Much of the goodwill it's garnered since, which is reflected in review scores, only came after the storm of controversy over Spore not being "the ultimate simulator which would mark the 'end of history' for gaming" died down. And you wouldn't really have any idea this was the case if you weren't there when it happened.

dannersy 8mo ago

You're cherry picking. The open world games aren't as compelling anymore since the novelty is wearing off. I can cherry pick, too. For example, Starfield in all its grandeur is pretty boring. And the users may not care about code directly, but they definitely do indirectly. The less optimized and more off-the-shelf solutions have seen a stark decrease in performance but allowing game development to be more approachable. LLMs saving engineers and developers time is an unfounded claim because immediate results does not mean net positive. Actually, I'd argue that any software engineer worth their salt knows intimately that more immediate results is usually at the expense of long term sustainability.

whywhywhywhy 8mo ago
Startfield is boring because of the bad writing and they made a space exploration game where there are loading screens between the planet and space and you don’t actually explore space. They fundamentally misunderstood what they were promising, it’s the same as making a pirate game where you never steer the ship or drop anchor. You can prove people are not bored with the concept as new gamers still start playing fallout new Vegas or skyrim today despite them being old and janky.
- alexpotato 8mo ago
  This is why Sid Meier's Pirates [0] remains such a great game. It was really a combination of mini-games: - you got steer a ship (or fleet of ships) around the Caribbean - ship to ship combat - fencing - dancing (with the Governors' daughters) - trading (from port to port or with captured goods0 - side quests Each time I played it with my oldest, it felt like a brand new game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Pirates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Pirates!
  - whywhywhywhy 8mo ago
    Played this as a kid, genuinely great gameplay loop and felt very immersive at the time.
- dannersy 8mo ago

Nursie 8mo ago

> Spore is well acclaimed. Spore was fun (IMHO) but at the time of release was considered a disappointment compared to its hype.

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bartread 8mo ago

> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver. Yes, this is a wildly uneducated perspective. Procedural generation has often been a key component of some incredibly successful, and even iconic games going back decades. Elite is a canonical example here, with its galaxies being procedurally generated. Powermonger, from Bulldog, likewise used fractal generation for its maps. More recently, the prevalence of procedurally generated rogue-likes and Metroidvanias is another point against. Granted, people have got a bit bored of these now, but that's because there were so many of them, not because they were unsuccessful or "failed to deliver".

bombcar 8mo ago
Procedural generation underlies the most popular game of all time (Minecraft) and is foundational for numerous other games of a similar type - Dwarf Fortress, et al. And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines). What procedural generation does NOT work at is generating "story elements" though perhaps even that can fall, Dwarf Fortress already does decently enough given that the player will fill in the blanks.
- optionalsquid 8mo ago
  > And it's used to power effect where you might not expect it (Stardew Valley mines). Apparently Stardew Valley's mines are not procedurally generated, but rather hand-crafted. Per their recent 10 year anniversary video, the developer did try to implement procedural generation for the mines, but ended up scrapping it: https://www.stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-10-year-anniversary/ https://www.stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-10-year-anniver...
  - bombcar 8mo ago
    They're quasi-generated with random elements and fixed elements - similarly to early Diablo procedural generation.

larodi 8mo ago

> No one cares about how the code is written. I would overstate: No one even cares how architecture is done. Unless you are the one fixing it or maintaining it. Sorry, no one. We all know Apple did some great stuff with their code, but we care more about the awful work done on the UI, right? I mean - the UI seems to not be breaking in these new OSs which is amazing feature... for a game perhaps, and most likely the code is top notch. But we care about other things. This is the reality, and the blind notion that so-many people care about code is super untrue. Perhaps someone putting money on developers care, but we have so many examples already of money put on implementation no matter what the code is. We can see everywhere funds thrown at obnoxious implementations, and particularly in large enterprises, that are only sustained by the weird ecosystem of white-collar jobs that sustains this impression. Very few people care about the code in total, and this can be observed very easy, perhaps it can be proved no other way around is possible.

TimTheTinker 8mo ago
This is overstating it. Computers are amazing machines, and modern operating systems are also amazing. But even they cannot completely mask the downstream effects of poor quality code. You say you don't care, but I bet you do when you're dealing with a problem caused by poor code quality or bad choices made by the developer.
- miningape 8mo ago
  Yep willing to bet that the majority of people saying "users don't care how well the code is written" will crash out when some software they're using is slow and buggy, even more extremely if it glitches and deletes their work. Just like how most people don't care how well a bridge is designed... until it collapses.
  - larodi 8mo ago
    yes, they will hit the TV or through the remote, or bang the mouse, or the box. I mean - if you tell me this is 'care', no... this is outrage, and it would probably not even be focused to one particular component. and for what is worth - the reason of failure may not be because of particular nut, but the combination of them all. the whole idea that most software is done in good faith is just plainly wrong, and most of the software we rely on a daily basis - all the enterprise bullshit - is very very very often not done in good faith, but rather just made, seamed, helped into some weird equilibrium of temporary performance. perhaps hardware is done right more than software ever is.

BloondAndDoom 8mo ago

One the topic procedural generation; rogue likes are all about it and new generation Diablo like games have definitely similar things, well respected new games like Blue Prince. There has never been such as successful period of time for procedural generation in games like now, and all of these are pre-AI. AI powered procedural generation is wet dream of rogue-like lovers

hiddevb 8mo ago
I don't think I agree with this take. I love procedural generation, and there is definitely a craft to it. Creating a process that generates a playable level or world is just very interesting to explore as an emergent system. I don't think LLMs will make these system more interesting by default. Of course there are still things to explore in this new space. It's similar to generative/plotter art compared to a midjourney piece of slop. The craft that goes into creating the code for the plotter is what makes it interesting.
- 1899-12-30 8mo ago
  The key to non-disruptive LLM integration is using it in a purely additive way, supplementing a feature with functionality that couldn't be done before rather than replacing an existing part. Like adding ai generated images to accompany the dwarf fortress artifact descriptions. It could completely togglable and doesn't disrupt any existing mechanics, but would provide value to those that don't mind the slop.

mathgradthrow 8mo ago

localization? Why would you oppose LLMs doing localization?

fhd2 8mo ago
I guess the chain of reasoning would be: AI for art is bad -> Writing is art -> Translation is writing. Personally, I do appreciate good localisation, Nintendo usually does a pretty impressive job there. I play games in their original language as long as I actually speak that language, so I don't have too many touch points with translations though.
JadeNB 8mo ago
In case they hallucinate? There's no point having content in a wide variety of languages if it's unpredictably different from the original-language content.
teamonkey 8mo ago
It’s bad at it. At least, it can’t be guaranteed to get nuance or context correct in a way that doesn’t feel artificial to a fluent speaker. My favourite example I saw was where Google translated an information page of the Italian branch of a large multinational as “this is the UK branch of [multinational]”, presumably because the LLM thought that was more contextually appropriate in English.

larsiusprime 8mo ago

Also RE: procgen, one of the hit games right now, Mewgenics, is doing super well and uses it extensively. Obviously it's old school procgen that makes use of tons of authored content, but it's still procgen.

SirMaster 8mo ago

>No one cares about how the code is written. People definitely do care. Nobody wants vibe-coded buggy slop code for their game. They want well designed and optimized code that runs the game smoothly on reasonable hardware and without a bunch of bugs.

llm_nerd 8mo ago
Your second paragraph does not follow, at all, from the first. These are completely orthogonal demands. The gaming industry is absolutely overwhelmed with outrageously inefficient, garbage, crash-prone code. It has become the norm, and it has absolutely nothing to do with AI. Like https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/ https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times.... That something so outrageously trash made it to a hundreds-of-million dollar game, cursing millions to 10+ minute waits, should shame everyone involved. It's actually completely normal in that industry. Trash code, thoughtless and lazily implemented, is the norm. Most game studios would likely hugely improve their game, har har, if they leveraged AI a lot more.
roesel 8mo ago
No one wants _buggy slop code_ for their game, but ultimately no one cares whether is has been hand crafted or vibe-coded. As proof, ask yourself which of the following two options you would prefer: 1. buggy code that was hand-written 2. optimized code that was vibe-coded I'll bet most people will choose 2.
- SirMaster 8mo ago
  I've never seen something as complex as a video game vibe coded that was actually well optimized. Especially when the person doing the prompting is not a software developer. So I personally do care and I am someone, so the answer is not no one.
  - NeutralCrane 8mo ago
    Vibe coding as we know it has only been a thing for the last 12-18 months. So by definition the vibe-coded games you have seen are the ones being rushed.

amiga386 8mo ago

> Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. Restaurant-goers only object against you spitting in their food if it's painfully obvious (i.e. they see you do it, or they taste it) Players are buying your art. They are valuing it based on how you say you made it. They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the rise of AI (where someone else made the art and you just shoved it together... and the combination didn't add up to much) and they come down hard on AI slop today, especially if you don't disclose it and you get caught.

riversflow 8mo ago
> They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the rise of AI That’s not what I remember, I remember PUBG being a viral hit that extensively used asset flipping.
- amiga386 8mo ago
  The more nuanced take is that, if somehow your game is actually good or interesting despite being full of other people's assets, players will see the value that you created (e.g. making a fun game). This is missing in most "asset-flip" games. Another example comes from Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, which despite the fact it uses a lot of pre-bought art assets, the entire game has the indisputable hallmark of Bennett Foddy -- it has a ridiculously tricky control mechanism, and the whole game world you play in, should you make any mistakes, has a strong likelyhood of dropping you right back at the start, and it's all your own fault for not being able to recover from your mistakes under pressure. You can see this theme in his other games like QWOP and Baby Steps

dec0dedab0de 8mo ago

No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. This reminded me of a conversation about AI I had with an artist last year. She was furious and cursing and saying how awful it is for stealing from artists, but then admitted she uses it for writing descriptions and marketing posts to sell her art.

raincole 8mo ago
Sinix even explicitly says that AI is an IP theft machine but it's okay to use AI to generate 360 rotation video to market your 2D works[0]. To summarize this era we live in: my AI usage is justified but all the other people are generating slop. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8fFM6kjZUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8fFM6kjZUk [1]: Disclaimer: I deeply respect Sinix as an art educator. If it weren't him I wouldn't have learnt digital painting. But it's still quite a weird take of him.
Lord-Jobo 8mo ago
Which I would point out isn’t necessarily hypocrisy on their part. I can rage against guns and gun manufacturers for their negative effects on our nation and hate when they are used for monstrous evil, but also believe that police should have firearms and that the second amendment is important. It’s a tool. You can hate the way it’s made and marketed, and hate many of its popular use cases, and still think there are acceptable ways to use and market it without requiring a total abolition.
- Aushin 8mo ago
  I mean, the police probably shouldn't have firearms and the second amendment is one of the worst legal creations in human history.
WarmWash 8mo ago
Everyone is in it for themselves. The world makes waay more sense when you really internalize that. It doesn't necessarily mean people are selfish, large groups often have aligned interests, but when an individuals interest alignment changes, then their group membership almost always changes too. I'd bet she has a bunch of pirated content and anti-copyright remarks from the golden age of piracy as well.

hamdingers 8mo ago

At least to some extent, the anti-ai folks don't care about ai assisted programming because they see programmers as the "techbro" boogieman pushing ai into their lives, not fellow creatives who are also at a crossroads.

Izkata 8mo ago

> Spore is well acclaimed. Its creature creator was, but as a game it was always mediocre to bad. They had to drop something like 90% of the features and extremely dumb down the stages to get it released. It was also what introduced a lot of us to SecuROM DRM - it bricked my laptop in the middle of a semester.

AnotherGoodName 8mo ago

Games with ai art assets are some of the most popular right now in any case. Arc raiders being a great example where some of the voice assets are AI generated. Be careful of reading any viewpoint on the internet. Apparently no one used facebook or instagram and everyone boycotts anything with ai in it. In reality i think you’d be foolish not to make use of the tools available. Arc Raiders did the right thing by completely ignoring those sorts of comments. There may be a market for 100% organic video games but there’s also a market for mainstream ‘uses every ai tool available’ type of games.

Throaway1985123 8mo ago

Spore was not well-acclaimed precisely because it failed to live up to its promises as a world-builder. Only the 1st two stages were any good.

pojzon 8mo ago

3/4 pf all code written now is auto-complete. Code was never the hard part.

vor_ 8mo ago

> If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. And if you actually read the article, you'd see it addressed that. > Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. Like a library?

simianparrot 8mo ago

Let's not forget No Man's Sky here. Or Elite Dangerous' planet-scale procedural generation using solar system properties to fuel the deterministic but procedural generation of tectonic plates that again seed how a planet's surface is deterministically generated, even down to impact craters over millennia, for a universe of billions of consistent deterministically generated full-scale planets you can land on. Something you couldn't do without proc-gen because there's not enough disk space to store it.