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I struggle with these world models from the perspective of video games (so this post is a particular perspective). I'm not a game developer myself, but some of

by mccoyb 5mo ago

I struggle with these world models from the perspective of video games (so this post is a particular perspective). I'm not a game developer myself, but some of my favorite games carry a deep sense of intentionality. For instance, there is typically not a single item misplaced in a FromSoftware game (or, for instance, Lies of P -- more recently). Almost every object is placed intentionally. Games which lack this intentionality often feel dead in contrast. You run into experiences which break immersion, or pull you out of the experience that the developer is trying to convey to you. It's difficult for me to imagine world models getting to a place where this sort of intentionality is captured. The best frontier LLMs fail to do this in writing (all the time), and even in code, and the surface of experiences for those mediums often feel "smaller" than the user interaction profile of a video game. It's not clear how these world models could be used modularly by humans hoping to develop intentional experiences? I don't know much about their usage (LLMs are somewhat modular: they can produce text, humans can work on it, other LLMs can work on it). Is the same true for the video output here? All this to say, I'm impressed with these world models, but similar to LLMs with writing, it's not really clear what it is that we are building towards? We are able to create less satisfying, less humane experiences faster? Perhaps the most immediate benefit is the ability for robotic systems to simulate actions (by conjuring a world, and imagining the implications). In general, I have the feeling that we are hurtling towards a world with less intentionality behind all the things we experience. Everything becomes impersonal, more noisy, etc.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
robot_jesus 5mo ago
By and large I agree, but it doesn’t need to be either/or. Many of the most popular games in the past decade are procedurally generated and have nothing “intentionally” placed (apart from tuning/tweaking the balance of the seeding algorithms).
- mccoyb 5mo ago
  Right, and I wondered how these world models might be use in a careful way (just as agents can be used carefully to accelerate work). Are video game developers using these systems in their workflows? Would love to learn more!
- danielbln 5mo ago
  Which game would that be apart from Minecraft?
  - robot_jesus 5mo ago
    No Man's Sky, Terraria, Dead Cells, to name a few.
    - debugnik 5mo ago
      Dead Cells just arranges a few pre-designed rooms together for each stage, doesn't it?
      - fredoliveira 5mo ago
        If it does do that, it doesn't feel that way. I never found it particularly repetitive.
        debugnik 5mo ago
        To be clear, "a few" qualified the chosen rooms that get procedurally connected for each stage. I'm confident the pools of premade rooms are rather large, although I certainly noticed some repetition back when I played.
  - fc417fc802 5mo ago
    Dwarf fortress, no man's sky, elite dangerous, ... The combination of "many", "most popular", and "nothing" is overstating it by a wide margin but for example the majority of the vegetation in games as far back as oblivion was procedurally placed.
    - rightbyte 5mo ago
      Battlefield 2 had procedural trees and terrain the year before. I think it more or less came with open world maps?
  - 5mo ago
- swiftcoder 5mo ago
  > have nothing “intentionally” placed (apart from tuning/tweaking the balance of the seeding algorithms). I think you underestimate the intentionality that goes into developing procedural generation. Something like Dwarf Fortress isn't "place objects randomly" - it is layers upon layers of carefully crafted systems that build upon each other to produce specific patterns of outcome
  - robot_jesus 5mo ago
    By calling it out in my comment, I was trying to not underestimate it. I guess what I'm saying is: Couldn't a world model with targeted training and thoughtfully tuned system prompts be directionally similar to the layered systems to produce specific patterns of outcome?
- avaer 5mo ago
  I've had good luck with using LLMs to create procedural content engines for my game prototypes. So the distinction between AI and procedural might get even blurrier.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
FromSoftware-quality games are <5% of the market. >50% of the market is abominable slop that very well might benefit from AI writing and design. for example, I am 100% certain that ANY model could write a better Dragon Age sequel than the rotting corpse of Bioware did, because only humans can despise their audience and their source material. an LLM would dutifully attempt to produce more of the thing rather than 're-imagine' the thing for 'the modern audience'.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  So? Parent still want to know how tools like these could potentially by used in a better way. That most people don't obsess over quality when building/doing things shouldn't mean that no one should.
bee_rider 5mo ago
What does intentionality mean in the context of a world model generated game-world? I guess true human intention would have been throw out the window already at that point. One aspect of intentionality is that there’ll be a narrative payoff when you find something you find interesting. In videogames, the world is mostly pre-designed, so the designer has to predict what you’ll be interested in for the most part (In pen and paper RPGs, this is usually done better, because the human dungeon master/DM can plan ahead, but also improvise a payoff or modify the plot between sessions). If there was a world model generated game world, I guess the model would have to be “smart” though to setup and execute those payoffs. An advantage that the world model would have (and shares with a good human DM) is that everything is an interactable, and the players get to pick what they think is interesting. If everything is improv with a loose skeleton around it, you don’t have to predict as far out. I think world model generated games, if they even become a thing, will be quite a bit worse than conventionally designed ones for a long time (improv can be quite shallow!) but have a lot of potential if they work out. FromSoft is an interesting example. They make the game more believable by having extremely missable quests, just, most of them don’t block progress through the game, and you usually stumble across enough side quests naturally (although IMO the density was too low in Elden Ring, their system showed a bit of weakness in the less-guided context). The plot is pretty vague, but the vibes tell enough of a story that you don’t really mind. It’s sort of improv/pen-and-paper but the player’s imagination is doing the job of the DM.
- lkey 5mo ago
  > there’ll be a narrative payoff Fromsoft is perfectly happy for you to miss all of the direct exposition. It's as they intended and most people do. The intentionality of their world still draws people in and gives the world a sense of groundedness that keeps people coming back and separates it from the pale imitations. It's more than them being good at 'Vibes'. The environment is built on the bones of a greater ongoing narrative that is intentionally obscured, even from the player who reads everything. Dark Souls is a world in a constant cycle of Rebirth, Decay, the struggle against Entropy. All civilizations, at the end of the series, are stacked one upon another in an endless expanse of ash and dust as you bear witness to an permanent eclipse, a fading star, as time itself dissolves and the last fire fades. Before that heavy handed stuff though, the simple matter of the direction your character travels reinforces these motifs. Down to the deepest depths and you'll witness what remains of the first civilizations. Climb up and you see the desperate attempts by the powerful to impose a false order that they hoped could forestall the inevitable. You can even shatter the illusion of a golden order in the first game if you find the extremely missable secret boss. It couldn't be any more clearly 'said' if you were interested in paying attention. Adding an AI model to explain or 'improv' the story of the world would destroy the whole purpose.
unfitted2545 5mo ago
If we use world models to train AI systems, are we not essentially forcing something to live so it can gather data for us? Yes, we haven't gone that far with creating consciousness yet, but there is gonna be a lot of money around neural computing devices for consumers in the coming decades, so that will speed up knowing what sense data you need for consciousness.
- ctoth 5mo ago
  > are we not essentially forcing something to live so it can gather data for us? Wait until you learn about what we do to chickens.
  - Azantys 5mo ago
    The Matrix is imminent
Lerc 5mo ago
There are two things here, firstly, Without AI, you can have heavily designed environments or you can have procedurally generated, people manage to make both work. Both can also fail because of reasons specific to the approach. Careless procedural generation can produce a poor variety or nonsensical outputs. Careless specific placement can violate any rules that a game has established creating an incoherent experience. Making a world internally consistent by explicit placement gets harder as you increase in scale. When internal consistency is a factor impacting quality, there is a scale at which generated content eventually becomes the higher quality solution. Secondly, when generating content with AI, the same rules around carelessness apply. There are certainly generative AI tools out there that offer few options when it comes to composing what you want, that is not a necessary part of AI, some of it is because people are wanting rudimentary interfaces, some of it is that the generators are sufficiently new that the control mechanisms are limited because they are focused upon doing something at all before doing it highly controlled, in some ways the problem is that things are new enough that it can be hard to describe what is desirable controllability, making the generator to see what people would like it to be able to do is, I think, a reasonable path to follow prior to creating the control that people want. Part of it is also that there _are_ tools that give a high level of control over what is generated but far fewer people get to see them. There are ways to control styles, object placement, camera motions, scene compositions, etc. The more specialised you get, the smaller the subset of people who need that specific control. I think AI can make things possible for people who could not have done so without them, but it's still going to take care to make something special.
- bredren 5mo ago
  This intentionality in the application of AI is very confusing for folks because at first glance it seems like it should just work. It seems to, even. Whereas if you hand a router to someone with a flush trim but in it and ask them to clean up the edge of a table they will take one look at it and nope away from that dangerous spinning thing. If they have the mind to give it a shot and despite a quality tool and bit they bite into the table and ruin the line (or something much worse) no one will be surprised—-they have no experience or recognition of what expertise is in woodworking. But with AI, it is much more hazy what expertise is. The methodology for quality results is changing each week and the articulation in personal tooling involved makes it challenging to adopt another “expert”’s workflows.
Glohrischi 5mo ago
Video games are not the initial motivation at all. These world models are key for robotic and coherence in video generation. Give a world model images of a factory, the robot now can simulate tasks and do the best result. Give a world model images/context etc. and it can generate a coherent world for video generation. What this world model system might be able to do for us in regards of gaming or virtual reality: Either simulate 'old' environments like the house of your grandparents (gaussian splatting but interactive) or potential new ones like a house, kitchen, remodeling. It can also be a very interesting easy to approach VR environment were you can start building your world with voice. That would be very intentional. After all world building is not necessarily connected to being able to generate 3d assets. Just because you need to go this route today, doesn't mean you have to do this tomorrow.
pigpop 5mo ago
Even though I doubt the main purpose of these models is to produce video games, I have the opposite view from you in that I am excited to see these put to work as components of procedural generation in video games. I don't think that is going to negatively impact story driven games that you seem to enjoy any more than the market for open world and simulation games currently does. They are separate concerns and use distinct techniques. Where you look for an intentionally evoked experience authored by a game designer, I am looking for an unexplored world unfolding before me filled with emergent and unique phenomena that perhaps no one and not even the game designer has seen before.
orbital-decay 5mo ago
> some of my favorite games carry a deep sense of intentionality. For instance, there is typically not a single item misplaced in a FromSoftware game (or, for instance, Lies of P -- more recently). Almost every object is placed intentionally. That's a pretty specific and one-sided example. There are tons of good games that don't rely on elaborate item placement (e.g. many Bethesda games are great because most items are useless decorations, they broke that rule in recent games, giving the purpose to clutter, and it made them a lot worse). There are tons of good games not relying on this intentionality at all, they're either literally random cool ideas thrown at the wall, or even procedurally generated.
- mccoyb 5mo ago
  That’s a fair critique of my comments! The space of fun games is large and diverse.
jdironman 5mo ago
I'm of a strong believer that AI just isn't (may never will be?) a strong judge and executor of "quality". Quality is a loaded term though. Are there any objectively good game designs? Even if there is, maybe only one game of 10 that use the same 'blue print' every reach critical mass (popularity).
duskdozer 5mo ago
>We are able to create less satisfying, less humane experiences faster? Yes, exactly. Inundate the world with superficially plausible yet hollow content, including any desired themes. People who aren't very discerning won't complain; the others will be outmatched and find that 99/100 pieces are all noise and they will need to spend increasing amounts of time trying to find the 1, if they can. I think there are some good parallels with Amazon: the broken sorting and manipulated unit pricing, coupled with the avalanche of cheap clones pushes users to give up and just buy one of the top listed products (a featured listing/Amazon-clone). If you do a web search for various products and go to images, Amazon product links often take up 50-90% of the results.
- Aperocky 5mo ago
  I think you also can create satisfying, same human experiences faster, but not as fast. But the dopamine descent require strong discipline to stop there, and most don't .
  - Caracas288 5mo ago
    [dead]
wongarsu 5mo ago
One thing is robotics. Both for training robotics AI, and to let robots test hypothetical actions before comitting to them. I don't think world models are stable enough for either yet The other is creating multi-modal models with a better understanding of our world. LLMs often fail at incredibly basic spatial reasoning ("someone left a package in front of your apartment, describe going there", or the "should I drive to the car wash or go there", etc). World models excel at these kinds of things (in theory). They develop a great understanding of physical spaces, object interactions, etc. They can simulate fluids, rigid body physics etc. You "just" have to get really good at making world models, then somehow marry them with an LLM in a way that ensures the LLM can benefit from the world model's training data. Nobody has managed to really do that yet So lots of hopes for the future. Until then they get commercialized as video models, or ways to experience your favorite forest, or to have a really bad video game ... whatever can be sold on a short time horizon to finance the actual goals
- romesc 5mo ago
  We are seeing increasing evidence that these sort of video world models are terrible options for useful rollouts of the physical dynamics of the environment. It is hypothesized that you can get them to be better than simulators by training on physics simulation data, but then the question becomes, why not use the simulator directly? There are a lot of areas where predictive models make sense in the robotics stack, but doing it with "video world models" as is trendy this year is likely a bet in the wrong direction according to the evidence we have been amassing in the last 6 months.
teucris 5mo ago
> In general, I have the feeling that we are hurtling towards a world with less intentionality behind all the things we experience. Everything becomes impersonal, more noisy, etc. You’re right - but that world is not the end of the story. The intentionality matters. Human creations matter because they connect us. I don’t know how long it will take, but people will build judgement as to what makes for good use of these tools to make meaningful things and expand our creative horizons in deeply human ways. Mind you, there will always be shallow slop. It’ll just take time for creators to learn how to use these tools to make something that isn’t slop.
kettlecorn 5mo ago
I think your comment can be split into two questions: 1. Games derive some appeal from their intentionality and hand-crafted nature. Will these less-intentional experiences be as appealing? 2. Can these less-intentional tools still be used to create intentional designs? On that first point I think it's important to remember that the lineage of video games comes from board & card games and sports. There's always been an ability to inject more complexity and less-intentionality into those things. Sports in some ways are like a simplified and altered role-play of war battles, and more realistic war roleplaying does exist but it has less appeal. As humans we like solving things and noticing patterns and the intentionality of games taps into that appeal. On the latter point I do think these world models will eventually be used to meaningfully contribute to building games. I think people will have to find new ways to design that balances intentionality against the freeform nature of these simulations, but it may take a while to have the capability to do so.
vintermann 5mo ago
> Games which lack this intentionality often feel dead in contrast Like for instance... Dwarf Fortress? Minecraft? Generative AI is just another method to go procedural generation. Not necessarily a better way. Or you could even argue that procedural generation is a form of generative AI... But either way, there are games where the lack of intentionality is central to the appeal.
- 0x457 5mo ago
  > Like for instance... Dwarf Fortress? Minecraft? DF for some doesn't fit into this category for me. Minecraft feels dead to me, while many other games that utilize procedural generation are not.
- 8note 5mo ago
  minecraft itself is a blank slate until the player or modder or whatever puts all that intentionality in. its a very dead game on its own. they are still very intentional about adding and changing the tools by which you make your own fun though.
stephen_cagle 5mo ago
I suspect these models will be like old Gutenberg's printing press. A rapid rise in the amount of content; most of it not that great. However the sheer volume will result in even more high quality content actually being created in aggregate. Put another way, the average game quality will go down, but the actual rate of "Great" games will go up.
- mplewis 5mo ago
  But these aren't great games. They are not even good. They are just tech demos with nothing of interest to gamers. Why do I need more slopware? I have an entire Steam library of excellent games that deserve to be played first.
  - stephen_cagle 5mo ago
    Agreed, these aren't even games currently. I am just saying that world models will lower the barrier to entry to making games. Which might mean that 1 in 1000 of the lower-barrier-to-entry-people might someday makes a great game. So more great games in aggregate, but more bad games on average.
    - DrewADesign 5mo ago
      And theoretically AI does a great job at helping HR filter unqualified candidates, and it helps candidates optimize their resumes and application strategies to help them land the right role. So people should be landing dream roles left-and-right. Is that how it’s working? In reality, I don’t see any of this trending towards the theoretical happy path everybody always talks about. Most people give up trying to find something good on Amazon and just buy whatever vaguely plausible knock-off garbage shows up in the first few search results. Most people just take any job interview they’re offered even if it sucks. Most HR people don’t use it to enhance the quality of their decisions — it replaces their decision-making roles in many respects. I’m an art school graduate and talk am in many art discussion communities. This is causing a massive industry-wide morale crater. In any sort of art, it damn near eliminates the reward of craftsmanship in favor of marketing useless trend-of-the-week bullshit. Far fewer people enter a market that can’t sustain them. The idea that this is going to create ‘more artists’ and therefore that must mean there must be more skilled artists is fantasy. The skills you learn by prompting are not even on the same track to learning how to create things yourself. You essentially become a high-school intern acting as an art director, commissioning pieces. It’s instant gratification for people who don’t care enough about something to learn how to do it for real.
tomjen3 5mo ago
That is interesting. And it's an AI critique I haven't heard before. Would you consider it possible that the way non-intentionally placed items break the game immersion for you is because they appear in such a way that you think you can interact with them in a certain way, but you can't? Like if there's an extra door in the house you're trying to get into, but that door doesn't really open, then in your mind that breaks the integrity of the game's systems. If so, I think the LLM response is that there are no more doors that don't open and that the world can be generated as needed. No computer can handle the complexity of even a small town. But it would be possible, at least in the future, to generate the part of the world you interact with, which would heighten the emersion.
- 8note 5mo ago
  its reasonably the same "reversion to the mean" or "not x, but y" the intentionally placed tree serves no particular in-game job mechanically. it instead points your eyes to the right place when you walk up the path, and then again when you look back down from above. when they're saying everything is intentionally placed, they mean everything, whether it looks important or not. It's all directed to a cohesive core
  - pbhjpbhj 5mo ago
    So you want a human going 'oh stick a tree anywhere, it doesn't matter' rather than having that done procedurally whether by a simple algorithm or an ML model? It sounds like you might be assuming intent where there is little. I suspect if you didn't know a poem was written by an LLM you might ascribe purpose and intent to many aspects - rather like a high-school English language teacher.
jareklupinski 5mo ago
i've played multiple AAA(+) games before AI 'was a thing' that have had textures/elements, like bulletin boards or posters, where even on cursory glances (not zooming in or ADS) you can easily see literally "Lorem Ipsum" instead of lore or story which would have helped build atmosphere LLMs had nothing to do with this
therealpygon 5mo ago
Consider instead the possibility this may be used as a rendering layer for data backing it. Instead of shipping three-dimensional models and GBs of textures, you can ship a couple photos or a blueprint file or <any other modalities/whatever> and a detailed text description for significantly less storage. Now imagine the world model can adapt the styling of this world on the fly, where every person‘s experience could be unique in terms of visuals, but consistent in terms of the gameplay. It’s been my belief for several years that this is how the future of games will be constructed. Data in the background, game engine for rules application/ physics execution/orchestration/maybe low-poly rendering, an AI world model taking low resolution input in generating customized visuals/effects/textures/everything, even camera location, but still constrained by concrete rules in the game engine. I’m certain one day it might all be handled by AI, but the above seems much more realistic and achievable that expecting AI to do all of these things, at one, correctly, every frame.
Keyframe 5mo ago
You touched upon the substance of what we're witnessing et large with AI. Stuff feels hollow and worthless even though it looks amazing. Graphics, images, video, music, text, code.. So, what's the deal? As with ANY work in life, the quality of the result is a direct reflection of care and intention behind it. Simplified, it's a reflection of how much _you_ put effort in it. It always shows. Even in AI day and age. It's just that path to a result (without effort) is now way shorter so volume is showing up and diluting the overall impression. The latter kind of cheapens every field it touches, so even more effort will have to be put in to show up on the radar.
altmanaltman 5mo ago
Re what are we building towards - I think ultimately AI and these tools will be very useful to professionals who already know how to excel at their art. They can be very powerful tools but creating meaningful art/subjective work that is actually good is actually a borderline impossible task for LLMs since it requires genuine creativity. Similarly, I am seeing coding agents be infinitely more useful to people who already code than non-technical people thinking they can vibe code their own Salesforce. Its just that AI doesn't work well as a "productivity booster" tool in the marketing context. So they are pushing towards the idea that anyone can do anything with AI which is imo a really stupid hill to die on or base your ipo on.
WithinReason 5mo ago
To turn this into an actual usable game the network would need to generate an image conditionally from (low asset quality) maps made by the game devs, so map design, object placement is human, graphics is AI.
az226 5mo ago
Before long you’ll see reasoning world models.
whywhywhywhy 5mo ago
> We are able to create less satisfying, less humane experiences faster? Huge percentage of AI spend is on this with the gamble people won’t care if it’s less humane they’ll consume it anyway.

by mccoyb 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

robot_jesus 5mo ago

By and large I agree, but it doesn’t need to be either/or. Many of the most popular games in the past decade are procedurally generated and have nothing “intentionally” placed (apart from tuning/tweaking the balance of the seeding algorithms).

mccoyb 5mo ago
Right, and I wondered how these world models might be use in a careful way (just as agents can be used carefully to accelerate work). Are video game developers using these systems in their workflows? Would love to learn more!
danielbln 5mo ago
Which game would that be apart from Minecraft?
- robot_jesus 5mo ago
  No Man's Sky, Terraria, Dead Cells, to name a few.
  - debugnik 5mo ago
    Dead Cells just arranges a few pre-designed rooms together for each stage, doesn't it?
    - fredoliveira 5mo ago
      If it does do that, it doesn't feel that way. I never found it particularly repetitive.
      - debugnik 5mo ago
        To be clear, "a few" qualified the chosen rooms that get procedurally connected for each stage. I'm confident the pools of premade rooms are rather large, although I certainly noticed some repetition back when I played.
- fc417fc802 5mo ago
  Dwarf fortress, no man's sky, elite dangerous, ... The combination of "many", "most popular", and "nothing" is overstating it by a wide margin but for example the majority of the vegetation in games as far back as oblivion was procedurally placed.
  - rightbyte 5mo ago
    Battlefield 2 had procedural trees and terrain the year before. I think it more or less came with open world maps?
- 5mo ago
swiftcoder 5mo ago
> have nothing “intentionally” placed (apart from tuning/tweaking the balance of the seeding algorithms). I think you underestimate the intentionality that goes into developing procedural generation. Something like Dwarf Fortress isn't "place objects randomly" - it is layers upon layers of carefully crafted systems that build upon each other to produce specific patterns of outcome
- robot_jesus 5mo ago
  By calling it out in my comment, I was trying to not underestimate it. I guess what I'm saying is: Couldn't a world model with targeted training and thoughtfully tuned system prompts be directionally similar to the layered systems to produce specific patterns of outcome?
avaer 5mo ago
I've had good luck with using LLMs to create procedural content engines for my game prototypes. So the distinction between AI and procedural might get even blurrier.

b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago

FromSoftware-quality games are <5% of the market. >50% of the market is abominable slop that very well might benefit from AI writing and design. for example, I am 100% certain that ANY model could write a better Dragon Age sequel than the rotting corpse of Bioware did, because only humans can despise their audience and their source material. an LLM would dutifully attempt to produce more of the thing rather than 're-imagine' the thing for 'the modern audience'.

embedding-shape 5mo ago
So? Parent still want to know how tools like these could potentially by used in a better way. That most people don't obsess over quality when building/doing things shouldn't mean that no one should.

bee_rider 5mo ago

What does intentionality mean in the context of a world model generated game-world? I guess true human intention would have been throw out the window already at that point. One aspect of intentionality is that there’ll be a narrative payoff when you find something you find interesting. In videogames, the world is mostly pre-designed, so the designer has to predict what you’ll be interested in for the most part (In pen and paper RPGs, this is usually done better, because the human dungeon master/DM can plan ahead, but also improvise a payoff or modify the plot between sessions). If there was a world model generated game world, I guess the model would have to be “smart” though to setup and execute those payoffs. An advantage that the world model would have (and shares with a good human DM) is that everything is an interactable, and the players get to pick what they think is interesting. If everything is improv with a loose skeleton around it, you don’t have to predict as far out. I think world model generated games, if they even become a thing, will be quite a bit worse than conventionally designed ones for a long time (improv can be quite shallow!) but have a lot of potential if they work out. FromSoft is an interesting example. They make the game more believable by having extremely missable quests, just, most of them don’t block progress through the game, and you usually stumble across enough side quests naturally (although IMO the density was too low in Elden Ring, their system showed a bit of weakness in the less-guided context). The plot is pretty vague, but the vibes tell enough of a story that you don’t really mind. It’s sort of improv/pen-and-paper but the player’s imagination is doing the job of the DM.

lkey 5mo ago
> there’ll be a narrative payoff Fromsoft is perfectly happy for you to miss all of the direct exposition. It's as they intended and most people do. The intentionality of their world still draws people in and gives the world a sense of groundedness that keeps people coming back and separates it from the pale imitations. It's more than them being good at 'Vibes'. The environment is built on the bones of a greater ongoing narrative that is intentionally obscured, even from the player who reads everything. Dark Souls is a world in a constant cycle of Rebirth, Decay, the struggle against Entropy. All civilizations, at the end of the series, are stacked one upon another in an endless expanse of ash and dust as you bear witness to an permanent eclipse, a fading star, as time itself dissolves and the last fire fades. Before that heavy handed stuff though, the simple matter of the direction your character travels reinforces these motifs. Down to the deepest depths and you'll witness what remains of the first civilizations. Climb up and you see the desperate attempts by the powerful to impose a false order that they hoped could forestall the inevitable. You can even shatter the illusion of a golden order in the first game if you find the extremely missable secret boss. It couldn't be any more clearly 'said' if you were interested in paying attention. Adding an AI model to explain or 'improv' the story of the world would destroy the whole purpose.

unfitted2545 5mo ago

If we use world models to train AI systems, are we not essentially forcing something to live so it can gather data for us? Yes, we haven't gone that far with creating consciousness yet, but there is gonna be a lot of money around neural computing devices for consumers in the coming decades, so that will speed up knowing what sense data you need for consciousness.

ctoth 5mo ago
> are we not essentially forcing something to live so it can gather data for us? Wait until you learn about what we do to chickens.
- Azantys 5mo ago
  The Matrix is imminent

Lerc 5mo ago

There are two things here, firstly, Without AI, you can have heavily designed environments or you can have procedurally generated, people manage to make both work. Both can also fail because of reasons specific to the approach. Careless procedural generation can produce a poor variety or nonsensical outputs. Careless specific placement can violate any rules that a game has established creating an incoherent experience. Making a world internally consistent by explicit placement gets harder as you increase in scale. When internal consistency is a factor impacting quality, there is a scale at which generated content eventually becomes the higher quality solution. Secondly, when generating content with AI, the same rules around carelessness apply. There are certainly generative AI tools out there that offer few options when it comes to composing what you want, that is not a necessary part of AI, some of it is because people are wanting rudimentary interfaces, some of it is that the generators are sufficiently new that the control mechanisms are limited because they are focused upon doing something at all before doing it highly controlled, in some ways the problem is that things are new enough that it can be hard to describe what is desirable controllability, making the generator to see what people would like it to be able to do is, I think, a reasonable path to follow prior to creating the control that people want. Part of it is also that there _are_ tools that give a high level of control over what is generated but far fewer people get to see them. There are ways to control styles, object placement, camera motions, scene compositions, etc. The more specialised you get, the smaller the subset of people who need that specific control. I think AI can make things possible for people who could not have done so without them, but it's still going to take care to make something special.

bredren 5mo ago
This intentionality in the application of AI is very confusing for folks because at first glance it seems like it should just work. It seems to, even. Whereas if you hand a router to someone with a flush trim but in it and ask them to clean up the edge of a table they will take one look at it and nope away from that dangerous spinning thing. If they have the mind to give it a shot and despite a quality tool and bit they bite into the table and ruin the line (or something much worse) no one will be surprised—-they have no experience or recognition of what expertise is in woodworking. But with AI, it is much more hazy what expertise is. The methodology for quality results is changing each week and the articulation in personal tooling involved makes it challenging to adopt another “expert”’s workflows.

Glohrischi 5mo ago

Video games are not the initial motivation at all. These world models are key for robotic and coherence in video generation. Give a world model images of a factory, the robot now can simulate tasks and do the best result. Give a world model images/context etc. and it can generate a coherent world for video generation. What this world model system might be able to do for us in regards of gaming or virtual reality: Either simulate 'old' environments like the house of your grandparents (gaussian splatting but interactive) or potential new ones like a house, kitchen, remodeling. It can also be a very interesting easy to approach VR environment were you can start building your world with voice. That would be very intentional. After all world building is not necessarily connected to being able to generate 3d assets. Just because you need to go this route today, doesn't mean you have to do this tomorrow.

pigpop 5mo ago

Even though I doubt the main purpose of these models is to produce video games, I have the opposite view from you in that I am excited to see these put to work as components of procedural generation in video games. I don't think that is going to negatively impact story driven games that you seem to enjoy any more than the market for open world and simulation games currently does. They are separate concerns and use distinct techniques. Where you look for an intentionally evoked experience authored by a game designer, I am looking for an unexplored world unfolding before me filled with emergent and unique phenomena that perhaps no one and not even the game designer has seen before.

orbital-decay 5mo ago

> some of my favorite games carry a deep sense of intentionality. For instance, there is typically not a single item misplaced in a FromSoftware game (or, for instance, Lies of P -- more recently). Almost every object is placed intentionally. That's a pretty specific and one-sided example. There are tons of good games that don't rely on elaborate item placement (e.g. many Bethesda games are great because most items are useless decorations, they broke that rule in recent games, giving the purpose to clutter, and it made them a lot worse). There are tons of good games not relying on this intentionality at all, they're either literally random cool ideas thrown at the wall, or even procedurally generated.

mccoyb 5mo ago
That’s a fair critique of my comments! The space of fun games is large and diverse.

jdironman 5mo ago

I'm of a strong believer that AI just isn't (may never will be?) a strong judge and executor of "quality". Quality is a loaded term though. Are there any objectively good game designs? Even if there is, maybe only one game of 10 that use the same 'blue print' every reach critical mass (popularity).

duskdozer 5mo ago

>We are able to create less satisfying, less humane experiences faster? Yes, exactly. Inundate the world with superficially plausible yet hollow content, including any desired themes. People who aren't very discerning won't complain; the others will be outmatched and find that 99/100 pieces are all noise and they will need to spend increasing amounts of time trying to find the 1, if they can. I think there are some good parallels with Amazon: the broken sorting and manipulated unit pricing, coupled with the avalanche of cheap clones pushes users to give up and just buy one of the top listed products (a featured listing/Amazon-clone). If you do a web search for various products and go to images, Amazon product links often take up 50-90% of the results.

Aperocky 5mo ago
I think you also can create satisfying, same human experiences faster, but not as fast. But the dopamine descent require strong discipline to stop there, and most don't .
- Caracas288 5mo ago
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wongarsu 5mo ago

One thing is robotics. Both for training robotics AI, and to let robots test hypothetical actions before comitting to them. I don't think world models are stable enough for either yet The other is creating multi-modal models with a better understanding of our world. LLMs often fail at incredibly basic spatial reasoning ("someone left a package in front of your apartment, describe going there", or the "should I drive to the car wash or go there", etc). World models excel at these kinds of things (in theory). They develop a great understanding of physical spaces, object interactions, etc. They can simulate fluids, rigid body physics etc. You "just" have to get really good at making world models, then somehow marry them with an LLM in a way that ensures the LLM can benefit from the world model's training data. Nobody has managed to really do that yet So lots of hopes for the future. Until then they get commercialized as video models, or ways to experience your favorite forest, or to have a really bad video game ... whatever can be sold on a short time horizon to finance the actual goals

romesc 5mo ago
We are seeing increasing evidence that these sort of video world models are terrible options for useful rollouts of the physical dynamics of the environment. It is hypothesized that you can get them to be better than simulators by training on physics simulation data, but then the question becomes, why not use the simulator directly? There are a lot of areas where predictive models make sense in the robotics stack, but doing it with "video world models" as is trendy this year is likely a bet in the wrong direction according to the evidence we have been amassing in the last 6 months.

teucris 5mo ago

> In general, I have the feeling that we are hurtling towards a world with less intentionality behind all the things we experience. Everything becomes impersonal, more noisy, etc. You’re right - but that world is not the end of the story. The intentionality matters. Human creations matter because they connect us. I don’t know how long it will take, but people will build judgement as to what makes for good use of these tools to make meaningful things and expand our creative horizons in deeply human ways. Mind you, there will always be shallow slop. It’ll just take time for creators to learn how to use these tools to make something that isn’t slop.

kettlecorn 5mo ago

I think your comment can be split into two questions: 1. Games derive some appeal from their intentionality and hand-crafted nature. Will these less-intentional experiences be as appealing? 2. Can these less-intentional tools still be used to create intentional designs? On that first point I think it's important to remember that the lineage of video games comes from board & card games and sports. There's always been an ability to inject more complexity and less-intentionality into those things. Sports in some ways are like a simplified and altered role-play of war battles, and more realistic war roleplaying does exist but it has less appeal. As humans we like solving things and noticing patterns and the intentionality of games taps into that appeal. On the latter point I do think these world models will eventually be used to meaningfully contribute to building games. I think people will have to find new ways to design that balances intentionality against the freeform nature of these simulations, but it may take a while to have the capability to do so.

vintermann 5mo ago

> Games which lack this intentionality often feel dead in contrast Like for instance... Dwarf Fortress? Minecraft? Generative AI is just another method to go procedural generation. Not necessarily a better way. Or you could even argue that procedural generation is a form of generative AI... But either way, there are games where the lack of intentionality is central to the appeal.

0x457 5mo ago
> Like for instance... Dwarf Fortress? Minecraft? DF for some doesn't fit into this category for me. Minecraft feels dead to me, while many other games that utilize procedural generation are not.
8note 5mo ago
minecraft itself is a blank slate until the player or modder or whatever puts all that intentionality in. its a very dead game on its own. they are still very intentional about adding and changing the tools by which you make your own fun though.

stephen_cagle 5mo ago

I suspect these models will be like old Gutenberg's printing press. A rapid rise in the amount of content; most of it not that great. However the sheer volume will result in even more high quality content actually being created in aggregate. Put another way, the average game quality will go down, but the actual rate of "Great" games will go up.

mplewis 5mo ago
But these aren't great games. They are not even good. They are just tech demos with nothing of interest to gamers. Why do I need more slopware? I have an entire Steam library of excellent games that deserve to be played first.
- stephen_cagle 5mo ago
  Agreed, these aren't even games currently. I am just saying that world models will lower the barrier to entry to making games. Which might mean that 1 in 1000 of the lower-barrier-to-entry-people might someday makes a great game. So more great games in aggregate, but more bad games on average.
  - DrewADesign 5mo ago
    And theoretically AI does a great job at helping HR filter unqualified candidates, and it helps candidates optimize their resumes and application strategies to help them land the right role. So people should be landing dream roles left-and-right. Is that how it’s working? In reality, I don’t see any of this trending towards the theoretical happy path everybody always talks about. Most people give up trying to find something good on Amazon and just buy whatever vaguely plausible knock-off garbage shows up in the first few search results. Most people just take any job interview they’re offered even if it sucks. Most HR people don’t use it to enhance the quality of their decisions — it replaces their decision-making roles in many respects. I’m an art school graduate and talk am in many art discussion communities. This is causing a massive industry-wide morale crater. In any sort of art, it damn near eliminates the reward of craftsmanship in favor of marketing useless trend-of-the-week bullshit. Far fewer people enter a market that can’t sustain them. The idea that this is going to create ‘more artists’ and therefore that must mean there must be more skilled artists is fantasy. The skills you learn by prompting are not even on the same track to learning how to create things yourself. You essentially become a high-school intern acting as an art director, commissioning pieces. It’s instant gratification for people who don’t care enough about something to learn how to do it for real.

tomjen3 5mo ago

That is interesting. And it's an AI critique I haven't heard before. Would you consider it possible that the way non-intentionally placed items break the game immersion for you is because they appear in such a way that you think you can interact with them in a certain way, but you can't? Like if there's an extra door in the house you're trying to get into, but that door doesn't really open, then in your mind that breaks the integrity of the game's systems. If so, I think the LLM response is that there are no more doors that don't open and that the world can be generated as needed. No computer can handle the complexity of even a small town. But it would be possible, at least in the future, to generate the part of the world you interact with, which would heighten the emersion.

8note 5mo ago
its reasonably the same "reversion to the mean" or "not x, but y" the intentionally placed tree serves no particular in-game job mechanically. it instead points your eyes to the right place when you walk up the path, and then again when you look back down from above. when they're saying everything is intentionally placed, they mean everything, whether it looks important or not. It's all directed to a cohesive core
- pbhjpbhj 5mo ago
  So you want a human going 'oh stick a tree anywhere, it doesn't matter' rather than having that done procedurally whether by a simple algorithm or an ML model? It sounds like you might be assuming intent where there is little. I suspect if you didn't know a poem was written by an LLM you might ascribe purpose and intent to many aspects - rather like a high-school English language teacher.

jareklupinski 5mo ago

i've played multiple AAA(+) games before AI 'was a thing' that have had textures/elements, like bulletin boards or posters, where even on cursory glances (not zooming in or ADS) you can easily see literally "Lorem Ipsum" instead of lore or story which would have helped build atmosphere LLMs had nothing to do with this

therealpygon 5mo ago

Consider instead the possibility this may be used as a rendering layer for data backing it. Instead of shipping three-dimensional models and GBs of textures, you can ship a couple photos or a blueprint file or <any other modalities/whatever> and a detailed text description for significantly less storage. Now imagine the world model can adapt the styling of this world on the fly, where every person‘s experience could be unique in terms of visuals, but consistent in terms of the gameplay. It’s been my belief for several years that this is how the future of games will be constructed. Data in the background, game engine for rules application/ physics execution/orchestration/maybe low-poly rendering, an AI world model taking low resolution input in generating customized visuals/effects/textures/everything, even camera location, but still constrained by concrete rules in the game engine. I’m certain one day it might all be handled by AI, but the above seems much more realistic and achievable that expecting AI to do all of these things, at one, correctly, every frame.

Keyframe 5mo ago

You touched upon the substance of what we're witnessing et large with AI. Stuff feels hollow and worthless even though it looks amazing. Graphics, images, video, music, text, code.. So, what's the deal? As with ANY work in life, the quality of the result is a direct reflection of care and intention behind it. Simplified, it's a reflection of how much _you_ put effort in it. It always shows. Even in AI day and age. It's just that path to a result (without effort) is now way shorter so volume is showing up and diluting the overall impression. The latter kind of cheapens every field it touches, so even more effort will have to be put in to show up on the radar.

altmanaltman 5mo ago

Re what are we building towards - I think ultimately AI and these tools will be very useful to professionals who already know how to excel at their art. They can be very powerful tools but creating meaningful art/subjective work that is actually good is actually a borderline impossible task for LLMs since it requires genuine creativity. Similarly, I am seeing coding agents be infinitely more useful to people who already code than non-technical people thinking they can vibe code their own Salesforce. Its just that AI doesn't work well as a "productivity booster" tool in the marketing context. So they are pushing towards the idea that anyone can do anything with AI which is imo a really stupid hill to die on or base your ipo on.

WithinReason 5mo ago

To turn this into an actual usable game the network would need to generate an image conditionally from (low asset quality) maps made by the game devs, so map design, object placement is human, graphics is AI.

az226 5mo ago

Before long you’ll see reasoning world models.

whywhywhywhy 5mo ago

> We are able to create less satisfying, less humane experiences faster? Huge percentage of AI spend is on this with the gamble people won’t care if it’s less humane they’ll consume it anyway.