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I'm pretty tired of the "Y made this game in Z tokens" all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it's cool that it's even possible, but they're
by matsemann 2mo ago
I'm pretty tired of the "Y made this game in Z tokens" all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it's cool that it's even possible, but they're useless as games. None of them are any fun. They're like the most boring variant of basic controllers you can imagine. None have any cool mechanics. None have any tweaks made from hours and hours of testing. All have the same cel-shader.
- moron4hire 2mo agoIt's blockchain for gaming all over again, putting the cart before the horse.
- segmondy 2mo agoyou're tired because you lack imagination.
- throwatdem12311 2mo agoIt’s the people spamming these shitty games that lack imagination.
- segmondy 2mo agopeople are excited, let them be excited! but more than the excitement is realizing the implications of what this means for building software, first it looks like a toy and then it doesn't. the OP is talking about how the games are not playable and fun. who cares? that's not the point.
- matsemann 2mo agoWhat does it mean for building software? These games cannot become fun. There is no way to prompt it fun, and any change you try to prompt it to make will inevitably blow up something else. The code is a mess and impossible to build upon.
- throwatdem12311 2mo agoI would hope that if you’re making a game that the goal is for it to be fun! If that is not the point then there is no point at all.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2mo agoWe're all just impressed that it's even possible. No one is saying these are fun. I guess the next question is if they can be made fun without too much additional work with a human guiding the AI.
- minimaxir 2mo agoUnfortunately people are saying they are fun for the purposes of ragebait that goes viral, which is half the reason people intentionally post AI slop on social media.
- tripleee 2mo ago> the next question is if they can be made fun without too much additional work They can't. If you think about how these things are trained it's blatantly obvious fun is an impossible metric to optimize them for
- egeozcan 2mo agoTraining impossibilities aside, how would you even make an optimization loop for "fun"?
- hdjrudni 2mo agoI suppose. But real human-made games require lots of play testing to become fun. Maybe we just have the AI churn something out, have humans play it, and iterate. It could still speed up the overall dev time.
- revel 2mo agoLLMs are bad at creative work and I don’t see them improving any time soon. Try asking an agent to write a story about raccoons. It will almost certainly involve either stealing food or raiding trash with a 50% chance of having a character named Pip. If a location is mentioned, it’ll be Elm Street. I guess this is the average story and, similarly, the average game is boring and predictable
- josh-wrale 2mo agoI think the trick is to use LLMs like scalpels instead of hammers. That said, you can place a scalpel in the hands of a deterministic (or not) robot.
- CuriouslyC 2mo agoIronically, they're getting worse at creative work because all the RL is collapsing their distributions.
- dofm 2mo agoWorse in a very specific, bland, uninteresting way, too. Early generative AI at least had the virtue of relentless, unsettling weirdness, in the same way that generative art from the late 90s and early 2000s did. A handful of people made creative use of that spooky weirdness. Now it turns out "Airspace" art.
- jmole 2mo agoSeriously, what is the deal with Pip! I was experimenting with childrens' fiction more than a year ago and 9 times out of 10 you'd get a character named Pip unless you were specific in the prompt not to do so.
- cautiouscat 2mo agoI recently saw a study on this actually. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26492 https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26492
- tripleee 2mo agoIt's the flashy game/movie trailer equivalent for LLMs. Completely unrelated to the real experience, but good for marketing.
- Jtarii 2mo agoLLMs currently have 0 imagination, I have strong doubts that will be solved any time soon even if they continue to become superhuman at everything else. They just have the creative instincts of a 50 year old accountant.
- throwatdem12311 2mo agoIt’s called “demo porn” and it’s really obnoxious and borderline offensive to people that take the craft and art form of video games seriously. If I see one more “one shot MMO” where you just walk around and do absolutey nothing or another menu slop idle battler or rogulike deck builder I’m going to go Postal in Minecraft.
- Aurornis 2mo agoI’ll never not be amazed that we can type some words and get those results back out. However I do agree that the results are much worse when you try to use them. They look great in screenshots and video clips which makes them perfect for content farmers. All of the LLM generated games I’ve played have been really bad to play, though. I even tried my hand at a simple game, thinking I could iterate on it with prompts to fix some rough edges. After the initial productivity burst every change turned into a slog of tokens with one thing changing and something else breaking it. I would try to use my remaining weekly token budget across Anthropic and OpenAI to refine it at the end of every week but after a couple weeks it felt like I wouldn’t be getting anywhere without scrapping it and going back to having the LLM build it one step at a time with my careful instruction. Which, in retrospect, is the only way I can get usable output of an LLM for anything complicated, so it’s not surprising. It’s a fun reality check project though.
- techblueberry 2mo agoI think it’s interesting to watch that we all have to sort of fine tune our own expectations and build the mental model for how impressive this is. On the one hand I think most of us are incredibly impressed because we know, that quick demo would have taken us months of work to build in the before times. On the other hand the promise is a cure for cancer and the end of all work. So when everyone is telling you “skill issue is why you can’t one shot WoW”. It’s hard to know how you’re supposed to feel about Karpathy advertising one shot custom virtual worlds but giving you slop. Incredibly impressive slop when compared to how long it would take to create it just 3 years ago, not so much compared to Elon saying - “by the end of this year, grok will create a version of the odyssey that competes with Nolan’s”
- vvbull 2mo agoDid he really say that? What an absurd thing to believe, let alone say out loud.
- upmostly 2mo agoUnfortunately the Phaser framework has decided to go all-in on this route, and it's really disappointing. These one-shot products aren't games. They're barely even demos. I don't even know what to call them. For a mature framework like Phaser to sell-out like this and create a vibecoded platform for vibecoded games is shocking.
- eterm 2mo agoRight, but the new phenomena is that we've lost a signal. Used to be if a game looked that good it probably had time spent on the game part too.
- dofm 2mo agoAnd you could almost always tell a "game construction kit" game from a real one, couldn't you? Whatever was missing from those is always missing from these, and it seems just as rare that the game will reach much beyond its origins. Whenever I think about AI games I find myself thinking about Tiny Wings, Flappy Bird and Angry Birds. Three simple, elegant games. It is easy to see what makes Tiny Wings so completely loveable — it has a sculpted, adorable, perfect charm with a cleverly inverted game mechanic that has a calibrated level of exasperation and reward. But why were Flappy Bird and Angry Birds, very basic games with very old game mechanics, so charming? It seems equally impossible to imagine an AI coming up with a game with the quality of any of them, even with maximised creativity. But explaining why for Flappy Bird seems quite difficult, especially when you consider it uses some stolen visuals!
- knollimar 2mo agoit's crazy because I've seen "implement flappy bird on an FPGA with VGA output" as a 2 week project to a human as something immediately understandable. Maybe it's the smoothness of motion that makes these games understandable and LLMs seem to consistently fail at that. Ask them to do something snowboarding and they go really hard on the physics since it seems like they don't know what kind of approxmations feel good.
- ben_w 2mo agoI've been hearing similar from a while back, but the blame wasn't being directed at AI, it was directed at Unreal's defaults now making random indies look like AAA in the screenshots. (It's been a while since I was in the game industry, so IDK quite how accurate this is).
- singron 2mo agoI've heard this called a "dancing bear" before. It's interesting because it's a bear dancing, not because the dancing is any good. These conversations get frustrating since one group is saying the dancing is bad, a second group is saying it's good (for a bear), and a third group is saying we are a few years from a bear-only dancing industry.
- moron4hire 2mo agoThe hype train the caught me was VR. I'm reminded of the Microsoft Hololens. It was an incredible feat of engineering. At the same time, it was--at times, literally--a painful experience. There was a vision of the Hololens being a general purpose compute device that enabled something more like the power of a desktop without being tethered to a sitting position at a desk. You could see it if you squinted hard (incidentally, the device caused a lot of eye strain). But even at the height of the VR hype cycle, I didn't know anyone pushing the Hololens on anyone. Nobody was telling the world they were going to be using Hololenses v1 or v2 as their only computer "or get left behind."
- peterbower 2mo agoI agree - they have not been good games. However, the fact that it is able to build and work with shaders effectively is promising - massive time saver and lowers the barrier to entry for people who need these capabilities without double majoring in advanced mathematics and computer science/game design. One would hope it accelerates AR/VR - if decent studios finally get behind it.