PERSPECTIVE
Notes from videogaming’s borders
As Iapproach my third decade in the game industry, my natural curiosity about new technologies is now mixed with worry: that if I don’t learn them quickly enough, they might also bring about my obsolescence. I don’t want to be that person who refuses to use a new tool and declares that it’s the children who are wrong, so I keep wondering if now’s the time to pick up Godot or start getting serious about VR.
Specific technologies aren’t what keep me up at night, though. You can always adapt to them pretty quickly. It’s entirely new ways of working that are the most challenging to adopt, whether that’s going from working in an office to working remotely, or going from a single game release to making games as a service. And I think AI may be one of the biggest changes to game development in a long while.
AI isn’t new to games, of course – it’s been used for decades, to govern the behaviour of NPCs and generate graphics. But in the past year it’s been impossible to miss the tidal wave of AI-generated art from tools such as DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, which turn text prompts into increasingly decent-looking graphics. Meanwhile, Nvidia’s GET3D AI tool can generate 3D meshes and textures, and various companies are commercialising ‘neural radiance fields’ that can generate 3D views of complex scenes from just a few 2D photos – photogrammetry on the cheap, in other words, providing that you don’t mind the AI dreaming up the details.
Perhaps we don’t need 3D models for computers to create convincing moving images on 2D screens, though. That’s what Google’s Imagen Video and Meta’s Make-A-Video AI systems are doing, by converting prompts into short movies. They’re quite basic, but improving quickly. And AI writing tools based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model, such as Sudowrite, are already being used to help write novels. They aren’t limited to generating prose, either: you can use them to brainstorm ideas for plot and dialogue.
It leads to a broader question of whether we’re comfortable with AI disrupting entire professional fields overnight
These AI tools might transform how companies create assets for games – generating the 3D models and dialogue for hundreds of NPCs, for example – but from an operational perspective they’re comparatively minor changes to the overall development workflow. It’s games such as AI Dungeon that are truly transformational, though, where AI-powered conversational interaction is the central component of the game; and Bureau Of Multiversal Arbitration, a multiplayer game on Discord involving AI art generation.
There are important ethical questions here. Most generative AI tools were trained by scooping up text and graphics from the Internet, often without their creators’ cons
