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Peter Molyneux thinks generative AI is the future of games, all but guaranteeing that it won't be
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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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There is a possibility something like this will be possible in the future, but it's not going to be an achievement of AI, it's largely going to be the achievement of regular developers creating a general-purpose game engine that can be used to put together a game block by block, which can be utilized by both human game designers and AI. (Likely to better effect by the former.) I can imagine Entity Component Systems will play a big part of that.
One of the biggest blockers for AI making games is going to be testing it to select for better performance. With text it's relatively easy to see if some text an AI produced is plausible. Images are also plentiful, but that's a lot more subjective. With both of these it would also not take a massive amount of time to add a human element. It's quick to check if a paragraph or image looks like it is a good response to the input promt. A game, however? How long do you need to play it to see if it's fun? At best, perhaps, you can write an AI to control a bot character to see if it's technically playable.
I don't want to even think about the electricity that wlll be wasted training such models.
ECS has really nothing to do with this. ECS is just a specific way to store the internal state of a program, fundamentally no different from other data structures.
Also, a good game is far more than just text and images and current "AI" can't even generate those individually. A game needs significant thought put into things like game loops, story arcs, balancing,... that are non-obvious when existing games would just be training data. Not to mention that using an existing game as training data is both non-trivial and also we just don't have the vast amounts of them that current systems seem to need to produce anything even half-way decent.
ECS already makes it a hundred times easier for me to conceptualize game mechanics, modify and extend them. Giving AI the ability the ability to create data separate from systems that use them will make it much easier for it to build a game. I don't believe for a second it will be able to write functioning object-oriented game code for example. It will likely be best if it avoided coding via a text-based language altogether, and use visual scripting or another system based on chaining logic blocks together. But that still counts as the "system" part of ECS.
Visual programming has been tried and tried again and failed every single time. Mostly that is because graphics are just not very good at abstraction and programming is all about abstraction.