The conversation/free-for-all around the role of automated “AI”-based game development rolls on with a few thoughts from Tom Hall, co-founder of id Software and one of the creators of the original DOOM, who says he’s (Commander) keen on the prospect of “ethical” uses for such tools in gamedev, but worries that reliance on them “will homogenize games, sort of like AAA games are now”.
Speaking to Sektor.sk, Hall said he was “excited” by “how AI could be used ethically to be more of a core element of the game, so it’s almost like a game that you’re playing and it’s playing you, in a sense, or it knows what you want. It could generate things for you, or enable different gameplay, it can adapt much more seamlessly to what you’re doing, or just sensibly create more game content.”
But he added: “I don’t want it to just willy-nilly be procedural, everything AI, and just not have any crafting to it, because that will homogenize games, sort of like a lot of AAA games are now. They’re just kind of like I attack the monster, oh, it’s attacking, I’ll roll out of the way. It’s all kind of the same stuff. And that’s what I don’t want to happen to games because of AI. I want it to enable us to make cooler things, and more amazing things, but there still needs to be a sense of craft.”
I’m not a fan of games that are designed by committee, and I fear AI-generated games would take that to the 11th degree.
Given that, I feel very specific aspects could still be vastly improved by AI, like games that implement procedural generation; I feel like his mention of procedural fears more of everything becoming procedural, instead of it supplementing the pre-existing applications of it. Those kinds of games hit a plateau at a certain point in the gameplay loop - the limitations of the tiles or combinations of assets starts to become very predictable and doesn’t achieve the purpose it sets out to at that point.
Also to take into account, AI needs a dataset to train it, and to avoid the homogenization he fears would involve producing datasets for specific tasks, and differentiating them from one another; to me, devs producing these unique datasets to sell is inevitable, and there’s definitely going to be a lot of “shovelware”-quality datasets being thrown around. The ethics of the data contained in a lot of those kinds of ones will definitely be questionable.
It’s a really mixed bag.