Frankenfornite anyone? Why games need a human touch, and not a serving of AI slop.
Tech giant Microsoft recently announced a new generative AI model dubbed Muse. Being staunchly against Generative AI, I immediately took to Bluesky ready to write one of my signature posts. You know, the ones where I swear a lot like a big boy.
The idea of a new AI model spaffing out games really fucked me off. But as chance would have it, I saved face this time. I stumbled upon an article that better explained what Muse is, and all before I went off on one. It's worth a read. Muse isn’t going to generate games. I’d misunderstood its purpose.
Imagine my surprise, then, when VGC posted an article flying in the face of what I'd just read — Satya Nadella flapping his gums about Microsoft's Muse generating a library of games... oh. It’s ambiguous whether this relates to games they plan to actually sell or games they're generating to further train their model. Regardless, the fact they’re talking about this shows they plan to use Muse in this capacity.
Joe Skrebels, Xbox Wire Editor-in-Chief
They can give it all the "this will actually lead to more jobs, actually!" spiel, but there's only one real reason they'd be heading down this avenue — to make quick and easy money. I've hardly had to delve into my mind palace to surmise that. A company that’s sunk billions into scooping up a large percentage of the games industry, needs to recoup that cost — make no bones about it, this is all about a better top line and nothing else.
Fortunately, as I'm typing this post, none of this is possible. In its infancy, Muse can’t yet generate playable games of the quality gamers expect. Unless you're a big fan of pixelated dirty protests and, hey, I ain't gonna kink shame you, but most of us aren't.
As with most AI models, promises and "what ifs" prop Muse up — but what happens when those "what ifs" turn into a reality?
Let's say for a minute that Muse is everything Microsoft wants it to be, and it can ideate and generate games with relative ease. Trained only on game footage alone, it would react to gaming trends in a very short space of time. Using the countless hours of YouTube footage handily recorded by so-called influencers and streamers, Muse could take the next Fortnite and spit out a Frankenfortnite in record time. This quick reaction would avoid situations such as the one PlayStation has found itself in, where they've gone all-in for live service and absolutely shat the bed. It also means money! Strike the iron while it's hottest. Flip the tap and let the slop flow. Your slop buckets are overrun with slop? Nonsense! You need more slop! Slop for everyone! Please, sir, can I have some less?
Human Creativity vs A Digital Muse
Okay, I've lost my mind, but there is a serious side to this. If we reach a point where generative AI creates playable games based on footage alone, creativity dies and plagiarism lives. AAA game development becomes purely reactive and capitalised on in predatory ways.
The winners are those who can afford to market the game. The losers? Well, that's the people making the games that feed the machine. In a time where fans have felt the need to create a version of Nintendo's eShop, on account of half-baked asset flips or outright plagiarised content flooding the original one, you think we would try to put measures in place to stop this from happening. Instead, we're using the power of a thousand suns to contribute to the shit pile.
This is all hyperbolic, of course. We're years away from any of this becoming a reality, and even then it may not happen. But big corporations focusing on this career-ending tech at a time when the industry is on its knees, haemorrhaging talent, leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
My only hope is that if this does come to be, people will vote with their time, favouring human-made video games over the malformed algorithmic computer sputum. But that ultimately comes down to what experience we want from playing a game.
I recently finished playing through Dordogne; a short indie game from a few years back. It's inherently human-made — from its tactile watercolour artwork to its well-written, multi-layered characters, through to its heartfelt story. It's a game I thoroughly enjoyed playing because of that emotional connection. Sure, I'll play a Doom every now and then. We all need those moments where we switch off our brains and smash demons around for a bit. But games like Dordogne, that let you connect to the people who've made them, are what make this medium special.
Such games give me hope that we can push against a world where number-crunching algorithms spewing out facsimiles of real, emotionally-driven human creations replace every creative industry. I just pray the industries hang on long enough to see that through.
