To be fair, I think game worlds could be the one place where the odd AI hallucinations could be fun as hell.
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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A model randomly creating quirky output like hands with six fingers does not get you to David Lynch.
So I observed this talk, which I thought was quite good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jeb_mSOgrVg
And I started thinking that it would be cool to put the magic system of a game in the control of an LLM. Pivotal decisions of what's going to happen at some given point get passed to the LLM in a particular type of markup, with the answer of what happens in the world coming back in the same markup. You can give it guidelines, but skilled players can get around the guidelines or learn how to trick the system, and also, there is inherent fuzziness to the edges of how things happen, and inherent jank and risk to the system because you can never completely sure what is going to happen based on what you thought would happen.
All the things that make modern AI not a good thing to put into your systems suddenly become advantages from the perspective of immersing the player into the magic system without it being completely systematized. The magic goes back to being magical. You can literally have someone type something for what the incantation they're using is, and it may get more powerful if they put a lot of emoting into the box, or they can literally try something that isn't anywhere in the system and just "see if it works"... but also, you can't quite be sure even what common stuff is going to do, 100% of the time.
I never got serious enough about the idea to try it out but I thought it had the potential to be super-cool.
"Procedurally generated with extra steps".
Because "procedural," the word we've been using for this for years, doesn't fleece millions of venture funds from dumb hypeinvestors
I get your point but I don't quite think that the dream is that they can have the AI make changes to the world to create an immersive experience which is generated from first principles, and responds realistically to what you're doing.
I think the dream is that they can finally get rid of all those artists, level designers, playtesters, and so on, who have been hoovering up salaries that could be getting spent on blowjobs for the executives or something else that's really productive, and replace it all with a box that has one button that says "make game now."
Procedural is still based off of seeds and can be recreated on any machine with the same seed.
I think the point would be to have truly random generated maps.
AI still uses random seeds like other procedural algorithms.
They could generate random seeds as it’s being generated making it truly random.
With AI the same input will not always return the same result, unless asking for a black and white answer that is.
Surely the random seed should be considered a necessary part of the input, no?
If you want repeatable results, the point would for it to not be repeatable, every thing would be unique.
What would be the point of making a game if someone could just repeat it with reverse engineering some seeds?
People love swapping Minecraft seeds because it allows them to share unique experiences. Like if something really cool generated, other people will want to see that thing happen!
To deny players this would be a huge error - seed hunting is a non-trivial community engagement factor.
Okay, and this is attempting to do something different, being truly random.
Both can exist, no?
Lots of games that use procedural generation don’t have public seeds or a way to input them sometimes, so there’s plenty of precedence that people want the opposite too.
You don't want truly random, whatever that means to you. 99.9999'% of what randomness produces would be unplayable noise. Nowhere near anything a human would consider fun, engaging, or even interesting at all. The gaming marketing world went already through this discussion. Random generation without human intervention does not create fun games.
Random generation without human intervention does not create fun games.
Well arguably that’s the point of having the AI, it establishes what’s good and what’s not while still being random.
It’s the human element dude.
AI is not human. And don't call me dude.
And neither is procedural generation, so what’s your point then? They’re trying to make something truly random, no need to shit on it just because you’re biased against AI in general or don’t understand the point.
I bet you rely on spellcheck and auto correct don’t you…? That’s not humans either, yet it’s acceptable. Hypocrite.
Best genAI could do is a wave collapse algorithm where words could control some parameters, but is a dumb idea.
Good thing this isn’t generative Ai then.
We knew this was coming, but I wonder at what point it will be practical. Yes, image generation is a fascinating approach. We can see super realistic scenes generated by A.I.—with no traditional 3-D rendering necessary. It just generates what it thinks it’s supposed to. What your human eye should see.
I do think this is likely the near-future of basically anything artificial. But…
Compare to a team of developers who design a game, its characters, its story, and its environment. The money, time, and effort. Compare that to what it would cost to develop a game with A.I., the overall processing power and cost.
At this very moment in time, of course, whatever comes out of it will be crappy and weird. It would be more expensive overall. However, we can’t really expect it would stay that way.
A.I. will absolutely be the future of gaming and virtual reality. There is no stopping it or beating it that I can see. I don’t yet know how to feel about that.