What happened to the AI game? Lessons from experiments in AI game design

What the article describes is an approach to gaming similar to how software apps in general are approached. This doesn't work. Games are inherently about a challenge, they are not just interactive software where you press buttons and things happen.

> Other mediums don’t have this expectation. What would it mean for a book9, show, or movie to be deemed too easy? When expanding our view from traditional games to entertainment in general, the real issue to tackle isn't difficulty. It's boredom. Luckily, the tools we use to prime the player can also be leveraged here.

Yeah, no shit. Games provide a challenge and often require skill. If you take these elements away it's like making every piece the queen on a chessboard. The whole point is to provide a system that has goals and rewards and some way to navigate the space in order to get to the goal. When this space is challenging and requires skill, that's basically a game.

The problem we have is that "game" is not well defined, and people confuse this with interactive software with pretty pictures. This is why so many AAA games are failing to create good products, because they have changed the product from something that provides a challenge, to an interactive experience with an online store.

As far as LLMs and AI. I think it will revolutionize gaming once you have realtime inference at a sub-frame speed. The model will have to produce the action for the next frame, and if that model is smart enough to generate novelty in behavior, then genres like RPGs will never be the same again. Right now inference requires powerful machines running in parallel and results served over TCP (not even UDP which would be faster).

The best way to use AI right now is just for some generic art that you can add to the background, or generic filler text you want to slap somewhere.

Great write up. Love to see more of this topic on Hacker News! We've been building in this exact space since 2023, though we jumped directly into 3D with real-time multiplayer from the start.

My take: The "not a game" positioning feels like surrendering before the real design challenge begins. With our first experiment (Retail Mage [1]), we deliberately created a hybrid between traditional game structure and AI improvisation. We released it precisely because we were getting similar feedback from folks that an early implementation was too open ended and didn't "feel like a game." While I think we proved our point, we also learned a lot (including some mistakes we made).

That said, I _also_ think we can build _more than games_ with this technology. I think we’re edging into a new genre or medium: more improvisational and participatory than either traditional games or film. Structure still matters in this space, though. Without it you're really in the fanfic engine or writing assistant space. That’s fine! But it's a different goal.

Honestly, I'm very interested in this space. I was just speaking on a panel about this Monday at GamesBeat in LA and a few of us have a new podcast about this topic "Playing With Inference" [2] with folks like Nick from AI Dungeon as guests.

[1] https://www.jamandtea.studio/news/making-retail-mage-a-new-a... [2] https://playingwithinference.com/