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Comment by jna_sh | Hacker News Reader

“ can it build a game idea I've had for years, in a single shot?”

Do people do no research or introspection when they’ve had an “idea for years”? There are countless examples of this exact game. I played this on the Gameboy Advance! There’s like 50 of them on the App Store right now.

The standard “this almost certainly exists wholesale in the training data” applies, but I’m also interested in how you carry an idea for years and don’t notice this, or whether the “idea” here was actually “using this thing that’s been remade thousands of times as an AI benchmark”.

There’s nothing wrong with remaking an old classic formula, especially in game dev. It’s the describing it as “an idea I’ve had for years” that rings weird.

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I think that's exactly why AI is suited for 99% of stuff we do.

I have pointed out on here before that instances of truly unique human ideas not grounded in nature or previous ideas from others is almost nil, there are not many examples that someone can give me. All human ideas and work is derivative.

Elves? Humans with pointy ears. Werewolves? Humans mixed with wolves. Car tyre? Cart wheel...stone wheel/roller. Etc.

I feel like prior to GenAI, you’d have had to reckon with the true originality of your idea in some form as you did the research. Creatives having to confront their own unoriginality is such a thing it itself is reflected in countless pieces of media.

So it’s interesting to me that the creator here didn’t encounter the tens of physically published versions, or the hundreds of them shipped to digital app stores, or all the codebases on GitHub, in the course of making this. I’m sure they would have done naturally prior to GenAI. Is that good or bad? I don’t know! But it’s interesting to me.

> the creator here didn’t encounter the tens of physically published versions

The simplest counterargument: since there are already tens of similar games out there, why didn't the previous authors, supposedly grass-fed genuine checkmark blood-through-their-veins humans didn't notice the other 9-8-7-6-5... games, and still released their own version? Maybe because it was still that they wanted the game out there? Maybe because originality really isn't that common? Maybe because each individual had their own idea and spin to it? Maybe because they wanted the game out as they made it?

Same for this author. How they made the game is irrelevant, and nitpicking the "originality" or anything else is silly. Something like this wasn't possible 3 years ago. Now it's possible. Deal with it, and stop trying to find ways to diminish it. It's a huge accomplishment any way you cut it.

My thoughts are less about the merits of creating something that already exists than they are about _knowing_ you are doing that. Which I think my post made very clear :)

> I’m sure they would have done naturally prior to GenAI.

I gave a simple counterargument to this. Since there are "countless" prior games, many of them released before genAI, your argument is pointless.

Do you think the only reaction to knowing you’re not the first to do something is not to do it? Do you think I said that?

To spell it out in case it is still non-obvious: knowing this allows iteration. It allows remixing. It allows you to inspect what has come before and what it did well and where it succeeded and where it fell short and thus what you could _add_. It is an enabler of creativity! Thus I think it is interesting that GenAI may make it harder to have this experience.

They said they think they would have encountered those other games without GenAI, not that they or any of those other authors shouldn't have released the game.

> why didn't the previous authors, supposedly grass-fed genuine checkmark blood-through-their-veins humans didn't notice the other 9-8-7-6-5... games, and still released their own version?

a) To make it better

b) To learn, in service of a) or another project

How is the theft of all human knowledge and the destruction of any way of having a meaningful existence a huge accomplishment?

i had a boss. before he was my boss, he was a friend. he took me under his wing, musically speaking. he showed me new music. told me what gear he was interested in. we went to some gigs.

he used to say “the best artists have the biggest record collections”.

they’ve done their research. they developed taste. they’ve been in that battle with the unoriginality demon. they’re still in that battle with the unoriginality demon. they’re always searching for new. for unexplored. for different.

they’ve also figured out what “good artists copy, great artists steal” means.

we take small bits. small ideas. small riffs. we turn them into our own. then we repeat that N times to create “a song”. we borrow. we revere. we obsess. turning lots of little differences into a completely new work. yes it’s all derivative. but derivative originality takes a lot of fuckin’ effort to get right. to be tasteful.

this thing isn’t artistic stealing, it’s the most low-effort stealing possible. creativity, originality and more importantly taste appear nowhere here.

so, is it bad? depends on your perspective on creative endeavours being worthwhile and whether you have taste or not i guess.

edit - personally i don’t think you can polish a turd. even if you rewrite it, the memory lingers.

Amen!

Just because AI can give you a recipe for an sandwich doesnt mean everyone who sells or buys or experiments making sandwiches are going to stop.

I think this is false. New ideas are born every minute, and llms arent going to help people with those for the most part, they'll end up steering you back towards the gradient if you do.

Can you give us an example of a new idea that is not derivative of something that already exists? Should only take about a minute.

Snark aside (and apologies), there's absolutely nothing wrong with the "no new ideas" take and nobody should think there is. Humans tend to work collectively, try as we might to do or appear otherwise, and often come to the same conclusions through reasoning and logic. No one-person truly invented the light bulb, etc, when really all inventive thought is branches of derivative thought as we build our collective knowledgebase. A better question would be how many novel ideas are the logical conclusion of branches of derivative thought and how many are tangential brought about by the injection of our irrationally.

> a new idea that is not derivative of something that already exists? Should only take about a minute.

A child is born every 4.4 seconds. But it took me and my girlfriend over 9 months to birth one!

Even if an original idea did show up every minute globally, does not mean that it takes only a minute to come up with the idea.

> it took me and my girlfriend over 9 months to birth one!

By my math you should should have at least 2 in that time, unless one of you wasn't pulling their weight.

I don't get your point, so I am going somewhere else: twins and triplets

So I guess it was a dig on OP not just giving himself equal, but top billing somehow, over his girlfriend on creating a child.

Wow those 6 seconds you contributed were what made the difference, big guy. Not the 9 months of gestation, by any means. let's hear it for OP and his splooge everyone, and so on. You get the picture.

I'm not sure what's going on exactly with Gen Z males, it's an interesting phenomenon. I wouldn't expect that kind of dialog from GenX or Boomers even.

It seems to me that most media genres discover the most interesting parts relatively early, then most subsequent work is deeply derivative. I feel that way about video games, digital music, movies.

I'd wager it's because ideas are simpler to explore orthogonally, giving an overview of what's possible.

The question is not whether the ingredients are original. They almost never are. The question is whether the synthesis is any good

While I agree that it isn't revolutionary that it could implement this from a single prompt, what's surprising to see is how well done this one is compared to the other tries. The controls and movement are smooth, the animations aren't jittery, the ui makes sense, there's a clear progression in difficulty. This model clearly "understands" the implementation of this game far better than the others did.

Yes, this subtly seems worth noting. That smoothness suggests that even if many of the concepts are common/non-original, the bringing together of various pieces in a form that works well on modern mobile browsers is still impressive - browsers are moving targets and even if there are open source versions of this, it's comparatively rare they'd get continual care and attention to stay fully current (unless implemented via an o/s engine)

Still, if the code for multiple similar games is in the training data, then that's worth thinking about.

It's called Ostrich effect and we all do it. You enjoy toying with your own idea so much, that your brain shields you from the pain of finding out it already exists. Deep down you know it probably exists. It's harmless, unless there's other people's time and money involved.

> You enjoy toying with your own idea so much, that your brain shields you from the pain of finding out it already exists.

Doesn’t look like the author toyed with the idea at all, though, apart from having it in their head. Considering how they describe themselves (Check the About/Home page), if they had toyed with it at all they would have already built it.

I also don’t see why finding out it exists would be “painful”. The game is free and the author didn’t experiment or learn anything from building it, they just prompted it in one go.

I think you misunderstand what was meant by "toying with your own idea" here. I interpret it as daydreaming about it.

> I interpret it as daydreaming about it.

Which is why I said:

> apart from having it in their head.

But if that’s all you’re doing, there’s no “pain” from finding out it exists. On the contrary, there is plenty of room for joy.

Yeah "toying" as in "entertaining the idea" in any form or shape.

And I disagree that the author didn't get anything from it. There's a ton to glean, it was probably fun, and many HN readers enjoyed the post.

> And I disagree that the author didn't get anything from it.

Those were not my words. Clearly they got a game out of it. What I said was they:

> didn’t experiment or learn anything from building it

Which is unambiguously true. There was no experimentation and no learning. There was one prompt and one result.

> and many HN readers enjoyed the post.

That’s entirely orthogonal.

I also realized this, a quick Google search would’ve told me that this game has been made several times before, also way before I ever had this idea. Apparently it’s a pretty obvious game idea.

Ah well, it’s still fun and it does appear to measure how good AI is in creating these kind of games.

Well … it’s a measure of how good it is at reproducing a game that probably already exists in multiple forms in its training data.

The question is more whether this game exists as open source somewhere in the training data (probably does).

You can't possibly think those models are only trained on open source data?

I agree - it's worth doing just for fun.

I did the same recently just for fun - I really enjoyed "Gravity Force" on the Amiga - itself a lunar lander variant.

Could a model build a Gravity Force like game I could run in-browser? Yep! (I never made it as good as Gravity Force - just got the basics down)

Well, “an idea I’ve had for years” and “something that has never been done before” are not the same thing.

This is fair! I am possibly attaching some notion of originality to the word “idea” in the context of a project that others don’t.

yes you are

Usually it’s an idea somebody had in a flight of fancy or inspiration but they haven’t really shown much interest in the actual medium prior, so they don’t really have any knowledge of its existence and then they also don’t go out of their way to confirm if it already exists.

Like I remember in college I had something akin to the idea of “50 people 1 question.” I was starting to become interested in shooting my own documentaries and was particularly interested in man on the street style interviews. I pitched it to a friend who then told me about 50p1q, which baffled him because it was like the hot thing already a year or two prior haha.

Anyway that’s just something I think happens a lot. And now with genAI people don’t throw the idea around even, they quickly do a crappy version of the thing, present it, then find out it exists. Which isn’t terrible I guess but it’s one less filter for my better or for worse.

This is a thought I've had about genAI.

In case it all just comes from training data, "one shotting" a game would be more comparable to "git pull" and changing some assets than "generating code".

I'm not saying this is how it works, I'm trivializing LLMs with this statement, but when I see someone on linkedin excited about generating checkers and chess my first thought is "you could have done that with git pull for the past 20 years".

If OP is anything like me, they probably played it (or saw and wanted to play it) on the GBA too, and the memory became an idea, forgetting they had actually played it because it did exist.

But also, how original can a game idea ever (now) really be – there's always going to be things you can describe it as 'like' or a mix of, even if not identical. And for such simple things, very little room for being non-identical to whatever they're like.

I believe that AI is not a signal of all white collar jobs being replaced, it’s a signal that SWE was in its own bubble and this is the pressure to pop it.

Most software is not needed, YCombinator itself works on the philosophy of “maybe 2/300 ideas are good” and even among those their biggest hitters were social media platforms and undercutting existing services using VC money.

It was a big game that didn’t make a lot of sense in retrospect, and now with these AI super coders it just doesn’t make sense faster.

Software ate the world, and AI is the garbage disposal meant to chew up the leftovers.

Same thoughts exactly. I personally started looking into indie game dev and I've just started to realize how naive I was and how hard just game design can be, and that I'll probably never be good at it, and that most of my ideas are pretty garbage (or incomplete at best).

Even with the perfect AI to write, one would need to iterate through many different ideas, play testing constantly, getting people to play test and analyze what they found fun and where they got stuck. And to get the best ideas you'll need to be playing lots of different kinds of games.

I played it in Twilight Princess and I did not have fun and Link probably didn't either.

Most small games are recombinations of existing mechanics anyway

I’d guess that large games have an even higher percentage of pre-existing mechanics than small games do. It’s much easier to do something experimental if you don’t have to wrangle investors and entire teams of writers, artists, and developers.

90% of everything is crap according to the late SF write Theodore Sturgeon. That was true before AI and it remains true presently. Does it really matter whether this game was in the training data or not here? I guess if one is trying to assert it can build original ideas (and it can, I've done it), but it seems like this is the equivalent of pulling something from Stack Overflow and customizing it given the description of the problem.

IMO the ability to describe a game and let the AI implement a PoC is pretty wild. It's a signal as to whether such an idea is worth pursuing further to me rather than a finished product. And I am enjoying all the experimentation with existing genres as well as the occasional truly original experience due to the dramatically lower cost of entry. What these efforts lack currently is the playtesting and polish that is hard without a human in the loop. So much like agentic engineering, the productive work is in being a centaur. It surprises me how much pushback this is getting from the demographic that embraced the relatively inscrutable git over simpler alternatives for small teams along with the tower of Babel of equally inscrutable frameworks and APIs.

It's not unlike Martin Scorsese admitting upfront he's using GenAI as a creative tool to visualize scenes for his scripts. The predictable backlash that he dare use AI in any way for any aspect of his craft despite his irrefutable oeuvre is a sign of the times more than a legitimate objection to me. Ask the users of deviantArt to stop working with Photoshop and see how that goes.

Having worked in the game industry in the past and adjacent to Hollywood over my career, they were already top heavy exploitative cultures before AI. And any auteur that thinks they can replace humans with agents is as tuned in to GenAI as the tech CEOs and VCs that happily announced layoffs and instituted tokenmaxxing benchmarks to measure the "incredible" boost in productivity AI enables.

So my question, ahead of the mandatory downvotes for not chanting along with the torch-bearing mob against AI in every way is: beyond the CapEx and the buildout issues (both legit IMO), how is AI impacting you negatively and personally?

You are the second person to respond to my question that’s entirely orthogonal to the actual AI usage here with a very self-conscious screed. Go read my responses to the first one :)

If you're going to go orthogonal to the AI yourself, what makes you think other people won't go orthogonal to your own screed?

I'm happy to assume the guy had the idea in his head for years. That others did too should come as no surprise. We are all a lot more alike than most people acknowledge. And this seems the credible successor to Activision's stampede from the late 1970s. Happy?

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