Google Playground: Create and play custom games
blog.google
blog.google
Play a little game, then when you're done it generates a new one based on what you've enjoyed. Repeat ad infinitum.
You also have to actively use your game for most games, unlike TikTok videos which you can just watch with your brain turned off.
Haven't followed them too closely, but wouldn't be surprised if they'd added LLM tools to the platform.
Well to your point, youtube already has these little mini games that exist in portrait mode. Seems like something is liminally out there pointing in that direction.
The last few founders I knew working on variations of the idea finally pivoted out over the summer. It’s definitely one of those ideas that sounds great until you try building it and you realize there’s nothing there. Definitely will get funded again before the year is up!
I was able to spin up a couple of games really quickly--a 2D cosy space exploration game, and a snarky sci fi trivia game. I'd say the the writting for the humorous trivia questions and the cosy interactions was reasonable--this isn't a tool that can only do reskins of old school arcade games. In addition to music and graphics it can do text to speech.
It's still an experiment, simultaneous impressive, and frustrating, with rather unexpectedly low prompt compliance. But, beta.
It really doesn't seem to like shifting from multiplayer to solo play. It seems like you ought to have a strong opinion upfront. (again, early days)
It's natural to think of this quick and easy tool for playing game, but I suspect part of the eventual value will be learning tools and "self gamification" I could imagine doing a variant of my trivial game for memorization or language learning.
Let developers use your models and tools and build stuff with it. Why own everything.
Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform.
I often want to play simple games like Pacman, space invader, breakout, tetris or some other random iteration. Sometimes there are non-spammy simple versions of this game but often there aren't. This seems like a pretty cool fix. And if they disappear in the future, who cares?
YouTube started exactly how you described it, some silly thing not meant to be serious and today powers multiple 100M+ businesses using it for content to reach mass audiences.
I read at some point that projects at Google didn't get a greenlight unless there was a reasonable expectation they could be used directly or indirectly by a billion people.
You ain't making sense. Companies need $, and what's wrong with what they do with what they own and can do in this particular case?
Yes. Google does not actually care about search anymore, and the threat that the technology could disappear altogether is real.
My logic is not “don’t make money” but more so pick a lane
They can empower the community and let a PaaS emerge that’s locked in on their APIs for example
For example, did Shopify get into building Marketplaces for E-commerce? No
It isn’t like they would not be able to make money from the gaming industry by being just the layer zero, my beef here is that they’re going one layer up
I also didn't bother with in-app game dev for now since I figured your local agents will be better. So for now you just develop locally with a CLI and your favorite subsidized model.
Do you really think Google cares about gameplay in the same likes of, say, Nintendo?
Is it really just that they give kids nice shiny imaginary points for playing longer?
I'm a bit worried that Google Slides-games will fall out of fashion now ;(
Looks like they forgot to create a "Not available in your region" page, which makes me wonder whether they made this over a weekend.
This looks like it might be very useful indeed!
> To keep the experience safe and welcoming, every published game undergoes safety screenings aligned with our Community Guidelines, along with user reporting.
Kind of cringe. I mean I suppose its one thing to stop people making CSAM but safety screens make it sound like you can't have any sort of mature game? Gore, violence, drugs, suggestive themes or nudity etc all disallowed or something? Everyone has to make a T for Teen game?
Im not sure how to justify the feeling. Maybe it's that I expect more than entertainment out of creative works (which I consider games to be), but this... Corporate slop firehose seems fundamentally empty in a way that raises goosebumps, like a black mirror episode.
If you are disgusted by this, the resources spent on AI adult content would make you mad. But why judge what other people choose to do.
There's an episode of President Curtis where USA is running out of energy and the final solution is to (spoilers) tax AI porn.
And I don't have a problem with AI _assistance_ in creative work either.
What horrifies me is the picture of someone absentmindedly placing a half formed thought into a textbox and people consuming it, no deep thinking at all involved in neither creators nor users. It's the mental equivalent of the wall-e humans.
You may analyze why do people seek such a thing and feel compassion. and what should humans do instead? Why? Is there an objective answer?
I had an idea for a small game for ages, never the time for it and now i'm vibing on it randomly because its fun.
How much finetuning/prompting would you allow me until you think its reasonable? One prompt? Or a certain amount of resources i put in?
Don't get me wrong, i'm curious on when you think a certain quality is reached. I ask this myself too. Like i have a lot of experience in the area of game development, game mechanics, programming and usability. Now the game itself i adjust constantly because i have a lot of strong opinions.
But will this ever be something i might release for free and people get a benefit out of this?
I do think I have a general principle, which is: once we have a new capability, we can use it to reach further or to reach the same places with less effort. Reaching further seems objectively good; reaching the same places with less effort is more of a gray area.
I realise there's an argument for democratization, for reducing friction to put creativity in the hands of more people. Say you're a great artist who could make beautiful games but don't know how to code, you might use AI as a crutch to enable you to express your art. Same if you're a coder or have great ideas about game design but don't have graphics available to make the whole product happen.
If AI is covering all fronts though, we're throwing the baby with the bathwater here. There's no talent allowed to shine, no message that can now be better delivered, no idea better expressed. it's all wrapping.
and notice how the message from google is not 'reach more people', or 'let your talent shine'. The message is 'type a whim from your couch and you'll get it instantly'. Quick empty dopamine, no quality involved.
I could see microgames creep into social media feeds maybe. That's what this allows for. Games that might be novel for a few minutes. Some folks will put in the effort to make a modern multi-hour game here but very few, like their player-base.
Also, prototyping! Maybe it's good for that (just don't share it publicly).
We are in the ara of commoditization and we just have to learn handling it.
And its not just AI 'slop' making it so, its also A LOT of peole having acess to so much more.
The indiegame scene got crazy. As soon there is one new game concept, hundreds of small adjustments to this idea are popping up.
The sorting game thing? Has now a lot of clones/variations.
AI adds more of this for sure, but its not the underlying issue.
>Playground launches today for users in the U.S. (18+)
I played a few editors picks. "Westbound Frontier" is a kind of RTS. On mobile all the windows open on top of eachother and the text is very hard to read. The amount of resource required to build the first building after town hall was way too high by and you had to wait ages to do anything. There was an infuriating AI sound track singing "ooo-wee-ooo". 0/10 from me, broken and not fun.
Next I tried volcano run, a 3D infinite runner. Not my kind of game but a nice aesthetic and it actually worked. After about 30 seconds though the graphics changed to a really low contrast mode (night?) and I couldn't see the rocks I was supposed to dodge. 2/10.
Honestly genuinely a bit shocked Google launched this. It's obviously not ready, the "Editor" who picked these games should have known that. I am not sure if this is some kind of set of skills for Gemini or a fine tune or just a prompt but it certainly feels very low effort and embarrassing.
Every "AI + Google" product is pretty much like this, impressive to people who basically have no other skills than "talking about stuff others click on video links for" but falls apart to any sort of quality checks, and most of time isn't even internally consistent and coherent.
Let the slopocalypse commence.
Big tech already controls the distribution of traditional platforms so they are building AI platforms to make sure they keep control of the distribution of AI platforms, including that for games.
As for game quality, these look close to Opus 5.5 one-shots to me, maybe even a little worse.
I was out after the slurping sound in the first 1-second.
"Friend-slop" has already proven wildly successful, and significantly lower effort than AAA games.
Combine this with the fact your game will be stolen and put into Roblox, it really feels like we're approaching a era of just rapidly produced games that live for weeks rather than years.
Obviously the end-game is for the companies to automate all the text, games, and software so you just go to their feed and pay them a monthly instead of individuals making making this content.
You be tripping if you actually think AAA soulless that has filled with agenda is better
Perhaps it's their culture of letting engineers experiment with stuff during work hours that also led to Gmail, Maps, etc. and the mobile game ad market is certainly big.
I guess this mainly competes with mobile games, most of which are mediocre at best and aim to get a few "whale users" to spend inordinate amounts of money on coins, gems, or whatever in-game currency.
Maybe the theory is that those games are so easy to vibe-code that completely democratizing it will lead to enough of a flood of games?
And a few will stand out and become Candy Crush-sized successes?
Or perhaps it's the idea that if you can have millions of extremely niche games, each may have a few hardcore fans because it caters to their specific interests (the same way Kindle Direct Publishing enabled hyper-niche literary genres)