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Comment by TomGarden | Hacker News Reader

You may be right, at the same time a lot of "AI will never solve X" takes have aged pretty poorly, and I'm not confident what's fun about existing games cannot be codified and shown statistically somehow. Some genres seem more accessible to AI than others

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It's hard to say for sure, I think we can at least confidently assert that games are going to be more challenging than other forms of creative expression like Books, Music, Art, etc because people's tolerance for derivative games is lower than their tolerance for derivative movies/music.

Agreed!

And I genuinely hope there will be some categories of games/music/books/art where human input is still needed and preferred. Currently I'm already a handful of bulletpoints down on the list of stuff I thought AI would never be able to do, and it's been kind of destabilizing

Certainly yours and mine, given we're both (presumably) adults with experience. I'm not sure if the next generation of kids is going to care much given the popularity of platforms like Roblox.

It's not that kids actually love the lazy derivative games on Roblox. What they love is the rush they get from feeding the gambling addiction the Roblox Child Casino was carefully designed to develop in them. Cheap games on Google Playground won't be nearly as attractive to kids unless Google also fills it with anti-features like push notifications to nag children into getting another fix when they start having fun outside of Roblox, or adding a ton of limited-time rewards to fill kids with anxiety and make them feel like shit when school, homework, or family gets in the way of earning more Robux.

What Google Playground really needs is their own currency, designed to hide the true cost of every purchase, that children can earn by making popular games. Then Google can profit from child labor the same way Roblox does. https://www.classaction.org/news/roblox-lawsuit-alleges-enti...

> a lot of "AI will never solve X" takes have aged pretty poorly

"Make a fun game" or "create good art" is the cognitive equivalent of trying to solve the halting problem. These are some undecidable algorithms that cannot be solved by just throwing more GPUs at it.

Now, if you were to ask an AI to make an "addictive game", I'm sure it will eventually be able to.

i think the difference here is that humans can't even write down what makes a great game great. we don't know. you have to play it.

if we can't even write it down, how is an llm going to be able to ace it?

I feel like this is true with most media such as music and movies too - generally consumers don't understand exactly what they like.

I imagine AI will be making semi-complex indie-style games before we see an AI movie worth watching

I don't think anyone, given better alternatives, would choose games like these. There's a reason low effort output of LLMs has been dubbed Slop... Slop isn't fun or interesting to consume.

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