Digital Playgrounds: Exploring AI’s Impact on Video Gaming

AI is all the rage at the moment, with various AI tools being spotlighted on social media and even in the mainstream news. It seems like Artificial Intelligence is going to have an impact on every aspect of modern life, and that includes video games.

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How AI Could Democratize Video Games

One huge change has already been going on for a long time, and that is democratization. Since the late 2000s, the tools to develop games have become more easily accessible; the release of tools like Unreal Engine 4, Game Maker , and Unity made it possible for almost anyone to make a video game. Then, with the advent of Steam Greenlight and its successor, Steam Direct , it was suddenly possible for anyone to use the largest digital distribution platform available for a relatively low one-time fee.

This democratization of video games can easily be seen in the exponential growth in the number of games released on the Steam platform. According to Steam DB , between the launch of Greenlight in 2012, and today, the number of games released on Steam each year has increased from 301, all the way to 12784 in 2022. That’s an increase of more than 4200% in a decade, much higher than the approximate 300% increase in revenue for the games industry attributed by Statistica in that same time period.

This increase in the number of games being released is arguably good because of the vastly expanded variety of experiences now available. More people are making games than ever before, presenting viewpoints and perspectives that we may not have had a chance to see if the games industry had remained the way it was the in the 90s and early 2000s. It’s not much of a logical leap to say that AI would only strengthen this effect.

AI-Assistants to Make Games With

If you were lucky enough to catch what was going on at Google I/O 2023 , then you know that AI assistants are currently the “in” thing. Services like Bard and ChatGTP are showing that AI can help everyone from writers and artists to programmers and designers. The future of AI in game design will almost certainly take the form of in-software assistants that can help developers with areas they’re not too familiar with.

Imagine a master programmer having an AI assistant help them with art or a fantastic writer and artist getting help from the built-in AI assistant to figure out a complex programming challenge they otherwise might have struggled to get done. It could mean more true auteur experiences akin to the work of Toby Fox or Lucas Pope, as well as lowering the barrier to entry for fan-made projects like translations and unofficial continuations of dead franchises.

Of course, all of this assumes that the issue of AI being trained on unwitting creatives’ work has been solved. Currently, the two biggest barriers to this technology becoming widely used are related to public image and legality. Right now, most AI is trained on work without the original creator’s permission, and thanks to this, much AI-driven work isn’t exactly well-received online.

How AI Could Oversaturate Video Games

While it’s true that AI will help more people make video games, it could also lead to a huge glut in the market, and that has caused some problems for the games industry in the past. With AI assistance, it will become even easier for low-effort developers to churn out low-quality, low-price games as a quick scam. This has already been an issue in previous years, with 2017 seeing Valve remove 173 asset flip games from the storefront as reported by Gamesindustry.biz .

AI assistants could make these games easier to produce and make it harder to detect such games, as AI-generated content can at least appear marginally different from bundles of pre-bought assets currently used. When you add the ability for the incredibly young and inexperienced to make a game because they feel like it, it’s not hard to see why the introduction of AI assistants would make some people nervous.

Another Gaming Explosion

AI could create another explosion in the number of games being brought out. It might even finally force Valve to enact some quality control on the games it’s allowing for Steam’s survival. The concern is that if AI content floods the market, people will lose faith in industry institutions, leading to a similar crash as was experienced in the early 80s. One of the primary causes of that crash, cited by places like History Computer , was a huge amount of low-quality software being released with no consumer guidance available.

The final major struggle with AI-assisted game design is how it works legally. As we previously mentioned, AI-driven art is not currently accepted by the wider public, especially not in online circles. With gaming being such an online-centric industry, it seems that the hurdles could be bigger here than anywhere else, and many gamers may see avoiding the purchase of AI-driven games as an important moral stance.

The Video Game Industry Needs Solid Guidelines Around AI

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While we’ve talked at length about both the potential positives and negatives of the future of AI-assisted game design, it’s worth remembering that all of these potential issues can and should be accounted for. If Valve and other large digital retailers wish to avoid a repeat of previous gaming crashes, then it would almost certainly be wise to try to enact some slightly stricter quality control guidelines that are industry-wide.

The simple capping of how many games a company can release without special permission would be a good start. It would limit how many games in a backlog a publisher is allowed to release, but staggering a launch of an entire backlog over a few days seems a small price to pay for keeping the industry motoring along healthily.

On top of that, the games industry should not wait until legislation is imposed upon it by the government. Self-imposed codes and standards are an important part of any industry, from the Comic Code Authority to the ESRB; these self-policing policies are an important part of a healthy industry. People in positions of power within the industry need to start thinking about how we restrict the power that AI has over creative human expression now and not when it’s too late.

Could AI Be the Future of Gaming?

As AI starts to sink into more and more industries, there’s no doubt that we’ll find it in our games in the not-so-distant future. Whether this is for better or worse is up for debate, we’ve outlined a few key impacts AI could make.

But could AI be the future of gaming, leaving human creators in minimal roles? We hope that’s not the case and that AI works as a well-regulated tool for developers rather than as a replacement.

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