On the surface, Game Development seems like the perfect field for AI takeover. Programming and the Arts have long been in discussion about AI job loss, and those are key pillars of Game Design. Still, I’m more hopeful that AI can’t replicate what developers put into games, at least not currently.
AI is getting much better at coding and can write it much faster than humans can.
According to Forbes, the programming field is being threatened by drastic change in the short term and potential job loss long term. For Video Games, while I have seen it can write an individual feature fairly well, what happens when systems have to be combined? There’s no guarantee the dialogue system I ask AI for will be compatible with my preexisting movement systems, for example. Additionally, when game designers give up writing their own code, they lose a lot of control. Game design is incredibly iterative; we go through many different versions until the game feels as good to play as possible. It is incredibly difficult to have AI fine tune the feeling of a game in the same way.
Generative AI has also been increasingly used to generate writing and art, both very important for game production. As any teacher would know, AI writing…isn’t all that, at least right now. AI trains itself off writings and creates based on what it’s seen. This means that what it makes tends to have already been done before, and individual writing style is usually averaged away. Visual art is similar, but could be argued to be of higher quality. Still, visual art (and the industry generally) are resisting AI altogether. Recently, the Indie Game Awards
retracted its Game of the Year award from
Clair Obscur for it’s use of AI generated placeholder textures. While the AI is encroaching into the arts, I don’t expect developers to embrace it, at least not in the short term.
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