The audiences exist, but there's ten of you for every one of them. There is a market for low effort - always was - but AI has saturated it worse than ever.
Use AI for the things that aren't art, but craft. And accept that no one will pay for the craft, so the more things you resign to be craft-not-art, the less reason there will be for anyone to play, let alone buy, your game.
Create away. But if you try to sell it, I will assume you are a get-rich-quicker, and I'll warn people against your game like I warn people against MLM schemes or 3d printed tat hawked on Etsy.
Fun is a dime a dozen. You can have an LLM tell you jokes all day if you want to. Casino games are fun too. You almost certainly want something more than fun.
Meanwhile, I’ve spent the last five weeks poking at an MNA and fluid dynamics solver for Minecraft, of all things. That’s the kind of fun I like. It’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it?
Heavy use of AI, of course. I’d never have gotten anywhere on my own; I’ve got my hands full just playtesting everything.
I think this discussion highlights something interesting:
Our society is moving towards a more one-dimensional conception of enjoyment, or in other words, "base fun". Not to say that simple fun is bad, but I think it would be a shame if life enjoyment were reduced to straightforward fun and nothing else.
Yes, but tastes differ as to what fun is, and endless banal dialogue in Claudish would, for most people, wear thin as quickly as smalltalk with chatbots.
Same goes for AI-generated environments that are no more compelling than assets produced with traditional procedural generation techniques.
With that said, in games as elsewhere, there's a huge difference between quickly thrown together AI slop and development processes where AI is judiciously used as a labor-saving device.
"My plan for Spirit Call was a game like Genshin Impact (原神), with a new character every few weeks."
In other words, their plan was to get really rich with as little effort as possible, copying the essence of a highly profitable and exploitative gacha game.
Exploring new games or any media, to me, is all about avoiding the authors who have that as an objective. And right now, AI use for creative media (and even more AI praise in games, like this article) is a stronger warning sign than bargain bin asset packs.
But, I don't hate AI. It'd be hypocritical of me. I am still the person who got fascinated by the first blurry dogslug, and struggled to get Lua Torch running on my already then ancient GPU so I could play with the DCGAN code and make flowers from the Oxford dataset. Generative AI is damn amazing. It's people who would use it to get rich quick who suck.
Yes, I think people are a bit quick to forget how much pre-LLM slop there was. In all sorts of media. Asset flips on steam, Chuck Tingle-level "romance", algorithmic spam on streaming services (think baby sleep rain relaxing lo-fi beats) etc.
It's a good tool if you want to rank people, it's a bad tool if you want to help people. IQ tests couldn't (and can't) even detect dyslexia, a specific disability which you can get help with, which was known even in Terman's time. IQ tests by design throw out all information which could complicate ranking people. If your goal is to help, why would you measure people with a tool which can't tell the difference between dyslexia and concussion?
IQ tests have been revised several times to address things like that, like that they "unfairly" penalize dyslexia, or that they had lots of questions which were easier for people of specific social backgrounds. Every time they were, they naturally became less "predictive", since both dyslexia and not belonging to the California white upper middle class give you pretty obvious disadvantages in life outcomes.
So don't waste time on IQ, and don't waste time on other academic culture war BS either.
Wait, this is the opposite of reality. IQ is in fact a useful tool (in a battery of other tools) for helping diagnose cognitive deficits and learning disabilities. That's what it's good for: as a clinical tool. It's in fact terrible for ranking people.
Well that's what it was used for! Do your history homework, mr. clinician!
Tell me then, if someone scored low on a text-based IQ test and that's all you know, how do you tell if it was caused by dyslexia or concussion? I guess you break out that "battery of other tools"? What does IQ tests give you that those other tools don't give better?
Oh, I know one. An excuse to write someone off as simply stupid. An excuse to _stop looking_ for the things which might have helped them. Which is what it was historically used for.
IQ is a very bad tool for measuring populations. That's because IQ is definitionally designed to force a population to adhere a particular metric: a bell curve distribution, with the median at 100 and the standard deviation of 10. Whatever the thing you're measuring is--and there's good reason to think it's not "intelligence"--you're crunching and distorting that measurement to get the number at the end of it to force the population to adhere to a standard distribution.
We don't have a good model of what intelligence is. But since IQ studies are fairly common, there's a lot of data collected that uses IQ, and since it IQ looks vaguely like "intelligence," a lot of researchers who are motivated to find reasons to declare particular people intelligent or unintelligent are more than happy to use that data to support their claims.
The answer to that question should be blindingly obvious: you don't.
It should be clearly evident that trying to use IQ to establish that "<insert ethnic group here> are stupid" is bad science. It's the same sort of science to establish that "<insert environmental factor here> causes stupidity," so we also need to reject it even if the environmental factor is clearly something problematic. The problem isn't the conclusion, it's the methodology.
So do you reject that lead poisoning causes stupidity because it is unethical to measure intelligence?
It’s a good thing that measuring IQ enabled us to discover that trace amounts of lead in the environment causes reduced intelligence. That was a key piece of data for banning lead in fuel. The loss of IQ points happens to all kids living in cities, rich and poor. Rich powerful people didn’t want their kids made stupid by lead in the air.
I think that removing lead from paint and fuel has greatly improved the lives of billions of people.
No, we knew lead was bad. We knew what heavy metal poisoning looked like, we knew lead caused heavy metal poisoning. We knew of a hell of a lot more concrete effects than average lower scores on IQ tests.
> The loss of IQ points happens to all kids living in cities
No, it didn't. The reduced test scores happened _on average_.
I won't rule out that what you said is correct, in that it may well be the fear that "my child may lose 1-5 IQ points!" helped get lead banned, but if so, that's an indictment of society.
I agree with half of this argument but think you're taking it too far when you reject IQ testing as an epidemiological tool. It's not dispositive. It's statistically ill fitted as a ranking tool, for the reasons you stated, and the fact that it's not reliable across its whole range, and test-test reliability issues, &c. But like, "you can use it as an indicator for environmental causes of cognitive harm" is actually a valid argument, I think?
A lot of HN is currently about rocks that we've made very smart, in case you haven't noticed. I don't want archeology polluted by generic academic culture war stuff, so can we please leave "intelligence" out of it?
It takes an enormous amount of engineering work to make an intelligent rock, and not all intelligent rocks are equally intelligent. This is very obvious.
And what's the difference exactly? We knew that e.g. the Visigoths had Scandinavian ancestry, but we also know that by then they had lots of other ancestry, too.
To me this reads like Lenski (not affiliated with the authors!) trying a little too hard to make it into an academic culture war issue.
Same here. This study is mostly kicking in open doors - or at least the people quoted not affiliated with the study for some reason, are kicking in open doors. I got into this as a tangent from genealogy, and that the Goths were for a good part actually from Scandinavia is not a particularly bold assertion.
Now that the Wielbark culture simply is the Goths, that would be a sightly bolder assertion - and one which is probably good they're not making since it would probably be oversimplifying things.
Use AI for the things that aren't art, but craft. And accept that no one will pay for the craft, so the more things you resign to be craft-not-art, the less reason there will be for anyone to play, let alone buy, your game.
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